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Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a Magic card with the theme of addiction. What does the card do, how much does it cost, and what does the art look like?
My first thought would be something like The Magic Mirror where it starts as a good thing, gets better, and then kills you.
The first question is what color. My immediate reaction is Red, so that’s where I’m going with this.
So, what are the key aspects of “Addition” as a theme? It has to start off easy and seductive, but get progressively worse as it drains away your life. Now, I have been out of the magic game for a long time so the exact numbers here are probably out of line but hopefully the general design comes across well.
Addictive Power
Mana Cost: R
Enchantment
(Tap): Deal 3 damage to target player or creature and put an Addiction Counter on this card
During the End Step of your turn, pay (1) for each Addiction Counter on this card, suffering 1 damage for each mana you cannot pay.
As for the art, I picture a wide-eyed fire wizard holding a small fire in his/her hands while a giant flame blazes in the background.
I like the idea, but you’re correct that the power level is probably too high, at least in the decks that most want this card. A Red Deck Wins/Burn deck will be looking to achieve as much damage as they can as cheaply as possible, so R for 6-9 damage to an opponent and 1-3 to yourself is a great deal. At 2 damage a pop, it’s OK but not clearly better than e.g. Lightning Bolt. Alternatively, it could be “target creature” rather than “target creature or player”.
(Sidenote: Red cards now generally either target creature, player, or “any target” to include Planeswalkers as a valid target.)
It’s more like 3-6 damage, but I’d agree that’s not a serious cost for a deck trying to burst someone down. A balance tweak would be to start with a counter. That way, without paying additional mana, the player is (on turns 1 through 4) dealing 3,6,9,12 and taking 2,5,9,13. That would still make it a powerful card but you’re super dead if you can’t secure the win in 3 to 4 turns.
This card is insanely broken and would have to be banned in all formats/restricted in Vintage.
Also, enchantments don’t get tap abilities – it would have to be a coloured artifact.
I think thematically you want to look at paying a cost to get a useful effect, but over time that useful effect gets less and less powerful, and eventually you’re forced into paying the cost just to avoid negative effects.
I’m having a hard time designing something that isn’t a design monstrosity though.
First draft:
Stims – UB
Artifact
3,T: Put a charge counter on Stims. If Stims has less than four charge counters on it, draw a card.
At the beginning of your end step, if Stims is untapped, lose 1 life for each charge counter on Stims, and remove a charge counter from Stims.
So with tapping/untapping you’re representing the decision to take them or not. If you take them you get cards up to a point, but eventually you’re just getting nothing from activating it, and digging your hole deeper and deeper for when you need to stop using it.
Problems:
– I’m not sure the payoff is that great. It’s a downsized Jayemdae Tome (I got the idea from Bloodletter Quill, which is kind of playing a similar game). Maybe 2 down, 2 to activate, but the cheaper you make the activation the less of a problem it is long-term. Maybe make the cost equal to the number of charge counters, but you’ll probably end up hopping on and off them later on… maybe that’s a flavor win?
– Minor flavor problem: you can use stuff like Voltaic Key to bypass the drawback without actually “taking” the stims. This is probably ok, lots of things like this happen over the course of a game.
– Major flavor problem: you can take a bunch of drugs, destroy the drugs, and suffer no drawbacks. Possible solutions are making the stims indestructible while they have charge counters (meh, you can still exile it), or having the stims copy themselves rather than creating charge counters (but then how do you get rid of exactly one a turn).
Yeah on reflection I like:
Stims- UB
Artifact
Stims is indestructible and cannot be sacrificed as long as it has a charge counter on it.
X,T: Draw a card and put a charge counter on Stims. X is the number of charge counters on Stims.
At the beginning of your end step, if Stims is untapped, lose 1 life for each charge counter on Stims and remove a charge counter from Stims.
We can flavor exile effects as being extraordinary intervention, but now we’re not just destroying it with random stuff or sacrificing it.
Rather than making it just stop working entirely, we always make it beneficial, but it’s a worse and worse rate. By the time it’s 5-6, you’re probably really unhappy paying for it, but the end result of stopping is going to be really bad too.
At 2 down 0 activation to start, this is an extraordinarily strong base rate. It might end up being a little too powerful, but I like the idea of it looking amazing at first, and then 5 turns later you’re regretting everything.
I really like this implementation, but one card per turn feels pretty weak next to things like Phyrexian Arena. Maybe up it to draw 2, but lose 2 life per charge counter? Probably a good balance then to raise it to 3 CMC, and it can come out on the same turn as a lot of other draw engine stuff but with a stronger rush.
I was more making it a derivation from Jayemdae Tome and its successors (Endless Atlas being probably the closest). I’m not sure Phyrexian Arena is a healthy target to hit, I’m not sure that card would get printed today. But I think your interpretation could work.
I played around with making it usable multiple times per turn to sort of frontload the effect, but I couldn’t get it to feel good: it starts comparing very poorly to X draw spells before too long, so it probably does need more initial benefit.
Compare to Arcane Spyglass if you want the drawback to be permanent even if you destroy the Spyglass itself.
Arcane Spyglass?
I’m not sure I understand the comparison, and I can’t find any card with the word Arcane or the word Spyglass that makes more sense.
Yes, that Arcane Spyglass. Sacrificing your lands is a permanent drawback, because you’ll have less mana in each of the following turns. It might work better as a drawback in aggressive decks than damaging yourself. The second ability even makes this sort of addictive, because you get a bonus card when you do the sacrifice the third time.
Ah, I understand now.
I’d like to have two routes every turn: going deeper into the addiction and quitting it. At any given point, going deeper should be easier than quitting, but the advantage of quitting is that it’s done, you won’t have to make that choice again (with both options being worse now) next turn. My card goes a little deeper by constantly offering the option to go back in once you’ve quit, which I think mirrors the real-life struggle of addiction. You don’t just quit, you have to quit and STAY quit, even though it would be so much easier to go back.
The issue I have is the player who just goes really deep until it stops being cost-effective, and then destroys the drugs, preventing themselves from suffering any of the effects from quitting.
You can solve that by making up-front costs to use it like Arcane Spyglass, but that’s affecting the “keep using it” path, Arcane Spyglass’s second path is “don’t use it, nothing happens”. The second, worse path will always be defined by the text on the card, and that opens up the third path of just getting rid of the card so its text won’t affect you.
I wonder if “The land continues to burn” might have some potential, but the formatting is going to be a mess. The bad effects have to be an ability of the counters rather than the card that created them so they persist after the card leaves, but they still care about the state of the card that created them, so you’d have to do the “a card named ” templating, because the counters don’t have a link to what created them.
My own attempt:
Chasing the Poppy (BB)
Enchantment, Curse
Target must be a creature. Target becomes tapped and gets one addiction counter. Target does not untap during the Untap Phase. Target may be untapped once per turn by paying mana of any color(s) equal to its number of addiction counters. If the target becomes untapped add one addiction counter to it.
Art would look like this, but with fantasy creatures, not Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium#/media/File:Opium_smokers_China.gif
A few thoughts:
– The Curse subtype has up until now been reserved for Enchant Player effects that are typically meant to be put on opponents. I’m not sure there’s any particular reason to break that trend for yours, there are maybe 3 cards that care about the subtype, and it’s probably if anything less like a curse than the average negative Aura.
– Your templating has issues unless you were specifically going for the early-era phrasing: it should be an Aura with Enchant Creature, and it should either have a trigger at the beginning of the controller’s upkeep or give the creature an activated ability. Look at Paralyze for a good example of how this is done.
– Your card just seems like it’s harmful magic cast by an enemy, a la the aforementioned Paralyze or Glimmerdust Nap. It becomes harder and harder to pull the creature out, sure, but addiction isn’t usually imposed by an external force, most addicts wanted to start doing the drugs rather than being held down and forcibly drugged. I think the key flavor of addiction is both positive and negative effects, with the positive outweighing the negative to begin with and the balance eventually shifting the other way. Unstable Mutation captures this quite well in a rather simplistic form.
I think in modern Magic templating it looks like this:
Enchantment – Aura
Enchant creature
When ~ enters the battlefield, tap enchanted creature and put an addiction counter on it.
Enchanted creature doesn’t untap during its controllers’ untap step and has “X: Untap this creature and put an addiction counter on it.”, where X is the number of addition counters on enchanted creature.
Curses are an enchantment type, but they exclusively enchant players. Negative status enchantments on creatures are simply Auras. The effect as written is blue – tapping down creatures and not letting them untap is nearly always a blue effect. Black tends to either kill creatures or makes them smaller. You can also possibly reduce the mana cost to a single mana, since it comes with a “get out” clause.
I think a lot of black cards that represent making pacts with demons would qualify. Also, cumulative upkeep.
Here’s my off-the-cuff take:
1UB: Enchant creature aura
[edit:] enchanted creature has: At the start of your turn, put a -1/-1 counter on enchanted creature and draw a card. When this creature dies, discard your hand.
Of course, the flavor fail here is that you want to get your 0/6 wall hooked.
Here’s another take:
Phyrexian insight
Enchantment 1BB
At the beginning of your upkeep, draw a card
Pay 5 mana: you get a poison counter. Any player may activate this ability.
I think flavour-wise the card’s got to be Black – short term benefit for a long term downside fits very well. There are a lot of effects like this already, often enchantments that give an initial benefit and a long-term problem e.g. Demonic Pact
I’d make something like:
Addictive Lore 2BB
Enchantment
At the beginning of your end step, put a lore counter on Addictive Lore. Then choose one:
* lose 1 life, then draw a card for each lore counter on Addictive Lore.
* lose 2 life for each lore counter on Addictive Lore and sacrifice it.
The second choice is to make it so you can go “cold turkey” off it, but it’s more painful than just taking another hit.
This is my favorite one yet. I like the simplicity and that there comes a point where you no longer have the life to sacrifice it so you just have to keep digging.
Master of Puppets B
(or perhaps “Puppetmaster” if I don’t want to get sued by Metallica.)
Art is a decaying marionette-style puppet
Enchantment
At the beginning of your upkeep, put an addiction counter on Master of Puppets.
(T): for each addiction counter on Master of Puppets, add B to your mana pool and lose one life.
If Master of Puppets is untapped at the beginning of your end step, you lose the game.
I think I like it: trading life for mana, ramping up over time, and being compulsory – you have to get the mana each turn even if you don’t need it, whereas optionally trading life for mana is overpowered. You’re also taking a risk that someone could untap it during your turn and force you to take damage by having to tap it again. If upon playtesting it were too overpowered, the “lose the game” trigger could be moved to an earlier phase like the beginning of combat – that would force you to spend the mana earlier in your turn so would be less powerful. Thematically that would be kind of fitting with the addiction theme since your opponent would see you getting all your cards out there in your first main phase, spending as much as you could ASAP.
Copying fortyCakes ‘cold turkey’ ability, I’d add:
Skip your next turn: Sacrifice Master of Puppets.
Skipping a turn is a riskier proposition than taking life, and you’re leaving your fate up to your opponent, which is thematically nice.
Risky Addiction
Mana Cost: 1BR
Enchantment
When Risky Addiction comes into play, reveal the top card of your library and add it to your hand.
BR: Reveal the top card of your library and add it to your hand. If the card revealed was a land, replace this ability with “At the beginning of your upkeep, discard a card”.
Thought Lash
Cumulative upkeep—Exile the top card of your library. (At the beginning of your upkeep, put an age counter on this permanent, then sacrifice it unless you pay its upkeep cost for each age counter on it.)
When a player doesn’t pay Thought Lash’s cumulative upkeep, that player exiles all cards from their library.
Exile the top card of your library: Prevent the next 1 damage that would be dealt to you this turn.
This was an alternate kill condition in a Donate deck I had years ago.
Phyrexian Cortex 1B(B/pay 2 life)
At your upkeep, gain a poison counter and draw a card.
Your maximum hand size is reduced by the poison counters on you.
Too Much Fun!
Cost B
Enchantment
Indestructable
Too much fun may not be sacrificed by itself or another permanent you control.
As an additional cost to cast Too Much Fun sacrifice a permanent you control. Destroy target creature. Then draw two cards.
On each players upkeep step sacrifice a creature you control or discard a card. If you cannot sacrifice a creature or draw a card, take damage equal to your opponents devotion to a color of their choice. Then you may draw two cards, if you do discard a card.
For the art, I think I’d want something from the Cole’s Voyage of Life.
I think it should be quite strong for 2-3 turns, then the screws should start to tighten.
That’s pretty convoluted, but no moreso than Doom Foretold, which it is vaguely reminiscent of.
Yeah, there’s a card recently spoiled in the new Unsanctioned set that would love all those lines of text.
I was thinking of that Treacherous Blessing and Funeral Rites, in coming up with some of the effects. I’m sure there are some interactions in some of the historic sets that would make it broken, by sidestepping the effects, but I think something similar could probably be balanced for a rotating format like standard.
Black has had a number of cards designed to trade a benefit now for a cost later. Contract from Below is probably the most famous (back when Magic was played with Ante) and Infernal Contract is similar (draw 4 cards and reduce your life by half).
Think that should be “sacrifice a creature or discard a card.
It’s sort of weird that the power level varies based on the color choice of your opponent’s deck (because fewer colors will make it do more damage through devotion). I’m used to cards being strong against certain archetypes, i.e. good against aggro but bad against control. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a card that cares whether your opponent is mono-R aggro or RG aggro.
It’s also sort of weird that if you have discipline about not playing the extra cards you draw, you can reduce the “bad” outcome to “at the beginning of each player’s upkeep, loot twice” (just always choose to draw, and keep the worst card in your hand to discard to the next trigger), which is if anything a positive effect in most games (you can filter your hand to better cards).
Sometimes your opponent can interact with that with discard effects and make you take some damage or sacrifice a creature, but you’re also getting a 3-for-2 to kick it off at an extremely cheap rate. Sultai Ascendancy basically does a worse version of the ongoing effect, and it costs 3!
Fever Dreams
0
Enchantment
~ is blue and black
At the beginning of your upkeep, draw a card for each age counter on ~
Cumulative upkeep U/B
If ~ would leave the battlefield, you lose the game instead
Should have Hexproof so you don’t die to a random disperse. The last ability really needs to be triggered, too, otherwise Opalescence and Platinum Angel creates a weird state-based action loop.
Addicts Anonymous (AA) – WWWW – Enchantment
Upkeep: 2
When AA comes into play, all your other Addiction cards are exiled.
Other players may spend 4+2X to permanently gain the effects of AA (including upkeep), where X is the number of players with AA.
All your creatures gain +1/+1 per player with AA, and first strike.
WW:dispel target Addiction card (every card mentioned in this thread).
[art: circle of mages, sitting, facing inward, bathed in light, as varied demons scurry in the dark around them]
Not actually a Magic player, but I liked the idea, so I did some research and came up with this. Sorry if it’s unbalanced or the wording is bad.
Soul Hooks
Mana cost- 3 black.
Enchantment.
Cumulative upkeep 2 of any color. Target player gains 3 life and control of “Soul Hooks”. if “Soul Hooks” leaves the battlefield for any reason, its controller loses 5 life and discards their entire hand.
I don’t have a problem. I can stop whenever I want.
The art would be sinister grinning figure offering a goblet.
So it looks like a card of this type should have three things
– a positive effect, so you want to use it
– a negative consequence of its use, preferably permanent
– increasingly negative consequences for continued use
And there is the question of whose addiction is being modelled. Is the player becoming addicted to something, or is one of their creatures?
It would also be useful to have the consequences be somewhat variable. Some people can use alcohol in small quantities responsibly. Others can’t. And this variability contributes to the temptation to use the card.
Finally, the card could let the player “detox”, getting rid of the addiction, but this should properly be difficult or costly.
I think the positive effect has to end up being almost absurdly good, because it then models the attraction of drugs very well. You go “oh my gosh, that’s amazing, why wouldn’t I run this” and stick it in your deck, then four turns after using it you go “oh, that’s why”. Magic actually does benefit a lot from being able to frontload undercosted effects, so there’s a lot of potential to put players in this situation.
Although most of the suggestions here are permanents, and you have to be careful not to let them just escape the negative effects by removing the permanent: that’s not how addiction works!
I’ve seen poison counters used, which is a cool way of putting permanent effects on players, but in 90% of games your opponent won’t have infect creatures, and having 9 poison counters doesn’t matter unless you’re facing a 10th. Again doesn’t map too well, addiction should be gradually debilitating, poison counters go from “irrelevant” to “instant death”. You could use some new type of counter on players, but you’d probably want the card to define what it does, and then you can still remove it and remove the effect from the counters.
The big problem with addicting creatures to things is that you can usually get rid of your creatures with little consequence, and as a result you probably won’t get the flavor of an addict well. It will be difficult to keep players from getting the positive effects and disposing of the creature when it becomes less useful.
Magic’s randomness is usually tied to the deck because it’s hard to choose things at random otherwise, and multi-layered randomness feels bad in a tournament setting (there’s some limited coin-flip stuff but they try to keep those irrelevant). “Draw some cards” is a really common payoff, so it wouldn’t be too hard to do something like Risky Addiction where an attribute of the card you draw determines the outcome. It would probably have to be land-nonland, because that’s the only binary that you can guarantee players won’t game too much, if it was “bad effect on creature” you’ve suddenly made a very good card for creatureless decks.
Good analysis, thank you.
I don’t play Magic, so here’s a Hearthstone suggestion.
Lickable Toad!
Art is a Tauran shaman licking a very large and very surprised looking toad
Shaman Spell
2 Mana
Reduce your maximum hand size by 3 and draw until your hand is full.
The plan for this card is to empty your hand early then play this to draw seven cards for two mana (a crazy good deal). Most decks won’t float seven cards in hand often anyway so the downsides are minimal. The second hit is a lot worse, only drawing four cards max and making overdraw likely even for the aggressive archetypes. Playing a third copy would take work and, while it wouldn’t kill you directly, would pretty much make winning the game impossible.
It’s a very powerful effect but it takes a bit of effort and deck design to use, limiting it to aggressive and mid-range decks only. It is hot trash for combo decks because you need that hand size to hold on to your key cards, and control decks just can’t play enough cards fast enough to not be killed by the overdraw. Probably would make the play-testers tear out their hair tying to balance it.
Reducing maximum hand size as a drawback is pretty interesting in Magic too, although we don’t have overdraw so it’s probably not a powerful enough drawback to work on its own.
I do like the idea of someone deep into the addiction having very short-term thinking though: eventually they’d have to use-or-lose their entire hand every turn, and many of the benefits we came up with were “draw a bunch of extra cards”. Might be an interesting addition to other cards, sort of an upgraded version of Avaricious Dragon.
More Hearthstone brainstorming!
Odious Salesman
Art is a goblin with a trench coat opening it up to reveal glowing vials
3 mana neutral minion
2 attack / 5 health
Card text: Whenever you draw a card, draw an additional card and shuffle a bomb into your deck.
A well stated card, that draws you extra cards. A brilliant idea until those bombs start being shuffled into your deck. One is okay, three or four are survivable, but if you ever let more than six into your deck you can basically lose in a single turn at any point from then on. The double edge of both going through your good cards faster and adding in negative cards is really dangerous if the minion lives and your opponent may not want to kill this card because it hurts you more than it hurts them.
Bloodbound Deamon
3 mana Warlock minion
8 attack / 8 defence
Card text: At the end of your turn deal two damage to this minion. Death-rattle: summon an 8/8 for your opponent.
A terrifyingly cheep giant that will definitely die without your intervention and when it does it causes a massive tempo swing to your opponent. The player can dominate the early game with it for a turn or two but will quickly find the shoe on the foot when the death-rattle comes in. A silence effect would rather undermine the message but would be an interesting combo to build around.
My first thought of this was very similar to everyone else in this thread – make the card fit somewhere in the black archetype of trading a short term benefit (likely drawing cards) for a long term benefit (likely life).
In the interest of not copying other ideas though, lets see how addiction would fit into some of the other colors:
Drug: Steroids
Roids – GG
Enchant Creature – Aura
Target creature gains 1 addiction counter.
Enchanted Creature Gets +X/-X where X is the number of addiction counters on it.
Enchanted Creature must attack each turn if able. (on account of the roid rage).
During your upkeep, place an addiction counter on enchanted creature.
Drug: Opiates
Painkillers – WW
Enchant Creature – Aura
Enchanted creature gains (tap) creature and prevent all damage that would be dealt to it each turn. Place a -1/-1 counter on it. If enchanted Creature is tapped this way, it doesn’t untap during your next untap phase.
Drug: Hallucinogens
Grumgully the Generous – 1RG
3/3
Each other non-Human creature you control enters the battlefield with an additional +1/+1 counter on it.
I don’t play magic, never have, and have no idea what goes on a magic card. So with that ignorance stated up front, please accept my direct answering of your three questions based solely on my knowledge of addiction (which includes some that is firsthand but thankfully mild):
The card creates an association between a certain action and other things you do in the game, so that any time you do those other things, you have to take the action. The list of those other things grows larger and larger over time until it encompasses basically everything else you might do in the game. For the first few turns the action is fun and even beneficial, but after that it gets worse and worse until it’s totally self-destructive.
The card costs nothing.
The art uses themes of circles and spirals and other things that allude to feedback loops. That’s in the background. In the foreground is an iron lever, glowing red hot. The metaphor is that to shut off the feedback loops you have to grab the lever and pull, but it’s going to burn like hell.
If mana burn were still a thing, a card that just gave you one more mana every turn than the previous turn would seem pretty much perfect.
You can just make mana burn a thing again. Card text always beats the general rules.
True. But less fun.
Still, you’d get (more or less):
Unquenchable Thirst
Mana Cost: 0
Black Enchantment
Unquenchable Thirst starts with one counter on it, and gains one counter at the end of your turn.
At the beginning of your turn, you gain one black mana for each counter on Mana Burnout.
You lose one life for each unspent mana at the end of your turn.
You may sacrifice Unquenchable Thirst, but you lose one life for each counter on it when you do so.
Or would it be a Sorcery? I haven’t played in a while.
Doesn’t work as written, because your mana pool empties between phases. But you could patch it by adding something like “your mana pool does not empty between phases”, which is already a semi-common effect for cards that play with land or mana mechanics.
And Enchantment is correct, yeah. Those are the persistent ones. Sorceries are spells that can have an instantaneous effect and go away they’re played, but only be played during your turn and can’t be played in response to someone else’s spell; Instants can be played during opponents’ turns and as responses.
So, Braid of Fire.
I considered posting that as well, but two major differences:
1. The mana has to be used in upkeep, which makes it a way more limited card and less attractive to play with the drawback of mana burn. It fails the “enticement” bit of addiction, because the average deck wouldn’t want to pick it up: you’ll only use it if you have a very specific game plan for that mana, which will likely absorb it all.
2. Cumulative upkeep lets you “quit” at any time, by just choosing not to pay and sacrificing it. That’s not how addiction works!
I don’t think your #1 is a big deal, because R or UR decks can find something useful to do with mana at instant speed. This is often a great card in commander. And plenty of addictions only target certain tastes or temperments.
As for quitting, I agree it doesn’t work that way generally, although amusingly it does kind of model a certain view of addiction as a defect of personality or will. You can quit anytime, but you want the possibility of a hit, so you take the loss of resources and opportunity and health that your hobby brings. Just go cold turkey!
Death Sticks
Mana Cost: 3
Artifact
Cumulative Upkeep: 1
When Death Sticks leaves play, if you sacrificed it, you lose the game.
At the beginning of your main phase, add 4 to your mana pool and take 1 damage.
Death Sticks
Artifact: Equipment
Mana Cost: 3
Equip Cost: 2
When Death Sticks comes into play, equip it to a creature.
Death Sticks may be equipped on creatures you do not control.
Equipped creature gets +2/+0.
At the beginning of your end phase, Death Sticks does 1 damage to equipped creature’s controller and all creatures they control.
Peer Pressure: Equipped creature’s controller may pay 3 colorless to create a token that’s a copy of Death Sticks and equip it to a creature of their choice. They may play this ability only once per turn, and only when they could play a sorcery.
“C’mon, Timmy. Don’t you want to make friends?”
Six types of twins
Mirror twins, conjoined twins, people with blood of two types (how do they even live?), etc. And discussion of the lack of solid theories about how various sorts of twins happen.
I’m a mirror twin. I’m the left-handed one, but as far as I know all my internal organs are in the normal positions. Ask me anything!
Edit to preempt the obvious: my twin and I know we’re mirrored because of (among other things) our opposite handedness, footedness, locations of birthmarks, and direction of scissorbites we both had as kids.
I had no idea (some?) birthmarks have a genetic basis.
If you are raised together with a twin sibling, does that have advantages for you in childhood over being raised together with a sibling a few years apart? For example, does it help you learn faster as an infant, or make you better adjusted? Is it easier or harder on the parents? Is it easier or harder on a third sibling who is older than you? Are the advantages worth the increased risk of premature birth and other health complications?
(I have three month old twin nieces, and I’d like to know what to expect.)
My twin and I have a “third” sibling who’s 6 years our junior, FWIW. My parents tell me that having twins was easier because we kept each other entertained. We always had someone we could bounce things off of, etc.
I think we probably did learn faster. I think I remember my parents telling me we had a bit of microphasia as infants/toddlers, but as we got older that was definitely replaced by an uncanny ability to understand very quickly and fully what the other one was referencing. That ability continues to this day.
I’m convinced we could have taken advantage of being twins more and become legendary musicians or engineers or something, but we didn’t get along well enough for that. Also, we felt pretty suffocated by it most of the time, and basically did as much as we could once we were about 7 and older to set ourselves apart from each other and find our own paths. I think in many ways the “mirror” thing reached well beyond our bodies and into our politics and style of dress and inclinations toward different lifestyles and so forth.
Our younger sibling had a really difficult time with us when he was little — we didn’t really make peace until we were all adults — but I doubt it’s specifically because his older brothers were twins.
I don’t know anything different obviously but one of the clear advantages is that it’s another way I get to be very unusual, which I like.
The main disadvantage I can see is that if I wasn’t a twin (born a month premature, at that) I’m pretty sure I’d be 6’1″ or taller like almost every other guy in my family. Instead I’m just average sized.
Thank you for your reply.
What does “microphasia” mean?
> I’m convinced we could have taken advantage of being twins more and become legendary musicians or engineers or something,
I can’t find it, but I think there was a question somewhere on SSC on why it so rarely happens that a pair of identical twins become famous as a team (music band, sports team, entrepreneur group, etc).
> Our younger sibling had a really difficult time with us when he was little — we didn’t really make peace until we were all adults — but I doubt it’s specifically because his older brothers were twins.
Sounds belivable to me due to anecdotic data: I argued a lot with my brother while we were children, and neither of us are twins.
I think microphasia is technically any time a language is spoken by very few people (might also apply to two AIs talking to each other), but it’s commonly used to refer to a kind of “secret language” that twins develop on their own, typically when they’re very young.
Well, there’s the Proclaimers, and the Bryan Bothers, and Pliskova twins.
I’m sad to see Yang drop out. Not because I agreed with his policy or because I thought he had a chance of winning, but because he seemed like my kind of guy. He was thoughtful and cared about interesting things. Hopefully he ends up doing something else interesting in the future.
I wonder if this was a “quite while you’re ahead” play – as in reputation ans social capital rather than polling.
He quits now, he’s the smart asian guy who brought up UBI and talked about automation. Stay in, and he risks drawing fire?
No, it was “quit because you’re out of cash”. I like Yang (not my preferred candidate) but he was in no way ahead.
Oh really? Thought his fundraising was stellar due to online donors.
It’s a shame that you have to pay so much to play
My impression is that the donations were drying up as he failed to produce results on the trail/bring in new supporters (to provide new donations). It is possible that isn’t correct, or at least isn’t the whole story.
I, too, liked Yang, though I was thoroughly meh about his policies. He was never going to win, of course, but everybody else seems either too crazy, too insipid, or too calculating and possibly evil. Good luck for the future, Mr. Yang.
Which basket do you think Tulsi Gabbard’s in?
Does it have to be just one?
She’s a wee bit crazy, but not Sanders-level crazy. She has Sander’s likeable skepticism towards war without his borderline-sexual love of spending obscene amounts of imaginary money. Would prefer her over Sanders, I think, but she has no chance.
The dark side of Monopoly?
I’ve noticed that most of the Democratic field can be neatly categorized according to the categories of unsuitable MPs from this quote (Sir Humphrey, in Yes, Minister):
Too old and silly
Sanders, Warren, Biden, Bloomberg
Too young and callow
Buttigieg, Yang, Gabbard
So I take it you’re on team Klob?
Leaning towards Bloomberg, actually. He’s one of the older candidates, but much less silly than the others. He’s also by far the most fiscally conservative of the major Dem candidates. My biggest negative towards him is his absolutely awful record on civil liberty issues.
I don’t know enough about Klobuchar to have a strong opinion about her.
Across both major parties, Bill Weld is my favorite candidate, despite him being quite old and at least somewhat silly. But his candidacy doesn’t seem viable even at a “meaningful symbolic protest” level, so it’s not worth changing my registration back to Republican to vote for him and forgo the opportunity to vote in the Democratic primary.
I was registered Republican pre-2016 and switched to NPP (Independent) at the last minute so I could vote against Sanders in the Democratic primary after Trump locked up the Republican nomination. After the primary, I switched to Libertarian for a while, then back to NPP.
I think it was a smart move on his part. Seeing how he had no path to the nomination, his persistence in the race only served to peel voters off from other candidates. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine who the main person he was peeling from was (although I’m sure he has internal polling that makes this explicit).
Sanders’ victories in Iowa and New Hampshire were close enough that an additional 1-2% matters a lot. And Sanders is the only viable candidate that could conceivably offer Yang a role in the next administration. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of cabinet position for Yang, his policy vision is very much in line with Bernie’s.
Is it? Yang talked up the entrepreneur and innovation in silicon valley. His concern with automation and support for a UBI was generally framed as “human centered capitalism”, and he seemed to look at issues in terms of market fundamentals, pointing out that the government is bad at directly running a lot of things so it should throw money around instead. It’s not that Yang wants to slow capitalism and automation, but that he wants to lay down a societal floor so that “normal people” survive it.
Bernie aims a lot more ire at the people who are Yang’s friends and generally has a more regulatory agenda on top of the fiscal expansion both support. Yang seems more concerned about having a societal floor and more positive about billionaires, whereas Bernie is more concerned about inequality and a lot more negative about billionaires and big companies.
They are both on the left, so they’re going to align on issues, but they are coming from quite different places in general. Sure there’s a lot of meeting room in the middle, but I see them as quite disparate candidates, at least based on their open rhetoric and policies.
They have their differences sure. But of everyone running, Bernie/Warren/Yang form a clade of significant policy overlap distinct from the rest of the bunch. Sanders isn’t going to restrict himself to appointing cabinet positions to people who also identify as socialist, since that would leave almost no one of note outside of a handful representatives.
Is there anything specifically, not in terms of choice of rhetoric or emphasis, that Sanders and Yang disagree about? I haven’t closely followed the Yang campaign, so I could be missing something here. I don’t recall a single moment of contention on the debate stage.
I find it hard to believe they are that close in policy. Admittedly I haven’t followed campaigns closely, but I took one of those “isidewith” quizzes and Yang was at the top of the list for most closely matched with my answers (which I was surprised by) followed by Klobuchar and Buttigieg. Warren and Sanders were at the bottom (which I was not surprised by). Granted, I left a lot of answers blank, so maybe they are more similar on issues that I don’t care or know enough about. One issue I do remember was that Yang was against any minimum wage.
Wikipedia tells me that Yang thinks the UBI would render the minimum wage unnecessary (which is not too different from how Nordic countries have replaced the minimum wage with sector-wide wage setting in union contracts).
I wonder what Yang’s stance on the minimum wage is, if we assume the UBI doesn’t pass congress?
Yang didn’t support free college or national rent control. His “MFA” is just a public option, very different from Bernie’s.
Good news(?) for the polyamory community: Utah decriminalizes polygamy
The language in support of the bill is very much that of civil/human rights, that these are “unfairly marginalized” citizens. Opponents cite the high rates of child abuse/indoctrination/social isolation of current polygamists. As a condition of their entering the Union, Utahans outlawed polygamy, and the current position of the Church of Latter Day Saints is to excommunicate those found practicing it. I wonder if the Mormon Church will soften that position now that the practice is no longer de jure illegal.
My first thought with this sort of thing is “how will it affect the tax code/inheritance laws?” The bill itself is religion-neutral, so one need not believe Jesus came to America to claim a second (willing) wife (or husband, one supposes).
According to that article, a bill has been passed out of the state Senate’s committee. This doesn’t tell us how likely the bill is to be taken up by the full chamber and passed, a similar bill passed by their House, make it through reconciliation, and not get vetoed by the governor. Unless they’ve managed to do all that since yesterday.
And even then the bill is just reducing it from a felony to an infraction. It’ll still be illegal.
It will basically stay the same. They decriminalized it, not legalized it, so the second marriage of record would be invalid, and the first marriage will receive all the benefits. You might be able to make a contract to alter the inheritance ramifications, but that would have to be separate and still be restrained by Utah state law. Glad no one is being prosecuted over it though.
what is the argument against legalizing?
Polygamist cults have a very horrible track record regarding indoctrination and child abuse. The strongest argument against it relies on that, basically saying “Proving child abuse can be hard, but proving polygamy is easy. The vast majority of polygamy cases involve child abuse, so by outlawing polygamy we prevent more child abuse than happy marriages”*
*Note, I do not necessarily agree with this position or its factual claims. I don’t know enough about the data or arguments for or against to weigh in on it. I just know that this is a very common argument I have heard
interesting how outlawing the practice is more acceptable than say forcing polygamists to increase child protection oversight. from a personal freedom perspective, one seems to allow strictly more freedom; yet emotionally it feels less.
First, define legalizing – if it simply means no penalty for a second (third, etc.) marriage that is not recognized as legally valid – then probably just the moral argument that non-monogamy is wrong, which I think fewer people think should be enforced in law (or no longer agree with at all).
If you mean setting up a system by which a person can be legally recognized to more than one person at the same time, well that would have a lot of complications across the system and in fact probably just wouldn’t work with out a substantial redesign.
Medical decision making is probably the simplest. Currently if you are incapable of making medical decisions the default is your closest relative is empowered to make them for you. This default can be trumped if you create legal documents specifically to designate someone else. Your spouse comes first as the closest relative. Having multiple spouses would make this harder as the possibility of ties would exist (and it might be harder to get everyone contacted if you truly have a large number of spouses). However, this one can probably be fixed relatively easily. If you don’t have a spouse, even if you are an adult, your parents are probably your closest living relatives — so the possibility of ties already exists and the system has come up with ways to resolve them. Also we would probably just develop a strong norm of having people officially designate a medical decision maker.
The rest of the changes would probably depend on what we mean by poly marriages. We need to figure out who is married to who, unlike in monogamous marriage (where we know the answer is both people are married to each other) if we recognize polyamorous marriage we need to decide (at least as default) are all people in the marriage are married to each other or do we have a set of pairs in which A is married to B & A is married to C, but B and C are not married to each other. I am going to refer to these as group marriage and parallel marriage for brevity.
Then depending on how we answer that question we need to think through how to resolve its effects on a number of areas most notably tax consequences and custody consequences.
Tax law and custody would be complicated. And would impose fiscal costs on the system that it might not want to bear. The biggest tax benefit to marriage is that transfers between spouses, including most importantly the estate on death, are tax free. This could theoretically pose a problem in monogamous marriage where the estate is never taxed if you had serial remarriage to a younger partner after death; e.g. A marries B, A dies, B marries C, B dies, C marries D, C dies, and so on. But practically marriage patterns tend to seek rough age equality so that this doesn’t seem to ever happen and eventually estates get taxed.
If you had group marriage, can add to the group at will, and the marriage unit doesn’t end until every group member is dead – I would worry a lot more that you could have a never ending marriage unit that avoids the estate tax forever. Parallel marriages would also raise this risk.
Custody would be more complicated as well. Current marriage default assumes that both spouses are basically equally parents. Is this true in a 5 person group marriage where the children are biologically the children of A & B and A &C, but not D or E? If A & B want to leave the group and go be a monogamous pair do they have unique claim on their biological kids or do we grant equal status to C, D, and E? What if because you are at 5 now, E is more or less not a parent, doesn’t live in the house, visits often, but isn’t in the day to day. Are we going to now have courts getting deeply involved in figuring out the family arrangements of all these groups? Yes, this happens some now in monogamous marriages, but the default is to assume equality – the number of different poly relationships which are likely to be less standard probably raises the amount of this intervention a lot. (this probably doesn’t implicate parallel marriages)
In addition to the rest of the answers provided, it can be really hard on the young males who are kicked out of the community at a certain age. See “lost boys”
Not saying that this is a definitive argument against, but it is definitely an argument that is used.
Polygamy produces a shitty society. Only some men take more than one wife (at a time), but that leaves a lot of young men with really no hope to start a family. Imagine a bunch of incels who aren’t otherwise losers.
Considering this was one of the requirements for Utah’s statehood as you say, it should be revoked if the bill passes.
Thus giving Trump an opportunity for revenge on Romney.
+1 to everyone else who says it hasn’t actually been decriminalized. It still needs to get through final approval in the chambers then get passed by the governor. I cannot imagine this is the kind of attention Utah wants, so I’d still put my money on it not passing. Also, there’s still the Edmund’s Act making polygamy illegal at the federal level. Best case this would become a weed-type situation.
Also, this just sounds like a bad idea. The FLDS community has a downright terrible track-record, and periodic anti-polygamy raids is a good tool currently for LE to go after some of the worst violators.
Not nearly as bad a record as the Texas child protection authorities who siezed 300 FLDS children on the basis of what they knew, within a few days, was a bogus phone call, repeatedly lied about them to justify what they were doing, confined two pregnant adult women by pretending they were minors until they had their babies who the authorities could then seize, …
A record that leaves me highly dubious about claims other people make about the FLDS. For details see …
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If you’re willingly part of a sub-population that has a history of unacceptable behavior, you get occasional negative outcomes.
Read some firsthand accounts from some of the women who have escaped from the community. Or read the firsthand accounts of some of the lost boys.
Heck, if you’ve got time for a road trip, head on out to Colorado City and check it out for yourself. The beds at Zion’s Most Wanted are pretty comfortable, although the life stories of most of the staff were, in my opinion, somewhat disquieting.
Aftagley:
Are there other groups besides polygamous Mormons for whom you’d apply the same reasoning?
Here’s the first couple off the top of my head:
Anyone involved in or tangentially connected to terrorism.
Anyone involved in or tangentially connected to international drug smuggling.
Anyone involved in or tangentially connected to weapons trafficking.
Anyone involved in those quasi/political fringe groups. Stuff like Sovereign Citizens movements.
Any of those former leftist guerrilla movements that are now trying to evolve into credible political parties in South America.
Anyone who still supports nazis or fascism.
I can keep going, if you’d like.
Don’t hold back! What sort of negative outcomes do you think the Texas child protection authorities should occasionally be subjected to?
Losing their high-profile case in court and getting roundly criticized by nearly everyone in the country seems fair.
ETA:
Individuals who commit crimes suffer a lifetime of suspicion when new crimes are committed even after they’ve served their particular sentence. This may or may not be fair, but it’s a reality of life – we suspect people who have a history of negative outcomes.
Communities aren’t really any different – if your community has a history of forcing pubescent girls into marriages with old men and kicking boys to the curb, you can expect the occasional sideye from the rest of society.
If a group forcibly took several hundred children away from their parents in an attempt to make the parents abandon their religion, held multiple adult women prisoner by pretending they were minors, and repeatedly lied about what they were doing, you think losing the case, and so eventually having to free the children, and being criticized by the small minority who were paying attention, is really an adequate punishment?
Would it be adequate for ordinary mass kidnappers, ones who don’t commit their crimes under color of law?
This is pretty much consistent with how it usually works out when someone powerful abuses their power to kick around someone who’s widely reviled. At most, they have to apologize and promise not to do it again and maybe pay some compensation (usually from the taxpayers, not their own budget).
The cases where the powerful people actually face consequences for their abuse are pretty rare. Spy illegally on millions of Americans, and only the whistleblower goes to jail. Get caught lying under oath and tampering with evidence, the judge yells at you and the case gets dropped. And so on.
Once in a great while, you get a Nifong (the prosecutor in the Duke Lacrosse case, who actually lost his job and got disbarred–turns out even prosecutors can push abuse of power too far, when the targets of their abuse are wealthy and connected and the whole thing happens under heavy media coverage), but it’s not common.
From the last open thread, I hear there was interest in explaining why [YOU] do not believe in God.
Objections commence!
The tendency to see agency everywhere is a well known human bias, and seems to be the source of historic religious beliefs. The universe does not look like the sort of thing a being with any psychology I understand would have designed (at least not any benevolent being with an interest in humans; I suppose I can imagine someone with a hobby of making simulated universes just to see what happens making this one, but that’s not the God of any religion I’m familiar with). The methods of saving theological hypotheses from these issues look like ad hoc cheats to me; essentially, theism resembles a skeptical hypothesis in the philosophical sense, and while it’s easy to construct skeptical scenarios in such a way as to make them immune from any possibility of refutation, that very fact means we really have no choice but to not take them seriously.
Would you consider free will an illusion and everything determined?
I’m not sure why my position on free will is relevant, but most people have contradictory ideas about what is involved in free will. There is obviously nothing which perfectly corresponds to a set of contradictory criteria. Is it really necessary to launch here into the discussion of whether anything which fits some more limited set of criteria deserves the name free will, and if so, which thing? Trying to stick to the topic, I suppose I can say I think it’s an illusion that free will helps clarify or solve any theological problems.
You mentioned that seeing agency is a human bias, so it’s a question of whether you think humans have agency at all.
A friend of mine expressed his opinion that free will is illusory, as he believes everything is at its core deterministic, so any notion of choice is illusory, and all actions are more or less fated to be. To him, this was the logical extension of believing in the big bang and that we happen to be in the one “successful” iteration of universes where he and I are able to sit together and have a conversation.
At its root, I’ve found that it’s just a big of a leap to assume a multiverse in order to explain existence rather than a creator/designer.
I do not believe thinking humans are like humans is the same as thinking things that are not humans are like humans. It is the latter I was referring to in my original comment above. I know this doesn’t cover everything you seem to be asking about, but I don’t think the rest ends up being as relevant as you seem to think. If I must say something about my view of free will, I think Korsgaard has some interesting things to say on the subject.
I think it’s interesting how often the free will/determinism debate comes up, especially with relation to these types of things. I see where the apparent paradox comes from, but I think that it is resolvable and actually has been resolved. The ‘calculus’ that resolves this ‘zeno’s paradox’ comes in the form of something which manifests in topics of undecidability, chaos theory, and computational complexity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eC14GonZnU I would consider a must-watch to anyone who is confused by determinism/free will. The lecture only covers the mathematics and computation theory, but I think it has profound implications for the nature of ‘determinism’ and for how ‘free will’ can emerge therefrom. In fact, I do know someone who stopped believing in anything supernatural as a direct cause of being exposed to these concepts.
In essence, there are extremely simple systems, for example cellular automata like conway’s game of life, or simple turing machines, for which their behavior is completely deterministic in that it follows a very specific set of rules to compute its next state, but also is both computationally universal (it can be made to implement any algorithm), and more importantly, Maximally Computationally Complex. What this means is that it has been proven that for many initial conditions of the system, it is not possible to predict in advance how the system will evolve, even though the rules are simple and deterministic. The algorithm is irreducible to any simpler calculation. The only way to see what will happen is to run the algorithm itself and see what happens. This is not a practical issue, it’s not that we don’t know how to predict it; it has been proven that it is fundamentally not possible to know what outputs the algorithm will produce without running an algorithm that is equivalent to the one in question.
It is clear that the universe is such a Maximally Computationally Complex system, since it can be made to implement these algorithms, like conway’s life.
So everything is deterministic, but also very much not predeterminable. So your will is not ‘free’ in the sense that you will only end up doing one thing following deterministic rules, but the thing creating your outputs can be your own (irreducibly complex) algorithm of volition and choice, which is fundamentally nonpredeterminable.
The following is more conjectural, but I suspect that the reason that we feel like we have ‘free will’ is that this is what it feels like to be inside a Maximally Computationally Complex algorithm deciding its own future state, plus some other things like consciousness and self-awareness which may or may not be very related.
@Shion Arita
We know that the universe is complex enough that, if it is deterministic, it is unpredictable (by a simple calculation). We don’t know that the universe is deterministic. If indeterminism can support a “real” libertarian free will (admittedly a big if), then free will does not have to be dismissed as an illusion.
I was raised functionally agnostic in that my parents just never really touched on the subject directly. My father was an ex-Southern Baptist and my mother ex-Catholic. They didn’t get into their reasons until I was a teenager. They figured I could investigate and make up my own mind as I got older, so I didn’t really have a strong push in any particular direction.
Without privileging the hypothesis, there’s simply no reason for me to conclude the existence of a god. From an outsider view without any baked-in animosity or strong predisposition, the idea simply is not a good explanation for, well, anything. It also invites more questions on every front I cared to look into.
With regards to this area, I remember a couple threads back people talking about the idea of hell and, quite frankly, watching someone assert something about hell, which was at odds with a myriad of other branches of Christianity, is something of a head-scratcher as an outsider.
The idea just is not a very useful one to me.
Do you believe that some things are absolutely evil and others are absolutely good, or that they are relative to circumstances?
In short to the above, in its entirely: “no”. Neither dichotomy works for me. I’ve read no shortage of defenses or justifications for any number of actions ranging from the mundane to the divine. I have more tenets than a moral philosophy and I can effectively sum it up as: “try really hard not to ruin anyone’s day” and “shit happens.”
Models beyond that and attempts to model morality I tend to find tedious.
A conversation is a much more efficient format for these kinds of questions so forgive me if I come off as too probing – just trying to understand your position better.
When you say there’s no reason to conclude the existence for a God, what things do you conclude the existence for? Are you nothing more than the product of time, chance, and matter? Or is it more of an indifference viewpoint of, “well I’m not sure what to believe, but what you just said doesn’t add up. I don’t need to be sure of something to be sure that you’re wrong because you just told me a flying mouse teleported through the window and ate your textbook, and that’s why you can’t complete your homework. I don’t need an alternative hypothesis to call BS”
Not a problem – sorry if I come off terse.
With regards to existence, things that have at least some substantive, ostensibly visible impact on the things around me. Something detectable, maybe testable. Honestly, things existing or not existing is just not that much of a consideration for me in my day to day. It really doesn’t matter much to me if I’m hallucinating things I’m interacting with because at the end of the day it really doesn’t much matter.
Probably. I don’t have much reason to conclude anything else.
You’re framing things here as a dichotomy again. It isn’t a matter of not adding up or requiring an alternative hypothesis – there aren’t really any questions I’m looking to answer, anyway. The idea of a god simply does not contribute meaningfully to my understanding of the world. It isn’t even calling “BS”; the idea is just not interesting or even really useful to me.
What are some things in life you find interesting? Hiking? Food? Companionship? Games? Music?
All of these things. If you’d said “philosophy,” though, not that at all.
Leaving aside arguments concerning the implausibility of a human-like agent creating the universe, my gut reason for not believing in god(s) comes from the obvious character of the religious belief as a fantasy. You’re afraid of dying? Guess what! A omnipotent, benevolent being from beyond time and space will ensure that you, personally, are given eternal life. What luck! The whole thing is an expression of fearfulness, and once you accept that you and your memory will perish utterly from the earth, it becomes hard to see how anyone could think otherwise.
At this point, someone will object that I do a disservice to the moral and spiritual charter of religion, and that reducing it to a desire for mere personal survival misrepresents why people actually believe. Perhaps I am, but I’d still wager that few people would worship or obey a god that mandated all spiritual and moral stuff while causing personal identity to cease at death.
Isn’t this literally what Buddhists seek?
I’m no expert on Buddhism, but I don’t think the state of nirvana can be equated with death, which is what I mean. I’m open to being instructed on this by someone who knows more.
Sorry, I’m not Buddhist and my question is genuine for my understanding as well, but my prior was that Nirvana is the erasure of self, which is what you equated death with.
It seems to me that Christianity provides an answer to a fear of death, existential dread, injustices that man cannot solve, etc by convincing people of a fantasy, consisting of various constructs that alleviate people’s negative emotions.
Buddhism seems contradictory, because on the one hand it tells people to give up desire and to let go of delusions. Yet on the other hand, karma and reincarnation are very similar to the heaven and hell construct. If you do good, you get rewarded by being reincarnated better and if you do bad, you reincarnate worse. This seems contradictory, where you work hard on your karma, to get to a point where you extinguish desire. However, without desire, why care about karma or Nirvana?
Anyway, apparently much of traditional Buddhist practice has centered on gaining merit and merit transfer, rather than reaching Nirvana. So this makes it much more similar to Christianity than is often claimed.
Leaving afterlife aside, the Judeo-Christian worldview is arguably more helpful to construct society with than a purely materialist one.
For instance, the Declaration of Independence states:
If you believe that a person is not just a more specialized animal, but a creation in the image of God, that their life has sacred value, then you have a bedrock of egalitarianism of inherent worth. But what truths can actually be “self-evident” without such a construct? What is even truth itself? Where do you derive rights from outside of might makes right and construct hierarchies accordingly?
As for the first part, man was made in the image of God, but people often want to fashion God in the image of man. How is it more plausible that anything can exist at all given enough time, chance, and matter than it was deliberately designed?
It’s probably empirically true that religions confer coordination advantages for societies at certain stages of development; it’s probably also true that they retard coordination when these stages are superseded. But even if the latter isn’t true, what you’re arguing for here is the presence of an evolutionary selection effect that rewards religious belief–not the likelihood of that belief being true.
I disagree that this bedrock is necessary. Our moral intuitions inform religion, not the other way around. And even at that, my lack of religious conviction in no way impedes me assigning moral worth to my fellow citizens. In fact, I would have to wonder about anyone who needed their moral regard for other people to be shored up by some extraneous ideology.
Because the quantities of time, chance, and matter are literally astronomical. And though I hate to make the Dickie Dawkins move, whence comes god, then?
I was addressing why it’s not just a matter of fear of afterlife.
Where do your moral intuitions come from though? Again, with the caveat that this format may be more inquisitive and less optimal than a conversation, I’d venture to say that a lot of your assumptions are the product of an implicit Judeo-Christian value system.
If you look around the world, there are plenty of societies were it’s not love your neighbor, it’s eat your neighbor. Both figuratively and literally. Sure your tribe is pretty cool, but those bastards across the river deserve what’s coming to them.
If you look to history, you can easily see that it’s abundantly clear that people definitely need moral regard for other people to be shored up. Even in the Bible, the book of Judges is all about what happens when, “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”
As for the last statement, if you examine the math, time is the enemy of chance, if you will. The asymptote is 0 not 1, for lack of a better framing, when it comes to atoms even coming together at all, planets staying in habitable zones, etc. If anything, these hypotheses are a poor attempt to explain away a creator by assuming a creator doesn’t exist, and then hand waving the actual physics of what it would take for that to be true.
My moral intuitions, most of which I share with every human being who has ever lived, have come from 2 billion years of natural selection, followed by several hundreds of thousands of years of gene-culture coevolution. To assign any of this to something so recent as Judeo-Christianity is to know nothing of human anthropology. Do you think Roman civilisation had no moral values? Or China of the Han period?
This is simply untrue. Every society on record has normative precepts that are used to police social interactions. It may not look like what you’re used to, but it’s there. And guess what? It’s most not Judaeo-Christian.
You don’t seem to have any knowledge of human beings. We are not amoral individuals who need to be restrained by the moral law; we are prosocial cooperators who very occasionally defect from social norms. The Book of Judges is not a warning; it’s a counterfactual though experiment that justifies the presence of a priestly caste.
I have examined the math, and this is just vague rhetorical bombast. Even a vastly improbable event becomes likely over enough random iterations; this is no less true of conjoint improbable events. The framing is not how likely or unlikely something is; it’s how likely or unlikely something is given the number of trials that have occurred.
why then do the church’s morals seem to lag society’s morals rather than lead them?
i would venture to say that judeo christian value systems persisted so successfully because they were implicitly the product of a neatly bundled human value system.
The claim is not that any moral intuition can only come from a Judeo-Christian framework, just that yours and mine do. The moral values you cite differ from those we hold today.
The Romans lived in a shame and honor culture. It was expected that women raped should commit suicide for the sake of honor. The conquest of “barbarians” was a bedrock of the society through slave labor and new wealth. Torture was an obvious tool for interrogation.
I am Han Chinese. It still influences my bewilderment that people expect politicians to be moral rather than scheming by nature. For kings and generals, there’s very much an ends justifies the means approach toward amoral tactics and strategems to achieve objectives. For commoners, there’s the whole notion of being convicted of laws you are not aware of but that you should just know are wrong.
In the former, it puzzles me that you wouldn’t classify Rome as an “eat your neighbor” society. For the latter, the middle kingdom was decidedly arrogant about thinking neighbors beneath them, but pleased to have tributary states. Both very much fit an “eat your neighbor” approach…China just didn’t like the taste (which again is simplifying given its forays into southeast Asia).
I think you may be misunderstanding what I’m saying about humans. By my worldview, though humans are made in the image of God, and therefore are inherently moral creatures, they are easily led astray and value autonomy over obedience. Laws are a standard that allow humans to see how short they fall to whatever standards they construct for themselves. I believe that this morality stems from the “image of God” concept rather than evolution. Your read of Judges certainly differs from the interpretation of others.
As for the last part, are you assuming you get to try again? Because as I alluded to, the multiverse notion is a convenient untestable workaround to the problem of improbability that is not widely discussed but well-enough known to be beyond just rhetoric. Non-theists like Paul Davies conclude as much when dismissing God in trying to wrestle with the Goldilocks dilemma.
Because if you have one shot (and hence my assertion that time is the enemy of chance):
1. You need to have a cause for a Big Bang
2. Your Big Bang has to go poof just right so that the universe neither expands too slowly as to collapse back into itself, nor too fast as to have everything accelerate apart into cold nothing
3. You need black holes not to swallow all the stars but everything close enough together that planets can form
4. You need planets to settle in a habitable zone for long enough for life to chance to form before the star goes supernova or otherwise fizzles out
5. You need necessary ingredients for even the simplest versions of life to be possible. Life must eat and breed
6. You need non-life to assemble itself in a way that information can be passed on and reproduction to be possible. Life is not useful if it’s as barren as the rock that it comes out of
7. You need your unicellular organisms to organize and find a way for the reproductive data to also change to form multicellular organisms. From there, it must find other organisms to feed on
8. You need your planet not to change so much as to extinguish that life soon after its formation
9. And you need this all to happen before the universe dies out into a cold nothingness.
So your infinitude of matter runs against the clock of time. Again, once you hand-wave at a multiverse, you get rid of the inconvenient problem of time by resetting the clock through infinite trials. And to me that fits much less neatly than assuming a being created the game to begin with.
@DragonMilk
If the cause of the Big Bang is outside our universe, then there doesn’t need to be a cause, because the laws of the universe may not apply at all.
This is very counter intuitive, making it very hard to reason about things like a lack of time/causality, where we do experience time, but a hypothetical observer outside our universe would see all our time in the same instant.
—
The rest of your argument is fallacious. One could just as easily wonder why God would make all these unlikely choices.
Or alternatively, one can similarly argue that it’s impossible that my erstwhile neighbors won the lottery, because the chance of winning is so low. This ignores that:
– We would never have asked that question if the outcome didn’t happen. So the chance of intelligent life happening is actually 100%, in every situation where intelligent life is asking the question.
– There are actually many lottery-players and there may be an infinite amount of universes. If so, the chance of any outcome happening is actually 100%, no matter how unlikely each random event along the way is.
– The extent to which outcomes are deterministic and/or constrained is unclear. My neighbors winning the lottery might actually be happen again if you would do the Big Bang over. Or just the fundamental physical constants may be deterministic, where the very processes that create the Big Bang and/or determine how it unfolds, reliably creates the fundamental physical constants that we are rather attached to.
If we’re in the business of convenient lies, surely we must be able to find some that are more useful than Christianity. Like, it’s not optimised for that at all.
And a Christian would say because it’s true – there are too many inconvenient things in it for someone to really try to pass it off as a lie (relying on testimony of women in a society where women’s words were no admissable in court, having sinners like tax collectors among the apostles, and a persecutor like Paul who imprisoned and killed many of them become an evangelist).
Well I’m sure they would, although the reasons your hypothetical Christian is giving are woefully bad since the implausibility of someone telling a somewhat awkward lie is completely insignificant in comparison to the implausibility of the supernatural from an atheist perspective.
But I think I might have misunderstood you: I interpreted your comment as saying that even if Christianity’s bonkers metaphysical claims are false then the ethical teachings would still be valuable, but on rereading I think you might have been saying that even if the specific claim of an afterlife is wrong, other claims (both ethical and metaphysical) would still be useful.
I believe that some (all?) Jews don’t believe in any kind of survival after death.
Epistemologically, there’s plenty of reasons, Protagoras (ETA: and everyone else) already expressed some of the key ones better than I could. They all mostly boil down to one thing – there’s not remotely enough evidence to justify this hypothesis or even consider it seriously. But explanation why it matters, what counts as evidence, and why do we need so much of it in this case can get quite lengthy.
But historically, I first stopped to believe in benevolence of God and realized that if he does exist he must be the hugest asshole in the world. Once I looked at it this way, it became pretty obvious that there’s no reason to assume his existence other than wishful thinking. What I mean to say is, God plays an important part in the mental construct which allows you to trick yourself into believing “in the end everything is alright somehow”, and once you stop and think and notice that no, everything is obviously definitely not, what you’re left with is a bulky piece of a mechanism no longer working, and no reasons not to throw it out. That is, this is how it worked for teenage me. (See also: Yudkowsky for a much better and longer discussion of this “the world doesn’t look like the god exists and cares” argument, and how it applies to some non-religious concepts as well)
Where do you get the notion that there is such a thing as an asshole or caring though?
Regarding benevolence, the simplest analogy I’ve heard of is that if you are sold a vehicle equipped with an owner’s manual, and decide to drive it into a school, investigators will not be questioning the benevolence of the car-maker but rather that of the driver.
I’ve been asked why I get so prickly in theological discussions. It is because too often I have the overwhelming sense that the theological side of the discussion isn’t taking anything seriously, so why should I? I mention this because you have given an example here; I find it difficult to imagine the level of willful blindness required to fail to notice that it might make a tiny difference, might make the cases ever so slightly not the same, that in the vehicle example the car-maker did not also manufacture the driver.
This is why I asked about agency upthread.
In the analogy, the car would be your body, but the driver is your agency/free will. Which would be a different discussion in the form of, “is it benevolent to allow humans agency?” but quite separate from assuming that God cannot be benevolent.
Personally, I was taught it while growing up, like everyone else. If it was abstract “you”, then it’s where it gets lengthy, but basically there’s a good evolutionary explanation for attachment, altruism (both reciprocal and otherwise) and punishment for defection from group norms in humans.
I understand that there’s certain moral stance which allows one to say “It’s this sucker’s own fault, should’ve known better than to be born with a cancer/in a poor Nigerian village/in 1930 Dresden)”. Just like for every victim executed by every tyrant or his death squads, there’s a way to say – the poor bastard should’ve seen it coming, has none to blame but themself. We generally don’t use this as a justification for tyrants, and usually also question the morals of anyone who does. (The part about questioning the morals is in no way meant to be a personal attack, it’s there just to emphasize the striking difference in attitude)
For the last part, that’s where the afterlife does come back into play.
For those whose families have been butchered, sisters raped, and suffer in the hands of fellow humans in various manners, what can you tell such a person to keep them from taking matters into their own hands?
There, the idea that it is for God to mete out vengeance rather than man becomes useful. That the world was good, humans wrecked it, and it had to be redeemed.
Yes, only to make things far – to be precise, infinitely – worse. To hand out infinite punishment for finite sins is infinitely disproportionate and makes you an infinite asshole. And for the heaven – it doesn’t quuuuite excuse you that you put a person in heaven after say 10 years of suffering, if you could have put them there from the very beginning without any extra effort, or any effort at all since you’re omnipotent, and you also could’ve put everyone else there because what’s the point of torturing people if it doesn’t even serve any educational purpose or helps someone else in any way, you just put someone in pain for all eternity because they disagree with you, what the f*ck is wrong with you sorry I got carried away. But that kind of illustrates my gut feeling about this whole question, so I’ll leave it here.
I don’t quite see where you’re going with this.
Except that part where the god is omnipotent and omniscient, and the humans are not. Like, how difficult was it to make the world unwreckable? Let the people have all the free will they can carry but in a nice comfortable environment where nobody dies or suffers unless they choose to. The vehicle example isn’t applicable here not only in the way Protagoras said, but also because, you know, automakers aren’t exactly omnipotent. Not to mention the obvious conflict between the definition of the free will you seem to be using and omniscience.
Now I am aware that there’s sophisticated theological arguments against these questions, and against my answers to those arguments too, ad infinitum. But, at least for me, past a certain point they all started to feel like tying oneself in knots in order to deny the elephant in the room (see my rant above).
At risk of repeating the other thread, the short reply is that people go to hell not for what they do, but where their hearts are i relation to God – as CS Lewis puts it, in the end, it’s either a person saying to God, “Thy will be done,” God saying to you, “They will be done.” Otherwise, it’s actually quite unfair that someone that grew up in a peaceful and prosperous society would be judged via actions as well as someone else who was orphaned in a brutal war.
Also, you are raising very reasonable objections and I hope I’m not coming across as dismissive in my aim to be brief given the format of the website. That qualifier made, with the additional qualifier that I don’t even rise to the level of armchair philosopher (moreso the bored at work kind), I’d say the following:
1. The theist holds that if God is the all-knowing and all-powerful one, then there has to be a reason for evil and suffering to still exist. Convenient enough to assume the premise that God exists in the first place! But let’s entertain the common responses to evil and suffering.
2. Suffering is a catalyst for growth or destruction. It isn’t inherently an evil thing. If chaos is your god, so to speak, then why is suffering not just an expected outcome rather than something to be railed against? It would appear that all suffering is just a signal for the organism to change how its situated with its environment, and if that organism is unable to do so, oh well, the signal was given but change was not possible. To elevate to a sign that a benevolent creator doesn’t exist assumes some moral framework.
3. Traditional moral frameworks assume the existence of the divine, whether Christian, Hindu, or some other. Naturalistic explanations fall short of why it is that humans have “unalienable right” are “created equal” etc.
Side question, though, why not believe in God, just that he is in fact quite the asshole?
A theoretical God being an asshole is no reason to deny its existence. It is, however, strong moral grounds for refusing to worship said asshole. If the Biblical God manifest before me and convinced me it wasn’t a hallucination or trick of some sort, I would believe in the Biblical God. But barring some very good explanations, I would not worship it.
In other terms, what they think of God. Condemning someone to eternal suffering just because you didn’t like what they think of you doesn’t exactly pass my “not an asshole” test either. If anything, it makes things worse since now God’s also a self-absorbed asshole.
Insofar I can understand what you’re saying in 1, 2, 3, it’s about the God being the only source of morality. This is not true, there’s evolutionary explanations for morality, and that’s why it’s observed in every human society and in many animal species, all the way down to fish for some very simplistic examples, if I’m not wrong.
Teenage me would’ve probably answered with rather specific instructions on where such an asshole-god can shove his demands for worship. More seriously though, the point I made in my first comment is that once you stopped seeing god as a benevolent entity which will make sure everything is alright, it becomes immediately obvious that there’s no real reason to continue assume his existence at all. I.e. once you don’t have the motivation to tie yourself in knots, you kind of stop doing it. Like, imagine I asked you why you don’t believe in the daemon sultan Azathoth who gnaws hungrily beyond time and space? Your answer would probably be along the lines “Eeh, why exactly should I, again?”. And if I insisted, it would’ve probably went on in the format of me suggesting one far-stretched reason after another and you answering – no thanks, that does sound really stretched and like it was invented by someone very motivated to convince me that Azathoth exists. One does not need reasons to not believe in something, it’s the default any proposition starts with. If you’re asking about my counterarguments for the most common arguments for God existence, those were covered above by other people.
Also, don’t certain strains of Christianity say that mere belief isn’t enough, you must have Belief, i.e. worship God? I’m pretty sure there are scriptures along the lines of “demons know that God exists as a fact, but they are not saved.” So knowing that God exists but thinking that he’s an asshole is still a ticket to condemnation.
AlexofUrals, people actually do frequently blame the victims of tyrants. The catchphrases are “People get the government they deserve” and “Why don’t people stay home and fix their own society?”.
Define God. Seriously.
Richard Dawkins says:
So do I. But I don’t see how that’s significantly different from God as defined by some theologians, esp. Tillich’s Ground of Being. If both theists and atheists agree to believe in the Ground of Being or something like that, and agree to disbelieve in a big white-bearded man in the sky, what’s all the commotion about?
Personally, I believe in the Christian God, and many answers to objections flow from that, but the question was more generically, “do you believe in an entity that exists outside the observable natural world that brought said world into being?”
That doesn’t really narrow it down. Tillich is also Christian.
I find even the notion of existing in the observable natural world to be barely comprehensible due to multiple world stuff. How can I possibly figure out what it means to exist outside the world? Also Tillich:
Finally,
Is it supposed to be a one-time intervention or a continuous support? Because those might lead to very different results.
Also the inflaton field fits your description but I’m not inclined to worship it.
Also, generically speaking, Creator God may be completely different from the God of Good. In Zurvanism Ahura Mazda (the God of Good) is below Zurvan, the source of existence; but in Gnosticism the Creator God is below the God of Good who disapproves the very idea of our (bad) world.
This one (at work so all religious cites blocked)
And yes, I intended first ask why the existence of a creator is rejected, but unwittingly am responding with my own understanding/doctrine.
@DragonMilk
Well, that specific one looks easy: as far as I understood (I might be wrong) TGC is YEC, and I reject Young Earth because it contradicts all sorts of evidence. I guess this would be a common problem for all attempts to define God as “the main character of this book”.
Where do you get the impression that TGC is YEC?
@DragonMilk
From statements like this:
But OK, if you say it’s not YEC, I believe you. But you do believe in literal Adam and Eve, right?
@eigenmoon
Yes. But believing in an archetypal first man and first woman is a far cry from thinking archaeology is bunk on the basis of a poem. I’m not a literalist as Genesis 1 and 2 would contradict themselves if it were.
It’s more a premise that the Bible is special revelation from God, and so it’s implicit that it’s true, and from there you interpret what is literal, figurative, etc.
@DragonMilk
Do I understand correctly that you personally are not a literalist here even though TGC is, so when TGC says:
you interpret it figuratively, unlike TGC?
Perhaps I was unclear – Genesis 1 is the poem, which YEC is based off of, in my understanding. Genesis 2 introduces Adam, which I said, “yes” to, I believe there literally was a first human man and woman.
Taking that literally is where I assume people have inherent sacred worth, and aren’t just more enlightened animals, and egalitarianism, so that no group of people is more or less optimally evolved and therefore suited more to be proles or intellectuals.
So in summary, yes, I believe in a literal Adam as the basis of humans being made in the image of God and thus all moral consequences that flow from that rather than an animal to be exploited or eliminated were it to be expedient to do so.
@DragonMilk
OK. Although the mountain of evidence against Adam and Eve is less than that against YEC, it’s still there, and it’s not about morality, exploitation or elimination, but about DNA, fossils and stone tools. I don’t think that denying evolution of humans is viable at this day and age.
@eigenmoon:
I believe that all sapient hominids, including Neanderthals, are descended from an original pair that were raised from animal intelligence to ability to interact with the realm of Forms.
@eigenmoon
What sort of evidence are you talking about? And as I pointed out, to me it’s more a philosophical rather than archaeological claim. When I look around, there’s something uniquely sentient and conscious about humans that I don’t get from dogs, cats, or other mammals, much less turtles and the like.
In terms of viability, what do you mean? To me, a worldview is viable if it is productive in engaging with others in everyday life. I get along with people better if I value them as distinct from another offshoot of a tree whose branches include chimps. Or alternatively, what is your basis for gender equality given the sexual dimorphism in other species, gender roles in animals, and clear biological differences in humans?
@Le Maistre Chat
Which hominids are sapient and how did you determine that? What are Forms?
@DragonMilk
I’m talking about that sort of evidence that makes it unclear which species are sapient, given that there’s a nice line of Australopitecus and Homo species that make increasingly complex tools.
How is this different from willing to convert to whatever religion gives you the most social rewards?
Dogs, cats and turtles have too few neurons for a meaningful comparison. Chimps though:
I’m somewhat puzzled by this:
Are you saying that accepting evolution somehow blocks the motivation towards gender equality? And do you consider Christians (“the head of the woman is the man”) to be the champions of gender equality?
I have no idea, so I am agnostic on that front, but I do not believe in Christian God.
mostly i think, ‘Mysterious ground of the universe’ is merely a motte.
Is there a word for believing in the mysterious ground, but not the anthropomorphic god? I’m a stone atheist in regard to the latter, but I know too much about the weirdness of cosmology/consciousness/time/quantum physics, etc. to reject the former.
Deism I’d guess.
I remember, years ago, Neil Gaiman referencing “Possibilianism.”
Panentheism , emanationism. Emanationism is the idea that the material world is not self-subsistent, but continually generated by the GoB, like a movie being projected. Often couple the idea of multiple levels of reality. Gnosticism and Qabbbalah are forms of emanationism. Vedanta is similar, asserting that anything that appears be other than Brahman is Maya, or illusion.
I have not seen (or read, heard, etc. Using seen just as a convenient shorthand) any strong evidence that any sort of God or Gods exist. In the absence of any compelling reason to believe something, the intellectually honest thing is to not believe in it.
As a background, I was raised Christian and was fairly involved in the church (youth ministry, bible camps, stuff like that). One day, in the midst of growing doubt, I sat down and physically wrote down all the evidence for God. After that, I went through and reviewed it and crossed out anything that isn’t actually good evidence. The results were too weak, so I decided to stop believing.
The cosmological argument is the only one I find even vaguely compelling, and I only accept it insofar as it offers a plausible explanation for existence. Arguments that go further to assert that I ought to try to determine and live in accordance with the will of God seem to either hinge on the presumption of some sort of teleological Final Cause (which I reject) or fail to argue effectively about the ontological properties of God if you’re an idealist about epistemology (which I am).
Started out believing in a vague nondenominational christianity by default, but it got chipped away gradually. There were occasional moments of conscious thought about it (“wait, I don’t actually believe Jesus literally rose from the dead, hmm”), but it was mostly a slow transition of no longer feeling the religious foundation to be necessary. Something like:
Christian-esque God->non-Christian but still triple-omni God->noninteractive creator God->nature-as-godish-thing->wait, why bother
There was no strong external pressure against religiosity- I intentionally avoided the atheism movement of the time since I perceived it to be overly aggressive and optimized for winning debates. If anything, there was a mild pressure towards religion- I wanted it to be true, since losing it felt like losing meaning and admitting something exceptionally bleak about reality.
But being afraid that something isn’t true is an unstable basis for believing that thing.
Losing belief in a triple-omni interventionist God was pretty easy, since the practical problem of evil requires some heavy arm twisting (like, say, Unsong). Even if I desperately wanted it to be true, it just seemed too unlikely to warrant belief in. Each time you remove omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, or interventionism, it gets easier to square with observed reality. Eventually they all just faded.
It was harder to try to figure out how to deal with meaning, and something in the rough neighborhood of ‘free will’. I felt like a creator was necessary for there to be meaning, though I had no truly strong argument why that was the case beyond the feeling. (I felt like I had strong arguments, of course- it’s just that under scrutiny they eventually bottomed out at the underlying feeling.) And it felt like a supernatural form of ‘free will’ was required in order for anything to be more than rocks. Again, with no particular hard rationale.
Eventually I just came to realize that a creator doesn’t actually help with meaning. It was fully possible for this universe to be a simulation of Entity A who bet their friend Entity B that a statistically average universe of these properties would produce more than X paperclips. So, in some sense, the only thing externally meaningful about this universe was… the creation of paperclips. Would I, learning that is actually how reality is, suddenly find paperclips more meaningful? No, not really, except insofar that I’d be worried about the simulator turning everything off if it looks like he’s losing the bet. But that’s a far cry from what most people mean when they’re talking about meaning.
So if we examine two universes that look exactly the same, with one created by an entity and the other where everything came to be through the consequence of physical law, the humans in both would still find things meaningful. And they’d both be justified in that feeling, because you only find things meaningful that you find meaningful, and that is the highest form of ‘meaning’ that can logically exist. The fact that some strong entity somewhere finds something meaningful is not enough for you to find it meaningful.
My concerns about free will also eventually collapsed completely. I wanted to avoid determinism and to have some ineffable higher agency. I couldn’t escape the brute fact that anything interesting requires structure to exist at all, so by trying to punt my agency into something beyond atoms, I was just subjecting it to a higher level that was still, in some way, structured and entangled with this universe’s causality. There was no way around that- if it weren’t the case, ‘free will’ would be utterly pointless and nonfunctional. Whether the structure was discrete, deterministic computation or evolving stochastic processes, in this universe or a higher ‘spiritual’ plane, changed nothing. At the end of the day, I am a machine of laws of one form or another, and that is the highest level of agency logically possible. The laws do not merely bind me, they are the structure that allows me to exist and act at all. Adding extra layers of laws on physical law doesn’t change anything and there is no reason to assume they exist, so I dropped it. (Not sure if I found lesswrong before or after this. Probably plagiarized some.)
Oddly enough, morality was never really an issue. I guess I’ve always believed that human morals were a byproduct of humans, even when I was vaguely Christian. After all, even in a created and designed universe, the reason why humans act moral isn’t because God is puppeteering them, but rather because humans were built and taught to be that way. When you replace God with other humans, things don’t change much.
Humans can be good just like dogs can be good. We’re social animals who have lived with other social animals in complex behavioral networks for generations. Cultures mostly separated from our own can have some pretty big differences, but there’s a great deal of common ground because of the constraints and incentives of such a network. That common ground seems to grow even further when humans can spend some time thinking about what they actually want for themselves and others.
Despite the steady decline in belief, I fully appreciate the attractiveness of the idea, maybe even more now than before. There’s a comic where a kid arrives in heaven and God greets them, and, despite just dying, everything’s fine, because hey, Heaven, and they go to dinner with everyone- that sort of thing is pretty much an instant trigger for tears. There is such a gulf between the idea that everything is fundamentally okay, and what is. I want that to be true so badly, but I can’t make myself believe in it any more than I can believe 2+2=5. The lack of any higher benevolence implies a fucking absurd burden on us animals who are only barely more capable than dogs. We’re trying our best, and we might make it, but we’re too slow to save billions.
The real reason why I don’t believe in God is probably because I lack a God-shaped hole in my soul. This in turn makes me insufficiently susceptible to the biases that are necessary to believe in religion/God.
I feel the same. I believe that there was a study done a few years back using an fmri on people and asking them to pray. If I recall correctly, about 10% of people didn’t have the same response as the rest. I’ve been looking for it, but I can’t find it anywhere. It’s possible I mentally combined some studies or remembered the conclusions differently. Does anyone know of this or a similar study? I found a bunch of fmri studies on prayer, but none coming to that conclusion, so I may have just dreamed it.
Seems to me the very question of the reason of a belief or lack of belief in a terminal concept is miscontructed, because it seems to imply that such a belief is a conscious choice — but there’s no rational answer that I can give as to what leads me to the belief that reality is real, or not real, that God exists or doesn’t, that souls exist or don’t, that morality is real or not; I have no evidence in favor of either position. I just believe what my subconscious brain tells me to believe, and any answer I could give to the question would be a rationalization.
You beat me to it, except that I was heading for something a little different.
As long as we define religion and religious behaviour to be about belief – which is how Christians tend to frame it, so natural to many of us – then for me the non-belief argument is simple and trivial: a combination of (1) no falsifiable predictions and/or plenty of falsified predictions (2) too many choices of unfalsifiable things to believe; how can one be more believable than another?
Where I was heading was:
This requires more nuance – just about anything you could say about a big name religion won’t apply to all people who claim to follow that religion. But I think it’s also a lot more interesting.
Here’s an example. The following two snippets comes from the same post by EchoChaos in Open Thread 146-75. The theology expressed is familar to me, but I forget the technical name for it.
This makes me angry. Any being that set up a situation like this, creating a system where every person deserves Eternal Punishment – and then, typically, expresses His Justice by seeing that many of them receive it – is to me completely hateful and abhorrent. No good person could support a moral monster of this kind. Obeying such a monster’s commands out of fear and hopelessness is understandable, but demonstrates no kind of virtue or moral worth. In a Christianesque theology of this kind, the most moral Supernatural Being available would be Lucifer, who rebelled against this monster in spite of knowing that successfully overthrowing him would be impossible.
Now I’m not saying that people who believe this are necessarily bad people – that’s a somewhat different argument.
Also, it’s possible to add epicycles – different from those I supplied – that make this a less bad choice. Imagine, for example, a universe that was this way of necessity, not created by the deity in question, who was merely trying to mitigate the harms created by this system.
But without carefully constructing epicycles, the deity in question appears to me to be utterly unworthy of worship.
Ah, I think there’s two dynamics at play here.
I don’t think it would be controversial to say we are separated from God by default. After all, if we weren’t, we wouldn’t have to have this discussion. This state of separation persists throughout life and even after death…by default. And no need to rehash the why, as the topic of sin is a separate discussion in itself.
From there, the details of hell are murkier for most Christians because the gospel focuses more on reconciliation with God rather than the specifics of what exactly being apart from God will look like. I personally defer to God on what happens to pre-Jesus and never-heard-of-Jesus people. If I were to speculate, he gives non-Christians a chance to meet Jesus and repent as well.
You may then say, “well yeah, if I have the choice between heaven and hell once I die, of course I’d choose heaven!” And that again is where people get into speculative pieces like The Great Divorce, which argues that actually no, in the end there are those that still value autonomy over obedience, even if it means “hell”.
So in my understanding, God created a system where people were already living eternally in paradise (Eden), but expected obedience in return. It’s yet another discussion to speculate as to why the possibility of evil is allowed in creation – some would argue that evil is tautologically anything that goes against God’s wishes, and so for free will to be truly free, there has the be the capacity to disobey.
The Christian message is one of reconciliation – “for God so loved the world” and all that – the evil that resulted from disobedience must be paid for, and so God died in our place so that all may have a second chance to turn back.
And so everyone is left with the same choice once again – either turn away from sin and to God or stay the (new) default course of separation.
If hell is simply “separation from god”, then why do biblical descriptions of it involve eternal torture with fire and brimstone (which seems far more like active punishment)? “Separation from God” strikes me as possibly a modern reinterpretation that papers over something uncomfortable, rather than a direct reading of the text.
Of course, if you aren’t a biblical literalist, this might be a moot point. And I do acknowledge that this is also a point on which believers disagree–I’ve heard sincere arguments for both “it’s just being apart from God” and “it’s a lake of fire where demons will torture you”.
Apologies, that was kind of a “gotcha” and I’m trying to avoid that. (Unfortunately, the edit window’s just passed.) To rephrase a bit more constructively:
The biblical descriptions of hell often feature fire, brimstone, and the like, which many people have interpreted quite literally. Do you think that hell is a place where people experience actual torture, or do you think the “eternal fire” language is more metaphorical?
As some put it, “I don’t think demons literally torture you, after all, they are thrown in there. But I think what you experience is much worse.”
Chalk it up to my conversion experience toward the end of high school, but when I had insomnia and thought I died, I thought I was in hell because the perceived separation from God featured a prominent physical burning sensation.
Anecdote aside, you asked about torture and fire and brimstone. I’m not sure that there’s actually any talk of active torturers, and think it’s a popular construction – after all, the would be torturers are facing the fire and brimstone themselves (Rev 21:10). Revalation 21:8 refers to this fiery part as the second death – which to me implies that there’s a final judgment that evaluates the already dead. This would be unnecessary if only what you did until you died was all that was counted.
Also, regarding the fire, I may be wrong, but because it’s referred to as a means of destruction, it may be a means of destruction rather than passive torture in itself. As in, the fire is eternal, those thrown in may not be, and instead destroyed. My uncertainty is due to considering any physical suffering far better than eternal separation from God.
I’ve encountered the “Hell is (merely) separation from God” theological position frequently, and it works reasonably well for those attached to Biblical phrasing, but not wishing to conceive of their God as sadistic.
It doesn’t help me much, in that I’m presumably already seperated from this particular God ;-(
More importantly, I should have put more stress on the idea that we all deserve punishment, simply for being the way we are created. That’s where a good part of my anger comes from, and I’m sure some of that is amplified by my own life experiences. (I was on the autistic spectrum before the diagnosis was well known; therefore the only possible explanation of my autistic symptoms was me being a bad child, deserving of punishment. I have a huge hot button about punishing blind people for failure to see, cats for not being monkeys, etc. etc.)
He didn’t set up a situation like this.
We did.
Precisely zero humans created by God were condemned to Hell, and the first ones chose, of their own free well, to set up this situation.
God has spent the entire existence of humanity trying to fix this situation.
Well, I didn’t.
And God allowed them to make that decision for everyone else. How generous.
How about “Adam and Eve go to Hell, everyone else starts in the same situation”?
@Viliam
I’m going to wager a nickel that like Adam and Eve, you have also sinned.
Only for their children. There are other created beings that Adam and Eve didn’t choose for (angels, for example).
All other created beings did start in the same situation. It’s only Adam and Eve’s children who have this problem.
Fortunately, God cares about us and is trying to get us back.
@EchoChaos: Just to be clear, you believe that the Christian creation myth is true in a literal way, i.e., it’s not just an analogy for evolution or something similar? As in, God created Adam and Eve, and all humans alive today are their descendants?
@Adrian
Yes, I believe there were a literal Adam and Eve.
If God exists, he goes through ridiculous lengths to hide himself. People pray to him and say that he does miracles, but these miracles can obviously be explained by other causes. It’s strange how the only way he works is by doing things in a way that is easily compatible with other explanations. He doesn’t seem interested in breaking the laws of physics. There are stories in the Bible of people who do wicked things and then are immediately struck down. It’s an amazing coincidence that the better at recording events we get, the less we see these stories. And yes, religious people have their own ideas about this discrepancy but it’s exactly the kind of story you would expect to hear if God didn’t exist. He doesn’t really have any kind of explanatory power for how the world works except in the most esoteric way, and that’s if you believe the dubious philosophical arguments. God is at best an epiphenomenon and you have to wonder what’s the point of worshiping an epiphenomenon.
I was raised Catholic, but started doubting around the end of my freshman year of high school. If I recall correctly, some of my reasoning was along these lines:
My family is Catholic, so we believe that the Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Christ. My grandparents, however, are Protestant–they don’t believe in transubstantiation. How do I tell who’s right? Come to think of it, my grandmother converted from Catholicism to Protestantism when she married my grandfather, and my dad converted back to Catholicism when he married my mother. What’s really going on here?
Come to think of it, what’s my justification for believing in any form of Christianity as opposed to, say, Hinduism? I have some Hindu friends; why are we seemingly each convinced of an explanation of the core foundation of the universe that totally contradicts the others? If I were raised Hindu, would anything convince me of the clear truth of Christianity?
Also, God is supposed to be all-powerful and all-loving, but my life is kind of shitty right now. [Freshman year of high school was generally not a good time for me. I wasn’t the mentally healthiest; nor the most socially skilled.] Why would a loving God put me through this crap? Why would He put everyone through the crap we all go through? Would all this pain make more sense in a world without an omnibenevolent creator? [yeeeeah I was real angsty. Listened to Green Day.]
It was also around this time that I stumbled upon Less Wrong. The post about belief-in-belief and the post about the universe being uncaring and mechanistic (the one with a content warning and cellular-automata-based torture) both hit hard–it seemed like the universe I was living in was not one with a God, but rather one based on math with no explicit terms for goodness.
There wasn’t a specific moment, but between the spring of my freshman year and the fall of my sophomore year, I gradually went from completely believing in God, to having some doubts, to just not believing in God. In the years since, my reasons for nonbelief have shifted somewhat. For one, I think my own suffering is much less of a factor in the (poorly-named) “problem of evil” than e.g. the existence of degenerative diseases. But now, it’s not really about specific reasons; Christianity just feels untrue to me. Now that I no longer identify as a Catholic (unless my parents ask), I feel like it doesn’t need specific evidence to refute it any more than Hinduism or Shinto or Buddhism does. I can make arguments about the immorality of the biblical God, or the contradictions in the Bible, or the invalidity of scapegoating, but those aren’t my core reasons. The real crux of my disbelief is, this isn’t what I’d expect a world to look like if there were a single, omnipotent, benevolent God as described in the Bible and the teachings of the Church. That is, P(world I see | God) << P(world I see | mathematical universe).
For me, it’s the sheer mundanity of existence. Why create a universe with snot, and razor burn, and threads that come loose, and needing to pee, and appendicitis, and myopia, and clipping toenails? I get the theological discussion around theodicy — that cancer and plagues and babies born with painful terminal illnesses are somehow part of God’s plan — but I fundamentally cannot understand a divine creator who came up with a world as full of weird, unnecessary, minor inconveniences as this one.
A couple of people said something like this, and it’s really weird to me. Like, you can’t imagine why someone would make a mundane world? That kinda seems like a failure of imagination to me. Haven’t you ever read a novel that showed a character doing mundane things, at least in part? Weren’t those parts useful and important in the context of the story?
I sympathize with the “it’s wrong of God to allow this extreme suffering” idea, but the one in your post I don’t understand nearly as well.
I think it’s the inverse of the watchmaker’s hypothesis. If you find a watch on the beach that only keeps time properly on a Tuesday, is labelled with Arabic and Roman numerals, and has to be wound an hour a day or else it’ll go haywire. Well, either the designer is a hack or maybe it was just chance after all.
Yes, that’s sort of what I was gesturing at. The niggly, rough, hack-y bits of being alive in the material world honestly don’t feel like the work of an omnipotent supernatural deity — but they all make sense as natural consequences of being bags of smart meat who have kludged together civilisation.
What if it was created one way but through human action and desire for autonomy it ended up the way it is now?
Snot arises due to cold or illness. Neither is in Eden. Razor burn involves a human custom of shaving hair and doing so with a manufactured blade. No need for threads if you can go around naked!
I don’t see why having to pee is so bad, I quite enjoy peeing sometimes. Appendicitis likewise may not be present in Eden given the diet of Fruit of Life and such. Myopia is likewise due to human autonomy resulting in life spent staring at things close rather than flora and fauna far away. You got me on the toenail clipping, though.
For the rest of your mundane examples, however, the theist would argue they are self-inflicted.
I understand that the theist would say that the Fall is the cause of human ill. But God created the consequences for the Fall. Like I said above, I can understand emotionally the appeal of saying we’ve brought death and plague down on our own heads as a result of Man’s sin — that’s serious stuff, the proper work of the moral arbiter of the universe. I don’t get why a divine God would design a universe that, were Man to Fall, we end up in this world with a lot of very boring, very dull, minor inconveniences.
At that point it’s just an argument from ignorance or disbelief, I guess?
1) Epistimologically, there are an infinite number of things I could believe in. For knowledge to be useful or predictive, I need to constrain my beliefs to those for which there is evidence in support. Looking around, there is no objective evidence that I can find in support.
2) The meaning of the word “God” always seems to slip out of grasp much like trying to nail Jello to the wall. Those which are highly specific are easy to discredit through internal contradiction (eg. omnibenevolence, omnipotence, omniscience). Those which are vague are useless (eg. clock-maker entity which created the universe).
@DragonMilk says:
I guess I don’t believe due to my background, lack of imagination, and that I have a heart two sizes too small.
I have thought of a rather long post detailing my family and personal religious (and non-religious) background, but I don’t think it would be that instructive.
FWLIW, the message that God both exists and loves us has never hit home with me, I remember that years ago I read quite a bit of both Bertrand “Why I Am Not A Christian” Russell and C.S. “Mere Christianity” Lewis back-to-back, and while I’ve forgotten Russell’s arguments, some of those of Lewis I can still remember, but they didn’t give me faith, and the only part of the Bible that felt real to me was the Book of Job.
I have the habit of prayer, but I expect nothing more of it than from wishing upon a dandelion, and, while damnation and Hell are imaginable to me, redemption and Heaven just aren’t.
Growing up, I more or less took it for granted that God existed, since other people seemed to think so, but didn’t think much about it. When I was ten, I came up with a proof that it was more likely that God did not exist than that he did. I mentioned this to my father, who told me that that was his opinion as well — I think the first conversation I ever had with either parent on the subject.
I later concluded that my proof was mistaken, but I still don’t believe in God. The world makes sense without God, it doesn’t make more sense, arguably makes less, with one, and I have seen no strong evidence for the existence of God. Like Laplace, je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.
I observe that some obviously intelligent and reasonable people believe in God, which is some evidence, but then others don’t believe.
Why isn’t there a broader and more effective US political coalition behind expanding the child tax credit and/or creating an explicit “child allowance” like other countries have? It seems like lots of different folks should have strong reasons to support it. For example:
— if you’re a progressive, presumably you care about reducing poverty, and child allowances are known-effective at poverty reduction for a particularly “deserving” group, and also arguably a long-term investment in better human capital development (poverty being a better predictor of educational outcomes than educational system quality)
— if you’re a feminist, child care is hard work done mostly by women, and feminists have [citation needed] been saying for decades that it’s unjust for that hard work to be uncompensated, and a child allowance would raise the compensation
— if you’re a traditionalist, child allowances make it easier for families that choose to have one parent stay at home, while still also helping families that use daycare
— if you’re a UBI type, a child allowance is a step toward a UBI (at the very least, toward delivering social spending as simple cash transfers with minimal strings) that has many of a UBI’s upsides for the targeted group, and basically none of the downsides, and is less expensive
And I see reformicons of the Douthat type realizing this and talking it up occasionally, and I think there’s even a bipartisan bill to increase the child tax credit, but AFAICT it’s gone nowhere. Why? Fiscal conservatives might object to the cost, but fiscal conservatism has very little influence in either major party right now. Progressives might speculate that it’s latent racism, i.e. the white electorate doesn’t want to support a program that might disproportionately benefit poor black kids and/or induce black parents to have more kids, but it’s not clear how strong this effect is these days and if you wanted to propagandize against this effect it would be super easy to spotlight sympathetic red-state white lower-middle-class families who would benefit. Is there another blocker I’m missing?
It was a major part of Trump’s platform, actually. He had Ivanka driving it and it made it into his tax bill.
It was increased from $1000 to $2000, and allowed to be taken as a refund of up to $1400 if it’s larger than federal tax liability.
Are you saying it should be increased further? If so, how much?
Canada’s max benefit is on the order of $5K USD/year for younger kids, as per https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/child-family-benefits/canada-child-benefit-overview/canada-child-benefit-we-calculate-your-ccb.html
Consider whose clients the parties are. This is too straightforward to employ a lot civil servants, and might plausibly address the underlying problems social activists need to shout about. On the other side, just giving people money might plausibly result in somebody less than maximally virtuous getting some, and might make people wonder why all other government functions – the tax code, or corporate subsidies, say – aren’t also easily described in a single sentence using only round numbers.
“This would be achieve my opponents goals and therefore is actually bad for them” is a fully general and low quality argument.
‘Modern political parties’ stated goals don’t actually match up all that well with the incentives of their leadership in practice’ was more what I was going for.
There’s already a pretty big “child allowance” baked into many federal anti-poverty programs. TANF (welfare) is generally only available to household that include children under 18. Parents of young children get preferential consideration for Section 8 (rent subsidy) vouchers. Any program that uses income relative to the federal poverty line to determine eligibility (including Medicaid and the ACA exchange subsidies) implicitly subsidizes children and other dependents, since the poverty line is based on household size. And until the ACA’s changes to Medicaid went into effect, most states limited Medicaid eligibility to households that included minor children, elderly adults, or disabled adults.
And there’s already a fair amount of pushback against this on the right. A standard conservative line of attack against current federal anti-poverty programs is that the programs actively encourage people to have children they can’t afford to support without government assistance, and especially to have those children out of wedlock. That line of attack is weaker and less popular now than it was before the late 90s overhauls of federal welfare programs and state child support laws, but it’s still around.
Not sure what bill you’re referring to, but HR 3300 passed committee last week, no Rs in favor. I’m watching it for EITC reasons, but it looks relevant to your interests.
It is relevant, thanks. I was originally thinking of:
https://www.bennet.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/american-family-act
which is less bipartisan than I remembered it being.
For some suggested pro family formation policies I recommend reading Affirming the American Family by Gladden Pappin and Maria Molla, and for some of the partisan rhetoric on the issue I recommend reading Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family by Thomas Edsall, and Are Liberals Against Marriage? by Ross Douthat
My own guess about “Why not?” is that too much inter-partisan cooperation is required, and Congress doesn’t do much bi-partisan anymore (and the States feel too broke), for an intra-party coalition I imagine too many Democrats think such policies would be anti-feminist and too many Republicans still have a “Starve the beast” anti-social spending agenda.
I’ll also note that Denmark is supposed to have such policies and while they seem to help some at the margins their birth and marriage rates are still low, I’ll also note that the recent relatively low birthrates in the U.S.A. are driven by a drop in un-wed births since the ’80’s and a drop in new marriages since 2008, births among married couples have actually gone up recently.
Our government is incapable of any kind of bipartisan reform. It doesn’t matter what it is.
Outside of military action in a foreign land.
But we haven’t had bipartisan support for a new war since 2003.
It’s a terrible incentive to give people money for just having kids. I think increasing the tax credit would only increase the number of kids in poverty by increasing the incentive to have kids when you can’t afford them.
From The Atlantic, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” In this long, long piece, Brooks argues that the nuclear family was propped up artificially by a whole bunch of things in mid-century America, but the extended family is more stable and natural, and as the nuclear family continues to collapse, with worse outcomes for children, we’d better head toward something. He concludes that we’re not going back to the extended family anytime soon, but what folks can do is forge artificial kin networks.
Seems like a key part of whatever emerges is stable housing, which may be less and less tenable in the common urban context. Either jobs start moving back out of cities (unlikely, the head honchos don’t care enough to give up the swanky conveniences they can trivially afford), or we go full Tokyo zoning regulations.
Has anyone made the argument that social atomization is somewhat linked to people moving around more? We grew up making friends of classmates just because they were consistently there, and while commutes reduce that incentive for bonding with co-workers, getting to know your neighbors out of inertia is definitely reduced by unstable housing.
A kin network doesn’t work when they’re even as much as a half-hour away, blood relatives or not.
“Has anyone made the argument that social atomization is somewhat linked to people moving around more?”
Yes, Brooks makes that very argument in the linked article.
I’m strongly in support of extended families being treated as a critical/default support network. Friends, jobs, and health all come and go, we need to average those across more people to have stable lives. My peers (early 30s) are all (many anyways) highly motivated to disassociate themselves from their parents and rarely see any family more distant than their nuclear.
I’m not convinced there is any reasonable way for most people to generate a strong enough artificial kin network to replace the services extended family has traditionally provided. Where will you find people 30+ years younger than you who will house and care for you in your old age or who will loan you thousands of dollars interest free to replace a wrecked car?
Those would be extreme cases, but I’ve seen a good deal of extended-kin like behavior in the context of the SCA. When we moved from Chicago to San Jose about twenty-five years ago, two people showed up to help me and son unload the van. They were both SCA people, one who I knew slightly from before.
A good many years ago, two women who were active in the SCA were in an auto accident. One died, the other was badly injured but eventually recovered. During the recovery period, SCA people were cooking food and freezing it in one person sized packages for her, probably doing other such things I didn’t know about.
Those are cases I directly observed, but I’ve seen evidence of many more such things over the years.
There used to be mutual aid societies, bound together by ethnicity or religion or some other similar factor. Some still exist.
Strong religious communities do this. (Mennonites, for example.)
I have only had time to skim the article, but I think you are Mia characterizing his argument. He says multiple times that extended family is in the rise. He pointed out that many people can now create an artificial kinship network, but his examples were mostly affluent, urban, and white. I think what he is saying, and what I agree with, is that the country is going to be divided into people in extended families and people in artificial kinship families, but they won’t be in nuclear family. I’m doing my best to keep my extended family together, and so far, it seems successful. Others will prefer artificial kinship families, but nuclear families will be unsustainable.
He does indeed mention trends such as grandparents living with or near their children. And yet that section is prefaced,
Admittedly, those trends might be more significant than Brooks made them out to be. His own interest is clearly in forged family.
This is a false dichotomy based on attributing all possible desires with the average. My wife and my families combine for 10 siblings, 9 of us live within half an hour of either our parents or our in-laws and the 10th was widowed at a young age but lived near her parents prior to that. It would be a mistake however to think we didn’t get mobility/liberty whatever as part of the bargain because we currently have roots and live near our families. I dropped out of college twice, leaving the state both times, played poker professionally traveled to countries on 3 continents in the interim. One sister of mine moved 500 miles away for 3-4 years before returning, a brother moved 2000 miles away, another brother was staffed on a different continent for several years, my wife moved 2000 miles away before returning to her parents area.
Its easy to combine both a restless period and a rooted period.
This is a false…monochotomy?
Yes it is possible to leave and then come back, but the reality is that a lot of people aren’t doing that, for various reasons. It is worth exploring what the ramifications are, and what if anything can be done to mitigate the loss of extended family involvement. The fact that some people (you) still have extended family involvement doesn’t really change that.
The point is that you can have both stability and wanderlust as a culture and have it work. The phrase he leads off with is
and then follows it up with a list of things that sound like they run counter each other. If these things do not in fact run counter to each other then they are not the problem and thus it is likely that the author is looking in the wrong place. When he says
The too much here is carrying a ton of weight, you can have both privacy and an extended family with quality relationships- its a matter of resources and their allocation, phrasing it this way makes it sound as if they are impossible to combine.
Reading the article its a cherry picked nightmare.
Shocking, if his father was in his 20-30s when he had kids then he is comparing 1961 to the great depression.
How real is this? From 1890 to 1940 the rate of never married men and women rose at 45+ rose from
Men 7.5% to 10.5%
Women 6.5% to 9% (eyeballing graphs)
How do we add in the effects of more frequent divorces? His numbers are for first marriages, modest divorce and remarry rates could shift that so long term partnership start dates ended up much more similar.
Female labor force participation rate went from ~33% in 1950 to ~39% in 1965. In 1960 the median age of first marriage for a woman was 21 and never married at age 35 was around 7%, so it seems like a substantial number of married women must have been in the workforce in 1960.* What is the proportion of married women in the workforce that a society can handle? Why?
For how long and to what point? This source says that real male median incomes did start a decline in 1975-1983, but the low of 1983 was higher than every year from 1951 through 1967, and that male median real wages were higher for every year from 1973 through 1991 than for every year from 1951 through 1967, and the low point in 1991 was 56% more than the 1951 reading. That is a pretty stark blow to ‘men could earn enough to keep their woman at home in 1951 but not in the 70s and 80s.
*Googling also give me a divorce rate of 9/1000 married women in 1960.
Can they, though? As tenuous as actual kin ties can be, they do tend to be stronger than even well intentioned artificial ones.
How many people are still in contact with their siblings versus their best friends in college? I was very close to several people in college, but the only one I see now, let alone could rely on, I married. Not the case with actual family.
This is the problem I have with critiques of the nuclear family–and I do need to actually read your link, not just comment on your comment. Anyway, it’s valid to say we should have more support for young–and, heck, middle and old–families rather than just expect newlyweds to forge life alone. Grandparents, uncles, etc. should have a role. But this doesn’t mean that we can then toss it all and say actual family ties are irrelevant, all you need is love, family is what you make of it. Those kinds of bonds, it seems to me, rarely provide the stability of even a nuclear family, let alone an involved extended family.
I read the full article and this also struck me as a glaring blind spot that I felt mostly went unaddressed.
I think it matters a lot that you actually live with said people. Which is only possible if living with them is pretty easy to arrange, which is very much not the case for most folks today.
Even so, I agree, actual kin ties seem to be stronger.
I don’t think the problem is that kin ties are tenuous. It is that when your family is spread out across a few thousand miles there isn’t much they can do to directly support you. Hence, the best you can do is artificial kin networks with friends/neighbors who are local.
Ah, there’s a word for that, though it’s since been co-opted to refer to any group with any common interest at all.
Community.
And, yeah, it’d be nice to have more of those around.
Well sure. Does it change things for you to substitute “artificial kin network” out in favor of “tight knit community”?
Honestly, yes, though perhaps irrationally.
A community is something a family can integrate into. An “artificial kin network” sounds like something that is designed to supercede or replace a family.
Though a nuclear family is not sufficient, it is necessary, or at an important and not easily replaced foundation of whatever social arrangement we would want to set up.
One of the things propping up the nuclear family in the fifties, according to Brooks, was how “before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another’s children.” More:
It seems to me this is a stronger meaning of “community” than most of us have ever known.
@Randy M
The artificial kin network isn’t supposed to replace the Nuclear Family, it is supposed to supplement it in the way that extended families used to. The point isn’t “destroy nuclear families”, it is “we focused pretty hard on nuclear families, lost a lot of what we used to get out of extended families, and now we probably need to find a way to replace what we were getting out of extended families with something else”.
I think in your objection you are conflating nuclear family with extended family, and applying points that are directed at the former and current states of extended families to nuclear families.
I mean, the article is called “The nuclear family was a mistake” and if they were arguing we needed stronger communities, why invent a new phrase?
Like I said, I see a sort of bait and switch (admittedly not in this article I still haven’t read) that starts with lamenting how in traditional hunter gatherer cultures grandparents cared for babies more than they do in ours, and ends with some radical social rearrangement that makes me think of Brave New World that severs biological ties entirely. (Or, you know, I’m misremembering and conflating several different things in my mind. I couldn’t dig up links for you or anything, I’m just explaining my gut reaction to the phrase)
It’s cool to find ways the neglected kid, DINK yuppies, and lonely old lady down the street can bond and help each other. I get that. It’d be better if they had the organic bonds originally.
And on a superficial level, “Artificial Kin Network” reads like someone (I want to say Millennial, as but that would be distracting, I think) thinking they’ve invented some never before seen concept without realizing they’re searching for something ubiquitous a few generations ago.
@Randy M
Like I said above, this forged family thing must be one of Brooks’ pet ideas. I think it’s less interesting, at least in its particulars, than the rest of the article.
In an attempt to tie this to the other timely news of the day, he should get with Andrew Yang, who in his book proposed a system of social credits that would give UBI recipients out of work from automation something to do.
Maybe they can find a way to incentivize lasting community ties.
More power to them if so.
Randy M and others, I’ve seen people talk about chosen family, not artificial kin networks.
I think this is especially a thing for people who have extremely abusive families and also for people who’ve been thrown out of their families for not sharing the family’s religion or for being gay.
This isn’t the same thing as family ties becoming diffuse because of geographic separation.
I had a brother by mutual adoption, closer to me than my one sibling, although she and I get along fine.
None of your causes involved — I got along very well with my parents, regard my father as possibly the best person I’ve known, am conventionally heterosexual and shared my parents lack of religion.
It’s true that families are more spread out than they were a few generations back, but they are also richer and have better transport and communication systems.
I happen to know of a case, involving a family spread out literally from one side of the country to the other. One member suffered a severe stroke, from which he is gradually recovering. His siblings have been taking turns to visit for a couple of weeks to help his wife out with cooking and caretaking. At the same time, she has also been getting a lot of help from an artificial kin network of friends and neighbors.
For a much milder case, I recently exchanged gifts with a family none of whose members I have ever met in realspace.
To answer your rhetorical question literally – I certainly am still in contact with my four best friends from college despite one of them being us five being spread over 3 continents. We still help each other non-trivially insofar it’s possible over such distances, and meet from time to time. I do hold equally close relationships with my only sibling brother and – kind of – with parents, but not with my extended family.
This makes me still more sceptical about the suggestion though. To form so tight bounds, it’s definitely not enough just to stick the people under the same roof. I never formed even passing friendship with anyone just on the basis of sharing a room or apartments – and there was a fair number of roomates in my life.
That’s awesome, I’m slightly envious and slightly guilty. For awhile I was a little resentful of a couple guys for not staying in touch… but I made precious little effort on my end.
I am still in touch with one friend from College, and with my only sibling.
With worse outcomes than what? High infant mortality? Becoming chimney sweeps at single digits? Doing backbreaking labor on a farm your whole life?
Why don’t you read the article and find out?
Because I would like to know if it is worth the time investment, the quotes here so far indicate that it is not.
Here is the passage I was summarizing:
This is light on links to research, which could have been multiplied indefinitely. The reason is no doubt that these are well known and much controverted results, and none requires comparison with nineteenth century child labor or infant mortality.
wrt the child welfare claims, I wonder if those studies looked at heredity as an alternative explanation. The moms who decided to have kids out of wedlock are not identical to the ones who didn’t, and the parents who got divorced with small children are not the same as the parents who didn’t. In both cases, those differences may have been passed onto the kids, either directly through genes or indirectly through upbringing and childhood environment.
I’ve given the article a first quick go over. It sounds like the claim is we are failing kids relative to what extended families did to kids 130 years ago but this quote
Sounds to be comparing the results of contemporary kids from married and unmarried couples. There is obviously a lot of selection bias in that sample.
@Nick,
I feel bad that I can’t remember the source (I’m guessing NYTimes or Washington Post, but I can’t find it now) but last night I read something that referenced Book’s essay and said something along the lines of “For those with steady jobs the nuclear family is still stable” and they looked at historical accounts of English families and found that the extended rather than nuclear family never was predominant, so deep roots in anglo-american culture.
I wonder if amongst Anglo descended Americans the nuclear family is doing better than amongst those with other ancestry.
Mormons would make an interesting sample.
Only in a qualitative sense. Mormons are not an unbiased samples of Anglo-Americans.
I’m very suspicious of this – firstly, ‘historical accounts’ basically by definition* hugely oversample the (urban/affluent/mobile, pick at least two), and secondly, if I’m right that by ‘deep roots’ they mean ‘became common in English factory towns during the Industrial Revolution,’ that’s not actually very deep and says kind of the opposite of what they want it to given how awful and alienating such places were supposed to be.
*Who produces things that count as historical accounts? The literate, with time to write and both people it makes sense to write to and stuff it’s both worth writing about in the first place, and then worth commenting on by modern scholars – for example, a major source for lots of what’s going on in 17th-century England is Samuel Pepys’ diary. Pepys’ nearest-equivalent position in the modern American government is something like Deputy Secretary of Defense; he’s not exactly going to give a man-on-the-street view of things.
We’re probably a lot more atomized and mobile than most past societies, but I think of the nuclear family as largely being associated with societies where people arrange their own marriages and plan to have a separate household from their parents/family, and also with places where cousin-marriage was rare.
@Nick, @EchoChaos, @Statismagician, and @albatross11,
I found the source: a piece from The Institute for Family Studies David Brooks is Urging Us to Go Forward, not Backward by Andrew Cherlin, which I’ll copy below:
@Plumber
The same is true for Germany, the “extended family” with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins living under one roof, was a thing that only started in the late 19th centruy when live expectency started to rise, but wealth still was to low, for everyone to afford their own lodging.
I found this portion interesting:
Are we better off when these kinds of services are largely done by professionals rather than family and friends? The economic indicators certainly think so.
Maybe this is just restating your point, but the economic indicators are defined to be such that they rise when transactions are monetized.
I’m assuming you’re not taking that at face value, but because tone is hard to read through text, that doesn’t really inspire confidence.
Can you summarize the relevance? I’ve read the linked piece and don’t immediately see the connection. If you’d put your rebuke into words, that’d be helpful.
Sure – basically, even if it’s true that real economic indicators tick up when we specialize everything (non-obvious, vs. e.g. GDP is twice as high but housing and education cost ten times as much so things basically cancel out; cf. The Two-Income Trap), in most other circumstances where we try to optimize for abstract metrics at the expense of naturally fuzzy organic institutions, it tends to go really, really badly in subtle and hard-to-fix ways, so maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to urge everybody to replace family structures which benefit from massive biological and cultural support with ‘forged-family’ (and isn’t that a weird choice of adjective for your own proposal, Mr. Brooks) structures which don’t.
Possibly there isn’t a better solution given that we’re sticking with the highly-mobile atomized population model. That doesn’t mean it was ever thus (I haven’t read MacFarlane’s work and the article Plumber quoted is too vague to say what it is he’s actually talking about; my suspicion is that what he means is ‘premodern English peasants generally don’t live in hierarchical clan structures sharing a single dwelling/compound/territory like Scottish or Irish ones do, obviously they still live pretty close to each other and help out the family in emergencies’ and it got garbled by interpretation and American popular media just being unbelievably bad at long-term thinking) or that this is in any way an ideal situation.
Ah, okay. Yeah, I agree and this is what I was referencing in an overly oblique way, ie, if I went to a legal prostitute instead of sleeping with my wife, GDP would benefit, but there’s a lot that’s left out of that analysis.
But to be fair to David Brooks, he isn’t advocating a more consumer oriented family, but using the existence of these substitutes as an explanation to why affluent nuclear families hold up better than poorer ones–that is, they can purchase the extended family that they might have benefited from in the past. (Though there’s confounders there; the economically successful might have traits that help them build lasting families, like long time preference). I take his pitch to basically be, “those who can’t afford this should be, and in many cases are, joining together with others and form networks of reciprocal assistance.
To reiterate my position, that’s great, where it works, but I don’t expect it to work much better.
To bring it back around to my (highly obscured) point in this thread, it would probably be a great first start if people appreciated the kinds of things families do for each other even where these don’t result in exchange of small green pieces of paper (who, after all, aren’t the unhappy ones in the arrangement).
@Nick,
I’m going to (once again) do long quotes from the NYTimes, this time two pieces that (somewhat) contradict each other:
Alright, I’m too lazy to (again) dig up the sources (I’m pretty sure some old posts of mine on an old thread have them), but IIRC current birth, marriage, and church attendance rates (all three correlate) are much closer to what they were in 1940 than they are to those of 1955, and the rates of 1940 were down compared to the 1920’s. Sucides are also up now comoared to previous decades, and I’ll note that religious belief itself may be less of a factor than attendance and relative prosperity, basically frequent attendees tend to be those that are more married with kids and steady jobs, college graduates (on average) are more secular than most, but have higher marriage rates than the non-collegiates, and they do tend to have kids, just later and less than the frequent church-attendees, so three groups that I’ll call the “Red marrieds” (tend to live in outer ring suburbs and rural areas, have at least one spouse with a steady middle-class job, get married younger and start having kids younger), “Blue marrieds” (tend to live in cities and inner ring suburbs, have steady jobs, marry and have kids later, but do have them), and the unmarrieds who tend to be without steady middle-class jobs, and who increasingly don’t have kids.
The 1950’s we can think of as a time of majority “Red marrieds”, but if we look at the very early 20th century the patterns aren’t like the ’50’s, rural residents had big families, and so did married city-dwellers, but the urban poor tended to not get married at the rates of the ’50’s, and if they did have kids those kids were more likely to be left as foundlings.
The late 20th century had many more unmarried mothers with children than earlier, but there’s less after 2008.
Far less Americans now live in rural areas than in 1920.
Today’s birth and marriage patterns are more like those of urban America in the early 20th century, and less like those of the middle and late 20th century.
It’s the latter 1940’s till up until recently that are the anomalies.
Later in the article, we discover that the division is, roughly speaking, at the 50th percentile, so “most privileged” means “in the top half of the income distribution.”
Neither of the articles mentions what strikes me as likely to be a major cause. One reason for men to get married in the past was that it was the only way available to them of getting a woman to sleep with them. Improvements in the availability of abortion and contraception, most obviously the birth control pill, made women who didn’t want children much more willing to sleep with men who didn’t want marriage. That reduced the bargaining position of women who did want children, so some of them ended up having children without a husband.
That explains the apparent paradox of improved control over reproduction, which was supposed to lead to a sharp reduction in the number of “unwanted children,” euphemism for children of unmarried mothers, actually leading to a sharp increase — the children in question not being actually unwanted.
This article claims that people born blind never develop schizophrenia. I’d never heard of this, and it’s way outside my field, so I’m interested to hear from people who know more–is this really true?
You have heard of it; Scott mentioned it a few years ago. He linked to this article.
Base rate neglect. Psychologists are bad at math.
Your article links to a 2018 study that looked at half a million people. They shouldn’t have expected to find any congenitally blind schizophrenics.
Coke or Pepsi, and why?
Sierra Mist or Sprite, and why?
1) Coke, because it tastes better (even though based on where I was raised I think I’m supposed to be a Pepsi person. Why? Tastes a little better. Sweeter maybe, or something. I don’t know.
Sprite, because Sierra Mist tastes like trash.
Truth
)
Coke because I believe it tastes nicer. However I wouldn’t put any faith whatsoever in my ability to distinguish between them in a blind taste test….. so the ‘because’ is more likely to be rank prejudice.
We don’t have anything called Sierra Mist where I live (France) so I can’t compare it to Sprite – which was pleasant enough last time I tried it
To be fair, I only drink these kinds of things about once in a blue moon – I have a Soda Stream machine for my fizzy needs, and I rarely add anything to the carbonated water – it’s fine just as it is.
Coke because it’s got better amplitude than Pepsi. Also freestyle soda machines.
From The Ketchup Conundrum.
The Ketchup Conundrum was a great read, thanks for linking.
However, it does seem that certain flavor notes have since been discovered that basic Heinz wasn’t covering. Unfortunately, Heinz put out extra flavors to cover those notes, so there’s still no competition. But that blind spot was…heat. Cue the bottles of Ketchup mixed with Sriracha that are now out there.
(Meanwhile, you can also argue that the other condiment that covered what ketchup didn’t was BBQ sauce.)
They had a balsamic vinegar one a few years ago that was fucking delicious and they stopped making it.
Huh! My beef with ketchup is that most of them are too sweet now. One with a heavier sour note would be welcome. (That’s why steak sauce and Worcestershire sauce are still staples.)
Try mixing it 1:1 with malt vinegar.
The part of me that knows anything about signals is cringing at calling that “amplitude”.
Pepsi. By comparison Coke seems to me kind of syrupy and less, idk, crisp? Also, and it might be in my head, but Coke makes my teeth gritty, like it feels bad for my enamel. I don’t drink much of either, though.
Coke, because I like the slight lime flavor it has*, whereas Pepsi just tastes like sugar water to me. I actually prefer RC to either because it’s a little bit less sweet.
7-Up over both Sprite and Sierra Mist. I like 7-Up, I don’t drink the other two. Again, I feel like 7-Up has a deeper flavor and the others just taste like sweetened water.
I don’t drink much soda (probably twice a month at most), and when I do it’s almost always Dr. Pepper.
*I suspect it’s actually just a higher level of citric acid than Pepsi, but to my tastebuds it comes out tasting like lime to me.
Pepsi over Coke and Diet Pepsi over Diet Coke. I find both Pepsi products a little bit sweeter and to have less of some particular .. bitter note I don’t like.
Diet Cherry Coke over Diet Cherry Pepsi. I find Diet Cherry Pepsi undrinkable as it causes me to gag.
Sprite over Sierra Mist. Sierra Mist seems to lack flavor or character or something. I prefer 7up over both.
Coke, because it tastes better.
Sprite if those are the choices, because Sierra Mist tastes weird (as I recall, but I haven’t had it much), but none of the clear sodas are really worth drinking.
Coke, because it tastes better (but Mexican Coke is even better, and RC Cola is best.)
Sprite, because it tastes “cleaner” when mixed.
Mexican Coke > Coke = Coke Zero > Pepsi = Diet Coke
Pepsi and diet coke are overly sweet, while coke has a nice earthy flavor. Though I flip-flop back and forth between liking Coke and finding it kinda gross. That real cane sugar tastes better–or maybe it’s just the glass bottle messing with my psychology. And coke zero truly does taste like coke.
Sprite Zero = Diet Sierra Mist > Sprite
Was raised on diet Sprite since I started drinking soda in middle school (it’s the soda my parents buy). They got diet sierra mist when it was cheaper, and I doubt I could tell the difference in a blind taste test (but given the choice I’d take the sprite zero). But the non-diet sprite tastes wayyy overly sweet to me. I don’t think I’ve had much non-diet sierra mist, so I can’t speak to it.
Bottled Coke over bottled Pepsi, then Pepsi on tap over Coke on tap. Not really sure what it is about the syrup mix that makes Pepsi better than Coke out of the fountain, but it’s a pretty consistent thing for me.
I buy the cheap zero-calory coke from Spar and Lidl supermarkets, branded “Spar” and “Siti” respectively. These cost as much as mineral water, that is, I pay for the costs of the bottle and being ready on the shelves only, not for the Coca-Cola or Pepsi brand. I also sometimes drink Coca-Cola Zero or Pepsi Max when I eat in fast-food restaurants that sell them. I also occasionally buy Coca-Cola Zero because it has the sturdiest 0.5 liter plastic bottle that I can buy, and it’s useful for soap or shampoo. I cannot distinguish by taste among these zero-calory cola drinks, except for that the drinks made from powder in the fast-food restaurants often have too much or too little carbon dioxide, whereas anything bottled is consistent.
When I was younger, I preferred Coca-Cola over Pepsi, and I could distinguish their taste, because their sweetness tasted different. But now I almost never drink cola drinks with sugar in them, so this doesn’t apply anymore.
Perhaps as a companion / foil to DragonMilk’s thread asking for non-religious people’s reasons for non-belief, I would be interested in hearing from religious believers about specific idiosyncratic or uncommon arguments, reasons, or evidence that may have nudged, compelled, or supported your belief. For this purpose, I would be looking for types of things different from “the Holy Spirit helped me believe” or “the Bible tells me so,” or “guilt for my sins,” or “I was raised religious” which are going to be much more common and very broadly applicable. As an example, David Friedman (I think?) has mentioned that one of his children became Catholic in part because of examining the evidence in the life and career of Joan of Arc. I’m sure there were other reasons, but that was one I hadn’t heard before. Or as a personal example, while not the sole determinant, one perhaps less-standard reason I find the Bible persuasive is that I have found its account of human nature to be astute and to have substantial predictive power.
Any other outside-the-basic reasons or idiosyncratic arguments that have worked for you?
ETA: I was thinking of Christianity when I wrote it, but I’d also be interested in the same from any other religions.
In my late 20s I partitioned my brain like a hard drive so I could be religious* for a while, despite being a lifelong atheist up to that point. (Leading up to that was an increasing distaste for atheism as an identity, a distaste I still have.) About 5 years later the partition sort of eroded away/I was unable to maintain it, and my enthusiasm for sustaining an identity as a religious person dissolved with it.
Nowadays I like to say I’m an “entropist”: I believe with a lot of certainty in the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and if you trace it backward you get to a single point of infinite order, which if you squint at it makes the monotheists at least look like they’re on the right track.
*Specifically, Jewish in something like the Karaite tradition. I still identify as a Karaite Jew in terms of my ethnicity.
Interesting to hear that there may have been an ex-atheist angle, since it’s sort of the mirror image you see oftentimes in ex-believers (the “been there, no thanks” sense). Are you much of a *foom* AI person? Singularity behind, singularity ahead…
Well, one singularity is cosmological and very real, the other is a metaphor and quite speculative.
But no, I’m not much of an AI person, as in I’m not terribly worried about the Singularity.
i feel this way about joe pesci
this is an underrated comment
I believe that, in the absence of a transcendent grounding for human existence, moral argument becomes nonsensical–you wind up positing that people should be good because people should be good, or have no grounds for designating one kind of human behavior any better than any other, except due to contingent circumstances which don’t always apply. Morality as a shared compact for behavior is vulnerable to both a free-rider problem–it’s quite possible and sometimes arguably more sensible to profit from a generally moral society without being moral oneself–and to the problem of why one should be moral in a broadly immoral society.
In addition, if nature is all there is, I still have no reason to believe in naturalism unless I happen to be happier that way. If it makes me more satisfied to believe in God, or Yoda for that matter, I might as well. We all have to proceed under at least the implicit assumption that our lives are meaningful in some sense, even if we don’t own up to it. If naturalism is correct, then that’s a lie. But we can’t do otherwise. We’re stuck believing some kind of lie. It might as well be an aesthetically appealing lie. And the belief that “believing in lies is bad” is itself a value judgment, and as meaningless as any other in the moral void of an uncreated universe.
This is the really crammed and short version, minus a bunch of provisos. In my experience, these arguments aren’t really convincing to people who aren’t me, so I’ve stopped bringing them up. Your fault for asking. 🙂
They’re Kierkegaard-adjacent, so that’s a pretty decent pedigree. If I didn’t want to hear, I wouldn’t have asked!
I don’t understand that argument.
Suppose there is a very powerful being who created us and lots of other things, perhaps everything. That doesn’t tell us whether he is good. You still have the same problem as the atheist in justifying moral belief.
The concept of “good” presumes that there is some goal to work towards, or some standard to meet. If one assumes a meaningless cosmos, there is no standard beyond what we personally prefer, based on socialization or personal preference. We think X behavior is good, the Aztecs, Nazis, or whoever think/thought differently, and there’s no arbiter between us. But we’re all convinced, on a gut level, that morality is “true”; we have a deep conviction that immoral/unethical things are wrong, and most of us feel far more offended by that than we would be by someone denying something obviously factually correct–which is merely comical in most cases. We can consider immorality dispassionately in the abstract, but if ever confronted with it our reaction is visceral and extreme.
Belief in moral truth is not exactly belief in a deity, but it makes a lot more sense, and is easier for me to live with, without the assumption that the universe is meaningless. I have a hard time articulating it, but every time I try to put myself in an irreligious headspace, I find myself bouncing in and out of nihilism in an irritating way, or juggling terms in a way that feels dishonest. And even the objection to dishonesty is a value judgment, so aaaaaaarghhh screw it back to God we go.
But does it imply a teleological final end, or simply an idealist goal?
Maybe your reaction to this will be similar to what I get when people talk about compatibilism – “it’s just a gloss for determinism, it’s not meaningfully different” – but it seems to me that there’s a lot of room between moral relativism and moral realism. Moral facts are constituted by minds as relations between ideas and circumstances, and insofar as minds by their nature disallow or obligate particular relations, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to take the stance that those moral facts are more true than others.
That would be true of an Aztec no less than it’s true of you. How do you infer existence of Jesus but not Tezcatlipoca from this fact?
Also, are you saying that the thought that morality really is relative and/or originates from mere humans, and there’s no higher arbiter to say that you truly really are right and they’re wrong, is literally unthinkable for you?
I’m not arguing for any particular religion at this point, only for God [or functionally equivalent widget, e.g. karma]. To put it in simpler form:
1. Human beings need to be able to make value judgments.
2. Value judgments are incompatible with a purposeless universe.
Therefore, I’m better off believing that the universe is not, in fact, purposeless. Truth and falsehood are beside the point if I’m wrong.
2 is simply factually wrong. There’s plenty of humans who seem to be perfectly capable of passing moral judgements without belief in a purposeful universe.
I also don’t understand how saying “That’s the morality I endorse because I feel like it” is meaningfully different from “This is the God (karma whatelse) I believe in, because they support the morality I feel like endorsing”.
Yes, such people exist, but they seem to be engaged in blatant doublethink of a kind I would find intolerable. Therefore, I reject their beliefs. I don’t think “we must all believe in X or we’ll start misbehaving,” I think “I personally reject X because it leads me to absurd conclusions.” Other people’s embrace of inconsistent principles doesn’t concern me.
Have read your second point over several times, still not getting your drift, sorry. It’s nearly 2 AM and I”m reading it during a bout of insomnia so perhaps it’ll be clearer later.
And the evidence bears this out, ie. not all thieves are atheists and not all atheists are thieves. Humans are naturally social/moral/good, and they seek meaning and want to understand things. God serves as an explanation for the source of the meaning which we naturally create, and explains the good we find fully formed inside us. We’ve explained a lot of things based on evidence now, for instance it’s not so hard to see where that social morality might come from in an evolutionary perspective; but questions like consciousness are still on the edge of what we can figure out.
Anyway, I don’t find it that problematic, nor does it lead one to nihilism. Being shaped by millions of years of evolution into the dominant species on a planet which has been gifted the (seemingly unique) ability to question its own existence, one can just enjoy being human and making a few more. And there are plenty of yet-unanswered questions to work on. Or, human culture provides plenty of opportunities to find meaning; you can dedicate your whole life to photos of Joe Biden eating mayonnaise sandwiches and die fulfilled.
I believe most of our behavior, moral or otherwise, comes from a mixture of conditioning and incentives. What we profess to believe is a very distant third for most people most of the time. I’m not concerned that we’ll all start mugging the elderly when the last church closes; fear of retaliation takes care of that anyway.
But nor do I believe we’re “innately moral.” People throughout history have done all sorts of horrible things, not because they were mentally ill or defective, but because it they wanted to and their circumstances encouraged them. We are less horrible now because we’ve arranged a nicely ordered society where there are fewer reasons to be horrible and more reasons not to. My concern is the philosophical problem of what it means to say they “shouldn’t” have attacked/robbed/raped/enslaved/killed those people.
@theredsheep
I think we contain both moral impulses and immoral impulses, but even considering the horrors that we’ve inflicted upon our fellow man, humans do a lot more of what I would call “good” than I’d expect an agent with a random set of values and drives to do.
Philosophically, I think that saying an action is “wrong” means that it is contrary to our higher-minded values. By “high-minded” I mean generally the goals we feel good about having at the meta-level; that we would expect our good friends and future selves to endorse.
We do more of the good than the bad because if everybody did the bad all the time civilization would collapse and most of us would die. Therefore we have set things up to heavily discourage blatantly antisocial behavior. Even in much earlier and cruder societies, the penalties for e.g. theft could be quite dire, at least for the commoner sort of person.
However, we could and did engage heavily in cruel behavior towards people who didn’t matter, with the exact definition of who didn’t matter varying across time and space. Sometimes it was the other lord’s peasants, sometimes it was women, sometimes it was imported black people. This is not how a “naturally good” species behaves; it’s how a rational species structures and responds to incentives. And yet we have to believe that good is a real thing. This is a difficulty, but I prefer to face it head-on.
@theredsheep
I don’t think people are created good; I think that people created “good”. That is, the concept of “good” describes a subset of our distinctly human values–namely, the ones we praise in others and try to cultivate in ourselves. It need not be baked into the fabric of reality to be important to me as a human.
I feel like what you’re getting at but not explicitly saying is, “if ‘good’ is just a descriptor of what you value, why is your idea of ‘good’ superior to that of e.g. a Nazi or a slaveholder? They certainly must have thought they were morally in the right.” And I don’t have an easy answer to that. The best I can do is to say, without particular evidence, that I think most people who have done terrible things by my account could be convinced of the wrongness of their actions. It would probably take some kind of magical full knowledge of the world, and ample time in a post-scarcity utopia to think things over without the urgent pressure to survive and climb political ladders and defeat their enemies. And of course, there must be some scenarios where I would be convinced that I was wrong, in the hypothetical utopia of contemplation.
Perhaps I’m too optimistic though; there might be people with whom I would always fundamentally disagree on core values even if we were both omniscient and could try to convince each other for a century. I can only bite the bullet and say that they are wrong according to my morals and the morals of the people who I think are good people, and that though I have no cosmic justification, I will fight for my values over theirs. I think these cases would be rare, though–I highly doubt this is the case between me and any mentally healthy person in the modern industrialized world.
You’re close; really it’s more that I think the whole concept of morality becomes rather silly and arbitrary, a kind of cardboard god obeyed for no reason. It seems simpler, to me, to proceed on the assumption that our lives are somehow not a shaggy-dog story, and go from there.
Sorry, that last one could have been politer. I’m not feeling great today.
A theist would argue humans appear naturally social/moral/good because they are created in the image of God. If you watched chimpanzee vids and applied human values, it would be harder to draw the conclusion that evolution provides the same mores. Go further from human-like, say ducks or dolphins, and it would seem that people who assume nature can deliver morals haven’t really looked into nature, but project human values onto it.
Being made in the image of God is not enough to overcome the evils that arise from autonomy, however. The theist doesn’t contend that people are naturally criminal. Only that they are naturally flawed.
@theredsheep I’ve been away from the conversation that I started here, but in the middle you said:
That’s the fundamental drive of our evolution, from actual natural selection to cultural and intellectual. We have done better by being “good”. Social impulses are innate to us, feelings like guilt, obligation, closeness. The fact that those have arisen makes sense. Morality is one facet of the equally innate drive to understand ourselves (itself a facet of a drive to know generally). Possibly morality in its strictest definition is dissolved by this type of understanding (I’m not an expert on the exact differences between it and things like ethics), but I imagine it at least remains as useful an abstraction as any other in our culture; and not only useful, but compelling, as much so as any other arbitrary aspect.
@DragonMilk Humans have human morals. We have a hard time universalizing them to other animals. In cases that seem common sense, we fail to apply them when interacting with other animals; but this can be true of how we interact with each other as well. When it comes to examining their behavior, even if we can point to some behavior X between humans and say “X is always bad”, it’s hard to then look at animal behavior and be sure that we’re seeing X, let alone use an instance of X to declare the animal immoral.
The upshot of this for me is that assuming any kind of human source for morality seems familiar and comfortable. The idea that some higher being supplies it is uncomfortable because that being should be relatively unknowable. The idea that its designs are made knowable through something like a text document would be unthinkable. Anyway, in DragonMilk’s model, morality doesn’t apply to animals; in my model, morality doesn’t apply to animals.
I used to have a much stronger belief in innate human goodness. Then I read Jared Diamond books and (more importantly) had kids. We behave because we had good behavior hammered into us as children; at the start, we have a basic spark of empathy, of variable strength, but if left to their own devices my two older sons would have straight-up killed each other by now, though not with an adult’s understanding of the gravity of their actions. They aren’t “evil,” but they still hit each other at the slightest provocation, then lie about it–and other parents routinely compliment us on our well-behaved children!
@theredsheep My assertion is morality is a process that happens when innate social feelings are subjected to examination from our desire to understand. Children aren’t born with concepts, but they are born with basic programming to learn from and bond with parents, and parents feel a natural chlidrearing urge. Or, I’m not a parent, maybe they don’t, you tell me, I think I read it somewhere…in any case, thank you for teaching your children not to murder each other! I admit, humanity would be massively set back if we didn’t teach our children anything, but the ruins will be populated by the many offspring of the one guy who does…
I’m not familiar with the author (have heard of Guns, Germs, would you recommend?), perhaps if I knew his work I’d understand how my arguments and worldview are wrecked by it. One thing which makes me uncomfortable is that as a result of this worldview, I assume that humans have built something beautiful with all of their concepts and culture, but it (increasingly) places us in a world in which we don’t feel we belong. We built all of this, but we weren’t quite built FOR it, and the processes by which we could properly adapt to it are too slow.
Well, I was thinking of Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday,” where he describes modern non-state societies–their ethical norms do not resemble ours, to put it mildly. Many of them have absolutely no ethical objection to massacres of women and children in wartime, for example; benevolence only applies to your own kin group. But really, everything I’ve read about anthropology leads me to believe that, to the extent we’re good, it’s because we’re taught to be, and because we’ve painstakingly built up a society to reward it.
“I believe that, in the absence of a transcendent grounding for human existence, moral argument becomes nonsensical”
This argument seems common enough, even if it doesn’t appeal to everyone. For example, Pascal:
For years, as a young atheist, I tried to take utilitarianism and other atheistic moral philosophies seriously, but there was always something gnawing at me. Then one day, I figured it out. Atheistic moral debates, for all the dread seriousness the utilitarians bring to their calculations, are in essence indistinguishable from “Star Wars or Star Trek?”: mere statements of preferences, dressed up in elevated language so as to obscure their banality.
From that point on, I couldn’t resolve the cognitive dissonance between feeling that moral principles are transcendent and the inevitable conclusion that they are banal. I had to either discard moral transcendence or atheism. I tried at first to discard moral transcendence, but concluded that atheism was the more disposable.
Well, yeah, I have a preference for good. And there are people out there who have the opposite preference. That’s life. Of course I would prefer my side to win.
There is no banality in preferences, in my opinion. If something feels banal to you, it is probably not a strong preference, almost by definition.
I’ll try to phrase this a different way because maybe I’ll be more persuasive to the commenters above. Apologies if I misinterpret your point.
We follow the law because of the social contract we have with the government. We sacrifice freedom for state protection. But the law is not immutable and can be changed. We can elect representatives to support our interests.
Morality, on the other hand, is above the law. Morality is absolute and cannot be changed. When God gives us morality, we should listen. But if morality is a human-made social construct, then someone is trying to short circuit the legal process to tell you what to do. This is very arrogant. If morality is really that fundamental, then pass laws to enforce it. Otherwise, if someone is trying to force their opinions of right and wrong on me, my response is “who died and made you god?”
This, I think, is what red sheep meant when they said that you must have some kind of supernatural or metaphysical or transcendent for morality to exist.
In response to Friedman above, about whether we disagree with God’s morality: in a universe where God exists and has created the universe but somehow mankind disagrees with his ideas of morality, we are in a “Might Makes Right” scenario and the universe creating god is clearly mightier than we are.
Morality is purely internal construct by which we can judge ourself and others. God doesn’t have any more claim on objective morality than me or you, his infinite might may compel obedience, but obedience is not moral based on master’s power. It’s no more moral to get mugged by a man with a tank, than it is to get mugged by a man with a gun than it is to get mugged by a man with a knife so to say.
I’ve got an impression that a lot of advanced theist arguments follow the weird pattern of:
– Here’s a statement
– As you can see it’s self-contadictory and makes no sense
– Therefore god must exist
@Belisaurus Rex
Democracy and free speech resolves this.
My morality, combined with other beliefs, is what makes me vote for X, rather than Y. We can try to convince others of our morality & other beliefs.
With everyone having a vote, no individual is arrogantly forcing others to do their will, because it is the will of the majority.
@Captain Crutch
Might be a definitional issue here. If big God exists and created the universe and the very ideas of good and evil themselves I have no problem believing He created a morality that exists independent of humans. If morality is a purely internal construct, it loses its universality and most of its persuasive force. If morality is not transcendent, but internal to someone else, then I would call it “opinion”.
@Aapje
Democracy and free speech are the solution to the nation-scale problem (Supreme Court as a big exception), but I am more interested in the local-scale. Whatever the law says, there are plenty of situations where someone without real authority over you tries to coerce you by disguising their opinions as morality. The justice or injustice of this is beside the point–Darwinian logic gets you to “defend yourself when attacked”. You don’t need morality to dislike aggression directed at you personally.
Sure, although we limit local aggression by making more severe cases of it illegal, through democratic laws.
Not really what I meant. I intended something closer to the Is-Ought problem, if you’re familiar with that. “Who died and made you god” presumes morality by objecting to unjust coercion.
I don’t need morality to object to coercion, just preferences running counter to another’s morals.
My criticism of morality is that’s it is an attempt to short-circuit the existing systems by appealing to a higher power, when that “higher power” is really your own preferences.
It personally annoys me but I understand why they do it.
I have one argument that is uncommonly stated, though likely widely believed. I really enjoy going to Church and being a Christian. Church has always been a relaxing and welcoming environment to me, that I would prefer going to than any other activity. It’s very calming, gives me time to reflect, and gives me a chance to spend time with likeminded people. I of course have other, standard reasons for believing in God, but honestly, even if I didn’t believe in God, I would still want to go to church, though I do not think I’d gain the same benefits if I didn’t believe.
Note, I’ve regularly attended 6 different denominations of Protestant churches, and am now Russian Orthodox. This statement has been true for all except one odd Protestant Church that I can’t remember the denomination of.
Do you recall the ways in which it was odd?
Do you think there was a progression towards “basic Protestant” to more “smells and bells” since you’re now Russian Orthodox?
I’ve noticed something similar in my own progression; my theology hasn’t changed much over the years but I have a deeper desire for the extra ritual of the Orthodox faiths compared to the Protestant denomination I was raised in.
Not quite. What I said was the one of my children thought the evidence on Joan of Arc was difficult to explain on a non-religious basis, hence the best evidence he knew of for religion.
He’s still an agnostic. And even if he were certain of the conclusion, it would at most make him a Christian. Protestants and Eastern Orthodox, after all, can still believe in divine intervention.
Fair enough, thanks for the correction. Still a unique take. Given that Joan was, herself, prominently Catholic, that was how I remembered it; I didn’t mean to misrepresent your story.
Me too. I don’t get how you’d infer the truth of Eastern Orthodoxy or Protestantism from “God performed miracles for a teenage Catholic girl.”
I think David’s pretty correct on that point, given that the Catholic church was still the only Western church at that time. If the Christian God was working through Joan to accomplish something in France at that time, it wasn’t doctrinal reform; so I don’t think it would automatically preclude the Reformers also being seen to do God’s work later on.
When I was 10 or so I had good reason to believe God exists, and I knew people said He was good of course, but I seriously doubted whether I could trust Him. That wasn’t so much an intellectual barrier as having personally seen messed up stuff happening.
Getting past that was about half taking the question seriously enough to talk with God about it myself, and half reading the Psalms. All of them. Moving only once while doing it. Because I started and couldn’t put them down.
It’s not that all my questions were answered right away, but it was a conservation of expected evidence thing: from what I’d seen I had reason to believe that the Bible contained the answers. From there I’d talk a bunch about Jesus and a relationship with Him and all that, but you asked for the bits that weren’t the usual.
So I was born in China, but moved to the US when I was 2. Relevant in that my family did not have any Christian background until coming to the US (nor extended family).
My parents converted when I was in elementary school, and I nominally did so as well, as I thought it all well and good that there exists a creator, and that there also exists some Jesus dude who offers a lifeline to the really bad people out there.
In my teenage years, I look back and consider myself a pharisee in the sense that I was outwardly moral but had the thought, “thank you God I’m not like *that* person”, and that were I to lose everything, I still had my reason, and took pride in that self-sufficiency.
Through a traumatic experience that led to a bout of insomnia, I went cray cray and had concluded I died. After the fact, I “truly” converted by recognizing I’m pretty awful too and it’s about the heart and not just outward actions. And I thought, if a little lack of sleep (2 weeks) can rob me of reason, what can I actually lean on, and what brought me into and out of that delerium?
And so my conversion was deeply personal. I had to be shown that I too am a sinner, need Grace, and that absent Christ, life is pretty pathetic, meaningless, and gloomy.
I prefer the idea that there’s some kind of ultimate, benevolent motivating force behind my existence and that of humanity/the universe in general – it’s a comfort. I’m not going to pretend that the existence of God is defensible on logical grounds, but I think everyone should be allowed a certain amount of irrationality in terms of their world view. I figure the existence of God is within those tolerances.
Well, on a good day I’m a polytheist, accepting of concepts somewhat akin to continuing revelation. (On a bad day, I’m indistinguishable from a sarcastic atheist.) For those looking for meta-categories, this puts me in the broad coalition known as NeoPagan – though you don’t have to be NeoPagan to be a polytheist.
I was not raised in this faith, though I’m just barely young enough for that to have been conceivable. Instead, I started having “spiritual experiences” in young adulthood, and looking for ways to integrate them with my beliefs and values. For various reasons I rejected any religion with tenets that privileged masculinity, which left me with a very small set to choose from. Some varieties of NeoPaganism were in that set.
When my life improved, I stopped having spontaneous encounters with non-ordinary reality, and could more easily frame past ones as hallucinatory than anything else – except by then I’d learned ways of producing similar experiences, through ritual, meditation, etc.
I resolved the conflict between this and my scientific background by reasoning that religious practices were often highly beneficial to people, and I might as well keep on doing them. Fortunately I was part of a movement that agreed that religion was about practice rather than belief, and regularly sprouted sects that did things like take their liturgical language from a favoured novel. (E.g. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land inspired a Church of All Worlds.)
What finally did me in was petty politics and general nastiness among my fellow NeoPagans. I don’t think they are all that much worse than any other religion’s faithful, though there is a tendency for converts to have more “issues” on average than people following the religions they were born into. But I came out on the losing side of a conflict of this kind, stopped attending any kind of group observances, and after a few years I realized that without a congregation to be part of, I stop maintaining any kind of religious practice.
So now I’m a lapsed NeoPagan, specifically a “hard” polytheist interested in historical reconstruction, but pretty much non-practicing. (That’s more than most of you will care about, but I’m mentioning it in case there are coreligionists reading this.)
I retain an interest in theology, and a much better than average knowledge of the field.
Thanks for sharing, that’s a very different story than any I’ve heard before!
That’s very interesting, particularly the “pull” of your personal ecstatic / spiritual experiences. Thanks.
Hey, which open thread was the previous one you mentioned in? I want to go read that. Thanks!
The thread on reasons for non-belief is actually lower down on this open thread. It begins here.
If you mean the earlier thread that inspired DragonMilk’s post, I’m not sure which he meant, but I think it was this extended discussion of Divine Command Theory. I might be wrong on that, he may have been looking further back.
Oh wow, I feel dumb, thanks!
I don’t know if this counts as outside the basic, but I accept the ontological argument.
Absolutely I think it counts. C.S. Lewis, as I recall, worked his way from indifference to atheism to Platonism to deism to Christianity. Pretty non-standard journey.
As a chemist, I know that life can’t just appear from chemistry. The necessary molecules for all fundamental functions of life, are so ridiculously complex, that they can’t randomly assemble. Therefore I must assume a Creator.
The only other explanation is to believe in (aleph-two) infinity parallel universes, which is a cop-out if you claim to base your beliefs in science and logic. But then there must also be infinite many universes where God (as described in the Bible) exists, so why not believe you’re in one of those?
your solution to complexity is even greater comolexity
The complexity of God is a philosophical question we can’t answer. The complexity of life is a question we can investigate with science and mathematics.
so it is your belief that you don’t know if god is more complex than a rock?
We can’t answer it? What about all the times we did answer it, and the answer was divine simplicity?
@ meh
How do you measure the complexity of God and of a rock?
is measuring complexity a philosophical question we can’t answer?
we can use your definition of complexity here. how does god compare to a rock?
What are you talking about? The entropy of God? How is that a meaningful concept?
This comes across to me as feigned ignorance. If you are just now confused at what I am saying, then I don’t know how we even got here.
I’ve been confused the whole time.
This just seems like more feigned ignorance. Perhaps we should stick to the other sub-thread which has a somewhat more concrete topic of argument.
Anyone got a .zip of the pentaeuch? /s
@meh I’m also confused about what you are asking so it’s not just him.
to help me discover where i went wrong, can you tell me your steelman and/or best guess?
@meh having just reread – My best guess is that you are trying to get him to give some numeric value of difficulty of generating a rock compared to God. Presumably to push the line that God is too complex/difficult to generate, to use as an explanation for things being improbable. But honestly it’s not very clear.
no numerical value, my question just wants an ordering. the problem is that giving either answer reveals the inconsistencies in the argument. so instead it becomes that i am not allowed to ask the question.
when we investigate life with science and mathematics, we understand the molecules didn’t randomly assemble
ISTM that the critical question is whether there was some iterative path for simple molecules to assemble in ways that made them able to climb toward more and more complexity, until they got to the kind of molecules that make up existing life. It seems almost certain that any evidence of that process would have been long since eaten by the more-successful molecules on the way to life, if it happened that way.
I don’t think there’s any way to rule out that God snapped His fingers and there was primitive life, which then evolved forward into what we see in the world now. Nor to rule out occasional divine intervention in evolution to get desired species or traits. (If farmers and herders can do it, surely God can, too.) But it’s hard to get much traction for any kind of theory there, because God can do anything, so there’s never going to be any evidence that contradicts it. All you can do is find evidence that some alternative way of primitive life coming into existence is possible.
It seems really hard to me to come up with proof that something we find *couldn’t* have arisen by some kind of evolutionary process (random mixing plus some kind of naturally-occurring selective process that hill-climbs to higher and higher complexity).
but if instead of asking about how life arose, we instead ask how complexity arose, then only one gives an answer. one shows how more complexity can come from less, the other just asserts greater complexity
That would violate the second law of thermodynamics, in a way only life can do.
how can it violate anything if you don’t admit to being able to measure anything? you are eating your cake and having it.
@meh
I started by using complexity as a shorthand for low probability and low entropy. Complexity as you use it, is a vague philosophical concept.
I’m cool with using your definition if it makes it easier for you to answer a question
The Earth was not and is not an isolated system, being open to radiative transfer in and out, so the Second Law does not rule anything out.
@ The Nybbler
That’s a weak defence for abiogenesis.
Physics doesn’t rule out a Boltzman brain to form either.
It’s not a defense at all. It’s a complete counter to your objection to abiogenesis, which was not so much weak as erroneous.
@The Nybbler
Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have used the word ”violates”, but abiogenesis goes against all we know about thermodynamics and chemistry, even if you on a philosophical plane can imagine something else.
Abiogenesis is such an extraordinary claim, that it requires – if not extraordinary evidence – so at least an idea about how it could happen.
The second law is a statistical thing.
A system going from a disordered state to an ordered one is not impossible, only astronomically unlikely. But the nature of life means it only has to happen once.
And the chance of something astronomically unlikely happening at least once in an entire ocean over a billion years needn’t be small.
@Lambert
I’ve done the math and concluded that for all intents and purposes, it’s impossible for even one of the large molecules, crucial for life, to form spontaneously.
Show me the fermi calculations.
Especially the assumption about how complex the ‘minimum viable organism’ is.
This would be interesting. Would you mind sharing your calculations?
Umm.
I call begging the question. Obviously even very improbable things do happen – are statistically sure to happen, somewhere and when, given enough time and space – and we manifestly exist to be discussing this.
Isn’t that begging the question?
“Is chance enough to explains life?”
“We’re alive, ergo yes.”
Let’s use one small part that is necessary for all life – RNA-polymerase. It has minimum 3300 aminoacids. The first step of that forming, is to string along 3300 aminoacids of the right chirality from a racemic mixture. You need to make 10 to the power of 990 molecules to have a 50% chance of that happening. Compare to the estimated number of atoms in the universe:10 to the power of 82. Then of course the right aminoacids must come in the right place to make it fold in the right way and have a biological function.
You probably need over hundred different types of equally critical molecules to form at the same place at the same time to get a self replicating cell and start evolution.
ETA: corrected the math.
@ Randy M
I’m thoroughly agnostic; I don’t have a position on this. My point is that mere improbability isn’t sufficient to prove divine intervention, logically speaking.
@Statismagician
Technically, you can’t prove anything. I just answered the thread starters request for uncommon reasons for my beliefs.
Fair enough – I lost track of the original point of the thread; mea culpa.
Why is that the *first* step, and why are the iterations completely random?
RNA polymerase is part of all current life, but we don’t know it’s necessary.
The probable form of abiogenesis is that some much simpler but really crappy life forms by chance.
Then DNA based life evolves and immediately outcompetes the simpler life.
+1 for meh’s position
From an agnostic perspective it looks like you’ve picked an artificially complex initial position and are discounting various forces that could lead to a reduction in randomness.
But our existence doesn’t prove that improbable events did in fact happen by chance. If you find a piece of paper with your name on it, that isn’t proof that ink splotches are a likely cause of the letter addressed to you.
You could make an argument that, assuming it is from chance, it’s existence dictates a reasonable upper bounds for how unlikely such a thing occurring is; but that is exactly begging the question.
Further, “given enough time and space” requires math to show we have in the ball park of that much time and space. Sure, it naively seems like we have an awful lot of both, but that needs to be related to just how unlikely it is.
@Aftagley
It’s not artificially complex. Life is irreducibly complex.
@Lambert
A prebiotic ”evolution” can only favor molecules with high stability and rate of formation. It must be up to others than me to come up with an idea how information, biological functions and self replication can be achieved in a RNA world.
A quote from the Wiki-page on abiogenesis:
Then he resigns to the multiverse to solve the problem.
I’ll be on my own in Manhattan on Weds, Feb 19th, most of the day (meeting my wife for dinner late in the evening). Any suggestions for an out-of-towner to spend the day on his own? Considering doing the Intrepid museum, since my wife isn’t as interested in that sort of thing.
Matinees on Broadway can be pretty cheap. Last time I was there I saw Spamalot with Clay Aiken.
The TKTS booths are a good way to get day-of tickets at a discount. Beetlejuice is worth seeing, if you’re interested.
Intrepid is definitely what I’d do, but I’m also a weirdo. If you go, let us know how it is.
Spending a day in the Met isn’t a bad idea. Even if you aren’t interested in art, the Making Marvels exhibit on display there is amazing for anyone interested in the history of science and the Enlightenment. Plus, a full-scale replica of the original Mechanical Turk.
I agree that the Met is great- but my wife and I spent a ton of time there just a few months back. Plus, she’s an art history grad student, so we’ll be doing art museums together a lot anyway- figured now’s my chance to do something different (although I do love the art museums).
Have you been to the Cloisters as well? I remember enjoying it, as someone with medieval interests, a very long time ago.
We did go, yes! She’s a medievalist, so you can imagine it was mandatory. We’ll likely be back, though.
An Experiment on Human Aging
Elysium (Nicotinamide Riboside) is a supplement that there is some reason to believe may slow aging. The people who produce it have recently offered a genetic test for biomarkers of age. The resulting data ought to provide some evidence on whether the product actually works, evidence based on an experiment on humans, not rats or fruit flies.
I assume that they have data on how long each customer has been buying their product, what his chronological age is, and what, according to the biomarkers they test for, his biological age is — limited, of course, to those customers who have purchased the genetic test.
Run a simple regression: Biological age = Chronological age + A +B x number of years of use of Elysium.
A is there because Elysium customers who buy the test for biological age are a non-random sample of the population; their biological age might, on average, be different from their chronological age even before they start using the product.
If B is negative and significantly different from zero, that would be evidence that their product works. The size of B would be evidence of how well it works.
How much of what we mean by aging is captured by the stuff they’re finding in their tests, though? You could have a drug that treats the markers but doesn’t help you stay mentally sharp or physically active as you age. Alternatively, you could have a drug that helps you stay mentally sharp or physically active but doesn’t do anything to the markers.
That’s a problem with some evidence on aging. If some additive or diet holds down the biomarkers, is it really slowing aging or is it the equivalent of holding a match under the thermometer in order to warm the house?
My inexpert guess is that there are two categories of effects of aging. Category 1 is things wearing out, as evidenced by the behavior of my knees or the accumulation of plaque in my arteries. Category 2 is aging proper, the whole system working less well because of shortened telomeres, or some other cause or causes with very broad effects.
Category 1 can to some degree be engineered around, for instance by replacing the knee joints, which I gather is now a fairly standard surgery. So if category 2 can be controlled …
Conan review #5: “Queen of the Black Coast”
This was first published in the May 1934 issue of Weird Tales. Margaret Brundage illustrated the monster, Belit and Conan, here looking more like Rudolph Valentino than Ahnuld.
We start in media res with a ship’s master in Argos annoyed to find a mailed horseman leaping off his steed to the ship as it’s easing off the piles. It seems that Conan is being pursued by a squad of horsemen and archers on foot trudging behind, so push off now!
They’re sailing all the way from Argos to Kush, which is fine by Conan, a mercenary who found no work in Argos but did find trouble with the law.
Values Dissonance alert: Conan and the crew of the Argus are bound for Kush to buy “ivory, copper ore, slaves and pearls.”
Howard’s brief, lush descriptions of the countries they pass on the way to Kush is worth quoting, as it also captures some of the racial bias we’ll be seeing repeatedly:
(Stygia is Egypt, which practices human sacrifice while the pre-Greek, Germanic etc. Hyborians don’t, a flagrant reversal of facts an autodidact history buff should have known.)
They find the smoking ruins of a Kushite village, which Master Tito identifies as pirates’s work. He says they’ll try to outrun any pirate ship they encounter, but they can beat off reavers if there’s no other choice, unless it’s Belit. So of course they encounter Belit, a Shemite woman whose galley is crewed by more than eighty black warriors. Conan starts exchanging arrows with the minority who aren’t manning the eighty oars, noting that he learned archery among the Hyrkanians (so he’s already been as far as the Caspian Sea in the gap between the thief stories and this one). Tito and all the steersmen die and Conan takes over, but only briefly, as the Argus is rammed, grappled, and spearmen jump to fight the merchant rowers. We get some nice description of how Conan can survive fighting outnumbered: he’s wearing armor and puts his back to a mast so he can’t be surrounded.
Belit calls off her men and Conan falls in lust, a feeling that’s apparently mutual, as she basically proposes on the spot due to the allure of his physical power: “I am a queen by fire and steel and slaughter–be thou my king!”
Time passes, and one day they pull in to the river Zarkheba, where a Stygian galley once fled from Belit upstream and washed back downstream days later with its cargo but only one man, and he was gibbering insanely. She believes there’s a walled city somewhere on that river: let’s go sack it! Hmm, seems like a bad idea if you’ve established it’s a Lovecraftian city of death and madness, but OK.
On the way there, Conan and Belit debate theology and life after death. The plot-relevant part is Belit saying “Were I still in death and you fighting for life, I would come back from the abyss to aid you” They also lose a man to random encounter with a giant water snake. Then they come to the city, and find it a ruin where the only sign of life is a great bird/bat/winged ape that flies off a spire. The black men are afraid to go try to loot the open-air dungeon, and they’re clearly in the right. She makes four of them lift up an altar by handholds and stops her lover from helping them: she foresaw that lifting it would trigger a falling stone trap that kills the four lifters. Sure enough, the trapped altar covered a chest high as a woman’s arms full of diamonds, rubies, bloodstones, sapphires, turquoises, moonstones, opals, emeralds, amethysts, etc.
They see the bat-thing perch on the ship. Conan runs to investigate and returns reporting the thing destroyed their water casks. He leads twenty men away from the putrid river to find fresh water. His face gets close enough to a black lotus blossom to smell it, but while “juice was death, [its] scent brought dream-haunted slumber.”
He dreams that the city was built by winged humanoids before even lungfish evolved. The individuals were mortal but the species endured over geological time, and eventually an earthquake “caused the river to run black for days with some lethal substance spewed up from the subterranean depths, a frightful chemical change … Many died who drank of it; and in those who lived, the drinking wrought change, subtle, gradual and grisly” … basically the Devonian angels evolved into cannibal ape demons. His dream reaches human history, and he sees the ape demon transform people it encounters into werehyenas, then he sees himself arriving, and his sub-chief N’Gora attacked by the creature. So waking up, Conan obviously has to fight N’Gora and more werehyenas. He hurries to the ship, where he finds Belit hanging from the yardarm strangled by the very ruby necklace she stole!
Conan grieves by giving Belit a funeral on the ship. He thinks the demon is toying with him, letting him fill with grief and fear before attacking. Eventually it sends twenty werehyenas and he kills some with arrows before he runs out (combat scenes are better when you track ammo!), then fights with his sword until they reach grappling range, and finally fights two bare-handed. Then he’s knocked down by the flying demon and is about to be killed when… Belit’s ghost interposes herself! Her intervention holds the monster while Conan gets up and cuts the thing in half just above the hips.
Then it’s back to the ship with Belit’s cloak-wrapped body… he gets her out to sea all by himself, then sets it on fire from shore. And… come on, man, you discarded the treasure?!
For those who don’t know, the character Belit was copied from the title character of H. Rider Haggard’s 1886-7 novel She, about an immortal Middle Eastern woman who’s lived for 2,000 years as a goddess in Africa. Why Belit’s crew would worship her when she lacks She’s god-like qualities goes unexplained. Howard must have assumed 1934 readers would take it for granted that this is just what black men do. That’s the “white goddess” trope, which shows us that 1880s-1930s Anglo-American racism counted Semitic peoples as white.
Of the original Conan stories, this is objectively the one that most captured the imagination of future writers. The first comic book to feature Conan was published in Mexico starting in 1952, not under his name but La Reina de la Costa Negra. When writing Marvel’s Conan comic in the 1970s, Roy Thomas stretched his time with Belit over 3 1/2 years of monthly issues.
Loving these. Thank you!
You’re welcome!
This was my favorite story so far. We’ve got an exciting start, humor, action, travel, love, loss, philosophy, mystery! Wonderful!
And speaking of philosophy, Conan’s already answered the Simulation Hypothesis adroitly:
ETA: I also particularly enjoyed the bit with the judge. Conan is truly a barbarian: he cannot understand the concept of some sort of “legal system,” concludes these people are obviously mad, and naturally cleaves the guy’s skull. I mean, what else are you going to do?
Also, I just learned that Robert E. Howard never married, had only one known (and short-term) girlfriend, lived with his mother (and tragically killed himself the day she died). Passages such as:
Made me think of The 40-Year-Old Virgin:
Also, I laughed when the very next sentences after the paragraph in which Belît bares her soul to him is:
“Conan I’ll defy space, time and death for your bruising kisses!” “Oh shit bitch, get off me I got slayin’ to do!” Just…what the hell, man?
Also, it is good that The Vale of Lost Women will be discussed in a CW thread.
His one known girlfriend, Novalyne Price, wrote a memoir starring him that was adapted into the 1996 film The Whole Wide World.
Sadly, she was introduced to him three years before his suicide specifically as the one person in the same small town who could show her how to get fiction published, a goal she gave up on upon his death to focus on school-teaching.
The man has his priorities screwed up. A Player Character was supposed to focus on treasure, spend it attracting the opposite sex, and fight when necessary! 😛
Oh yes.
Related to the values dissonance alert, Kush comes from a term for killer or slayer, because it was a very high mountain range and quite cold and the name givers slaves died frequently there.
There are two places called Kush.
The Hindu Kush is a mountain range with a Persian name that is said to be derived from “slayer” or “mountain” (similar but unrelated words). But there was a Kingdom of Kush in Southern Egypt / Nubia / modern Sudan. Biblical Cush seems to be more like Ethiopia or Yemen. I think this is the one in the story. I don’t think that the Indo-European word is related to the the Afro-Asiatic word.
Is Ayesha really the origin of the “white goddess in Africa” trope?
As far as I know, yes. It would be interesting to be corrected.
This sounds like a job for tvtropes. The closest thing I see is “Mighty Whitey,” but most of that is about men. It gives only two examples from before Haggar: James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May (neither of which is about women nor Africa). But it claims that the trope is from the 18th century. Is this an error, meaning the 1800s or the setting of Cooper? Or is this a trace of relevant older stories? But probably She is the answer to your narrow question.
Hmmm. I didn’t think Belit’s crew literally worshipped her as a goddess.
I figured they stuck with her because she was actually that good a pirate. Legendary enough that random trading ship captains would say, in all seriousness, that they were totally safe from pirates, unless it was Belit, in which case they were boned.
In the story, Belit and Conan maraud around for a fair bit of time, and I remember an aside that they have to replenish their crew at some point, from a specific region or set of villages or something that Belit gets her crews from.
Belit’s like a pirate supervillain; sure, she’s nuts, but she wins. If you join her crew, maybe you get dead, but if you live you definitely get rich. She wins enough that they’ll even put up with crazy demands like her randomly picking up boy toys from vessels she raids.
One thing I did like is that it was always Belit’s ship, Belit’s crew, and Belit’s plan. While she lived, Conan was her sidekick, not the other way around. He didn’t take over just because he’s the main character.
Actually, Conan is pretty frequently OK with playing second fiddle to some other heroic figure. As long as he’s getting paid or bruisingly kissed.
I didn’t get the impression that they followed her for any other reason than because she was…her. If they were going to follow her just because she was a great pirate, then I would expect some kind of depiction or demonstration of her martial prowess, but that didn’t happen. There’s no hint that she herself is a great Amazon Warrior. They follow her, like thralls, even to likely death, for no apparent reason other than that she is Belît. There’s not a hint of grumbling about sailing up the poison river to the maddened kingdom: they simply obey. Mere mercenaries might take issue with throwing away their lives for uncertain gain, especially when merchant ships offer such easy prey. And the only things that she seems to posses that her ebony warriors do not are creamy pale white skin and female body parts. I would have liked a little bit of exposition as to her background. Just say something like “she built up this crew by being a super-fierce warrior woman” and that would be fine. As is, it seems like the only reason these people are following her is because they worship a white lady.
That’s one of the things I really like about these stories: Conan is just kind of a schmuck. He’s good with a sword, and fearless to the point of stupidity, but he’s not particularly heroic or noble. Definitely not virtuous. No great purpose. Not saving the world or anything. Doesn’t have much purpose besides the three S’s: slay, steal and screw.
The arc of the Conan stories builds towards Conan hack-and-slashing his way onto the throne of Aquilonia, where he’ll finish his career as a bored but apparently well-liked and competent king. That’s not a spoiler, and it’s not me projecting later stories back onto earlier ones: the first story published was “The Phoenix on the Sword”, which features King Conan fighting off a palace coup. Later ones are meant to be read in that light.
So while the chronologically earlier stories are definitely episodic and picaresque, I don’t think it’s quite right to say that he’s not showing virtue or nobility, at least in some of them. The whole point — and Howard’s not shy about saying so outright, in various places — is showing a certain type of virtue and nobility, a kind that’s sharply contrasted with the civilization around him but which is definitely present, and indeed which we’re supposed to see as the secret to his success.
True, it’s not clear if they literally worship her. It could be a mercenary calculation “we don’t want to go creepy supernatural places and she’ll coldly sacrifice four of us to a trap, but she’s Just That Good at piracy that the loot’s great for the survivors.”
“Battle and raid had thinned their crew; only some eighty spear-men remained, scarcely enough to work the long galley. But Belît would not take the time to make the long cruise southward to the island kingdoms where she recruited her buccaneers.”
Yeah, I loved that. Conan will sometimes come across as an invincible Marty Stu, but in this reading order, that’s never been the case yet.
Visual interpretations of Belit, post-Margaret Brundage.
Mexican Belit, 1952
Marvel’s Belit, 1976
Dark Horse Comics Belit, 2012
Marvel’s Belit, 2019
The 2012 look says “goth stripper” more than “pirate queen” to me, and I can’t help but think I’m looking at Dejah Thoris in the 2019 one even though I know better, but I actually kinda like the conquistador helmet in the 1952 one.
(Yes, a morion’s several thousand years out of period, but come on, this is Conan we’re talking about.)
Ha, yes!
I don’t know what the thinking was behind keeping her skin ivory white in 2019 after the 2012 goth look, but it’s awkward to redo that skin color with Barsoomian jewelry-instead-of-clothes.
Speaking of that 2012 look, can I just point out that walking barefoot on a wooden deck covered in blood sounds like a good way to turn a minor inconvenience into a death sentence?
You’d think, but as late as Cook’s voyages it was apparently common for sailors to go barefoot in warm weather — bare feet are pretty grippy on wooden decks, even awash. I was more surprised to learn that they’d often lose their shoes when the guns were being exercised — no doubt it gets hot on a frigate’s gun deck, but I wouldn’t want to get my bare toes behind a recoiling gun. Not that it’d help much if I did have shoes on, I suppose.
The goth stripper look was trying to be closer to how Robert E. Howard described her in Queen of the Black Coast:
…
Note that she does however wear sandals. Also note that unlike in the comics, Conan actually wears black plated armour. Granted Howard may not have intended to be literal in describing her skin as ivory white, but he does in fact use those words. I personally rather like it, especially in this panel with the psycho eyes and the blood on her mouth. It’s sexy.
Conan review #6: “The Vale of Lost Women”
Ohhh yeah, this story. Conan has made himself the war-chief of a tribe in Vaguest African when the Gamemaster springs an obnoxious moral dilemma on him: is he a bad enough dude to not save the
Presidentdamsel from the Negroes, or will his conscience force him to save her from gang rape?VoLW was never submitted for publication, but since Conan stories were written for Weird Tales, there are also flying Lovecraftian entities that demand women sacrifices, but mostly it’s just a racist moral dilemma. So let’s break it down…
A white woman named Livia has been abducted by the Bakalah tribe along with her brother, who was stripped naked and murdered, which seems to be described by her in a delirious PTSD-like state. A Bakalah woman brings her food, wickedly rolling her eyes (“Whatever, whitey!”) and mocking her by swaying her hips. From her hut, Livia watches the ugly, smelly King Bajujh receive a visit from the warriors of a neighboring group. She’s excited to see that one of the visitors is a white man in the local fashion of leopard loincloth and plumed headdress, and the visitors have the body language of equals rather than suppliants to Bajujh.
“His appearance was alien and unfamiliar; … But she made no effort to classify his position among the races of mankind. It was enough that his skin was white.”
You can see where this is going: she assumes that he’s enough of a 1930s racist to save a white woman from black men, despite knowing nothing of his culture. So she sneaks up to him and, well, it’s a good thing he actually knows her language (Ophirean). She exposits to Conan that
“By special permission of the king of Stygia, my brother was allowed to go to Kheshatta, the city of magicians, to study their arts, and I accompanied him.” Kushites were raiding for travelers to ransom or sell into slavery outside the city, and the siblings got caught between greedy rivals until the divided band of Kushite captors got overtaken by the Bakalah tribe. She cries for the blood of her brother’s murderers, offering her virginity as a bribe. But Conan is like “Eh, no thanks. Women are cheap as plantains here.”
Livia on cultural relativism: “I see the absurdity of supposing that any man in this corner of the world would act according to rules and customs existent in another corner of the planet,” she murmured weakly
But then Conan: “I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a
black man; and though your kind call me a robber, I never forced a woman against her
consent. Customs differ in various countries, but if a man is strong enough, he can enforce
a few of his native customs anywhere.”
Aaaugh, why even have him say no if he’s going to change his mind into a 1930s racist right when Livia says she lost their debate?!
So OK, Conan has his Bamula warriors attack their hosts instead of forming an alliance with this larger group of people to loot a third, the Jihiji. I feel like Conan’s suddenly a Paladin and, having achieved a nice small domain in a sandbox D&D campaign, the racist GM sprung a “make the Paladin fall” BS dilemma on him. Unarmed Conan gets a surprise round by using the old “use a beef bone as a club” trick he learned in prison, which acts as the signal for his warriors to attack. Despite being the one who demanded violence, Livia is a soft civilized woman who freaks out at the sight of it. As Conan approaches the prison hut to free her, she smashes the door open herself and runs away. She tries to steal a horse and a local man tries to stop her, but she gets away by letting him rip off her tunic. She’ll stay naked for the rest of the story.
Riding for hours in the dark, Livia comes across a valley. She wonders if it’s the valley her captors mentioned with fear, the one where all the young women of a different ethnicity had fled to escape rape by men. Conservation of Detail being in effect, yes, there’s an all-female settlement here.
“One, lovelier than the rest, came silently up to the trembling girl, and enfolded her with supple brown arms. Her breath was scented with the same perfume that stole from the great white blossoms that waved in the starshine. Her lips pressed Livia’s in a long terrible kiss.”
Oops, I guess lesbian separatists don’t revere consent either. Right after kissing her, though, the woman and her fellows lie Livia on a stone altar. Ring around the altar, chant a soft paean of soulless joy, a welcome to the flying god come down to claim a fresh sacrifice.
“Its wings were bat-like; but its body and the dim face that gazed down upon her were like nothing of sea or earth or air; she knew she looked upon ultimate horror, upon black cosmic foulness born in night-black gulfs beyond the reach of a madman’s wildest dreams.”
Conan rushes in to fight Cosmic Horror Bat for her life, getting his blood splashed thickly on the ground for his trouble. One interesting detail: he doesn’t kill it, but only injures it enough that it chooses to fly away. He approaches the altar, panting, dripping blood at every step, and… hang on, where the brown women at? They’re never described reacting to an unknown swordsman and their god fighting.
Let’s try to make sense of what that thing was: “A devil from the Outer Dark, … Oh, they’re nothing uncommon. They lurk as thick as fleas outside the belt of light which surrounds this world. I’ve heard the wise men of Zamora talk of them. Some find their way to Earth, but when they do, they have to take
on earthly form and flesh of some sort.”
Livia tells Conan she double-crossed him, so “punish me as you will.” Is… is that flirting? Well, no matter: Conan won’t have sex with her, calling her a child of cities, and books, which isn’t your fault but you’d die trying to be a hard man’s girlfriend. He says he’ll take her back to Kheshatta, where she can find passage home. THE END
OK then. What to say? Despite her racism, Livia is a pretty sympathetic victim. She saw her brother tortured to death and rape is rape; you don’t lose all sympathy because you’re white and they’re black. But her and Conan’s 1930s racism is a wretched anachronism, worse than the others in the series because it’s so morally/politically charged. No one wanted to see Conan as a too-literal White Knight. The weird valley is underdeveloped as though this was only a first draft (it was), and the Lovecraftian entity is just serviceable.
It seems obvious that the racism was grafted on to give some contrived justification for why Conan would act contrary to his normal disinterested and pragmatic proto-anti-hero character. But weirdly, it actually feels much less justified this way than if Howard had just said “Conan did it because he felt like it” – since that seems entirely consistent with his character.
Been enjoying this series, by the way.
It is an interesting thing that the racism aspect could be stripped out so easily, and it would seem perfectly in keeping with Conan.
Like, honestly, if the story was that, while Conan was negotiating with another warlord, a totally hot woman suddenly ran up and begged him to save her, and then Conan threw all his negotiations out the window and killed a bunch of people…
Well, that doesn’t sound too strange for Conan. Conan, as people have noted in these threads, makes bad decisions. He’s a bad thief, because even though his thieving skills are solid, sometimes he just walks away without looting anything. He’s a bad lawyer, because sometimes he gets frustrated and murders the judge. He’s a bad chief, because sometimes he murders the other negotiating party to impress women he’s just met.
I also think that it says interesting things about how our culture has shifted, though. Conan murders a bunch of people to save a woman because he has a superficial characteristic in common with her. This makes us uncomfortable, because that superficial characteristic is race.
But it means we’d feel better about the story if Conan didn’t have anything at all in common with the woman. We’d rather Conan had no reason than having an inappropriate reason.
Makes me go “hmmmm” when I think about the logic.
Edit: My favorite thing about this story, though, is Conan just shrugging off the Thing That Shouldn’t Be as the cosmic equivalent of vermin.
Unfortunately the author throws that away by having Conan say “You don’t impress me because nubile women are cheap as plantains. But aw shucks, I’d kill a negotiating party on their home turf to save any white woman!” And Livia and Conan dress that up with a little talk about cultural relativism and how a culture’s mores are changed over time by men with mighty thews.
I feel like it’s a no-win situation, like when a tabletop GM tries to harm a player’s character by presenting a moral dilemma. It’s dumb to lose an alliance by attacking while outnumbered and gain a bad reputation as “the unstable white chief who flips out and kills other tribes during negotiations.” But Livia is a sympathetic victim and the audience would like him less if he laughed off her plea to be rescued from gang rape.
Plus while that feels like the moral choice, 80 years of cultural shift mean his words creep us out. He’s been a bystander to how many local black women getting raped…? He should have saved them too, we think. Then, though, you can’t expect a mortal man to play the White Knight who flips out and kills every rapist he ever sees and stay alive in a world where rape is just Tuesday.
“Ah yes, ethereal fleas. They usually don’t come inside the Van Allen belt.”
1) The racism is uncomfortable to read in 2020. But it’s also sort of a simplistic “aw shucks” racism? There’s no “we’re superior to them” or “they’re inferior.” It’s just “you’re us, they’re them.” It really isn’t much different than a Star Fleet officer who wouldn’t leave a human in the hands of Klingons.
2) Even in 2020, though, I appreciate people who act like people. As far as I can tell, white westerners are literally the only people in all of history, including present day, who are not or who try not to be racist. Of course people from the Time before History are going to be racist! They’re going to be mad racist! They have not heard of Dr. King and have not had their HR training on implicit bias and white privilege.
I get very annoyed with the “I’m totally a bad guy…but not racist!” trope in media. Like in Red Dead Redemption II. Arthur Morgan, the protagonist you play, is an uneducated, 19th century thief and murderer. Literally robs and murders completely innocent people. But he’s totes 2020 woke about women’s rights and race relations and all that. This is not believable and I kept rolling my eyes at the otherwise excellent writing. See also multiracial street gangs.
3) On the other other hand, the racism also doesn’t make much sense in-world. She’s from Ophirea, which is far from Cimmeria. Ethnocentrism certainly makes sense, but apparently literally the only thing they have in common is white skin.
4) I’m also not too sure about her alignment. She and her brother made a deal with Stygia to go to their wizard city. Um, all we know about the Stygians so far is that they’re basically devil worshipers. So she and her brother wanted to go learn black magic with the evil devil snake worshipers, and then got captured by blacks! So there really is literally no reason for Conan to kill everyone except for the color of her skin: they’re not ethnically similar, nor do they seem similar in alignment.
5) Finally it’s just a pretty bad story. There’s no big secrets or mysteries or dramatic tension or exciting battles. This was the worst story so far.
Yeah, this story was engineered for the cover art.
“Got bills to pay. Need the extra cents per word for nailing the cover. Let’s see…Conan…mostly naked woman…scary bat monster…more naked women in the background…maybe the first woman is tied up and being sacrificed to the monster?”
Basically this. She’s an Ophirean city-slicker and he’s a barbarian from dark Cimmeria. She was going with her brother to learn black magic from one culture it’s explicable the superstitious barbarian is bigoted against. The context isn’t there for them to categorize the world into “us two” vs. “them locals.” Ethnocentrism is super realistic, but here Howard is importing racism exactly as it developed to justify the African slave trade and was still current in 1936.
There even could have been a wacky misunderstanding where she thinks he’s Ophirean, but nope.
Also this. There’s the setup that Livia exists and meets Conan, and the only other element is “some bad women live in a valley with a space god”, which we know to expect because these are weird tales.
Conan’s got a real ear for languages, doesn’t he? I wonder how many he’s fluent in by the end of the series. It’s certainly a half-dozen or more, and he can’t be much more than thirty or so by the time we see the last of them — he’s older by The Phoenix on the Sword, but I think all the King Conan stories are set in Aquilonia or neighboring regions, and we see that one fairly early.
In his roaming about the world the giant adventurer had picked up a wide smattering of knowledge, particularly including the speaking and reading of many alien tongues. Many a sheltered scholar would have been astonished at the Cimmerian’s linguistic abilities, for he had experienced many adventures where knowledge of a strange language had meant the difference between life and death.” — “Jewels of Gwahlur”
If the Bamulas and people of Keshan (“Jewels of Gwahlur”) speak proto-Cushitic (reasonable, as Semitic is still one language here), we’ve seen him speaking
1. “Nordic”, 2. Nemedian, a Hyborian language (same as the languages of Argos and Aquilonia?) 3. Zamoran 4. Kushite 5. Ophirean
Since he was born in a tribal society that speaks a language isolate, that’s 6-8 already.
Is it possible there’s a lingua franca?
What are the purplest places to live in the U.S.? Looking for places politically diverse enough that it’s usual to know people with differing political views and to have some incentive for getting along with them. Do such places even exist anymore?
honestly i would say everywhere is like this, its just a matter of who you talk to and associate with. even if where you live is split 65-35, thats still a third of people different. its probably higher than any racial diversity metric
Hmm…I live in a city that’s about 80-20, whereas there’s no ethnic group here that makes up more than 50%. So the take-home point of your comment for me is that anywhere is more politically diverse than where I live.
can you just move to staten island though? its not like you need to go on some cross country search for purpletopia
I agree. Maybe not everywhere but damn near almost everywhere is like this, so long is it’s not on the internet.
I’d guess inner suburbs of the largest cities in red states.
Edit: Taking a look at results, and picking a large city in a red state at random, it appears South Omaha, Nebraska went 57/43 Clinton, Eagle Run went 57/43 Trump and North Omaha/Benson went 58/42 Clinton.
Or the outer suburbs of blue states like Illinois. Chicago is so Blue it makes the state blue, even though most of the state is quite Red.
Does this kind of situation mean that primaries undergo an Electoral College type thing, where the delegate count is often not matching the state popular vote?
All these areas are becoming substantially Bluer. The IL 10th elected Mark Kirk (R) to the House for the longest time, who then went on to become one of the most liberal GOP senators. Kerry and Gore barely carried the district. Since then, it’s become a blue-leaning area, with a partisan index of +10 D.
Same story could be told for other suburban districts like the 8th or the 11th.
We’re redder than the state as a whole, but these are definitely blue-leaning areas, and the kind of “Red” you get is not the Red Tribe kind.
Maryland is probably a good example of a purple split that doesn’t look like one. Annapolis, for example, has thousands of eloquent liberals permeating the government and arts communities. But it also has the Naval Academy.
Every year, the Naval Academy has a croquet match with the tiny liberal arts college across the street and it turns into a giant party. If anybody’s ever in Annapolis in mid-to-late-April, I strongly recommend swinging by.
Is the naval academy still very red? Judging from what I’ve seen there is a huge enlisted-officer split that skews ever more blue as we go up the ranks nowdays.
@twocents says:
My next door neighbors house in Albany, California
The dad is a police officer and a Republican, the mom is a registered nurse and a Democrat, and their daughters are too young to vote.
Also the supervisors meetings at my work in San Francisco, California, the Superintendent (from further northern California) is a Republican, as is the Chief Engineer (born in the Soviet Union), and the two Senior Engineers (one from Virginia, the other split his childhood between San Francisco and Puerto Rico) are Democrats (it was during the Kavanaugh hearings that everyone’s leanings became clear), a few years ago I’d say the “hands” were about 50/50 as well, but with the recent retirements and new hires I doubt that’s true anymore.
Come to think of it if I expand the definition of “workplace” to all the buildings I repair the mostly Republican cops and deputies, and the mostly Democrat attorneys and clericals on-site roughly balance.
Ten to twenty years ago when I worked union construction jobs older whites and younger Hispanics were mostly Democrats, and younger Hispanics and older whites were mostly Democrats.
I’d say that among guys I’ve worked with for a long while Democrats and Republicans have mixed on the job in very “blue” areas, but except for a few lady cops and deputies the women that I have heard their political leanings have been overwhelmingly Democrats.
What about the inmates?
@Noah,
I have overheard inmates say things along the lines of “Oppressed by the white man!”, but I try to limit my conversations with the inmates to topics such as “Does it flush now?”, and not politics.
Probably Virginia.
Small towns in rural NE? Medium-sized college towns in the deep south? Or get a job on a military base in a major metro area?
The only reason you need to interact with people who disagree with you anymore is because of work or because there’s no one else around.
Any small town with a nationally-ranked college in a red state–Charlottesville, Madison, etc–if you want the white elite left and right, with the difference being education level and social role.
Any small Rust Belt city with a significant non-white population–if you want the working-class left and right, with the division being ethnicity and employer.
Any black community in the South, if you want the division to be mostly ethnic.
Three minute video about the Dutch Cycling Against the Wind Championships aka the NK Tegenwindfietsen (tegen = against, wind = wind, fietsen = cycling).
It seems like anime is a topic that has phased out of the common interests of SSC commenters. Somewhat inspired by some of the “best anime of the decade” lists that people have been putting out, here are some recommendations of more recent shows that SSC viewers might enjoy. These shows are all available (in the US) on Crunchyroll, unless otherwise stated. For non-US, use because.moe to find out your streaming options.
3-gatsu no Lion (March Comes In Like a Lion). A show about a high-school aged boy who was able to become a professional player at a young age. Much more of a social drama, than about sport technique. Some saggy bits in pacing, but overall a strong portrayal of living with depression and/or anxieties on career progression, without the show itself being depressing. Also on Netflix.
The Ancient Magus’s Bride. Another show with a portrayal of slow and uneven recovery from trauma. Honestly, you can easily ignore the whole bride part and pretend the central relationship isn’t romantic. Two complex people, one deemed broken by others, the other viewing herself as broken, gradually deciding to better themselves for the sake of staying with each other. But also, a show that really does a great job depicting the inhumanity of the fae, including Oberon and Titania as recurring characters.
Gatchaman Crowds. The best show about the internet age is still GITS:SAC (somehow), but Gatchaman Crowds might be the only show to directly address how the internet age has affected social relationships as its main plot.
Nejimaki Seirei Senki: Tenkyou no Alderamin (Alderamin on the Sky). The rare anime competence porn show! In a fantasy world, a strategy/tactics genius begins to reluctantly rise through the ranks of a dying empire, despite having a contempt for said empire.
Mob Psycho 100. People have raved about the animation of this show for good reason, but the story is also extremely good, about social anxieties and escapism and the empty promises of happiness that power makes.
Ping Pong The Animation. High school story that interrogates why people play their chosen sport. A bit of a slow burn, but this thing is truly a masterpiece. On Funimation.
Expelled from Paradise. A rare film that looks at a post-Singularity future without cribbing from the cyberpunk aesthetic too much. On Netflix.
Kyousougiga. A surreal fantasy tale that’s really all about the complexities of family relationships, especially the conflicted feelings we have about our parents. One of my favorite shows of all time.
Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru (My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU). I think that this show, in particular would be on interest to SSC, as it’s primarily concerned with how popularity politics underline our society and relationships. Lots of Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory stuff, some Radicalising the Romanceless stuff.
Hibike! Euphonium also has a lot of popularity politics underlining its plots, but in a more subtle way, and adding how feelings about artistic quality and value further complicate the situation.
Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru. Magical girl show, which imho is uniquely relevant in its thematic and plot resolutions to religious SSC members (in a pro-religion/faith way). Second season, which I haven’t watched yet, is on Amazon only.
Log Horizon. Has some saggy pacing, but still one of the only pieces of media that is close to being rationalfic, with a “what if the players of a MMORPG woke up inside of the game?” premise, and doing a deep dive on the world-building from that.
On the pulpier side, where there is some thematic stuff, but it’s more important that things are just plain fun:
Assassination Classroom, in which the classic heartwarming tale of a teacher who goes the distance to help his students gets the twist of his students trying to kill him on the regular, and also the school hyperbolically gives meritocracy a bad name.
Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken (I Can’t Understand What My Husband Is Saying). A shorts series about an extremely otaku husband with a normie wife. They love each other very much. It’s adorable and very heartwarming. The author of the manga also wrote the Dragonmaid manga, the anime of which I also recommend.
Gamers! Not actually that much about gaming, but more about creating the biggest train wreck of a comedic love polygon you’ve ever seen. Leave no misunderstanding un-escalated, no communication left un-bungled, and watch these @#$%ing stupid teenagers somehow still trip into cute relationships despite their best efforts. The back half gets a little saggy with angst, though.
Girls Und Panzer. The world-building in this show is BONKERS, but 200% of said bonkers world-building is in service to making The Fun Train happen. Military tank battles as an actual girls’ sport. The film has better action sequences than anything in Marvel. Also on Netflix, especially the film.
Grancrest Senki loses steam in the back half, but it’s pretty fun if you like tabletop gaming. The author of the source material previously did Record of Lodoss War, which actually was adapted from his own campaign. Others have said the Grancrest has a slightly more JRPG flavor. Either way, it’s a good palate cleanse to GoT’s nonsense. Also on Netflix.
Symphogear runs 500% off of Rule of Awesome. It’s a “so bad it’s Awesome” watch. Compare to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, but with singing mechagirl lesbians.
Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen (Kaguya-sama: Love is War). By the same director as Grancrest Senki, but with much stronger writing. A story about lampooning conflict theory in a high school romcom context. Much more comedic and breezy fun than SNAFU above.
Kakegurui. Uhhhhhhhhh slightly nonsensical contrived gambling games filtered through going so over-the-top and psychosexual that it wraps back around to fun to watch. The live action drama is less psychosexual and compensates with the joy of watching the actors somehow still being just as over-the-top. Both anime and live-action are on Netflix.
Monster Musume. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the sex comedy is a lost art in western media.
Pop Team Epic. Inject distilled memes directly into your arteries. Do NOT watch the Netflix version, it’s butchered.
Zombieland Saga. Idol group made of zombies. And win.
Honorable mention goes to fantasy-tinged food anime, which I’ve been on a kick for lately. Isekai Izekaya, Restaurant to Another World, and Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family, though the latter is a spinoff so you might not get the most of the show unless you already know the Fate stuff. Very good for a laid back watch after work, while also getting ideas and tips for future cooking projects.
I’ve watched/tried watching two of these.
The Ancient Magus’s Bride had some promise but the execution was really boring, so I dropped it a few episodes in.
Log Horizon could’ve been really good – the best show about community-building I know of – but was really brought down by the juvenile humor bits and repetitive gags. I still enjoyed it overall and I’ll watch season 3.
I’ve also tried to watch The Ancient Magus’s Bride and I can confirm that it’s boring. Dropped it after a few episodes.
Ancient Magus’ Bride is the best show I stopped watching because I forgot it existed. genuinely great moments, but it can’t hold my attention.
Log Horizon in general has some amazing bits, and other things that don’t come together. Will watch season 3.
Fair enough. I mean, I only watched AMB because I wanted to watch something with only medium engagement. I’ve got a list of probably better shows that I’ve been putting off because I don’t have the spoons for them. But AMB has just enough strong moments of animation and interesting moments with the Fae to warrant a recommendation. For the anime plebs. 😉
If you like capeshit you should watch My Hero Academia. If you love capeshit you have to watch My Hero Academia. It’s an interesting exploration of what it means to be a hero in a world where superpowers are growing increasingly common. Also it’s a Shounen in which the main protagonist is given serious drawbacks and obstacles that he has to overcome in order to earn his bullshit OP powers. The greatest highlight though is the sheer creativity in not just the number and variety of powers seen in the series, but how the characters make use of them.
One of my favourite examples is Mirio, whose quirk is Permeation, which makes him intangible. When you first see him in action he is an absolute combat monster. As he goes on to explain though, it’s not because his quirk is strong, it actually has a lot of advantages. When he is intangible he can’t see, he can’t hear, he can’t feel, he can’t even breathe, he just falls down to the earth. Which means even something as seemingly simple as going through a wall requires a lot of steps and careful coordination as he makes different parts of his body tangible and intangible in sequence. If you look carefully, you can see he has scars along the length of his arms, and those are all injuries he got while learning how to use his quirk. It’s really neat how the story puts a lot of thought into not just what can be done with powers, but also what their inherent limitations are.
I’d anti-recommend MHA. Despite everything about it being an exploration of powers and creativity, it’s still really just a story about hitting other people harder. The entire story arbitrarily locks off characters because their powerlevel isn’t high enough, and Horikoshi is really bad at powercreep. Most of the characters you get introduced to in the first 30 chapters aren’t relevant, and aren’t allowed to be relevant because they can’t level buildings with their punches. It really seems like he just can’t think of a way that someone who is invisible or can generate literally any object could achieve a goal, so the only characters from the school itself that are relevant to the story are ones who’s powers let them obliterate a city block.
Really if you want an exploration of superpowers, just read Worm.
I stalled on MHA by the summer camp arc. For capeshit, there’s Gatchaman Crowds, Concrete Revolutio, Tiger and Bunny, and Samurai Flamenco. Magical Girl and Tokusatsu cover capeshit pretty well, too. (The Reflection was amusing up until it whiffed the ending extremely hard. But it does literally have Stan Lee in it!)
And agree that it’s certainly no Worm, in terms of truly exploring superpower applications. That’s just not something that animation is meant to do.
Admittedly, the creativity and explorations of superpowers part is in direct tension with a running theme, embodied in the main character, that if you stack enough super strength it really does let you hammer every problem into a nail. The main flaw of MHA is that it’s trying to tell a Superman story at the same time it’s doing everything else, and the Superman inherently warps all storylines around him because of how powerful he is. The genius of MHA though is that it made Superman stand-in be in terminal decline, while his successor is seriously limited by being unable to control the awesome power he has inherited. It is within those limitations that you get an interesting story.
This of course does mean it gets less interesting once those limitations are no longer relevant. The anime hasn’t gotten there yet, but I am really not a fan of how in the manga Deku just start pulling a bunch of extra powers out of his ass after he’s gotten a good handle on his super strength. He doesn’t need these extra powers and they are directly counter to the whole theme about how stacked super strength is a god-tier power in an of itself. So end of Season 4 may very well be my stopping point, since I’m not looking forward to what follows. Nonetheless it’s been an amazing ride and I have very much enjoyed it, so I still highly recommend it.
My stopping point (not actually where I stopped, but where I decided the story wasn’t going to recapture me) was the AfO fight where someone with literally dozens of unique powersat his disposal decides that the best course of action is… to make his arm giant and punch real hard. I think it encapsulates a lot of the problems of the story.
I really was holding out for ages that there would be an arc where collateral damage would be absolutely not allowed, just to prevent the usual suspects taking the spotlight. Like a villain who turns people to glass, then maybe the rest of 1-A could do something other than cheer from the sidelines.
AfO didn’t do that because it he couldn’t think of anything better to do with his dozens of powers, he did that because he was showboating and wanted to prove that he was stronger than All Might. He probably would have won that fight if he’d done something else, but he didn’t want to just win, he wanted to win in a very specific way before the eyes of the world. His arrogance was thus his undoing.
Seconded. Although for slightly different reasons. Anime(to be fair to the Japanese, popular fiction) generally has pretty horrible world building, but MHA is incoherent nightmare fuel.
There’s something about much of the manga and anime I consume where the scenario/setup is very interesting, but as soon as they try to explain it, everything goes to hell because there can just be no reasonable explanation for it. Case in point, the original Danganronpa was a great show and I love it, it’s one of my favorites. The prequel show is meh because, well, explaining The Worst, Most Horrible Thing to Ever Happen was never going to work. You can’t live up to hype like that.
This discussion makes me wonder if there’s MHA fanfiction that does a better job with these issues.
At that point, though, just read Worm.
The problem MHA has is that it sets up an intriguing world-building (people eventually built institutions to take advantage of normalized superpowers), and then immediately starts introducing elements that break the world-building in order to provide immediate stakes for the hero to Punch Harder.
It’s a similar situation as the Nasuverse, where there’s all of this extensive world-building about how magic works…but only to demonstrate how awesome our heroes are for being able to break those foundational rules.
The two problems with just read Worm are that I have already read Worm, and anyway I found it kind of excessively dark and oppressive, so that I don’t quite regret reading it, but don’t really want to re-read it or read more of the same.
This is actually one of my favourite things about the Nasuverse. In gaming terms, everyone’s broken overpowered bullshit is explicitly acknowledged as broken overpowered bullshit. It can lead to really fun storytelling. Like in Fate/Zero where one character who is really invested in his idea of how the world works and dies horribly for it. His investment into the rules of magic and magical combat is completely understandable because it’s what he was taught and what had worked for him until the point where he meets someone who took a hard look at the rules and figured out all the loopholes. It’s both tragic and badass all at the same time.
I am basically fine with stories breaking their own rules as long as they acknowledge that they’re breaking said rules. Unless the rules get broken so much that it doesn’t feel like they’re breaking the rules anymore but rather didn’t have any to begin with. Nasuverse doesn’t quite feel that way for me, but then I’m the kind of person who reads the lore articles in the wiki so my I have a different context on how the whole thing operates. So I know that all the things that seemingly break the rules are actually either quite in line with them or operating based on higher principles, and I find the convoluted way it all fits together rather fascinating.
“…and then the hero just up and transcends the rules of the world to win” is a common anime climax, but I like them when the rule they’re transcending is based in the thematic journey, so that transcending them has a meaning to the real world, as well. It helps when the fictional world is a one-off that doesn’t have to deal with the fallout of such a rule-breaking being now existing in it, because it was constructed to demonstrate that thematic journey.
It’s not good when you have a world that’s constructed to make the lore and the rules matter (because it has continuity across many stories), and then having every other protagonist breaking those rules just to look cool, and yet somehow the world isn’t responding and updating to the fact that their rules are apparently bullshit that don’t apply to a bunch of people. I’d much rather read/watch a world of badass normals, who succeed because they find the creative ways in which the rules interact, rather than just “yeah, not feeling these rules, whatever.” Note that even the person in Fate/Zero who figured out the loopholes still dies to bullshit OP characters.
This is why I prefer reading Nasuverse fanfiction to source material, because the fanfic authors actually care about the lore, and have their moments of awesome be creative applications of it, rather than what tends to happen in Nasuverse canon.
I haven’t watched any of these, except for a few episodes of The Ancient Magus’s Bride which I didn’t like.
My list of series, in no particular order:
Attack on Titan
The breakout anime of the decade. Eldritch abominations, military fantasy, political intrigue, coming of age, hope disillusionment and despair whiplash, with stunning visuals and epic musical score.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Dark and grim deconstruction of the magical girl genre. Starts like any other magical girl shows and becomes increasingly dark, when you think it can’t get any darker it manages to one up itself. Very good directing.
Fate franchise
I watched Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works. The former is the prequel to the latter.
Good urban action-fantasy, mostly good characterization (except maybe the protagonist of the latter who comes across as passive until late in the series, probably due to his video game origin). The plot is somewhat convoluted and tends to get lost in exposition, but I enjoyed them, especially the first one.
Angel Beats!
Surreal commedy-action-adventure with an emotional finale. A bunch of teenagers trapped in a pocket universe modelled after a Japanese highschool, where they battle each other, mostly for fun since they respawn after they die, until they eventually figure out what’s going on. Very original and well paced. Good musical score.
One-Punch Man
Parody of the superhero genre. The protagonist is a plain looking guy who can defeat any foe with literally one punch. Sounds like a lame gimmick, but they managed to make 12 hilarious and wonderfully animated episodes around this premise. I’m only talking about the first season, I didn’t watch the second one since it is maligned over teh interwebz, but it doesn’t matter since the series is mostly episodic so there are no story arcs left to conclude.
Vinland Saga
Vikings: the anime. Actually more historically accurate than the live tv show, but with over-the-top cool anime fights. The plot is quite mature, as it should be, think of the first seasons of Game of Thrones without dragons or ice zombies.
Visually gorgeous, with both fast paced animation and lots of attention to detail (the design of the ships, swords, armors, and so on).
Psycho-Pass
Dystopian sci-fi. Set in a near future Japan, where massive surveillance and technocracy replaced democracy and people can be imprisoned, turned into indentured servant of the state or even summarily executed based only on their psychological profiles automatically assessed by opaque, unaccountable algorithms. The first season follows a division of cops and their indentured “enforcers” who struggle to solve a string of seemingly impossible murders that the defy the supposed perfection of the system. I didn’t watch the second season, but I definitely liked the first one.
The Promised Neverland
Dark fantasy. Children living happily in an apparently idyllic orphanage, until some randomly discover that those who get “adopted” suffer a quite terrible fate, hence they stage a covert rebellion against the “nannies” that run the place.
For those starting it, be warned the second half of the first season of Attack on Titan is really rough. We have no idea what was going on, and nothing gets explained until quite a bit later. It’s all setup for a pretty great story, though; the latest season is very good.
One Punch Man is great. Don’t listen to those people who say the second season isn’t any good, it’s great, too. I’ve been reading the manga past the end of season two since I’m impatient.
Eh, consensus is that Mob Psycho 100 (by the same author) is much better than OPM.
I’ve watched both, and while Mob Psycho 100 is great, too, personally I enjoy OPM more.
I agree with Nick, OPM is so good.
Ehh, I don’t know. That one episode where OPM handed over all our personal information to China was kinda sub-standard.
I say this with tongue in cheek, but: Pleb. 😛 What are these mainstream-ass recs. 😛
(I can’t stand ufotable’s action sequences for UBW. They’re all floaty weightless shit like the Black Panther climax fight. Have not seen the more recent sequences praised for their sakuga in Apocrypha and Grand Order.)
Nani?!!
Go watch Boku no Pico then, you edge lord 😛
Anime movies (only original ones, not sequels/prequel of series):
Your Name
Magical realism/coming of age/romance/drama. Focuses on two teenage protagonists, boy and girl, who magically swap personalities during their dreams. Commedy and romance ensues, until the two have to face a catastrophe and the loss of wonder due to growing up. Will their relationship lasts outgrowing the magical world of childhood into the mundane world of adulthood?
The Wind Rises
The last and possibly the final feature film by Hayao Miyazaki, quite different from his usual surreal style, this is a historical drama set in the interwar period focusing on an engineer working on the design of the Zero fighter aircraft. Based on the historical Jiro Horikoshi and Miyazaki’s own childhood and fascination with airplanes, adult in themes though not in the sense of gore or sex, but in depicting the struggle of a talented young man struggling to find his place in an increasingly miliaristic and dysfunctional society.
Blame!
Cyberpunk dark sci-fi, following a lone protagonist journeying through a seemingly infinite megastructure of bizzarre geometries with inexplicable purposes by ancient rogue AIs, some of which are hostile and some indifferent. In his quest to find the “net terminal gene” to regain access to the AIs, he meets sparse groups of people struggling to survive against the threat of the hostile AIs and weird cyborgs.
The movie is quite good in my opinion, but might be a bit difficult to understand if you’re not familiar with the manga. The animation is all cel-renderd 3D rather than hand drawn, which looks distinctive and is disliked by certain anime “purists”. Personally I don’t mind it, but your mileage may vary.
Ah yes, Blame! The mind-boggling vast, multi-millenia long tale of one dude’s quest for internet access. That’s the manga though, the movie is really a Western. A wanderer who is searching for something wanders by a town in trouble, and he stops to help because that’s what heroes do. Except that instead of being out in the desert they’re somewhere inside an endless post-apocalyptic artificial megastructure patrolled by hostile AIs. It’s available on Netflix, and here trailer one and trailer two.
I would like to strongly recommend This Corner of the World, a sweet, sad, utterly beautiful feature about a young woman growing up in Hiroshima before and during the War.
This is definitely on my list. Also on Netflix are Miss Hokusai, A Silent Voice, Flavors of Youth, and Fireworks. The former two are quite critically acclaimed, while the latter two were considered worthy watches, thought not great.
Looks like slice of life social dramas aren’t the usual fare for the anime watchers here, though. Which is a shame, honestly, I think anime is at its best when it heavily leverages complex social relationships into a brilliant catharsis, with genre as merely the facilitating mechanism for it.
Most of the recommendations by others here have been about genre as the main appeal.
I watched A Silent Voice and I found it too depressing to be enjoyable.
I usually enjoy dark and dystopian anime where the dark elements are fantastic, but A Silent Voice is a different beast: it’s a utterly realistic story about kids bulling and ostracizing each other to the point of attempted suicide.
I read A Silent Voice at work and it was rough. Shit hits hard.
I tried Assassination Classroom on the recommendation of a friend a few weeks ago, and dropped it after four episodes. I just could not stand it.
Kakegurui is great, though the sexualization really bothers me. I’m looking forward to a second season. For those looking for other gambling anime, try Kaiji.
Assassination Classroom is a “turn your brain off” kind of show. It’s also lower-key than JJBA or Symphogear on the Rule of Awesome, and more uneven. So I can understand your dislike. It was just a fun low-stakes watch for me.
Assassination Classroom is my favorite of the “not incredibly mainstream” animes lately. Not that it is super niche or super obscure, but it is one I found and liked. Most anime’s that don’t catch fire, IMO, don’t catch for a reason.
I didn’t realize how many of my favorite anime came out the decade before this one until I tried to make a top 10.
1. Steins; Gate. The original not the adequate sequel, 0. Steins; Gate is one of the most emotional stories I have ever seen, and is in my top 3 anime of all time. The sci fi time travel ends up just being a backdrop for an emotional guy punch, and a creative mystery. It’s an anime I’d recommend to anyone.
2. A Silent Voice. Not as good as the manga, but still the best story about dealing with a disability and bullying I’ve seen. I’d recommend to any Slice of Life (SoL) fan.
3. Your Name. It’s a kind of cliche magical realism romance anime, but it is the best executed anime movie there is. Worth watching for any SoL fan, or general fan of anime directing.
4. Puella Madoka Magica. The peak moment of the dark and gritty magical girl genre. It capitalized on the earlier success of Lyrical Nanoha and the creative animation of Studio Shaft to make something truly unique. Of course that unique thing was then ripped off a dozens times poorly.
5. K-On. Right at the boarder of the decade, but since the second season was better, I’ll include it. This anime is probably the core of the 2010s SoL. It took a topic with no substance, and allowed the audience to see slow character development over 36ish episodes. While there has been a cute girls doing cute things genre of anime for a while, it’s success made the genre explode, and they roughly follow the same archetypes. Overall a really fun light ride.
I’m going to lightning round the rest.
6. Fate Zero
7. Anohana
8. Angel Beats
9. Kill la kill
10. Konosuba
Your Name was certainly Pixar levels of family-friendly film animation at its best. My only complaint was how Mitsuha was kind of buntzed from the protagonists’ seat in the back half.
My favorite Yamada production is Liz and the Blue Bird, hands down. It drills down with concentrated focus on telling its story through atmosphere (where A Silent Voice, as you say, was burdened with getting through the plot).
I tend to get antsy with K-ON with wanting to characters to actually accomplish things after a while, but the fact that I still keep rewatching it shows just how good it is on pure execution.
For Trigger, I have to go with Little Witch Academia, hands down. The true successor to the whimsy and wonder of the early Harry Potter books, while also serving as a metaphor to the value of low-brow art. The animation is stellar, always vibrant with personality.
If you really liked Little Witch Academia I would strongly recommend the manga Witch Hat Atelier. It captures the sense of wonder and exploration of a magical world perfectly, while also being a little more serious but not necessarily more mature.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Speaking of anime, what happened to mecha anime?
After having being a mainstay of the medium for pretty much as long as there have been anime, they all but disappeared this decade. Not completely disappeared, they still made Gundam spinoffs and the occasional movies to milk the sacred cows of Evangelion, Code Geass, Eureka Seven and so on, but there has been a dearth of original shows, and the few that were made were quite underwhelming: Guilty Crown (meh, I dropped it after a few episodes), Valvrave (didn’t even watch it but I’ve heard bad things), Darling in the Franxx (I almost dropped it after a few episodes due to the excessive ecchi harem stuff, the ecchi harem stuff gets toned down after a while and the show becomes almost interesting around the mid point, then the ending is a total mess).
Has this genre lost its steam? If so, why? I get it can be repetitive, but so it is any other major anime genre, and the other genres aren’t disappearing.
I think there are often themes that run through Japan that we cannot easily identify outside that go through anime. Like around when Attack on Titan came out, there were many “wall based” Animes also coming out, that were too close temporally to be pure copycats.
Hrm, arguably mecha was always subtextually about the conflicted feelings around technology development and the specter of nuclear technology. (The show Big Robo is slightly more overt about this). However, the new generations have grown up in a world where technology is represented by things getting more compact, and networking technologies. Who needs a giant robot when you can just have a regular-sized super suit? So superheroes (whether that be magical girls, tokusatsu, or western-style capes) cover the same kinds of themes, without the accompanying additional burdens on special effects.
It’s a similar story as how space opera is no longer the face of science fiction. In film and TV, even when we have humans in space, we rarely have aliens unless they’re part of a franchise with legacy source material like Star Wars, Star Trek, or Marvel. As time marched on, giant robots and space travel were revealed to be dead end paths of technological innovation, so we stopped dreaming about them as much. As above, augmented humans and cyberwarfare are the new path forward.
That said, three very recent critically acclaimed mecha series that are on my list to watch: Granbelm, Planet With, SSSS Gridman.
Also in the past decade that are relatively not-sucking: Aldnoah Zero, Kuromukuro, a new season of Full Metal Panic, Gargantia, Voices of a Distant Star, Expelled from Paradise, Knights of Sidonia, Cannon Busters, and, uh…AKB0048.
Rooster Teeth even took a stab at it, with gen:LOCK!
You might want to check out two of Gen Urobuchi’s projects: Gargantia and Aldnoah.Zero.
Gargantia is sort of a super robot anime, except the super robot and its pilot started out as completely unremarkable mass-produced units in a vast interstellar war against the space squid, who become remarkable by winding up trapped in a primitive backwater planet that knows nothing mechs or space wars. The story is mostly about someone raised his whole life to be a soldier learning how to be regular person without a war to fight. However, since he does have an extremely advanced robot with a sapient AI, that makes it a super robot series.
Aldnoah.Zero is a mecha anime that is interesting because it’s the protagonists who are the regular soldiers piloting numerically superior but technologically inferior mass produced mechs while the antagonists are the ones who are honourable knights with awesome high tech prototypes. The main character is a chill genius tactician who wins against superior adversaries using tactics, teamwork, and physics. Oh and politics, deft political manoeuvring actually plays a major part in how the war is resolved in the end.
If the mech has a sapient AI, why does it need a pilot?
Because the Galactic Alliance of Humankind prefers to have humans making the decisions, so while their AIs are sapient they are supposed to have strictly advisory roles. This actually becomes something of a plot point eventually.
Second Aldnoah.Zero. It plays very much like a guile hero version of a mecha anime. Plus it has a pretty great soundtrack.
I generally approve of this (at least the ones on it I’ve seen, anyway). My comments:
It takes some real skill to do the same thing Madoka Magica did without seeming like a rip-off, and they pulled it off. 9/10, I’m subtracting a point because while the ending is satisfying thematically, they didn’t actually justify it in the plot and so it comes off as a bit of a deus ex machina.
(Madoka should also be on this list, seeing as it came out in 2011 and launched a whole deconstructive magical girls trend)
Also, as an antidote for the grimdark, I’m recommending Kill La Kill, which could be summed up as “The staff of Gurren Lagann make a magical girl anime.” Yes, the costumes are ludicrous fanservice, but it’s just so damn energetic and fun. Hammy and over the top in all the best ways. Give it until the third episode – that’s the point when it really flips over from “gosh those costumes are skimpy” to “gosh these girls kick ass.”
The music for this kicks ass. It’s very much a Nana Mizuki vehicle, but good at what it does.
Another one with good music, but it’s really the characters that make this great – all of them with interesting personal issues that tie into the story’s theme. It’s using zombies to explore “what counts as living, rather than just surviving?”
Oh, and there’s also trans representation, if you care about that.
Also, since you seem to appreciate a good idol anime, I’m going to add a recommendation for AKB0048. J-Pop with spaceships and mecha and battles set to music. Second season isn’t quite as strong, but still has some really good scenes.
SPOILERS FOR YUUKI YUUNA
The deus ex machina was the point of the show, though. That’s why I listed it as relevant to the religious members of the commentariat. It’s God stopping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, or Hezekiah’s prayer.
Madoka Magica is kind of about learning that the benevolent higher authority does not exist, and so we have to become that benevolent being ourselves if we want it to exist. It’s a very secular view, both humanist and trans-humanist. But the Taisha in Yuuki Yuuna, as well as the structure of the reset ending, fit the old stories of mythology much more. It’s a tragedy with a happy ending. In the context of a show where religion is a major theme and explicit part of the setting, the reset ending is absolutely appropriate.
Also, the 2nd season might address some of this stuff, which I haven’t been able to watch because I don’t have Amazon.
END SPOILERS
Hah, I’m into actual Japanese idols, so AKB0048 was unsatisfying as not truly capturing the appeal of idols. I would have preferred for it to lean harder into the weirder scifi parts, to be honest. Also, the main cast is way undeveloped, you could tell that Okada Mari (the writer) was way more interested in the expys of the real-life AKB members.
The more an idol show actually tries to be an idol show, the more likely I won’t actually like it. I’ve tried and failed multiple times to watch Idol Master, and only liked Love Live when it was being a comedy show rather than an idol one.
CONTINUED SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY
Yes, Shinju-sama is a god, but it’s not presented as a particularly capable or interventionist one – the main characters spend most of their time protecting it, and must sacrifice their own bodies in order to gain the power to do so, and even then all they’re protecting is a tiny bubble, beyond which is nothing but things that want humanity dead. That’s not a setup that makes me think “have faith and you will be saved.” It makes me think “Doing the right thing is going to hurt, because this world isn’t fair.”
It also doesn’t help that the Hero System is also presented as very mechanical rather than spiritual (right down to the name!). It’s activated by cell phones, it gets upgraded by the Taisha between arcs, and Karin is introduced as the newest and greatest model. If you want to talk about humanism and saving the world yourself instead of waiting on a higher power, well… you could do worse than introducing an organization that creates and upgrades the heroes that save the world.
The theme I took away from this show was “While the world can be cruel and unfair, you can get through it as long as you’ve got good friends.” Which is reinforced by how Yuna is able to talk down Mimori at the climax – she promises that even if Mimori loses her memories again, Yuna will remember her.
Lastly, even leaving aside our thematic dispute, it violates a pretty important rule of deus ex machinae, which is to not make us ask “Why didn’t you do that earlier?” If Shinju-sama could return the girls to normal after they had finished their work as heroes, why didn’t it do that for Sonoko, rather than leaving her paralyzed in a hospital bed for who knows how long?
Bottom line is, while you can come up with plenty of interpretations after the fact, you only get one chance to make a first impression and it didn’t really work for me.
Again, your objections come from looking at the show from a secular and individualist/self-determination view. The evaluation of Shinju-sama and the Taisha assumes that gods are supposed to have all of the answers, which is a relatively modern view propagated by the youngest monotheistic religions. Looking at the show from an older, more mythological lens, the show advocates for an active relationship with the source of mystic power. It’s a story about how the girls successfully changed their gods’ minds! Gods who you can plead your case to, and know that they listen, that they can admit wrong! And that active relationship is what demonstrates the oldschool/mythological heroism of the girls.
I know that this reading doesn’t work for many people. It’s not even my usual cup of tea. But I just found it fascinating to see what non-cringey religious media could look like, what sort of things they consider thrilling catharsis. And it was somewhat refreshing to see such a change from the standard JRPG “kill God at the end” model.
They don’t actually show the girls pleading their case in any visible way, is the thing! They do explain what happened in one of the side-story followups, and it is as you say – Shinju-sama changed their plans when it realized that Yuna and Co had found a better way.
But you don’t get credit in my book for bringing in material from outside the story. Sonoko After is a good fix-fic to a flawed story, but it doesn’t retroactively make the original ending more satisfying.
Clearly a good excuse for me to rewatch the show to check what kind of “prayer” the girls make. 😛
(I was never bothered by the reset ending to Mai Hime either, so maybe I’m just more amenable to that kind of thing.)
It’s interesting because the comparisons to Madoka threw me off completely, and others as well. It was funny reading the reactions and how people kept expecting it to turn dark like Madoka. Like when the new girl shows up in ep4, everyone was like, ok, she’s about to die.
The weird thing is that the Magical Girl genre wasn’t even that light to begin with. The scouts died on the regular in Sailor Moon, starting from the first arc. And you had Mai Hime as basically a trashier Madoka Magica in between.
I guess CCS and Precure are relatively tame, which is why Madoka felt dark to other people. And Yuuki Yuuna did eventually tap into that body horror, but they still maintained their bright colored aesthetic.
2020 Drop out pool.
What’s the order of remaining major Dem candidates dropping out? I’m going with, first to last:
Steyer
Warren
Klobuchar
Biden
Pete Buttigieg
I’m assuming Bloomberg stays in to force a contested convention with Sanders winning a plurality, and the DNC chooses Bloomberg in the second round of voting. But I’m cynical.
I’m probably wrong, but my gut feeling is that Biden (and probably Warren too) will pull out on Super Tuesday, unless he has some drastic turn around that I’m not expecting. I’ll go with:
Biden, Warren (same day)
Klobuchar
Steyer
Bloomberg
Sanders
I expected Biden to pull out soon, but Bloomberg’s remarks on crime and minorities probably mean he stays in for longer.
Warren and Steyer are both out before Super Tuesday
Buttigieg, after his strong start, chokes on Super Tuesday and pulls out after.
Klobuchar also hangs on through wishful thinking but pulls out after Super Tuesday
Biden, Sanders, and Bloomberg go the distance and we get a brokered convention which goes to Anybody But Sanders.
(Confidence: low. very low)
Largely agree with this, except everyone stays in until Super Tuesday.
Agree on low confidence. This is all too messy to confidently predict. I don’t think any of these people can beat Trump, though.
I think Warren and Steyer and Buttigieg can’t beat Trump even if they somehow become the nominee — Warren loses the elite part of the Democratic coalition, Buttigieg loses most minorities, and Steyer who? Biden may have a chance, at least if we get any sort of economic downturn or 2019-nCoV makes it to the US “bigly” and the CDC looks stupid.
Bloomberg sets up a “Battle of the New York Billionaires”; I think Trump beats him but I don’t know how much I’m blinded by hatred for Bloomberg (who wants to take away every little pleasure that could make life worth living).
Sanders… well, he should also lose the Democratic elite. If he can win anyway, I guess I have to find a capitalist country to flee to.
Biden: I think everyone agrees that turnout is key. Winning over the barely existent swing voters is less important than turning out your base. You would think Biden’s base would be in the Democratic Party, but apparently it is not, as he keeps coming in at the bottom of the pile. If he can’t turn out Democrats in the primary, he definitely can’t turn them, or anyone else out in the general.
Sanders: He’s going to kick me off my very good health insurance, put me on a government plan, make me pay for everyone else’s plan, also make me pay for health coverage for anyone who can drag themselves across the border, also not stop anyone from crossing the border. This is loony. No one will go for this. One can say “oh but Trump’s ideas were loony!” Sure, but the bad(?) things Trump threatened (wall, deportations, muslim ban) were happening to foreigners, not the voters. There’s no chance. The DNC elites would obviously have to stop him from winning the nomination at a brokered convention.
Bloomberg: I need to do some research about what his policies actually are. I don’t know much about him except he’s “Captain Nanny-State.” My gut instinct is that people will not be interested in someone whose notoriety comes from banning things you like. But this is all Epistemic Status: Not Paying Attention Yet so this prediction is low confidence. That said, the only way Bloomberg gets it is brokered convention. Which means the DNC elites screwed over Bernie to pick a billionaire. Which means the Sanders supporters burn the motherf’er down. He doesn’t win either.
I don’t see how any of this works. Which makes me happy as a Trump supporter, but it’s also rather self-serving, so if I’m wrong I’d like to know how.
Guns aside the rest of Bloomberg’s take-away-your-toys reputation relies on some pretty minor policy initiates when he was mayor. It wasn’t like NYers were going to black markets to find illegal colas or anything. Mostly he’s a boring technocratic centrist.
Actually, New Yorkers are increasingly buying coke on the black market.
Bloomberg is a centrist Republican who is running as a Democrat because he can’t beat Trump.
The only major thing he breaks with the Republicans on is gun control because he wants to keep guns out of the hands of blacks and Hispanics in New York and doesn’t care if he disarms rural and suburban Americans to do so.
The biggest reason he can’t win is that he is backing off of the things he actually succeeded at (competently administering New York and reducing black deaths) and pushing the things that nobody wants.
Absolutely no way he drives the black enthusiasm that Democrats need to win the Rust Belt without the white working class, who he can’t win.
abortion, theocracy, climate change, election security, taxes
The combination of spying on Muslims and stop-and-frisk under Bloomberg doesn’t leave me with much hope for any kind of support for civil liberties or pushback against the surveillance state from Bloomberg.
@meh
I assume that’s at me:
Abortion is the standard centrist Republican difference.
No Republican wants a theocracy, that’s silly.
Climate Change is another thing that lots of centrist Republicans are for addressing. The carbon tax was originally their idea.
Election security is a talking point, not a serious disagreement.
Bloomberg cut taxes and opposed tax increases while Mayor of New York. I think his change is mostly to have a chance at the nomination and don’t think he’s very serious.
This is not a convincing argument.
It’s actually not even an argument, but merely an assertion.
just use the google machine. i don’t want to do this.
What am I supposed to google? How much republicans want a theocracy? Republicans want a theocracy about as much as Democrats want gulags. Which is to say, not very much, but it sounds scary to the other side.
@Conrad Honcho says: “..Republicans want a theocracy about as much as Democrats want gulags. Which is to say, not very much, but it sounds scary to the other side”
+1
Last I checked Republicans nominated Romney in 2012 and most Republicans aren’t Mormon, and in ’16 their nominee was Trump who hardly seems religious at all much less a Theocrat.
On the Democratic side Sanders, the most Left candidate, calls himself a “socialist” but campaigns for the U.S.A. to be more like Canada and Denmark not Cuba and North Korea.
Sheesh!
Full disclosure: My impressions of what Democrats and Republicans are like are largely based on those I know face-to-face rather than characterizations of them on the internet
@Plumber
How do you expect to make completely unreasonable assumptions about people based on a caricature of their political beliefs if you go around doing something like that? 😉
how about we play a game where i give a quote and you guess who or which party it refers to, *without googling* (since nobody wants to google).
lets start with
who was criticized by the conservative PAC Club for Growth for increasing property taxes and spending.
Is there a name for the phenomenon where arguing poorly against a position convinces others to be in favor of that position, regardless of the actual arguments in favor of it?
this concept was explored in enders game
the house membership of which party has a unanimous stance on abortion? what is that stance?
When the news of Burgoyne’s defeat at Satatoga reached Scotland, a student (correspondent? there seem to be differing versions) told Adam Smith that this would be the ruin of England.
“Young man,” Smith replied, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
Meh,
Come on dude. That’s against the spirit of this place.
You clearly have a ready criticism of a comment, so state your argument clearly.
The drive by insults are understandable and the underlying emotions completely relatable, but in the end the comments ring inexcusable.
Lay your argument out and I’m sure this place will be better for it.
@skeptic
apologies; it easy to forget this is not a non-public argument, and i was disinclined to effort post a response given prior experience of usefullness and good faith.
op says Bloomberg differs from a republican only on one issue, then misrepresents him on one issue, and defines a ‘moderate republican’ to be indistinguishable from ‘moderate democrat’, despite the number holding those positions vanishingly small.
imo, an easy google search would reveal this, and did not want to spend the time replying.
Bloomberg may not be the most democratic democrat to ever democrat; but there is more than *just one* issue separating him from republicans.
Warren is the tribune of the Democratic managerial elite (Djilas’ “New Class”, the Atlantic’s “Next 9.9%”). But nobody else seems to like her, which is why she’s doing poorly so far.
Biden drops if he doesn’t win SC, which is looking increasingly likely.
Steyer and Bloomberg will stay as long as they are willing to keep writing checks, no idea how long that will be.
After Super Tuesday I see at least 2 of Warren/Klobuchar/Buttigieg/Biden dropping. The Party wants to avoid Bernie getting a plurality of pledged delegates in a brokered convention, and will exert pressure to keep that from happening. That means winnowing it to Bernie vs one other viable candidate shortly after Super Tuesday.
The party may want such a thing (to the extent the party can want something), but that doesn’t mean that the individual candidates will give up on their ambitions to help the party achieve that goal. Sanders, Biden, Warren, and Bloomberg are all old enough that this is very likely to be their last good chance at becoming president–they will be much less viable in 2024 or 2028, and may not even be healthy enough to run at that point. It’s going to be hard to get any of them to give up on their ambitions for the good of the party.
If the nominee is Sanders or Warren, it seems like they will need to choose a running-mate who is younger and more centrist. I keep thinking that Buttigieg and Klobuchar are both well-positioned for that role. For Biden, the running mate should definitely be younger and probably female or minority or both.
Sanders, Bloomberg and Biden sure, but Warren is 71, it seems fairly ridiculous to say that its the last chance for guys who are 77/78 and then also say that Warren wouldn’t have a shot next time around at 75.
Also, Warren doesn’t look old. Sanders and Biden are clearly Old Men. Warren is technically a grandmother, but doesn’t look like a grandma.
What? Warren doesn’t look as old as Biden or Sanders, but she 100% looks like someone’s grandma.
Yeah, she looks like a granny, or potential granny anyway. The farthest I’d go is to say that age has been kinder to her than to Sanders or Biden.
Biden is the centrist candidate who has decent minority support. If he wins he needs to throw a bone to the far left to appease their anger about Bernie not getting the nomination again.
> but that doesn’t mean that the individual candidates will give up on their ambitions to help the party achieve that goal
That’s basically what happened with Trump in 2016, no? The entire Republican Party apparatus seemed to be opposed to Trump to the point that they were almost all willing to back Cruz. Except for the last few which were required.
Except people didn’t drop out early so they could rally behind one guy in opposition to Trump.
That’s because the alternative to Trump was Cruz, and for all the hand-wringing we hear now about Trump, at the time establishment people hated Cruz more than they feared losing (since they thought Trump was a guaranteed loss).
That means winnowing it to Bernie vs one other viable candidate shortly after Super Tuesday.
My feeling is that Warren draws from the same block as Bernie. [1] Keeping her in keeps that pool divided.
As others said, everything is set to get a repeat of the 2016 Republican convention, though. Trump was the only person vying for a certain crowd, so he had it all to himself. The majority of candidates were bulked around stable centrist rule, so they had to split that pie.
[1] One way I may be wrong is there is evidence that many Warren supporters moved to Bloomberg. So maybe they were more fans of technocratic rule than social democratic rule.
I would also expect that some Warren support is feminists supporting women, who would move to Klobuchar if Warren dropped out.
I’m a recent college graduate working an office job for a small family business. This job has been rather dismaying and exhausting, primarily because of the rather extreme amount of nepotism and cronyism that takes place here. I would like to get a feeling for the “average” job compared to my own to help me calibrate my ability to assess employers (if everywhere else rewards productivity the same amount, it’s a moot point, but if the grass genuinely is greener I’d like to know that).
To what extent to you think your employer rewards productivity, compared to other factors? The new Immoral Mazes sequence has been discussed here recently, which would paint a pretty bleak picture, but it seemed (to myself and some others here I believe) to claim way more than it was able to justify, yet it really feels like my small office of less than two dozen people fits most of what he was describing.
I guess one possible saving grace would be the fact that my employer operates in an incredibly niche field, and if the fruit hangs low enough, a company will be able to turn a significant profit even with incredibly poor management. While this fact has admittedly fired up my entrepreneurial spirit, it’s cold comfort while I’m still here.
(I guess, in typing all this out, that I have to contradictory pieces of evidence pulling in opposite directions, and therefor find it too difficult to make any generalizations beyond my current workplace; if such a small company can feel this mismanaged, then a giant corporation with multiple layers of middle management must be must worse VS this company is able to get away by being mismanaged because of how niche of a field it operates in, so a company in a more competitive field would have to be better, in order to exist at all)
How bad really is it out there?
I work at a large software company. They seem to do a pretty good job of rewarding competence, and I’ve definitely never seen anything I would describe as cronyism.
The cost is that they’re obsessed with metrics: you have to first come up with a way to measure the thing you want to do, then declare how much benefit you expect it to produce, then do the thing, then do the measurement.
There’s a lot of stuff where the benefit is hard to measure, and that stuff generally does not get done. Sadly, “maintaining existing software” is something that is particularly hard to measure (because the benefit is just “nothing broke”), so my company tends to be pretty bad at that.
The other cost, of course, is that we have to spend a lot of time on measuring.
Dude, run. Go work for a Fortune 500 company right now.
At the least you can leverage the brand later. Any small firm that doesn’t reward talent is an immediate red flag.
Probably pretty non-SSC Advice (sorry.) Choose a firm you want to work for. Network aggressively with connections you have. That’s your next step. Don’t be afraid to leverage your alumni network for this.
I work at a small company in a management role. We have a problem with rewarding laziness and punishing competence: responsibility is taken from people who can’t or won’t handle it and given to those who can, without any real change in compensation. Getting rid of people is hard once they are entrenched because it is like a family. The boss is too nice in some respects, and so am I, but people love working here because of that and we have a great time.
From the management perspective it is harder than it looks, is what I’m saying.
It kind of depends on your field. If you do something that’s hard to measure or quantify, it’s easy to get away with nepotism etc. But if you have to, say, meet a quota, or deliver working features, or dig a certain number of holes, then it’s harder to hide incompetence.
I will second what vallyeofthekings and Skeptic are saying. Measuring can be hard and inefficient, but still better than not measuring; and networking, relationship-building, and good employer names on a resume are very important early in a career.
If you have any aptitude or interest in software configuration (as opposed to development) or project management, I’m going to shamelessly plug the place where I work: visit atginfo.com and see if it seems interesting. My company (now a division of a Fortune 200) expects continuous improvement, and relentlessly rewards competence and punishes sloth. Best of all, our two biggest criteria for hiring are: Do you seem smart? and Do you work hard? As a boutique consultancy, we have to train the rest anyway.
There’s also sales as an option if you want to be rewarded for performance. A highly-leveraged compensation plan is pretty common for junior salespeople, and you have to perform or get fired. Lots of stress if you don’t thrive on the pressure, but the reward can be great. (Bias warning: I work in a highly-leveraged sales job and I love it, because I’m sick that way. But I only have to keep track of one metric 😀 )
Thing about small family businesses is if you’re not in the family, you’re not going anywhere. So even at best, this job can only be a stepping stone to somewhere else.
This. There is a difference between mere nepotism, where 1 of 5 good positions is taken by someone’s relative, and a small family business, where it is 1 of 1.
In my experience, the correlation is positive but small.
There is a lot of noise. A project you work on may fail for reasons that are completely unrelated to what you did. People work in teams, so other people’s productivity (or lack thereof) may be mistaken for your own. You may be assigned to a project that is obviously doomed, or told to use a product that is shitty and breaks all the time, but from outside it will seem like your fault. (On a meta level, recognizing doomed projects and avoiding them is also a skill you can learn.)
Then, there are the other skills: the general social skills, and maze-navigation skills. If you want that kind of job, which you probably don’t.
The U.S. Medical Licensing Exam Step 1, which all medical students take at the end of their second year of studies, will become a pass/fail test.
https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/28/step-1-pass-fail-root-rot/
Machine learning question: recently, I tried to train a regularized logistic regression algorithm on a data set with way more parameters than examples. When I used a sufficiently high lambda value, the weights of most of the parameters in the data set dropped to almost nothing, leaving only a tiny handful of related parameters as significant contributors. I could then re-train the algorithm using only those parameters as inputs, without substantial regularization, giving me a simpler and more predictive final algorithm. Is this a known technique for eliminating parameters that don’t need to be included to create a predictive model?
I assume by regularization you mean L2, ridge regression. Have you tried L1, LASSO? That automatically gives you sparsity. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s pretty close.
Yes, ridge regression (although I wasn’t aware that was a term for it). Thanks for pointing me towards LASSO regression; that might be a more efficient way to accomplish this in the future.
Fucking machine learning….
Doug’s suggestion is a good one. This is well-trod territory in the statistics literature. I imagine genomics is a good place to start, but that wasn’t my area of study.
Here’s a paper by Tibsherani and Hastie. Their point (computational efficiency) is a little off-topic, but it looks like they go through a bunch of different solutions to your issue.
If you want to search for stuff, methods might say something like, “logistic regression for p >> n”.
Thanks. That should be helpful for the future.
The term for this is feature selection.
Thanks. This didn’t get covered much in the machine learning class I took.
How galaxies die. It’s obvious that stars have limited lifespans, but it turns out that some galaxies have more gas cool enough to make start than others, and various circumstances can cause that gas to be used up or heated more quickly, thus ageing a galaxy.
Not that this is a near-term problem for us, but any thoughts about how the gas can be used efficiently for star formation?
I believe the traditional way to facelift an old galaxy is to crash it into another galaxy.
The collision of the gas clouds leads to star formation and an eliptical galaxy.
Problem solved, then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision
No, that’s covered in the video– you get more stars, but at a high cost. You need something more subtle if you’re thinking about the very long haul.
I’ve had a number of discussions here semi-recently about pronoun etiquette. While I think the issue of coming to an agreement on what politeness should look like between people who disagree on transgenderism is interesting and important, today I’m instead interested in trying to get at the crux of that core disagreement.
I think that it is reasonable to treat gender dysphoria by allowing the dysphoric person to “identify” as the gender they want to be–that is, use a name and pronouns associated with their preferred gender, wear clothes associated with that gender, and possibly seek medical treatments to alter their physical appearance with the goal of “passing” as that gender.*
People who disagree with the above statement: What would you say are your core reasons for disagreeing with me?
*To preemptively address a point I know has come up: I acknowledge that this constitutes a redefinition of “man”, “woman”, “gender”, etc. However, note that this redefinition only affects the edge cases–the majority of people, who identify with their biological sex, remain in the same categories. Note also that English words are vague concepts (‘cloudlike clusters in thingspace,’ one could say), not logically precise definitions.
I think the argument you are up against can be fairly summed up as “You don’t get to give me homework if you ain’t my Dad/teacher/boss.” There’s just a sort of bone deep reluctance to give so much as one inch in terms of people being able to unilaterally force you to do anything, ever.
Like, raise your hand if just about everyone you know at one time or another has told you that they are ‘bad with names’. That isn’t random, it is because names are hard. If you meet a lot of people you have to remember something unique about them, and then properly assign it to them.
People with fancy pronouns are basically getting 2 names worth of work. You have to remember their name, and also that they want you to use ‘they’, or switch up the he/she.
So they want to know ‘why do I have to do this extra work’, and the answer boils down to ‘if you don’t I’ll be sad’, and, well, there’s your divide. Friends, family and a third group that can read as either altruistic or virtue signaling depending on your politics care how you feel, they’ll go that extra mile. Folks outside those categories narrow their eyes or roll them, depending on age.
Like, the quote you bold is a long list of stuff that is getting reacted to differently. I’ll go down the list.
– use a name associated with their preferred gender.
* I don’t think anyone minds people changing their names, even to ones that you’d expect were the other gender. Most people are willing to learn a name per person.
– use a pronoun associated with their preferred gender.
* The only pronoun most people use for themselves is ‘I’, and that doesn’t change. I think what you mean here is ‘make other people use a particular pronoun’, and that’s the thing I talked about up above.
– wear clothes associated with that gender
* I feel like ‘ladies can’t wear pants’, is, like, super old fashioned stuff. I doubt you’d run into anyone who goes hard on that since at least, like, the invention of tv. Certainly I think the Dukes of Hazzard let America express an opinion on girls in shorts, and hasn’t there been a bunch of Drag Race shows that are super popular for the reverse? I dunno, I think if you run into someone who is hardcore interested in controlling what other people wear as they go about their lives beyond ‘cover up your naughty bits’ you are in a weird location.
-seek medical treatments with the goal of ‘passing’ as that gender
* Most people (see homework principle above) don’t want to pay for someone else’s voluntary medical stuff. But I’m not super aware of a movement to stop random strangers from blowing their own money on whatever they want.
Hope that helped.
If you apply that consistently , you are going to be behaving with basically zero agreeableness/co-operation, and that has costs. People will respond by not anything for you that they don’t have to. But then “consistently” might be the key issue here.
Why would you apply it consistently? You don’t treat every person you meet exactly the same, Bill from accounting doesn’t get exactly the same treatment as your spouse/kids/friend from high school and none of those individuals gets exactly the same treatment.
A really basic social norm is generic politeness, different levels in different areas and eras but the key here is the generic part. If you call every man you meet sir and every woman ma’am, but you call people you know a bit mr x or mrs y and then you call people you are intimate with by their first names or nicknames then you have a fairly clear gradient for your relationships.
The norm that is being violated that I think causes the most problems is the request that transgenderd people should get treated differently than the broader generic politeness would dictate. The statement that you are trans and want to be called something different is more intimate knowledge that you would typically give a stranger or coworker you barely know. It would be considered awkward if on introducing yourself you said, ‘hi I’m Steven, please don’t call me Steve as that was my grandfather’s name and he was an abusive, racist, alcoholic that I don’t wish to be reminded of’. Not only is this TMI but it is also putting a burden on the person you are talking to that is out of proportion to your relationship. It is true that remembering one person’s specific preference for what to be called isn’t difficult, but if you were asked to remember specific preferences for every casual acquaintance, person you meet, co-worker, kids of co-workers etc then it would be overwhelming for most people.
Wait, do you not know people who request that everyone use a name for them that is not their full legal first name? Because I know lots of people like that, and it’s never an issue. Like, I’m pretty sure nobody in the world except DMV workers calls J. Michael Straczynski “Joseph” even though that’s his name. There are plenty of people whose names I don’t remember, but it’s very easy to remember the preferred names of the people whose names I do.
@Hoopyfreud
Most people know lots of people like that.
I work with a woman who goes by her middle name, but her first name is in the company directory, so we can always tell who doesn’t actually know her when they address her by her first name in an e-mail.
The magnitude of reaction to mis-naming is somewhat different, though.
Name itself has less intrinsic information in it. Name is just the convention. What people are against is reducing sex to “just a convention”.
I imagine reaction to being asked to call someone “Doctor” or something that is beyond convention would be pretty negative no matter how convincingly one can wear stethoscope.
This seems like the key point, and in my experience it’s not actually generally true. There are people who react to misgendering like it’s genocide, but as far as I can tell they’re fairly rare and are way more commonly seen blowing up Twitter than in actual factual real-life gas stations.
Are you really sure that names are just conventions? I’m roughly about as upset when people get my (first, I expect people to mongle m last name at this point) name wrong as I am when they get my sex wrong. In particular, there is a certain diminuitive form of my first name that bothers the fuck out of me.
No, I am talking about the level of request.
A: ‘I’d like you to meet Steven Jones’
B: ‘Nice to meet you Steven’
C: ‘Please, call me Steve’
——————————————
A: I’d like you to meet Jamie Jones
B: Nice to meet you Jamie
C: Nice to meet you as well, please refer to me as He/Him.
———————
The second example has an additional request, remember my name and remember that I have a specific pronoun preference that is probably counter to what you would naturally call me, but also has a lot of additional information that is not conveyed when you say ‘call me Steve’. It would be generally viewed as inappropriate to say ‘call me Steve and I suffer from depression so keep that in mind when talking with me’.
Which explanation is the real one?
1) Don’t do things to be nice and agreeable, do things because you absolutely have to.
2) Be generally nice and agreeable, but carve out an exception for this one thing because its bad and wrong.
Sure, some people feel this way but it says more about you than about the person using that, and if you convey this information to every single person you are introduced to you are asking something extra that most people aren’t asking.
Yes, the way I’m going to address you is a convention between you and me. Intentional or negligent misnaming would confer information about our relations (I can’t be bothered to make an agreement with it, or think I can get away with agressively violating it) but your name itself has very little information attached to it, beside maybe your background at times. I. e. if you introduced yourself as Hans, I will assume you are some kind of German.
Declaring yourself a woman or a man has more ramifications as long as there’s more difference between a man and a woman that there is between a Hans and a Harry.
I can’t choose to call myself a doctor and start prescribing treatments, or choose to call myself aquitted of murder and walk out of prison, because those words have meaning. Does word “woman” has a meaning or is it just another label you put on yourself?
@baconbits
If someone calls me [redacted], I’m going to ask them not to. I have no compunctions about this, and I’ll consider them an asshole if they choose to continue. Sucks to be them if they reflexively refer to anyone with my name as [redacted], but I don’t really care. My distaste for it matters at least as much to me as their verbal tic.
Also, consider:
A: I’d like you to meet Riley.
B: Nice to meet you, Riley. (To A:) Was she the person Jimmy worked with on the turbo-encabulator project?
C: Yes, and it’s he.
Note that it’s not even necessary for Riley to be trans for this conversation to happen – merely looking effeminate or androgenous is enough. I don’t see anything particularly egregious or onerous about this interaction; do you?
How many people did the former artist known as Prince traumatise?
@CaptainCrutch
Both, probably. I don’t think that “woman” exists as an ontological category, and I think it’s common for people to use the same words to refer to different things. For example, consider me and people who think that Pollock paintings are “peaceful.” I tend to infer that their epistemological construction of “peacefulness” is one I can relate to but not really experience. It may well be that your epistemological construction of womanhood is very different from mine, but I think that both of ours have meaning. And I disagree with you about the relative importance of gender and medical licensure.
Ontologically, a woman is someone who (Assuming they are not impended by some kind of illness and injury as well as age) can gestate. A man is someone who (Assuming the same) can fertilize a woman to make her gestate. This different functions lead them through different physical and mental development and causes the to assume different social roles. Transgender would be someone who is born to fertilize, but would rather have a body that is fit for gestation (Or vice versa) and suffers through that. But it seems to gotten to the point that a woman and a man is meaningless, yet you can definitively feel like one and demand to be treated as one.
This whole thing makes me think of old Soviet comedy called Kin-Dza-Dza. The main characters, transported to another planet discover that all people in the universe are divided into two groups called Patsaks and Chatlanians who hate and oppress one another. The only way to tell them apart is to use a device that light up green or orange indicator when pointed at a person. One of the main characters tries to ask alien what’s the difference is, whenever it’s genetic or something, to which exasperated alien asks “Are you colour-blind?”. The distinction exists, but also there’s no difference. Except we haven’t yet invented gender-telling device.
Wait, did the general public actually stop calling him Prince? Given the timeframe of his popularity and his strong opposition to having his stuff on the Internet, I don’t think I have a good perspective on this, but I assumed every time someone referred to him “the artist formerly known as Prince” it was being done to mock the silliness of his renaming, and most people just went on calling him Prince.
If he lived next door or was my coworker and got exceedingly angry every time I called him Prince, I could see myself being pretty annoyed by that.
There are pedantic arguments that challenge this definition and that it’s easy to be imprecise with, so I’m going to elide them and give the general principle: there are people who almost everyone thinks are [men/women] who have bodies with all the functions necessary to make a baby except for one or two. Some of these people are (tragically) fertile and some are (also tragically, but perhaps not quite as much) not. A definition that’s only valid for most people fails as an ontological category; ontological categories don’t have exceptions. It may be the case that you believe that the categories are perfect and it’s the people that are egregiously assigned to them, but even if you take that line all it establishes is that there’s a difference between ontological and (typical) epistemological gender categories. I still don’t see why the parallel to someone calling themselves a doctor is warranted.
@Hoopyfreud
Maybe for you, but an Aristotelian would say that there are categories that work that way, like essences. “Dogs have four legs” is a true statement about caninity even though some dogs have three.
It appears I had a reply deleted, since I thought I was being neutral in my framing I am dropping out of this discussion.
@Nick
Aristotle would also say that only particular dogs are substances, and that caninity is a quality – and that substances can admit contradictory qualities. An Aristotelian might say that a trans man has the quality of womanhood, but also a contradictory quality (manhood). In that case, insofar as manhood (and womanhood) are binary, what we’re referring to when we speak of someone “being a man” is not necessarily a question of whether they have the quality of manhood.
@baconbits
It probably got eaten by a cheesegrater. If you’re committed to dropping out go ahead, but it almost certainly wasn’t manually removed.
Note that it’s not even necessary for Riley to be trans for this conversation to happen – merely looking effeminate or androgenous is enough. I don’t see anything particularly egregious or onerous about this interaction; do you?
That example is a simple mistake that can be corrected without making a huge fuss. The “everyone state their preferred pronouns” bit is where it gets silly and annoying. I’ve had my first example in the wild of an email with preferred pronouns attached, and while I understand why they did it (because of the particular job in the particular area) it was pointless signalling. This was a stranger to me, there was no picture attached to the email to need clarification as to “OH, Riley is a she not a he!”, and the name was conventional female name.
The person on the other end could have been a balding, bearded rugby player named Terence pretending to be a lady and I wouldn’t have known (or cared) one way or the other, because it made absolutely no difference to the reason I got the email or what I was expected to do in return.
This is not like the gay rights fight, even though it’s being coded the same way: nobody thought in that situation (or at least I never heard of it) that “hey, why don’t we try and normalise it that everyone introduces themselves with their preferred sexuality? That way it will be made easier for gay people, they’ll feel more comfortable, they won’t be singled out for this one thing!”
Right now, if someone insists on “Hi, I’m Susan, please call me she/her”, that makes me think something weird is going on, whereas before I would not have done so. If the stated aim is to make trans people feel comfortable and confirmed in their gender presentation, and to remove any “hmm, there’s something that strikes me as a bit off about Susan” and replace it with “Susan is a perfectly normal woman”, then it’s not working and I don’t see how it will make a trans person who does not want to be known as trans because they don’t want the whole “oh that’s the woman who used to be a man” thing with their co-workers feel any more successful in that.
The only thing I can see it going for is making the weirder pronouns clear: “use ‘they/them’ for me”, “I’m xie/xer” and the likes. Otherwise if you look like a woman and have a woman’s name, why on earth do you need to tell me “Oh by the way, use female pronouns for me”?
EDIT: To sum up, if I get any more emails with preferred pronouns in the signature line, I will have one of two reactions:
(1) If they’re cis, this is stupid and pointless
(2) It’s possible they could be trans. But if they’re currently presenting as female, why feel the need to tell a perfect stranger (me) that they used to be a man?
Prince changed his name in order to inconvenience Warner Bros., as part of a dispute with them over his contract and the pace at which new albums of his were being released. Once he and Warner Bros. came to a resolution and parted ways, he resumed calling himself Prince. He certainly didn’t care if anybody who wasn’t Warner Bros. or part of the press called him Prince (he cared what the press called him, as how this was reported was important to his efforts to annoy Warner Bros.) I suppose the story illustrates that people can change names for strange reasons, including reasons deliberately calculated to annoy others, but it does not seem especially typical.
@Deiseach
Not going to disagree with this, honestly. We already mostly have an equilibrium, low-drama interaction for correcting someone’s incorrect reference to one’s gender, and I don’t think the great pronoun sharing social engineering experiment is likely to work out in the long run. I’m not offended by it as such, but I don’t think it’s going to really catch on. It’s just not a useful enough social technology to get traction IMO. This is sad and unfortunate for people who get very bad dysphoric feelings when misgendered, in the same way that “gimme five” might be for a paraplegic, and I don’t begrudge them their efforts to change the norm; they certainly don’t deserve to be hurt by people’s casual references. But I think it’s doomed, and will probably be something they have to deal with among strangers, at least occasionally, for a long while.
@Nick
To clarify my last post: I don’t think an Aristotelian would say that properties like “caninity” or “manhood” ontologically exist. As far as I can tell, Aristotle only believed in the ontological existence of substances. I actually mostly agree, and the question of distinction between ontological categories is really just for the Platonists. I don’t think they exist at all (which, as a bonus, means that my arguments here can’t possibly prove too much).
No, Aristotle did believe that universals exist, he just thought that they depended on particulars for their existence. Plato thought it was the other way around. Neither thinker held that everything perfectly instantiates its form: four-legged-ness is part of the nature of dog-ness, even if your Fido lost one of his legs in an accident when he was a puppy.
I’m not entirely clear on whether Aristotle believed that universals are (secondary) substances and therefore have being in the way that primary substances do. He seems to suggest both that universals are merely descriptors of primary substances and that primary substances instantiate universals. I’m probably biased towards the first interpretation, but I do think it’s unclear, and that the first makes more sense.
If your true objection is the onus of having to remember that trans people use pronouns that you don’t expect then I propose a compromise. No-one will ever complain if you use male pronouns when referring to someone whose appearance gives no indication that they would prefer female ones or vice versa, or if you forget to use “they” or a neopronoun. In exchange, whenever there are obvious cues that someone would prefer pronouns that don’t match their observed sex at birth (for instance, you parse them as “a man in a dress”), then you use the their preferred pronouns.
Note that the objection that it’s hard to remember the right pronouns is not the same as the objection that you experience cognitive dissonance when using preferred pronouns for trans people.
I am not sure what coalition you are supposed to be representing but I don’t think this position is as universal as you seem to think it is.
It seems to be a poorly stated proposal, rather than an observation.
I’m not saying that explicit position is universal or even popular. But do you disagree that the discourse around this topic would look very different if refusal to use preferred pronouns was limited to cases where the person doing so genuinely didn’t see any indications that someone preferring she/her was not a cis man?
Pronouns, it must be remembered, are not for the convenience of the person they apply to.
Which is why wanting to be he or she is OK, and wanting to be they sort of is, and wanting to be zir makes you at least a little bit of a self-important dick.
I think your statement is, on its face, reasonable.
I have two chief concerns:
1. I think your statement is perfectly reasonable for adults who have had enough time to mature, sort themselves out, and thus have the life experience and emotional stability to make reasonably informed decisions about permanent, life-altering things.
On the other hand, it gives me the absolute heebie-jeebies every time I see some story about a pre-pubescent kid getting put on hormone blockers, or some four-year-old getting diagnosed as gender dysphoric because they liked pretending to be a particular character in a storybook. The same way I feel when I read about children getting tangled up in the sexual revolution politics of the ’60s and ’70s. I feel like there’s a certain amount of social experimentation going on, and it’s offputting but acceptable when people conduct experiments on themselves, but really scary when they conduct experiments on other, non-consenting people. And kids are the absolute model of people who cannot reasonably consent to most things; that’s what it means to be a child.
2. It’s reasonable and polite to treat gender-dysphoric people as if they were the gender they identify as, wherever the associated costs are not too large. And it’s nice to be polite. However, it’s not reasonable to penalize other people for not being polite, especially where there are costs associated, or where the other person may not be aware that there’s something to be polite about.
To put it more bluntly, it’s better if everyone is nice to weird people. That’s a good thing. I endorse being nice to weird people. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to demand that people not notice weirdness. If I met someone with a realistic skull tattooed on his face, I would try to be polite about it, but I would have real questions about hiring that person for a face-to-face customer service job. If I worked with a person who periodically experienced scary thrashing seizures, I would feel compassion for that person and try to be considerate about it, but I wouldn’t really blame anyone around for being freaked out about the whole thing, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for not wanting that person to drive the carpool.
Back in 2008 when I wrote Future Imperfect, before either hormone blockers or transgenderism were an issue, indeed before I knew that hormone blockers existed, I speculated on a different purpose for them.
I wonder how people who approve, or disapprove, of the use of hormone blockers in the context of transgenderism would react to that very different use.
I think it would be a bad idea unless medically necessary. I don’t know if we can safely block puberty for years and there will be no side-effects and you can just start puberty at a later age by coming off the blockers.
Even at that, the social effects on children? You’re in a class of your peers, they’re going through natural puberty, you’re on blockers. Now they’re getting taller, stronger, growing breasts, voices changing, all the rest of it. Now you’re chronologically fourteen and look like a ten or twelve year old in a class of fourteen year olds. That has got to be odd.
This isn’t too far from my experience growing up. I grade-skipped, and didn’t start growing until relatively late (big growth spurt was around 15). I was the second-smallest in my 8th grade class of ~150. It wasn’t horrible, but it was also kind of annoying. But it could have been a lot worse if I’d been, say, into sports.
I once refereed a kids match where one of the kids was pubescent and the rests weren’t. It was like a Hulk movie.
The coach of the other side wanted me to intervene, but I could hardly give a red card to the player for being naturally big & strong.
I think individuals have the right to use the pronouns associated with their preferred gender, although there are not very many contexts in which one uses a gendered pronoun to refer to oneself, the usual pronoun for that purpose being “I.”
But that doesn’t mean that an individual has the right to have other people use the pronouns associated with that individual’s preferred gender, which seems to be what people are actually demanding. That would be the right to require other people to pretend to believe in the preferred gender, even when they don’t.
Relevant anecdote from a (cisgender) man who’s had long hair since high school: when I was younger, I’d occasionally get misgendered either by accident or out of malice. The accidents lasted exactly as long as it took me to open my mouth and speak, and the malicious incidents typically persisted until an authority figure noticed and told the offender to stop calling me “she.” Were those authority figures out of line here? You have no way to know that the offending party didn’t have a sincere belief that long hair was effeminate enough to disqualify a person from being called a man. Personally, I’m comfortable calling them assholes with opinions that were too stupid to respect, if they really thought that.
Would you also be comfortable defending my right to call them a stupid asshole? And would you agree with my assessment?
I cant tell exactly what David means by “require,” but surely it doesn’t apply only to literal brainwashing.
Actually what happened IRL was the authority figure punished them for being rude and the parents probably never heard a thing about it. The offender was sufficiently chastised that they (mostly) stopped. Is that unconscionable? The person claimed to sincerely hold this belief, probably because they thought it would mitigate their punishment. I think this was a lie, obviously, but I can’t read minds.
And other people can choose not to be rude. I’d rather spend time dealing with their rudeness and keep my hair, but I feel entirely comfortable leveraging other people’s standards of niceness and coordinating their behavior in order to deal with that rudeness by making certain behaviors too costly for most people to perform.
@zqed
Your 2 and 3 are the same – typo? I think there’s a missing piece of your chain. I don’t think it’s material, but I would like to know what you intended to write.
Consider the case where I think it’s highly probable that Jenna’s bag is fake, not because of any property of the bag, but because I know that Jenna is poor and that it’s therefore unlikely that the thing is genuine. In actuality, it might be the case that the bag is real and Jenna’s grandmother passed down the bag to her when she died. Alternatively, even if her grandmother did pass it down, Jenna might have no idea whether or not the bag is fake, even if her grandmother told her it was real. Imagine that, for both of these cases, if Jenna explains this, I believe not only that her bag is fake, but also that she’s a liar, and I start calling her “lying fake-bag Jenna” whenever I speak about or to her.
I think we agree that teacher intervention is appropriate in this circumstance, but it’s not clear to me on what basis you think this is the case. I have a sincere belief that Jenna is lying, that her bag is actually fake, and that I’m being unjustly persecuted by the teacher. Jenna believes that my conviction that the bag is fake isn’t well-supported, because all she knows for sure is that her grandmother, a person whom she trusts, told her it was real. If the teacher intervenes against me, that teacher is privileging Jenna’s opinion over mine. I have no problem with this. I think that by calling Jenna a liar with a fake bag I’m being rude and mean, and that it’s perfectly appropriate for that to prompt discipline. I think that, given that neither of us have a strong basis for a definite belief about the nature of Jenna’s bag, we should either defer to Jenna’s belief, at least around her, remain silent, or seek evidence that might contradict it. But I think that going around casting aspersions on her character for claiming to have inherited a nice bag from her grandmother without any evidence to suggest that she didn’t is unacceptably unkind.
If the context is one where the authority figure is entitled to chastise rudeness, such as a school where being polite to each other is one of the conditions of attending, then it would be appropriate for him to tell the offending party that he doesn’t have to refer to you as “he,” or at all, but he may not make a point of referring to you as she.
But I don’t think the situation of children in school is an appropriate model for adults in voluntary interactions.
So what would your suggestion be if this happened at a party, now that I’m grown up? I’d probably kick them out and never invite them again if it was my party, call them an asshole, complain to the host, and leave if they didn’t want to boot the offender, or leave and not go to any more of their parties if it was theirs. I get the feeling that neither of us see anything wrong with the first or third options, but how do you feel about the second?
I don’t think many people could disagree with your bolded section (notwithstanding caveats, as Walter and Phigment have noted, regarding decision-making capability and not imposing costs on others).
One thing you don’t explicitly state a position on though, and where I suspect a lot of the actual disagreement lies, is whether dysphoric persons should be entitled to use gender-only spaces set aside for the gender they identify with? That’s where things become tricky.
A lot of the anti-trans feeling comes from edge cases rather than naming/pronouns. But ceding ground on pronouns would mean ceding some ground on other aspects, too.
Like, I’m fine with a trans female dressing femininely and going by she/her. Whatever. But I am against assigned male at birth athletes competing in female sports (I don’t care about the opposite; if AFAB athletes want to compete in male sports, power to them).
There are issues with public bathrooms (to which I think the solution is to have a urinal room and a mixed gender bathroom).
And then there are prisons. If a criminal claims to become female (but doesn’t medically transition, just changes dress), should that person be allowed to go to a female prison?
This is more common than the converse, for reasons that should be obvious if you know typical trans people of both genders.
@VoiceOfTheVoid
When you say: “use a name and pronouns associated with their preferred gender,” do you actually mean: “get to force others to use a name and pronouns associated with their preferred gender”?
Part of the core disagreement is whether the transgender person gets to force this on others, or whether others are allowed to choose their own words.
Framing an obligation on person X to do Y as if it is no more than disallowing X to prevent others from doing Y, is actually one of the more irritating behavior of some activists, due to its dishonesty.
Framing “trying to change a particular social convention to one we consider more polite” as a draconian attempt to force people to speak dishonestly is also irritating – even if you think it’s an accurate summary of the situation. It’s the least charitable framing of the position. People are free to choose their words in all kind of situations; they are not free to demand that there be no social penalty for doing so.
Assuming we’re talking about social and not legal penalties. The comments on this thread (and the original) are unclear on which we’re talking about. I don’t support legal penalties for using “wrong” pronouns.
There is a huge amount of disagreement over what “man” and “woman” actually means. People who think that an important part of “man” or “woman” can’t be transitioned away and/or doesn’t necessarily match self-identification, are not merely asked to be polite, but to lie.
This is different from being asked to not use gay or racial slurs, because there is very little strong disagreement on what gay or black refers to.
Also, gender is different because there is extremely widespread agreement that people should be discriminated by gender (where even those who would disagree with that statement are nearly always in fact supportive of discriminatory policies and behaviors).
This is different from sexual orientation and race, where very many people truly don’t want discrimination.
The result is that a there is a huge amount of objection to adopting a gender categorization that doesn’t match how people want to discriminate.
An issue is that people are worried that they will no longer be free to choose their words, because the penalty will actually exceed the social.
Also, it is a common belief among the left that non-legal penalties can be extremely oppressive/discriminatory, yet in situations like these, it is very often implicitly or explicitly claimed that non-legal penalties are minor inconveniences against which it is silly to have strong objections.
I’m not convinced that “obliging people to lie” is a good characterisation of the situation.
I agree though that sex/gender is different, especially given that the pronoun question is part of a broader set of issues around self-identification.
I also agree that there’s inconsistency in how people on the left generally approach non-legal penalties in cases like this.
We’ve spent years arguing over sex and gender and how gender roles are constructed and that there is no “boys like trucks, girls like dolls, men go for hard science subjects, women go for nurturing roles” programming. Boys can wear pink and make-up! Girls can have short hair and like cars and motorbikes! Only traditionalists conservatives misogynists who want to keep women chained to the kitchen sink would say there is such a thing as a male brain and a female brain and they are different! And people who say there are male and female brains need to be shamed and punished to make them not say such bad things.
And then along come (some) trans activists arguing that they simply have to wear dresses and long hair and pink and jewellery and make-up because they are real women, and they knew they were real women because they always liked pink and make-up, and that’s because they have female brains, Science Says So. And people who say there’s no such thing as male and female brains need to be shamed and punished so they will stop saying such bad things.
Somebody make their fucking mind up, okay? I can say X or I can say Y but I can’t be a weathervane saying both X and Y at once.
No one’s saying you can’t use social penalties. What people are saying is that they aren’t going to enforce the social penalties for you, and they’ll oppose you if you try to use social penalties against them for that reason. It’s a pretty basic ‘no, you don’t yet have the social power to get your way’ response. There’s also an element of advice in it – if you start your coordinated meanness before you have proper coordination, it may well backfire on you.
What do you mean by “force” here? Is a politeness norm considered force? Is being called a jerk because you refuse to call someone their preferred name considered force?
Is being called a jerk because you refuse to call someone their preferred name considered force?
If you dare to say that biological male sex is not the same thing as biological female sex (sex not gender, mind you), then you are liable to a court decision in employment law:
The judgement goes from some confusion between “gender assigned at birth” to “the sex to which they have transitioned” to “referring to a person’s sex”. Not their gender, their sex. And the gender is the part we’re being told is not the same thing as the sex at all, you can be sex A but gender B. Now, I think the claimant in that case probably didn’t help herself at all with some of her attitudes, but on the other hand we’ve got a legal ruling that thinking, holding and expressing “I believe C’s sex is biological male, even if C’s legal gender is female” is bad, wrong, hostile, absolutist, and abusive. You not alone have to “call someone their preferred name”, you have to agree that their new sex now matches their new gender – or else. It’s not just a matter of politeness norm, it’s enforcing that the new definitions are here and you’d better use them.
Enforcing a law is clearly silly, but that’s not currently the case in the US (or the UK, I guess, since Brexit?). Using a person’s preferred pronoun seems to me to fall under the same norm of politeness as using a person’s preferred name. And that definitely doesn’t count as force.
The broad middle of “being polite is good, but enforcing it via a legal framework is bad” seems to be missing from the discourse, probably because the discourse is largely driven by the extremes.
No. The “middle way” is missing because of employers and lawyers. Tolerating “not polite” people in the workplace, particularly where there is an “identity category” in play, is a recipe to get sued for discrimination. (In contrast, nobody sues companies for shutting down such speech). Therefore, “polite” behavior is made mandatory. This then creates a norm, which often gets enshrined into law because (1) most employers are already doing it because of the aforementioned, so “what’s the harm”, and (2) employers prefer to have clear rules to justify their policies.
So the equilibrium of “impolite but not actionable” is unstable in such a legal regime. Impoliteness quickly gets legislated away.
I can’t help myself here, I don’t agree. If I am talking to another person about you and I forget your name and use a throw in like ‘that guy from accounting’ and it is totally acceptable. Under the name politeness system I can forget your name and entirely substitute something that I know is not your name and it is fine. I can also call you the wrong name repeatedly and its annoying but not considered aggression, or confuse you with someone else without notable risk.
I can’t help myself here, I don’t agree. If I am talking to another person about you and I forget your name and use a throw in like ‘that guy from accounting’ and it is totally acceptable. Under the name politeness system I can forget your name and entirely substitute something that I know is not your name and it is fine. I can also call you the wrong name repeatedly and its annoying but not considered aggression, or confuse you with someone else without notable risk.
I have no data, but I would guess the same is true of pronouns. Getting it wrong due to absent-mindedness is probably only aggressive to a very small but very loud percentage of trans people. Maybe that’s wrong and most consider it aggressive, which is clearly unreasonable.
It should fall under the standard politeness norm, then, and (I’m guessing) probably does for most people.
I do agree with hl2003 that HR and the all-consuming imperative to avoid liability does drive a lot of norms to extremes; this is also bad, but unfortunately not unique to pronouns but to an enormously wide swath of behavior.
Not just absentmindedness, intentional misnaming is fine. If you remind be of a movie character and I am chatting with someone I might refer to you as that movie character without it automatically being a problem*. I can intentionally mis-name you without major objection, but I am not supposed to intentionally mis-gender you (at least according to some).
*Obviously the individual choice in movie character could lead to issues.
Not just absentmindedness, intentional misnaming is fine. If you remind be of a movie character and I am chatting with someone I might refer to you as that movie character without it automatically being a problem*. I can intentionally mis-name you without major objection, but I am not supposed to intentionally mis-gender you (at least according to some).
Those don’t seem equivalent. Rather, the analogous instance of mis-naming would be calling someone a name or nickname they’ve explicitly asked you not to call them, which is indeed rude.
Two reasons.
The first is I don’t believe it’s helping. I have known transgender individuals, and none of them improved visibly psychologically from the outside with their transition, although as far as I know none of them got surgery. One de-transitioned and was the mentally healthiest of them. This is small sample size, of course, but studies are just as muddled about the benefits.
The second reason has to do with the control over others that it gives. It’s one thing for someone to make a request, it’s quite another to expect it to be automatically followed. There are always jocular examples of pronouns like “His Majesty” and such, but there is a natural visceral American reaction to compelled speech. It’s why the first thing that we put into our Constitutional Amendments is “you don’t get to do this”.
I oppose it on moral grounds the same way I’d oppose any law that you have to call the President “His Excellency”, which is in fact the proper diplomatic form of address.
Both closely mirror what I would say.
For example, transgender partner of a friend of the groom at a wedding recently. Friend of the groom is in the wedding party, having been friends with groom for a dozen+ years. Transgender partner was generally just a person with oddities 5 years ago. 3 years ago caused a huge bird-related issue, wore a pikachu costume to the wedding.
While I understand wanting to protect someone’s privacy, I am immensely curious what a “huge bird-related issue” might be. Were they pet-sitting and the bird escaped? Did they ruin a Thanksgiving turkey? Did they pretend to be a Thanksgiving turkey? Did they bring a live turkey to Thanksgiving?
Apparently most of my theoretical bird issues are just about Thanksgiving.
Argh… I too am immensely curious about bird related issues…
Edited for abysmal spelling.
Bought like 3 birds, didn’t take care of them, 2 died, had a freak out episode and bought 3 more. Then another died, partner is like, “no more birds”, person freaked and let out the birds, into the wild, then wanted them back like a day later.
I don’t know much about it as this is like 3rd hand, but it was apparently quite a fiasco of birds.
That 3rd hand will come in handy for taking advantage of the arbitrage between birds in hand vs. in the bush.
VoiceoftheVoid:
I agree with your basic position–if someone asks me to refer to them as “she” or “they” instead of “he,” I’ll do my best to remember to do that.
There are cases where this doesn’t work, which center on either places where the male/female distinction is important (womens’ vs mens’ sports) or where someone’s likely to be trying to take advantage of our politeness rules to do something nasty (men declaring themselves female so they can be put in a womens’ prison).
I’d also add that I don’t think anyone should be required to affirm things they don’t believe. I wouldn’t want the law demanding that someone use the right pronouns. And if a group of women want their women-only space to only include people with two X chromosomes or who were identified as female at birth, I’d say that’s within their rights, and I won’t condemn them for it and certainly won’t support someone trying to force them to knock it off via legal means.
I 99% agree.
For people who just want to identify as male/female/they, meh.
My one exception is people who pick stupid custom pronouns. When it’s just some attempt to pick something “unique” or unuausl it’s merely annoying. When it’s chosen to make communication harder it crosses the line into “no, just no”.
The one that got to me was someone who wanted “the” as a a pronoun. Don’t care. Even if they’re not taking the piss which I wouldn’t be surprised if they were. “the” as a pronoun just leads to bad/confusing communication and trying to claim it for such is just abusing a norm there to help people.
I am 100% comfortable with refusing to recognise “the” as a substitute or “he/she/they”.
One of the arguments against weak-manning a position is that you are not accurately representing the position as it exists in the real world- that you are deliberately attacking as weak a position as possible in order to make it difficult for opponents to argue against.
I think that your bolded statement does this, but in reverse. It states transgender claims in as inoffensive a manner as possible and one which is designed to be maximally difficult to argue with. Like weak-manning, it does not accurately reflect the real-life positions and goals of the transgender movement as a whole. The transgender movement is not saying to me, “Let me choose how I dress”; it is saying to me, “Wax my balls“.
Others have pointed out the problems with your framing of the issue as “use pronouns”. I will just add that people don’t have pronouns; languages have pronouns.
The word you’re looking for is motte.
No, this is just wrong. The overwhelming majority of trans people are really just saying “let me choose how I dress, don’t beat me up for looking weird, please call me she and her instead of he and him.” A tiny but visible minority reported on heavily in media are demanding someone wax their balls. Outrage-seeking media is a distorting filter.
Obviously, we need rules that recognize that some people will try to exploit any rule of politeness to behave badly. That doesn’t mean that most people who want you to follow those rules are intending to behave badly.
When laying down any societal rules, both legal or just more broadly, one has to understand how people may abuse them, and look at actual attempted abuses.
Unsurprisingly, high-profile abuses of the system will lead to less support of it in the future.
Yes, but to the extent outrage media can point to actual court cases and government decisions that put people out of business and so on, there is justifiable outrage and real abuses of actual power in pursuit of an absurd agenda, which unfortunately probably gets misplaced to the wider more representative trans population.
I don’t believe you. Prove it.
Most trans people are not trans activists. They’re just schmucks trying to get by like everyone else.
Okay, so I’ll interpret this as meaning, “Less than 51% of trans people are activists”. An “activist” probably means a person who cares a lot about transgender issues and spends a lot of time in public discourse about them. Let’s see what we can find.
…not much, it looks like.
Survey here says that 94% of transgender people say that “violence against transgender people” is a “very important” public policy priority for them; 25% say it’s their top priority, but all the issues asked about were transgender related issues, so we can’t really use it to see how many are “activists.”
That’s as far as I got for now.
On a more personal level, I believe most claims that “not every member of [group] is an activist for [issue x]” because I’ve met members of most other groups that aren’t activists. This is not the case for transgender people.
Really? This seems like a bold claim. I would expect as a general rule, that most people of category X are not X activists.
There is a perception out there (to be honest, one I share to a certain degree), that activists in general are annoying types who will make everything about their pet issue and never acknowledge the other side of the coin. If this were true of trans people, and I dont think it is, it would shift my view in a direction which is not favorable to them.
I also think that being an activist requires a certain personality type, which I would expect is distributed similarly across various populations. The activist type is probably higher in extroversion than average, and I see no reason to believe that is the case for transgender people in general.
I have to agree with Two McMillion: Most (I think all, but am hedging) Transgender people I have met are activists for Trans issues. It’s possible that there are tons of Trans people outside my local area who are just keeping their heads down and doing their own thing, but in my personal experience, this is not the case.
I think there’s a selection effect where the ones you are more likely to notice are for that reason more likely to be activist. Someone who has not need for the activism is harder to notice as trans.
I dont doubt that the most visible trans people are activists, that’s almost the case by definition. But all of them? That’s an extraordinary claim.
What do you mean by activist? Is it their main job? Is it a thing they volunteer for on the side? Do they just tweet pro-trans stuff?
Frequently making conversations about Trans issues, posting about it on social media, actively interacting in social events to push for trans related agendas. Obviously most are not employed doing that full time.
And I’ll admit there may be a selection bias: Trans people who pass flawlessly don’t need to be activists, as no one can tell the difference. Those who remain are those who can’t pass and those who really care, as the former are disproportionately affected and the latter are true believers. That doesn’t change my experience, just the parsing of it.
I would expect that, too, but every single trans person I met and have been aware of meeting was an “activist” in the sense that woah describes. Is there a selection bias effect? Probably, but it still means that my experience of transgender people is not the innocuous “just change my name and call me she” type.
Okay, so this link (https://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/8-perceptions-of-the-publics-voice-in-government-and-politics/) says that about 50% of people think people like them can influence government decisions. The survey I linked earlier gives a breakdown of transgender people surveyed which has about the same percentage saying people like them can influence government, but, interestingly, nearly a fourth saying other/don’t know. Only 3% of the general public selects other/don’t know. I wonder what the reason for the difference is.
This may be a reasonable assumption, however when academics who treat transgendered people are prevented from researching if this is true or not it cannot move on from being an assumption. Would it not also be reasonable to treat gender dysphoria with therapy helping the person come to terms with their biological sex?
Several in this thread have pointed out that this is actually asking others to use the name and pronouns. A lot of people appreciate having the “under God” clause in the pledge of allegiance. For social nicenesses sale should we encourage everyone to keep under God, even against their worldviews?
Privately funded or publically funded? Can an employer funded healthcare plan refuse? Would doctors be compelled to treat if they disagree that it’s in the best interests of the patient?
Here is a story. I ran a one-shot D&D game for a person who preferred “they/them” pronouns. I said: “I respect your pronouns and will try to use them, but I anticipate this will be difficult for me and I will probably slip up and forget.”
I ran the D&D game and I have no memory of using any pronouns for anyone, which suggests to me that I failed at respecting this person’s pronouns. Running a D&D game takes a great deal of concentration, and it’s difficult to focus on this while also remembering pronoun rules.
(I did refer to their character with female pronouns several times. In retrospect, perhaps I should have assumed that their character also used they/them pronouns?)
They sent me a reminder: “I prefer they/them pronouns.” I think I said something like: “I take it I failed at this. I’m sorry. I will try to do better in future, but I have to be honest, it’s likely that I will forget again in future. : – /”
I have not heard from them since. : (
I don’t have a specific moral here, except that I actually genuinely find it really hard to remember to use people’s pronouns.
I’m surprised they didn’t specify. And, if they actually got upset about the “misgendering” of their fictional avatar done in a non-sneering way, they must not have a lot of experience. Playing opposite gendered characters happens, often resulting in much accidental confusion.
This has been happening in an RPG I’m in, where a girl is playing a male character, and everyone keeps forgetting except me. She’s been easygoing about it, to be clear; and it’s not to my knowledge a trans thing for her.
No, exactly, I don’t think it is. My friend just rolled up a female character, and I don’t think it says anything about his internal state, and I’m probably likely to forget it about half the time. (the PC gender, I mean, not his internal state).
Thank goodness we can default to agendered second person pronouns.
We also have a female player in the game I’m running for you whose second PC is a male giant rodent. No one seems to get confused.
Yeah, when everything from the DM is “What do you do now?” and everything from the other players is direct address, it’s pretty easy to minimize bad pronouns.
To preemptively address a point I know has come up: I acknowledge that this constitutes a redefinition of “man”, “woman”, “gender”, etc. However, note that this redefinition only affects the edge cases–the majority of people, who identify with their biological sex, remain in the same categories.
This is precisely the point on which I am going to argue – it won’t be, or remain, edge cases. It is a fundamental redefinition. This is not like the arguments “don’t like abortion? don’t have one!” or “don’t want gay marriage? don’t get gay married!” It will affect me directly, because this is all about “what is the definition of ‘male/female/man/woman’?”
When the “same categories” are now decided on “biology is meaningless except for when we want to use biology to prop us up, i.e. your physical body doesn’t count but I have a ‘female brain’ so I totally am a real woman, never mind my male body”, I do not see how “the majority of people… remain in their same categories”. Now the category “woman” includes “functionally male down to the chromosomes, but so long as he puts on a blonde wig and a dress he’s as much a woman as you and saying otherwise will get you brought up in court“.
Tell me how that is not affecting me? We don’t even have a proper measure of the rate of transgenderism in the general population – figures are floating around between 0.3-0.6% of the population. Let’s say that a combination of repression, social disapproval, and mistaken identity (“I am sexually attracted to my own gender, I must be a gay man not a trans woman”) means this is under-rating the real numbers. Let’s make it 2% of the global population is transgender.
That makes 2 people out of every 100. That makes 98 people being compelled by both social pressure and legal activism to say to those 2 people “Yes of course you are a real woman/man in every detail just as much as anyone else”. Because the argument being pushed is not just “This is Sally who used to be John”, it’s “This is Sally who was always Sally even when her stupid parents/bigoted doctors said she was John”. The argument used to be “gender and sex are different”, but I’m seeing it moving more and more to “using gender where sex used to be used, conflating the two, and insisting that gender and sex are the same thing when it comes to accusing people of transphobia”.
I don’t care one way or the other about Sally Smith who used to be John Smith turns up someplace I am, gets introduced as Sally and is referred to as “she/her”. If I never met Sally before, it’s nothing to me. If I knew Sally when she was John, I might be a bit surprised, but for civility’s sake I’ll go along with it.
What I won’t go along with is (1) Sally is a woman as you are a woman, and always was, and saying anything else is transphobia and (2) you can’t just agree to say “Sally is she” in public, you have to believe it internally or else it’s transphobia. I’d be happy to treat it the same as mental illness; ‘born this way’ with a twist in the underlying biology that means you’re not functioning as intended, no moral judgement on this, medication/surgery to help (dysphoria/transition) and even social accommodation such as “refer to Sally as she”, I’d even respond to the “but it really upsets me if you think of me as a man or that I’m really male” in the same way I’d try and avoid upsetting someone with a phobia or mental illness: don’t seat Tim near the door, he’s schizophrenic and even though he’s on his meds and coping well, he has this problem with open doors that causes him distress. The same way, don’t deadname Sally, it upsets her. Both Tim and Sally have mental problems that they’re trying to cope with, don’t be a dick about it.
But that’s not good enough. It can’t be mental illness or any kind of misfunctioning. It has to be perfectly normal, always has been, and is completely the same thing as cis and any “no, sorry, a cis woman who underwent a hysterectomy is not at all the same thing as a trans woman who never had a uterus to start with” is plain and simple hate bigot transphobia to be punished and stamped out.
Here is a story. I went to a brunch that had drag performances. Some of the performances were just about being fabulous, but at least one was specifically about the theme of dressing up as a woman in order to fool straight men into courting one, and not revealing that one was biologically male until one was in a straight man’s bed having sex.
I was pretty offended. This seems like a really rude thing to do to someone.
The drag performer did not seem to feel guilt at this hypothetical act. The story being told was all about how great it was that she was doing this.
—–
I’ve seen a quote elsewhere that went something like this: “The shape of my genitals is none of your business and it won’t be your business unless you’re actively interacting with them.” I’m not sure how commonplace this belief is among trans people.
As a cis man who is attracted to people who are biologically female, I’m expected to put a lot of effort into courting and flirting if I want to find a mate. If I spent a lot of effort courting a woman who turned out to be biologically male, I think I’d feel embarrassed and upset and sad.
—–
I agree with your assertion that people with gender dysphoria should be allowed to use whatever pronouns and clothes and restrooms make them feel comfortable. But there’s a similar assertion someone might make, which is that people who have male genitals should be allowed to imply that they have female genitals in order to flirt with people who are attracted to people who have female genitals. I think this is a real assertion that some people are making. I don’t agree with this assertion.
I wish that we had a clearer vocabulary around this.
I imagine there are trans activists who would disagree with my statement that I’m attracted to people who have female genitals. They would say that I’m actually attracted to women, and all this stuff about female genitals is transphobic.
I don’t know if this is a strawman. I avoid activist spaces.
Please tell me this is a strawman and nobody actually argues this.
I’m sorry to disappoint you.
Meet Riley Dennis.
Without getting into how common this is or the proper response or expected trauma levels, etc., is there anyone who would argue that this isn’t a form of rape?
Yes, because especially in legal contexts words should mean specific things and this doesn’t match any definition I know about – also because if it is I’ll have to read about the inevitable media-circus trial for six months, which I don’t want to do. Absolutely an awful thing to do, though, just so we’re clear.
California has “rape by fraud” laws which may cover this, but it does seem like it would be a stretch.
I’ll admit to not having a specific legal definition in mind, but a fundamental misrepresentation of what the act entails does seem like it would violate the consent norm.
If not rape, I would say it’s at least as bad as sneaking pork into the food of someone known to you to be a devout Jew or Muslim. I think most people would say that doing so is wrong, and it would not matter of the Jew or Muslim liked the dish before they knew it contained pork.
I don’t think we normally classify sex or sex-adjacent things done voluntarily because the other person hasn’t been honest with you about things you care about as rape, and I don’t think that would be a good change to laws or social norms. Like, if if you start dating someone, get serious, and are ready to sleep with her, and then she admits to you that actually, she’s married and been cheating on her husband with you, that’s shitty and you should probably stop seeing her, but I wouldn’t think that made all your pre-sex activities into some kind of sexual assault. Or if you slept with her and she told you afterwards, it wouldn’t be rape by any sensible definition. So it seems like something similar is true for a transperson–it would be shitty and undermine any hope of a longer-term relationship for them not to tell you the truth about something so fundamental, but it wouldn’t be rape or sexual assault, IMO.
If I agree to PIV intercourse and in the dark I find myself the recipient of PiA intercourse, that’s as rapey as date rape or other kinds of sexual assault that aren’t backed by application of physical force. It’s as much a violation of consent as agreeing to a kiss and finding someone trying to remove your clothes and initiate intercourse.
And that would at the least get you kicked out of college and probably counted in statistics on such matters, if not charged and arrested.
Someone who had actually transitioned and had a very reasonable facsimile is a more complicated matter, but I didn’t get that impression from the annecdote.
I agree it wouldn’t be rape. I think a case could be made for sexual assault. I would say this would be more serious than lying about being married.
Edit: In a case where it resulted in actual penetration or attempted penetration, it would be rape, unquestionably. I’m assuming (for this hypothetical) all sexual contact stops after the unexpected genitals are discovered.
@albatross11
Sexuality has a component to it that also has some depths that are tough to full explore.
I’m not in the market right now, but it is a literal moral imperative to me to not engage in any sexual activity with a male (and I regard MtF transgender as male). It’s also a moral imperative to not engage in sex with a married woman, but someone’s sexuality is pretty core to identity and deception there seems worse instinctively to me.
I agree that it isn’t rape, although rape by deception does exist in some jurisdictions, but it is definitely a substantial level more bad than pretending you make more money or padding your bra.
If someone blindfolded you (willingly) and said ‘I’m going to let you touch my (insert particular gender’s genitals) but instead put your hand on someone else’s genitals I would think that would qualify for the basic standard of sexual assault.
The quote was “not discovered until having sex”, hence my strong reaction. Otherwise it’s simply an attempt at such.
Maybe I’m typical-minding my approach to sex, but I would almost certainly have noticed male genitals on a sexual partner well before they had the opportunity to attempt penetration (and would definitely notice if they were maneuvering to penetrate me, since I expect to be the one doing that).
I took “during sex” to refer to the whole shebang*, including various foreplay that (usually) comes before the actual intercourse.
(Edit) *Err…no pun intended
Oh sure, and I don’t place high credence on any story told at drag queen open mic stand-up having actually happened.
But what’s described is at least attempted rape, imo.
@acymetric
It would be at least plausible that e.g. oral sex could begin with the receptive man not knowing what the drag queen had for genitals.
But it’s an act. Theatre. Fiction. People do all sorts of things in fiction which would be horrible in real life, and sometimes the audience is supposed to laugh or even identify with the villain protagonist. Nothing wrong with that, IMO; theatre doesn’t have to be morally correct.
Also, it’s not necessarily a leftist narrative. A good number of leftists are actually all about getting the trap trope banned, as they feel that it feeds into the gay panic defense that underlines a lot of violence against trans people. (But some of those also think drag is transphobic, so whatever.)
Banning “trap trope” as in banning traps from seducing straight men, or banning it as in forbidding straight men from thinking traps are gay?
Now I want an adversarial collaboration on whether traps are gay.
As in, shaming anyone from creating or consuming media with the trap trope in it, or to refer to any crossdressing characters as traps.
There’s a difference, though, between a character we support despite their villainy, or because we think the victims of their villainy deserve it, and a villain we support and say that their actions were not villainous at all.
This is an important point for me. I regularly find characters to be deeply immoral(abusing and manipulating the people around them, for example) while the author/writers of the fiction treat the character as a hero, resolving all conflicts such that they were actually correct or at the very least not morally culpable for their actions. To me this reflects a failure of character on the part of the creators and the wider audience for not twinging at the same things I do.
I agree they should be “allowed” to do all that. However, if they manifestly do not pass in their current state, it is unreasonable for them to be offended when others don’t wish to agree with that identity. Identity is not entirely chosen, it is in large part taken up.
I also don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable for them to insist on being allowed to use group restroom facilities of the gender they wish to be (or, rather, feel to be) but aren’t. Public establishments should have accommodations, however, like single use facilities.
And, if you care about women’s sports, it doesn’t make since to allow a MTF to compete with F. I personally find the whole thing farcical.
But, since there’s considerable fuzziness at the boundaries, I think others in society should be gracious in the their judgments of whether or not someone fits the category.
I object to the framing, which is that there is this problem, here is this proposal for treatment, how else can we treat it? It reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons where Homer gives a toast to alcohol, “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” If you’re living in poverty and you’re unhappy, alcohol makes you happy! Well why are you in poverty in the first place? Might it have something to do with the alcohol abuse? The framing is that it has always existed in the same proportions in every society. In some societies nobody noticed it, but they are certain it was there all along, with all the associated psychological distress that they are convinced they know how to cure.
This gets closest to an angle of the trans phenomenon, or the response to it, which I think is really neglected. We see a lot of discussion of what doctors do and don’t think about transgenderism. Lots of discussion of gender dysphoria, how it manifests, how it is alleviated, and so on. But this is all taken for granted. We rarely, if ever, discuss what assumptions are behind all of that. How do doctors think about sex and gender, and how does that affect treatment?
What frustrates me is that this is not the sort of thing I think really smart journalists would neglect on other topics. If widespread advice about sex life were really bad because, I don’t know, Quakers had taken over the medical profession, I’d have the pleasure of reading a withering twenty thousand word critique in the New Yorker. If physicists were all signing onto string theory out of overwhelming groupthink, we’d be hearing about it. Instead, a lot of the criticism I’ve seen has taken strategies like the following:
1) I’m not going to dispute anything doctors say, but I don’t want compelled speech.
2) I’m not going to dispute anything doctors say, but that’s not how God made us.
3) I’m not going to dispute anything doctors say, but won’t we please think of the children/women athletes/women prisoners.
And even the few journalists who are really good at reporting on trans stuff, like Jesse Singal, always simply take doctor recommendations for granted. I’m not saying they need to cast a critical eye to those recommendations in every article. But I read this stuff pretty regularly and I’ve never seen it done.
I also really want to pick on (2), because back when conservative Christians saw that trans issues would be the next culture war battle, articles started getting written about why one shouldn’t transition, and I read lots of them. And folks, speaking, as you know, as a conservative Catholic, most of them were just bad. Lazy arguments that God made us male and female, this quality is immutable, therefore transition is wrong—and all this dressed up in theobabble about the human person or whatever. Yes, God made us male and female, and yes this is immutable—I believe that, of course. But that last step doesn’t follow. It might by choosing less tendentious theology, but even so, it’s never going to appeal to those who aren’t already religious.
We can do better here, but we need to change strategies. So for a while now I’ve been wondering, where are the conservative journalists? We should have a good idea how gender dysphoria as a diagnosis came about, what it implies about sex and gender, and what it means for the profession. That is the only path forward I see.
1) Dennis Prager used to make a point that, while expert opinion is often invoked in policy matters, they should not be given deference in determining policy. His example was Firemen (or an association thereof) that recommend classroom doors remain closed to reduce fire risk, not at all a common occurrence, and thereby deprive the room of fresh air. I can’t vouch that this was actually an enforced policy in any school, the the point was that experts often have a focus on their field that excludes other considerations. So in this case, trans doctors may be concerned, quite fairly, with the distress reported by their parents in misgendering (or whatever) and make recommendations based on that, but not actually consider any effects on others or counter arguments.
There’s a feedback loop here, where you go into fields that you think are important, and assign them more importance because that’s where your time and attention are devoted.
Add to that potential groupthink in professional organizations and replication crisis and all that, and while expert opinion on facts is important, “XYZ organization said it, therefore we should do it” is a fallacious stance even if we give them credit for sincerity and good faith.
Yeah, for quite a careful thinker and writer like Jesse Singal, I’m astounded how he can write in one article about how doctors are afraid to mention desistance or recommend slower treatment because of lunatic activists, and insist in another article he’s just following consensus. Of course, he has much more familiarity with the literature than I do, so I’m sure his confidence in treatment is better founded. Even so, though, I never see him discuss this, and more importantly, I never see journalists who presumably don’t agree with him about the range of trans issues question it, either.
One thing I should clarify is that imo the phenomenon of doctors being afraid to recommend slower treatment is kind of a secondary phenomenon. Obviously it impacts ‘consensus’ and how seriously we should treat that consensus today, but was that true fifteen or twenty years ago? It might not have been a big factor when these things were first studied seriously.
2) I agree that a some of these religious/conservative argument to transsexuals comes off as poorly reasoned. Many ills are present in the world that we take it as good acts to remedy. And “God doesn’t make mistakes” is just nonsense if used to argue that any inherent quality is good–we believe in the inborn inclination to sin, for one thing, and for another individuals with abnormal karyotypes exist, and while their existence is not an error, the body they inhabit manifestly presents them with challenges that we would like to remedy just as much as the myopic or the lame.
I think this reasoning comes from the perception–often true, imo–that gender itself, any inborn distinction between male and female, is being reconsidered as inessential or detrimental. God created the ideal of masculine and feminine (though not with precisely the same baggage we attach to the terms), this was a good thing, and has generally served us well. But does this mean that any individual in particular fits well into the category of their birth or even any category? No more than the lame man was born that way due to his sin.
Consider that in pre-modern patriarchal societies, women presenting socially as men was likely the predominant form of gender-bending. This raises a lot of questions about contemporary transgenderism, such as:
1) when we discuss it, a super-majority of the time we’re talking about male-to-female and most the rest we’re talking about abstract principles rather than FtM. The go-to explanation for pre-modern transvestism was “women were oppressed”, so if current gender-bending is reversed…?
2) In that conservative argument, “ergo it’s wrong to transition” not only doesn’t logically follow, it’s grossly underdefined. What is “transition”? Hormones, surgery? Or even dressing as the opposite sex? Obviously pre-modern women who cross-dressed to gain masculine freedoms weren’t gulping male hormones, so were they wrongdoers?
This sounds related to the TERF argument that transwomen are transitioning just to get benefits that feminists fought hard to win for women.
Conflict theory. Because people who hold such views are working to grind me out of society. So instead I should oppose them in any way possible to avoid granting them yet-another victory, regardless if it’s meritorious.
As I’ve said before, the Masterpiece Cake case will keep on paying this kind of “dividends” for many years.
“No skin off my nose, let them go to hell in their own way, none of your business if I do” are really good arguments for why I should be okay with other people wanting the freedom to do something I don’t want to do, and maybe find gross or offensive. Let them live their own lives, just leave me out of it.
That’s not a way of thinking that plays well with modern thinking, though. And once we’ve decided that if it’s allowed, it has to be supported and agreed with and celebrated and taught to your kids, it turns out that a lot of people who would have been fine with “Oh, hell, let the gay couples marry, what harm does it do to me anyway?” are a lot less sympathetic than they used to be.
A lot of it is I just do not understand what they can do as one gender that they cannot do as the other. Like, I had some “feminine” interests as a little kid (eg I had a Care Bears kitchen set); I never thought that made me “not male.” It seems to me that trans is reinforcing gender stereotypes.
It feels ridiculous to say things like “He gave birth to a child.”
As ana53294 said, giving on the pronoun issue does make it harder not to give on things like biological males who declare themselves female participating in women’s sports, or the “wax my balls” case (if trans women are women, how can we exclude them from women-only spaces?).
I do think that pronoun issues are less likely to come up with people who pass well. However, there seems to be an inverse relationship between how well a trans activist passes and how loud they are.
I don’t like it when people are forced to lie. (It may be a trigger to me, as I grew up in a socialist regime.)
Now, this is different from politeness norms, despite the fact the politeness often involves little lies. The difference is that politeness is not mandatory. You can weigh it against other concerns. For example, you may usually say “good morning” even if your morning sucks. But there are situations when you can say “sorry, this morning really sucks for me”, and people won’t start avoiding you like a leper.
Similarly, if someone looks like gender X, I would have no problem to address them as gender X. As a polite fiction, but why not; one more polite fiction among many. But I want there to be an opportunity to say otherwise, if I consider it necessary for some reason.
(Another objection would be the slippery slope: On day 1, people only ask you to address people as X if they look like X. On day 100, you will be required to address people as X even when they don’t even try passing as X, and your obedience will become a signal of purity… and perhaps a condition of your further employment. And this is because during days 2-99 people kept reminding each other that doing so is mere politeness that only a truly horrible person would refuse to do.)
People can go wild with name changes and transitions, I don’t even care about gendered sports, but I disagree with preferred pronouns for the same reason I won’t use “Your Highness” to refer to a man who thinks he’s Napoleon. Because he isn’t actually Napoleon, and to imply otherwise bugs me. This is as you say, a redefinition of “man” and “woman” and I think it’s a dumb redefinition. The fact that the redefinition only affects edge-cases doesn’t make it less dumb: a redefinition of “dog” to mean “either those animals descended from wolves, or a cat named Fido” changes the categorization of almost nothing! I will resent language changing in this way exactly as I resent “nonplussed” or “literally” being used to mean their opposites.
This is a complicated question, but all the good ones are.
For one, I think it is odd that it is suggested we should humour what is arguably a mental illness. That’s not the proposed treatment regime for other mental illnesses. The proposed treatment for people who think they should cut their arms off is not usually “humour them, let them do it.” Nor is the treatment for thinking you’re Jesus allowing the person to wander the deserts of Israel. If someone invented a pill tomorrow that would make transgendered people OK with their birth gender/sex, I think the appropriate thing to do is guide people toward THAT. I don’t know if that’s the view transgendered people would take (and they’ve got an argument for that view). Since that pill doesn’t exist, I think the whole “let them do what they want” angle makes a lot of sense.
But…to what extent do I have to go along with it?
For example, pronouns are for the convenience of people using them, not their subjects. I think I’m rude if I don’t use your selected ones (extremely so if I insist upon it). But I’m not a monster (and if you’ve got a pronoun much outside he/she/they, I think I’m being perfectly reasonable). Nor am I a monster if I am uncomfortable with the idea of having sex with someone who is biologically male.
Basically, I’m fine with this being our current best-case treatment option for some level of mental illness. But that’s not what it is – note the push to remove it from the DSM etc. This is especially so since, to me, sex and gender are extremely closely linked. I am perfectly happy to believe that people can feel they are the wrong sex. I think we should let them live as that sex to the extent possible. Hell, I think we should probably pay for it in those countries where people pay for such things.
Basically, what you describe is fine. But “gender dysphoria isn’t a mental illness, you monster, and all ways of being a particular gender are equally valid”…not so much. And that seems to be being pushed pretty damn hard.
What is free will, really? And what makes it different from unfree.
I find that free will is usually used specifically to denote one’s aspects that warrant punishment (Or reward). It would be immoral to punish you for what you didn’t control and at the very least it would be in poor taste to take pride in what you didn’t choose to accomplish. So when one wants people to be judged for something, positively or negatively, they attribute it to choice. When they don’t, they trace them to circumstances beyond their control.
I am rich because I chose to work hard and made good financial choices. You are rich because you lucked out. I am lonely and unattractive because I lost genetic lottery, you are lonely and unattractive because you choose to not not excercise and dress well, etc.
There is, dare I say, no free will absolutism. It’s highly unlikely anyone believes literally anything can be done if only we chose to do it. So it’s used as a marker on what one thinks should or should not be dismissed.
Soccer hooligans tend to have a level of stability in their cooperation and stability in their goals, which makes them a lot more organized than regular thugs. Some hooligan group are practically paramilitary. So the crossover is not that weird.
I’ve seen it argued that America lacks hooligans because of the high mobility.
What is middle or upper class is sometimes rather arbitrary, where the more upper class stuff often requires that the masses shun something. American football is the mass sport in the US, with soccer being the main (upper) middle class alternative, while lacrosse is a truly upper class sport.
Soccer is the mass sport in Europe. In my country, field hockey is the main (upper) middle class alternative.
And anything on a horse is a notch above hockey.
EDIT: dumb joke
The sport of choice for the urban poor is BASKETBALL.
The sport of choice for maintenance level employees is BOWLING.
The sport of choice for front-line workers is FOOTBALL.
The sport of choice for supervisors is BASEBALL.
The sport of choice for middle management is TENNIS. And….
The sport of choice for corporate executives and officers is GOLF.
THE AMAZING CONCLUSION: The higher you go in the corporate structure, the smaller your balls become. There must be a ton of people in Washington playing marbles!
Nah, people in Washington throw huge dance mixers and soirees. They have the biggest balls of all!
Which tracks perfectly, since they don’t really run anything and are a slave to the above-mentioned special interests.
The football fan clubs where also a major part of the Arab Spring in Egypt.
Another important feature of sport clubs in authoritan socieities is that they are seen as an acceptable social release valve, and thus are one of the few places were the (secret)police will turn a blind eye to a lot of young man gathering, and organizing.
This is essentially a form of what van Inwagen calls the Mind argument (because of the number of times it appeared in the prestigious philosophical journal Mind in the 20th century). A similar line of thought is found in Hume; I don’t know of a prominent earlier example than Hume. Most of those who make the argument are compatibilists (that is, instead of framing it as no free will vs. free will, as you have, they frame it as free will understood as being under control of our own psychologies which are themselves deterministic vs. some sort of contra-causal free will), though Hume actually is closer to your version in the Treatise of Human Nature before switching to the now more common framing in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Isn’t *entirely* reducible. A voluntarist can’t credibly claim that every action comes out of nowhere . Instead they typically replace the idea of actions being determined by character, background, etc, with the idea that they are merely influenced by them. But some statistical level of influence, not strict determinism, is the best one can hope for out of the use of punishment as deterrent.
The mad scientist who only goes by the pseudonym Nikola Tesla has created a prototype duplicator machine. He put something in the two boxes, presses a button, the contents of one box ceases to exist, and a copy of the contents of the other box appears in its place.
Art historians examined a genuine 17th century painting before and after Tesla managed to duplicate it, and they certified both copies as original. Both copies of a trained bird not only survived, but, after getting past the shock from the unpleasant duplication procedure, was found to have her intelligence and memories intact. Microprocessor and memory chips can be duplicated while powered on and running, and both copies keep the exact memory state.
There’s just one big problem. Which of the two objects ends up vanishing and which one gets copied is random. There’s no way to influence or predict the outcome, there’s always exactly 1/2 chance that the contents of the first box will vanish when you press the button.
You are a rich investor. You have the opportunity to have a duplicator machine manufactured based on Tesla’s invention. Would you do so? What will you use the duplicator for?
I pose two variants.
(A) You were lucky enough to have sponsored Tesla’s mad science research early, so you are now the exclusive owner of this invention. You may keep it a closely guarded secret or patent it. If you play your cards right, you’ll be able to use duplicator technology for years before anyone else has access to it. The fact that the duplicator works has already hit the news though, so you can’t use it as a surprise.
(B) Tesla is independently wealthy and eccentric. He talks about the workings of the duplicator to anyone who listens, and is not willing to protect it with a patent. Anyone with enough money to fund a research laboratory can now develop a duplicator. You can expect competition.
Clarifications.
The story happens in the near future. The mad scientist isn’t the Nicola Tesla who died in the 20th century, just some youngster who assumed his name.
That the machine copies one of the two objects randomly is a fundamental physical limitation, not something that Tesla added as a joke. Your experts have assured you of this. They mentioned something about conservation laws, you haven’t understood the details.
Some people claimed that the duplicator is impossible for reasons of quantum mechanics. Your experts assure you that the duplicator does not copy the exact quantum state of an object, it merely makes a copy that is close enough to the original that it’s indistinguishable in practice for any object that you’ll encounter in practice. It won’t be able to copy the individual photons of a fiberglass cable between one of those quantum cryptography gizmos and keep their polarity.
Developing and building a duplicator won’t be cheap, your experts estimate that it will cost a few hundred thousand dollars and 6 to 36 months. They promise you a model that can copy objects as large as fits inside a truck. It is possible to make a bigger one, but it gets very expensive, because it’s hard to transport the parts on road or rail. The supporting machinery is big and heavy, it needs a fixed indoor installation such as you’d have for a medical magnetic resonance imaging machine. The machine will probably take a minute to recharge between duplications.
Tesla’s prototype is smaller, it can copy objects that fit into a home microwave oven. If you want to dupliacte something urgently, you could use that prototype, but you are recommended against it. That machine is jury-rigged and looks like it could explode any minute. Nobody in their right mind would allow Tesla near a real engineering project. Tesla doesn’t keep lab notes, and he could explain just barely enough to your experts that, together with examining his prototype, the experts are now confident they’ll be able to reproduce the invention. You had to pay them danger money to even go near Tesla’s country house.
For socks. Put two single socks in the machine and you’ll have a matching pair 😛
Am I the only one who feels like my used socks have a distinct “handedness” (footedness?) to them? Maybe my feet are especially asymmetric, but they (the socks, not my feet) stretch enough after a few wearings that it feels wrong to swap them.
Maybe you should start buying L/R socks.
+1
Toe socks man. It solves this problem for you AND your toes get to feel extra comfortable.
I would reply, but I think this is going to get too CW even for the CW OT thread.
That’s because you’re actually supposed to wash them between wearings )
Put two single socks in the machine and you’ll have a matching pair
That is genius. Once the bugs get worked out (such as “eek, if you look funny at it, it will blow up”) then you can incorporate it into a tumble dryer and clean up (heh) as the spectre of the single sock in every load of laundry is banished from homes forever!
I start a business selling identical snowflakes
You can probably get a lot of mileage on “100% identical wedding rings and friendship bracelets, certified created by magic duplicating machine”.
I’m trying to think of other cases where you can put two items in the boxes and don’t care which gets duplicated – the value comes from synchronizing. Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee yet because nothing good is coming to mind…
I wonder if that would work for hardware random number generators. If it does, you can probably get some one time pad-esque encryption out of it.
@CaptainCrutch
Ooh, that one is actually really good.
Lab mice and other experimental animals? The more similar the experimental subjects are, the more certain you can be that any differences in outcomes is due to the active variable.
This seems like a fantastic way to dispose of unwanted material.
Nuclear waste, hazardous material etc.
It’s hard to get rich by trying to double things because if you lose once you lose it all and the expected return isn’t positive. But if you’re trying to dispose of things then it’s no problem, you just keep running the machine until you “lose”.
There will be occasional times when you get runs of duplications but if you build a large chamber, leave lots of extra space and just keep loading the duplicates back into the original until you “lose” (taking into account criticality etc for things like nuclear waste) then you’re golden.
Excellent idea!
What’s the probability this leads to infinite nuclear waste?
One of the boxes is empty. Or has some donuts or something.
If you end up duplicating the waste, combine in into one box and repeat with another box of donuts. Eventually you’ll lose the waste, probably you don’t approaches zero as your operation time increases.Eh, maybe EchoChaos is right. :/
But what if you load the other box with something as valuable as losing the nuclear waste, so either way you profit?
edit to edit: No, idiot, that’s doubling your losses!
Every new post doubles my mistakes rather than resetting them! It’s meta!
It will lead to, on average, no change in the amount of nuclear waste.
With infinite attempts, double-or-nothing game will result in complete loss. The chance to get infinity waste conversely is zero. Feeding all your waste into the machine.
Problem is that power of two will run out of control really fast and Earth will implode into black hole of nuclear waste.
Reminds me of this suggestion by Ron Unz:
https://www.unz.com/runz/the-red-and-black-fund/
As mentioned by EchoChaos, the expected amount of waste stays constant. On the other hand, if you have a way of disposing of large amounts at once that is more economical than dealing with a slow trickle or storing it until it accumulates, the replicator might help.
The two obvious uses are machining QA, where you don’t care which tolerances a particular piece has as long as they all have the same tolerance and gambling, where people pay you for the opportunity to play double or nothing with some wealth.
I don’t think that the waste disposal idea that @Murphy uses can be plausible because your machine can’t hold infinite doublings, which is what is required to “eventually” win double or nothing.
If you can hold 5 doublings, then you will get rid of waste 31/32 times, but that 1/32 times will leave you with 64 times as much waste as you had before, so you’d expect to net zero.
Note that if you want exactly matched tolerances for small components, and you can make a lot of them, you can get large numbers of these small components by running the machine a lot of times. Put one piece in each box, push the button, and you’ve got two. Do that twice and now you have two identical pairs of components. Put one in each box and push the button and you now have four identical components. Iterate so you have two boxes full of four identical components, push the button again, and you get eight. And so on. You can use the device to go from lousy manufacturing precision to having a million exactly-matched components.
Yep, this was exactly the use-case that I came up with as the most viable one.
Ninja’d.
Okay, so you can use this for biology experiments, too. Get a supply of captured wild animals, and then use the same technique to get 2^k identical animals (not just clones, identical). There have to be some cool experiments you can do with this.
The same algorithm works for anything cheap you’d like a lot of exactly identical versions of. Find something that’s cheap to produce and not worth much when it varies, but that’s valuable when you have 2^k identical ones, and you can use the machine to make a lot of money.
Imagine using it to mint money. We make a whole lot of weirdly inked/stamped/stained pieces of paper, no two alike, in ways that would be extremely hard to duplicate intentionally. Run the algorithm to get one big batch of identical hard-to-duplicate pieces of paper, which you can use as currency or tickets or travelers’ checks or something.
I’m going to assume that you mistakenly said “hundred thousand” when you intended to say “ten million” or “hundred million”.
At the ‘few-hundred-thousand’ price, there’s an obvious use for this device in manufacturing. The factory that stamps out expensive electronics suddenly has a way to increase production by a factor of roughly 50%, once they build and install one of these. Sure, there’s 50/50 odds that the cheap pile of stuff in one box might be duplicated instead of the current WizBangGadget. But if the WizBangGadget is duplicated the other half of the time, production can surge to a higher speed very quickly.
You’re probably right that I gave a too low figure for the development costs. Make it say 10_000_000 dollars if the development team works here in Eastern Europe, 40_000_000 dollars if they work in Western Europe, 100_000_000 dollars if they work in the U.S. or Switzerland, 250_000_000 dollars if you want it all done in Silicon Valley.
I don’t see how the duplicator would help production in manufacturing though, other than perhaps what EchoChaos says.
Expected change in the number of WizBangGadgets is zero.
If we are going the mad scientist + rich investor combo, why not use it for consensus building among your minions. If there is a disagreement over direction of your corporation, have all the people on each side of the argument go in opposite chambers of the machine, pull the lever, and instant consensus! As a bonus, it may cause people to not reach that point in the first place.
This could also be used for politics. The US Presidential race is pretty much a toss-up anyway most years, so just put both leading candidates in the machine and pull the lever, and the winner will come with their own VP/Backup.
If you try that, you’ll certainly be charged with murder. You may have to figure out how to change society such that this becomes legal first.
As difficult as this is to make profitable in reality, it would make a great magic card.
Telsa’s Explosive Duplicator
1UR Artifact
Tap: Target two creatures or artifacts you control. Choose one at random to create a copy of. Sacrifice the other.
This could be a neat betting mechanism.
Especially if we can pull of the infinite expected value bets –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
Are we expecting the amount of energy this sucker uses per button press to be independent of the contents?
I’m thinking something like you charge up the plates of a huge capacitor, so one plate with a ton of positive charge and one plate with a ton of negative charge. Get your two chambers as close as physically possible, put a plate in each, and press the copy button. Now you have two plates with identical charges, so you’ve just created some amount of energy.
There’s probably a more impactful variant with something besides capacitor plates, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
Tommy: Mommy, mommy, Dave’s ice cream is bigger.
Dave: Yeah, buy yours was bigger the last week.
Tommy: Not by this much. It’s just so unfair!
Mom: *sigh*
But what if you end up with two Daves?
Tommy: Mommy, mommy, how come Dave gets a doppelganger!
A few niche uses:
– IVF for someone who wants identical twins.
– Creating identical objects for those who want untraceable items (e.g. firearms with identical serial numbers and other testable properties). Presumably possessing a duplicated weapon will become criminalized, but it will create doubt concerning more serious charges.
– Russian Roulette, now with much more interesting results for the survivor (many, many possibilities for the survivor to pursue).
I think there’s a niche here for things which are fairly easy to make but sometimes need to be absolutely identical in length or mass. Some scientific instruments, perhaps. Nuclear bomb explosive lens parts. Cables for high-frequency trading. But I don’t know if this device would be any better than current methods.
Assuming that our genetic technology has improved a little, the duplicator can be used to solve the problem of letting me choose, among the children I and my wife could have, which one we do have.
Make up a package containing a lot of my sperm and several of my eggs, arranged so each individual sperm and egg is identifiable. Make another such package. Put one on each side of the duplicator, press the button.
You now have two identical packages. You can destructively analyze everything in one of them to determine which subset of my or my wife’s genes each sperm and each egg has. Pick, from the other package, the sperm/egg combination that will produce the best offspring.
The basic idea is from Heinlein, but with an easier solution to the problem of how to learn the genes in a sperm or egg without damaging it.
More generally this could be done for anything where destructive testing is easier/cheaper/more reliable than non-destructive testing.
Weirdly, it still costs the same number of destroyed units, it’s just that you can use it to get much more fine quality control.
I’m thinking of cases where it’s not just “this type of widget is certified” but “this specific widget is certified.” Say you have a factory that makes bolts. Some of them are sold for $1, but some of them are x-rayed for imperfections and certified to absolutely guaranteed hold 1000 lbs of force. Those are sold for $20. My understanding is there are some things where this happens.
If destructive testing is much cheaper than an x-ray then you can afford to lose a few dozen bolts to this device every now and then and still come out ahead.
Also for certain things, you might want an exact copy sat around for engineering forensics.
Which I suppose is the same thing, but post-facto.
Or while it is in use. Apollo 13.
This is the best answer yet. Highly lucrative and easily fits the constraints.
This is my favorite solution so far, and Jake R explained why. You are making expensive technological objects that sometimes have faults, but it’s easiest to test the faults in a destructive way (in the wider sense of destructive: driving the first hundred kilometers with a new car is destructive because it reduces the price of the car so much). You duplicate the objects and test one copy destructively.
I still feel like we’re missing some potential though. There’s got to be some way to break this invention more.
One potential use of this is that if you have 2^n distinct things, you can make all 2^n of them identical to one of the things from the initial set, though you have no way of controlling which. This would be useful for medical testing: animal models could be made to have a perfect control group, and arbitrary numbers of them at that. If we had had this 10 years ago, we probably could have decided to limp along much longer with the international prototype kilogram if every lab could know that they were getting a perfect copy.
Another thing that this would be good for is single use products that have a low but detectable failure rate. For example, you could use the winnowing procedure above on 1024 packed parachutes. You could test one of these in very controlled circumstances, if it worked, you would know for certain that the other 1023 would work just as well.
Depending on how expensive it is, it could be used for mining. Take n * 1024 rock samples that contain varying proportions of some mineral that is both expensive to test for and expensive to extract. Run the winnowing procedure n times for each of the sets of 1024 rock samples. Your expected amount of mineral extracted is still the same, but your test is suddenly 1024 times cheaper.
Yeah, doing the 2^n identical replications algorithm lets you do exhaustive quality control testing on one or a few samples and know that the rest are good.
Question: Why do the odds on betfair and predictit differ so much?
Right now, predictit has Sanders at 46 to win the nomination. On betfair you can pay $1 to win $2.72, which works out to just under 37%. This is a 9-point gap. That seems very big to me, and it’s persisted for at least a day (I noticed a similar-sized gap yesterday).
Anyone with insight into why this gap hasn’t be arbitraged away? I don’t trade in these markets, so I assume there’s some cost to make trades, plus a bid/ask spread (but that looks to be around 1%). Also, is one of the two just much more likely to be accurate (i.e. more liquid, lower transaction costs / limits)? Would it be betfair?
not enough market makers is the simple answer. Given the volume of trades the market is predicting an outcome within a margin of error – those bids are likely within that margin of error.
Yes, but … why is the bid-ask spread on Predictit so small?
Is it possible to see the whole order book?
Yeah, bid-ask spread tells you the “margin of error” answer isn’t quite correct.
I think the reason is different populations of users plus too many restrictions and fees to make arbitraging away the difference rational.
From chapter 2 of Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Thanks! Huh, I guess I hadn’t realized how large these transaction costs are.
Though it doesn’t fully resolve the mystery for me. If you’re already trading on predictit (mostly for fun I guess), then it’s not that costly to adjust your position (you already know you’re going to pay taxes and fees on profits and withdrawals). So one would expect the prices to mostly line up, even if it wasn’t possible for one person to profitably arbitrage them, just because they’re both trading on the same information set, which critically includes the price in the other market.
Maybe the average trader on predictit is actually just not very bright, and the wisdom (which does exist, even predictit has great calibration compared to non-betting markets) is just a cumulative effect.
Soccer hooliganism and political activism are surprisingly intertwined; see this article on Italian football and the (usually) far-right Ultras associated with several clubs, and this Wikipedia article on the (in)famous Curva Nord hosting the die-hard Lazio fans. Much of this comes from (a) Roman clubs being Roman, that is, clannish and tribal about what areas of the city you come from and who the ‘real’ fans are and (b) Mussolini and Fascism and its popular survival after the war.
On the left, famously there is the German club St Pauli and its supporters:
The high-water mark of hooliganism, at least in the British context, was during the 70s-90s and developed as much or more into rival gangs who were more interested in violence and crime than in the sport (the matchdays serving only as an excuse to get together and organise fights). The deliberate crack-down by the authorities within the game and the police means that it’s much less of a problem nowadays. To the point that you’re more in danger of being visually assaulted by yet another Soccer Hooligan Movie than a real one.
The Yugoslav wars taking place in the decade 1991-2001 overlapping with the 90s hooligan period means that it’s not really surprising there were such influences and that the local thugs/hardmen/wannabes easily moved from adopting an identity as one of the ‘Ultras’ or ‘the Firm’ to one as paramilitaries.
Well, I can only throw two quotes from different essays by Chesterton against you, please take it as seriously as you made your argument against free will 🙂
Interesting finding that I have no skill in evaluating:
People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected from Schizophrenia
That’s because they will never gaze on a mind-shattering visage of the Great Old Ones.
This is pretty much the Netflix film Bird Box.
@albatross11 mentioned this earlier in this OT. @Douglas Knight suggested that it was base rate neglect. I haven’t done any digging to see if that seems correct.
It’s mentioned in an SSC post:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-up/
Since both Schizophrenia (about 1 in 100) and Congenital Blindness (about 3 per 10,000) are both relatively common there *should* be no real shortage of case studies.
Some more exact numbers in this paper:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00157/full
Ok, someone with better stats skills than me help out here:
If there is a 0.00019% chance of someone having a condition (a little worse than 1 in 500,000), what are the odds that a population of 311,591,917 would display 0 cases?
This feels like its going to be like getting 5 heads in a row at some point during 1,000 coin flips, but maybe not.
assuming independence
https://www.google.com/search?q=(1+-+0.0000019)%5E311591917&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS725US725&oq=(1+-+0.0000019)%5E311591917&aqs=chrome..69i57j6.15639j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I can’t tell if your tongue is in your cheek. Call it 0.0002% or P=0.000002 of having a condition. So, 0.999998 of not having it. The chance that 300M don’t have it is 0.999998^300M, or about 2.6e-261.
I don’t think the concept of justification is meaningful without free will. What will happen will happen; it’s no more or less justified than the cue ball following the 8-ball into the corner pocket in a game of pool.
It is obvious that people have goals and make decisions that (seem to) advance those goals. Justification is explanation how your actions will advance the goals we agreed are good, and thus are good.
From outside the system, the people are merely mechanical parts of the system; they have no goals and saying they do is just anthropomorphizing them. From inside the system…. there are no actors inside the system, it’s deterministic.
What are the most plausible non-humanoid alien races you’ve seen in sci-fi? Authors too often either go Starteck/Starwars way and give their aliens basically human body plan with some decorations (which is admittedly the only body plan we know for sure works for a sapient species, but that’s hardly a good justification), or err too far in the opposite side and, trying to make their aliens as alien and bizarre as possible, give them highly impractical or outright ridiculous features – odd-numbered legs, external digestion with food just glued to their bodies, piston-based locomotion, single cell organisms size of a human etc. I’d argue that multiple heads or mouths, single eye, no signs of skeleton for a terrestrial creature, extreme sexual dimorphism (especially where one of the sexes doesn’t get intelligence) or more than 2 sexes, tentacles over tentacles over tentacles (more than 1 branching) and some other commonly used features also fall into this category.
What are the best examples of an author staying as far as possible from both extremes and keeping their alien race inhuman but biologically realistic? Bonus points if their ecology and evolutionary history is discussed and actually makes sense.
Skeletons in Space by Andries Louws has some of the best aliens I’ve seen in Scifi. I’m not sure if it meets your criteria across the board but they definitely aren’t just “humans dressed up” like many aliens are.
Pierson’s puppeteers (Niven) have two heads and a complicated sexual reproduction scheme that involves a second helper species, and we get some discussion of how they evolved. They are also famously cowardly and paranoid.
The Tines (Vinge) are doglike creatures who are basically bright animals as individuals, who form a fully sapient creature only in packs, using sound to network together the individual creatures.
The Arachnoids (also Vinge) are spider-like creatures who (like all life on their planet) live 30-ish years at a time, then go into deep frozen hybernation for some time, and wake up and continue their life. They come off in _A Deepness in the Sky_ as being almost too human-like, but there’s a justification for that in-story.
Brin has a bunch of aliens in his Uplift series, and while many are humanoid and relatively human-like, there are also sentient plants that aren’t remotely like humans. One is an important character in _Sundiver_.
I loved that the leader of the Puppeteers is called “The Hindmost.”
To the devil with them!
Puppeteers was one of the specific examples I’ve been thinking about when plausibility was thrown away for the sake of weirdness. They have three legs – which is extremely maladaptive from the purely mechanical point of view, a creature with this body plan would’ve been surpassed by four (or more) legged competitors very early on. Their females aren’t sapient – while among sapient males, any mutation making a female smarter would’ve given a huge advantage and thus fixated. And it’s not that they would’ve need to evolve intelligence from scratch, just activate the genes which create it in males (of course in practice this means that a big gap would have never formed in the first place). They have two mouths, which I can’t exactly pinpoint what’s wrong with, but it’s never encountered in Earth biosphere ever, even though our last common ancestor was some extremely primitive cell – long before any mouths started to form. I’m very doubtful their evolutionary history justifies appearance of intelligence too.
Sentient plans are even worse, since on Earth no multicellular autotroph evolved as much as self-propelled locomotion, let alone any senses, let alone intellect. And it makes perfect sense – why should they? If you don’t need to search for food, because you generate your own nutrients, it’s apparently more effective to evolve passive defences and/or procreate, then to try and outrun anyone trying to eat you.
Hibernating arachnids sound more plausible though and from what you said I have no strong opinion on Tines.
Nitpick: IIRC, male and female puppeteers are both intelligent. (Kzinti females aren’t sapient–maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?)
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure “nothing like this evolved on Earth” is very convincing as a reason an alien could have evolved in a particular way, and am really unclear on why it’s obvious that a 3-legged thing couldn’t have evolved when we are 2-legged things that evolved in a world of mostly 4-legged big animals and 6, 8, or 10-legged smaller animals.
My guess is that Puppeteers would have evolved intelligence by needing to understand, predict, and coordinate the actions of the rest of the herd. (By comparison, elephants seem quite intelligent, and they’re also large herd animals, so this doesn’t seem impossible to me.)
The creatures described as “Puppeteer females” were really a separate nonsapient species the Puppeteers had parasitized to gestate their offspring. (Their two biological sexes, both sapient, were characterized as different types of male.)
You’re right, I was confusing them with Kzinti and/or what LHN describes in this regard.
The mechanics, thermodynamics and game theory are the same on every planet. On the other hand, we have a vast range of environments on Earth (and Puppeteers specifically are known to have evolved in a very earthlike environment – grasslands or something if I’m not wrong). One common thing about the numbers of legs you mention is they are all even. An extra leg doesn’t add mobility when walking, let alone running, rather it hinders it, no matter how alien your species is, and for stability when stationary, there’s a thing called ass, or thick tail in some species, but not a fully developed leg. Also, we’re not remotely the first bipedal apex predator or the smartest species on Earth, these were both done by dinosaurs (including Avians), a number of times.
For extra mouths, I’d guess it’s just added complexity for zero benefit (note that number of mouths would have evolved waaaay earlier than any appendages let alone Puppeteers using them as hands) but I’m really not sure about the cause. However, the fact that we started as a cellular bag with two holes, insects started as a bag with one hole, medusas started as the hell knows what, and over half a billion years and multitude of environments none of the groups ever evolved a second mouth does seem pretty suggestive.
Yeah elephants are a strong argument against the idea that only omnivores can be really smart. I’m genuinely confused why are they so intelligent, and perhaps that makes Puppeteers’ evolutionary history more plausible.
Puppeteers [ … ] have three legs – which is extremely maladaptive from the purely mechanical point of view
I have not read it, so as a general thought:
If the 3rd leg serves like the tail for a kangaroo — give balance while moving, and stable upright position — that could be an advantage.
The back leg also functions as a weapon, quite possibly used instinctively. (They turn away from their attacker, use the eyes on each head to triangulate the target’s location, and kick it with their back leg.)
Tines are almost exactly dogs except they broadcast their thoughts in the auditory range. I don’t think you can actually make a principled case for their evolutionary plausibility — there are surely huge disadvantages to constantly making lots of sound that would be selected against long before you could achieve the advantages of a hive-mind.
In terms of alien-seeming aliens from a Niven story, Moties strike me as interesting and, like, basically plausible barring their mental specializations. They’re from hexapodal stock, but have some kind of fiddler-crab style deal where on one side one of their arms became vestigial and largely vanished, and the other became giant, and on the other side they have two delicate manipulator arms, plus two legs. They have an endoskeleton and binocular vision. No neck, which then allows their big strong arm to pull on their skull to give mechanical advantage, with a sturdy, non-spine-based internal structure.
They have to mate or die. If you assume that a starving motie-ancestor that mates auto-terminates its pregnancy and itself survives, that doesn’t strike me as hugely likely to be maladaptive — the inefficiencies seem on the general order of what we see on Earth species. They’re serial hermaphrodites, I guess you could make an argument that this is adaptive because it prevents self-impregnation, which is not a great reproductive strategy, but allows more possible options for genetic recombination.
I can imagine a path from some kind of social pack species (like wolves) toward a collective intelligence, and using sound to coordinate between the pack members seems pretty reasonable. I mean, who knows whether it could really arise that way, but it’s not obviously impossible to me. We have at least one worked example of semi-social creatures that extensively use sound to coordinate their activities, and that have clearly undergone extensive evolution to support their sound-based communication and coordination mechanisms.
That’s actually something that is very interesting to think about. One would need to think on what are the necessary evolutionary pressures that lead to intelligence. I did some quick research, and it seems like the there is convergence in how the most intelligent non-human came about: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1439-0310.2009.01644.x
Complex environments, social dynamics and dietary diversity seem to be needed, and are capable of making species as different as ravens and chimpanzees to achieve “high” intelligence. My intuition is that birds would pretty much never end up as intelligent as humans, because they can’t manipulate things as precisely as apes (fingers are better than beaks).
Anyway, if I had to bet on what an alien probably looks like, I would bet that it would be bipedal and have hands.
That sounds very interesting, thank you, I’ll make sure to read the article!
Why do you think creatures with 4 or more legs – given they also have at least one pair of dedicated hands aren’t plausible? IIRC when vertebrates started to colonize land there were 2 taxons of fish competing for it, one with 2 pairs of fins used as legs, the other with 3, and while the former won on reality, from what we know it’s possible things would’ve gone otherwise and all the terrestrial life would have inherited 3 pairs limbs. But maybe I’m misremembering or it was no accident that 2 pairs of limbs won?
It seems like some body plans / environments make developing technology very hard. You might be able to become as intelligent as humans in an underwater environment, but it’s going to be hard to invent metalworking when you’re underwater!
In a fluid environment, a simple bidirectional twitch wandering along an axis is enough to give propulsion.
[illustration]
Simple, robust mechanism => evolutionary advantage.
And when mammals re-entered the sea, they used it again, this time with vertical bending for propulsion.
[example]
It’s not inconceivable that with a few million years of evolutionary time, a crow could evolve to prop itself up on its tail feather and wings and manipulate objects with its beak and both feet. Its feet don’t have to bear much weight so can remain precise manipulating instruments, and its wings could easily remain functional with slightly stiffer feathers. If flight becomes a less important evolutionary advantage then maximum brain weight (and power) also becomes less of a limitation.
One idea I had (but I haven’t seen his book): suppose the available solar radiation is all really long-wavelength stuff (radio). Then it might be workable for the plants to make wide antennas and absorb energy from it, but hard for the animals that need to move around to support sense organs that have to be, say, a couple meters long to be useful.
Pretty sure they don’t make stars like that. Temperature determines which wavelengths the star produces. A radio star would not only be colder than our sun, it would be colder than our earth (which glows in infrared).
Yeah, I have no idea what kind of cosmological conditions would be needed to give you such a situation, just that it’s one way I can kind-of imagine the pattern we were discussing.
ETA: Wikipedia says some pulsars emit strong radio signals–maybe that might be an explanation.
Also, maybe a pulsar being your planet’s main energy source would give you some situation where no-eyes life would arise, if (for example) you got a one-minute burst of light energy every hour or something.
The protobacteria that humans discover on their new planet (and are deathly allergic to) in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Aurora”.
I was impressed by the utter alienness, yet realistic-seeming behavior, of the creatures in Arrival. Would love to see a movie set on their planet. (FYI, I’m currently reading “Other Minds,” about octopus evolution, and I’ve always been partial to octopoid-like aliens, like the ones that appeared briefly in that Babylon 5 movie.)
Hm, I must admit I wasn’t impressed with the movie at all, from their whole nonsensical business with time, to rather pointless visit by the aliens (resolve the tensions created by said visit and help one woman reconcile with death of her to-be-born daughter isn’t particularly ambitious set of goals for a first contact). About the aliens in particular, they’re even called heptapods – and odd number of limbs on ground is both very maladaptive and easy to fix. And despite having so many of them, their limbs don’t show any signs of specialization afair. Also the idea of having 7 fingers on 7 hands may look cool numeralogically, but is really hard to justify evolutionary.
Assuming the arms are arranged in a circular fashion, I can’t think of any reason why 8 arms would be favored by evolution over 7 arms. After all, starfish have an odd number of arms (5). My guess is that it’s just a random first-past-the-finish-line feature of biology.
Yes, but starfish live in water. Something coming out of water onto the land will most likely at first use all of it’s primary limbs for locomotion and thus have a huge pressure for them to be even numbered and symmetrical. And from there on yes it’s first-past-the-post, and all its terrestrial descendants will have an even number of limbs and consequently of arms. Although I can imagine the first terrestrial creature having two types of appendages, larger ones it uses for locomotion, and smaller manipulative ones, perhaps some kind of tentacles or chelicerae around its mouth. If the latter then form arms, I can’t think of any obvious reason why they can’t be odd-numbered. But that’s visibly not the case with heptapods.
Regardless of all this, I thought the heptapods were not very imaginative or alien. Basically giant wise octopuses minus an arm. Pretty sure when Chiang created them he decided to put all his effort into exploring the (now debunked?) idea that language creates reality, and to reserve none for outside-the-box thinking with respect to exozoology.
It’s a beautiful story but one of Chiang’s least impressive from a sci-fi perspective.
I think we should at least entertain the idea of regressive evolution where something useful like a prehensile tail no longer conferred a competitive advantage and became the coccyx. When a species has evolved to the extent that it can leverage its own technology to take care of the fine-motor manipulation, there is no longer a particular selection pressure on those features and they go the way of the coccyx – the course that Wall-E’s humans are on.
Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves” was his response to critics complaining that his science fiction didn’t have enough aliens or enough sex. So he wrote an entire novel full of alien sex. Not his best work, but it’s pretty entertaining.
That’s easy. Expedition by Wayne Barlowe is a fake documentary of humanity’s landmark voyage to Darwin IV, with the intent of studying and cataloguing its diverse biosphere. The team quickly finds that all of the species there are blind, using sonar to sense their environment. The species are myriad, including medium-sized herd animals, raptorlike aerial predators, three-legged elephantine creatures so large that they sustain huge ecologies on their backs, an even larger sea composed of a single amoeba (think Great Red Spot), huge striders that roam across that amoeba, parasitizing it, and a variety of neutrally buoyant species, including one that appears to be proto-sapient.
Illustrations are full size, and fill nearly every page; the work is basically a picture book that would fit well on a coffee table. Barlowe designed this entire world; he’s an artist with a degree in biology and a career in making extraterrestrials look like they could actually exist. If you’ve ever seen a realistic looking alien in a movie after about 1995, chances are that it was designed by either Guillermo del Toro, or Wayne Barlowe (and in at least one case, both).
Wayne Barlowe’s paintings are fascinating because he doesn’t only use variations of existing species, but they don’t strike me as very plausible.
That looks like an amazing example of world building, but I presume they planet have some amount of sunlight, since human colonize it – and then there must be plants for animals to eat? If so, how likely is it that over billions of years of evolutionary history not a single cell happened on synthetising a photosensitive molecule other than their analogue of chlorophyll? I’d say not a chance. On Earth it happened early on, and I believe multiple times independently. And I said a lot above about an odd number of legs.
How could you get something like that? Maybe some weird property of the local star that occasionally either goes dark for unpredictable periods of time (so light isn’t so useful as a seeing mechanism) or has huge random flares that burn out all the proto-eyes that evolve before they can evolve a defense to the flares?
Light gives you finer resolution, and more importantly, doesn’t require you to spend energy generating a signal or inform the world of where you are, so it seems like eyes would be a huge win.
I can’t really think of any way to achieve this. The problem is, whatever you change spectrum, intensity, modulation etc of your lighting, it must still allow your autotrophs to synthesize organic. And if it’s good enough to power roughly your whole ecosystem, it’s certainly good enough for some organisms to use it for navigation. Long dark periods? All life will have to hibernate or die out since there’ll be no influx of calories. Flares? They either burn your plants so you’re screwed, or they not and then the eyes can be resistant too. Although I can imagine this limiting their usefulness, since more resistant likely means less sensitive, so you can get much more species with echolocation, but not entire ecosystem of them.
Chemotrophs are too low powered or unstable to support a big complex ecosystem, at least on Earth. Maaaaybe you can get around that, especially on a larger planet with different geological composition. But even then, assuming it was thrown out of the star system or something so it gets no light means it’ll freeze. Ok, it’ll remain warm for quite along time due to internal heat, more so for a large planet, but 1) I’m not sure it’ll be long enough for complex life to evolve 2) During that period the life can just use infrared for vision.
Perhaps someone with more imagination and/or actually knowing biology can come up with better ideas.
Another idea: For some reason (again, I have no idea how it would work), the solar energy arrives on the planet in short bursts–maybe five minutes in every hour or something–and its arrival is random or at least so complex as to be hard to predict. Most of life is spent in the dark, so being able to see in the dark is necessary to live, whereas being able to see during the occasional bursts of light isn’t all that helpful.
I got around to locating my copy of the book.
Darwin IV is 6563km in diameter, and circles an F-class binary – so close together that they’re effectively one star. A Darwin IV day is 26.7 hours long. F-class is a yellow-white dwarf.
The planet has no seas (other than the “sea” formed by that giant amoeba), but does have polar caps. The atmosphere is oxygen-rich, and the 3/5 Earth gravity yields some gigantic fauna. The plains are “blanketed with thick tube-grass, a stalky pencil-thin succulent that grows astonishingly fast.” These plants store huge amounts of the planet’s water.
The fauna have evolved “sonar and infrared faculties” instead of true eyes, and also often have sophisticated pressure receptors along their lateral lines. They also have hot bioluminescent spots that show up well on infrared (Darwin IV is much colder than Earth). Temperature is their primary sense.
There might be more background in the book that I’ve forgotten.
The blobfish (oh wait, that’s real).
Seriously, I think you could Google a picture of an existing species right here on earth and have 90% of the population assume it’s an alien special effect. Which prompts the question, has anyone written a book with aliens modeled on/evolved from tardigrades?
Right, basically what I was asking is when any of those weird creatures are used as a basis for a sapient species, for cases where it can make sense. Intelligent tardigrades would definitely be something worth seeing/reading about.
Tardigrades are probably too famous. Also, they’re already called “water bears” because they remind people so much of another well-known species.
Actually, come to think about it, tardigrades are already done.
Mother of Demons has two mollusk like races. I’m no biologist, but the book seemed to at least be making an attempt to extrapolate what a planet ruled by mollusks would be like.
As for extreme sexual dimorphism, I could imagine a species where the female is sentient and the male is microscopic, first living inside his mother and then inside his wife. I figure an older female could transfer some of her sons to a young female, who then uses them to reproduce for the rest of her life.
It would be strongly advantageous for the “mother” to transfer her own DNA rather than her sons’.
One idea I have, which I’m not sure if anyone has explored, is a world in which the aliens reach adulthood far faster than humans do, around three years. You can’t just say “history would be like ours but just sped up,” because it takes just as long to drive your tank from Moscow to Berlin or cross the Atlantic in a ship. The effect would be that wherever there’s a vacuum it fills up far quicker than it has for humans. They never experience a world like ours where they are far underneath their carrying capacity. Theirs would be a more brutal world and that would be used to explain their lack of ‘morality’ when they first interact with humans.
Coronavirus badness update:
Still at a 5-6 (out of 10). China is clearly lying about the numbers at this point, especially with their update of 15,000 new cases in a day and it will affect global supply chains, but spread outside of China remains low and probably containable. Although I will update my belief about what percentage of the 5-6 level damage is human death and what percentage is the economic damage from the quarantines and lockdowns.
The big question is what will happen in first world countries like Japan, which saw its first death today.
The WHO is claiming that those 15k new cases represent multiple days or weeks of data, not a one-day spike, so it’s not quite as bad as that. I’m still at a 4 out of 10.
Personal Badness – 6-7/10. My work has had to basically shut down all operations in Southeast Asia. Significant disruptions to planned events, basically every timeline we had is out the window.
Overall Badness – 4/10. I’m with Broblawsky on this, I still think this will mostly be confined to China.
The Chinese rumor mill has it that the Wuhan lab that was studying the virus had workers that did not properly dispose of the dead specimens. Rather than burn them in hellfire and such, they sold them as food.
Plausible, but yet to be borne out.
Plausible, but yet to be borne out.
As a rumour/conspiracy theory? Yeah, it sounds good.
As reality? I would hold off on it. Even if we accept Chinese labs have shitty discipline, no standards of biological waste disposal and workers are corruptly making money on the side, they would probably have been doing this all along – they wouldn’t suddenly decide to sell the one lot of specimens that had this one particular virus.
So if Wuhan routinely had outbreaks of “hmmm, never saw that one before”, then okay, entertain the possibility. But right now, that sounds more like the ordinary kind of crazy idea whipped up by lack of information and online frenzy.
That’s the thing, the contention is that they’ve been doing it all along, it just so happened that like SARS, the virus mutated in one of those specimens “improperly” disposed of.
I have heard this one from my Chinese contacts as well. They seemed to believe it. I am more skeptical. Anyone have anything better than rumor to confirm, deny, or cast doubt on it?
Rumor mill scoop #2: Deaths severely under-reported, based off of the uptick in cremations at funeral homes. The cremation rate is estimated at between 1k to 2k for the past two weeks.
China’s death rate in 2019 was 7.2 per 1,000. Wuhan is 11 million people. So annually, one would expect 79,200 deaths, or around 217 a day. One of the 8 (not the largest) funeral homes was recently approached and a dude said they processed 127 bodies the prior day.
So assuming the “excess” deaths of 800/day are from coronavirus, over 2 weeks the # of deaths in Wuhan alone should be at least 11,200, or around 10x the reported deaths.
Yes, I’ve seen all sorts of rumors about that also. Not that I trust the Chinese government much, but I trust internet rumors less. That said, you may have heard this from a trusted source, and if so, which one?
I’ve also heard internet rumors that this disease only really affects east asians, because they have more ACE II receptors and this virus enters cells through ACE II receptors. I have literally zero idea whether this is complete BS, plausible but unproven, or pretty certain.
I trust my source faithfully relayed to me untrustworthy internet rumors!
As I lay out below, it’s moreso the # of cases being under-reported given the 2% or so mortality rate seems apparent to those who have talked to crematoriums. I suspect half a million are infected in China (mostly Wuhan) based on the early spread of the disease internationally, and now these alleged crematorium figures. That roughly corresponds to 1 in 22 having it, which I don’t think is too farfetched given how something like the flu works in the US, which there is actually a vaccine for. The CDC’s estimates for 2017-2018 were 44.8MM people in the US got it, or about 1 in 6 or 7. Again, with flu vaccine and all.
LOL.
These numbers are certainly plausible.
No.
You can’t infer local excess deaths from national mortality rates, especially not in China for all sorts of reasons. You also can’t assume per-day rates are flat through the year (they’re not), or that some dude who may or may not actually work at the mortuary knows what he’s talking about, or that even if he did it’s meaningful and not just because, e.g., the owner of largest mortuary happened to be on vacation that week.
Agreed that it’s a very cursory methodology, but if you look at flu deaths from 2017-2018 in USA, I don’t think the numbers are particularly alarming.
CDC estimated 61k died from the flu in the US. If half a million people in Wuhan actually have the virus, and the mortality rate is 2%, then 10k lines up.
I’m not arguing that the mortality rate is higher than reported. I’m suggesting that the # of cases is underreported given the mortality rate based on admittedly sketchy funeral home cremation extrapolation
I have been looking for an explanation for the following observation, but cannot find one:
The nCov is said to have a higher R0 than Sars, and is clearly worse in China. But Sars seems to have spread much worse internationally than the nCov. Going off memory, *one* person lead to an infection of close to 100 people in Toronto. Currently, there has been one(?) h2h transmission in the US (among >10 cases), no(?) h2h in Australia(>10 cases). There have been a lot of h2h in Germany, but all are confined to the employee’s of the affected company and their immediate relatives. Containment measures are surely part of the explanation, but according to case reports, many of the known cases were walking around quite freely before they got diagnosed or before the severity of the virus became a public topic. The numbers don’t add up for me.
I would be interested in a summary of cases in Japan and Singapore, if anybody has one.
What reasons are there for the virus to spread so virulently inside China but not outside?
First, quality of health care system.
Second, time. The disease started there, so it has had time to get enough infected to overwhelm that system and its supplies.
My knowledge of China is more Beijing than Wuhan, but possible factors could include: High population density, extensive use of public transportation, heavy air pollution, common use of relatively unsanitary food carts, factory jobs that won’t take “I have the sniffles” as an excuse for missing work, extensive use of traditional Chinese medicine, low social trust limiting engagement with official medical and public-health services, and possibly climate, diet, or population genetics. Just off the top of my head.
Some but not all of these will be present in neighboring southeast Asian nations, and we don’t know which ones may be most important.
Is there any way to fix aromanticism? Or failing a general solution, to force yourself to develop romantic attachment to someone?
I used to be able to develop crushes in high school and college, but for typical nerd reasons, didn’t really date. It feels like I stopped developing crushes on friends and acquaintances around 23. Ironically, starting at around 25 (I’m 29 now), I’ve been able to get dates pretty regularly via a combination of apps and social situations. But despite going on 57 first dates, 18 2nd dates, 10 3rd dates, and 3 times that I kept seeing the women I felt most likely I’d *eventually* develop feelings for for over a month, nothing’s ever clicked.
This is obviously very much at odds with how it seems to work for most people, and I find it pretty distressing. I do *want* to be in a romantic relationship, but I’m increasingly worried that that’s not possible.
Probably worth noting that I have a very low, albeit not nonexistant sex drive, and it’s definitely gotten weaker as I’ve gotten older. That said, asexual people seem to have little problem developing romantic relationships (cf: our dear host), so I’m not sure that’s the real issue here.
@epenethesis,
All that you described and especially how old you were when you notice the changes seem normal to me.
Speaking for myself I’m just less passionate than I was in my youth, 15 year-old me wasn’t very different from 20 year-old me, but 25 and especially 30 year-old me were, and (among other ways) the differences match what you describe.
Embrace it and call it “wisdom”.
Well, most single 29 year olds still enter romantic relationships, which I seem to be unable to do.
Or are they all just joining their lives with random people with very little emotional impetus behind it?
@epenethesis says:
Judging from The Atlantic Monthly and many “click bait” headlines romantic partners are increasingly rare for your generation, maybe because of more digital distractions and less cocaine and lead exposure?
(I’ve also seen the rise of online “dating” blamed, paradox of choice or casino effect or something)
Maybe not “little” but judging from my experience definitely less, and frankly having lower emotional highs was worth the higher lows, adolescent “in-love” was mostly painful.
Do you still live in the Bay area? If so, I think there is a cultural contribution to the issue.
You don’t have to answer it, and excuse me if some of these come across as offensive, but do any of these apply to you?
1. Had a tough breakup you didn’t get over
2. Have a goal of hooking up when dating
3. Have mostly male friends
4. Have a list of expectations from a spouse-to-be
5. Watch porn regularly
Again, I don’t know you at all, but the process seems a bit off – I’d think you’d keep seeing people that click rather than go on even a 2nd or 3rd date.
1. I had an *intense* crush around age 23 that took about a year to get over. However, I’ve never had a break up (as my original post states, I’ve never really been in a relationship)
2. Nope. Again, low sex drive
3. Mix. Was in the SF tech milieu through most of my 20s, so tilted male for that reason.
4. Yes? I don’t think excessively exacting, but everyone has some standards
5. ~1x a week
The issue is that no one really seems to click. Going on 2nd or 3rd dates when I think “eh, she seems interesting” is just an attempt to check that the issue isn’t I’m writing people off too quickly/have too exacting of standards/expecting too much from a first encounter.
May just be a season of life – what other things do you enjoy doing? Cookoing? Games? Sports? Hiking?
Perhaps try to find an existing friend or make new friends (who are female) that share those interests and go from there. The low sex drive will help those relationships! Girls really value guys that they trust are into what they are into rather into their pants.
Can try a few meetups, again with the goal to befriend. Romance should blossom on its own when you find a companion you share a lot with.
As a warning, however, it is my understanding that failure to declare romantic intentions in a timely fashion is generally not appreciated.
Right. The Friendzone isn’t some inescapable black hole, but it’s definitely a thing you need to account for.
Desperate times call for desperate measures!
But seconded
One possibility might be epenethesis is demiromantic, though, in which case the reason they don’t fall in love like other people is precisely because they need to become friends with a prospective partner first.
As for avoiding getting labelled a creep, the solution is to be friends with a group of prospective partners, rather than befriending just the one, and have them on pins and needles about your intentions until the situation resolves.
Which is to say, build/join a larger friend group that does group activities together on the regular.
Why do you want to want a romantic relationship if you don’t have a high sex drive? Desire for family? Social pressure? The 14 words?
You shouldn’t expect to develop romantic feelings for someone after a month of dating, particularly if you aren’t doing the dirty deed. It usually goes sex -> romance for men, and then often it’s just sex -> nothing. The whole soulmates meme is kind of gay.
That’s a bizarre thing to say given that gay men notoriously have more casual, non-romantic sex than any other demographic.
I am about your age, I still get nervous and excited when there is a prospect for physical interactions with someone I am attracted to, which gives me a ‘spark’ on almost any date I go on. That being said, I have never been in ‘love’ and don’t expect I ever will be. I do intend to marry, but I don’t think I will ever fall in love, I am just looking for someone who I think will make a compatible life partner/child raiser. I tend to typical mind pretty hard about this, and assume that nobody(or almost nobody) falls in love as depicted in movies, fiction, etc, but I am probably the weird one.
To me the mental state that I associate with love involves elevating the other person, and I am generally really bad about this. Potentially related, I don’t experience and don’t really understand being a ‘fan’ of someone else. Yes so and so is funny, or a good actor, or whatever, but I just don’t care and I don’t really understand the head-space of people who do, who scream or freak out when they meet their favorite celebrity. (Iv’e never met Scott in person though, so maybe I just haven’t met the right celebrities yet)
During WW1, some countries quickly realized that they were completely unprepared for industrialized, total warfare and gave up pretty soon. Was this just a matter of lack of will or was it the case that they literally could not keep going?
Can you give specific examples of what countries you have in mind? As far as countries that got rolled pretty quickly, Romania jumps to mind, but in their case they entered the war late and immediately faced the German war machine in full swing (Germany arguably being the most prepared country and probably top-3 if not #1 in overall fighting will).
Romania was the first country that came to my mind but I’m generally thinking of those countries in Eastern Europe that couldn’t handle industrialized warfare. My understanding is that by 1918, Germany was doing almost all the heavy lifting in Europe for the Central Powers. To a lesser extent, I’m thinking of Russia. They did put up stiff resistance for three years but then folded in 1917. How much of that was low morale, and how much of that was just not having the resources to keep going?
Low morale was all of it.
At a surface level, being willing to spend huge quantities of blood and treasure is itself a big part of being prepared for industrial war, so I’m not really sure how to approach this – you can’t really separate the morale from the materiel dimensions, they each feed into each other.
WW1 is a complex beast wherein the Germans were basically always “winning” while they knew they were technically losing because America was totally not neutral and Britain controlled the Atlantic.
So it is certainly a case by case basis. Countries falling to Germany couldn’t match the tech. The French/English couldn’t match the tech. Also, you have to understand that its not a popular decision to throw away 50% of your males age 16-40 just to lose a war more slowly.
Unless there is a case of total genocide slash selling captive population to slavery (think Rome vs Carthage), all defeats in war are essentially matters of lack of will to resist. Even if your field army is broken and your country occupied, there is always a possibility of guerilla resistence.
It’s pretty common to see comments that “race doesn’t exist” or “race has no biological meaning” or “race is just a social construct” or “race is unscientific.” An old post by razib khan (13 years old) that I saw linked today goes over some of the reasons this is nonsense.
People don’t really dispute that people with ancestors from different continents look different or have some degree of related genetic differences, but the associated, highly ideological assumptions grafted onto that fact.
birdboy2000:
Sure. The problem is, the only way to decide whether those highly ideological assumptions are correct is to examine them directly, not to try to define away the whole question.
Douglas Knight:
Thanks, I missed that!
In the (Western) general public, sure. Around here, not so much. I think the majority of this blog’s readership privately (or extremely vocally, in some cases) believes that there are significant differences in human characteristics across different genetic clusters/regions of origin.
The issue of course comes when race is used badly as a proxy for traits that have better indicators in a particular individual. For an obvious example, knowing that someone has a Harvard degree will give me a better rough estimate of their level of intelligence than knowing if their ancestors hailed from Nairobi or Nanjing.
Even at the macro level, using race is somewhat ~problematic~ at the national level without taking into account the history and governmental institutions of the nation. It would be an extraordinary claim to say “race” doesn’t explain any of the variance in outcomes, but pinning down what percent is the contentious thing.
I myself (being thoroughly mixed-race) am strongly in favor of further research into human genetic diversity for the potential medical benefits. But then, I don’t have a horse in the race, no pun intended.
When those definitions are based on centuries-old observations, it’s reasonable to ask whether they accurately represent reality.
broblawsky:
So, it seems like this quote from the linked post kind-of addresses that:
This says that among American particiants, at least, you get the same racial categories by asking people what race they are (using more-or-less the centuries-old racial categories) as by looking at DNA.
This seems rather like the way that pre-DNA scientists inferred a sort-of tree of ancestry among animals. Later on, using DNA, people found that the old tree was a reasonably good fit for reality, but got things wrong in a few places. The older observations weren’t wrong, they just weren’t as good as what you could get with better tools.
Note that none of this says anything about racial superiority theories or any particular claim of racial differences–just that you have to address those arguments directly, not by ruling the whole category of race somehow non-scientific and therefore out-of-order.
This is an often repeated claim that seems suspicious to me, because
1) If you interrogate DNA you can get a wide variety of answers depending on what markers you look at and which number of categories you tell your algorithm to construct.
2) People are actually not that good at the telling race of others (given the many anecdotes of white people successfully passing as black, and reciprocally) and often have fanciful ideas about their own ancestry.
This is noise in the measurement, and there isn’t that much of it, which is why it’s only anecdotes.
Even Elizabeth Warren didn’t claim to be anything like full-blooded American Indian.
I am fully aware of the “fuzziness” between races from personal experience, but that doesn’t make the distinctions not real.
Just because it’s tough to tell where red becomes purple doesn’t mean that purple and blue don’t exist.
(You could have picked a better color for your example, given that purple doesn’t in fact exist — it’s just a trick of the brain to avoid seeing equal amounts of blue and red as green, which it should logically do, but would be highly impractical)
I might even go so far as to dispute what you just said, if what you turn out to mean is that you can group people into clusters where all members of cluster A are more like every other member of cluster A than like any members of cluster B.
Unfortunately, many people like nice categories. They don’t want cars blending imperceptibly into trucks, or blue blending imperceptibly into green – they want everything to be A or B. Much nonsense results, and a fair amount of that nonsense is on display in discussions of race.
And this is before ideological assumptions are grafted on – it’s even before they decide that one of these groups includes them personally, so they therefore prefer it.
That objection is equally true for other racial discussions though. If some blacks earn more than some whites, is it sensible to discuss black and white people as groups with different opportunities in life?
Just for fun: most Americans seem to think they can assign races to individuals easily and automatically. If they also have a conception that Klingons are likely to murder them in their sleep, they might well refuse opportunities to those they consider to be Klingon, convict them of murder on evidence that wouldn’t convict those they believe to be other races, etc. At that point you can easily produce evidence that the more someone appears to be Klingon, the more of this type of trouble they tend to experience. And a category thinker would just phrase that as “Klingons ….”.
Note that I agree with you – most discussions of “race” are flawed, sometimes to the point of uselessness, because of this kind of simplification. But a social category/construct can have effects like the above.
@DinoNerd, Have you considered evidence which might falsify the Klingon story? Have you heard of the Galactic Crime Victimization Survey?
@DinoNerd
That wasn’t actually what I was arguing. I was being a devil’s advocate to show that extremist claims intended to completely undermine racism, actually also undermine the very claim that racism is an issue.
Categorizations are in general only valid if they (can) actually give you an answer for the specific question you have. Categorizing by race is neither always useful nor always useless.
I’m not convinced that this is true or that you are just pointing out a tautology: people believe that they can categorize people who obviously belong to an ethnic group rather well.
Culture tends to have a substantial correlation with race/skin color/etc, which makes race/skin color/etc an indicator of culture, just like clothing may be (and in some or even many cases it may actually be a better indicator than cultural behaviors like clothing choice, when the culture is not worn on the or as a sleeve).
A complication here is that if Klingons are actually substantially more violent, not discriminating against them doesn’t actually cause equal outcomes, but different victims.
For example, if every other Klingon murders their host who rents them an Airbnb, then not doing rental discrimination will cause far more hosts to be killed per rental to a Klingon, than per rental to a non-Klingon. This is really quite unfair to the hosts.
However, discriminating against Klingon renters to keep the hosts’ chance of being murdered per rental low, is unfair to the Klingons who weren’t going to murder their host.
There isn’t actually a (non-)discrimination solution that is truly fair to all Klingons and all hosts, except to equalize the host-murdering tendencies of Klingons and non-Klingons or to perfectly be able to predict who is going to murder.
@Aapje
This is an old and tired argument. Some people discover, let’s say, that 1 in a million Klingons are criminals, but only one in 1,100,000 Vulcans are criminal. Maybe they have good evidence; maybe some liar seeking tenure produced “research” “proving” this.
Now they know that Klingons are more likely to be criminals than Vulcans, so instead of looking for the one in a million who actually are criminals, they simply treat all Klingon appearing people as likely criminals – and when they actually catch a Vulcan appearing person in the act of commiting a crime, they announce that s/he was really a Klingon passing themselves off as a Vulcan, or fail to mention their categorization – or acquit them in spite of evidence, since Vulcan’s aren’t criminals.
Whatever they do they commit a massive injustice – one that’s still unjust even with numbers more like what they possibly imagine (1 in 2 Klingons are criminals, and only 1 in 10 Vulcans). It’s not especially unjust to those people categorized as Klingon who actually are criminals, or those categorized as Vulcan who are not. But the rest are punished or rewarded for what they don’t in fact do, just because it’s common in their group.
They also fail at their own goal, if that’s preventing or avoiding crime. But they feel really good about their own Vulcan moral rectitude, and proud to be part of the more desirable group ;-( And it’s not too strange to refer to this as their “revealed preference”, though of course it’s also possible that they simply don’t think very effectively.
In any case, I’m afraid I was just playing with ideas. Given what you have stipulated, one possible explanation is … All this in response to people who appeared to be touting false contradictions in the ideas of those who regard race as essentially a social construct.
In the unlikely event that all you can know about a person is whether they look like a Vulcan or a Klingon – no reference checks, criminal records, job history, etc. etc. then you *might* get some advantage using their categorization as an extremely unreliable heuristic, though equally possibly at a cost of convincing previously innocent Klingons that they might as well do what they are going to be punished for in any case.
That’s not realistic. Yet we’ve had poster(s) here who clearly prefer such heuristics, having made claims like “If I wanted an engineer, I’d hire the person from the group that produces proportionately more engineers, rather than the person with engineering training and/or experience”. I presume that people who behave this way are attached to reified categories in a way I completely can’t empathize with. (Those simply making such statements might merely be trolling, but I don’t think that’s the case in the current thread.)
I don’t understand why so many people can’t see this.
Dinonerd:
I understand some people use racial categories and related statistics in dumb ways, or use them to prop up their prejudices. And yet, that *still* doesn’t justify saying untrue things in order to weaken the arguments of the dumb and prejudiced.
If Klingons kill a lot more people per capita than Vulcans, and some dumb people decide that this must mean that all Klingons are murderers and no Vulcans are, that’s an error in reasoning that should be disputed directly. It doesn’t justify trying to convince everyone that Klingon-ness is a social construct and there’s no scientific meaning of species and it’s all species-ist pseudoscience.
when they actually catch a Vulcan appearing person in the act of commiting a crime, they announce that s/he was really a Klingon passing themselves off as a Vulcan, or fail to mention their categorization – or acquit them in spite of evidence, since Vulcan’s aren’t criminals.
DinoNerd, I am shocked that you are ignoring the existence of Romulans. No need to introduce conspiracy theory gambits about “Klingons passing themselves off as Vulcans” when there is a simple, factual explanation for why some self-identified “Vulcans” are nothing of the type!
What next – arguing that Tellarites and Terrans are the same thing, because “Tellus” is another name for “Terra“?
How do you feel about species? Exactly the same issues commonly arise there.
Or how about social science research which uses socioeconomic class or poverty as category variables?
This is literally the largest part of the American car market (SUVs and crossovers)
@Albatross11
What I thought I was arguing above was that something can be a reified social category, and still be of interest to sociologists and others because of its effects on those so categorized, without representing anything more real.
It’s self evident to me that there are no firm borders between races, that I had to learn – in adulthood – which people would be categorized as “black” in the US – and that the borders not only could easily be somewhere else, they are somewhere else in other cultures. I started out looking for an explanation of people who insist on treating race as something independently meaningful – and in particular, “race” in the modern sense of 4 or 5 big categores, with no interest in smaller ones.
I can construct a dozen thought experiments that produce “racial” differences that are both statistically significant and ultimately meaningless, (Did you know that the “tall” race has proportionately more males and the “short” race has proportionately more females. Let’s all construct a pseudo-evolutionary just-so story to explain it. Or better yet, note that the “tall” race, containing proportionately more (young adult) males, is statistically more prone to violence than the “short” race.)
It’s very hard for me to understand my opponents in this situation. I can find both mistake theory and conflict theory explanations for their expressed beliefs, but that’s just about all. There isn’t a convincing argument in sight, and for me there never has been.
I can also construct thought experiments that produce meaningful correlations, which are what my opponents seem to be insisting are proof of race as a tangible thing, without producing non-socially-constructed boundaries between races. Some of them appear likely to be simplifications of what’s actually happening. (Simple example – some trait is statistically speaking, distributed based on ancestral latitud e- 10% of those with long term ancestry at the equator have it, and 90% of those with long term ancestry at the Arctic Circle. The trait severely increases the risk of some disease, so it’s important to check for it… but more so in those whose ancestry suggests they are more likely to have it…)
I’d be much more sympathetic to people interested in much smaller scale differences. Those seem plausible. But even then, people are individuals, and treating them as the average of their race isn’t something we do with those we actually relate to as people.
[Edit: Aargh – put this in the wrong place in the thread. I think we’re just too deep for an effective conversation.]
@DinoNerd,
Do you support affirmative action? Maybe you’re an exception, but people who make these kinds of claims tend to see very clear “racial borders” when it comes to that particular issue.
We could argue all day about Meghan Markle or Barack Obama, but there’s pretty much no doubt that Donald Trump is white and Kanye West is black.
But it turns out that the people who are studying these things are not idiots; they adjust for age and they consider the sexes separately.
And it turns out the second-tallest race is more prone to murder than the tallest or the others, even when considering age. (you have to bring in the population figures to confirm this… but at the high-homicide ages, it’s not even close)
This all to me looks like coming up with specious objections in an attempt to deny clear but uncomfortable statistics.
Why are they considering the sexes separately? If some race has not the same ratio of males to females, we ought to want to know that! Ditto for age!
That’s not adjusting for confounders, that’s arbitrarily deciding that significant traits you don’t like are confounders.
Yes, if some race has a lopsided sex ratio that’s probably interesting information. The way to find that out is not, however, to come up with a height figure that is affected by the sex ratio. Rather, you measure the sex ratio separately. And the same for age.
Just to clarify:
What I am not saying: American racial categories cut nature at a joint; race is the most important thing to know about a person; racial divisions are deep and important.
What I am saying: Race has a biological meaning in the sense that knowing someone’s self-reported or apparent race gives me important statistical knowledge about their genes and biology. Large groups of people labeled “black” differ in a bunch of observable physical traits from large groups of people labeled “white.” When we observe some important-in-life statistical difference between blacks and whites, genetic differences could possibly explain some or all of that difference, and the only way to find out is to dig down and check.
The trick here is that race is a somewhat fuzzy socially-defined category that has a genetic basis, and that also involves a bunch of shared history and culture.
There are things that differ across races that are definitely genetic, like consumption of sunblock and choice of hair-care products. And there are things that differ across races that are definitely cultural, like the black dialect of American English. And there are things that may be best explained by either one (or more likely some of each), like the higher rate of heart disease among blacks.
DinoNerd:
The place where average group differences matter is mostly when you’re measuring group differences in outcome. If you want to figure out which kids in your class belong in the advanced math track, you don’t need to worry about group averages for that–you can just give the kids a math test and put the ones with the high scores in the advanced track. But if someone demands to know why Asians are half the advanced math track even though they’re only 10% of the school, then we’re talking about group differences in outcomes–there we need to be able to talk about group differences in ability, to make sense of what’s going on.
Sure, racial categories are fuzzy and largely socially defined. Compare with:
a. Sorting people into “poor” vs “not-poor”
b. Sorting people into “tall” vs “not-tall”
c. Sorting people into “obese” vs “not-obese”
d. Sorting people into “old” vs “not-old”
All of these are fuzzy categories that you could argue either way, and that are largely arbitrary and socially constructed distinctions that don’t exactly cut nature at a joint. And yet, if you use those fuzzy categories to split a group of people into obese/non-obese, the obese ones will have, on average, worse health in particular areas. If you use those fuzzy categories to split a group of people into old vs not old, again, you’ll see practically important differences in disease prevalence and interest in playing contact sports and energy level between the old people and the young people. If you use your arbitrary/fuzzy categories to divide a group into poor and non-poor, you’ll see important differences in a bunch of social stuff. And so on.
I see American racial categories as being very much like these categories–there’s an underlying real difference, but exactly who should go in which bin is a bit ambiguous and could often be argued. But any sensible way of binning people will still give you some interesting results.
@Alexander Turok I’m exceedingly unhappy with affirmative action. I see too many cases where the people who benefit were those of the target group who were already most advantaged. OTOH, as long as being “black” gets you a higher risk of various kinds of nasty actions being directed at you, for whatever reason, some kind of counter balance makes sense.
I first came to the US to take a programming job. One of my first experiences here was hearing that another person hired at the same time had changed their mind and gone back where he came from – apparantly he couldn’t find any vacant places to rent, whereas I’d had no trouble. No one seemed surprised, since that priogrammer was black. (Regretful, yes; surprised, no.)
The other early experience was being required to attend some kind of AA meeting. I initially parsed AA as Alcoholics Anonymous, but of course it turned out to be Affirmative Action. That meeting told me, a literalist programmer type, that if people wanted to do things to me I didn’t like, because it was part of their culture, I mustn’t attempt to stop them. (Actually, the meeting didn’t raise the idea that I might conceivably dislike their actions for reasons other than cultural bias. But I’d been previously involved in an incident with an immigrant’s ‘culturally normal’ behaviour which had been problematic enough that I’d resolved with low grade violence… so I was sensitized.)
I interpreted the AA meeting, correctly I think, as warning me of requirements for certain kinds of speech at that employer, if I wanted to avoid getting in trouble. But it might just have been “see we’re trying” theater to impress some government agency.
That was nearly 30 years ago. I doubt things have gotten any better.
My bias would be to direct any affirmative action at people who are poor, regardless of other categorization. But that’s before I think about what evidence I have of the lived experience of black people in this country, which still seems pretty bad. That experience justifies some kind of counterbalance.
@albatross11 Your comment deserves a direct response, made with it in front of me, but that’s hard to do at this level of threading.
I can’t argue with any of the above, except perhaps for quibbling about the word “important”, and pointing out that smaller groupings would give you better knowledge.
This is where I’m less certain. Ultimately, I don’t especially care.
I can see two reasons to care about this:
– One is arguments about outcomes. When it’s argued that unless the proportion of Klingons in management matches the proportion in the population, there’s something wrong with the company, this becomes part of the set of responses the company might use.
– The other is in an attempt to improve individual outcomes, where I think it’s 90+% wrong-headed, because the categories are too broad. (The other 10% is things like screening for Tay Sachs disease primarily among people of Ashkenazi descent [a category much smaller than any modern race, by the way].)
The arguments about outcomes are overall unfortunate. It’s hard to distinguish between:
– obstacles at every step, because of reactions to one’s appearance
– socialized not to attempt such an achievement at all
– hereditable statistical differences in capacity and/or interest
Worse, most of the attempts to do so are highly motivated. The set of people who care about differences in outcomes for some reason other than trying to help a favoured group seems miniscule, except for those who are just trying to get excused from changing business as usual.
I certainly don’t have a solution. But what I see in practice is that looking at this sort of thing simply gives more “scientific support” for people who do believe what you are not claiming:
I somewhat seriously suggest studying genetic differences involving Tibetan, or Inuit or Pygmy populations – each with their own unique environment with real physical challenges – compared perhaps to some kind of average human. Leave the “racial” categories alone for a century or two, until society stops providing differing opportunities etc. based on them (if that ever happens – my guess is that if it does, it will be because they’ve been replaced by new categories serving the same social function.)
And refusing to look at it gives more “scientific support” for people who believe that any difference in outcomes must be due to discrimination, and if the difference persists that shows we are not doing enough to prevent discrimination.
Try reading popular articles that mention differences in average wages between men and women or between blacks and whites. What fraction even consider explanations other than discrimination, or conclusions other than that this must be unfair?
GNXP was originally a group blog. This particular post is by “p-ter”
Race is a difficult characteristic to use since there is no distinct definition of a race that will include all you think belong to that race and exclude all others. But it’s double difficult when those who deny that races exists, sometimes uses racial definitions, e. g. talking about “white males” as something problematic.
“White males as problematic” is using the “race is social construct” definition, though (as well as gender as social construction). Whether or not someone “passes” as a white male is inherently about how they pattern-match to the social construction.
This is good to know. So, me being born as white is not a problem. It’s just me having a white face that is a problem.
It’s just me having a white face that is a problem.
This explains fake tan! 🙂
Brassford:
Fair enough, but that’s true for a lot of other categories we use all the time, such as species and socioeconomic class.
Okay, so first of all there are people who hold or at least pretend to hold extreme beliefs. They genuinely believe there is no genetic basis to race whatsoever. They are wrong, but are also a (vocal) minority.
The more reasonable similar view is basically this: there are genetic tendencies among humans for a wide range of traits that are clustered by ancestry. Certain genes are more or less common among various human subgroups in a way that can have measurable impact (albeit often a small one). However, these groups map very poorly onto the modern concepts of “race”. Attempting to blame genetics for different outcomes among groups as broad as “White” or “Black” is as foolish as trying to compare the density of blue objects against yellow objects*. Furthermore, as racial barriers continue to decline and ancestry trees get let distinct, trying to determine what genetic subgroups an individual falls into becomes increasingly difficult and less useful.
*”We’ve run the numbers, and blue objects are 9% denser on average than yellow objects”
“Okay, but that probably has nothing to do with the color and the color of an object is one of the least useful things you could learn if you’re interested in density”
“Why are you denying that color exists? Don’t you know that color is a well understood scientific concept?”
Unsaintly:
Fair enough–that’s a reasonable argument to make, but when you say
that seems to me to be a claim needing some kind of justification. (Also, it’s worth pointing out that in an American context, we’re not talking about all people of European ancestry vs all people of African ancestry, we’re talking about populations that were mostly drawn from a smallish part of Africa and a few countries in Europe.)
How do you feel about using genetics to explain different outcomes between blacks and whites in rates of sunburn? Or sickle-cell disease? Those seem to me to be obvious counterexamples to your statement above. The first one is kind-of trivial, the second is a weird special case, but both are places where genetics drive some observable real-world differences. And there are more–IIRC, there are a number of diseases that have different prevalence in blacks and whites and American Indians and Asians, which also seems like a pretty obvious counterexample.
Now, that doesn’t tell you whether any particular observed correlation between race and some given outcome is ultimately genetic–that’s a research question, and often a pretty hard one with tons of potential confounds. But it does mean that you can’t define away the whole question by saying that race doesn’t exist or that it’s foolish to imagine that genetic differences could explain some observed difference in outcomes. You have to actually make the argument for the claim you’re making, and provide evidence.
No, they don’t.
So 1 (one) study, which starts by saying that it contradicts several previous studies, has found that 1 (one) way to look at genetic markers (out of the many different ways that exist) is a match for 1 (one) way to classify race (among the many ways that exist).
Color me unimpressed.
Eh, I’m not going to argue with a prior of 0.
I think I disagree on the blue/yellow objects.
If you are trying to figure out “what determines density, color is really not likely to be helpful.
But if you are answering the question “why, when you pick the densest objects in the building, are they disproportionately blue vs yellow?”, then it can be very useful.
Meh. Just say vegetables doesn’t exists (as a scientific concept). Is it meaningful to talk about vegetables?
“Race is just a social construct” means pretty much the same thing as “I never give less than 100% to my job”.
+1
Thank you for making me smile today.
I was recently in a quasi-job interview (long story) that seemed to be going well until the person I was speaking with asked, “Has there ever been a time when you’ve given less than 100% to your work?”
When I replied, honestly, “Yes,” she seemed really taken aback and asked for more details.
Without making myself look bad, I pointed out that sometimes people are tired, distracted or in some way unable to give it their all. Given that the position we were talking about was supervisory, I told an anecdote about a former subordinate of mine who was normally a stellar performer, but went through a tough divorce and had some trouble focusing. I then talked about how I worked with this employee and helped them get back up to standard.
The interviewer continued to look uncomfortable and replied that their expectation was that employees who physically weren’t a peak condition shouldn’t come in, and that personal problems were expected to be left at the door.
She then grilled me for some specifics on times when I hadn’t given it my all. I provided an honest and (IMO) acceptable answer about occasionally getting tired while working an overnight shift when I was younger. She seemed to accept this and the conversation moved on.
My question here is, what the heck was going on in this interaction?
I’ve got three theories:
1. This was just a test to see if I’d honestly answer an unflattering question.
2. This was all a setup to just see what kind of goofing off I’d admit to.
3. This person legitimately expects all employees to always operate at 100%
4. We had very different definitions of operating at 100%
Options 1 and 2 both seem weirdly aggressive/deceptive based on how the rest of the conversation went, but I legitimately can’t imagine option 3 being the case and I’m not sure what her definition of 100% would be if it’s option 4. Anyone with experience in this world have any ideas?
I hate it when people use 100 % (or even worse 110 %) as a metaphorical expression. I would’ve told her that I don’t know what she means by that because no one has ever “given 100 % to work”.
5. This person asks a lot of stock questions and is used to stock answers and you threw her with a different reply.
How reasonable was the rest of the interview?
Perhaps she’s just used to having people handwave a “no, I always give 100% to my job” answer?
That seems very likely true to me, but it’s not really an answer.
Maybe it was a test to see if you’re willing to tell pleasant lies for them?
I’d probably try and avoid answering the question, like “I consider it an obligation to give my all to my employer when at work,” and hope they don’t follow up and ask how often I fail to meet said obligation.
That’s clever.
@Aftagley says:
That looks like a pretty standard “Are you willing to lie the way we want you to?” question that private industry employers use to weed out the clueless and/or honest, if you haven’t encountered such before I’m guessing you’ve been blessed and/or are young, sounds like you recovered well from it.
Good luck!
Yes and yes.
Wait, what? I was supposed to parse this question as “This is your opportunity to prove you can lie to me in a semi-convincing fashion?” What possible benefit would a prospective employer get out of that?
Thank you!
At some point you might be promoted to sales (fudge the truth to customers) or management (avoid spilling the beans to employees about some pending reorg/firing/HR changes).
It may also be part of the company culture to simply mouth absurdities because they are expected, and think no more of their literal meaning than you do of “God bless you” after a sneeze. I have encountered such attitudes before; thankfully, I was never in a sufficiently prominent position for anybody to ask me to blither in that fashion.
Also, a good percentage of people do, in fact, not “give 100%” to their jobs at times, simply because the job is not worth it. That doesn’t mean you’d necessarily be a slacker at the job she’s interviewing you for, but it’s bad form to admit, “yeah, when I worked for the gas station I basically stared into space for hours at a time.” Might have been aiming to weed that out. Some employers really want someone who will throw themselves on every available grenade.
This is not a good filter for engineers who are often too honest and why you don’t want them in front of customers. I’ve lost count of the number of times a service guy has told me to shut my mouth and to not be so honest.
No no no, you are making it needlessly specific. The lesson is, you are supposed to parse any question that way. It’s called “social skills”.
People exaggerate all the time. People also expect others to exaggerate all the time, and therefore they always discount what they hear. So if you describe yourself truthfully, and they discount that… well, what you said was effectively perceived as “LOL, I don’t give a fuck about my work”. That is a really shocking thing to do at a job interview.
Seen that way, a bit of exaggeration isn’t even lying, but the practice would seem to push language to drift in less useful, but occasionally amusingly absurd, directions.
And I say that as the local recognized grandmaster in absurdity.
If that’s what the interviewer was doing, then she was being really stupid, because unusually honest people exist, and how does one miss that?
@Nick >
Sure they do, and most are bad fits for the jobs that such interview questions are for.
Hmmm, this is a fairly depressing outcome.
I can tell you with 100% honestly that the job I was interviewing for would literally never have me interacting with any member of the public, and wasn’t pipeline for any kind of sales or public facing position.
It would, however, have put me in charge of a bunch of resources (money, time, etc) which led me to thinking maximum transparent honesty was the way to go. I’ll likely reevaluate this moving forward.
@Plumber
Sure, but note well that this explanation contradicts Viliam’s. It can’t simultaneously be the case that businesses are looking for people who will lie smoothly and that businesses think these are just reasonable social skills and have never heard of honest people. If the latter were true, they wouldn’t be filtering for it.
I have worked at several places where lying to customers and lying about ourselves was standard. For example when I worked for a very large company 90% of my job was being a living person in the building in case of an emergency, as such I spent most of my time goofing off on my computer. I still kept a spreadsheet ready to alt tab in case my boss came in. He would joke about how busy he was, I would agree, and then he would go back to his office and sit down and goof off on his computer/make personal calls(I could hear him through the wall). Nobody actually had any work to do, but we were serious business people doing serious business, and of course I always gave 100%.
Your office sounds like the poster child for David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.
Fixed.
Not “could,” but “will.” An employee who values honesty and his own integrity too much to smile and nod at obvious bullshit isn’t the kind of employee all managers want.
Huh. That sounds like a way to verify Zvi’s Moral Mazes idea. If corporate is systematically filtering for this, for at least some positions, this would be a pretty good evidence in favor.
I wonder if there’s a way to create job profile that differ only on this kind of question and how employees respond?…
I would add option 5: This person is not used to have an interviewee answer a question like that truthfully. But 4. is also a very reasonable explanation.
Yeah, I think it was probably a stupid stock question.
Like someone looking up a list of “good” interview questions, seeing “what is your biggest weakness?” and then asking it.
Not really caring if it is a good question or not.
Interview processes are one step up from reading chicken entrails.
Were more than about half the interview questions STAR questions? Anybody who relies on those isn’t really in the “I will ask meaningful questions and apply realistic assessment standards to the answers” camp to begin with.
Some of them were, but most of them were more focused on specific issues. This question was definitely not X in a series of Y stock interview questions.
You should have given her an equally stock answer – ie. Work Life Balance. Turn off phone/email during vacations.
It’s also common enough for interviewers to try and force you to act “diplomatically”.
The cliche “what is your greatest weakness” would be one if it weren’t so cliche.
Some others include “if you feel your manager is wrong about something, what would you do?” “suppose something changed/added that makes it tough to complete with the given time, how would you handle/prioritize things?”
How these questions should be answered is… debatable. If you’re not great at diplomacy, then honest should be fine as long as it won’t be a HR nightmare. Assuming your job is not something that requires diplomacy.
“My greatest weakness? Probably my meth habit. Or maybe my porn addiction–that’s pretty bad. Oh, and my extremely violent temper, that’s kind-of a weakness. Or maybe….”
Would a good answer be “I’ve been told I interview pretty badly,” or is that totally transparent?
“What is your greatest weakness?”
“Sincerity.”
“Well, I don’t think that sincerity is a weakness.”
“Well, I don’t give a fuck about what you think.”
@Viliam
That made me laugh as much as @Conrad Honcho’s musings on Conan the Cimmerian’s dating habits!
I hate the questions with obvious answers. At the interview for my current job I was asked during the peer interview section (where I was interviewed by members of the team I was joining), “How would your co-workers describe you?” I answered: “Sexy. Reeeeeally, really sexy.” They thought it was hilarious, and I did obviously get the job. But what am I supposed to say? “It’s a toss-up between ‘violent’ and ‘stupid,’ I guess.”
I think I’d go with, “Writes long posts about the real interpretation of The Karate Kid.“
You just pick your best job-related trait?
As others have pointed out, you are being naive.
This is totally normal part of corporate oppression, where you are expected to spit humiliating platitudes. Vaclav Havel, Czech dramatic, dissident and later president, captured reasons for this well in his (very real) example of a Czechoslovak grocery store forced to display a sign proclaiming loyalty to communist regime.
I was tempted to reference something like that myself, though I was thinking more of Stalin punishing dissident artists by forcing them to praise him. In both cases, the intent is to degrade the individual’s will by forcing them into complicity with falsehood. In this case, however, I don’t think it’s anything so conscious as all that; it’s more that people at the company are accustomed to a culture of inanities, and meeting someone who does not cotton on and accommodate themselves to it comes as something of a shock.
To answer your question:
The interview process is about lying convincingly, especially when it comes to why you love your job and want to work for this specific company. Honesty or bluntness just puts you back in the unemployment queue. So prepare some standard lies for the junk questions that are not about actual capabilities.
My own experience:
If I put 100% into my job they’d get upset at having 1000 lines of code to review every week, and not understand any of what I was doing.
So I put in almost no effort because that’s what they can keep up with.
At previous jobs, this wasn’t a problem because I had free reign and a long list of features to work through. More importantly, no entrenched customer base that hates change.
I’ve even seen this problem when playing multiplayer games like Minecraft or Terraria with friends. That same monomaniacal focus made cooperation with other people mostly irrelevant because creating something was always faster and a larger supply than asking someone else for it.
So giving 100% is not viable because it’s often more than can be easily processed.
Maybe, but if you go into an interview and scream “100%? You couldn’t handle my 100%! You probably couldn’t even handle my 10%! I’ll give you 5% and you’ll beg me to slow down!” you will not get the job. Don’t ask me how I know this.
I am surprised that the “right” answer _isn’t_ along the lines of “Oh yeah, after doing several weeks of 24/7 work to meet a deadline, I was only able to put in 99%”.
“Have you?”
“No one giving 100% to the company would ask such an inane question.”
Unless you’re a superstar, the must-hire genius/wunderkind of the field that can walk into and walk out of any job with any company they like with no repercussions and no problem walking into another job, then you’ll generally have to toe the line in job interviews and do the ‘usual thing’ when it comes to selling yourself, tailoring your presentation to the needs of the job, and answering the questions. Most of us are ordinary people applying for mid-level positions and sending out several applications at once, and most of us don’t get the ‘live your passion, make your hobby your work’ dream but have to do boring old slog because you have to work to live. Not to say it’s always boring old slog, you can and will enjoy your work, but there’s going to be a lot of ‘plough my way through the dull but necessary parts’ as well.
(1) Job interviews are all about lying. The honest answer to “Why do you want to work here?” is “Duh, because I need money to live, and you need a job to get money”/”I want a promotion and/or more money than my old job would give me”. The honest answer will get you crossed off the list. Instead, you are supposed to warble on about how it has been your dream since infancy to work for Wilson’s Widgets. Never mind that you’ve applied to five other companies and if any of them make you an offer, Wilson’s Widgets can go sink into the sea.
(2) Employers really do expect you to live, breathe, eat and sleep the job. It’s bollocks, because of course no human being ever gives or gave 100% to the job every day; you get distracted, sick, personal problems, even the trivial ‘finished big project and now just tootling around with busywork and surfing the Internet until the next big project’. Again, you are not supposed to answer honestly, you’re supposed to fudge up some “I’ve always made it a priority to put the work first/leave personal life outside/whatever excuse sounds good”.
(3) This is along the same lines as being asked “What is your greatest weakness?” They don’t want to know your weaknesses, and if you tell them, then you don’t get the job. Again, you are supposed to burble about “I’m too committed” or whatever: it’s all about selling yourself. Sell, sell, sell!
Any and every professional coaching/training I’ve had to undergo for job-seeking techniques has said the above. Even when I’ve had the confidence to be that one in the class asking “But it’s all rubbish, it’s all boilerplate, canned answers”, the reply has been “Oh yeah but you still have to do it”. There’s a grab-bag list of phrases and traits for every job and you just have to shuffle them about: everyone puts down in the “personal statement” part of their CV that they can work on their own and as part of a team, they’re conscientious and painstaking and creative and innovative, etc. etc. etc.
Yes it’s contradictory. Yes it’s boilerplate. Yes you have to do it. It winnows out applications until there’s a neat pile of ‘possibles’ on the desk to call for interview. And this is the whole point of preparation for interviews: you make up a list of possible questions, make up a series of stock answers to them, then practice until you can rattle them off like a script. Then you practice some more until you sound as if you’re not rattling them off like a script. Faking sincerity is the big thing here.
What an employer is looking for is “how can I get the most work out of this person for the least expenditure and disruption?” Doing the stock answers means you’re less likely to be disruptive, you know the expectations that you are supposed to follow. Honest answers mean you are likely to be the square peg in the round hole. Most people don’t take any of this crap too seriously (job coaches, HR, and the guy ultimately making money off your labour probably do take it seriously) so once you’ve got the job, you can be a human who is not 100% all the time on the work.
But to get the job, you first have to pretend that yes indeed, if by shedding every single drop of blood in your body it would increase the share price of Wilson’s Widgets stock by 0.001 cent, you would gladly do so, and only regret that you had but one life to give for the cause.
This makes no sense. A system that is optimized for liars and grifters is not going to benefit the company! I know, because I have met liars and grifters, and they are not good to work with!
ETA: Like, okay, suppose you get the smooth talking grifter who is happy to lie all day and night about anything and everything. Is he actually working to the benefit of your company? Of course not! He’s going to take credit for other people’s work, shift blame onto everyone else, and probably steal people’s stuff when they aren’t looking. Why would you design an interview process to pick up this guy?
But it benefits the liars and grifters who are calling the shots.
It makes sense if your company has more than two levels of hierarchy. You’re hiring for your team, but you don’t care about doing what’s best for the company, you care about you and your team looking good. If you accidentally hire a too honest person who actually cares, they may begin to (sticking to the area of my own job) complain that you should write clean and maintainable code, test it properly, wonder whether clients even need this feature, or some such. While a grifter will be happy to do whatever it takes to roll out the project in time and get a promotion/bonus.
Why would you design an interview process to pick up this guy?
Nick, it’s not about constant lying, it’s about regurgitating the acceptable answers. There’s a list of “this is what we want in an employee” which gets landed on the desk of HR (in this case) and then they go to work on selecting the CVs and setting up the interviews and so on (where I’m now working, I often get the job of “sort out these CVs then print out the list of interview questions” and I’m not at all trained in HR). To give you an example, about two vacancies ago I got one application in from a guy who worked on European space agency project. It was an interesting and unique work history. Did he even get considered for the job? Hell, no, because that was not what we were looking for. Could he have done the job? Maybe, even probably. Did he have a snowball in Hell’s chance? No, because he stuck out too much as outside the usual range of applications.
The guy who gives the honest answers about not being 100% when they’re tired or sick, or who doesn’t spin the stock answers out when asked “what do you consider your greatest weakness?” is probably the guy who is going to stick out like a sore thumb on the job: the guy who won’t ‘go along to get along’ with his co-workers, the guy who will rock the boat if he thinks he’s not getting a fair shake, the guy who will fight with the boss instead of finding a diplomatic and face-saving way of ‘this request is bullshit but I can’t say that straight out, let’s find some way to get around it’.
For example, from that list I linked, I think this is complete codswallop (if I have an “entrepreneurial mind-set”, not alone am I going to leave this job as fast as I can, I may even become your competitor if I think I can do the same service better and cheaper), but some idiot out there is going to think this is perfect advice for when they’re hiring someone, so coming out with “I don’t want to start a business, that’s a stupid idea” is not going to get you hired:
Tell a prospective employer that “Heck no, if I/my kid is sick, I’m not going to be 100% concentrating on the job, I’m going to be at home until I’m/they’re better”, you’re telling the employer “I’m too risky to hire because I’m not dependable time-keeper who will put in the contracted hours”. It would be nice if the world was different, but that’s how it is: they’re hiring you to work X hours a week, they want X hours a week of work, you tell them “Sure I’m gonna give you X hours a week of work” not “I’ll give you X hours a week except if my personal life takes priority”. Yes, people get sick and will take time off, everybody understands that, but this is like asking about “what are my holiday entitlements?” before you even get the job: it makes you sound as if you are not serious about working.
I’ve had to learn the hard way to bite my tongue and reel off the standard answers. Once you get into the job, it’s different, but to get to that point, you have to be the Usual Product. The unique, quirky, stand-out from the crowd may work in some areas and some jobs, but the usual run-of-the-mill world of work just wants the usual-run-of-the-mill kind of workers.
Yes of course liars and grifters are bad for a business! But it’s precisely because they know how to play the game of agreeability and standard answers that they get hired!
The thing is, in this interaction, it was fairly clear that I was being headhunted. I’m not a wunderkid, but I have had the good luck to stumble into a position where there’s just not many people on earth who do what I do and have my existing skillset – this is a skillset the interviewer’s organization presumably was interested in acquiring.
I’m currently, as I said several times before and during the interview, happily employed somewhere else and didn’t need this job. They could maybe offer me more pay but not a life-changing amount. I get the whole “we need to filter out all these applicants somehow, so we’ll just see who can toe the line in the application process” thing, but presumably the people doing so know what they’re doing, and no when it’s no longer necessary/appropriate. Why would you ask someone you’re actively recruiting these kinds of questions?
Force of habit, probably.
Yeah, if you were being head-hunted, then that sounds – to be frank – more like a recruiter looking to make commission on placing a new client than seriously considering you as a candidate for a particular job.
Had a standard list of questions, expected the standard stock answers, was thrown when you insisted on being honest, tried pushing to make sure you were persuadable. You stuck to what you said and weren’t biting, so that ended it.
On the other hand, if you are interviewing for a job that indeed aligns with your dreams (such as a pinball manufacturer when you’re an electrical engineer), being honestly enthusiastic probably shows.
if you are interviewing for a job that indeed aligns with your dreams
That is the ideal and would be great if it happens, but it doesn’t always (ironically, the interview I was most prepared for because I really wanted the job and felt it suited me and I suited it was probably the one that went worst – I got the impression I was more prepared than the interviewers!; the interview that was ‘stock questions and answers’ got me hired).
Man, I’ve worked at some pretty toxic environments, and even THERE they didn’t expect people to give 100% all the time. This just seems like a stupid question. It doesn’t seem like a standard STAR or other behavioral question, either.
What was the position of your interviewer in the company? Also, was she the hiring manager? Approximate age?
On the youngish side; not a hiring manager but I’m pretty sure she’d done interviews before.
It sounds like you were getting head-hunted based on one of your posts above. Was she with a recruiting agency or a HR person on behalf of a company trying to poach you?
Both of these people have a very good chance of not knowing WTF they are doing. Either that or they were trying to get you into a position that would require a ton of hours and this question was an essential filter (those positions sometimes exist, and certain people need to fill them, but they aren’t for everyone).
I don’t think I’ve ever had head hunter try to informally pre-screen interview me in this fashion. They are usually trying to dangle bait, and once you bite, they are trying to aggressively reel you in and put you in front of a decision-maker to see if you stick.
This just seems like a stupid question.
Probably some dumb question she picked up from some dumb article or book or seminar: next time you’re interviewing, throw this one in! It’ll winnow out the diamonds from the fakes!
It’s like the bullshit “what business do you want to start?” question I linked from that list above; some idiot will pick up some buzzword or modish trope and think it’s the bees’ knees and use it even where not applicable. Being able to take bullshit in stride is all part of learning to deal with life’s rich tapestry as it applies to the world of work 🙄
Lots of good answers here. Yes, it is true, to get a job one has to lie with as much sincerity as possible. I don’t understand why this is so, but it is. I don’t think this results in hiring the best employees, but that is the way it is. It sounds very cynical, but job interviews are one area where cynicism is the best approach.
I suppose the main reason for requiring fake answers to dumb questions is the point someone made above about a square peg in a round hole. If you learn lie politely, you’ll fit in much better. I don’t really think that employee “fit” is such an important thing for a company to succeed as HR always insists. But if you hire only round pegs, then everyone else’s life will be easier. Really managers hire people to make their life easier, not to benefit the enterprise. Hopefully you can do the job too, so the manager doesn’t have to find someone else to do it, but the most important qualification is that you fit into your round hole comfortably.
My experience in getting a job is pretty nearly limited to the academic market, and I don’t think lying was ever necessary. I’m also not sure how practical it would be. Before being hired by SCA, I had an interview with the university’s number two person, a Jesuit who I had been told was a fan of liberation theology. I didn’t make any attempt to pretend to be either a Christian or a leftist, and if he had done his homework doing so probably wouldn’t have worked.
But I was told that he supported hiring me.
It’s true that I failed to be offered tenure at three or four different schools, but I find it hard to think of any lies I could have told that would have changed that.
@DavidFriedman
Or maybe your not being the kind of person who could come up with those lies is the reason for the lack of tenure.
“Lies” is perhaps a little extreme for what I meant, but there is a level of insincerity which is unavoidable in a lot of job interviews. If you’ve never had to fake-smile your way through an interview, I am truly delighted for you! I seem to have an unfortunate face for this, that others can read my true feelings; one interview was for a very minor role but the guy doing it was a Little Tin God in his own mind, and while describing to me the Blue Book (I swear to God this is what he called it) that he had himself personally written about the requirements and duties of the job, and that he expected me (if hired) to take home and study every night (because there would be tests! on if I had read and internalised it!), I think he may possibly have garnered some faint hint from my demeanour that I was thinking “This is bullshit, you are not Chairman Mao and I am not a child that you can make me do homework”. Needless to say, I did not get that job 🙂
Interviews are a performance, I should have said; you’re playing the part of “perfect employee for this job” and that includes dressing properly, advice on how to comport yourself (e.g. sit up straight, don’t chew gum, don’t be over-familiar or over-relaxed, be polite), and preparing and practicing answers to possible questions so you don’t “um” and “ah” your way through the interview.
It’s partly theatre, as well as needing the right qualifications and experience. Five to twenty other interviews are being held for this job, what makes you stand out? In the good way, not in the “will think it’s hilarious to pretend to be dying of coronavirus around co-workers” way!
Well, lies in the sense that you buy all the stupid tropes HR is always pushing. You really shouldn’t tell HR that you won’t be working 100% every day, even though that is obviously absurd. My bet is the HR person who asked that question hasn’t really thought about it, so doesn’t realize how dumb the question is, but you really shouldn’t tell them this, as was apparently implied by the OP.
You do need to tell the interviewer that their organization is a great place that you really want to work, even though that is a lie 90% of the time. If you are asked for weaknesses, you better not tell them the truth, or you’ve lost the job. If you are unusual in any way, don’t tell them that, because you will lose out on the almighty “fit” that HR is always looking for. If you ever had a bad situation at work, and you honestly can’t think of a way you could have handled it better, for God’s sake don’t talk about it. Remember, everyone else interviewing for the same position will likely be telling these polite lies, so why would they hire you if you reveal you aren’t perfect? You may end up with the job anyway in the rare case that you are much better than your competition, but by telling the truth you put yourself at a great disadvantage.
Maybe my opinions can be discounted because I am a terrible interviewer and I seem to get the job very rarely (3 offers of permanent jobs in my professional career). But I have had over 100 interviews in my life, and I’ve tried every approach. The interviews that went the worst, where I knew I had zero chance when I walked out, were the ones where I tried to relax and be myself. That doesn’t work.
That makes sense with regard to believable lies. But the discussion is about a lie, “I always work 100%,” that the interviewer is not expected to believe.
Human body temperatures may have been getting cooler over the last 150 years or so – since the mid 19th century, 0.59 degrees for men and 0.32 degrees for women. This study appears to be relatively robust (n = 677,423) and claims to have adjusted for measurement error for the older studies. They claim that the change may be the result of a reduction in low-grade fevers and improved climate control in our homes.
That’s quite a claim. There are similar claims made with respect to temperature measurements in the global temperature record relevant in the global warming issue, and I’m skeptical of that claim also. Do you have any idea how they did it in the human body temperature study?
By checking their hypothesis (that temperature declines about ~0.02-0.03 degrees per birth decade) within the individual measurements, as well as across multiple experiments. The results appear to back that up: in both the older measurements and the newer ones, younger subjects are on average cooler than older subjects.
Very interesting. Could it be that people just get slightly warmer as they age?
The results appear to hold true for both the people of different birth decades measured at the same time people of the same age measured over experiments decades apart: 0.02 degrees per birth decade.
Couldn’t that be explained by average body temperature changing with individual age?
Body size is up, could that be it?
I have no idea, but intuitively, I would think being bigger would have the opposite effect.
Not necessarily. Larger body sizes reduce the capacity for heat dissipation, because they have a lower surface area ratio. This is why Ice Age mammals tend to be large, for example. If body size is increasing on average, it would be beneficial to have a slightly lower homeostatic temperature to make overheating less likely. Not saying that’s definitely the issue here, but cooler resting temps would be the direction I would think the effect would go.
Yeah, that makes sense. I looked at different animals, and saw that elephants have slightly lower temperatures than humans, however, so do mice. Dogs and blue whales are higher though, so I’m not sure this little exercise taught me anything!
That’s an interesting idea. Maybe?
You’d have to factor in body mass, ideally differentiated by heat production (e.g. muscle and fat). Together with height that might be saying something. Else you would compare a fern and a globe of equal height.
Different explanation: Less physical work leads to less heat generating muscle mass.
Would be easy to test for, compare athelits and those who still do a lot of physical work, with office workers.
Admittedly without having read the paper, this is also my hypothesis.
Higher BMI correlates positively with higher core temperatures. If athleticism and BMI are inversely related, and people in the past had lower BMIs, the trend goes in the opposite direction of what you’re suggesting.
They aren’t. Athleticism and BMI are positively correlated, not negatively correlated.
Since BMI is just a weight to height ratio, bodybuilders, pro athletes, and such are often misclassified as morbidly obese. It is only a useful yardstick for the sedentary.
It looks like they may have been using the corrected one which takes into account waist-to-hip ratio, but yeah, straight BMI is a garbage metric.
For the sedentary of average build.
The official justification for the Air Force’s interest in UFOs has always been that they only care because the objects might be advanced, foreign planes and space ships that threaten U.S. security.
Among the many official UFO investigation reports compiled by the USAF, how many have determined that the sighted UFO was in fact a Soviet/Russian/Chinese craft?
Technically, “foreign” includes extraterrestrial, doesn’t it?
Going purely off your summary of the official justification and taking it at face value, it sounds like as far as the USAF is concerned it doesn’t matter what origin the craft have. What they care about is whether it threatens US security and also possibly whether they can get the tech.
Related hypothesis:
Anything which is sufficiently able to capture the attention of pilots during peacetime could be a distraction during wartime. So investigating/understanding/mitigating weird optical/weather phenomenon could improve performance at the margins.
Good point.
Plus a lot of these things are not (just) sightings but radar blips etc.
So it’s bug reporting too.
Agreed. I’m sticking to my opinion from half a year ago in the UFO thread “https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/26/links-6-19/#comment-767916”
This one’s for the programmers in the audience.
Have you heard the rule that functions should be short, ideally no longer than a screenful? Well, feast your eyes on row_search_mvcc(), a function in the MySQL open source database system. This function weighs in at a glorious 1607 lines, including inline documentation.
https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/1aa553074cec9c269bca7f50e1d8656f9ccd0201/storage/innobase/row/row0sel.cc#L4397
Any bigger horrors out there in the wild anyone would like to share?
Yes. I’ve also heard of the rule that you’re supposed to drive no more than 65mph on the New Jersey Turnpike. Alas, many of the horrors I am aware of I cannot share.
From the computing neolithic, there’s Crowther & Woods Adventure. Source code is here. In the main file, there are 2088 lines from the comment at the top to the END statement…. and not one subroutine (the other file has subroutines for I/O)
Donald Knuth’s rewrite of Adventure in C (or rather CWEB), which faithfully reproduces the logic of the original program, has a
main()function that’s 2854 lines of code.On the plus side, Woods meticulously commented his Fortran IV code, such that when Knuth translated the program for the specific purpose of demonstrating his “literate programming” paradigm, he copied many of Woods’ comments verbatim.
Video game VVVVVV recently released their source code and
void Game::updatestate( ... )clocks in at a whopping 3453 lines.In prior roles I’ve had to deal with some truly monstrous legacy code that honestly would have been easier to deal with if it was all in one function rather than spread across three 15000+ line files. Thankfully, no longer working there, I get to join the select group that gets to complain about having to have made changes to it.
Somewhere a CS prof is weeping, and cannot be consoled.
If the prof cannot be consoled, that’s usually not a big deal. Just look for the tears in /var/log/messages instead.
You really had to show me this. VVVVVV was one of the games of my childhood and it’s very close to my heart. This is just saddening. I miss believing the wizard was real.
Fuck that makes me feel old. VVVVVV came out just a couple of years ago *checks wikipedia* … ok, 10 years ago.
https://xkcd.com/2165/
I have plenty of analysis scripts that are +1000 lines. I like to think I’ve learned a lesson from this.
This comment gave me the worst guilt I’ve felt in years.
To every man who has had to own my analytics tools and databases from when i was just starting to teach myself machine learning, database schema design, and Hadoop…
I’m so sorry. So, so, so sorry.
There’s definitely a special place in hell for me for leaving Fortune 50 companies with some spaghetti code tools. They’re functional but…I never have to maintain them…incentives etc
Sure. I write in Java, but in a very opinionated kind of Java and with full acceptance of consequences. I happen to think that for business software functional is better than object oriented. So my main class is currently… let me count … 29921 lines.
You don’t divide up the code even into functions? Or do you write your functions inline as lambdas?
Of course it’s divided in functions, most pretty decent in size. I just don’t do classes, except for utility stuff (under 10%).
Oh, sorry, I misread. I thought you had a main function of 29 thousand lines. But it’s a class of 29 thousand lines. That’s different. Still really large, though.
It’s surprisingly ok – you’d think in 20 years there would be instances where I’d shoot myself in the foot with large classes. But other than having to take this into consideration when I change the IDE, it just works. I’m considering now taking a few pieces of code out into their own classes, partly to make outsourcing them easier, but it’d be just 2% code at most.
An entire generator tool that was one single function, over 10,000 lines of code. Not released publicly, but for internal company use (the programmer actually created it on his own time and was paid to transfer it to the company).
As a professional programmer, I disagree with this rule anyway. A function should be a logical unit, regardless of size. The only time a task should be split off into a new function is if it A) is repeated or B) needs to be referenced externally. I have driven many of my reviewers mad by refusing to split out big functions into parts and I am not sorry.
“Logical unit” is extremely subjective, however.
If you’ve got a function that’s a thousand lines long, it’s almost certainly doing more than one “thing”, and each “thing” can be its own function. This still creates functions that are logical units.
This makes it far easier to debug later: if you run into a problem, it’s far easier to narrow the problem down to the dozen-or-so lines of code that are in the function that has to do with that thing, and now you’re confident there’s nothing a hundred lines up that interferes with the behavior. You can consider each “thing” as its own input-output box, which lets you categorically rule out one box at a time.
Part of my job as a programmer is dealing with a legacy codebase that has this exact problem: functions are written from start-of-behavior to end-of-behavior without any thought of whether there are bits that can be abstracted out. Works great for the first month or so after writing the function, assuming that the guy who wrote it gets to keep fixing any problems with it. Then three years go by and a guy who’s never looked at it before has to do something with it, and it does not go well.
Tongue completely in cheek:
Is this the scissors statement that will doom us all, after all the culture war attempts that failed?
We are writers that happen to write programs. Like all types of writers we have our rules of thumb. Beginners violate them at their peril, but the very best of us transcend them.
I process slowly. Like many of you I find small talk very difficult, but one of my reasons is my slow processing. It’s just hard to keep up. In a conversation with a large group of people I’m rarely vocal because the conversation inevitably moves at a clip I can’t match, and in a one-on-one conversation there’s always a good deal of silences. My closest friends are all either like me in that way or simply accept it from me and don’t make me feel awkward about the fact that our conversations aren’t fast-paced.
In a few contexts it seems like my processing is actually faster than average, but I think those contexts are all topics that I know a lot better than most people.
Similar to speech, my reading speed is significantly slower than average, but with the tradeoff that my retention is extremely high.
A lot of people think I have good self-control or am uptight and that’s why I deliberate for so long before consciously choosing my words and opening my mouth. The truth is that I know no other way. I am almost literally unable to speak without thinking.
In some ways this is better than the alternative. But it’s also frequently a source of great frustration and angst for me. Is there a name for this, or is it something that has been studied as a category? It often makes me feel isolated and lonely and I’d like to get more of a handle on it, if possible.
No clue if there’s a name for it, but I am well acquainted with at least two people who seem to have the same “slow-n-steady” thing going on as you describe, if it makes you feel any less isolated to know that.
Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder ?
I don’t have a solution for you, just here to tell you that I am exactly the same way. I’ve only recently come to realize and accept this about myself. I find it very frustrating to be in group conversations, especially with quick people, because I want to participate but the conversation passes me by and is three sentences ahead by the time I’ve thought about and decided what I want to say. I do find it is a bit less of a problem if I’m in a group where I don’t feel socially anxious; the anxiety makes it harder to think of things to say. But I still seek out small groups and one-on-one conversations.
As @Well said, I hope it helps to know that there are other people who experience something very similar. In my case, I found alcohol speeded up my part of conversations, although I wouldn’t recommend it as a solution (and now I don’t drink at all)
I found a sort of explanation – for me – when I moved to France and therefore had to learn to speak French. It was torture, and a friend said the reason was because I’m the kind of person that wants to find the precise formulation of words to express what I mean – almost impossible in a new language. In other words, a form of perfectionism. I started to make a bit of progress when I made the effort to not care so much and got used to the feeling of ‘Oh sod it, here goes, and it doesn’t matter’.
That may not apply at all in your case, and the only other thing I can think of is that you might be surprised by the number of people who a) don’t mind silences, and b) actually appreciate someone who doesn’t babble and shut everyone else out of conversations.
I’m kind of curious about this: what would happen if you tried actively to blurt out the first thing that came to your head?
Is it a problem of nothing coming to your head, or is it a problem of anxiety/perfectionism preventing the quick response being said?
Because your description sounds like the latter, while kipling’s sounds like the former.
It’s a little different with French v English. With the French I’m always concerned with getting it wrong – which is sort of inevitable – so I often avoid speaking at all, or more usually avoid circumstances where I’m obliged to speak French. I agree that that seems different to Kipling-sapling’s experience.
Actually, with English I don’t really have much of an issue, although in the company of people who like to talk, I generally keep quiet. If I’m interrupted I stop talking, and I don’t tend to interrupt other people, so anyone used to doing that gets to talk as much as they want. One to one is generally fine – talking to my wife about how much I enjoy SSC can see me waxing lyrical and extended monologues aren’t uncommon. I don’t feel deprived of talking opportunities..
Same here.
I think it’s probably worse since i’m hanging out with a disproportionate number of jazz musicians at the moment, which kind of selects for people with fast ears.
i’m hanging out with a disproportionate number of jazz musicians at the moment
Niiiice! 😀
Sounds like sluggish cognitive tempo maybe.
Question: If you’re explaining something, are you likely to use exactly the same phrasing every time you explain it, even if you haven’t memorized it?
Another question: Do you think verbally (using language) or non-verbally (in abstract concepts that take time to translate)?
I have a friend who is like this, and it took me a while to realize what was going on. He’s highly intelligent and has one of the best minds for recall I’ve ever encountered. Like you, he can be quite quick if the subject is an area of special interest or experience. But he speaks slowly and has a tendency to get steamrolled in conversations, especially in groups.
Once I noticed this, I started making an extra effort not to interrupt him, and to ask him what he was going to say when someone else does. Do you find that helpful? If so, you could ask the people close to you to make such an effort.
Conversely, do you have any suggestions for the rest of us? “Don’t interrupt people” and “be comfortable with silence” are good rules in general, but if you have any more specific advice I’d love to hear it!
OK, I admit I had found the whole “living in a simulation” thing ridiculous from the get-go, but now I capitulate. The Simulators are now toying with us. There is a recently-described Canadian tyrannosaurid going by the name Thanatotheristes . . . wait for it . . . degrootorum. Putatively, this is the “Reaper of Death” with an honoring nod to the De Groot family who discovered the bones, but I’m not buying it.
I think this webcomic has the right idea.
They are definitely no longer taking us seriously and have just been screwing around. Maybe American political hijinks should have been a clue.
When I saw that the new conspiracy theory was that the nefarious Shadow, Inc., a division of ACRONYM, rigged the Iowa caucus, I was certain the writers had finally given up.
They just need to adopt that octopus spy agency logo to complete the story.
@eyeballfrog,
Also just too dull, why not classics like “Hijack a couple of nukes, hold the world hostage, something-something VOLCANOS!”
Volcanos? Tsk tsk, Plumber, even the nefarious villains are climate-change conscious nowadays! 😀
Wait a second. If lizard people have taken over our governments, does that make them tyrannosaurs?
Bloomberg is at 31% on predictit and 30.8% on BetFair to win the nomination. Conversely, 538 has him on 7%.
Earlier today, I’ve seen the theory on twitter that Bloomberg is buying stocks in the markets to artificially inflate his price.
What do you think? It seems quite unlikely to me – while it is true that he has enough money to steer the market in whatever direction he wants to, it would a) be a pretty scandalous thing to do (anyone know if it would be illegal?) and b) probably not very effective, since most people don’t know that betting markets are a thing. It seems far more likely to me that 538 is just wrong.
The gambling links are bets on who becomes the nominee, whereas the 538 link is about who wins a majority/plurality of delegates. 538 gives 37% to “no one gets a majority”, so the gambling odds are consistent with the 538 odds if P(Bloomberg wins nomination | No one gets a majority) ≈ 2/3
If no one gets the majority of delegates and Bloomberg gets the nomination, there are going to be honest-to-God riots. Bloomberg has no advantage against Trump and the Democrat party has to know that. There’s no way there’s a 2/3 chance that Bloomberg would win the nomination in that scenario.
Yes and no.
The market number for Bloomberg winning is 4x the 538 number for his winning a majority. But it’s only 2x the 538 number for his winning a plurality. It seems to me extremely likely that if Bloomberg wins a plurality that he will win the nomination.
But narrowing that last discrepancy is hard. Taking a lane model, I think that if any moderate had a plurality, the convention would pick them. And if Sanders has a narrow lead over a moderate, the convention would pick that moderate. So to reconcile the two, there has to be a 15% chance that Bloomberg comes in close second to Sanders. 538 says that there is a 15% chance that Sanders has a plurality but not a majority. Bloomberg needs all of that to match the betting markets. But what if he isn’t number 2? What if it isn’t close?
I think that the markets disagree with 538, but not by a huge shocking amount.
I think the difference can probably mostly be explained by the markets overestimating the liklihood of Bloomberg getting the nomination in a brokered convention where he does not have a majority or plurality.
There has definitely been a narrative in some places that Bloomberg is the “obvious” choice to emerge from a brokered convention regardless of where he actually finishes, and that is probably inflating the market there.
My bad – thanks.
Why are we discounting the possibility that PredictIt and BetFair are wrong?
People here treat those sites like the Bible for some reason.
The “some reason” is called the efficient market hypothesis.
Anyone who actually believes 538 could buy a thing for 69 cents that has 93% probability of being worth a dollar. That’s a huge profit! So, either 538 is not credible, or there are significant hurdles to actually execute large scale trades on predictit and betfair (i.e., “friction”).
Anecdotal evidence for friction: in 2016, I put in $50 on betfair betting that trump will manage to finish his first term. Predictions were at ridiculous 50/50 odds back then. Now, three years later, betfair is no longer available in my country (I think they stopped operating due to a new gambling law?). I can’t even log into my account anymore. No idea if they’ll honor the bet, but I’ll at least try to collect my $100 from them come 2021.
Doesn’t the relatively low volume of trades on betting markets make their information discovery abilities questionable?
I wouldn’t say that the volume is low. Can you quantify that? How much volume would you say is enough?
More of a hypothesis, I guess. Surely there’s some threshold of volume/participants below which information discovery is not reliable. A prediction market with two people won’t tell you anything, would it?
Not if the transaction costs are so much as a shiny quarter, it isn’t. Do you understand what the actual transaction costs in existing prediction markets are? And the capitalization limits?
Also, the “efficient market hypothesis” is not, not not not not not, “anything that has the word ‘market’ in its name and involves people buying and selling stuff, will be ‘efficient'”. Put together a list of criteria that should be satisfied for a market to be considered efficient, assess how well predictit and betfair meet those criteria, and get back to us.
ISTM that the fact that transaction costs, betting limits, etc., make it hard to do arbitrage between prediction markets, or to use prediction markets to hedge against undesirable outcomes, are part of why the market isn’t very efficient.
You’re being disingenuous. A shiny quarter per dollar would actually be a huge transaction cost.
I know what the EMH says. In fact, I do research on markets that are inefficient in particular ways. And I even explicitly talked about friction being the prime candidate to explain what we’re seeing!
My point (which I perhaps didn’t make explicit enough), is that at least one of two surprising things must be true: either prediction markets are very very far from efficient (further than I would have naively thought), or there is a meaningful, significant disagreement between them and 538.
I’m not the one who expressed the problem in terms of a single-dollar investment. But yes, it would be a huge transaction cost.
And I repeat my original question: Do you understand what the actual transaction costs in existing prediction markets are? Show your work, please.
This is the same market that said Kamala Harris was the front runner based on nothing but media hype. I have to wonder how wrong they can be before people stop believing them. I made this point a few months ago and some people said I was just missing something that the markets saw. But they weren’t any more predictive than Twitter journalists.
They appeal to a certain kind of libertarians who believe in them for ideological reasons (e.g. the efficient market hypothesis mentioned above), not because of empirical evidence.
Bet against them. Get paid!
Have all your winnings eaten by transaction costs and regulatory uncertainty!
@Alexander_Turok: Out of curiosity, would you be willing to say what kind of return you’ve made on betting markets, and how much you’ve put into them? I understand if you’re uncomfortable with the idea. Thanks.
So you’re concluding that BetFair is inaccurate based on a single case where an outcome didn’t come true – a case where the probability wasn’t even above 50% – even though any systematic evaluation shows that they’re excellently calibrated.
Doesn’t seem convincing. I simply deny that Kamala wasn’t the front runner.
@broblawsky, Nothing yet. I have 850$ on Trump losing.
@broblawsky I’ve put in a total of $42k and am up $17K (pretax) over the last 3.5 years. I am a Superforecaster, I assume my results are ~99th percentile. The website has made about $12K in fees from my activity.
It’s a hobby, not anywhere close to a profitable use of time (though if someone put some money in just to pick up the lowest-hanging fruit, they’d make a reasonable return).
Thank you.
Thanks. That’s actually a pretty decent rate of return (~10%), for gambling.
I’m probably going to start a new post on the next open thread so I can see how people here do on betting markets.
The EMH isn’t that an efficient market can predict the future accurately, it’s (roughly) that it accurately reflects all public information (and some private information).
More precisely, it’s that there’s no mechanical rule you can apply to beat the market.
I think predicting Kamala as the front-runner going in was a good prediction – she was smart, hard working, popular, demographically well suited, with prosecutorial bona-fides to help her appeal to middle America. I think it’s surprising that she crashed and burned, not predictable.
It would not be that scandalous, and in 2008 and 2012 it’s likely that InTrade (whose markets got talked about on TV) was manipulated when its McCain/Romney markets diverged sharply from BetFair (which was not as well known in the US despite being more liquid). But, I agree that it’s unlikely someone is manipulating it in this case.
Markets in individual states give Bloomberg significant chances of winning those, which is more of a direct contradiction to 538’s results.
If someone were manipulating these markets, I’d expect a few things to be different:
– he’d be trading higher on PredictIt than BetFair, since PredictIt’s frictions to arbitrage are much greater
– either the manipulation would be lazy and not extend to secondary markets like individual states (so he’d be trading fairly likely to win overall but very unlikely to win individual states), or the manipulation would be thorough and the individual states would be uniformly manipulated (and since they’re less liquid, the states would have some crazy markets). I don’t think either of those is the case – he’s trading with significant chances of winning individual states but not any higher than his nomination odds. There’s also a lot of variation in the level he’s trading in individual states.
– if the less-liquid secondary markets are being manipulated, I’d expect to see large resting bids that aren’t present (if you want to trade efficiently and get a good price for your buys, you won’t show giant size at once and you’ll carefully work into a position; if you just want to move a price you can advertise a large bid).
Maybe this isn’t an accurate way of looking at it, but I’ve always just seen predictit and betFair to be polling sites aimed at capturing the viewpoints of the kind of people who would use Predictit and BetFair
I’d argue the opinions, mores and priorities of the type of people comfortable with online betting differ pretty highly from the general population.
And if this leads to a predictable bias, you can bet against it and win money.
Still though, the “you” in this case is still the kind of person who would use Predictit and BetFair, so presumably they’d also (in aggregate) still possess whatever bias was causing this discrepancy.
Sure, but “can you make money off Predictit?” is a different question than “is Predictit more accurate than 538’s polling aggregation?”
I make money off of Predictit, sure. I make money because it’s easy to identify the ways in which it is inaccurate.
This is definitely the wrong way to look at it. It basically implies that everyone who bets is so blinded by their preferences that they exclusively bet on the person they want to win, which seems like an enormous accusation of incompetence on the part of the shareholders for which you provided zero evidence. It’s also contradicted by the only two cases of someone betting I can concretely recall, which is Scott betting on Biden and a friend of mine betting on Trump in 2016 because she thought he was undervalued. In neither case was the person supporting the candidate they bet on.
I’m not implying they are betting for their favorite candidate, merely the candidate they think will win. My apologies for not making that clearer in the initial post.
I don’t think that they’re blinded by preferences, but I do think that they may be blind in other ways.
Certainly the people who are interested in betting on probabilities of events is a group with different characteristics than the general population. Why would those differences make them particularly biased? At least as far as estimating probabilities goes, I’d expect them to be much less biased than the general population.
Thisheavenlyconjugation mentions this below, but the current BetFair prediction has Clinton as being the 5th most likely candidate to win the Democratic nomination. Previously I believe she rose as high as 3rd. That is downright bonkers and implies a disconnect from reality that make me not trust anything about the system. Not even Clinton fans think she could/would win the nomination, and valuing her over someone like Warren is just nuts.
I can’t tell why this bias exists or what particular factors cause it, but I can see the data input that goes into the black box and the predictions that come out.
Clinton is about the last person you would expect betting folks to be biased towards, so this seems to be evidence against your theory?
Like I said: I don’t think that they’re blinded by preferences, but I do think that they may be blind in other ways.
I don’t think there is a large cohort of Hillary stans out there who are putting money behind there conviction that she’ll rise again. In fact, the only time I hear Hillary’s name come up as a potentially viable candidate, it’s from people below who see all Dems as an outgroup who are mysteriously in the thrall of the Clintons.
the current BetFair prediction has Clinton as being the 5th most likely candidate to win the Democratic nomination
Well, somebody is mischief-making!
I can’t see why Bloomberg would choose Hillary. Getting the last bit of Pantsuit Nation that wouldn’t already vote for him to do so wouldn’t be much worth to him. A black running mate would likely be his best bet. I suspect this rumor was started by a Republican.
@sty_silver
His argument doesn’t imply that everyone who bets does so exclusively on the person they want to win. But it is reasonable to think that some portion of the betters are influenced by some degree of optimism bias. This seems far more reasonable than denying that optimism bias exists.
The argument is straightforward: Aggregated dollars are not aggregated knowledge units. A rich man’s $100 bet does not contain the same knowledge units as a poor man’s $100 bet. And the greater the discrepancy, the more the “information” the market conveys is distorted.
There’s no first-principles logic that leads to the conclusion that prediction markets will always be more accurate than simple polling, even in a hypothetical friction-less scenario.
FWIW, I’ve made some money in the past on PredictIt by screening* multiway markets and buying all the ‘No’ contracts** for a guaranteed profit, even considering the costs.
I’ve stopped because the ROI on the time wasn’t appealing anymore given the capitalization limits & my current financial circumstances.
So there’s definitely some irrational exuberance by supporters (a point in favor of the poll view), but there are also shrikes keeping them somewhat in check.
*Not all multiway markets are dutch books (~20% when I last checked)
**Given the 10% rake on profits, the proper proportion is dependent on the mix of prices
There’s a particular kind of post I see on here where I can tell that what’s been written is fascinating, but I don’t understand the topic well enough to know why. Would you be willing to unpack and/or explain this sentence please?
Sure, I’ll give it a shot; I’m going to start with the very basics to try to avoid additional clarifications later, so apologies if it seems patronizing.
There are two kinds of market on PredictIt: single question & multiway markets. The former lets you buy contracts on either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ but not both, and offers no way to make a guaranteed profit. The latter lets you buy either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ on each of the options independently (but still can’t buy both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ for the same option). In both types of market, PredictIt balances the ‘Yes’s & ‘No’s against each other so they’re not taking on any risk, but there’s no automatic mechanism balancing the prices in multiway markets across options.
Contrived example:
Rock - Yes: 45c; No: 55cPaper - Yes: 40c; No: 60c
Scissors - Yes: 30c; No: 70c
If you were to buy all the ‘Yes’ contracts, it would cost $1.15, and the best you’d get back would be 94.5c (if Rock won; PredictIt takes 10% of the profit on a winning contract, so 45c + 90% * 55c); guaranteed loss. However, if you bought all the ‘No’ contracts, it would cost $1.85 and the worst you’d get back would be $1.915 (if Scissors won); buying unequal numbers of contracts could get you close to a constant amount back regardless of the winner. PredictIt even recognizes what your aggregate risk is in a given market and will credit your account with the net (so your account balance goes down when buying the ‘No’ on the first option and back up when buying the other ‘No’s).
The main limit on this strategy are that you can have no more than $850 “invested” in any one contract (i.e., the nominal value of the individual contracts; in the example, you could buy no more than 1214 ‘No’ Scissors contracts, and to get a guaranteed profit you end up buying more of the most expensive ‘No’s*).
The additional caveat is that there’s a 5% charge when you withdraw money from your PredictIt account; the profit in my example isn’t enough to cover this, but since it’s only incurred on withdrawal, a string of <5% profit markets can result in enough accumulated to make you better off even after the withdrawal. Over the past couple years (between initial deposit & recent withdrawal), I netted ~30% after costs (albeit on a constrained investment due to the $850 limit).
*In markets with many more options, it's possible for there to be a guaranteed profit across the full set to start, and then an additional possible profit using just the options where the $850 is not yet binding.
Edit: Ghillie Dhu beat me to it with more detail.
You can frequently sell a package of mutually exclusive events on PredictIt for a total probability well over 100%, sometimes by enough to make money after fees. For most of the last year or two it was normal for the basket of Democratic presidential candidates to be trading ~120% to win the nomination.
Thank you, that was entertaining and informative and, at least from my perspective not the least been patronizing.
How do these Dutch Books come about? I would assume (maybe incorrectly?) that in functioning markets, these kind of anomalies either are prevented from developing or get exploited so heavily when they are detected that the total probability quickly reverts back to 100% (or, on second though, maybe 100% +/- the bookie’s take.)
@Aftagley,
The main culprits are:
(a) The 10% rake, so the prices can’t be arbitraged to perfect efficiency
(b) The $850 cap, so it can take multiple people noticing the same inefficiency to collectively arbitrage it to as efficient as (a) allows.
Bloomberg has spent his entire political career buying endorsements so it wouldn’t be surprising.
He doesnt have to. People generally believe money will get you further in politics than it actually will. That is, the markets are just wrong, because his candidacy plays into a very common false belief.
1. Bloomberg is running an unconventional campaign, and 538’s model works on historical data. Models generally do poorly when someone tries a new strategy, though this doesn’t mean the markets are correct.
2. He is doing something intelligent at the very least, I get his ads fairly regularly now and in none of them has he attacked the other candidates. He is gunning to pick up their votes as they lose steam/drop out which is his only shot.
3. His largest impediment is Biden’s age, this is his last hurrah and his 3rd attempt. He clearly wants to be president badly and isn’t going to pack in his campaign early in an effort to preserve a future run. Bloomberg could easily pick up a large chunk of his supporters if he were to drop out though.
I thought that was a very nice article, Kelsey.
Adding context to the above statement:
Approximately an hour ago, Why Prediction Markets are Bad at predicting Who Will Be President was published on Vox. It covers a bunch of the same points as was made in this thread.
I was originally going to chalk it up to random coincidence, but then I clicked through and saw that the author of that piece reps the EA movement and used to work at TripleByte, which if my calculations are correct, means there’s approximately a 120% chance they read SSC.
Wow. Okay. I guess I was wrong all along. This is a pretty hard one to accept, but I kind of have to – Kelsey Piper is one of the people where, if she says something that contradicts what I believe and I’m not particularly confident, I’m assuming I’m wrong and she’s right. So I guess, probably, 538 is correct and BetFair isn’t.
Small correction that doesn’t significantly impact the point of the article: Yang was only ~10% on PredictIt, his BetFair price hovered between 4-6% for most of the time.
If you want to change your mind again, you should read this one.
Hey! I didn’t see this thread before I posted the piece but yes, I read SSC.
Some thoughts:
FiveThirtyEight has updated in Bloomberg’s favor today, and I think yesterday they were underrating him; his odds are probably more like 15% or even 20% than 8%. They’re not 33%, though.
To be clear, I don’t know that Bloomberg’s buying himself excessively high numbers. I just think that the numbers are excessively high, and this is (like most of the weird stuff coming out of prediction markets) because they’re not liquid or profitable enough.
That said, he’s buying everything else? I’ve read credible reports that he’ll hire campaign staffers who tell his staff they support other candidates more. He threw a lot of money at endorsements on Instagram from teenage aesthetic bloggers. If you’re in his position it seems not-that-costly to throw money at everything anyone has thought of to get your name out there. And total betting volume on the Dem nominee so far on Betfair is under $10m, so you could probably produce the recent pop in numbers for a reasonable amount.
I was very disappointed in this article, basically it starts out saying that prediction markets are noisy (true) and then the evidence linked for models and sophisticated pundits getting things much better recently is a single data point in which one sophisticated model got it less wrong than the rest. It also makes some weird assertions
Lots of things happened between February 6th and 14th, Biden and Warren’s chances of winning dropped quite a bit and Bloomberg’s poll numbers rose a lot. Perhaps the increase is to much but to say that nothing came out to improve his prospects is pretty weak.
The markets are also putting Hillary Clinton (who the well-informed will be aware is not actually running) as having higher odds than Warren and Klobuchar (who unlike Bloomberg have actually won delegates). I’m not inclined to put too much trust in them.
Warren and Klobuchar having delegates is fairly meaningless, they would need 3-4 candidates to have heart attacks or something on that level to have a shot and even then Hillary might take the nomination ahead of them.
How?
Via what mechanism could Hillary Clinton emerge from the dustbin of democratic politics and at this 11th hour sweep through to the nomination?
Even the people who like Hillary don’t like her anymore.
> Via what mechanism could Hillary Clinton emerge from the dustbin of democratic politics and at this 11th hour sweep through to the nomination?
The presumption is that no individual candidate will have more than half the pledged delegates, and thus there will be a “brokered convention”. If I understand it correctly, this releases the chosen delegates from any obligation to vote for any particular candidate, and also brings in another ~20% of votes from DNC “superdelegates”. After some debate, whoever gets the majority of votes is the nominee.
Choosing Hillary Clinton as a last minute compromise candidate seems unlikely, but far from impossible. But I’m having trouble seeing any of the current candidates who have pledged delegates as that likely either, so I wouldn’t want to rule it out. While probably not Clinton, I do think that “last minute savior” (possibly from the closet of skeletons) is an entirely possible outcome.
What would you put the chances that the eventual 2020 Democratic nominee does not currently have any pledged delegates? I’d put it as more likely than Warren being the nominee at this point.
Given that Warren is currently fourth in national polling, if the three people in front of her had heart attacks I assume she would be in a pretty good position. Certainly ahead of Hillary, who has (a) missed the filing deadline for around a quarter of states including several of the most populous and (b) already lost an election against Trump. I agree the specific fact that they have delegates is irrelevant, but in general I can’t see how the Warren-Bloomberg polling difference of 10% vs 15% justifies a 10x difference in odds.
Warren is 4th and falling, roughly speaking that means people who thought they liked her decided that they didn’t and they aren’t likely to have her as a 2nd choice now.
If the three people ahead of her all died right now she might have a chance because she could land enough delegates to avoid a brokered convention. If those people die/had a massive scandal discovered before the election but while Warren is pulling in 3rd/4th/5th in every state then there is no way they are selecting someone who ran a campaign and had those numbers. Its bad democratically- the person had their chance to get votes and didn’t, and its bad strategically- if only 15% of your party will vote for her then what are national elections going to look like. Either you run a sacrificial lamb and accept defeat or you run someone who has proved popular with the party before (Clinton, Gore, Kerry or beg a Michelle Obama to run).
Not likely anyway.
Warren’s poll numbers are dropping, she peaked in mid October. I would say the best description of someone whose poll numbers peak early and then decline for 3-4 months straight is ‘the more they speak the less people like them’. Meanwhile Bloomberg’s numbers have tripled in the last month and a half, and his rise has been steeper (eyeballing 538s graph) than Warren’s steepest rise into her peak and his national poll numbers are lagging well behind the places where he is buying ads. I haven’t looked at recent numbers but when his national polls were ~8% states he was targeting were 15-19%, and NY state was 19% where he is better known.
I don’t know if 10X is the right ration, but Warren has to figure out how to stop losing support and then start winning people back, Bloomberg just has to keep doing what he is doing and see if the marginal returns on future campaigning are good enough to get his name called at the convention.
We’re getting into the part of the campaign where anyone who’s at all pundit-minded starts fantasizing about a brokered convention. This is surely what the people talking about Clinton are relying on.
As I understand the situation, the Democratic primaries award delegates in proportion to votes, the Republican are a mix of proportional and winner take all. That makes it more difficult for any Democratic candidate to go into the convention with a majority. In New Hampshire, for instance, the most popular candidate got only about a quarter of the votes, will get only about a quarter of the delegates.
So it looks as though the Democrats are likely to have a brokered convention, the Republicans less likely, even aside from the fact that the Republicans have an incumbent president running.
You’re not quite correct about the Democrats. There’s a percentage floor and the delegates are awarded proportionately among those who cleared it. So New Hampshire is sending 24 delegates, of which Bernie won 9, Buttgig 9, and Klobucher 6. Warren and Biden each got more than 8% but neither will get 2 delegates. B&B each get >37% of delegates off about 25% of Democrats’s votes.
Still, the point that a tight race with more than two candidates is dramatically more likely to produce a brokered convention this way stands.
The markets are also putting Hillary Clinton (who the well-informed will be aware is not actually running) as having higher odds than Warren and Klobuchar (who unlike Bloomberg have actually won delegates).
That to me sounds less like “I think Hillary is the dark horse in this race” and more like “I’m trying to lure in some sucker to take this bet”.
As far as I’m concerned, if you want to gamble on things like this, just use an ordinary bookies’ website (Paddy Power will give you 8/5 on Bernie and 7/4 on Bloomberg, Biden is 9/1). I don’t share the magical belief in the theory of prediction markets and I think anyone who is using them is trying to make money, not develop policy. And if making money means introducing deliberate distortions into the sacred and inviolable market, then the market had better drop its knickers and get ready to be violated.
The markets also probably have trouble estimating odds when the return is close to that of something risk free. The nominee bet wont pay out until July, so if return is low, who wants to take that bet since you have the added risk of the site disappearing or being regulated out of existence.
The legal American bookies can’t take bets on elections, and the illegal ones don’t have websites. Which is why these guys go through the farce of calling themselves “prediction markets” in the first place.
They need to stay small, to stay on good terms with the commodities regulators and off the radar of overzealous state attorney generals. But because the amount of money to be won (sorry, “earned”) is so tiny and the transaction fees accordingly are relatively high, the appeal of these things is limited to overly online “I am very smart” types. All of which means the ability of market forces to generate accurate predictions is limited at best.
And of course, just because markets are efficient, doesn’t make them right. For an obvious example, the market for 1-year stock index futures in March 2008 was waaay off from where the stock market actually was in March 2009. And that’s on a highly liquid market with lots of real investors making real money – but sure, the amateurs on PredictIt with their piddling sums can do better than the freakin’ Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
(Yes, I know, futures markets aren’t actually meant to predict the future prices of the underlying goods.)
The legal American bookies can’t take bets on elections, and the illegal ones don’t have websites. Which is why these guys go through the farce of calling themselves “prediction markets” in the first place.
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There is nothing that can go wrong with this transaction! Trust me on this, dear friends, and God bless you all! 🙂
Listening to the news over the past couple of days, I think Boris Johnson has been very clever in appointing/getting Dominic Cummings to be part of his government.
No, it’s not because “Hurrah, Cummings is rationalist-adjacent! He wants to break things and move fast!” and anyway I doubt much, if any at all, of Cummings’ grandiose imaginings will ever actually happen the way or on the scale he conceives.
I’ve never thought Boris a fool, the “cripes, old chum” persona he affects is a carefully-crafted image to make people underestimate him. The reason I think he’s been very clever about Cummings is that, with the recent Cabinet reshuffle, all the talk is “Boris is being led around by Cummings, Cummings is the organ grinder and Boris the monkey, Cummings is behind it all, Cummings is purging the undesirables”. One news article even referred to him as Boris’ consigliere.
Now, I don’t believe Boris is being led around anywhere by anyone (except by Little Boris, but that’s another matter) and I don’t believe Cummings is the grand mastermind lurking in the shadows, but I do think it’s damn handy for Boris to have people believing that. Boris is well able to maneouvre out people he doesn’t want – look how he finagled Sajid Javid into quitting – but having an attack dog to do the dirty work is also something in recent tradition within UK politics. For New Labour it was Peter Mandelson, the Prince of Darkness; for Tony Blair, it was Alastair Campbell; for the Tories (and Boris in his mayoral campaign) it was Lynton Crosby.
And now it’s looking like Cummings for Boris as PM. Now, the attack dog does not have to be a hatchet man, but he is generally the enforcer of the message, making sure everyone listens to their master’s voice. And with the current purge getting rid of anyone not seen as a true-blue Leaver/Boris loyalist, including axing a competent Northern Ireland secretary (his predecessor was this clueless but was a Leaver and May loyalist in Theresa May’s administration), there may be people looking around for someone to blame.
So having someone that Boris can go “Cripes, chum, I’d love to but Dominic says, you know?” when giving them the boot is very, very useful. And when Cummings’ usefulness is over, then Boris can get rid of him as well with little to no protest since all the grudges about poor treatment will be held against him, not Boris.
Of course, I could be reading 4-dimensional chess-playing into all this that is just not there, but I do think (a) Boris is not the fool he likes to pretend to be (b) that he would forgive and forget Gove’s earlier backstabbing to the extent of genuinely embracing a former Gove protegé seems much less likely than that he would pragmatically use him (c) Cummings is well able to make enemies with his own personality and attitude and demeanour, and there is a lot of lingering dislike of him amongst civil servants from when he was Gove’s teacher’s pet (d) all this means that he’s conceited enough to think he’s the one wielding the power when he is not so (e) I would not be at all surprised if Boris is using him as a cat’s paw.
I don’t know about the rest of your four dimensional chess, but (a) is definitely true, and (b) is less relevant, I think, than the fact that Cummings is the one who led the original Brexit campaign to victory. It’s not surprising that that came with spoils; that doesn’t mean Cummings becomes a dark mastermind, of course.
Are there really people who don’t think Boris knows what he’s doing? It seems obvious that he’s been playing 4-d chess since at least the Brexit vote.
What? Obvious to whom?
Let’s go through a quick Timeline post Brexit Vote:
-Couldn’t get Conservative Support following the Brexit Vote. At the time, even former allies lacked confidence in his ability to lead the tories.
– Supported Andrea Leadsom to be the new PM, she dropped out a week later.
– Took the job as Foreign Secretary for 2 years and, well, didn’t do that great a job. Consistently acted in impulsive and/or bizarre ways, eventually left the government to return to parliament.
– As PM, was unable to fufill promise to remove UK from EU by October 31st
– Failed and damaged the power of the PM’s office during the whole prorogueing debacle.
That’s just off the top of my head, and related to a pretty short period of time. If you’d like me to actually do some research, please let me know.
I’m not saying he’s incompetent or whatever, just that his skillset seems to be in identifying opportunities and capitalizing on them, not necessarily long-term planning or manipulation.
Granted, I don’t know a lot about British politics. But I do remember people saying in 2016 that Boris Johnson didn’t attempt to become the prime minister after Cameron resigned because he expected turbulence and would swoop in later to be the hero and that’s exactly what happened.
Right… but that kind of analysis depends on hindsight and prior belief in 4-d chess.
What happened in 2016 is that Boris was standing for leadership and relied on a key endorsement from then-justice minister, Michael Gove. Immediately before the election, Gove either decided Johnson wasn’t capable of leading OR stabbed Johnson in the back. Either way, Gove absolutely savaged Johnson in the press then decided to run for the conservative nomination himself. Gove was more connected then Johnson and drew from the same supporter base and eroded Johnson’s support enough to where it was obvious Boris couldn’t win. Seeing that he now had little chance of winning, Johnson gave a speech in which he said he couldn’t be prime minister.
Believing that this was all a plan on Johnson’s part is nuts. It also relies on Johnson enacting a plan that would severely diminish (at least temporarily) his prestige and overall reputation for the not-at-all guaranteed long term goal of May being hated and incompetent, but not enough of each to let labor win.
I mean, I play a Tzeench warband in 40k, but even that’s a bit too much of a “JUST AS PLANNED” for me.
My point is that people were saying it all the way back in 2016. I don’t know what happened. It just seems strange how well that prediction bore out.
Ah, ok. I see the issue. My apologies.
I’m pretty sure this is false, or at least if it’s true it was only among the absolute fringes of society. I just read through around 25 different reports about Johnson dated from June-October 2016 (dates picked to be directly before and slightly after the Conservative Leadership election, but not extending far enough into May’s tenure for people to see just how truly ineffective she was). Literally none of them included this theory, even normally pro-Johnson papers.
I think your memory of this series of events is incorrect, although if you’ve got any contemporaneous sources I’d be very interested in seeing them.
Yeah, that can’t possibly be true. In the 5 days between Brexit and Gove stabbing him, literally everyone assumed Boris would stand. After Gove stabbed him, the obvious explanation for him not standing was that his chances of winning were low and even if he’d won he’d have had much less support than anticipated.
Wrong Species, Boris went for the job of leader of the party and prime minister but was brutally stabbed in the back by Michael Gove, the guy who had up to then been his partner in crime (I have no idea why Gove thought anyone would pick him as potential PM, apart from his ambitious journalist wife, Sarah Vane, who played the Lady Macbeth to his dagger-wielding back-stabber).
That’s how Theresa May happened. That Boris then managed to clamber his way back, and into the ultimate job, is testament to what I’ve been saying – he’s no fool. Using Cummings to help him was smart, and I do think he’s using Cummings rather than the other way round.
Here, for example, is an opinion column by some judy whose job is to write clickbaity opinion columns, so don’t look to it for erudite political analysis. But the perception being peddled here is what I’m trying to get at – she may be sneering at a cabinet of all the talents (and she may not be wrong about the level of mediocrity and the selection been done on loyalty and supineness), but she’s sneering that Cummings is the one doing the puppeteering, not Boris:
You see? If this reshuffled Cabinet turns out to be incapable of fighting its way out of a wet paper bag, then it’s Cummings fault because he’s the mastermind pulling the strings. Boris is the Prime Minister and it should be his responsibility, but he’s managed to set up a scapegoat to take the fall should that be necessary. And Cummings is managing to wield his (perceived) power and influence in such a way that he’s alienating all possible allies, so no-one is going to be there to help him when it’s time to take that fall. Rapid ascent can be followed by as rapid descent.
Car people of SSC: what would you say is the complete list of common car maintenance procedures and repairs someone can do in his driveway without buying any fancy tools or equipment? (Assuming the person already owns a floor jack/jack stands/wrenches/etc. — but not a scan tool.)
Over the years, on my wife’s cars and my own cars I have…
– Changed brake pads
– Changed the oil
– Replaced light bulbs
– Replaced broken power mirrors
– Replaced wiper blades
– Replaced antennae masts
– Topped off brake, wiper, and other fluids
– And maybe done some other small stuff I’m forgetting.
What else should I be able to do on my own?
I’m asking both for my own knowledge and because I would use that as a kind of checklist of things I want to make sure my kids know how to do or are at least familiar with by the time they are adults. (ETA: I do not think EVs will completely replace gasoline cars within 20 years, even if they do I doubt my kids will be buying brand-new cars then, and I also don’t think any cars will ever be maintenance-free. If the model of car ownership, even for used cars, becomes subscription-based then I would hope my kids reject that model as I plan to, but it’s still useful knowledge to have and might at least help keep them from getting ripped off.)
Worth noting: on two different cars I have attempted to remove old radios/CD players and install new ones, but have never been successful for whatever reason. Luckily, I’ve found it’s always been pretty inexpensive and quick to have a pro do this.
If you can change the brake pads you can (and should) flush the brakes as well. No fancy equipment required unless you need to do it alone (then you need a pump). Probably under small stuff you should include replacing any accessible fuel lines or vacuum or coolant hoses if necessary, as well as the air filter.
Replacing spark plugs and wires.
Cleaning the throttle body.
Replacing oxygen sensors (and you really should get a scan tool)
Replacing serpentine belt (not timing belt, that’s a big job)
Replacing cooling fans.
Replacing fuel filter (if not in-tank)
Replacing battery.
If your time is much less valuable than money there’s all sorts of things you can do that I probably wouldn’t recommend in general, such as:
Replacing muffler and/or catalytic converter (You will be in an awkward position and all the bolts will be rusted solid)
Cleaning EGR passage (this is a terrible job. Certain year Miatas tended to have theirs clog, which is why I’ve done it. Another one you need codes to diagnose.)
Cleaning fuel injectors
Replacing starter and replacing alternator.
Replacing shocks/struts and other suspension parts. (will require an alignment after)
Replace brake rotors (but note they often just need to be resurfaced instead, and resurfacing requires a lathe)
Replace brake cylinders and lines. (replacing the slave cylinder is another nasty job done in an awkward position, and routing the lines is often a job for Reed Richards).
As for the radios, yeah, they make them fiendishly difficult; it’s not uncommon to have to take the whole dash apart.
Replacing spark plugs and batteries were among the ones I’ve done but forgot to list. Also replacing air filters (cabin and engine).
Conversely, what should you leave to a professional?
I recently let the dealer change out the thermostat after a P0128 code due to possibility of me really messing up a car.
Ah, I forgot the thermostat and the cooling system flush. Both things reasonable for a DIYer, replacing the thermostat (and thermostat gaskets) is one of the simpler jobs in most cars. Cooling system flush is not hard but pretty messy, so would be on the second half of my list. I’ve never replaced a radiator but I think it would be on my first or second list depending on the car (specifically, how much crap you have to move out of the way to get it out)
Things I would definitely leave to a professional, even beyond my second list — anything involving poking around inside the fuel tank, like replacing an in-tank pump or filter. Repairing the fuel tank. Timing belt and water pump. Pretty much anything that involves taking the engine significantly apart (e.g. head gasket). Alignment — it can be done without an alignment rack on some cars, but it’s tricky. Brake rotor resurfacing, as mentioned. Replacing motor mounts (since this requires lifting the engine). Any steering system internals (though the power steering pump would be on my second list, as would tie rods and U-joints). Body work. Air conditioning work (special equipment; also licenses).
I looked up the 2015 Jeep Renegade on youtube and noped my way to a mechanic…though mostly because it’s my wife’s car and the cost/benefit was not purely economical.
To be fair, most Chrysler products are unbelievable clusterfucks to try and fix anything on.
*Fiat products, but yeah same diff
I just took a look at the first video I found. It shows replacing it with the engine out of the car. WTF? I then found this article. That’s nuts. And a reason for my caveat “most cars”.
(my car is mid-engine, which makes just about any repair ridiculously difficult. But I knew that going in)
So you’re either driving a supercar or a Toyota Previa…
It’s not a Toyota Previa. I remember those, my parents test-drove one once (but bought a different car). Also not a supercar, with power well below the usual supercar cutoffs. There are more things in heaven and asphalt than are dreamt of in your philosophy 🙂
Redoing the head gaskets actually isn’t that hard of a job. If you can follow directions and keep track of parts you can definitely do it. I’m not a mechanic by any stretch, but I’ve actually done this twice. That said, both times were to older cars though, so it might be harder on newer ones.
Depends a lot on the car. Subaru’s are sort of the gold standard “this is a pain in the ass” car to do it on; you have to take the engine out of the car, get the heads machined, know how to identify the “right” updated head gaskets to use and follow a really specific torque sequence to get the new (always new, never the old ones) head bolts tightened down correctly.
My buddy has a early 2000’s civic that wasn’t nearly as much trouble – the head faces up, so for him he just popped a bunch of bolts off in about a half hour, cleaned the surfaces, tossed on the head and torqued everything to a (much simpler) spec.
I think the rule of thumb here is if the model and year of vehicle is known for head gasket problems it’s a little bit more trouble to repair it correctly, and if you have to take the engine out to do it it’s enormously more difficult. Any machining requirements essentially take the possibility of doing it 100% by yourself without professional mechanics being involved out completely.
Experience has made me extremely leery of doing head gasket work, even on older models, mostly because anything I can think of that would require changing the head gasket typically involves warpage to the engine head or the block itself, which is often enough to total the vehicle. A specialist on Datsun / Nissan’s Z series once described it to me as “brain surgery”.
So I’m very surprised you were able to do gasket work on a car that wasn’t new. What was the story?
Yeah, the last car I considered doing it on (but decided against) was a Subaru. I think you can get away without machining the heads if you catch the problem early enough, but you can’t know that until you have the engine apart and it’s STILL a major pain in the ass.
Oh yeah, and it’s a boxer engine, so there’s two of them.
One was on a Chevy 350 van that blew a gasket, and my dad wanted to get a few more years out of, so we worked on it together. The other was on an ’85 Mustang that my friends and I would race, and blew the gasket. There was warping on that one, so we eventually needed to replace the engine, but we got one more race out of it.
The big “you shouldn’t do this” for most people is transmission work. It’s complex and hard and easy to screw up/lose parts.
With everything else, it’s a difficulty + risk / benefit type of thing. Brake work is really expensive for the limited amount of work it takes. Brake work is moderately risky (difficulty level is low; non-working brakes are dangerous). Most careful people of low-to-moderate income would be benefited from taking the risk of doing brakes, especially if it’s just pads. Less people should remove an engine to do a clutch even though the potential financial benefit is higher, because it’s a lot more work and there’s a lot more to mess up.
Are there diy books for your car, or a not too different model?
They would also teach your kids the connection between technical documentation and manual work.
I downloaded a PDF of the repair manual, but have never really used it.
Rotating your tires, while a pain, is possible with what you have. Surprisingly few people do this regularly, but you really should.
That said, my local shop charges like $15 for it, so maybe it wouldn’t be worth it.
With the stuff you listed, you can drop transmissions, remove axles, do motor mounts, do radiators, replace hoses, flush various fluids, remove gas tanks, remove or flush differentials, etc. It’s almost quicker to list the stuff you can’t do:
-You can’t safely remove a motor. You would need an engine hoist.
-You can’t machine things; you would need at minimum a belt sander and to do it right much more. Everyone shops this out.
-You can’t do computer work/flashing. You need flashing stuff to do that.
-You can’t do anything that requires welding.
-You can’t do anything that requires a press (at least you can’t do it right; there’s some cheat-y stuff you can do for bearings).
There’s also some stuff that you can do but shouldn’t, really – Alignments are like this.
Almost anything else you can do, it’s all nut-and-bolt work; it’s just a question of whether it’s economical for you to do / worth the risk of injury or other catastrophe. If I had to make a short list of things to be competent at beyond what I perceive as “normal”, it would be this:
Flood-clear mode for checking compression on cars you are buying + other stuff for buying used cars (getting underneath and looking for rust, reading maintenance records, shaking the car to check shocks, going full speed and letting go of the steering to see if it pulls, braking to see if it pulls/squeaks/squeals, assessing fluid colors, cranking the wheel for power steering system, etc).
Tensioning belts properly
Getting into the habit of paying attention to torque values (and having both a big and little torque wrench).
Getting familiar with a voltage meter
Getting a better obd reader that gives you more data about how a modern car is running beyond simple codes
Knowing that hitting a starter with a hammer will make it work again for a while usually
Knowing and heading off “big, known” issues with your car before they actually come up (subaru head gaskets, Nissan CVT issues, etc)
First and foremost I would recommend acquiring a scan tool if you intend to work on anything from the late 90s forward. You’ll want an OBDII tool–it’s popular now to re-purpose an old android phone to run the software, and use a plug-in dongle to interface with the vehicle. For the cost of a good floor jack, you will be much better equipped to work on modern systems. There’s very little that you can do nowadays without a scan tool.
Now, looking at your listed systems, you list is comprehensive for most home mechanics. Brakes are the generally the greatest money-savers in pure dollar outlay terms, while fluid changes are the least. It costs me more to change my oil than paying a quick-lube, even assuming no labor costs. Depending on the vehicle, spark plugs and coil pack replacement can save you a lot too. You should know how to replace various filters: cabin (sometimes multiple), intake and oil (to ensure the filter is new after change, rather than physically replacing it yourself). This is a common service center scam, particularly targeting young women—they’ll bill for a new filter but not replace it.
I would then advance to basic mechanical systems and how they work. It’s beneficial, IMO to understand the bare basics of how systems function so that you can have a more informed discussion with you mechanic when troubleshooting. Fuel+spark+compression+air=propulsion, or how a tie rod functions to affect your steering. For example: If your engine is overheating, you can troubleshoot this yourself easily if you understand how your cooling system functions. Even if you can’t physically do the work, your mechanic will have a better understanding of the issue if you can describe the troubleshooting steps you’ve tried before they begin billing you. Engineering Explained on youtube is a good source for these types of discussions. Additionly, model-specifc forms on facebook and bulletin boards are an excellent resource for both pre and post purchase research—you can often find common pain points though these resources, though some may be overblown. (*cough* e46 M3 subframe *cough*)
You’ll find that most new vehicles are much more difficult for non-professionals to diagnose and troubleshoot—hence the scan tool recommendation. A classic example is the headlight replacement on certain late model VWs—begin by removing the front bumper and accessories, and then blindly grope various electrical connectors until you find the right one. No problem if you’ve done it 100 times before but challenging for a home mechanic. Or the oil filter on the mid-00 Subie Outbacks, lol.
Realistically, I believe automotive knowledge going forward will be more centered around ensuring that you don’t get ripped off by a bad mechanic, versus accurately diagnosing and correcting issues yourself. Modern automobiles are simply too complex for most home mechanics, unless it’s a hobby or passion. We maintain 3 vehicles now, 2 daily drivers (2014 and 2016) and a purpose built Jeep for rock crawling, and frankly I don’t work on the DDs aside from items on your list, despite having tools and ability to do engine-out work.
I would add that I have lots of auto-savvy friends who purchase older, mechanically simple vehicles for their children’s first cars, with the intent of teaching these skills. I pretty strongly disagree with this idea, primarily because of safety and reliability issues. Modern vehicles are leagues safer than even mid 00s cars, and given new drivers accident rates, I believe more safety is worthwhile if the finances can support it.
What makes the modern vehicles safer?
My dad once got in an accident where a sports car slammed into his Lincoln mark VII on the passenger side (other driver noticed he was on the wrong lane for a split and decided to swerve back than detour).
Because my dad’s gas guzzler was built like a tank, he actually drove off with a severely dented door rather than get totaled or killed by the totaled sports car.
As such, I’ve had a bias toward heavier and/or bigger vehicles for safety…what am I missing in this simplistic calculation?
Old iron (your dad’s Lincoln) gives the impression that it’s safer due to it’s thicker sheet metal. However, that’s only a surface level impression. Modern crash cells and crumple zones are vastly superior to anything that’s been produced before CAD and force analysis (not the right terminology). I don’t know if youtube links are allowed here, but a search for “2009 Chevy Malibu vs 1959 Bel Air Crash Test” will be all you need. Note the intrusion into the passenger zone seen in the Bel Air.
Your dad’s vehicles trades low-speed impact resistance (dented sheetmetal) with high speed impact distribution. In a new vehicle, that sheet metal crumples and distributed energy around the passenger compartment. Your dad’s Lincoln transmits that energy into the passenger compartment. Most modern vehicles are totaled after any significant impact anyway due to sensor costs, so the idea is “let’s divert as much force as possible around the passenger cell, so that the passengers receive less energy.”
Sheet metal is replaceable, the squishy meatbags inside the sheet metal are not. This concept of energy distribution is the major advancement in crash protection. If the outside of your car looks like crumpled aluminum foil after impact, that’s a very good thing.
Very interesting, watched the vid and glad to correct my misconception!
If I’m understanding right, modern cars are engineered so that any significant crash will total it as saving the passenger is the priority, whereas older cars may be cheaper to repair after a car, but leave the passengers…dead?
The commentary on crumple zones vs. hard sheet metal is all true, but it does not falsify your initial reaction that heavier vehicles are safer. They are. It’s basic physics; the heavier vehicle will experience less (negative) acceleration in a crash than the lighter vehicle. Less acceleration means less damage to the occupant. For a thought experiment, imagine a semi truck hitting a car. The car will go flying, the truck will hardly move. This is unambiguously good for the occupant of the heavier vehicle.
@hls2003
Yup, that was my starting point. Basic physics makes me want to be in a “mass”ive vehicle over a light, green one.
But I had no idea how much engineering advances had been made in passenger safety/design. So all else equal I will still pick a very heavy modern car.
Note that video is an offset frontal impact, which is literally the worst possible collision for a 1959 Bel Air because it does have stiff bars in order to prevent a car from riding up into the compartment like that, but an offset frontal slides right beside them.
Now, that still matters a lot, because offset frontal impacts happen in real life and surviving them is great.
But even at low-speed impacts, a lot more of the force of impact in older cars ends up giving things like whiplash that doesn’t exist when the crumple zones are caved in.
I’ll add that in EMS the engineering work for safety done on vehicles has improved so fast that there are still people and protocols which haven’t caught up. It used to be that trauma patients would be treated/flown based on “mechanism of injury” alone. Read: highway-speed crash or roll-over.
This is no longer the case. As you might imagine, a higher-speed impact is always going to be more dangerous. However, the safety cage design principle has *amazing* implications for survivability.
Best thing you can do to improve your safety: wear your seatbelt. One of the remaining risks for serious injury is “ejection” – being thrown from the vehicle.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet.
1. Draining and replacing coolant
2. Draining and replacing transmission fluid (my understanding is that this is more necessary for older cars). A flush is usually necessary to get the other half of the fluid that is throughout the engine block.
I recently did both. #1 was easy as there was a plug at the bottom of the radiator that I placed a bucket and just waited for it to drain. Then unplugged and filled it back up. I didn’t bother with flushing since I was replacing at a proper interval such that the old coolant wasn’t that old. #2 took more work and I did flush to get it all out. And #2 was a lot messier.
Does anybody on here play Angband? I only recently found it but I played Moria as a kid back in the (showing my age…) late 80s, and it was amazing how quickly the interface came back to me. I’ve got my High-Elf Mage up to Level 42 and am handling dragons pretty easily but not quite ready to take on Morgoth. Pretty addictive for a game with ASCII graphics.
I could never get into ASCII graphics, but I’ve played tiles versions of Nethack and Angband. My roguelike of choice these days is Dungeon Crawl for when I need to kill a few minutes on my laptop.
I like Angband and Nethack (probably Nethack better) but haven’t played either in forever.
I’ve played a bit of Nethack, but I’m no good at it.
A month ago Neike told us to try dosing ourselves with preposterous amounts of vitamin B12 and see what happened, so I did. Results: promising?
I was expecting that either I wasn’t B12 deficient, in which case nothing would happen, or I was, in which case my moderate depression would steadily improve and be basically gone by now.
Instead, I’ve been having dramatic episodes of anti-depression: colours become almost painfully vivid, and I can feel my mind trying to do the depression thing and failing. This seems consistent with how Neike describes her B12 recovery. But these effects are showing up at random, like once or twice a week.
My best guess is that B12 deficiency was one of several problems. Currently investigating what other factors might be involved.
Also look into the reason for the B12 deficiency. Intrinsic factor? Alcohol? Others? Ask a good physician, likely some lab tests will be necessary.
What were your methods here? I’m skeptical of vitamin supplements, having heard and read that they’re unregulated and may not contain the substance advertised or in the advertised quantities. Is there a brand you trust? What dosing did you use?
Where I live, vitamin supplements are regulated as medicine; I’ve just been going to the nearest store and picking up whichever B12 supplement is on sale at the time. This often means local brands, but one of them was Nature’s Bounty, which is also available in the US. They seem to have an excellent reputation everywhere.
For B12 specifically, correct dosage is not a huge issue because there’s no known maximum; as long as there’s at least some B12 in there, you can just take more.
I’ve settled on 10,000 micrograms (sic! 4,000 times a typical dietary intake), 5mg twice a day. I have no particular justification for that number. When I started I had frequent cravings for MOAR TABLETS and decided to just go with it, but now they’ve settled down.
Today I learned that some people have strong opinions about methylcobalamin vs cyanocobalamin, but I haven’t been paying much attention to which one I’ve been taking.
Wow, this is really fascinating! Thanks for sharing, and sorry for the delay in responding (I visit the fractional open threads much more rarely than the “regular” ones, but this is purely on me).
Minor point – I’m not suggesting ingesting an inordinate amount of B12, just enough to offset a potential deficiency (more will probably not hurt, given B12’s astounding levels of non-toxicity, but might be more expensive to maintain?).
I take 2 x ~10µg pills every day, which seems to be the correct amount for me (I was stuck at “slightly less than half of the minimum of B12 you should have in your blood” when I was tested, taking one pill a day got me to narrowly over the minimum, so we decided to up it to two).
I hope the ‘anti-depressive’ episodes help give you enough energy to tackle the remaining issues!
Quick news roundup:
Manchester City has been banned (pending appeals) for 2 years by UEFA from participating in UEFA events (which I guess is Champion’s League, right?) I know less than nothing about how soccer league stuff works, but wouldn’t this be kind of like Major League Baseball banning the Astros for a couple of years?
What dates have the most and least births in the United States over the past 20 years? Most common: many days in late summer. Least: Christmas, New Year’s, Fourth of July.
Stories like this one in the San Francisco Chronicle break my heart. I don’t know what it will take for this sort of thing to be absolutely not tolerated in schools. I’m not entirely sure even a murder will actually do it.
In re: the Chronicle story.
Even for San Francisco, this seems like an unlikely list of demands to actually originate with sixth-graders.
Might this whole situation really be as simple as ‘school isn’t able/willing to punish troublemakers in any serious way; troublemakers have realized this?’ Yes, I think it might.
@Statismagician,
“Restorative justice” (the school has a meeting with the victim and the victimizer’ and asks the perpetrator to apologize to the victim, nothing else is done) is why after a fellow student nicked him when he tried to stab our son we pulled our teenager out of his San Francisco bay area middle school and am homeschooling him (homework on computer and some community college classes), unfortunately California community colleges are greatly reducing high school level classes because adults keep taking them and “not matriculating” (passing the classes) enough, which means our younger son likely won’t be able to substitute community college for high school like his older brother.
As for the content of the Chronicle story it reads much like I remember my schools were like in the 1970’s and early ’80’s.
Disappointing if that’s true about the community colleges. I used to work at Butte Community College, and thought very highly of it- lots of great remedial courses, high-school level stuff, as well as challenging transfer-plan courses. The chem courses I took there myself were quite a lot better than what my friends had taken at the nearby CSU school.
@andrewflicker says:
Yeah, limiting access is the colleges way of complying with Assembly Bill 705.
’tis a shame, taking high school level classes at the community colleges instead of at the high school has worked great so far for our older son, but already the classes are becoming scarce.
This just seems like a story of cascading institutional failures. First the middle school can’t keep minimal safety and order in the classroom, then the community colleges get overloaded because of the failures of the middle/high schools and become less and less functional.
The extra, hidden layer of awfulness here is that now it’s going to become impossible to talk about actual restorative justice because the name has been taken over by pencil-pushers who don’t feel like doing their jobs and don’t care what the consequences are.
@Plumber
I took a GED pre-test out of a book and did well enough that I felt comfortable just dropping out, getting a GED, and going straight to a state college. Worked for me, though I don’t know how much luck was involved in actually getting in to college with a GED.
“Restorative justice” (the school has a meeting with the victim and the victimizer’ and asks the perpetrator to apologize to the victim, nothing else is done)
That’s how it works in the Seattle Public Schools as well.
Noticing this gets you screamed at for “white supremacy”.
((Anyone wanna try to steelman the contrary view?))
(1) I agree that a group of 12-13 year olds are unlikely to have originated the stated demands that way; it’s probably (if it’s like anything I ever experienced) a mix of ‘teachers firing up students about these kinds of problems and the preferred solutions’ and ‘kids deciding that a day off school is great, any excuse will do’ plus marching in a protest feels all grown-up and important
(2) The school, and more importantly the school district – which is getting a lot of blame in the story, but the reporter doesn’t seem to have tried talking to any officials from there – are probably hampered by directives/regulations over ‘the right to an education’ which means you can’t just kick out disruptive students, they have to get an education somewhere. If there isn’t a programme for early school leavers/any other school willing to take them (and other schools will not take on trouble makers if they can avoid it), then sorry, original school is stuck with them. In the defence of the school district, they are the ones who will end up with the lawsuit taken by do-gooders/ambulance chasing lawyers over “your school expelled little Johnny for no reason, he has a right to an education, accommodate him or else we want $$$$$ in damages”. And just because little Johnny gets in fights or swears at the teacher and breaks up the classroom? That’s not a reason! Do you have it on tape? Independent witnesses? No good Teacher Jones saying little Johnny did it, that’s ‘he said/she said’. From the photos with that article, I also imagine there is some kind of outside pressure (they talk about bussing in kids to ‘increase diversity’) about it being racist to punish misbehaving black kids – or any colour kids, I guess: thanks, Governor Newsom, bleeding-heart do-gooders and ambulance-chasing lawyers!
If you’re talking in class and you don’t shut up when the teacher tells you to stop, then you should be punished for it. It’s not minor, it leads to further bad behaviour, and if you don’t want to learn then you don’t get to prevent the other kids from learning.
(3) They don’t need social workers. Well, they do, but not in the school. I agree that the loss of the home-school liaison co-ordinator was probably a huge disadvantage as the one n the school where I used to work did a great deal of work with parents and was involved with the entire team implementing the scheme:
But what you need most of all is the authority to enforce discipline. There is only so much any school can do about the fucked-up home lives of its students, and little Johnny or Susie beating up other kids is not acceptable even if they have shitty parents who are all druggies and homeless. Until that’s fixed, no amount of “hire on more social workers” is going to make any difference.
So far as I can tell, it’s Manchester City being banned from the Premier League which would be like the Astros being banned from Major League Baseball. The Champion’s League doesn’t really have an equivalent in American sports; it appears to be a big deal, but still being banned from that seems to be not quite so big as you seem to be imagining. But I don’t have a clear idea of the exact magnitude. I also have no clue if they’re also potentially in trouble with the Premier League and it just hasn’t been announced yet.
So far as I can tell, it’s Manchester City being banned from the Premier League
Not quite correct. The Premier League is the domestic league, and City could be looking at points deductions (though it’s not certain) there (I’m already waiting the chants of #taintedleague because some fans can’t handle real opposition, they have to conspiracy theorise that the fix is in). They’re not banned and won’t be, though.
What they are banned from is banned for the next two seasons from European competitions. Ordinarily, the top four clubs from the Premier League automatically qualify to participate in the Champions League, and the fifth-placed team (and whoever wins the F.A. Cup, and the winners of the League Cup) qualify for the Europa League – the lesser competition.
The ban means that from the next season (2020-21 and 2021-2022) even if City win the Premiership, have a top four placement or win the FA and/or League Cups, they will not be permitted to compete in either the Europa or Champions League.
Is the Champions League a big deal? Well, yes. (2007 – the Miracle of Istanbul, 2019 – the Miracle of Anfield. Please watch the linked clip!) It’s the best clubs from across Europe all competing against each other (where “best” means “winners or top spots in their national leagues”), it generates a lot of revenue from television rights, and it’s seen as an important marker of a manager’s achievements – winning domestic trophies is the most important, but if you constantly win at home yet can’t make an impact in European competition, how good are you? (Liverpool have had the opposite problem: win handily enough, or at least do well, in Europe but cursed with not being able to win the Premiership in recent times). Win nothing either domestically or abroad, and you’re not very good now, are you? You ain’t got no history (warning: slightly NSFW language at the start). Oh, and it’s 6 European Cups now! 🙂
EDIT: As the gaffer said, at least fail beautifully:
Yeah, it occurred to me that I probably should have included an “and that isn’t what happened” at the end of my first sentence to make it clearer, rather than counting on the rest of my discussion to clarify things. Anyway, thanks for the insight into how big of a deal the Champions league is.
I’ve never been to San Francisco but from what is described it seems like a universal problem – anything school can do to students will only ever deter students who weren’t going to or couldn’t bully anyone to begin with. I suppose it’s some kind of anarcho-tyranny variant.
My edgy hypothesis is that lowered child mortality has screwed everyone up by robbing us of will to just let some unworthy children to suffer and die. In this case, we lack political will to just expel the troublemaker or even imprison them. Last time I got repeatedly kicked in the face, police got involved.
I’m sort of sorry for City, as this news surprised me, but mostly I’m going “You can’t buy titles!” 🙂
Chelsea were pilloried for this before (being the beneficiaries of the largesse of a Russian oligarch) and now it looks like City have the same (a Saudi moneybags with the club as his personal toy). I’m sorry for Pep Guardiola, and I can’t really enjoy Man Utd’s decline (I never had any animus against Ole Gunnar Solskjær), so I don’t know if this is a good omen or a bad omen for Liverpool (everyone keeps saying we’ve the league won already! don’t they know that is a jinx? don’t they know how things always go wrong on the last day for us????)
Oh my goodness on the San Francisco story.
So… am I reading between the lines correctly that the problem kids are among those bused in? And the problem isn’t them bullying other kids, but that they don’t have enough social workers and their buses leave too early for them to participate in activities? (Where they totally wouldn’t pose a problem to the other kids!)
Regardless, bullies and aggressive kids are harmful not just to the rich kids with silver spoon in their mouths. Those kids have options, parents who will advocate on their behalf, who can afford private school. It is the less privileged kids, including those bused in for diversity reasons, who suffer — they are also potential bullying targets, their classes are disrupted, they lose out in teacher attention in favor of the disruptive ones, are more likely to need to fight for themselves and less likely to have adults on their side.
(Also, kids are part tortured little souls who just want to be loved and understood, but in part they’re little demons who will take a mile for every inch you give. To varying degrees of course, but sometimes you need to rein in the latter before you can reach the former.)
That’s assault. AFAIU, the police should deal with it. And there are also civil liabilities? Why doesn’t the mother sue the school, the kids and the parents (who are probably too poor, so the school will pay, but whatever)?
I really, really don’t understand the parents. Unless they’re poor and don’t have resources, why do they allow crimes to be committed against the children?
The school is the school, they don’t give a shit about kids, but parents should. She should have sued them the very next day after they didn’t expell the kids, dammit.
It appears to me that if we live in a world where God does not exist it would also be true that the more educated one is the more likely they would be to not believe in God. If we lived in a world where God was real then education would correlate positively with belief.
This supposes that education is always positively correlated with accurate knowledge, which seems hard to justify without qualification.
The Bible says basically exactly that – man’s reasoning is so perverted and flawed that he can never, on his own, arrive at knowledge of God.
(Of course, that’s exactly what you would expect a religion to say if it weren’t true, as well; it needs an excuse to defend itself from well-thought-out criticism.)
Our dirty lying teachers use only the midnight to midnight 1 day (ignoring 3 other days). Time to not foul (already wrong) marshmallow time. Lie that corrupts earth you educated brilliant fools.
If it does not correlate then why have education? I was (naively?) assuming that more education led to more knowledge.
The important word is “accurate,” not “more.” Education generally increases one’s store of useful knowledge (as measured by what that knowledge allows people to do rather than measured by what they wish to know), which is often strictly inaccurate. It way well be the case that if we lived in a world in which it was (generally) useful to believe in God, educated people would be more likely to be religious. The past was arguably such a world.
But if we’re looking at the benefits in this world (I think that is what you mean by ‘useful’), who needs them more? The Oxford professor? Or the woman in an African village where completing 5 years of schooling is rare and people live on a dollar a day? Unless you really think that woman is incapable of figuring out ‘hey, praying to God works, and I really need it’, or even ‘I’m desperate, I’ll even try praying to God to see if it works’, how exactly does the professor’s education make him more likely to believe in God in this scenario?
Store of useful knowledge isn’t necessarily proportional to aggregate usefulness of accumulated knowledge, and education represents an opportunity cost. And religiosity can be circumstantially useful for sub-Saharan Africans in a way it isn’t for frat bros. I think that right now believing in God isn’t particularly generally useful for members of the the American educated class.
It wasn’t (this world) useful to the educated members of Roman society refusing to reject their faith even if it meant their deaths either. The useful thing in that society was to pay token homage to the Emperor and the gods and get on with making money or prestige or literature or whatever. What does that have to do with truth though? A thing surely does not become untrue as soon as you threaten to punish believing it.
Is it useful for the faithful tribal communities in the Congo to charge into battle believing they’re bulletproof? Evidence suggests the answer is yes, even though doing so probably makes the individuals mounting the charge more likely to die. So I disagree with your assessment.
But despite my saying so, I don’t want to overplay my hand here. Understanding things that are true obviously has some value, but in terms of determining what gets institutionalized into an education, truth definitely trades off against (other forms of) usefulness, which is why they teach the Bohr model of the atom in high school and not Kant. I’m making no claim (at least, not here) about whether God exists, but rather about the circumstances that determine whether an education is likely to correlate (or not) with believing in God.
I thought it made them more likely to live, because no one waivers and runs away and therefore group cohesion improves individual survival chance.
@Conrad
In the counterfactual where they individually fight, they’re more likely to die because other people won’t be with them. In the counterfactual where they flee, they’re probably less likely to die because they won’t be shot at. I suppose I should clarify that the individuals who are convinced to fight by gri-gri magic are more likely to die then they would be if they weren’t convinced to fight. Gri-gri is a mechanism for reducing aggregate risk, but it also redistributes risk.
it does, but you are making a leap from probability to certainty in your statement.
I think it is erroneous even if we grant education is correlated with accurate knowledge (see below)
HH needs to add a few ‘more likely’, ‘less likely’s to his statement
It occurs to me that in a world where God exists and pride was one of the main things keeping humans from Him, the rich and the intelligent would be more at risk.
Less abstractly, the day I went to college I thought evangelism would become easy. Finally, I was surrounded by people intelligent and educated enough to understand the arguments for the faith. 2 weeks and 10 people convinced of the truth of those arguments and still rejecting the faith anyway, and I was disabused of that notion. That isn’t evidence that Christianity is true. It sure is evidence to me at least that if it was true, education wouldn’t help people accept it.
I think there’s a fair bit of scriptural support for this idea, actually.
Most education nowadays is of a fairly technocratic kind, with an emphasis on imparting economically-useful skills. It’s not obvious to me that that sort of education would correlate positively with having true religious beliefs.
The actual data on this, IIRC, says if you graph education on an X axis and belief in God on a Y axis, you get kind of a backward Nike swoosh, where belief in God decreases as education increases but then rises again as people complete post-secondary education (PhDs and the like).
Source?
I’d also be interested in a source that shows this; these tables (which I found linked from here) show belief in God going steadily down as you look at people with higher degrees, all the way out to postgraduate degrees.
Interestingly if you look at the pages 2+, where they condition on a person belonging to a particular religion, some measures of religiosity (particularly church attendance) seem to go up with eduation.
In terms of formal education, though, shouldn’t NAS members be about as well-educated as scientists in general? Becoming an eminent scientist is more about the work you do after earning your PhD than about spending more years in school.
I think this is false, even if we grant that education is correlated with accurate knowledge.
If we live in a world where accurate knowledge is correlated with education does not imply that every individual true fact correlates with education.
Didn’t work for Communism.
I think intelligence is negatively correlated with religiosity for reasons unrelated to the truth of religious claims. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to have had unpleasant experiences with taking orders from or being under the control of someone stupider than yourself. Being a cleric is no longer high-status, and the job requires other skills besides exceptional intelligence–social finesse, for example. Priests are selected for those, not for being clever.
(I suspect there are a lot of very smart libertarians for similar reasons)
So I guess whether god exists depends on what country and time we’re in?
What’s the most fun thing to do with a 6 foot long, 8 inch diameter cardboard tube? ~1/4″ wall thickness.
Chop it in half and have a swordfight with a buddy?
Get on a rolling chair, have someone push you and start jousting strangers?
Convert it into a railgun?
8 inches seems a bit stout for a swordfight.
The only thing I could think of was some sort of pneumatic cannon, but I’m not sure what would fit the barrel, or if I’d just be better off buying PVC at that point.
Yeah, too wide to hold in the hands for a sword fight, but that just makes it possible to put it over a forearm and have a truly zany swordfight, one where previous skill with swords is much less useful because who trains for that kind of motion?
If you can saw it into lots of sections you could make a pretty neat building material.
something something castle/tower for cats?
Are we young enough to play make-believe? Then it’s obviously the torpedo you’re going to use to sink the Yamato.
Or along more peaceful lines, it’s the sewer pipe you need to replace so your town doesn’t drown in poo.
Rocket fuselage
1. Rally all kids you can get hold of.
2. Cap both ends of the tube very firmly (a solid application of rolls of duck tape will do), make a dollar-sized hole in the center of one of the caps.
3. Mount it, outdoors, firmly in vertical position, holed cap up.
4. Fill the tube with cheap Diet Coke. Needs a stepladder, funnel, kids to help.
5. Get everybody else into a safe distance.
6. Drop 1kg of Menthos though the hole.
7. Run like hell.
8. Watch.
9. Discuss with those so inclined.
Note: “The results showed that Diet Coke created the most spectacular explosions with either fruit or mint Mentos, [ … ] But caffeine-free Diet Coke did just as well…” (source)
You could add a contraption (out of cardboard?) to drop the Menthos at the pull of a string, to have some more fun-work for the kids and as a safety measure.
That’s the beginning of a nice Dobson telescope.
I pondered this in jurisprudence class in law school, and concluded “so what?”
If we have free will, it is right to punish criminals.
If life is deterministic, we can’t help that we punish criminals.
Either way, punish criminals.
Here’s a demonstration of the famous H&K G11 assault rifle with caseless ammunition. The host takes the whole thing apart and shows how the (impossibly intricate) action operates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKcvM2Hh4g
I have to wonder how something so intricate is going to keep working in the field, with mud and dust and snow and all the rest a military rifle has to deal with. Also, if that propellant isn’t immaculately clean-burning, the fouling is going to be a real pain.
>I have to wonder how something so intricate is going to keep working in the field, with mud and dust and snow and all the rest
Not like that’s ever stopped the German military before.
Apparently the propellant is, in fact, immaculately clean-burning. But perhaps concerns like yours are the reason nothing like that weapon has been adopted, although my understanding is that they really did work out most of the problems with the design before it was abandoned.
I believe the weapon was formally adopted, the program was just almost immediately cancelled because of the end of the cold war.
Cassander is correct. The Germans went to a great deal of trouble to get the propellant just right, and formally adopted it for service right at the time the German defense budget dropped through the floor because they didn’t have to pretend they were going to try to stop a Russian invasion any longer.
Yes, the mechanism is perhaps a bit complex due to the separate three-round burst feature. But if this monstrosity can give reliable service on five continents across a hundred years, there’s no reason the G-11 couldn’t have done so as well. And not having an ejection port open to the sand and mud on every cycle, is a huge advantage in reliability.
The same guy has a nifty series about the Thompson submachinegun. It’s a fascinating story. The company behind the Thompson, Auto-Ordnance, contracted with Colt in 1921 to manufacture 15,000 of the devices. They were complicated for their time, and were correspondingly expensive, retailing at something like $200, which was a lot in the 20s. Selling that first batch took a decade of small-batch sales mostly to private owners and police departments, through they did manage some sales to the USMC and the US Postal Inspection Service. Things got better when the world got worse and WWII started. After some redesigns to bring the cost down, over 1.5 million units were produced during the war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN1uUfMCQ0Y&list=PLypb6wjv1oOBV6SM7BEQGSno5FvhiXxvH&index=2
Let me also recommend the video on the M3 “Grease Gun”, also a submachine gun, but designed from the ground up for manufacturability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ivr4QdhVtU
Thanks for the link, johan_larson. I was interested enough, because the Thompson gun is mentioned in a rebel ballad from the 60s, to try and find out if it was (a) period appropriate and (b) did the IRA ever get them, seeing as how you say they were expensive to manufacture.
Turns out the song passes the historical test!
The IRA seems to have made a habit of adopting odd guns. A couple years ago I came across a PIRA ballad called “My Little Armalite”. After doing a little more digging, it turns out that the Armalite in question is not the widespread AR-15 but the considerably more obscure AR-18, which was created as basically a legal dodge — it fires the same 5.56×45 round and uses the same magazines, but internally it uses a short-stroke piston system more reminiscent of the SKS rifle, and externally it resembles the FN FAL.
It was a flop in the US, but it must have had quite a following in Northern Ireland if they wrote songs about it.
Happy somewhat belated Lupercalia, everyone!
Not to be spamming the site with LIVERPOOL’S SIXTH CHAMPIONS LEAGUE VICTORY IN 2019 but to demonstrate why the Champions League (and Manchester City getting a two-season ban) is a big deal is because it’s followed globally, not just European.
What do you first see when looking at this photo? I think it might be another case of real life optical illusions.
When I first looked at it, I thought that gur juvgr bs gur fxl nobir gur ubevmba jnf fnaq ba n ornpu, jvgu gur qnex pybhqf nobir orvat fbzr fbeg bs gerrf. Vg jnfa’g hagvy V abgvprq gur fuvc fvyubhrggrf gung V svtherq vg bhg.
I first saw the white of the sky as “something”, but after a fraction of a second I saw the boats and immediately did the figure/ground flip to see it correctly. After a few more seconds I flipped it back and saw the beach and trees as you say. Very cool!
I can see it your way, but what I thought at first is I was seeing smoke from a naval _battle_, until I realized the perspective didn’t work.
V svefg fnj gur fxl nf n ynxr.
It’s like a Rob Gonsalves painting in real life.
V fnj vg nf n juvgr fnaql ornpu jvgu oynpx fzbxr evfvat sebz gur ynaq. Frrvat gur fuvcf qvqa’g oernx gur vyyhfvba; V whfg gubhtug gurl jrer va sebag bs gur ornpu.
So this new building is under construction here in New Zealand:
link text
These weird angles seem to be on every new building around here. What’s the style called? Is it just a New Zealand thing? Am I alone in hating it?
Judging from past discussions, everyone on SSC except me hates every building designed in the last 75 years. I think this one is kinda blah, I’ve seen much better and much worse.
The building looks very 21st-century American “stumpy.” In America those buildings are designed to maximize height and floor space while staying small enough to be built with a cheaper wood frame instead of the steel or concrete required by our building codes for larger structures. Not sure if there are similar constraints in NZ. In any case, the weird angles are clearly decorative, in America it would probably have a rectangular design for cost reasons, and also rectangles look better.
I don’t hate everything built in the last 75 years. But I’m also not an architect so I don’t know how impractical all of the new construction is or isn’t — but I think New York City, for example, has a number of very cool new (or newER) skyscrapers, for instance. Last time I visited, I saw a bunch I hadn’t seen before, and I think they’re innovative and attractive. But then I’ve always liked tall glassy buildings.
Right now, I’d call it contemporary.
Possibly a kind of postmodern aping of the Vanna Venturi House thing going on.
I’m guessing that technologies like computer-aided design and CNC glass cutters have made this kind of design a lot more practical. It would once have been a nightmare to source all those different-sized pieces of glass and cladding.
I don’t mind that building, but I’d get bored of them fast if that’s what they’re filling all the empty spaces in Christchurch and every square inch of land within 30 miles of Auckland with.
For the record, I think there’s some very nice modern and postmoder architecture out there. It’s just that the bottom quartile is far uglier than anything traditional (with the exception of Prince Albert’s McMansion).
That Vanna Venturi house – ouch. I can see that the architect is trying to do something, but the problem is that the thing he is trying to do is not working for me. The assymetry hurts my eyes and makes me twitch to balance everything out, and that rather muddy green colour is too flat and ugly. Light coloured paint and lots of sunlight in an open plot with nothing around save rockery and sky, and it could look okay, but on that site and in that context it makes me itchy.
I just am too plebian in my tastes to appreciate the modern world!
This goes back to what I was trying to say about not confusing modernism with postmodernism.
Modernism: the old rules don’t make sense anymore, let’s throw them out and make new rules
Postmodernism: the new rules are too restrictive, let’s throw them out and just do whatever
Your second link is the kind of thing that, were I a builder and somebody handed me the plans for that, I’d go “FML” 🙂
I’m impressed it got built, and even more impressed that somebody successfully translated “looks like a cartoon background from, say, the Powerpuff Girls” into the real world. Nobody gives enough credit to the construction workers who have to turn these things into reality!
Really? I’d expect the reaction would be, “Oh, good, something I know exactly how to do because it’s just like the last six buildings.”
Don’t think it is just a New Zealand thing. I’m seeing a lot of that in new buildings around NYC.
While that doesn’t look especially great to me, I do appreciate the effort to do something with texture instead of just not matching, but identically profiled, facades as far as the eye can see.
I often have nothing to say during conversations, and a lot of my relationships suffer for it.
On the other hand I occasionally start monologuing, which isn’t great either. (Though occasionally i do exactly the same thing but get an awesome dialogue instead)
Any advice?
Have you contemplated becoming a supervillain? They don’t have a lot of casual conversations and monologue a lot.
More seriously, casual conversation tends to be about giving the other person room to express themselves in a way you’ve indicated you want them to. Ask questions about them, follow it up with your own views/thoughts, etc. Go back and forth and soon enough you’ll be conversing.
Thanks
How would you translate this into group discussions?
Dinners, group hangouts, family reunions,etc.. are where my problem is the worst. (Sitting in a group like a mute for an hour is horrible, and realizing all conversation has stopped for a few minutes and you’ve been monologuing through os pretty bad too)
There are three approaches to this: change yourself to be able to contribute to more conversations more, change your environment to have more of the few conversations you do currently talk more in, or find people for whom talking isn’t a large part of their relationship calculus.
1) A bit of a self-hacking to identify both what makes you contribute to conversations now, and try to get yourself in that mindset for a wider swath of topics, or to notice how kinds of mindsets talkers in your peer/friend group have, and emulate them. For example, I don’t have much interest in sportsball, but I can talk about it if I need to, by honing in on the elements of it I do find interesting.
2) You still identify what makes you contribute to conversations now, and just try to get in that situation more often. For example, picking up more friends in your chosen hobby.
3) Building relationships is about sharing experiences together. If your relationships are suffering for a lack of conversation, try to be more in situations where talking isn’t as required to share the experience, like attending concerts, playing games, going to an interactive museum, attending a dance class. (Things like movies are just a delay, people generally want to talk about them afterwards.) Do more things where you can interact more through nonverbal expressions of emotion.
Erusian is also right, it may be a case of your definition of “this is worthy to contribute to conversation” being too narrow (it doesn’t have to be a “nothing or I control the topic with a monologue” binary), and change your role to a support position of “facilitate others to talk more.”
I already do 2 and 3, the problems come in when the relationships need normal socializing.
1 sounds interesting and also pretty hard, thank you
Yeah, learning to small talk is easiest by getting the other person talking about themselves, even if you don’t particularly care about the topic. Prompt them with questions, ask for clarifying details, ask for their opinion on things and offer supporting factoids. You’d be surprised how far you can get with just nodding and “mm-hmms” and “yeah/yes” and “cool.”
Getting conversation started if it’s currently silent is harder, but “how is your job going/what are you working on/how are your kids doing” tends to work as a good springboard. Otherwise, it is up to you to suss out what your family members like to talk about, figure out their interests. You can see what they post on social media, as a start.
Approach number 1 is about identifying at the pattern in what you yourself like to talk about at a meta level. Do you like quantified things? Do you like speculating on motives? Do you like predicting events? Do you like talking about strategy? Do you like describing attributes or actions?
Then you take that meta level interest and just apply it to whatever object level topic is at hand.
For example, I might like reading books because I’m interested in the relationships. If the topic at hand is, instead, cars, then I could try steering the conversation towards industry talk about how various car companies are competing, or have the other people reminisce on their favorite experiences driving their cars (which tend to involve other people), instead getting bogged down in specs talk.
There’s an idea that our society has more fractures because of all the choices we have. Yeah, we have all these movies/tv shows/social media options but everyone is on a different wavelength. If you watch Game of Thrones and I watch Orange is the New Black, there isn’t much to go off on. We just have less to talk about. So all you need to do is start a fundamental restructuring of society and you should be good to go.
This should go well with the supervillain angle, thank you.
I’ll suggest something you will surely reject as too radical. But here goes. I was never able to satisfactorily solve the conversation problem. About 7 years ago, I gave up. My wife and I live in silence. We literally do not say good morning or goodnight. We eliminate all other relationships.
I know it sounds stupid, but for us it works wonders. Marriage is perfect (we never argue or criticize, duh). I am thankful everyday that I do not have to talk to people. I even feel thankful when we go to bed and don’t have to have any conversation.
Like I said, no one would believe how well it works. If I had to go back to talking I would shoot myself.