The Motte Moddes: HighSpace (November 2023)

3 comments - 429 thread views 28d ago by ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad (image post) Edited 26d ago

The goal of this thread is to coordinate development on our project codenamed HighSpace - a mod for Freespace 2 that will be a mashup between it and High Fleet. A description of how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.

Who we have

@FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist
@Southkraut, @RenOS, @netstack - Interstellar Warfare Consultants
Me - developer

Who we need

The more the merrier, you are free to join in any capacity you wish! I can already identify a few distinct tasks for each position that we could split the work into

developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)
writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters
testers: the way the any program works always makes sense to the developer, so feedback from people who aren't me is always appreciated. This is a pretty easy way to get involved, though it does require an initial investment of buying Freespace2, at least until we manage to turn it into a proper total conversion, and use only our content.

A small note if you want to contribute:

Don't be afraid to ask questions however small, or silly you might find them. This is literally one of the primary functions this thread has. The Hard Light documentation is... there... but it's not great, and between that, the peculiarities of LUA, the FS2 scripting API, RocketLib, and other parts of FS2 modding, it really might not be obvious how to resolve issues you run into. I might not be able to answer all questions, but I've dabbled in all these things, so there's good chances I might be able to help.

What we have

An official Highspace Github Org and Repository
An official Highspace Wiki
Even more concept art for ships, curtesy of @FCfromSSC:

A proof of concenpt for “strategic” system map we jump into on start of the campaign. It contains a friendly ship and 2 enemy ships, you can chose where to move / which enemy ship to attack.
A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.
A somewhat actual-game-like workflow. Attacking a ship launches a mission where the two ships are pitted against each other. If you win, the current health of your ship is saved, and you can launch the second attack. If you clean up the map you are greeted with a “You Win” message, or “You Lose” if you lose your ship.

Updates

This has been quite a productive month! FC exported a few stripped down models to the Freespace native format, and after tinkering with game data, and the resulting files we managed to import them to the game:

On the development front we now have:

Orbital movement of ships. Orbits are automatically calculated based on your distance, and the orbited body's mass.
Ships can get caught in the orbit of another body
Real time conventional and subspace movement.
Collision detection with planets.

On that, I was also experimenting with calculating any collisions with the plotted course, but this might be a bit of dead-end. Currently you set the destination relative to the body you'll end up orbiting, rather than in absolute coordinates, and that makes the usefullness of showing these potential collisions to the user questionable. The code might still be useful for the AI to plot the optimal course so I'll hold on to it for now.

What's next

Fleet info in the System View
Splitting / merging fleets
AI code for System View ships, first for plotting the course, and if time permits for some basic enemy movement as well.

Wellness Wednesday for November 1, 2023

82 comments - 1641 thread views 28d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

A Short Post About Bones, or, Bring Me The Head Of John The Baptist

5 comments - 698 thread views 29d ago by FarNearEverywhere undereducated and overopinionated (text post) Edited 29d ago

Inspired by @dovetailing's lovely post on Christianity, let me have the audacity to post on here something I wrote back in 2011 for interested Protestants on a website that I think is now defunct.

Don't anybody blame @dovetailing for this, it's all off my own bat!

To borrow a quote from Chesterton contrasting the suicide and the martyr, and the attitude of Christianity to both (“Orthodoxy”, Chapter V, ‘The Flag of the World’, emphasis mine): “The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's. I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?”

This is a look at why dry bones were and are considered to have a virtue in them that could benefit us (and I’m speaking of virtue both in the conventionally understood sense and the older sense, as when my granny told us ‘there’s great virtue in seawater’ for healing cuts and sores so we should go down and wash any injuries in the sea).

What exactly are relics? You may be interested to know that the Catholic Church classifies them by three kinds:

First-Class Relics: Items directly associated with the events of Christ's life or the physical remains of a saint (a bone, a hair, skull, a limb, etc.).
Second-Class Relics: An item that the saint wore (a shirt, a glove, etc.) Also included is an item that the saint owned or frequently used, for example, a crucifix, rosary, book and so on.
Third-Class Relics: Any object that is touched to a first- or second-class relic. Most third-class relics are small pieces of cloth, but you can touch anything (a rosary beads, a holy picture, and so on) to the first- or second-class relic (and that includes graves and tombs, which is why, for instance, there are customs of taking away clay or pebbles from a saint’s grave for healing or other uses).

Let’s get the lyin’, cheatin’ and stealin’ over with before we move on to the edifyin’. Yes, there were and probably still are a lot of fraudulent relics out there, but it’s too simplistic to dismiss them all as power-crazed clerics inventing fake miracles to enveigle the credulous peasantry and keep them under their thumb for profit and status. An example of this is one that regularly comes up; the liquefying blood of St. Januarius. Briefly, Januarius was a 3rd century bishop of Naples supposed to have been martyred during the persecution of Diocletian. An alleged sample of his blood is kept in a glass ampoule in the cathedral of Naples, where it is brought out for veneration three times a year and undergoes a miraculous liquefaction. His relics are particularly honoured against eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. Scientists and skeptics (the ones who like to spell “sceptic” with a “k” not a “c” to prove how hard-core they are) attribute this to a mediaeval fraud.

Ever heard the term “thixotropic”? It’s why you have to shake the tomato ketchup bottle before the contents will come out. Very simplistically, it’s how a solid(ish) material can become liquid(ish) and flow – and because the bishop tilts and moves the reliquary holding the blood, that is seen as evidence of “thixotropic flow”. The alternate explanation can be found here, where an experiment to replicate the alleged blood was done.

Their view? It’s scientifically reproducible, which means it isn’t a miracle, and is probably a fraud.

Quote from a now-dead link:

Today, a large percentage of the world's population believes that through transubstantiation, bread and wine physically change into the body and blood of the Son of God. Is it not possible that 650 years ago a Neapolitan cleric/alchemist, who might regularly pray to his patron saint, Januarius, accidentally discovered the thixotropic properties of the mixture of molysite and limestone? Might he not believe that the material had taken on the form of the blood of his patron saint? Better to present his discovery as the finding of Januarius's blood and receive acclaim, then present it as the result of an alchemical procedure and receive "no mercy" from Pope John XXII! Furthermore, in 1389, the Duomo of Naples was being built up and many artists from all over Italy were present. The king was then Robert of Anjou, described as an extremely religious person, and a "holy blood relic" was certain to please him.

And you know what? That’s fine. Unless the phial is opened and the contents examined (which is unlikely, but not due to fear by the clergy that their hoax will be revealed – sorry, conspiracy theorists! – but more to religious sentiment regarding desecration of a relic) nobody can say for sure one way or the other. It may have been a 13th century fraud (deliberate), it may have been a pious hoax, it may be an honest mistake, it may be the real blood of a martyr. You may be astounded, shocked and surprised to the point of your hair turning white to find out that the Catholic Church does not demand belief in the reality of relics – nope, not even the Shroud of Turin (which is a whole cottage industry on its own) or the Veronica or the Mandylion. If some experiment in the morning proved that the Shroud was indeed a 14th century fake, this does not mean that every Christian in the world would have to say “That proves the Resurrection never happened!” and have to rip up their Bibles. We don’t believe it because we have ‘proof’ in the form of the Shroud; the Shroud is venerated because (a) we believe in the Resurrection beforehand (b) it can be taken as an image of the Crucified Body of Christ, just like all those crucifixes in churches and paintings and hanging around people’s necks, which we use as a symbol and as a focus for prayer.

For myself, the rationalisation of the skeptic (some anonymous alchemist stumbled upon this reaction in an experiment and took it as a divine sign and decided to make fake martyr’s blood and present it to a notably devout King – who we must take, simply on the grounds that he was devout, as being a credulous idiot and not someone who managed to hang on to a throne in a time and place where politics was hot and bloody and therefore by necessity had to have a brain in his head – for the new cathedral, all done in the best possible taste and who also managed to invent a process that would work for six hundred years while he was at it) is just as much an article of his faith as the Neapolitan peasant who looks to the relic as an omen of the coming year.

That’s not to say that every relic should be considered the real deal; Chaucer’s Pardoner is an example of how they knew, back in the 14th century, that there were frauds and cheats going around:

First I pronounce where I come from, and then I show my bulls, one and all, but first the seal of our liege lord the king on my patent. I show that first to secure my body, lest any man, priest, or clerk would be so bold as to disturb me in Christ's holy labours. After that I then proceed with my tales, and show bulls of popes and cardinals and patriarchs and bishops, and I speak a few words in Latin to give a flavour to my preaching and to stir men to devotion. Then I show forth my long glass cases, crammed full of cloths and bones: all the people believe that they are holy relics. I have a shoulder-bone set in brass which came from a holy Jew's sheep.

Apart from deliberate fraud, there was a fierce spirit of emulation, when churches competed with one another as to which had the best and biggest collection of relics, which meant that we get such examples as the three (at least) heads of John the Baptist, as recounted in this Wikipedia article; after the desecration of his shrine by Julian the Apostate, the remaining relics were scattered and several places laid claim to having the ‘real’ head:

John's skull it is located at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great in Scetes, Egypt, at Gandzasar Monastery's Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, in Nagorno Karabakh, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and San Silvestro in Capite in Rome, and the Residenz Museum in Munich, Germany, (official residence of the Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria from 1385 to 1918). Further heads, no longer available, were once held by the Knights Templar, Amiens Cathedral in France (brought home by Wallon de Sarton from the Fourth Crusade in Constantinople), Antioch in Turkey (fate uncertain), and the parish church at Tenterden in Kent, where it was preserved up until the Reformation.

One of the alleged heads for your edification.

Such competition (what Ellis Peters called in the title of one of her Brother Cadfael mysteries, “A Morbid Taste for Bones”) led to things like the Venetians stealing Santa Claus’s body from Myra in Turkey (or rather, what was left after an expedition from Bari got there first).

You may also have heard or read some form of the jeer about the relics of the True Cross, along the lines that if gathered together, these alleged relics would make forty crosses or a ship or the likes. It seems to have its origin with Jean Calvin who made the comment in his “Traité Des Reliques” that there were enough pieces of the True Cross to build a ship, though it has lost no popularity to this day not alone with Protestants but free-thinkers, materialists, skeptics and atheists of all stripes. Well, we can thank an obsessive Frenchman for a rebuttal of this mockery; Charles Rohault de Fleury, an architect who devoted himself in later years to religious archaeology, and in 1870 published a book (“Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion”) on the fruits of his labours tracking down all authenticated relics of the True Cross, estimating the volume of a cross likely used in the execution of criminals by the Romans, and totting up the sizes of all the relics for comparison. He came up with a result that the claimed relics came to a weight of under 2 kilograms, which isn’t enough to make any kind of a boat, really. From the “Catholic Encylopedia” of 1913:

The work of Rohault de Fleury, "Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion" (Paris, 1870), deserves more prolonged attention; its author has sought out with great care and learning all the relics of the True Cross, drawn up a catalogue of them, and, thanks to this labour, he has succeeded in showing that, in spite of what various Protestant or Rationalistic authors have pretended, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not only not "be comparable in bulk to a battleship", but would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four metres in height, with transverse branch of two metres, proportions not at all abnormal (op. cit., 97-179). Here is the calculation of this savant: Supposing the Cross to have been of pine-wood, as is believed by the savants who have made a special study of the subject, and giving it a weight of about seventy-five kilograms, we find that the volume of this cross was 178,000,000 cubic millimetres. Now the total known volume of the True Cross, according to the finding of M. Rohault de Fleury, amounts to above 4,000,000 cubic millimetres, allowing the missing part to be as big as we will, the lost parts or the parts the existence of which has been overlooked, we still find ourselves far short of 178,000,000 cubic millimetres, which should make up the True Cross.”

I’ve seen a relic of the True Cross (alleged); it’s in Holy Cross Abbey in County Tipperary (a restored Cistercian monastery and church which had a relic of the True Cross from the 13th century but which was destroyed in the 17th century after Cromwell; the relic currently there was presented in 1977 by the Vatican upon its restoration) and it’s more a splinter than a huge chunk of wood. If the other relics are on the same scale, then we’re definitely not talking “enough pieces to make a ship”.

There are even “relics” of very dubious provenance. Yes, the (in)famous Holy Prepuce, which yes, is exactly what the name implies and if you want to know more, you’ll have to look it up yourself here.

Apparently, there was one contender which survived up to 1983 when thieves supposedly made off with it. Further comment is superfluous.

It would seem to be human nature that we can’t resist “improving” upon things, such as the tilma with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There is some insistence that this image is not miraculous but was painted by a native painter; it is certain that there were some embellishments made (e.g. the figure of the angel, the golden rays, the stars on her cloak, other elements added and removed). On the other hand, this is well within the tradition of the “icons not made by hands” (acheiropoieta) in Orthodoxy. However, since there is room for honest error and the effects of enthusiasm as well as fraud and deceit when dealing with relics from the early ages of the church, this is why you’re on safer ground with relics from a more modern era, where they can be historically verified. Like the head of St. Catherine of Siena, smuggled out of Rome by the Siennese in 1380 when the Romans wouldn’t give back her body to be buried in her home town.

Or the head of St. Oliver Plunkett, 17th century Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland, hanged, drawn and quartered in England for treason as part of the fallout from Titus Oates’ “Horrid Popish Plot”, now in the church at Drogheda.

Or the relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (the “Little Flower” which is a sugary sentimental name for a young woman who was as tough as old boots), exhumed due to popular devotion and nearly always on tour world-wide (they’ve been to England as recently as 2009, and visited Ireland both in 2001 – where one of the places they stayed was in Mountjoy Prison – and again in 2009). She even visited America in 1999.

Unfortunately, we moderns are much more squeamish than our sturdy forefathers in the Faith. When they put Padre Pio’s body on display, they had the face covered by a “a life-like silicone mask” (apparently so that he would look like his photographs, which is how the pilgrims expect him to look) which I think (a) misses the whole point of relics (b) could cause confusion with the bodies of the incorruptibles (and “incorruptible” doesn’t mean “looking as if still alive”, anyhow), if people think this is his real face and (c) panders too much to our need for prettification of death.

They did the same thing for St. Bernadette’s body (face and hands), only they had to use wax back in 1925:

A precise imprint of the face was molded so that the firm of Pierre Imans in Paris could make a wax mask based on the imprints and on some genuine photos. This was common practice for relics in France, as it was feared that the blackish tinge to the face and the sunken eyes and nose would make an unpleasant impression on the public.

Darn it, dead saint’s bodies should look like this! (Crypt of Ss. Ambrose – the bishop who baptised St. Augustine – Gervase and Protase).

Okay, we’ve had the fun, now comes the educative bit.

Early altars were built over the bones of the martyrs in catacombs; when the churches came up to the surface, the custom remained, which is why altars have relics in their bases or within the body of the altar itself (in an “altar stone”).

(Part One of Two, remainder below)

NYC Rats (rationalists) Gambling strategy & halloween party night [10/31]

5 comments - 551 thread views 29d ago by anewyorkrat (image post) Edited 28d ago

Rationality and Religion

66 comments - 1194 thread views 30d ago by dovetailing (text post)

1 Introduction

In the Small-scale Questions thread, @TheDag asked:

[H]ow do you handle the paradox of belief? [...] The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament. And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. [...] How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?

This post is my attempt to answer that question.

My apologies in advance for any first-draft typos or errors.

I am an Orthodox Christian -- a convert to Orthodoxy, but not to Christianity in general. I've been reading material from LessWrong/SSC/ACX for about 10 years now, but never considered myself a Rationalist, in large part because of the movement's basically-axiomatic rejection of anything not comporting with a materialist metaphysics. Nevertheless, I'm a natural skeptic and a mathematician by training, and I think I understand, at a visceral level, what TheDag is talking about.

This post is not intended to be an apologia for Religion, Theism, or Orthodox Christianity in particular. Instead, it is an outline of my way of thinking about Reason and Christianity, and why I think that (some forms of) religion -- yes, serious, supernaturalist, actually-believe-the-creeds Christianity complete with ritual and sacraments (in fact, especially that kind) -- is fully compatible with being rational; at least, as rational as we can reasonably expect to be.

Small disclaimer: I'm going to use Christianity, and (sometimes) Orthodox Christianity in particular, as my source of examples/topic of discussion. I (a) do not guarantee that everything I say will be precisely correct Orthodox doctrine (I'm doing my best but I'm not getting feedback from a committee of bishops and theologians) and (b) don't know how applicable this all is outside of Christianity. (It would be kind of weird if I thought that Christianity and other religions were in exactly the same position, since I think Orthodox Christianity is true and other religions varying degrees of less-than-true.)

2 The Goals of Rationality

Why does anyone care about being rational in the first place? The usual answer, which in my opinion is basically correct, is that there are two reasons:

Because it helps you to believe true things rather than false things. ("Epistemic Rationality")
Because it helps you make better choices. ("Instrumental Rationality")

Note that these goals are just that -- goals. There's no law of the universe (at least, there's no non-circular argument) that a particular "Rational" way of thinking will always be the best way to achieve those goals. A particular set of scientific, logical, and probabilistic methods seem to be pretty good, overall, and certainly excel in some domains, but in principal these are secondary to the above goals. Do you want to believe true things and live well, or do you want to Be Rational? Obviously the first, right?

Well...

There's another kind of reason to want to be rational. Maybe you have a skeptical temperament, and have an internal demand for a certain sort of rigor. Or maybe you have developed a kind of self-identification as a Rational Person, which has attached itself to a certain set of assumptions and ways of thinking. Or maybe you like to think of yourself as Intelligent and Rational, and there's this bunch of intelligent people you know, and they all say that thinking in a certain way, and believing in a certain set of axioms, is a prerequisite to being Intelligent and Rational, and theism and rituals and faith and religion is just Dumb Stuff for Irrational People and you don't want to be Dumb and Irrational, right?

(It should go without saying that this is a general You, not about TheDag in particular, but here I am saying it anyway.)

The important thing here is that these temperamental, identity-based, and social reasons for wanting to Be Rational are not, themselves, rational or virtuous. If it's the identity or social reasons that have got you, all I can say is that the faster you admit it to yourself and work on getting rid of them, the better.

But perhaps your troubles are in part due to a skeptical temperament, whether natural or trained, or with a difficulty believing that doing and thinking in ways that are not Rational could possibly lead to believing true things or living well.

In that case, the rest of this essay is for you.

3 Ontology

Some people are Christians because they trust authority figures who tell them it's true. Others are Christian because they believe they've witnessed an inexplicable miracle. There's nothing wrong with these people; many of them are better people than I am; but they are not me.

I am a Christian because of the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Okay, maybe that's a bit too glib, so let me expand a bit. There is a fundamental mystery of how consciousness can exist in a purely material universe. I don't mean that it's a mystery how something could exhibit intelligent behavior, or have some sort of internal model of the world that contains itself. I mean that the existence of a first-person perspective, of there being an I that sees from my eyes and thinks my thoughts, of there being a quality to experience -- all things that we take for granted -- seem impossible in a materialist ontology. The usual materialist takes either handwave the problem away, or else (inexplicably to me) bite the bullet and deny the existence of the conscious self at all.

Even so, I exist.

Lest I digress into the apologia which I did not intend to write, let me just make my main point here: the existence of a first-person perspective not only reveals materialism to be a premise rather than a conclusion, it poses a problem for the universal applicability of rationality, because while the first person perspective is a universal and undeniable fact, even the best thinkers cannot seem to articulate what, exactly, it is, or delineate it to the point of being able to reason clearly about it -- which is why we see the problem being dismissed as just muddled thinking by others.

My other point in bringing this up is as a segue into talking about exactly how deeply the Theist (or at least, Christian) ontology differs from the Materialist one. A lot of people have this unspoken idea that Christian ontology is essentially the same as materialist ontology, except that there is are extra entities which maybe don't follow the laws of physics, and one of them is "omnipotent" (whatever that means, maybe power level = infinity or something), and we call that one "God".

This is not the Christian ontology.

The actual Christian ontology is something more like this: The fundamental nature of reality does not look like atoms and the void, governed by laws of physics. Rather, the fundamental nature of reality is something which is in most respects unimaginable, but in which what we call personhood and will and morality and love and reason are fundamental attributes. This is God -- not another entity like a star or a chair or a cat or a human, only immaterial and superpowered, but rather, the Person at the heart of all reality, in virtue of which everything that exists (including, of course, the entire material universe and all its physical laws), exists.

This is so fundamentally difficult to get one's mind around that people resort to paradoxes to talk about it: We call God "The Existing One", and yet some Christian theologians have said things like "God is not a being" -- not because they think that God is just some idea, but because our notion of "existence" or "being" imports the idea of a separate entity within the universe, and is insufficient to what -- who -- God is. (More on this in the next section.)

This ontology is probably shocking to people whose habitual assumptions are materialist -- which is true of most people, let alone Rationalists. So they round off theistic claims, in their head, to something like "Superpowered Invisible Man". This concept is, from the Christian perspective, nearer to the truth than pure materialism, but -- the skeptics are right on this one -- being materialist-except-for-this-one-superpowered-dude is not very rational.

But within the ontology I've outlined, Christian beliefs about the world make reasonable sense -- I would say they are rational, not in the sense of being obviously inevitable or circumscribed by reason, but in that they don't pose any problem for a rational person who recognizes his limits and is content with partial understanding.

4 Cataphasis and Apophasis

When people talk about paradoxes in Christianity, they generally mean one of four things:

Doctrines, like the Trinity, which refer to concepts that our minds have a difficult time comprehending, because they are so different from our usual experience and categories.
Counterintuitive truths, expressed in apparently-contradictory language in order to draw attention.
Deliberate paradox in the form of Apophatic theology, meant to explode misconceptions about God and emphasize our inability to comprehend His fundamental nature.
Multiple ways of talking about the same topic that seem to be inconsistent.

Of the second I will have nothing further to say; it is clearly not a problem for rational thinking. Of the first, I want to emphasize that the apparent paradox is due to our inability to understand the concepts involved and nothing more, much like how arithmetic on infinite cardinal numbers is not a "real" paradox just because it doesn't behave like arithmetic on the integers. ("But I understand cardinal arithmetic, down to how it is a consequence of ZFC! If nobody understands the Trinity fully, how could it be reasonable to believe it?" More on that later.)

So let's talk about the third and fourth.

A number of foundational Christian thinkers have divided theology into two parts: Cataphatic, or positive, theology, and Apophatic or negative, theology. Cataphatic theology is what is at play when one says things like "God loves", or "God is merciful", or "God is just"; or that which is expressed in creeds and dogmas. Cataphatic theology is saying the things that we know about God. Apophatic theology is an approach in which, rather than making positive statements about God, we make negative statements about what God is not. (For some easy examples: "God is not material", "God does not have a cause outside Himself".)

Apophasis often takes the form of paradox when juxtaposed with cataphatic statements, because, first, our concepts which are employed in cataphatic statements will smuggle in implications or impressions which are not true, and second, because this paradox emphasizes our inability to comprehend the full truth about God. I mentioned the apophatic "God is not a being" above, for instance, which seems to contradict theism, but actually the point is that our notion of "being" or "existence" is not really applicable to God.

One might think of apophatic theology's relationship to cataphatic theology as trying to help us understand the "map" of cataphatic doctrine as a guide to the "territory" of who God is and how we relate to God, by continually pulling our attention to the fact that the map is not the territory. This isn't irrational paradox at all, but our continual reminder that the person at the center of reality is not something we can really get our minds around, and we're better off not imagining that we can.

(Digression: Apophatic theology is not unique to Christianity; there is something very similar in Neoplatonism as well as, I think, in Taoism ("The Tao which can be spoken is not the true Tao.").)

Finally, the fourth kind of paradox. It is much like the third, except that multiple counterbalancing positive statements are made, each pointing to part of a truth which is too difficult for us to really get our heads around. Now of course it is possible to excuse nonsense as "just different aspects of an incomprehensible truth," but the thing can really happen as well as being faked.

Let's take an example: What's the deal with sin? Why is it bad for me to sin? (other than it being bad for the people I harm)? The following answers are all defensible from both the Bible and Christian Tradition:

Sin is breaking God's rules. It makes God angry, and He will punish you for it. (BUT: Doesn't the Bible also say that God hates no one and is quick to forgive?)
Sin is bad because it's foolish, and tends to lead to bad natural consequences: material, psychological, or social. (BUT: People who do bad things often end up ahead.)
Sin is like a progressive illness; if you sin, you get sicker, and eventually you'll be miserable (unless you get cured). (BUT: where's the will and personal guilt in all this? And why do I need to consent to being cured?)
Sin separates you from God, and the absence of God's love ends up in misery. (BUT: How can anyone be separated from God and God's love, if God is everywhere and in everything, and loves everyone?)
Sin breaks your relationship with God (BUT: a human's relationship with God is only similar by analogy to our relationship with other humans, and how could this be broken, since God doesn't get emotional baggage like humans do?)
Sinning makes you into the sort of person that finds the presence of God intolerable. (BUT: how does that even work?)

(I probably left some out.) For what it's worth, I -- and many Orthodox theologians -- think the last one is probably closest to the truth, but in some ways it's the least actionable. What we get is all of them: partly because each of them is the right model for some occasions, and we, being unable to really understand the underlying reality, need a multiplicity of models for different circumstances. "All models are wrong, but some are useful," indeed.

5 Those Who Have Not Seen and Yet Have Believed

This section title refers, of course, to Jesus's words to the Apostle Thomas -- after the resurrection, Jesus appears to the Apostles, but for some reason, Thomas isn't with them. The rest tell Thomas, but he -- being a bit of a skeptic -- refuses to believe unless he can verify it for himself (down to unfakeable physical proof). Later, Jesus appears to all of them, offers that proof to Thomas -- and then gives a blessing to "those who have not seen and yet have believed".

There is an epistemic issue -- two, maybe -- that a lot of rational/skeptical people have with Christianity, and it's this. A lot of Christian doctrine contains claims that cannot be verified by anyone alive today (e.g the Crucifixion and Resurrection), or even could not have been directly verified by human observation at all (e.g. the Trinity).

The first is not, in principle, a problem. Everyone believes lots of things they can't verify, even things that nobody can verify now (historical events, e.g.), because they trust in the body of people who did observe those things and those who have passed on the report. They are not wrong to do so! Very little can be empirically verified by an individual. So part of the question, then, is how trustworthy are the people who reported and passed down these events? Since this is not an apologia I won't get into the weeds here (and also I'm not really an expert), so I'll just say that I think a good case can be made that the answer is "Pretty darned trustworthy, all things considered". Still, some of the claims made are pretty wild (cf Resurrection) if you haven't already accepted the overall metaphysics, so skepticism is understandable.

The second is more of a problem. How can anyone, no matter how honest or intelligent, come to know something like the doctrine of the Trinity, which is (a) something that can't be (physically) observed, and (b) admittedly not fully comprehensible by anyone? Christianity, of course, has an answer: it was revealed by God -- through the words of prophets, or Jesus, or by a revelation given to some of the Apostles. That's an explanation, but it has one problem: it does not bridge the epistemic gap for those who don't already broadly accept Christianity.

Here's the thing: this is fine. Nobody should be asked to accept these things just on the say-so of people they aren't sure they can trust. It is not rational to do so, but it's also not necessary. There are good ways to bridge that gap, such that blind belief is not required.

Roughly, it works like this: you get good evidence, of some sort, that at least some of the claims are true. Since all these claims are coming from the same source, they are tied together -- belief in one should increase your estimation that the source is a good one, and thus that the others, which you can't verify, are true as well. Coming to believe in the others to an extent, you see how they fit together (and/or find that believing other claims has good results). At some point a threshold is passed, and you believe not in the truth of this or that statement, but in the whole edifice, even those parts you don't understand (yet), because, as Chesterton put it, you find that Christianity is a truth-telling thing.

Talk to most thoughtful Christians, including many converts, and you'll find that something like this is the process. Maybe they have, like me, some deep philosophical convictions that turn out to be elucidated best by Christian doctrine. Maybe they had an experience that, while maybe not communicable to others, they feel they had no choice but to accept as miraculous, and which pointed them in that direction. Maybe they just found that acting as though the doctrines are true had good results for them that they did not find elsewhere.

As an exercise, I invite you to think about why, from the Orthodox Christian perspective, correct doctrine is so important. It's not because the beliefs, in themselves, are going to save someone ("Even the demons believe -- and tremble!"), nor the converse, that one cannot be saved without specific beliefs (see: the many saints who made errors or lacked knowledge, or the fact that the Church believes that children and idiots can be saved). It's not an arbitrary test, either. Rather, the Church believes that knowing certain truths about God and Humanity's relationship to God helps you, because God is real, and believing true things makes it is easier to be aligned to that reality, which is the real goal.

[ I ran out of characters, so the rest will be in a reply to this post.]

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

1655 comments - 24365 thread views 30d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1655

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 29, 2023

163 comments - 2386 thread views 1mo ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Israel-Gaza Megathread #3

455 comments - 12178 thread views 1mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

Advice for disagreeable people

24 comments - 1534 thread views 1mo ago by gog (text post)

Friday Fun Thread for October 27, 2023

172 comments - 2671 thread views 1mo ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

World Series 2023 Megathread

11 comments - 826 thread views 1mo ago by inappropriatecontent (houseofstrauss.com)

Transnational Thursdays 23

43 comments - 816 thread views 1mo ago by Soriek (text post)

Ways to address underlying emotions that may be causing physical health issues?

22 comments - 805 thread views 1mo ago by TissueReligion (text post)

Wellness Wednesday for October 25, 2023

75 comments - 1711 thread views 1mo ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Political Survey

73 comments - 1355 thread views 1mo ago by LRealist (text post)

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

1395 comments - 27010 thread views 1mo ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1395

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 22, 2023

159 comments - 2570 thread views 1mo ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

The Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis

42 comments - 2803 thread views 1mo ago by ymeskhout (ymeskhout.substack.com)

The term conspiracy theory is wielded as a pejorative, alluding to on-its-face absurdity. But the vocabulary we use has a serious ambiguity problem because conspiracies are not figments of the imagination. There is a tangible and qualitative distinction between plain-vanilla conspiracies (COINTELPRO, Operation Snow White, or the Gunpowder Plot) and their more theatrical cousins (flat earth theory, the moon landing hoax, or the farcical notion that coffee tastes good), yet a clear delineation has been elusive and it's unsatisfying to just assert "this one is crazy, and this one isn't." Both camps involve subterfuge, malevolent intent, covert operations, misinformation, orchestrated deceit, hidden agendas, clandestine networks, and yes, conspiracy, and yet the attempts to differentiate between the two have veered into unsatisfactory or plainly misleading territories.

What I'll argue is the solution boils down to a simple reconfiguration of the definition that captures the essence of the absurdity: conspiracy theories are theories that assume circumstances that render the titular "conspiracy" unnecessary. This is what I'll refer to as the Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis (OCH). Before we dive into this refinement, it's helpful to explore why traditional distinctions have fallen short.

The section on differences in The People's Pedia showcases some of these misguided attempts. For example, conspiracy theories tend to be in opposition to mainstream consensus but that's a naked appeal to authority — logic that would have tarred the early challengers to the supposed health benignity of smoking as loons. Or that theories portray conspirators acting with extreme malice, but humans can indeed harbor evil intentions (see generally, human history). Another relies on the implausibility of maintaining near-perfect operational security. This is getting better, but while maintaining secrecy is hard, it's definitely not impossible. We have actual, real-life examples of covert military operations, or drug cartels that manage to operate clandestine billion-dollar logistical enterprises.

There's still some useful guidance to draw from the pile of chaff, and that's conspiracy theories' lack of, and resistance to, falsifiability. Despite its unfortunate name, falsifiability is one of my nearest and dearest concepts for navigating the world. Put simply, falsifiability is the ability for a theory to be proven wrong at least hypothetically. The classic example is "I believe all swans are white, but I would change my mind if I saw a black swan". The classic counterexample could be General John DeWitt citing the absence of sabotage by Japanese-Americans during WWII as evidence of future sabotage plans. There is indeed a trend of conspiracy theorists digging into their belief in belief, and dismissing contrary evidence as either fabricated, or (worse) evidence of the conspiracy itself.

I won't talk shit about the falsifiability test; it's really good stuff. But it has limitations. For one, the lack of falsifiability is only a good indication a theory is deficient, not a conclusive determination. There are also practical considerations, like how historical events can be difficult to apply falsifiability because the evidence is incomplete or hopelessly lost, or how insufficient technology in an emerging scientific field can place some falsifiable claims (temporarily, hopefully) beyond scrutiny. So the inability to falsify a theory does not necessarily mean that the theory is bunk.

Beyond those practical limitations, there's also the unfortunate bad actor factor. Theorists with sufficient dishonesty or self-awareness can respond to the existential threat of falsifiability by resorting to vague innuendo to avoid tripping over shoelaces of their own making. Since you can't falsify what isn't firmly posited, they dance around direct assertions, keeping their claims shrouded in a mist of maybe. The only recourse then is going one level higher, and deducing vagueness as a telltale sign of a falsifiability fugitive wherever concrete answers to the who / how / why remain elusive. Applying the vagueness test to the flat earth theory showcases the evasion. It's near-impossible to get any clear answers from proponents: who exactly is behind Big Globe, how did they manage to hoodwink everyone, and why why why why why would anyone devote any effort to this scheme? In contrast, True Conspiracies™ like the atomic spies lack the nebulousness: Soviet Union / covert transmission of nuclear secrets / geopolitical advantage.

Yet the vagueness accusation doesn't apply to all conspiracy theories. The moon landing hoax is surprisingly lucid on this point: NASA / soundstage / geopolitical advantage. And this unveils another defense mechanism against falsification, which is the setting of ridiculously high standards of evidence. Speaking of veils, there's a precedent for this in Islamic law of all places, where convictions for fornication require four eyewitnesses to the same act of intercourse, and only adult male Muslims are deemed competent witnesses. The impossibly stringent standards appear to be in response to the fact that the offense carries the death penalty, and shows it's possible to raise the bar so high that falsifiability is intentionally rendered out of reach.

The moon landing hoax might be subjected to these impossible standards, given that the Apollo 11 landing was meticulously documented over 143 minutes of uninterrupted video footage — a duration too lengthy to fit on a film reel with the technology available at the time. Although only slightly higher than the Lizardman Constant, a surprising 6% of Americans still hold the view that the moon landing was staged. At some point you have to ask how much evidence is enough, but ultimately there's no universally accepted threshold for answering this question.

So falsifiability remains a fantastic tool, but it has legitimate practical limitations, and isn't a conclusive inquiry anyways. Someone's refusal to engage in falsifiability remains excellent evidence they're aware and concerned of subjecting their theory to scrutiny, but their efforts (vagueness or impossible standards) will nevertheless still frustrate a straightforward application of falsifiability. So what's left?

We're finally back again to the Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis, where the circumstances conspiracy theories must assume also, ironically, render the conspiracy moot. The best way to explain this is by example. Deconstructing a conspiracy theory replicates the thrill of planning a bank heist, so put yourself in the shoes of the unfortunate anonymous bureaucrat tasked with overseeing the moon landing hoax. Remember that the why of the moon landing hoax was to establish geopolitical prestige by having the United States beat the Soviet Union to the lunar chase. So whatever scheme you concoct has to withstand scrutiny from what was, at the time, the most advanced space program employing the greatest space engineers from that half of the world.

The most straightforward countermeasure would be to task already existing NASA engineers to draft up totally fake but absolutely plausible equipment designs. Every single aspect of the entire launch — each rocket, lunar module, ladder, panel, bolt, glove, wrench — would need to be painstakingly fabricated to deceive not just the global audience, but the eagle-eyed experts watching with bated breath from the other side of the Cold War divide. Extend that to all communications, video transmissions, photographs, astronaut testimonies, and 'returned' moon rocks. Each and all of it has to be exhaustively and meticulously examined by dedicated and highly specialized consultants.

But it doesn't stop there, because you also need absolute and perpetual secrecy, as any singular leak would threaten the entire endeavor. The U.S. was well aware Soviet Union spies had successfully snagged closely-guarded nuclear secrets, so whatever countermeasures needed here had to surpass fucking nukes. Like I said before, secrecy is not impossible, just very difficult. I suppose NASA could take a page from the cartels and just institute brutally violent reprisals against any snitches (plus their whole families), but this genre of deterrence can only work if...people know about it. More likely, though, NASA would use the traditional intelligence agency methods of extensive vetting, selective recruitment, and lavish compensation, but now all measures would need to be further amplified to surpass the protective measures around nuclear secrets.

We're talking screening hundreds or thousands of individuals more rigorously than for nuclear secrets, alongside an expanding surveillance apparatus to keep everyone in line. How much do you need to increase NASA's budget (10x? 100x?) to devote toward a risky gambit that, if exposed, would be history's forever laughingstock? If such vast treasuries are already at disposal, it starts to seem easier to just...go to the moon for real.

OCH® has several benefits. It starts by not challenging any conspiracy theorist's premises. It accepts it as given that there is indeed a sufficiently motivated shadowy cabal, and just runs with it. This sidesteps any of the aforementioned concerns about falsifiability fugitives, and still provides a useful rubric for distinguishing plain-vanilla conspiracies from their black sheep brethren.

If we apply OCH to the atomic spies, we can see the theory behind that conspiracy requires no overkill assumptions. The Soviet Union did not have nukes, they wanted nukes, and stealing someone else's blueprints is definitely much easier than developing your own in-house. The necessary assumption (the Soviet Union has an effective espionage program) does not negate the need for the conspiracy.

Contrast that with something like the Sandy Hook hoax, which posits the school shooting as a false flag operation orchestrated by the government to pass restrictive gun laws (or something; see the vagueness section above). Setting aside the fact that no significant firearm legislation actually resulted, the hoax and the hundreds of crisis actors it would have required would have necessitated thousands of auditions, along with all the secrecy hurdles previously discussed. And again, if the government already has access to this mountain of resources, it seems like there are far more efficient methods of spending it (like maybe giving every congressman some gold bars) rather than orchestrating an attack and then hoping the right laws get passed afterward.

It's also beguiling to wonder exactly why the shadowy cabal would even need to orchestrate a fake mass shooting, given the fact that they already regularly happen! Even if the cabal wanted to instigate a slaughter (for whatever reason), the far, far, far simpler method is to just identify the loner incel kid and prod them into committing an actual mass shooting. We've already stipulated the cabal does not care about dead kids. Similarly, if the U.S. wanted to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks as a prelude to global war, it seems far easier to load up an actual plane full of actual explosives and just actually launch it at the actual buildings, rather than to spend the weeks or months to surreptitiously sneak in however many tons of thermite into the World Trade Center (while also coordinating the schedule with the plane impact, for some reason).

Examining other examples of Verified Conspiracies demonstrate how none of them harbor overkill assumptions that render the conspiratorial endeavors moot. In the Watergate scandal, the motive was to gain political advantage by spying on adversaries, and the conspirators did so through simple breaking and entering. No assumptions are required about the capabilities of President Nixon's security entourage that would have rendered the trespass unnecessary. Even something with the scope of Operation Snow White — which remains one of the largest infiltrations of the U.S. government, involving up to 5,000 agents — fits. The fact that they had access to thousands of covert agents isn't overkill, because the agents still needed to infiltrate government agencies to gain access to the documents they wanted destroyed. The assumptions do not belie the need for the conspiracy.

I hold no delusions that I can convince people wedded to their conspiracy theory of their missteps. I don't claim to have any idea how people fall prey to this kind of unfalsifiable absurdist thinking. But at least for the rest of us, it will remain useful to be able to draw a stark distinction between the real and the kooky. Maybe after that we can unearth some answers.

—sent from my lunar module

Friday Fun Thread for October 20, 2023

89 comments - 2086 thread views 1mo ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Transnational Thursdays 22

38 comments - 833 thread views 1mo ago by Soriek (text post)

Some notes on "85 Days in Slavyansk"

16 comments - 866 thread views 1mo ago by Stefferi Chief Suomiposter (text post)

While the Ukraine war has been sidelined by the Israel/Palestine conflict flaring up (there can apparently be just one ongoing war in public consciousness), I've been long interested in finding more about the original Donbass war starting from 2014, so I decided to read a book from the pro-Russian side, 85 Days in Slavyansk by Alexander Zhuchkovsky (I guess the best-known one of such memoirs.) It's not what I'd call a work of high literature, but the style and translation was serviceable, and the described events were highly interesting, so the book was a breeze.

The book describes the event that really turned the post-Euromaidan pro-Russian protests (“Antimaidan”/”Russian Spring”) into a war; the occupation of Slavyansk by a small group of militants led by Igor Girkin (“Strelkov”), the battles with Ukrainian army and volunteer groups like Azovites after that and the eventual withdrawal from the city after Ukrainian pressure got too high. The author was not in the city right at the beginning but became a volunteer fighter at a later stage and has interviewed militants who were there (and are still alive). Some parts of the book give a “macro” view of the conflict, but much of it just recounts individual battles and, to some degree, life at the city.

Some things I thought while reading it:

While an obvious point, it’s hard to miss how the (blatantly, unapologetically) one-sided perspective makes the author describe things differently when the sides do them. When Ukrainians kill civilians, it shows their idiotic, brutish nature, when the separatists kill civilians, well, war is war, cruelty is sometimes needed etc. When Ukrainians make a maneuver wearing Russian symbols its duplicitous, when the separatists do a maneuver while flying the Ukrainian flag it's smart. "Ukraine" is a fake nation invented by Austrians and Poles but the flash-in-the-pan "Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic" which briefly existed in the 1918 is crucial to understanding the current situation in Donetsk. And so on.

All of this doublethink is to be expected, but what stuck with me was that Zhuchkovsky finds it ridiculous that Ukrainians would describe him and other Russian volunteers in Donbass as "mercenaries" - of course they would not fight for money as a cause - but then, when there are soldiers crying out in English or Polish in the Ukrainian ranks, the only explanation he can find is that they are, indeed, mercenaries. This is a mental block that I've continuously encountered in pro-Russian narratives; they can understand for sure why a Russian patriot would volunteer in Donbass, they can even at some level understand why an Ukrainian would volunteer to fight (because his mind has been eaten up by the ghost of Bandera), but the idea that a foreigner could fight and die for Ukraine simply because he believes in the Ukrainian national cause seems impossible. Must be that they're mercenaries or Western ops!

One of the arguments I've had often with pro-Russians is what events served as "triggers" for the war. Pro-Russians frequently finger the transfer of power after Euromaidan ("the NATO coup") and Odessa to claim that the separatist uprising was an internal development with scant external Russian influence, but when I've pointed out what has seemed to me be the absolutely most crucial trigger - the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea - it has often been dismissed, almost as if it had no effect on the events in the East.

Well, Zhuchkovsky's book certainly seems to confirm my view. While the Euromaidan is discussed rather perfunctorily and Odessa basically gets a sentence confirming it increased agitation and recruitment among separatist, but this just boosted an ongoing process, the Crimean invasion is constantly referred as a major separatist point of reference, something that made both locals and foreign volunteers confident that if they just stuck at Slavyansk hard enough the Russians would surely do the same as in Crimea and annex the Donbass republics. Which they eventually did, of course, but not within the time schedule the original volunteers had imagined.

In addition to the Crimean invasion, the other thing that, in Zhuchkovsky's narrative, led to the whole thing happening was one man - Strelkov. Strelkov is a virtual prince among men, a great leader who can do almost no wrong (the book has a mandatory sentence saying that "Strelkov made mistakes" but never really points out what these mistakes were), a great man against time who pretty much single-handedly creates Donbass out of nothing. In a way, with a lot of "smart" analysis talks about cultures and economic forces and whatnot, it's always refreshing to see someone come out with “Nah, that stuff’s there, of course, but in the end, it comes down to this one guy.”

I’ve seen some controversy on whether the 2014- Ukrainian war was a civil war or if a Russian invasion is the proper term, and one of the arguments for the idea that it at least started as a civil war was that most of the separatist fighters were locals, with volunteers from Russia and elsewhere only being like 30% of the fighters, according to the book. Even that is something of an uncomfortable argument, especially considering that Russian troops were directly being dispatched to the area as “volunteers” prior to Minsk, but if basically all the most important actors in getting the conflict going, especially the most important one, came from Russia, wouldn’t that be the most important thing to look at?

One of the least clear thing about the book is the level of Russian state involvement in the whole affair. In some parts of the book, the author says that the Russian state had nothing to do with them and the shady “backers” even tried to dissuade them, in other parts there are references to Glazyev and Aksynyov and other Russian state figures egging them on and promising support – with implication that this at least couldn’t have happened without some tacit approval from Putin. I get the feel the Russian system was using these guys as chaos agents and to force Ukraine to have to accept Donetsk autonomy and veto on foreign affairs. The Russian state created an illusion that they’d send the Russian army to help the volunteers, and then left them high and dry for eight years.

There are certain patterns in Finnish history that come to mind – Bolsheviks egging the Finnish radical socialists to start a revolution in 1918 and then, when they did that, offering almost no aid at all after some initial weapons supplies due to Brest-Litovsk, leaving the Finnish socialists to get brutally crushed. The guys in Slavyansk also seem comparable to Finnish “kinship warriors” immediately after that, right-wing volunteers who went to East Karelia in 1919 to take over the area with at least some backing from some sectors of the Finnish society, but then receiving no aid from the Finnish state after that and similarly getting eventually wiped out.

In the end, from my perspective it's basically like one of those "What if the good guys were the bad ones and the bad ones good ones?" fiction book reworkings. Reading the book, I can get the sense that what these guys are doing is, at some level an enterprise taking a lot of courage and gumption, and they’re ready to die for ideals – those ideals simply are, from my point of view, bad, especially for the ones like Strelkov who are doing all of this to revive Russian monarchical imperialism, an ideology that could easily conceivably threaten Finland’s existence as an independent country (and would certainly do it for nearby nations like Estonia and Latvia). Being heroic, courageous, and demonstrating manly valor for a bad idea is, in the end, worse than being a coward that accomplishes nothing for the same ideal!

Even the locals who could be excused as fighting for their specific homes and region against an army that’s bombing those regions got into an enterprise that just, in the end, led to eight years (and counting) chaos and misery for those regions, which are still a target of fighting. Even if the only evidence of what has happened was this book, reading between the lines (and occasionally lines, too), one gets the sense that the whole region has been thrown into a chaos – even if Strelkov’s guys might have possessed some discipline, there are constant references to random looters and marauding Cossacks wrecking shit up for the lols.

Of course, in the end, these people got what they wished for – large parts of Donbass, and other parts of Ukraine besides – have been annexed to Russia, and the current chances of Ukraine making short-term gains in these areas, let alone taking them over entirely, seem remote. So that’s a point for the Margaret Mead “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world” quote. Whether that change is good? Well, the quote never promised that…

Who is your real audience?

1 comments - 686 thread views 1mo ago by Sam_I_am (samschoenberg.substack.com)

I came across the following twitter thread the other day:

https://twitter.com/kitten_beloved/status/1519339931138609153

"I just can't understand how anyone could think [opinion shared by hundreds of millions]"

Congratulations, you have a common form of mind-blindness caused by ideological insularity

Don't worry, help is on the way, you can get better, let's get started

This thread is about understanding your ideological enemies. I agree with this thread. Understanding your enemies is incredibly important. It’s incredibly important if you want to be able to fight them effectively. It’s also incredibly important if you want to make sure that you’re on the right side in the first place. It’s a thread worth reading.There is, however, one issue with it. It’s not very well suited towards the audience who most needs to read it.

"But won't understanding my enemies make it harder to crush them, what if I start liking them"

On the contrary, understanding one's enemies is a vital first step on the path to getting their necks under your jackboots, forever

Developing feelings is rare!

What you're currently lacking is a theory of mind about your enemies, which means you are frequently surprised when their behavior contradicts your model of them

That's no fun, nobody likes being wrong constantly

So let's get better, progress through the stages with me

This kind of rhetoric won’t play very well with people who don’t already want to understand their enemies. Getting your enemies’ “necks under your jackboots” might be a figuratively correct description of what their motives are. However that’s not the way they think of it. It just sounds so oppressive when you put it that way. They almost never want to oppress people into agreeing with them. However, these enemies are an exception. They’re a special brand of evil. They’re so obviously selfish and/or hateful that it’s immoral to even try to rationalize their views. How can it possibly not be immoral to try to justify murder, slavery, bigotry, and exploitation of the poor?

At least that’s how they see it.

It’s a problem if your audience does not agree with your characterization their motives. They expect to know their own motives better than you, and a disagreement about their motives might lead them to assume that you’re not worth listening to. I also suspect that they don’t frequently feel surprised by their enemies. People who don’t want to understand their enemies often don’t behave like they frequently feel surprised by their enemies. In fact they seem to behave in the opposite way. This is probably due to confirmation bias, which makes what they do see feel like it reinforces their existing beliefs. This is another statement that doesn’t match their worldview, and it will further advance their distrust of you.

The audience of people who don’t want to understand their enemies, isn’t going to respond well to this thread, but there is an audience who will: People who do place value in understanding their enemies. I’m sure Kitten_beloved is aware of this fact. In fact, I suspect that the real target audience here is probably rationalists. There are multiple pieces of rationalist jargon in the thread. I’m sure that rationalists like it, but that’s kinda preaching to the choir.

I see this issue often when people comment about about censorship, cognitive empathy, or the marketplace of ideas. People criticize things like ending friendships over “disagreements”. However the word “disagreements” doesn’t rightly capture the emotion people feel when they end their friendships. To them, the people they “disagree with” actively want to cause harm. They roll their eyes when what they’re experiencing is described as mere “disagreement”. For a contemporary example of this, just look what people are saying about Pro-Palestine activists.

If you want a certain demographic to be your audience, and you want to appeal to them, then you need to recognize where their mindset currently is, and work from there. You will need to validate that they’ve likely experienced, and then explain how those experiences are consistent with your view of the world. Only then, can you effectively make the positive case for why your position is correct. Otherwise, they’re going to dismiss your point out of hand, because to them, what you're saying appears to defy their own reality. When appealing to a certain audience, you should do your best to make sure that you can make sense of their worldview. If it doesn’t make sense to you, then you’re at risk of misunderstanding it. Having a faulty understanding of your audience’s worldview will derail your connection with them almost as much as writing for a different audience will.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are different problems if you give them too much validation. They might just nod along with what you’re saying, and not realize that there’s anything about themselves that they have to change. You have to strike the best balance you can. Finding the right balance can be very difficult, after all, you’re trying to introduce them to a new way of thinking.

And I do apologize to kitten_beloved for picking on this particular thread. It’s far from the worst example of this. Most politicians are way worse. Making arguments that appeal to the audience that doesn’t need them might as well be the language that most politicians speak. This thread just happens to be thing that sparked my inspiration to write about the topic.

What percentage of incinerated plastics are released as atmospheric microplastic particles? I can't find any study on this. (lots of other math in post)

6 comments - 548 thread views 1mo ago by beej67 [probably less intelligent than you] (text post)

Wellness Wednesday for October 18, 2023

69 comments - 1616 thread views 1mo ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

There and out the back end: A gaijin’s tail Or: Colonoscopy in Japan

24 comments - 1109 thread views 1mo ago by George_E_Hale insufferable blowhard (text post) Edited 1mo ago

I was going to post this on my substack. But nothing is on it, and now this is not even on it, because I decided to post here, for better or worse. For those of you who have accidentally clicked on posts of mine before and recoiled, note that this is more of the same, and you’d best go ahead and scroll elsewhere now. There is no conclusion or point, and I certainly do not talk about Hamas or Jared Kushner or trans- (insert noun). No. The journey is the destination. Or however it goes. The destination is the journey. Whatever. This is the story of a colonoscopy. That should tell you enough.

I should play you some of that relaxing music that was in my head as I lay sideways on an examination table wearing my black nylon tear-away pants with the fly in the rear, gazing blankly at the video screen which was tilted down toward me as if to play the opening credits of Fantastic Voyage. I think I was humming in my head Billie Holiday's Embraceable You.

In order to not bury the lede, let me tell you what the doctor said at the end (there are many unintentional puns in this), so that you are not gripped by too much suspense and worry for my wellbeing. He said—and I felt he did not want to say this, that he would have preferred to say almost anything else—he said in what I imagined was a quieter voice than he normally used: “You’re fine.” Or that equivalent in Japanese. Actually what he said, clicking on his computer, the monitor of which now revealed neat squares of color slides depicting the interior of my colon: “綺麗.” That’s kirei, which means beautiful. It’s what you say about exceptionally attractive women, or sunsets, or flowers. It can also contextually mean clean, which in my case meant “There is no problem here with your colon.”

Two years ago, I went to my urologist because I had felt a pain in my lower abdomen that seemed wrong. It was not like any pain I had felt before. Probably. The urology clinic I go to is run by two older Japanese doctors who are there on alternating days, but my カルテ or file is the same for each, so they both have the same data on my PSA and creatinine and whatever else is measured in a urinalysis. The one doctor I seemed to keep getting on my appointment days is the more doubtful, less friendly one, and also the one who has the distinction of having done DRE on me more than any other doctor. DRE for those not aware means digital rectal examination. It is exactly what it sounds like, if you aren’t the type of person who assumes digital means something that might be shown on the readout of a G-Shock timepiece. No, digital means, in its barest sense here, finger.

He was stumped. Wherefore this pain? He asked me many questions in Japanese, and I tried to answer all of them as well as I could. It hurts here, yes. No I don’t have trouble urinating, no more than the usual with a prostate such as mine, at my age. On my insistence that I did in fact feel pain in the area I had indicated, he referred me to a research hospital up the road, writing a letter, enclosing a CD. He gave all this to me in a sealed envelope and sent me on my way. To the department of psychosomatic disorders.

The research hospital concerned is about ten years old, at least in its current incarnation in this set of buildings, and is still clean, has the requisite coffee shop on the second floor where one hears the reassuring and soothing clink of saucers and china cups, old people murmuring to one another as they take their morning repast of a “morning set”. Perceived as a whole the hospital as an institution would probably engender confidence even in the cynical. Clean carpets, working bright lights, purposeful movement, even the sick and probably dying blanketed and wheeled about on quiet gurneys seem to be in the best possible shape, considering. Like the Holidays Inn of my youth, before they became camp and moldy: All seems well-planned and expertly run. The nurses are more often attractive than not, at least from the bridge of the nose up (everyone is in masks in hospitals in Japan, all the time). The greeters and information desk personnel are female, lithe, and efficient, and give one a sense of being in the right hands.

The psychosomatic intake involved an interview of many minutes conducted by a nurse who seemed too young to be charged with adult crimes, should she commit any. I remember her as very pleasant and patient, and after about a half hour of interview as we were wrapping up I discovered via random throwaway phatic question that she spoke English rather well (the entire interview had been in Japanese, including my stumbling bumbling Japanese answers.) There was a time when this would have annoyed me. That time passed years ago. Now I just roll with it. People don’t like speaking English.

When I was finally allowed to sit in the presence of the doctor, who wheeled his chair the meter or so in and out from his desk expertly, and had the practiced look of a man who cares, and probably cares even about you, he told me, after a minute or two of speaking Japanese, to just say my whole spiel in English, to just get it out. Which I did, and briefly: I have pains here, and here, and I don’t know what is causing them and I would like to know. He then asked, in Japanese again: “What would be your ideal outcome here? What would you like us to say?”

I felt he must have learned these phrases in the elementary level courses that one takes in dealing with neurotic patients, the same courses that cause one to end up practicing in the psychosomatic disorder department. I did not say this. I did say: “I want someone to say ‘Oh, we’ve seen these symptoms before; this is probably what you have, let’s do a test.’” I do not know how I expected him to react to this, but it seemed as if I had given exactly the right response. If he had looked down and checked off a box on a clipboard, he could not have given off a more reassuring vibe. At last, it seemed some kind of examination would begin, rather than the type of qualifying session I felt I had been subjected to.

Please lie on an examination table. Okay. He palpated me deeply in the lower abdomen asking repeatedly “Itai? Kore wa?” “Does it hurt? How about here?” I realized during this examination that one can actually push fairly deep down into the abdomen presumably without causing damage, but when I finally did say “Yes, that hurts” it seemed such an obvious statement (as in: Why wouldn’t it hurt when you push basically all the way through my body?”) that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could learn anything from it, any more than if he had jammed a knife into my leg and asked the same question.

He nodded. He seemed to be thinking very carefully. He typed a bit on his computer, mumbling that I could get up from the table and put my shoes back on. I sat up and waited. This was how I was scheduled to get my first colonoscopy two years ago.

Fast forward in time to last week. Now we are at colonoscopy Number Two, which has been ordered for me by my local doctor, who has written the referral letter, again with a CD, though this time I am sent to the gastroenterology department. The pains have returned, though the first colonoscopy (and endoscopy, which was another day and involved a tube down my nose) showed nothing out of the ordinary. One polyp (not a word one wants to imagine, though apparently polyps after a point are normal) but it was removed, and found to be benign.

This time, I have been scheduled to have the procedure on a Thursday, and have cleared my schedule and bowels for this purpose. The way one prepares for a colonoscopy may be well-known to some of you, but I will iterate it here for the uninformed. According to the internet one is supposed to consume only a liquid diet the day prior, and cease all medication such as aspirin which would increase the chance of bleeding. There are various dangers if the colon has not been completely voided and a colonoscopy is conducted, among them a term I recently learned: intracolonic explosion. I do not even want to know how this term was coined or in what circumstances. (That is not an image link.)

In Japan, however, there are little boxes they let you buy for about 10 bucks that contain what are called レトルトパウチ or retort pouches that contain MRE-like substances, and these are supposed to get you all set. Each box has five pouches, three meals and two that contain watery rice. You are supposed to pour the contents into a pot or bowl and either briefly boil or microwave them.

The box has on its cover the various meals you will be eating on the day before. It looks like this. You can see each “meal” such as it is on the box, plus some little pills are there that I was supposed to take. The first meal, the breakfast, is here in its pouch, and then looked like this when I poured it in the bowl. It looked better in the pouch. Rice and stewed chicken and some egg. The lunch was daikon radish, more chicken but minced this time, and, according to my youngest son, some potatoes. It looked like this.

There were also two packets of the watery rice I mentioned, similar to what is known here as お粥 or okayu, which is the Japanese equivalent to the traditional chicken soup, i.e. it’s what you eat when sick, but without the egg that is usually a part of that dish. I dumped one of these on the dinner, which, in a contest, would have to be called the best of all the meals, but so Spartan as to be disappointing, though by the time you get to eating dinner you are so hungry that you are imagining if maybe you can just forgo the procedure altogether and just go grab a goddam cheeseburger. I was too hungry to take a photo at that point but here is what the box claims the dinner looks like.

Anyway over the course of the day I warmed all these up and ate them and drank a bunch of water and took the two little pills at 9 pm. The instructions said to then drink a cup of water at 10 pm but by then I just wanted to lose consciousness, so I drank the water with the pills. I went to sleep early as my family ate stewed yellowtail, white rice, garlic scapes with sesame, and miso soup.

On the Day Of, you wake and unsurprisingly you’re hungry. You are not supposed to eat or drink coffee, so I did not. I did drink some water. I put on sweatpants, wore the kind of sandals that slip right off, got all my stuff, and took the bus in. The instructions also say not to drive, as you will be woozy from the drugs they give. I remember the first time I had one of these, the drugs were very effective. This time they would not be, but I did not know that going in.

I won’t bore you with the details of checking in and finding my way to the right department, but all went efficiently. Eventually I was cordoned off with a group of two men and three women who were also scheduled for the procedure. I am not young, but everyone looked much older than I feel I look or am. But who knows. Everyone was wearing a mask, including me. They sat us all down at tables and put in front of us these big jugs of fluid, which had our names written on them in black ink. That jug looks like this.(My name is on the side that is turned around.)

If you are thinking to yourself “That’s a lot of fluid” you are thinking the same thing I thought. And it is. It’s two liters.

The nurse at this point is going on and on in Japanese about what to do. She is very animated and friendly and you can tell she has done this lecture many times. It is like a performance, a routine, she hits certain points like punchlines, and we all breathe in a laughing-like way accordingly at these moments. Drink 250 ml in the first 15 minutes. Then another 250 ml in the next 15. By then you should have gone to the toilet at least once. If we have not, we are informed, we shall be given an enema. This seems a foreboding prospect, despite what awaits us. Somehow an enema seems worse than a colonoscopy. We are also given more little pills to take. This is the blister pack of mine. I had greedily swallowed them before I thought to take a photo for posterity.

The next photo you might not want to click on. It is a little laminated paper with ~~six~~ five photos that we are told are the stages of what our voiding will look like. The first is dark, then they get progressively lighter. Like a little picture book of defecation. Here is what that looks like. You will note the cute little bear in the top right, because everything in Japan must have a cute mascot associated with it, even the act of crapping.

If you did not click it’s fine, but the last pic of the stages is clearish, like very weak tea. At this stage, if this is what you are producing out your rear end, you are a Go for the colonoscopy and you are supposed to call the nurse into the john and have her inspect it to be sure.

I begin drinking. After 20 minutes I have had about 300 ml of the stuff, which tastes like poor quality Gatorade with no sugar and too much salt. I excuse myself and sure enough I will not be one of the enemized, which is good news. Time passes and the nurse has switched on the television. She has said we should not just sit there and watch it, but that is what everyone does—all except one old guy who prefers to stare at the corner in the opposite direction, as if mourning all the mistakes in his life that led him to this little squalid room. Instead of sitting there and watching TV the nurse encourages us to walk around, and even to push in on our abdomen to get the process rolling. I take a stroll, come back, and watch the TV again. On the television there is a show called ラビット which reads like “Rabbit” but I realize is supposed to be “Love It.” On the show three extremely homely guys who are probably comedians are visiting a racetrack and oohing and ahhing over it. With these guys is one extremely attractive woman, but before I can try and follow what it is they are all doing at the track I have to excuse myself again.

Eventually I’m ready, after about six trips to the restroom. The bowl looks so clear it is as if I haven’t even sat on it. I push the chime and the nurse very excitedly runs up, much in the same was if I were an elementary school child who just announced that he finished making some bit of artwork and she, my teacher, has come to admire it. “Ooh that’s perfect,” she says, gazing into the toilet bowl. “You’re ready,” she says.

She escorts me to another small locker room. I have left behind my cohorts, who are all quietly drinking and sitting and contemplating the television, except the one sad man. Two of the women have struck up a conversation. Their voices dim as I walk down the hall to the locker room. The nurse says to take off all my clothes and put on a little pair of black nylon pants, and then put on what looks like a blue pajama top thing, something like Luke Skywalker might wear on Tatooine. Then put my stuff in the locker. A beat or two passes and I am wondering if she is going to watch me do all this, but she leaves and closes the door behind her. There is no lock on the door, so I make haste. The fly, she has noted, is in the rear of the nylon trousers, for obvious reasons.

Clad in this getup, I step out. I am still wearing my athlete’s sandals. The nurse takes me past my cohort again, and they are all still drinking or sitting waiting to drink. Their Japanese politeness prevents them from acknowledging me, though my American friendliness feels somehow hurt by this, as if they might cheer me on. I go first, wish me luck sort of thing. Maybe they just don’t care at all. I go into a room where another nurse is busy with something. This room seems less clean than the rest of the hospital. Scuff marks, signs of wear. She wheels over a rolling upright pole with an IV bag on it and wipes my arm with alcohol. As she is inserting the needle I can’t think of anything to say so I say: “Your watch is nice.” It is, though my eyes are so bad at focusing on close things I cannot tell if it is a Jaeger-leCoultre or just some offbrand. Probably the latter if she’s a nurse in a research hospital, but you never know. She says thank you in a polite way but I imagine she thinks I am an idiot. Which, I think, I am at this moment.

(continued in reply post due to character limit.)

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