I am a scientist. Newspaper articles have been written on my work, albeit ones over which I had little control; I have read them and I have sighed over their inaccuracies. I am well aware of what you meant, as I suspect is @RenOS.
I am telling you as a scientist that it’s really easy to use this reasoning to work yourself into some very shady places. Reaching its nadir when you start musing happily about how all the lay people don’t really understand how these things are done…
It’s precisely because it’s partly true that it’s so fucking seductive.
Corvos
1d ago
negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true
I love this.
you [...] start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is [feed] them information selectively
But this is where you are in great danger of throwing away your soul and admitting you are not a scientist or a teacher but a shepherd of men.
Saying, 'the plum pudding model is less accurate than other models which I will explain later but I am using this now because the best model needs to be taken in bite-size chunks' is one thing. Similarly, avoiding hot-button words like quantum in favour of something equally descriptive when talking to people can be wise for the reasons you give: I have sat in on interviews where the beleaguered interviewer has twenty minutes to try and fish something out of the firehose of words coming from a professor and produces something obviously insane based on the word 'quantum'. But this is in aid of greater comprehension.
in trying to persuade an audience that Sparta is not a society to be glorified or emulated, the Cartledge position is the obviously superior persuasive position
this series was immediately prompted by dueling essays about the value of Sparta as an exemplar for modern politics – the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people
This is not epistemics.
This. Is. DIDACTIIIIICS!
(couldn't resist)
In all seriousness, the above is not a matter of being correct or incorrect about the facts. It's the author using scholarship which he suspects to be wrong ("old, if not busted") in service of the author's moral, political goal. And that, as someone intimately familiar with the difficulties of scientific explanation, strikes me as a very different ball game. Being less than 100% open and honest with people for the sake of their own edification slides so easily and neatly into being less than honest because it serves your own goals that it's really really dangerous to get into the habit of doing it. I'm not joking when I say this is how senior academics lose their souls.
To some extent yes, you can always rederive things for yourself, in the same way that you could from a bunch of chemistry textbooks. In practice, censored topics create a kind of conceptual dead zone. In the same way that a model with the Golden Gate Bridge concept dialled up started finding ways to slip it into every conversation no matter how strained, censored models will smoothly elide anything conceptually close to naughtiness.
In practice, it’s easier to take an open source model and abliterate it by turning off the neurons that activate when you discuss censored topics.
Thank you, I see much more where you're coming from with this. I broadly agree with your analysis of
I don't think the responsible types are getting married and settling down straight out of high school, and the ones who are fathering kids are not the responsible types
though I see it as being broadly downstream of a cultural expectation of what responsibility looks like. For example, 100 years ago it was quite different. Teddy Roosevelt married his first wife when he was 21 and she was I think 16. She got pregnant at maybe 17 or 18 (and died, which devastated him).
Apart from the death (obviously) this seems like a broadly healthy dynamic.
Man finishes university and meets wife at 21 and is married around 23, devoting himself to earning money for his family for the next 10/15 years rather than an extended adolescence or almost-always-unneeded supplementary education like PhD. By the time he is 35 or 40, the physically hard bit of raising children is over and he can devote himself to career, personal aspirations or fun dadhood as he chooses.
Woman meets husband at 16/17, marries by 19. The age gap is less because teenage girls are hot or for fertility reasons, and more because women seem to be impressed by and attracted to men who are a little older and more put-together than they are, so IMO this bumps up serious relationship formation rates a lot. She raises her kids for 10/15 years and then by 30/35 the hard bit is mostly over and she can go for further education / charitable work / career / momhood as appropriate.
I think a lot of the responsible types including myself (this was when I was still an atheist) would have broadly gone for this. Maybe the expectations would be too high, I don't know. But I don't like that we seem to be doing everything possible to discourage relationship development and parenthood amongst the most responsible while letting 'er rip for the deeply irresponsible.
Obviously there are practical issues with the above life plan.
Socially, some men legitimately won't want this and will play around (a smaller percentage than you believe IMO) as will some women. The structure makes women broadly dependent on male providers for 10 years, which is the most dangerous part IMO. It's natural not to want to be that vulnerable. Some of the types you see might do better with more rigorous societal support/restraints and some I fear probably fall into the 'too reckless and thoughtless to prosper under any system' category, but you have more knowledge in that area than I do.
The economics have to work out also. Partly we have to push rates of further education down especially MAs and PhDs. As the proud owner of entirely too much education I don't believe most of it is really required or gave me much that I wouldn't have got from a considerably shorter period of higher education + industry experience. We also have to compensate fathers appropriately, which is done in many cultures. In Japan it's an open secret that in big Japanese corporations you can expect a considerable pay rise per child because you will obviously need it.
Sorry, this is a lightly-drawn sketch to just try and show where I'm coming from.
examples of "I was married at twenty, had a decent job, and am a happy father of a family of eight"
Oddly enough I only know one guy who sort-of took this route. Met his girlfriend in first week of uni, moved in with her in week 2. But he breaks the script everywhere else - they didn't marry until 25 when they were confident in their income, they are completely non-religious to the point of refusing to marry in a church, and as far as I can see they have no interest in children. Lovely people, very high income, Fabian society types.
his net worth peaked in the low three figures
Is this a typo or do you mean +10,002,000 with obligations of -10,000,000? Which indeed is very different from a man with $2000 in his account, although we don't have good ways to talk about this.
came to the conclusion that judging individuals by their race/ethnicity is dangerous, and ought to be treated as radioactive
As somebody who moved from 'commited to colourblindness' in 2010 to what you call "the 13/52 crowd", I suggest you consider carefully if this achieves what you want. There is nothing more radicalising than having people demand that you shut off your eyes, ears and brain to what any fool can clearly observe.
- No, my white-haired posh dad taking his son to school is not going to be carrying a zombie knife, Mr. Policeman. You and I know this perfectly well, and we know this is just theater because you're not allowed to just go a few blocks over and search all the black teen gangbangers who do.
- Yes, pretty much every horrible murder and mass stabbing these days is done by a brown or a black man. No, I am not fooled by your steadfast determination to avoid mentioning his race or you referring to him as a 'British citizen' because I possess the mystical art to distinguish between 'Tom Rutherford' and 'Axel Rudakubana' and to google photos of the bastard.
- Black people commit eight times as many murders as white ones, according to the former head of the Metropolitan Police in a rare moment of candour. Yes, I expect you to do something with this information because protecting the public is your job. I also note that this has been memory-holed to such an extent that I was only able to find it using DuckDuckGo on a webarchive.
- "Police hold black men responsible for more than two-thirds of shootings and more than half of robberies and street crimes in London, according to figures released by Scotland Yard."
In short, mild discrimination and clear explanations of why that discrimination exists is the only thing that can make multiethnic societies work long-term. As the Denmark authorities say, "obviously we release ethnic statistics, otherwise how could the public trust us?" (paraphrased, I don't have the exact quote).
If you are a pleasant, good-hearted young black man as many are, your greatest fear should be the kind of system that refuses to recognise or guard against the increased threat that you potentially represent, or to impose the social norms of your new home upon you, causing people to shun you in any way they can possibly get away with as in America until the cognitive dissonance finally becomes too much and their grandchildren bring in something far worse. Not to mention that it is of course the best way of protecting you from your co-ethnics.
EDIT: I tell a lie, there is one thing more radicalising. The mealy-mouthed apologetics given by these same people to excuse straightforward racism when it's aimed at whites. I don't accuse you of this but it's all too common.
EDIT EDIT: Perhaps this is a little heated, and for that I apologise. You are not personally to blame for all of the racial dysfunction in Britain. But really, really, try to believe me when I say that what you want is not going to be achieved by the methods you suggest. Moderation is important even in non-discrimination.
Isla Bryson pretty much single-handedly brought down the Scottish government, the most pro-trans government around, and completely tanked their agenda and destroyed the pro-trans movement in the UK. It could all have been avoided if the Scottish government and the trans movement had just been willing to say 'no, the tattooed rapist who decided to be trans five seconds before his court case doesn't get to go to a women's prison'.
Corvos
2d ago
This seems the most likely explanation to me. Not noticing anything at all or attributing it to menopause seems far-fetched. Noticing but not jumping to the deeply-weird truth seems plausible.
Corvos
2d ago
I am terribly sorry to hear about your husband. Please accept my condolences and my best wishes for you and your daughter.
Corvos
2d ago
Intrigued, I asked a long-standing lawyer of my acquaintance and his opinion was that although you (Count) and I are technically correct as regards the UK, in practice in the UK:
- defending barristers are chosen by the client or his solicitor
- this is true even when those barristers are being paid by the government through legal aid (unlike public defenders in the US)
- barristers who have a reputation for letting their clients down don't get work
- any defending barrister who wants to keep their career becomes very adept at finding ways to make sure they don't have to publicly withdraw and leave their client in the lurch, including amazingly tortured analyses of their client's exact words or sudden attacks of extreme literal-mindedness and incuriosity
Corvos
3d ago
Don’t bother. I respect @HereAndGone2’s opinion on many things but she is firmly and immovably convinced as an article of faith that young men are all commitment-phobic lechers.
I think about 10 different posters including myself have told her that that’s not how it is/was for them and it just bounces off. Not like she’s obligated to believe us but she definitely won’t.
Corvos
3d ago
How is he still in power over her two months after she leaves, though? Even if he was flirting with her inappropriately earlier, she clearly had the opportunity to tell him to go to hell with no adverse consequences if she didn’t like him.
This is not some ancient stinky guy. ‘Girl attracted to 26 year old wrestler with decent manners and stable job’ is not an impossibility requiring secret brainwashing.
Corvos
3d ago
Bit of a reverse ferret for the feminists, that one.
femininity is [...] just a costume
was the radical feminist position for decades, coming from people like Judith Butler. Albeit a costume that was hard to take off.
It was the radical feminists who insisted that men and women were just the same except for the imposed mores that society forced on women, and I believe it was also them who attempted to use gender to mean gendered socialisation rather than biological reality.
Then trans hit and suddenly half of them backpedalled and started say 'no! not like that!'
I think your lawyer has the option to recuse themselves if they have clear proof you are guilty. They also have the duty not to lie, and not to attempt to deceive the court. So if you start talking to your lawyer about dismembering your murder victims, your lawyer is likely to try to persuade you to plead guilty and they will also refuse to do many of the things that they would do for you if your guilt were actually in doubt. You're pretty much sabotaging yourself.
See e.g. https://barristerblogger.com/advocacy-tips/ethics/
That said, asking something like ChatGPT for legal advice seems broadly like it shouldn't be used against you, at least unless you say something like 'I'm sure they'll never find two of the bodies, and the last one is going to be too rotten to identify, what's the call here?'.
Corvos
5d ago
In the UK it’s caused massive hullabaloo. I meant to write an effort-post but one of the most important figures in the 2008 government (Peter Mandelson) was being actively treasonous, explaining to Epstein and his banker friends that they needed to “threaten [the Chancellor] a little” to get what they wanted on bankers' bonuses. Epstein was getting serious details like the PM’s resignation or changes to banking law under the table.
It’s a scandal that has a good chance long-term of bringing down the current PM, who reinstated the man.
Corvos
5d ago
Thanks. I’m not sure it’s a good look for them but it’s interesting to get a good explanation of the background.
Corvos
6d ago
‘Gamers are dead’ articles in places like Polygon was the first I heard of the culture war as well. I never realised that Gamergate was a specific thing until I read about it many years later but ‘suddenly the people who make games all gate me’ was a signal even I couldn’t miss.
In the UK we had a rather horrible school stabbing spree. Nothing about the assailant has been released except the very reluctant admission that he was “apprehended in a mosque”.
Isn't that what they say about China? "The country long united must divide. The country long divided must unite." America is still comparatively young.
In terms of scenarios, what do you think about the odds of having two self-proclaimed 'America's, both of which consider themselves to be the true one and the other to be a rump state that for one reason or another can't yet be brought back into the fold?
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