Hieronymus
3mo ago
((There's also some messiness involving Intel ARC, which is both strategically very important to the Western world's military, not obvious, and which has an entertainment business case that it's only barely starting to credibly begin to compete with kinda, but is a short investment away from being a really big deal.))
This is the first I've heard of a significant military interest in Arc. Could you unpack that?
Certainly the whole computer gaming world has been begging Intel not to kill off Arc before it's reached maturity. Everybody expected it to lose money for the first couple generations, but Intel has been incredibly strapped for cash, so it wouldn't be a shock to see it sacrifice long-term interests for short-term ones.
The current CEO and board have been abandoning new development processes since December of last year.
This is tantamount to giving up its foundries, and I'm surprised not to have seen more analysis. I wonder if he thinks that that portion of the business is totally unsustainable in the long run, or if he's just playing chicken with the U.S. government hoping for more money.
Maybe that's what a government stake in Intel is supposed to resolve?
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Society doesn't seem to have the right model for it. "Oh, he's an abusive husband because he yells and throws things, he's using his emotions to control you." I don't think it was that calculated….
I 110% respect your insight here. Modern society is quick to lump unlike things together and label them all abuse.
… (and for the record, he never laid a hand on me).
Given the circumstances, I would encourage you to explicitly communicate your respect for this and to thank him if you haven’t already. I bet it will mean more to him than you think.
I agree with the comments below that older boys and men can rarely give unfiltered expressions of emotion, particularly anger and particularly to women, without their being misconstrued. Often swallowing one’s emotions is the right answer. The teen years are the right time to learn this, but if your son is on the autism spectrum he’s going to have trouble.
I would try to get his dad’s input if you can, even – perhaps particularly – given his dad’s struggles. You might also consider asking a male teacher for his perspective; if he has a male teacher who hasn’t called you I would consider him first.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Aspects of Encanto are great, but central plot elements are treated in a very unsatisfying way.
The magic of the setting appears in several different guises: Roman Catholic folk miracles, brujería, Disney princess magic; but it doesn't behave consistently with any of them, doing instead whatever the writers thought was dramatically appropriate at the moment. The movie collapses the object and meta levels of its major symbol in an unprincipled way that feels like a cop out. And even once it's established that the symbolism of magic = family love is all that matters, the backstory revelations undermine it: Was it grandpa's death that brought about family love?
Great animation, good songs, exasperating writing.
The class of ideas I’d like to name is more intentional than that.
Consider feminism as a set of ideologies versus feminism as a political movement. Different feminist ideologies are quite varied, but the political movement is more or less united by the idea of increasing individual women’s freedom of action.
If you ask in the abstract, “What should family law look like?” then different forms of feminism will give very different answers. But if you want to know whether the feminist movement will support or oppose a given change to family law, you can simply ask whether it will grow or shrink individual women’s freedom of action. Likewise, pro-life types of feminism are often closer to other forms than those forms are to each other, but opposing abortion runs against this principle and so gets one labeled an enemy.
I think that increased school funding is a similar rallying point for a different coalition. Depending on the issue, money may or may not address it. But money is always a socially acceptable reason to give for the problem, rather than criticizing your allies, and it’s something the coalition wants anyway.
People legitimately support school funding or women’s freedom as they understand it, so it’s more than toleration. But it’s not necessarily their terminal value, either. It’s more of a means that has been elevated by social dynamics to the status of an end.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
I was just watching this review of the Framework desktop based on that chip earlier today. If you need more RAM and memory bandwidth than you do compute, it seems neat.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
enemy areas
This is, on one level, my actual impression of many places. I live in a blue state, so casual pride flags happen. But once you get above a certain threshold of rainbow density in a nominally public place, it’s clear that there’s a dynamic of deliberate hostility to those of us with other convictions.
Still, I’d not open with that phrase on the Motte. Mistake theory is not altogether dead here, the way it usually is there.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Yeah, I feel like epistemic uncertainty is still the right state. Some percentage of those accidental discharges will be negligent, but whether it’s 5% or 99% – who knows? And Sig’s P.R. team has not exactly earned a lot of trust here, either.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
I saw folks on Twitter complaining that, on medical questions, the new model continues to emphatically repeat the most likely answer according to the current consensus, while the old one was more willing to thoroughly explore the possibility space. Seems related.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
You also have to separate the Satanic Temple people — who are trolling atheists, from the LeVeyan Satanism people — who are somewhat more trolly atheists who admire Satan as a literary figure (he brought the light of true choice to man!) while not believing in the literal existence of Satan, from the actual, ritual and sacrifices to Satan people. The latter are considered dangerous even among practicing occultists.
Someone once described the first two groups as people “who worship Satan by pretending to worship Satan.” As an assessment it depends on Satan’s existence, but if you accept that it describes the situation well. It’s still worth distinguishing them from those who deliberately and unironically worship Satan, of course.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
… the true goal- spending money
Is this true in a sense other than those which are true for unions and government agencies in general?
Hieronymus
3mo ago
There is a Dewey-esque impulse among many education reformers to use the schools to shape the next generation into something their parents would not approve of. Nineteenth-century opponents of Roman Catholic education were in that vein, as was Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I think that's what he was getting at.
I don't know. There was a peak Darwin, too, and if he's back in a constructive way then that's worth celebrating, even if the ban evasion isn't.
I'd take that as another argument against permabans, although perhaps a mixed one given the reëstablishment of old beefs when his ban expired. But if he was already on an alt by then, maybe the productive discussion was continuing there and the main was just for fighting? I'm just a nerd on the Internet, probably not the best to analyze forum dynamics. But, for that reason, I'd like to welcome good folks back without needing plausible deniability or cloak-and-dagger nonsense.
(I know that sometimes even un-banned folks choose to rotate usernames. And while my life might be a bit nicer if they didn't, I acknowledge that there can be legitimate reasons for that.)
Hieronymus
3mo ago
I agree. But the various steelmen Scott got in reply convinced me that there's no way to rescue that framing that lets you discuss intended and actual consequences at the same time, let alone different levels or stages of intent. There's got to be a better set of terms to discuss those ideas.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
SEL (social emotional learning)
What's your take on this? I remember some pitchforks and torches raised a few years ago by socially conservative parents of grade-school kids that it amounted to a program of socializing students into the teacher's ethics while framing it as a skills thing. I haven't looked into it enough to understand it.
I do remember when a bunch of placards sprang up in my early '90s public elementary school listing all the traits they expected to develop in students. It read like a list of virtues as conceived by a committee of bureaucrats.
My reaction was more or less, "What qualifies you to teach me virtue?" I must have been a very humble child.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Man, if you're right and this is HIynka then that explains some things, but it makes me feel like we're losing out. There were meaningful insights in his post, but they were buried in a structure that prioritized flame-counterflame rather than laying the groundwork (which was mostly in the post!) first and then discussing the arguments clearly if passionately.
If the style and structure of this post had been within a standard deviation of peak Hlynka, it would have been excellent. Why did the mods switch from year-and-a-day bans to permabans? Were too many folks returning in the style of Darwin, with the bone to pick dominating everything else? Hlynka, when he could discuss his experiences openly and not be cagey about ongoing disagreements, was usually better than this. Yeah, there is a risk of spiraling again – we're all human, and he has a temper. But peak Hlynka was irreplaceable.
Clearly I don't follow meta-level Motte issues the way mods do, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Call this a tentative request to reconsider permabans in general and his in particular.
We need a term for the set of things that people and movements push for in practice after all the social dynamics have been accounted for, as opposed to the things they want in principle. Revealed preferences is close, but it comes bundled with a theory of mind I reject. (Revealed preferences are not preferences.)
The only item on your list of goals that anybody would support in principle is separating kids from their parents, and only some would endorse that. But as a practical matter that movement ends up fighting for the whole list.
There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse.
That's a meaningful improvement over the training some friends of mine went through. Are they still teaching Gardner's multiple intelligences? And a few years ago, the district where I had gone to school adopted a commitment to achieving the same outcomes for all students regardless of their gifts or circumstances.
An acknowledgment that not all children are the same, and that their different gifts cannot be made to produce the same outcomes in the classroom, is actually a big deal.
Inner city crime ridden areas. Not sure what to do when you have too high of a prevalence of violent people. I am willing to say that civilization has broken down in those areas, and then reiterate that gun rights are civilizational rights. If you don't have civilization, you can't have that right.
Since I haven’t seen any comments on this, I want to note how far it goes. It is a fully general argument against liberal democracy in those places. You may or may not be willing to see Los Angeles as a colony ruled by an appointed, authoritarian governor, but the principle points there.
Violent people don't always stay violent people. Testosterone is a hell of a drug, so young men are often more violent than older men. Not sure if ex-convicts should be allowed to have guns, but maybe if you don't trust them to own a gun you shouldn't trust them to be out of prison.
I am extremely sympathetic here. Reintegration of former prisoners into society should involve the restoration of as many rights as possible as soon as possible, rather than keeping them second- or third-class citizens forever. I am ignorant of a lot of details, so I wouldn’t want to present an uncompromising principle. My casual take is that if you trust him to vote, you should trust him to have guns, and if you don’t trust him to have guns, you shouldn’t trust him to vote.
The common thread is one of respect and trust. Gun control is intended to be, in a very literal sense, disempowering: If you are armed you have the power to do these things; we do not trust you with that power, and so we will disarm you. I think that living in a bureaucratic society has desensitized us to this, because respect is inefficient and illegible to the bureaucracy.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
That makes me curious: Do armed police inspire the same reaction?
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream. The idea that an immigrant who arrives with little more than the clothes they are wearing can through hard work thrive in the land of capitalism and freedom.
It’s hard for me to see this as other than a placebo ideology – an ideology against any common ideas, a standard against standards. It has no unifying power except that of money. Upward mobility for immigrants is a great thing. But it is not the only thing, and it shouldn’t replace the American heritage.
I remember a clip of a TV interview with a black Alabaman and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans during the George Floyd protests. He was counter-protesting demands that Confederate monuments and symbols be torn down. He had been adopted by a white family; their heritage became his heritage, and he was defending it. He’d become a true member of a family into which he was not born. But it’s not as though he had somehow ceased to be black. I think about this often as an analogy for immigration.
Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it; I don’t think I could or would have done the same in their shoes. Or consider the spirited embrace of Columbus Day in some Italian-American communities, because it emphasizes the intersection of the Italian and American heritages.
We could do worse than to prioritize those immigrants willing to respect the culture and heritage of the society they are joining.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
I think you misunderstood me. Most of the concern in my post is directed at the unimplanted embryos at the end of the process. That is also where polygenic screening becomes a focus of discussion.
I do think that the post-fertilization attrition rate is morally relevant insofar as it compares unfavorably with natural conception, and I said so, but that's not what I meant by destruction.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
From a consistently pro-life perspective, I think the gravest moral concern here is the potential to normalize and expand IVF.
In vitro fertilization involves creating more embryos than you intend to implant and then destroying the rest. If you are, as I am, a consistent prolifer, you recognize those embryos as people. IVF as practiced is therefore already a moral nightmare. If you were to fertilize one or two embryos and then implant them with a level of safety similar to natural conception, the moral valence of IVF would change dramatically.
Embryo selection does just the opposite. It doubles down on creating and destroying embryos – people – to select the one that seems to have the best genes.
As bad as current IVF practices are, they are mostly restricted to couples who cannot have children naturally. Embryo selection changes that dynamic. It encourages any couple who can afford it (at apparently less than a year’s college tuition!) to produce ten children and then slay nine of them. That’s why Scott’s reassurance rings hollow:
I think the strongest objection to selection would come from someone who is anti-abortion. If they think life begins at conception, then actual harm is done to a frozen embryo if it is not selected (and so probably eliminated).
But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term. …
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Tucker Carlson may have worn out his welcome with those things, but the explanation of the firing I trust most is the one Rod Dreher gave: that his Heritage Foundation keynote weirded out Rupert Murdoch by sounding much too religious. It seems like a stretch, I know, but if you watch the keynote I think it's easier to see.
Is there a reason it's committing to vote with the board rather than abstain from voting?
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