Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
22d ago
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
22d ago
You are demanding the output of like lobbying firms, the groups that produce huge detailed reports for legislation but you want it to occupy the space of policy debate forums.
I was literally saying that this wasn't going to happen?
But very little of this discussion even really needs to hit the public that is still debating whether climate change is a fake Chinese hoax or whatever.
And I've never seen it hit a place like here, outside of one poster who is really into California housing policy. I've never even seen such a thing linked.
I guess I have this strange idea that if you have a very well researched argument for a position that you support, then you ought to release it to convince people. Apparently this is silly?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
22d ago
I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with The Motte but maybe my reading comprehension today sucks because I'm really tired.
Just that I don't think we can balance out the prevalence of right-wing takes with establishment wonkery, because it's mostly too difficult to actually do and in the best case, far beyond the scope of what we do here. "Our systems are too complex for us to actually understand how they work" is kind of my hobby horse, but Amadan dinged me for calling out a certain subgroup in particular, so I expanded. Because the ding wasn't entirely unfair, but also not quite where I was going with that. It's not that neoliberals or progressives are uniquely unable to produce worthwhile policy wonkery - it's that I think basically no one is, and the thing I think those groups are doing wrong is holding on to the trust that someone, somewhere, has a firm grasp on how all of this works.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
22d ago
Holy crap, dude. From "I'm a neoliberal policy wonk" to "there's no point in actually doing any policy wonking" in seven hours. Was there an "Out-Cynic @The_Nybbler Speedrun Any%" challenge I missed?
I was pretty happy with mine the other week explaining that why even if adding people to a city brings down average income, it's still accretive to overall city value/GDP/wealth.
Really? It wasn't a bad post, but it was hardly a really good one. It was a few "I think that [blanks]" and first-thought guesses. (Edit: Nevermind, I found the post before the one I was looking at, which is actually a solid bit better. That's the sort of post I come here for... it's just not what people mean when they talk about policy wonkery.) I've put ten times that effort into posts explaining how armor scales in World of Warcraft, which is much simpler because it only involves 2-3 fully understood numbers.
Which is my entire point. I can casually drop an authoritative essay on that topic because it is simple, if not intuitive. "Is it good or bad when poor people move to a city?" is a much, much, MUCH more complicated question, to the extent that no one even seems to try to answer it in a definitive manner.
Back to your earlier point, I shouldn't need to pay you a bunch of money because Left Inc already has tens of billions of dollars slushing around ten thousand NGOs and Think Tanks, and I very much notice that all of that produces approximately nothing that anyone wants to point to as a rigorous policy wonk argument.
If I were wrong here, people wouldn't be writing "I think" first thought replies, they'd just be linking me to Neoliberal Project 2026 or whatever. If I were wrong here, we wouldn't need a 50 person team and a billion in funding and ten years to produce something uselessly mediocre for any purpose but partisan propaganda.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
23d ago
There are politicians (and staffers to politicians) who do in fact have a comprehensive and wonkish understanding of policies and regulations.
Yes, I remember being told this about Obama. More to the point, I was good friends with a few of them, who now have jobs like "Director of a Department with a budget in the billions". The "witty, unrehearsed" lines was actually what they were good at - dropping sick burns on the conservative firebrands they sparred with. It was a sad and sobering day when I realized that in spite of all the years of close association, I'd never heard them talk about the policy stuff that they were supposedly getting a Masters in. Every story was actually in the form of "I took a policy discussion and made it uncomfortably personal and dared the conservative guy to look like a jerk and instead he just stopped talking. LMAO pwned!"
but it's simply not true that policy nerds don't exist.
Neat. Is there some systematic reason why not a single one of them is writing anything for public consumption? Given the general pitch of "you should vote for us because of our mastery of policy wonkery", you'd think someone would notice the massive alpha in demonstrating an existence proof.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
23d ago
I'd love to see some actual effort posts on tariffs.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
23d ago
No, my argument, which I have been bleating about for years, is that no one is capable of producing real arguments, at least of the sort people mean when they say "neoliberal policy wonk". People have this image in their head of Leslie Knope mic dropping a 5" binder full of colorful tabs and highlighted text that covers an entire policy field. I've been looking for 20 years and no one in the real world actually does that. The people I've known who think they can do that are all just putting in enough effort to impress the teacher, scoring some rhetorical cheap shots, and then slowly getting jaded. Look at us here. Whole community full of smart autistic nerds addicted to political discussions.
Whither policy wonking?
We get essays and explainers and effort-posts, but the closest thing to policy wonking is Gendal-khan's posts on California housing issues, and even those are mostly updates on ballot initiatives rather than thorough, systematic wonk-papers on the housing industry/regulatory regime as a whole. Where are the "I know everything about trains" type posts laying out a sensible, state level energy policy? Anyone have an expansive-yet-granular solution for healthcare?
Does anyone have a spare effortpost covering a policy at the level of understanding, skill and insight that matches what we see on Friday threads about 4X games?
The difference, IMO, is that a 4X game is human-level comprehensible, and policy fields are generally not. It would probably take multiple life-times just to thoroughly understand the electrical infrastructure of a single mid-sized state. Working groups throw dozens of people and thousands of man hours into papers that are such pointless slop that no one ever bothers to read much less reference them. No one turns them into policy successes, no one has victories to celebrate and point to as justification.
The most relevant on we've seen was freaking Project 2025, and it was just a collection of essays with lines like "The Secretary should initiate a HUD task force consisting of politically appointed personnel to identify and reverse all actions taken by the Biden Administration to advance progressive ideology.". Anyone want to call that a triumph of wonkery? Point to a superior neoliberal version?
Because if you can, I would love to see it. I am not like this because I think policy nerds are gay and stupid and deserve swirlies. I say things like that post because I've been looking for 20 years and all I see in the policy wonk department is posers. If a bunch of neoliberals and progressives want to start posting detailed, wonky effortposts to own the chuds and make us all look like uneducated fools, then that sounds utterly amazing. Thank you! I'd ask what took them so long and where they've been hiding, but I'll be too busy devouring the insight porn and stirring my long-dormant technocratic urges from their deep slumber.
But until then, I'll keep pointing out that the wonks aren't wonking. They just produce boondoggles like California High Speed Rail and "affordable healthcare" and Covid lockdown. This matters when their claims to wonkish-mastery are being used to justify an increase in their political power, when they seem to have about as much relation to their fictional counterparts as Chuunibyou 8th graders do to Naruto.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
23d ago
I want more neoliberals policy wonks in here.
The problem is that these low-key aren't real. It's more "Aaron Sorkin aesthetic" than anything intellectually rigorous. They're about as capable of conjuring policy wonkery as goth kids are of summoning demons - and the internal experiences are probably isomorphic.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
23d ago
What concessions did Republicans get for their votes for the Continuing Resolutions during the Biden years?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
23d ago
Bond actually adventured and lived in Japan in the novels.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
24d ago
That's fucking hilarious. I haven't actually watched much of the show, just enough to grasp the conceit. In my mind, Reddington was something like the final money-grubbing exploitation of the character concept, dragging it down to Law & Order spinoff levels for the people who still watch network TV.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
24d ago
I think this changing idea of the "size of the world" may, at least in certain aspects, purely be a matter of the self-understanding of the same Western culture you hail from and are speaking to.
Absolutely. Up until the 90's "the world" meant Europe and maybe Japan. Everything else was a bit player. Now, China is a pole, and I don't think the West has any kind of traditional method of grappling with how different their culture is, much less offering the opportunity for deep understanding or even passing.
Europe has become more samey, but there's no Chinese/Indian equivalent of The Grand Tour to develop a cadre of people who grok those cultures.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
24d ago
Ehhhhhh. I am a digital nomad, from the US and have spent more than half of the past 3 years in either (non-anglophone) Europe or Asia, and really all you need to know today is English.
How would you say you approach interactions in these cultures? Is it "I am clearly an outsider, but we both know enough English to complete this retail transaction?" Are there any of these cultures where you feel like you understand them enough to finesse? To not pull a three fingers incident?
The point of the languages example is as an expression of mastery.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
25d ago
Teamwork, communication and interlocking specialties are hugely important in ways that they weren't before.
Yeah, with this approach we can still make progress in terms of scientific knowledge, but I think we've largely slipped past a point where a single person can keep it all in mind. Maybe that's fine, or maybe it's causing problems or maybe we're missing critical insights. But the discomforting thing is that we're losing the ability to tell. We can see trees, but not the forest. In an ironic way, it's almost a reversion to a more primitive state, albeit at a massively larger scale.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
25d ago
One of the inciting observations for this post was the fact that my own teenaged kids seem to lock into 90's nostalgia harder than their own youth. My daughter loves the same emo punk bands that were big when I was her age. My son watches 80's and 90's sports movies on loop.
Although, now that I think of it, that might parallel my brother (born in the 90s) being obsessed with A Christmas Story, a movie from 1983 based on a book from '66 about the Christmas of 1940.
There's a reason I repeatedly called the idea a hypothesis.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
25d ago
Humanity Peaked When I Was In High School.
Hypothesis: The reason there's such a broad nostalgia for the 90's and 00's is because that was actually the highwater mark for human aspirations (at least in the West). This is not because of any particular bit of art or culture or anything like that, but for boring historical forces type reasons.
So let's start by talking about art and culture. There's an image that every one of us has of the International Man of Mystery. James Bond. Jason Borne. Raymond Reddington. You can probably imagine your own version of this archetype. What does his background look like? Upper-middle class family, highly educated, top of their class, summers in [European location], winters in [different exotic location]. Military, special military, two decades of nebulous experience in fieldwork. Rafa can probably bang out a dozen plausible Early Life's without pausing for breath.
The end result is a man of spectacular and all-consuming agency. He is unparalleled in his ability to navigate and manipulate the world around him and the reason for that is his knowledge and experience. He speaks six languages, is familiar with a hundred cities, a thousand weapons and ten thousand wines and liquors. He knows the classics, knows the latest tech, knows fashion, watches, cars, boats, aircraft - everything. He is the embodiment of generalized domain-specific mastery, the culmination and exemplar of centuries of traditions that reached their crescendo when I was in high school, at the turn of the millennium.
Between 1990 and 2015, the plausibility of that man failed.
I don't mean that he was ever truly realistic. But most of us here can probably think of people who were reasonable understudies for at least a significant portion of that totalizing skillset. If that one professor we had who seemed to know about everything had gone special forces instead of into economics, yadda yadda.
The problem is that the world of 1990 was both smaller and had a stronger foundation. A well-bred prodigy who reached his prime in 1990 could plausibly speak English, German, Latin, Russian, a Romance language and a random other and thereby talk to anyone who probably mattered. There was enough commonality and overlap in those cultures that he could believably move between them with grace and comportment.
The world of 2025 is bigger. Now he needs to also speak Chinese, Japanese, 8 Indian tongues, Korean, Arabic, Farsi and a couple African languages. Where is he going to learn all of those? Boarding school? Dramatic 20-something romances? It's just too much. It breaks the bounds of plausibility. The structures and support, the cultural traditions that elevate the best of us, they don't exist for this scale. They're not up to the task. The closest we have to a man who can weave between English and Mandarin is John fucking Cena. When is the next (black) James Bond going to solve a puzzle based on his understanding of the Dao and the 4 Classics? It will land with a fraction of the 0.01% of the audience that reads xanxia and whiff for everyone else.
The world of 2025 is too complex for a single man to navigate it like that. Sure, Jason Borne can use Google translate, but that hamstrings his omnicompetence. Taking that tact just highlights the extent to which even the best of us can't master the world anymore. Reddington might know how to manipulate the phone lines, but how is he going to manipulate The Algorithm, which completely changes every six months? Do the highly specialized tech geniuses even understand what they hell they've called up enough to twist it to their own ends?
That's why I think nostalgia has locked onto the 90's. It's the last time the world felt fully human-comprehensible. Hans Gruber seemed like a man who generally knew what was going on in the world - and we could imagine such a man existing.
Now it's beyond that, it's systems of shoggoths that we can tweak and manipulate, but none of us can truly grasp as a whole - and we can't even really imagine someone who can. We've seen too deep into his Twitter feed and know he has utterly retarded opinions about things we do know a bit about. Worse, we have no institutions and traditions to wrangle the shoggoths. That's likely a factor in the AI frenzy - the hope that we can build a shoggoth-wrangling shoggoth, a sheepdog mi-go, while EY screams in horror at the blind arrogance of that plan.
Well, like I said. A hypothesis.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
25d ago
Well, there's our disagreement. I think they seem to be operating at a shockingly high standard. Vanishingly few bad arrests, and extremely reasonable uses of force when we don't just consider activist lies.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
26d ago
Also a solid reminder to double-check sources. I actually thought about it, but decided that the video was quite unpleasant and I didn't want to rewatch it. I still could have found an article or transcript that might have helped.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
26d ago
Well, with that I had to go rewatch the video. (Obviously disturbing, people dying.) You are correct. The bit immediately after the first shooting where she's yelling "You fucker!" was much more involved in my memory. And the son being theirs instead of his... woof. Talk about misremembering important details!
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
26d ago
The stereotype in Western culture is that Latin men are sexually aggressive or highly passionate, depending on how well they follow Rules 1 and 2. Indians also have a reputation for being sexually aggressive horndogs.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
26d ago
This new knowledge has made me reevaluate my views on him.
Positively, right? This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from you, just with some slightly different targets.
“Women at Oxford and Cambridge are better than Harvard and Yale because they know their job is to look pretty and get a rich husband”
This makes me think of a post I once read about a woman coming to a conclusion along these lines. She was undergrad at Harvard, studying hard to secure for herself, after another decade of hard work, a life of upper-middle-to-upper class comfort. She described a night where she was thinking about how much further she had to go, and how her gaze sort of panned over to the MBA library, which was full of eligible bachelors 5ish years further along that life path. So she decamped from the undergrad study lounges and started spending that time in the MBA study lounges, where she might have a serendipitous encounter with a handsome shortcut.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
27d ago
9 in 10 Republicans
have no problem with grabbing women by the pussyunderstand that golddiggers are a thing and that women often make unusual allowances for tall, famous billionaires.
FTFY. And it's 9 in 10 Democrats too, as evidenced by Bill Clinton's continued popularity, and the way most boomers of either side celebrate the rock stars of the 60s-80s.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
27d ago
A detained citizen is inconvenienced for a couple of days and many of them were very literally asking for it. A transed kid has their endocrine system skull-fucked forever because people they trusted lied to them.
One of these things is 4-6 orders of magnitude worse than the other.
I made a post hammering on the general topic last week, and my favorite reply was from ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr. He basically lays out how doing science has become much more difficult, but that you can still do it by having large, well-organized teams where each human mind node focuses deeply on a very specific sub-section.
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