LRealist
Studies ancient Egypt.
Friends:
Wadjet Anubis Set Ra
User ID: 2699
LRealist
4mo ago
Do you consider it worth the lesson to Putin and other belligerent world leaders that war is something you generally shouldn't start, because it leaves you weaker - in terms of your reputation among your own people, in terms of your economy, in terms of your population, relative to the value of the territories you gain - than you would have been had you just stayed home?
(I admit that I'm not just asking a rhetorical question, here. The US spent $7.7x10^10 on teaching a lesson to a handful of misbehaving despots that any grade school teacher will tell the same number of misbehaving kids for $4x10^5)
LRealist
4mo ago
Do you have an account at substack? I'd be interested to see how the author of that article would respond to what you're saying here.
LRealist
4mo ago
I didn't write the article, so I'm only answering for myself, here. But the counterfactuals are:
-
A history in which Ukraine's allies, particularly the US but also European countries, did basically nothing to help Ukraine, or even negotiated peace with Russia on favorable terms right as the war was starting.
-
A history in which Ukraine's allies, particularly the US but also European countries, immediately declared war on Russia as the war was starting in Ukraine.
Under 1, if Russia could have eaten Ukraine with little effort, that would have given their war machine practice, it would have boosted rather than ground down Russian morale, and it would have given them the strategic and material advantages of their new territory without much in the way of costs. It would have basically taught Russia and everybody else that war works, thus encouraging more war in the future.
Under 2, if Russia had been opposed at the outset, Putin would have been virtually forced to retaliate with nuclear weapons, given the speech he made promising consequences like those the world had never seen. And (though this may seem like a trivial by-the-way) it would have given other belligerent powers across the world the green light to declare wars of their own if they had been thinking about it.
These counterfactuals seem worse, and far worse, than the actual history we're living in.
LRealist
4mo ago
What is the general consensus about the war in Ukraine? I had a sense things were going very badly until I read Anders' post here:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/world-war-2-could-learn-something
The argument is that the situation was always awful, but if you compare what happened in Ukraine to the Nazi invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, things went far better because of the semi-illegibility of everybody's strategy against Russia:
"For Ukraine it is of course a catastrophe to be invaded by Russia and an even worse catastrophe to capitulate after a long and ruinous defense. Just as it was an unmitigated disaster for Poland to be invaded and occupied by Germany in 1939.
But for the world the only thing that matters is that the aggressor loses more from military action than they gain. This is certainly true for the Ukraine War. The war might have been a disaster for Ukraine, but it is also a disaster for Russia. Even if the Russians eke out a win in the end they will be weaker at the war's end than at its start. Not only does this limit Russia's abilities to invade other countries, it also serves as a signal to other potential aggressors to think twice before they act.
This is undoubtedly a win for the international community."
LRealist
4mo ago
My life is also pretty bad lately, but I definitely did something interesting:
- I celebrated the Winter Solstice, not Christmas
- I gave my children strange, cheap gifts which they loved (despite everyone's eagerness to open them, the eldest was extremely insistent that we open them one at a time so that he didn't miss any present)
Details are here: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/happy-solstice-eve
Downside - may not work with only Lord of the Rings characters to hang around with Upside - Label presents in Futhark which you learned from that old copy of The Hobbit when you were a kid, and Tolkein is there is spirit
LRealist
4mo ago
I spend almost as much time on Janitor Duty as I do reading the threads and comments. How would everyone prefer I rate posts, by strict attention to the rules, or, by a fuzzy combination of rules + effort + novelty (which, being honest, is what I do now)?
LRealist
5mo ago
I appreciate your thoughtful response! So much here I really want to respond to - I'll try to give a quick answer to everything I can.
First off, my other work has found a fourth factor of openmindedness vs skepticism, but I didn't have the survey space to include questions that would load on it - I deliberately excluded anything that might have loaded on it.
How many of those 301 responses were from the Motte?
About half, and yes the sample was unusual - extremely introverted, extremely realist. All you need is variation to uncover the space, though, and the results were exactly in line with my findings from ten years ago.
Speaking of which—I don’t know how you’d design a survey to test this, but I would expect a very strong “contrarian” axis to political positions... Were there any that clustered strongly with describing oneself as “Other”?
I didn't look at this. I'm in a time crunch lately, but I'll just say this is a good idea, and I'll poke around to see what's there with "other" affiliation.
Some of the positions on your chart really fit the “idealist” label, but others merit a raised eyebrow.
That's a point well taken, and you can see I really spent a lot of time vacillating on what to call this axis! But I'd say overall that killing the fetus, being cynical about Democracy, and arming yourself are "realistic." Ideally every fetus is a planned and wanted fetus, ideally the Right to Vote results in the best outcome, and ideally nobody needs a gun. But IDK, come up with a better name?
Finally, I want to comment on Ukraine. Clustering does not imply general approval, right?
Right, and since you mentioned it, maybe I should give some info on proportion of respondents supporting each proposition. (That isn't much a problem with the Ukraine one, but Flat Earth was so universally disliked that it could very well have swung in some weird direction if I'd been unlucky.)
Perhaps it’s a moot point, because I’ll bite the bullet. Accepting a risk of nuclear war is realist as hell.
Granted (although the Ukraine one wasn't even that idealist). Other people have pointed out that I may not have reacted very sensibly to people's answers on the Ukraine item. Obviously I have values of my own which will affect my interpretation!
I’d go with something like “abstraction,”
Mmm... I don't think it works. Rationalists are up-and-left, and they love abstraction. Empiricists like me are also up-and-left, and I also love abstraction. I admit to being somewhat idealistic, but generally my objection to anything at the lower end of that map is that it's all too idealistic, idealistic in a way that doesn't correspond to anything outside of a Disney cartoon. Similarly, I'm guessing that people at the bottom would admit to being somewhat realistic, but are seriously disturbed by the evident lack of idealism higher up. "What, we're just going to kill all the babies and accept the inherent racism in society? Don't we care about anything at all?"
(Yes. Yes we do care. We care about surveys. Also: making political maps)
LRealist
5mo ago
Yeah weirdly the idea of what age is old has itself been changing; 45 used to be nearing retirement. Nowadays 45 is when Emily turns to Chris and says "Maybe we might think about having our first kid? You think?"
(No wait who am I kidding, she sends him a text)
LRealist
5mo ago
Shame; the rarity of Gen X online has made me appreciate them when I come across them, like seeing a rainbow or an eclipse. Maybe I'll run another one survey year and you can represent your peeps then!
LRealist
5mo ago
There was a fair amount of Generation Z; extremely few Gen X or earlier. It doesn't necessarily matter, but the divide between Millennial and Zoomer isn't that great - Gen X remembers a time before computers infused everything, when you rode bikes, hopped fences, and threw horseshoes for fun.
In some ways, this likely just makes us slow to grasp what's going on. Definitely when I talk to X, Boomer, and Silent I feel like they don't even have the vocabulary to grasp current events. But in other ways having seen the Before Time was very grounding. I work with the locals face-to-face a lot, and there's been a clear change; it isn't just research finding surging levels of Neuroticism, younger generations feel babyish, over-anxious, and untethered from reality. (What would you do if the electricity went out for a month? Does anyone under 40 even know?)
LRealist
5mo ago
I've got the analysis from the political survey up. Thanks to everyone who participated!
The political map: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/what-they-didnt-tell-you-about-political
Personality correlates: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-conservatives
Although I didn't carry out the survey specifically to look for this, overall The Motte scored
- on the Left, and
- politically Realist,
which is the same as my username - maybe no surprise that this is the only political board I visit anymore, even if it's only to get pictures of tiny rodents with even tinier balloons.
Something that might concern you a bit more is the demographic homogeneity around here: The Motte is overwhelmingly Millennial. If you're interested in diverse perspectives, you might try particularly for more oldsters.
LRealist
5mo ago
This compass will be more important than the default one as time goes on.
You did have an interesting post, but this is unconvincing for two reasons. Specifically,
- you don't really have good evidence for this compass even existing, let alone being
- more important than the default one.
Reality isn't rational; it just is. And the way you establish the existence of something in reality, like variation in political values, is not by putting together an argument about how it would make sense to you and other people on the Internet, but by using empirical methods to check what's actually there, like this: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/what-they-didnt-tell-you-about-political
LRealist
6mo ago
Reasonable, though I didn't write that question, so I guess insert shrug smiley here?
LRealist
6mo ago
So I actually was responsible for that question, and I began by thinking about population density, and thinking of sending people to Wikipedia, and wondered whether I should ask people to give their answer in terms of persons per square mile or square kilometer. Then I realized "Who am I kidding, this survey attempts to measure intellectual ability with two questions you can either get right or wrong; the granularity is so coarse and reliability so low that we'll need n ~ 200 to see anything anyway, just try this handy picture of idealized living spaces."
LRealist
6mo ago
LRealist
6mo ago
I'm pretty far left on that scale myself; on the other hand, I was shocked to learn that people I know and trust are far to the right.
LRealist
6mo ago
Answering in that way won't skew anything. Some might argue that whenever the average departs significantly from Neither, your abstaining with Neither then functions as a dissenting opinion. But even taking this as a meaningful concern, the point of the survey is to get a sense of what everyone thinks, even people who throw up their hands in exasperation by simple attitude scales.
Out of curiosity, do you find the items on the Wilson-Patterson C Scale more or less frustrating? You just look at a word or phrase and respond Yes / ? / No: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Zitem-scale-of-social-conservatism-Henningham/764c5607d921d88d1cf9197f46858c38022899fb/figure/1
LRealist
6mo ago
What negative impact would this be
Your description of Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif suggests he was a psychopath. Psychopathy is largely genetic. Now I can understand that a resurrected vampire might find it novel or even contentious to think that increasing the incidence of psychopathic traits across the population might be undesirable. But trust me, we mortals are pretty leery of the Dark Triad.
LRealist
6mo ago
Well, I think a lot of what people refer to as leftward drift is, or is really, drift toward the kinds of attitudes that go along with wealth, security, and technological advancement. Even though the social foundation has been worsening for some time, technology continues to improve, creating a curious anxiety and helplessness in modern individuals.
But my guess is that the economy will soon drift downwards as well, spurring a rejection of hollow technological distractions, and giving rise to something that might look like conservatism, but isn't exactly - I don't foresee a return to religion, for instance.
LRealist
6mo ago
True. My sense is that woke attitudes correlate negatively with age, and from what I read, attitudes formed in young adulthood stick around. See for example https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/adolescence-lasts-forever
From that, I presume that Yes is going to gain some ground over the next few decades as No dies off. To me a bigger question is what the even younger generation will end up wanting or believing once Reddit goes the way of the Tasmanian Tiger.
LRealist
6mo ago
the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.
And now a hundred years later, what remains are a few monuments, and the colossal negative impact he had on the gene pool. Are you sure you mean to be constructing a defense of Moulay Ismail on utilitarian grounds?
LRealist
6mo ago
Reddit is dominated by the very young. This may give some insight into the future; unless the opinions of the younger generation change, we can anticipate that in twenty years, this No vote will be seen as racism, and they'll try again for a successful Yes.
But older voters aren't paying attention to this. They're dusting off their palms and throwing a shrimp on the barbie or whatever Aussies do.
Maybe I'm not understanding you, but this feels like two contradictory ideas. I grant that onlookers may just see Russia as inept, but if the Chinese were influenced by the failure of the Soviets in Afghanistan, wouldn't various aggressive powers also tend to be influenced by the failure of Russia today?
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