OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
It's a reference to the film Mean Girls. A character is trying to encourage the use of 'fetch' as a slang term, meaning basically 'good' or 'cool'. Eventually another character angrily shuts her down with, "Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen!"
In internet slang today, fetch is basically trying to force a meme artificially, through over-use.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
See my edit above for an apology.
I do agree that drawing ultimate or singular 'lessons of history' is a foolish endeavour. History teaches us a great deal, much relevant to today, but one of the things it teaches us is that events are extraordinarily contingent and you won't find simple, predictable laws.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
I can't really think of a more charitable way to interpret this, I'm afraid:
First: why the Cartledge camp? Why so much of the old (if not busted) over the new hotness in Sparta scholarship? Of course part of the reason is that I think the Cartledge camp is right on some points (back that in a minute), but more broadly, 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.
[...]
And so if the goal is to persuade people of an argument about Sparta – recall that 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 who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points. That being my aim, I used it.
(emphasis original)
I take that as an explicit admission that he premised his argument on positions that he himself thinks are in dispute, but which he believes are instrumentally useful for persuasion. He himself says that is prioritising persuasion!
It might be one thing if he had prefaced those earlier Sparta posts with a note that there are several schools of thought, he find several of them plausible, and for the following he's going to proceed on the assumption that the Cartledge school is correct - but he does not do that. It sounds to me like he thinks that such an admission of uncertainty would give the 'Sparta bros' an excuse to dismiss what he says.
(Not that I think that's necessary, because a dedicated 'Sparta bro' is going to ignore him anyway. Devereaux's Sparta series is not a serious attempt to persuade, but rather a performative dunking, done for an audience already inclined to cheer him on. I understand that persuading third parties, rather than your actual interlocutor, is usually the goal of public debate, but surely even that would be enhanced by presenting your case in the most comprehensive and intellectually honest way possible.)
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, or how serious you are? Aella's post is not really historical research? In a sense, I suppose, reading the works of historians and trying to discern common themes within them is something historians do, but I don't think it's a central example of academic history. It is a good thing for her to do, and I don't look down on it, but it's not something I would have leapt to as a good example of 'real history research'.
EDIT: Oops, sorry, I thought I was replying to QuantumFreakonomics here. I apologise. I agree that the post on the Maronite Chronicle is real historical research.
OliveTapenade
16hr ago
One of these things is not like the others - the Spartans were slightly less patriarchal than other Greek city-states, and Devereaux acknowledges this. But yes - the whole point of the Sparta series is to make it clear just how badly Sparta sucked. What else is there to say about Sparta? The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield.
This seems like an odd take to me? We have very few surviving writings from Sparta itself, because the Spartans did not esteem writing, but if we look at classical admirers of Sparta, it is very rarely the case that they admire Spartan merely for being militarily successful. Plato's admiration of Sparta is not for military strength alone. The case for Sparta is merely that they won all the time, particularly because they demonstrably did not, but that Sparta was in some way a uniquely virtuous society.
It should go without saying that we're not talking about a concept of virtue that a modern Westerner would wholeheartedly endorse, or that most people after the Christianisation of Rome would endorse, but it is nonetheless something that Sparta's contemporaries admired. It was the Spartan constitution and set of laws. Lycurgus was not praised for victory alone. It was the discipline of the spartiates themselves. It involved art and poetry - Tyrtaeus was highly lauded! One of our primary sources for Sparta is Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaimonians, which is extremely complimentary, and not focused entirely on military conquest. He praises the moderate appetites of the Spartans, their civic duty, their lack of greed or hedonism, their educational system, and so on. Xenophon is the one who tells us that the Spartans, unlike most poleis, lacked the institution of pederasty, and this is presented as a sign of the Spartans' virtue in valuing boys for their moral character, rather than in fleshly terms.
Should we take that all at face value? Probably not. Much of Xenophon's work is likely a veiled criticism of Athens itself, holding up a semi-imagined Spartan history in order to indict his present society. My point is just that it's plainly not true to say that the only thing Sparta was lauded for was its military record.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
The thing about Bret Devereaux, at least for me, is that he has a degree of genuine scholarship, but he's also way too online, too interested in arguing with strawmen or weak men, and willing to compromise his own commitment to truth for the sake of the latter. He does represent some useful insights to the public, but he's also wildly uncharitable to people he doesn't like.
Probably the best example of this is his series on Sparta, which is grossly ignorant of the latest academic writing on Sparta, is aimed primarily at owning 'Sparta bros' on Twitter, and by his own admission advances positions that he thinks are historically weak or less likely in order to more effectively win internet arguments.
Take, for instance, this post, in which he admits that the Hodkinson position is more plausible and better supported by evidence than the Cartledge position, but says that he made his case based on Cartledge position because "the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points". When someone admits to making an argument based on a weaker position purely for the sake of winning a debate, I think it is reasonable to conclude that that person is disingenuous.
I expect somebody with a reputation as a scholar to make only arguments that he himself believes to be strong or true. Some simplification for the public can be reasonable, especially when one is trying to educate children or undergraduates, but even so, I expect a scholar to as much as possible prioritise what is true over what can be used to persuade.
The whole thing is absurd at any rate because it is only an exercise in trying to defeat people he doesn't like on Twitter, exemplified by the weak man of Steven Pressfield.
It has always been striking to me that for everything we are told about Spartan values and society, the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States. If there is one thing I wish I had emphasized more in This. Isn’t. Sparta. it would have been to tell the average ‘Sparta bro’ that the Spartans would have held him in contempt.
I'm not sure what I can say here beyond, "Grow up, Bret."
The problem is that, using Sparta as an example, Devereaux is ignorant of the most recent scholarship, and misrepresents by omission the scholarship that he is aware of, in order to own a small, ignorant, and possibly imaginary audience.
This is not a serious thinker.
And if he's like that on classical Greece, which I've bothered to look into, why would I trust him on anything else?
He does sometimes convey useful insights in his other series, but in general I would caution people to always look up and independently research anything Devereaux tells you. He's clearly intelligent and well-read, but he is not a trustworthy source. He has a tendency to lump together periods centuries apart, for all that he criticises 'Sparta bros' he is something of a 'classical Rome bro' himself, he has a tendency to unhelpful political asides, and he tends to always be maximally uncharitable to people with whom he disagrees. I do not recommend ACOUP, if you want to learn about military history or the classical world.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Are these the equivalent of excitedly telling someone about your level 14 elf ranger? There are whole categories of activity that can feel deeply compelling while you're doing them, but are impossible to interestingly convey to others.
Though I have to confess that I myself don't find talking to an LLM compelling, even solo. It never feels insightful. It feels like endless regurgitated oatmeal, to me. Still, maybe some people enjoy that?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
What confuses me is just how this hooks anybody. I can barely stand to read it for more than a paragraph or two. Setting aside all other disagreements about AI, it's horrible just on the aesthetic level. These machines simply cannot write.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
That still fits my experience with them - I have spent some time mucking about with them, and every time I ask an LLM about something I know, it will frequently be confidently, even hilariously wrong. It is not aware of any difference between truth and falsehood and will freely mix them together. I want to avoid some kind of AI Gell-Mann Amnesia. When I ask it questions I know the answer to, it consistently prioritises producing something that looks like a confident, helpful, well-written answer, in total agnosticism as to whether or not that answer is true. It surely does the same thing with questions I don't know the answer to. The only sensible course of action is to assign zero credence to anything an LLM says. What it says might be true. Or it might not be. The LLM's word is worth nothing.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Asking a bot would defeat the whole point of the exercise.
For several reasons.
For what it's worth, working in a non-technical, non-coding-related field, my experience has been that some higher-ups are interested in the idea of AI and occasionally push a half-baked idea, which lower-level employees dutifully try for about two hours, conclude that it's useless, and then keep on doing things the old-fashioned way. I have yet to find any actual use-case for AI and continue to see it as a solution in search of a problem.
Maybe it's useful in some very specific, very narrow fields. Maybe coding is one of them. I'm not a coder so I don't know. But what my professional experience thus far tells me is that LLMs are good for producing large amounts of grammatically correct but turgid and unreadable bilge, and pretty much nothing else. If what you want is to mass-produce mediocre writing, well, that's what AI can do for you. If you want pretty much anything else, you're out of luck.
In a sense I think it's the ultimate 'wordcel' technology. It does symbol manipulation. It's good at translating one language into another, and apparently that it includes translating natural language instructions into computer code. But I remain skeptical as to its utility for much beyond that. It might be nice one day for someone to sit down and run through an explanation of how the heck this is supposed to get from language production and manipulation to, well, anything else.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
If you'll pardon some paranoia on my part... the post you link, attributed to Matt Shumer, really reads like AI slop to me. It does not read to me like a human wrote that. Given that the post is about Shumer outsourcing his work to bots, is it plausible that he also outsourced his post to a bot? Or that he had a bot edit and 'improve' his writing? Or that a bot wrote it and he edited it? Or, perhaps most frighteningly of all, that he's just worked with bots for so long that this is how he has learned to write, and now he imitates them?
Whatever the case, I just don't trust anything written in that mode. Did he write it? Is there any original human thought in it? I don't know. Under these circumstances, I am disinclined to trust.
He does say that he used AI to write it, which I guess proves my instincts right. The post is indeed awful writing, and if that's the standard of the AI that he thinks is going to replace all our work... well, even if he's right, it will be a tremendous disaster for written expression if nothing else.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Certainly, and the base rate being what it is, the odds that any given trans-identifying person is violent are so low that you should not assume the worst. In general you should try to treat people as individuals.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I'm skeptical of drawing strong causal conclusions around mass shootings if only because the number of mass shootings is so low. If we just look at Wikipedia's list, in the 1990s there are seven after Port Arthur, and twelve before. Counting Port Arthur itself, that's twenty, for a total of two per year. I think that's too low to draw any sensible inferences. If we go past that, Wikipedia lists fourteen shootings in all of the 1980s, versus six in the 2000s, and ten in the 2010s.
14-20-6-10 is overall a decline, but one that I find perfectly plausible in terms of the overall decline deaths by firearms (both homicides and suicides) over the period. Overall I tend to agree with RAND's conclusion - the evidence that the NFA reduced firearm deaths is weak at best.
For what it's worth I don't think NFA-style reforms in the US would accomplish very much, and I'd tend to support Australia moderately loosening up our firearms laws. I don't feel very strongly about firearms and I'd be happy to trade it away as part of a compromise on some other issue, but I think we could safely do it, and in principle I'm in favour of people being able to own things that they want, unless there is some pressing reason why they shouldn't. I'm more exercised about speech, personally, where I do think our record is unimpressive, and I look at the American First Amendment with mild envy.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Yes, I tend to think it's a combination of 1) shooters being almost entirely male, and thus more likely to be trans women than cis women or trans men, and 2) both shooters and trans people having strong positive correlations with mental illness.
You can debate the reasons for trans correlation with mental illness, say that it's all because of bigotry against gender-non-conforming people if you like, but the observation itself seems to remain true. Shooters tend to be biologically male people with some sort of mental disorder, and trans women are biologically male people who frequently have some sort of (other than being trans) mental disorder.
It isn't an epidemic or anything. But if trans women are slightly more likely, statistically, to be shooters than other demographics, it wouldn't surprise me.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
As an Australian (I cringed writing that phrase, but I suppose it's necessary), I am consistently annoyed both by local firearms discourse and by the way foreigners try to weaponise it. The 1996 buyback as far as I can tell made little difference - firearm deaths were a straight line trending downwards prior to Port Arthur, and continued their descent afterwards, with no visible change. There's just no particularly strong evidence that the policy change did anything.
I've come to interpret most tightening of laws after a tragedy as being symbolic. The buyback after Port Arthur probably didn't have much effect, but it was expressive. The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously." The reforms currently being proposed after Bondi are the same. Both additional firearm restrictions and additional speech restrictions have the same effect: they are very unlikely to actually reduce gun violence or anti-semitic feeling, but they signal, "We, the government, care about this, and are taking action."
The only people who lose out of these trade-offs are, well, the public. People whose rights to own what they want or speak what they want are shaved back another millimetre.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
That was what I saw at first. It appeared as breaking news on the ABC website. I was a little surprised for it to be Canada rather than America, as is far more common, and then a later update identified the shooter as a 'woman'. I admit I wondered if it was a trans woman if only because it's so unusual for women to be involved in mass shootings. Is there any confirmation on that either way?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Maybe it's different in countries with much richer traditions of winter or snow sports, but from my perspective, at least, the Winter Olympics were never culturally relevant. There is usually a cursory attempt to pretend they matter, but we all know that the real Olympics are the summer games.
Again, might be different in countries that have snow, but here, you will have a very hard time finding people who care, and it has always been that way to my recollection.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Without wanting to get too biographical, I've received suggestions like that before as well.
Fortunately a principle that's been helpful for me is to never make major decisions while in a state of despair, depression, or self-loathing. I remember advice I received once from a friend who'd been in the military - as much as possible, make decisions from a position of strength, not weakness.
One last heuristic I use when taking advice from another people is to ask myself, "Does this person want me to be strong?" There's a bit of unpacking to do there around what 'strong' means, but the point of the question is to look at whether this person is generally trying to move me in the direction of being collected, confident, at peace, empowered, etc., or whether they're trying to move me in the direction of being anxious, neurotic, dependent on others, etc.
It's not necessarily a red flag if someone encourages me to face a dark feeling, since vulnerability is something we all need to face sometimes. But the direction matters, and if someone is trying to make that vulnerability pathological, that is probably a sign that they're not going to make me stronger or happier.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I did say it was a joke. If nothing else, I've never kicked a hole in a wall - I'm more likely to find somewhere quiet and put my head in my hands. Like most jokes, I think it exaggerates a real point for effect, that trans people often still have some of the 'scripting' of their birth sex.
Sometimes they do overcompensate by trying too hard to adopt the 'culture' of their preferred sex? Anecdotally I think I see this more with trans women, but for all I know there are trans men who try really hard to lean into a macho concept of masculinity.
I agree with the observation that trans people tend to be lonely, at least judging from those that I've known. It seems plausible to me that people who are already lonely for non-gender-related reasons are likely to be more willing to consider radical changes to their lives. If you're lonely and sad by default, you may feel you have less to lose and be more willing to consider transitioning, and there's the possibility of the kind of love-bombing coffee_enjoyer describes.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Yes, I notice this with both trans women and trans men. In the normal course of development, you're socialised into your own sex and you learn a whole array of tools for how to be an adult man or an adult women. Trans people, even if they pass very well as their preferred gender, usually don't have all those tools. It's one of the reasons why they often look a bit uncanny-valley-esque, or can make natal members of that sex uncomfortable.
In the case of the person in that video, I think part of the issue is not knowing how men make friends, or how we express close, deep friendship. We don't do it the same way women do. There's a seemingly-endless genre of observational humour about how men and women have different languages for this sort of thing, and while the jokes are silly, they get at something real. Trans women have the reverse issue - they don't know the script for how to behave in female spaces. Thus that joke about how if a trans man is devastated, he hides and cries in the bathroom, and if a trans woman is devastated, she kicks a hole in the wall.
Anyway, resilience is definitely part of it. As a young man you learn things from your father, other older male relatives, role models, and so on, and one of them is how to suck it up when times are tough. When you've been a man your entire life, you probably don't realise how many things like that you do know. And the same for women in reverse.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
My understanding was that women attempt suicide more often than men, but men are vastly more likely to succeed, since they tend to prefer deadlier or more direct methods.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Aha, yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about below. It's easy to romanticise the other sex and believe that it's so much easier for them, but everything seems easier from a distance. You don't understand how hard it is until you've actually lived it.
Whether women or men in general experience greater happiness or life satisfaction is difficult to measure. Most surface polls show women reporting greater satisfaction, but that link suggests that women tend to use a higher scale than men and may actually be less satisfied. I don't want to make a general statement about which sex is, on average, happier, at least, not without a lot more research, but I would at least say that there probably isn't a vast difference.
I usually say something about it being a secret ballot for a reason. When I was a kid I inherited a rule from my father - you never tell anybody who you voted for, under any circumstances, full stop. I don't follow that rule religiously now, but I do still follow it most of the time. So I just say that I never talk about my vote with anyone. It's nothing to do with you - I just never tell anybody.
If someone decides to break off all contact with me because of that answer, well, we were never going to be friends anyway. Net loss of zero to me.
More options
Context Copy link