Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
6mo ago
Amongst my close friends in undergrad, there used to be a guy who had a ~150 IQ (he was the only member of the group who had it measured "properly" by a professional - he had a psychologist friend and he agreed to be one of the test subjects for something), and he was noticeably duller than the rest of us in [hard STEM subject we all studied] - this was evidenced objectively in exam results (and he worked to try get good results) I'm not sure if he is just one of those unfortunate people on the vertex of the functionality/IQ ellipse, or if it really was just a "culture" issue (maybe he was just overloaded with extra-curriculars, he had test-anxiety, etc - normally I'd discount those explanations as cope - but then... 150 IQ!)
It could possibly be a test with a different SD score, though I'm not sure why that would be the case since I think? most Western tests are calibrated to be SD15 or SD16. I recall hearing about a K-pop star with an IQ of 148 and then finding out [that it was 148 on a different scale (with an SD of 24), as was the standard in Korean school testing at the time (?)
150 would be gifted but not that exceptional in that case.
Oh yes, this is true! (I recall alluding to this difference in a reply I made regarding DeepSeek being uncannily good at classical Chinese poetry -- it's able to identify words that rhymed back in the day, but not in standard Mandarin.) Even in Middle Chinese these often wouldn't be exactly the same, so it would really mostly be a guide rather than an absolute. Nonetheless, they often sound similar enough that it's significantly less effort than if it were completely random, in the same way that Middle English sote is different but kind of similar to sweet (and not at all to mistletoe) in sound.
The way simplification really broke things is by removing many phonetic guides completely, like 廣 to 广. I happen to be more of a fan of the simplification done in 新字体 shinjitai, but even it kind of breaks things sometimes -- 廣 is now 広, for example, which has a misleading phonetic component. (Of course, it matters less in the Japanese case, as 広い is hiroi, and many compound words use ひろ hiro native pronunciation rather than こう kou borrowed (from China) pronunciation.)
I think this take is grossly correct, with the addition that the Chinese language — being relatively poor in range of sounds, as well as being monosyllabic for characters — would find the transition to a sound-based script more difficult than imagined. I’d also hazard a guess that logographs add an additional layer of difficulty in learning, but isn’t actually that much more onerous to read once learned — see the studies that show ability to recognise scrambled or deformed English words as long as certain signposts of a word are present like the initial and last character, which suggests a logograph-like recognition of words even in people only literate in an alphabetic language.
Add to that that most Chinese characters have a phonetic component, borrowing sounds from more common characters along with a helpful radical… (incidentally iirc simplification has actually fucked some of this up)
It's effective enough that in premodern East Asia, people from the Sinosphere who did not speak the same language could often write conversations instead.
Before the 20th century the vast bulk of the Chinese population was illiterate. And those that were literate were plugged into the imperial system of governance, which required the use of hanzi. There were some exceptions where ethnic minorities came up with their own syllabic scripts, but this happened mainly on the Yun-Gui plateau as far as I know, which I personally don't even consider China proper.
I’ve seen estimates that Song-to-Ming literacy was surprisingly high (but downtrending), up to 20-30%. It is interesting to note Choe Bu’s memoirs of when he was shipwrecked and his travels through China while getting back to Korea, where he gains the impression that literacy was quite common in the south, or at least around the Jiangnan area (but rare in the north).
Pigeon
coo coo
6mo ago
The one time I (was confirmed to have) got it I was pretty miserable with a few days of quite painful laryngitis that made swallowing difficult. It kinda sucked, wouldn't recommend
There are at least two things here that are worth noting.
One is that prerequisites required, both in terms of knowledge and (market/social/political/geological/etc.) conditions for a technology or piece of engineering to first appear are often not obvious to us at first glance as we look in retrospect. @MadMonzer discusses the example you gave of calculus, but I'd like to consider the steam engine for this. After all, the aeolipile as described by Vitruvius and Hero is a rudimentary thing with a turbine powered by steam, and the Romans had sophisticated and complicated designs like the Ctesibius water pump; surely they could've gotten to steam engines by the 2nd century!
Except that the steam engine that was eventually found useful required several technological and scientific developments that were simply not available to the Romans. It required a concept of pressure differentials, in particular the idea of a vacuum, as well as a sophisticated understanding of thermodynamics; it required advances -- with respect to both technology and scale -- in metallurgy (e.g. cast iron, which made the entire thing much cheaper, was available in classical China but would not be known in Europe until the early modern era) and manufacturing (e.g. machining techniques and precision tools) for steam engines to be feasible or economical to manufacture. (This list is by no means exhaustive.)
And even that isn't enough to spur the development and adoption of the steam engine historically! Many of these conditions were met in Europe, which certainly had tinkerers working on steam-based engines and contraptions in the 16th and 17th century, including a steam-powered cannon by da Vinci. They may even have been present in China, even with the relative decline in Chinese science by that time.
The conditions required for adoption of the primitive steam engine was present in England, which had a persistent relative labour shortage (so that it's worth investing in an early machine to do work) and coal mines with groundwater that needed to be pumped out; in one fell swoop you had a fuel and a method to get rid of groundwater flooding the mines!
From that point, incremental improvements start to occur fairly rapidly; but even these improvements required the existence of an economy that is growing to a scale where these improvements would've paid off. (In this case it seems like it was a virtuous cycle.)
There are other low-hanging-fruit examples like wheels not taking off in the Incan empire -- they had the concept of a round thing turning on an axle in toys and such, but due to the geography of their land and lack of pack animals, primitive wheeled transport wasn't really efficient -- and so it wasn't further developed!
I suppose what I mean is that for a technology (or an industrial revolution, for that matter) to take off, many things have to align at the same time -- in terms of technological knowledge, but also in terms of the right political institutions, social and population trends, financial incentives and economic landscape, geographic luck, and so on.
The other point is that historical cultures may have had similar insights, but -- due to circumstance, ideology, etc. -- these insights are applied in different and sometimes diametrically opposite ways.
You can find many classical Chinese texts extolling the virtues of laissez-faire governance, as well as texts discussing supply-and-demand, business cycles (and an early form of Keynesian economics), inflation, issues with monopolies, early forms of regulatory capture and the principal-agent problem, recognition of economic speculation, economic inequalities secondary wealth and capital accumulation, appreciation of differences in incentive and efficiency between the public sector and the private sector, and other ideas in economics and political economy. The ancient Chinese had a nuanced, if unsystematic, understanding of market forces.
But these texts, drawing from a zeitgeist of a different era, operating under different assumptions, and penned by a bureaucrat class under an imperial government, advance arguments and rationales that are often bizarre to our modern ears. Laissez-faire governance (of markets as well as of society broadly), often discussed as wu wei (無為), is often not recommended for price-finding efficiency, improved market incentives, or on grounds of liberty; but because of an idealisation of a distant government that does not interfere with the natures and desires of men so as to turn them greedy and capricious (rather than simple and honest agriculturalists), and from a Confucian idea that rulers should lead by example, and when they do the entire nation will follow suit.
As an aside, you see a smidge of this influence in the development of modern classical economics, as the Physiocrats drew significant inspiration from China; the word laissez-faire is in fact a loose translation of wu wei!
I actually disagree -- some premodern states were powerful enough to potentially enable free markets; however, as you allude to, most of the time states that were this powerful (or, at least, the people controlling these states) often had insufficient incentive, and in many cases a significant disincentive, to promote institutions of free trade. The Brits who pioneered it had a relative incentive compared to other states to put in the legwork in creating the ideological framework and the sophisticated mechanisms that would allow free trade both due to internal factors (e.g. such as that which lead up to the English Civil War, or the French political situation in the late 18th-19th centuries) and external (e.g. profitable colonial enterprise for Britain); it riding in a package with other European liberal ideas at the time also helped. I think this explains much of the difference; I wouldn't be sure that the Russians or Spanish or Ottomans wouldn't develop similar ideas if they had similar incentives and pressures.
You see a similar thing in Song China (as alluded to by @BurdensomeCount) -- which had the makings of a modern fiscal state, with sophisticated monitoring of markets, indirect taxes (rather than land/population taxes), professionalised administration for taxes, heavy monetisation, debt financing, etc. -- due to the government decision to tax trade rather than land. The land tax was insufficient to fund its military against strong quasi-Chinese states to the north and treaty obligations (towards the same states), and the Song had to find some other way to raise revenue.
The Yuan that followed was part of the Mongol empire which kind of just screwed up everything, and the Ming that followed the Yuan was, in hindsight, highly economically regressive, even if it had the state capacity (at least at first, probably) to encourage institutions of free trade; the Song Chinese fiscal state was still immature and weak, and did not survive dynastic transition.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
What’s the cultural distance between Spain and Latin America compared to the USA (I assume this is where you are)? I speak both Japanese and Chinese but not Spanish (and have only ever visited the United States), so I may have a skewed view, but it seems like the cultural distance between the States and the East Asian countries is larger than the States and Spain or Latin America.
It might be worth learning the East Asian languages if you want to expose your child to a significantly different culture as part of a broad liberal-arts-ish education.
I know I used to entertain learning other languages to read their literature. Who knows, I might try to pick up another language even this late in life!
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
finding racism in ham sandwiches
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
I tend to think of it this way -- a Timmy is drawn to cool stuff represented by the playing of the game (whether it be through roleplaying, through big fat numbers, the social aspect of the game, etc.), while a Johnny is drawn to cool interactions created by the game mechanics, up to and including bizarre 5 card combos relying on arcane rules minutiae that doesn't work out 9/10 of the time but that one time it works it looks really impressive...
A Timmy would be happy winning conventionally but in a "cool" way (think more "would look cool on a movie screen" rather than "would impress other players"), while a Johnny is more interested in doing unconventional stuff.
On the other hand Spikes just want to win at all costs within the rules of the game -- and if the most effective deck is utterly braindead and uninteresting otherwise, so be it.
In an RPG you could maybe translate it thus:
- Timmies would try to spec their character to feel the most badass
- Johnnies would be more interested in weird builds or challenge runs
- Spikes would minmax the shit out of the game (though TBH I think in a solo context even Spike-y people tend to loosen up a bit)
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
But what about their early morning puff while they’re still in their onesies?
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
I don't even know how to respond to this. Did I not explain further literally in the same sentence?
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
My partner runs circles around me in Mario Kart, and probably has spent more time playing games in the last couple years than I have. She's sunk in probably >20x the time I have in BG3, last I checked, and is enough of a gamer that she started talking mad shit about my brother's unoptimised strats while he and I were playing co-op (note: my first run, 0 familiarity with any mechanics) despite him having completed a couple runs already -- though he's more of a Timmy while she's more of a Spike.
She also used to beat me in WC3 more than 50% of the time when that was relevant. (I did kind of self gimp myself by being interested in relatively high execution strategies that I couldn't perform, and she would just huntress rush me to death)
She is quite competitive and plays to win, though, so now she doesn't play competitive games because she doesn't feel like she could compete at a satisfactory level anymore without putting in enough effort that it would derail other commitments. I can't really disagree -- I've stopped for largely the same reason (though I loosely still play a bit of MTG).
n=1, but they do exist.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
Sure, that makes me more likely to accept that there is a large difference between men and women wrt second languages in practice.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
He decided to get married before having kids, his wife converted to Judaism, they're raising their kids in his family faith/ethnic tradition, and whatever arrangements on the side they have
Does this even work? I thought Judaism was transmitted(?) through the maternal line.
It is perhaps more accurate to consider the pre- and post-Mao CCP as entities that share continuity but otherwise represents a break, in the same way that the Tang overthrew the Sui in the 6th century (after the Sui were bankrupting the country to invade Goguryeo) but essentially retained its edit: broad institutions and ministries.
One important thing to note about the Mandate of Heaven is that it is less extensive than the divine right of kings elsewhere in the world. The right to rebellion is explicitly written into the Mandate of Heaven.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
I agree broadly. I do note that there was one incident where one of these weirdos was incredibly persistent with one of my friends — tried to find her on Skype and sext her, etc — which was genuinely extremely offputting. And I think the one case where women do get more unwanted attention than men is in this arena.
But also (women broadly) don’t want to be treated like the boys so what can you do
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
the rude and awkward behaviour I've seen in Western online gaming communities towards even those merely suspected of being girls
Curiously I’ve observed enough of women I know playing games like LoL and Guild Wars (etc.) on international servers, and have had a ?feminine enough username in some games and been taken for a woman in games (???), to have had an experience of this around 2000s-2010s.
Most people were actually supportive, some to the point of white-knighting. I thought the proportion of men who were actually foul to women was probably well under 10%. But most of the games where communication are usually team games (and so you have (1-x)^9 chances of not rolling a shithead for a solo queue 5v5 game, which is going to be significantly higher than 1-x), and these people could be so foul (or wildly inappropriate, or just plain weird), that it does mar the experience a bit.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
Childish Gambino's This is America - except This is America was fuelled by the progressive zeitgeist, and thus was basically substance free, reliant on censorship to both provide substance and shield the song from critics, so my progressive friends' opinion of it was along the lines of 'we have to prop up black people so even if it's kind of empty we can praise it for what it didn't say'.
I always did feel that the This Is America MV was shallow even compared to the visual composition of things like Gangnam Style…
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
I wouldn't disagree, it's just the phrasing of the original reply:
Better at learning foreign languages. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever taken a language class.
Which seems like a stronger observation I have personally observed.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
I would've figured that stereotypes relating to rare traits are overestimated, in the same way that progressives overestimate the number of black/indigenous/etc deaths in custody by orders of magnitude. Though I also kind of figured that our stereotypes would just kind of vaguely gesture in a direction and the level of accuracy regarding the magnitude of the trait would kind of be accurate but imprecise.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
There are other silly minimizations: EX: Better Handwriting "just because of small hands". It doesn't matter what the source of the advantage is; the discussion is whether or not it's there.
I mean, this would suggest that women should have worse handwriting when it comes to writing in large sizes, which does create a notable exception for "better at handwriting".
In any case I think it does matter. If the difference in dexterity is mostly a matter of size then we could just retrofit many things to be man-sized rather than woman-sized instead; it is contingent on our current circumstances. But if it is really an inbuilt difference then there is no point.
No, I agree with this; but I think that some European states in the early modern period — France under Louis XIV? — had enough pure state capacity to develop the ability to support free trade, and it still took a little while for ideas about free trade to get expressed. Conversely in China, early Ming China most likely had the state capacity to support free trade, but pointedly decided not to. (Chinese state capacity withered away dramatically over the Ming-Qing period anyway; I am happy to be corrected about the European record.)
I suppose what I mean is that a modern state is necessary but insufficient.
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