Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
As far as I can tell this is a uniquely Christian innovation.
I mean, the Chinese have evidence of this in writing even in pre-Imperial history; 墨子 discusses punishments for rape during the Warring States period, and various annals including 春秋左傳 and 詩經 describe rape in a decidedly disapproving manner. I'm sure other cultures would
This is, of course, in the background of a very different philosophical culture and climate than Christian Europe. For one, the Christian idea of sin is probably actually quite peculiar, which I suspect makes much of the difference in mental interpretation.
Pigeon
coo coo
4d ago
They can detect Russian ESL speakers in 6 words of a prompt
Shit really? Now I'm curious what the LLM thinks I speak as a first language.
Pigeon
coo coo
17d ago
1 - I've been lucky in that I decided a few years ago to start listening to the entire back catalog of EconTalk. It started in 2006, and I'm around 2011 now. There are plenty of episodes that aren't housing-related, but there is an incredible breadth and regular stream of folks grappling with and trying to understand the housing crisis, the crash, and the process of recovery. I guess I've been stewing in it enough that it's clear what people thought they were trying to do, how it sounded nice, how it all went wrong, and now we're basically repeating the same tune, just a different key.
This sounds fascinating. Any way you could distill what you observed from those 5 years of podcasts?
Pigeon
coo coo
23d ago
Much of the cultural relevance and memes (in the Dawkinsean sense) from the Three Kingdoms can be found from the Romance, so if getting a background on that is what you're after then the Romance is definitely a better fit, as the culmination of a thousand years of dramatised retellings of the period. You're not going to get things like Zhuge Liang borrowing ten thousand arrows from the actual history.
I'm not sure if there even is an English translation of the Records.
Pigeon
coo coo
23d ago
Out of curiosity what did they do to the story to make the 2010 show such a meme?
Pigeon
coo coo
23d ago
Thanks! I had a look at the Substack, and while it's a decent glossary and dramatis personae, I was looking for something less dry. But it's useful context.
Just to clarify that you're looking for the novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義 sanguo yanyi), rather than the actual history, Records of the Three Kingdoms (三國志 sanguozhi)?
Pigeon
coo coo
24d ago
The 1994 version, from what I hear, is the most faithful to the original novel, but suffers occasionally from pacing issues.
(I haven’t seen any of the TV series as I read it in text)
Pigeon
coo coo
24d ago
Oh wow, I did not know about this.
It's a video of Xu Qinxian's secret trial. I'm surprised the party allowed such a recording, even for their own purposes. Perhaps something is shifting in the winds if a party member has leaked this out.
recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s
Wait what recent examples?
I’m pretty sure it was well known that there were high ranking members of the military who were disapproving of the crackdown, from a letter co-signed by multiple generals to Xu Qinxian refusing to march into Beijing, or Xu Feng, or He Yanran etc.
There is a safe way to do it, but...they've done this so many times, they do it the unsafe way figuring it won't be a problem.
This reminds me of the last time I worked in a rural setting as a junior. A nurse nonchalantly alerted me to a patient who she described as having had a laceration with some circular saw, with a demeanour suggesting that she thought the patient was a bit of a sissy and should've been told off and sent home.
I took a look at the wound and immediately blanched -- this man's second and third digits of his dominant hand was so obviously degloved that I can't imagine how the nurse could've seen the wound and called it a laceration, the subcutaneous tissue on both fingers was really trying its best to invent a new form of codex.
The only explanation I could think of how she could've given me that handover was that she didn't look at the wound at all and decided to short-cut the decision-making process after hearing a one-sentence summary of the history from the patient's wife.
I don't really have anything to say about the programming side of things, just wanted to share a story that also incidentally includes a woodworking incident and someone trying to take the easy way out.
I don't think we disagree, as from what I found men do kill women in relationships anywhere from 2 to 5 times as much, and in fact Wilson and Daly is one of the sources I cited; but given such a low base rate...
Which leads me to think that it might be one (or more) of men under-responding to the danger they're in, women over-estimating the danger they're in, or the self-defence clause is largely true and men really are astronomically less likely to be killed as long as they aren't violent.
For what it's worth, I think the third is almost definitely true to some extent, but I can't imagine it being the entire story, given that intimate partner violence in general also follows a similar trend, at least going by mainstream org press releases (something like 1:3 to 1:4 with likely significant male under-reporting); though there is an interesting part of the literature that contends that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and cases with unilateral domestic violence usually have the woman as the perpetrator, but still finding that violence causing injury (esp. severe injury) is still generally male-dominated, though again not to the extent that we usually assume it is. That aligns with my perception that murders and homicides aside, women are still more likely to be injured purely from biology.
(The review by Straus seems to suggest that actual cases of violence in self-defence are actually quite low:
Self-defense is a motive for only a small proportion of PV perpetrated by women (or men). Using a variety of samples and assessment techniques, these studies find that self-defense characterizes less 20% of female violence. Moreover, in general population samples, men and women are equally represented as using violence in self-defense by both victim and perpetrator report. For example, using a college student population, Follingstad (1991) found that victims of violence reported their aggressors' motivation was self-defense in 1.4% of cases if the offender was a male, and 4.8% of cases if the offender was a female and perpetrators reported that their motivation was self-defensive about 18% of the time (17.7% for men, 18.5% for women). As violence becomes more severe, there are greater gender differences in the use violence in self-defense; however, self-defense is still a motivation for a relatively small proportion of violence. In a sample of couples presenting for marital therapy, Cascardi and Vivian (1995) found that 20% of wives and no husbands attributed their use of severe aggression to self-defense. In cases of homicide, which make up a tiny fraction of PV, it is estimated that 9.6% of homicides perpetrated by women meet legal criteria for self-defense, compared to .5% of homicides perpetrated by men (Felson & Messner, 1998). Other homicide studies use different criteria and estimate higher rates of self-defense (e.g.Mann, 1988; Mann, 1992), though no study has found self-defense for a majority of cases.
so I wonder how the >50% self-defence stat for women comes from. Maybe self-reporting?)
Someone could probably do a systematic review on this. I can't imagine that the studies are generally high quality, though.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
If you really want to jumpstart science in East Asia you could potentially do so via reference to Taoism instead.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
Re: the Duluth model, I had to look this up and by the Wikipedia article it's been much criticised. I'd be a tiny bit more sympathetic about your complalnt there, save that I read this story in the news very recently. Ex-partner attacks woman with axe, sets fire to house, drowns himself. "Why this foolish notion that women are at risk from men?" you ask, and I point to this. Except for some guys who really are walking around with "I'm trouble" labelled on their face, how do you know that if you take up with Joe and then break up with Joe, Joe is not going to try and axe-murder you? It's a gamble!
I have to say that while I'm sympathetic to part of this, things like this model likely contribute to a zeitgeist that overinflates the danger that women face and underestimate the danger than men do.
I recall trying to find statistics about intimate partner homicides years ago (using US data), and found that while women do get killed significantly more than men do in these situations, it was more on the order of male victimisation rate at ~60% of the female level (which seems to be already down from 75% in 1992, at least according to this), rather than orders of magnitude more. Looking at other developed countries doesn't help either, since while it isn't as close as the US, IIRC it's still "only" on the magnitude of, like, 20-50%. The statistical data doesn't fit with the far higher subjective concerns that women have with getting murdered by their spouses. (I found this in a brief search, which suggests a skew of 2:1 in female:male victimisation globally on page 14, but doesn't seem to distinguish between intimate partner homicide and other family-related homicide.)
I could be convinced that generally, murders aside, women are orders of magnitude more at risk of severe bodily harm than men do without dying, simply due to biology, but I'm not sure the data supports that women are astronomically more at risk than men are from intimate partner homicide than men are, and I think men barely think about their partners murdering them (at least compared to women thinking about the same).
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
For instance, this was probably my favourite painting in the exhibition, and I would have purchased it instantly if it was for sale. But it looks like shit, honestly, on the website, because the screen loses the illusion of depth that makes the painting so compelling.
I am far less versed in visual arts than my partner is, but even then I recall seeing a few art pieces like this when I last went to an exhibit in Nagasaki; a painting of some cascades that really looked like like the water was jumping off the canvas, and a piece of a mortuary that I could practically feel the gritty texture of the dirt.
I can believe that the skill for working these small miracles is something that is slowly lost in the age of digitisation and mass consumerism.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
Surely even if this is true, predicting when this will happen is still incredibly difficult?
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
Many of China's once-ghost cities and trains-to-nowhere are a good example.
This is, at best, a mixed example.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
Oh, that looks like obvious malicious clown garbage. He has a broken leg. Why is he in the hospital for over a month with a broken leg? Unless that is understating his injuty to a hilarious extent, a broken leg is a couple hours of outpatient care and then getting released.
What? I admit to being possibly out of date regarding orthopaedics best practice, but my impression is that most tibial +/- fibular fractures require operative management. Isolated fibular shaft fractures maybe? Even for conservative management it's going to be a cast and crutches and no weight-bearing on that leg for weeks, with at least a couple clinic visits. Certainly not to the extent that you can be so blasé as to say "couple hours of outpatient care then getting released"!
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
euthanasia trucks
Why is this something that "no one seriously thinks happened"?
I mean, this happens to this day.
math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed)
I think it would be quite mean to ask a high school student to figure out/invent how to derive the Taylor series of a function ab initio.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
This is often not the case and is counterintuitive for many.
I recall when I was a student, an ICU consultant asked us to guess whether most people who go to ICU die from the initial resuscitation or escalation of intensive treatment; the time during of intensive treatment; or the time when we try to step down patients from intensive care; he was impressed at the few of us who guessed the last. Turns out we’re quite good at maintaining signs of life with technology, even as we are helpless to fix an otherwise nonviable body — at least if you’re stable enough to get into ICU and didn’t have your chest caved in by a bus.
This probably makes more sense once you try to guess about how often ICU doctors have to have difficult family meetings with patients’ families about withdrawing life support, versus patients dying while on life support.
Pigeon
coo coo
7mo ago
I don’t know how to interpret chasing off famine relief with gunboats… it far exceeds any of the evidence for the intentionality of the Maoist famines.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
With the caveat that this isn’t something I’ve actually experinced, I’m actually pretty sure this isn’t the case, because if the woman is unconscious there isn’t any pressure to finish.
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