Pitt19802
29d ago
I went to Pitt from 1999-2003, I was in the stadium when Pitt played Notre Dame for the last game at Pitt Stadium.
Have a number of thoughts about a number of places you mentioned.
But mostly just wanted to say thanks, that was a ton of interesting history that I didn't know about places I've spent a fair amount of time.
Appreciate it.
Pitt19802
3mo ago
Honestly, I wouldn't list any of those 4.
Here's a few real questions women have to answer,
If my husband gets a job where he needs to relocate, should I move with him?
If my husband get a job that requires long hours such that he's not able to handle a 50/50 split of familial duties (child care/chores), should I put up with that?
The answers to those questions don't revolve around physical strength, they revolve around 'can I trust him long term?'
'Can I trust him not to use up my fertility and then have a midlife crises and leave me for someone younger?'
That's what I would consider to be male responsibility, can I be trusted to put the welfare of my family ahead of my base impulses.
Pitt19802
4mo ago
A thing I don't think the 'manosphere' (loosely defined) has really grappled with, is men's role dismantling the 'patriarchy' (loosely defined).
" the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) "
That works as a definition well enough.
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
Its relevant that concurrent with Promise Keepers, we had elected Bill Clinton twice to the highest office in the land, JFK was considered the coolest possible politician, Joe Namath had been famous for going on 30 years at that point for being good with the ladies.
Culturally, men, held up that ideal as something to be aspired to.
If men are going to aspire to be cads, a feminism that decides that men aren't worth trusting the patriarchy to is a reasonable response.
My mental model of Promise Keepers, their main message was "hey men, be worthy of the patriarchy"
Promise Keepers as a phenomenon, it was always fighting massive cultural headwinds, it was founded with that express purpose.
Is it a failure that it's not still going strong 30 years later? idk, what's that half-life of these things? I mean Lilith Fair isn't still selling out shows, whatever Louis Farrakhan is up to, a million people aren't showing up in DC on the regular to hear him. These things peter out.
If some men took it to heart and actually lived better lives, I would say that counts as success, even if in 2025 the movement is a minor footnote in history.
Pitt19802
4mo ago
How old are you?
I sort of object to your framing honestly, if you think you have an effort post in you about this, have at it.
As a child of the 90s, who grew up in a house where we attended church weekly, this isn't a thing I would have heard about by accident, it's a thing I would have needed to be pretty oblivious to have not heard about. (I'm trying to think if my dad ever attended an event, I'm not sure if he did or not, I'll put it at about 30% probability that he did).
For those that haven't heard of it, it was an evangelical men's movement in the 90s that was started by University of Colorado's football coach.
There was a stretch there where they drew large audiences at football stadiums.
If you're familiar with Tim Tebow's place in our culture, I perceive it being a pre-Tebow Tebowesque phenomenon (I'd actually be sort of surprised if Tebow's father had no interaction with Promise Keepers).
I find it sort of an interesting window into our culture's soul why people would seem to prefer it if Tebow didn't live up to his values.
Pitt19802
6mo ago
Not quite sure how to parse "don't believe in God",
Prosperity gospel churches tend to be very light on the 'these sins are going to damn you to hell' stuff.
There is a Joel Osteen XM radio station if you're interested in checking it out, your milage may very, but I often find listening to it improves my mood considerably.
Pitt19802
7mo ago
Good post.
I think where a lot of people get stuck is in waiting for the perfect piece of advice.
Line I read that stuck with me that I think applies beyond the specific instance - "Too many get stuck in analysis paralysis, worrying about the “right” source of knowledge: CLRS, TAoCP, Sedgewick, Skiena, Roughgarden, Dasgupta… you don’t need to obsess over these. Just pick something, get a foundation, and immediately move on to practice. You will learn everything from pattern recognition" (its from https://www.bowtiedfox.com/p/faang)
It's what I was trying to get at, but am not quite eloquent enough to put into words well, I think when you're young (at least I did when I was young), there's this mindset that if I follow out suboptimal advice, I'm wasting my time or I'm screwing myself over.
Being older, I think you learn a lot just by iterating over a lot of different things.
I should exercise and eat better than I do, that said, unless you're a professional athlete, starting down any path is 80% of it.
Pitt19802
7mo ago
Can I ask how old you are?
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this reads like something I might have written between 20-25 or so.
I think a big part of transitioning from the academic universe to something approximating the 'real world' is that no one is going to walk you through life.
It's on you to pull out the bits of advice that resonate with you and decide to try those out, then decide which of those you want to keep trying, which of those you want to stop trying, and what you want to try out that no one advised you to do.
You get to decide the itinerary, you get to decide the score card too.
Pitt19802
7mo ago
I found that it is very good at telling me which book I am trying to remember from a few hazy recollection of what the book was about.
I was trying to remember which book about basketball stats I read about 15 years ago which had a chapter comparing the relative merits of Tyson Chandler and Eddie Curry. Google gives you a sea of links to those guys wikipedia and basketball reference pages.
Chat GPT immediately knew it was 'The Wages of Wins' by David Berri, had a command of the basic thesis of the book in a way that jived with my memory of the book, was able to contrast and compare the arguments from the book with other books on sports statistics, talk about the various assumptions the arguments from those books relied on.
I was honestly pretty blown away at how useful it was in contrast to google searching.
Pitt19802
7mo ago
I generally use it as a search engine that I can ask more specific questions to than I can ask google.
I think its pretty helpful with travel planning, I feel like it lets me dictate more degrees of freedom than google does.
I'm taking a trip with my daughter next month, my daughter wants to go ziplining, "Can you help me find ziplining places, we're starting at A, ending at B, anywhere roughly along the route ..." I find LLMs handle that sort of thing better than google does. "We going to be in X for 2 days, what's some things we should do?" "Ehh, I don't think we would like that, what else" "Ehh, how expensive is that, is there something more affordable?". idk, couple iterations of that get you to something pretty workable.
Nice write up.
2 fairly off topic points.
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I listened to the audio version a while back, I did so through the Libby app on my phone (you enter your library card info into the app and it lets you check out digital books and audiobooks), each library's selection is different, but I bet the audiobook version of Mere Christianity is a pretty common offering across most libraries.
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I'm highly confident that Scott has read a fair amount of Lewis -
"The best analogy I can think of is C.S. Lewis. Lewis was a believer in the Old Religion, which at this point has been reduced to cliche. What could be less interesting than hearing that Jesus loves you, or being harangued about sin, or getting promised Heaven, or threatened with Hell? But for some reason, when Lewis writes, the cliches suddenly work. Jesus’ love becomes a palpable force. Sin becomes so revolting you want to take a shower just for having ever engaged in it. When Lewis writes about Heaven you can hear harp music; when he writes about Hell you can smell brimstone."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life/
I think that shout out was what motivated me to listen to it.
Thoughts, ok, let me try to do this stream of consciousness style.
Not sure if you’re familiar with the Pixar movie Monsters University? But the nominal university setting is a basic mishmash of elements from large land grant public universities. Of the college campuses that I’m pretty familiar with (Ohio State, Penn State, UNC, Michigan, Georgia, University of Alabama, Cal) if you walk around them, you can see the elements that make up the Monsters University campus, such that Monsters University is sort of a fictionalized platonic ideal of what a big public school campus should look like.
Anyway, University of Pittsburgh’s campus is the least evocative of the Monsters University campus of any large campus I’ve been on.
I think the probable explanation is that those are all land grant universities, and Pitt isn’t. The basic feature of this is that Pitt is split in half by 2 fairly large throughfares, Forbes and Fifth. The typical land grant setup is that there is a large throughfare on one side of the campus, and then the campus is a fairly self-contained universe off to one side of that throughfare.
Ohio State’s campus fits this model. High St is a fairly similar road to Forbes, you can take it all the way to downtown Columbus, it has fairly heavy traffic, and Ohio State’s campus is a fairly self-contained university off to one side of it, so you get spaces like the Oval, and student life basically centers around that space. (CMU's campus sort of fits that model as well.)
Pitt’s campus doesn’t really have an outdoor square space that student life centers around in the same sense.
There was some effort to do stuff in the greenspace between the Cathedral and Heinz Chapel, and that was a nice green space. Sometimes they would shut down Bigelow between the Student Union and the Cathedral and do events there (I remember seeing the band Fuel perform there for free as a freshman).
When I went to school there, the space between Hillman and the Carnegie Library was a parking lot. They’ve since turned it into a fairly pleasant green space, which strikes me as a nice upgrade. I don’t really have a sense for how effective it is as community space. In general, I think the layout doesn’t really lend itself to student community life all that well.
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Anyway, on to some other stuff:
South Oakland – When I went to school there, there would be ads in the Pitt News advertising that you could rent a room in South Oakland for $200-300 a month. My general sense was not that it was a slum or anything, but that the general behavior of college-age people made it such that it made no sense to live there if you were older than 23 or so. I had several classmates who rented places there and would throw parties on the weekend. The general model was that you would pay $5, they would give you a red cup, there was a keg in the kitchen, and you would fit about, idk, maybe 100-150 people, into a 2 bedroom row house. The music blared and you couldn’t hold a conversation, then the neighbors, quite reasonably, would call the police. The police would show up and everyone would scamper away through a back alley.
I think I might have been to 4 or 5 parties that fit that description before deciding it wasn’t my scene and spending my weekend evenings doing other things. My general sense from walking around is that there were several parties like that per block in South Oakland on your typical Friday and Saturday evenings. The idea of actually living there as a college-age student didn’t appeal to me at all; the idea of some poor adult living amongst that, idk, it struck me as insane back then, and it still does.
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Schenley Farms – I had an economics professor who would invite students over to his house to discuss class presentations; he lived there. I was really taken aback by how nice his house was and how close it was to campus. I looked it up on Zillow just now and it estimates it’s worth $790k, which honestly seems a couple hundred grand too low to me.
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Carnegie Library – Yeah, absolutely, 1000% agree, it really is a great library. When my daughters were young I would take them there and they named it the ‘Castle Library,’ which, yeah, that’s about right. One of my favorite parts is that back in the stacks there are some windows that overlook some of the most impressive dinosaur fossils in the natural history museum.
For a couple of years we had Carnegie Museum annual passes, and that was a good standby outing when we wanted to get the girls together with my parents. That whole complex is great. Tip of the cap, Andrew, well done, appreciate it.
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Pitt Stadium and logistics – So yeah, Pitt Stadium’s last year was my freshman year. My dad and I had been to several games there even before then, and I have a significant amount of nostalgia for the place. The last 10 or so years of Pitt Stadium, Pitt football was not good. They’ve been much better in the 25 years since. The general rule of Pitt football attendance is that if they play Penn State, WVU, or Notre Dame, they’ll get a good crowd (and half the stadium will be rooting for the away team). If they play anyone else, you can wander around and find somewhere to stretch out and put your feet up on the seat in front of you because no one’s sitting there. There are generally lots of empty seats. That’s been true at Acrisure, and it was definitely true at Pitt Stadium.
My parents live in Monroeville. It really doesn’t take that many cars to bottleneck the Bates St exit off the parkway, and it’s generally a pain to get in and out of campus that way, I usually take the Greenfield exit and come in through Schenley Park. Where Pitt Stadium was, and where the Petersen Event Center is now, is even more of a pain to get to. We went to a basketball game over winter break when there were no students on campus; the arena was probably not even half full, we parked in the lots above the arena, and it was still a giant pain to get out at the end. That area just has a ton of bottlenecks, it takes forever. Putting a stadium in Panther Hollow sounds cool, but it would probably require a new highway exit off the parkway to make it work, and that’s not happening.
At some point when I’m a very old man, possibly after I'm gone and when my kids are very old, the consensus will be that the Pete is old and decrepit and needs to be replaced. If football is still popular then, replacing the Pete with a new football stadium might be a thing that happens. I think that’s the only real logical spot, and that’s sort of the only timeline that makes any sense.
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