ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I mean, perhaps some people are concerned about brain drain solely from the perspective of a zero-sum competition with other countries, but I think that letting these people's talent go to waste is a loss for humanity as a whole.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
France was demonstrably the first country in Europe to undergo the demographic transition and has a higher fertility rate today than its neighbors (I picked a source from before the recent migration wave to eliminate that confounder).
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
In my experience, there are a substantial number of ideologically captured researchers working in hard science fields where it doesn't affect their output very much, but who would consider moving to Europe if they felt the government was sufficiently hostile to their politics. Losing these people would result in serious brain drain, even if it would probably make the social sciences more productive.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Any country that passes through this population bottleneck experiences immediate and intense natural selection for increased fertility, which means that those nations that started earlier (France in the case of Europe and Japan in the case of East Asia) will revert sooner to a more sustainable birthrate. There is also more variation within Japan itself than Korea, with minorities such as Okinawans bringing up the average fertility. Lastly, Japan has in recent years implemented a more liberal immigration policy, with large numbers of Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese, Indonesian, etc. workers (or mail-order brides) moving in to maintain the integrity of the labor force and having more children than the natives.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I think some people certainly conflate "rule of law(s), which happen to have been established by a democracy" and "rule of law(s), which are by their nature inherently democratic", with the latter paving the way for tyranny. This intersects with disagreements over the definition of democracy, where one side claims it means "following the set of prescribed rules we have established for maintaining a representative government" and the other claims it means "the majority get to dictate policy with absolute unconstrained authority (at least whenever I agree with the majority)".
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
This is the latest report, but I first came across these details on Twitter last month.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
There are some restaurants and stores in China putting up signs like "all Americans pay 104% extra here", but many Chinese people these days still desperately want to immigrate to the US, so it will take a great deal to ruin our reputation there. There's an old Chinese joke about WWIII, where the strategic missile command asks for American targets and keeps hearing objections like "you can't strike there, my daughter is attending college in Boston!", "I just bought a house in San Francisco!", "my nephew lives in New York!", and in the end they decide to nuke Guizhou (the poorest province in China) instead.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
The reports I've seen seem to indicate that the Norks were actually quite competent and adaptable soldiers who, if properly equipped and led, would have a much better chance of breaking Ukrainian lines than the Russian penal battalions. Despite being sent to the front with only small arms and encountering combat drones for the first time, they were in many cases able to bait them into the open and shoot them down with precise rifle fire.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I suppose for the same reason French people say "four score and eleven" instead of "ninety one".
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Why is this judge's decision not simply part of the process by which "the country" decides who to let in and who to expel? Are the president's desires the sole legitimate expression of the national will? We have a government of laws, not of men, or at least that's how it was intended.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Is the US the same US as 200 years ago and not a new something on the same place?
I find that questions along the lines of "Is [X] an instance of [Y]?" are rarely helpful, and attempts to answer them pretty much always devolve into No True Scotsman'ing and other arbitrary redefinitions of [X] and [Y]. Usually there is some deeper question that better expresses what I really want to know, and I would be better served by finding a way to articulate it. This view of mine probably crystallized when I was reading a lot about the Byzantines online and waded through endless "But were they Romans or not??!!" threads. Who cares? Just admire the Hagia Sofia and stop looking for joints to cleave when reality hasn't provided you with any.
So if your question is "would a time traveller from the 18th century find the present an alien place?" the answer is self-evidently yes, even if we just gave them a stack of modern books to read by candlelight without exposing them to any advanced technology. If your follow-up question is "would such a person be so horrified by what they read that they would return to their timeline and immediately try to prevent us from coming into existence?" the answer is quite possibly still yes, but their pre-Reformation ancestors would have thought the same of them. If your question is "do we have a right to claim the name and symbols of our forefathers when they were so different from us?" I point you to China, which any Chinese person will be proud to tell you is 5000 years old, and that they are one and the same civilization as those illiterate, human-sacrificing, neolithic tribesmen of five millennia ago. Compared to that, 300 years is nothing.
As for I would divide things up, on a political basis there have been three Americas: the America of the Founders, ending with the Civil War; the America of Lincoln, after which I would place an interregnum between 1945 and 1965; and then the current America, which is in the process of being dismantled. On a cultural basis, there is a clear break in the mid-20th century, but I do not detect one in the 19th century, at least not in literature. From the point of view of the rest of the world, there is before 1945 and after. Draw enough of these lines and you will see that many of them overlap, and then you can choose to name the things on either side of them whatever you want. As for regional cultures, those were significant in earlier times, but are losing their strength in favor of a more general rural-urban divide.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Even if the downward spiral from Democracy to Caesarism is unstoppable, if you act too soon or too rashly (e.g. if Caesar took the crown from Antony and declared himself Rex, the Gracchi brothers holding on to the tribunate at all costs, etc.) you run the risk of the masses and the old elite uniting to tear you down. As such, if you want to seize power you must still occasionally demonstrate obsequious adherence to the rules while working to keep the bulk of the population on your side as you slowly push the Overton window in your preferred direction (for the record, I think Caesarism is bad and this would not be a good outcome).
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
This is the book I was thinking of, though one might want to supplement it with a more general history.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Muslim armies seem to have done well when led by a nomadic or recently nomadic military class i.e. Bedouin tribesmen or Turkic horsemen, and to have lost their edge after settling down in much the same way the Mongols, Manchus, and Khitans did after conquering China. I don't think slaves had much to do with it.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Well, substackers would quickly put themselves out of business if they said "I can't give you a definitive list of what to read to be a well-rounded/based/moral/whatever individual, you must think for yourself and ignore the opinions of pundits like me" so you shouldn't really expect that sort of honesty from them.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I'm not sure that modern curricula can be properly described as "multicultural" if they are curated to promote a single political narrative. I remember a fairly woke friend of mine once asked me for book recommendations for Native American history month and was confused when I suggested things like a history of the Comanches, the Popul Vuh, a book about Aztec philosophy, or 1491 by Charles Mann, because what they really meant was "give me another book about how much life sucks on the reservations and how it's all our fault."
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I don't doubt that intelligent and capable students could benefit from such an education, but your average child today would be lucky to get through a single YA chapter book without scrolling TikTok for 5 hours after every page, so I think the baseline curriculum should focus on providing them with the rudiments of a shared literary culture. With proper tracking of students, the higher levels can study foreign languages, among other things, but for most people it's a waste of time (and I say that as an aspiring polyglot).
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
You're right, that was a poor way to phrase what I meant, which was "you can't learn a language properly as an adult if you never acquired one as a child."
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
The purpose of such lists is to give students a grounding in the literature and philosophical traditions of their own culture, not an understanding of the whole world; the Western/Anglo centrism is the point. They should not be taken (as some intend) as a substitute in and of themselves for a complete education, which would naturally include world history, foreign languages and cultures, science and math, etc.
Moreover I think the focus on independent thinking, or as it was always put by my teachers, "we don't do rote memorization here" misses a key point, which is that without a core knowledge of facts, dates, and historical figures, or the web of references and cross-talk that define a particular literary tradition, a student has no framework in which to integrate new information and it will tend to slip away. You need to speak one language fluently before you can learn another. We don't need to go full Asian cram school, but teachers these days would probably better serve their students by adhering more strictly to a shared curriculum, not less.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
That's because the sort of people forums like HN and this one select for have a STEM education and disproportionately high verbal intelligence i.e. people who would have done very well in the humanities, but chose not to enter those fields for practical, financial, or ideological reasons.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
do we know for sure that he can read English, has anyone seen him read a book or something to that effect?
He has poor eyesight and refuses to wear glasses or contacts, so all of his notes and documents are prepared in extra large font. I doubt he could get through an actual book, which I suppose makes him a fitting president for the post-covid generation.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
To quote John Adams, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." The point is eminently not for our children to go back to the manual labor or agricultural drudgery of our ancestors. Any immigrant will tell you that they are working hard to enable their descendants to be lazy.
Does the sequence proposed by Adams lead to a "weak men, hard times" cycle? Perhaps, but it seems profoundly stupid to deliberately crash the good times in the hopes of producing strong men, instead of finding a way to preserve them for as long as possible, when we are on the cusp of technologies (AI, eugenics, etc.) that may allow us to do just that.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Today's version of "learn to code" is "learn a trade." There is a dearth of electricians, plumbers, carpenters, welders, etc. right now and there are well-paying jobs available for those who choose to enter those fields. The other part of the answer is just that the last generation of coders came of age during a gold rush and now those mines have run dry. Not everyone is born in time to be a 49er.
All the same, the US is probably still the best place in the world to start a business doing whatever you can imagine. Want to breed exotic fruit trees in Florida and sell subscription boxes to rich patrons with adventurous palates? Want to figure out the secret recipe for Roman concrete and start a construction company building docks that don't degrade in seawater? Want to build a fleet of nuclear-powered asteroid mining robots and take control of a functionally infinite supply of rare elements? Want to join the Vesuvius challenge with your superior ancient scroll-deciphering algorithm, become the greatest classicist who ever lived, and then go on tour with your AI buddy Plato reciting all the lost works you discovered to a captive audience? In the rest of the world they ask why, but in America we ask why not?
Think what you will about the migrant caravans knocking at our southern border, but the fact that so many people choose to make that perilous journey, not only from utterly destitute countries, but from China, with its gleaming cyberpunk "cities of the future" and zero crime or homelessness and growing power and influence throughout the world, tells you what the American Dream still means to people.
I don't have any specific advice about long-term prospects. I'm preparing myself mentally for the singularity, societal collapse, and everything in between, and just count myself lucky that I'm around to watch the fulcrum around which the rest of human history will turn. We're all stuck on this crazy ride together and might as well enjoy it.
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