ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
In the fields I'm familiar with, this was true ten years ago, but there has been significant improvement in the quality of Chinese publications since then. My understanding is that this is the result of targeted government pressure in a few areas deemed nationally significant and may not generalize.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I've used an Italian ceramic pan from Ballarini for a couple of years and it seems more durable than your run-of-the-mill teflon pan. I still treat it as I would any other non-stick cookware out of an abundance of caution e.g. use only plastic or wooden tools, don't cook with it above medium heat, and clean it with soft sponges that won't scratch. I'm not actually sure how much one costs, as it was a gift, but I think you can find good discounts on their cookware sets.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
The elimination of DEI programs was a separate executive order and one that I have no problems with, but certainly if progressive beauracrats tie themselves like a dead weight to programs or people that do actual work and threaten to drag them down into the depths then any damage done is on them and not the fault of the Trump administration.
Doctors letting patients die intentionally to make a point about abortion seems much less likely to me than them being incompetent and dealing with idiot patients, but I haven't looked into the details of these cases so I could be wrong. Most people I know working on government research grants (in the physical or non-medical life sciences) just want to do their jobs and resent any interruption, so halting or sabotaging their work as a protest would be inconceivable to them. NIH may have a different internal culture, and it seems the hammer came down on them first and harder than the rest.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
As long as we assume that living with a botched circumcision is still better than dying of AIDS, I don't see how this is sufficient grounds to condemn an organization that has saved tens of millions of lives, perhaps more than any other foreign aid program in history.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I can understand the logic of cutting off all funding first and then re-opening the spigot only to programs that reveal themselves as essential, so I will reserve judgement on this policy (if it even survives its first appearance in court) until we see how the second part is supposed to work. If it ends up taking long enough that most university and national lab research grinds to a halt and children in Africa start dying of AIDS because local workers are not allowed to hand over drugs that have been already been purchased and delivered, then I will consider it a grave blunder.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
My mother grew up in a two bedroom house with her parents and five siblings, and I remember how silly she found the American idea of each child having their own room. Since there is clearly no material limitation on PMC couples raising large families, the problem is entirely cultural and I doubt it can be addressed directly through government intervention.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
The primary reason is founder effects. Being a part of the rationalist diaspora, this community started out with a disproportionate amount of techno-optimist libertarians and has mostly shrunk since then. There are ways to get here from the collapsnik corner of the internet, but the path is much less straightforward than from the tech world, especially these days. I came by that road once upon a time, but it has since become overgrown and the markers have been lost.
You'll find a more receptive audience in the comments section at John Greer's blog, assuming you're not already a regular. His posts about astrology and magic may be offputting to some (then again, we have a lot of kooky ideas floating around here ourselves), but he wrote most of what he needed to about collapse at his old blog (archived here and several other places) and seems like the kind of person you might have found posting in some alternate universe 70's environmentalist version of the Motte.
I'll give the response to your 5 points from Greer's perspective (I read every post of his for about a decade, so I have a pretty good sense of it) rather than my own, because my beliefs are both more uncertain and less interesting than his:
While it's true that our society is in a downward spiral, these things take many lifetimes to play out (insert a reference to The Long Emergency by Kunstler) and worrying about imminent doom is simply the inverse of the idea that the AI singularity will solve all our problems overnight and usher in an age of fully-automated luxury space communism. In both cases, it serves as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the future, since who cares what we do now if we'll all either die from climate change or be uploaded into a virtual utopia by our benevolant AI overlords?
What things will look like on the ground is that each successive generation will use a little less energy than their parents. There will be no abrupt discontinuity, outside of the wars and conflicts to which humans are prone in any age. The future won't look like a carbon copy of some period in the distant and barbaric past, as though you rewound the tape of history, but many innovations and inventions of our modern world will persist in some form, even if you falsely assume that all remaining nuclear or fossil fuels will be completely used up or inaccessible (the radio, the printing press, the bicycle, ultralight solar-powered aircraft, the germ theory of medicine, trains, hydropower, etc. don't need oil or coal to work). We aren't the first civilization to decline and we won't be the last; this cycle of birth and decay is something the Greeks, Indians, and Chinese all figured out and learned to live with thousands of years ago.
Climate change may render parts of the world undesirable to live in, but the Earth's flora and fauna, humans included, will rearrange themselves and find ways to adapt to this (in geologic terms) puny extinction event. Pandemics are nothing new either, and the Black Death didn't destroy Latin Christendom. If all our chickens and cows die from bird flu, then I guess that serves us right for factory farming, but it's not as though we'll run out of food (unless you're Jordan Peterson and on a carnivore diet or something). The birthrate problem is one that solves itself, as people who want to have children will quickly replace the ones who don't. Lastly, we won't have to worry about maintaining industrial civilization, because industrial civilization is by its nature unsustainable.
If you want someone else's very different thoughts on that last point, then check out Anatoly Karlin's series on Malthusian industrialism. The long and the short of it is that maybe dysgenics will trap us temporarily in a bad equilibrium where our descendants are just smart enough to preserve civilization but too dumb to make any advancements, living in crowded slums like third world megacities today, but this situation will itself provide eugenic selective pressure and bring IQ's back up enough to climb out of the hole.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Serbia (>80% Serb and ranked 104 out of 180 by the CPI), Belarus (85% Belarusian and ranked 98 out of 180 by the CPI), Albania (>90% Albanian and tied with Belarus by the CPI), Kosovo (also >90% Albanian and ranked 83 out of 180 by the CPI), Cambodia (>95% Khmer and ranked 158 out of 180 by the CPI), and if we feel like stretching the definition of Southeast Asia we can throw in Bangladesh (99% Bengali and ranked 149 out of 180 by the CPI) too.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Meaning a high IQ Russian has more in common with an average Russian than a high IQ Persian. This is why a high IQ member of a nation in history continued identifying with their nation.
The Russian elite were for centuries francophiles who disdained the slavic culture of their peasant countrymen. In fact the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language, so it was clearly non-obvious to them that they should do this.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Preserving a nation enables trust and strengthens the benefits of meritocracy while limiting the weaknesses. You can trust that the other guy isn't lying about his exams, that he won't screw you over and steal your IP because you share a background, you're of the same tribe.
There are quite a few low-trust ethnostates in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, while places like Singapore and the UAE sit near the top of the corruption perception indices, so preserving one's nation does not appear to be necessary or sufficient for maintaining trust.
What happens when you bring in a million smart people from a foreign ethnic group and they start working together to infiltrate your institutions and build up their own power base, bootstrapping their merit into corruption?
They win a bunch of Nobels and found companies and institutions in your name, making major scientific and literary contributions to your society, before losing their internal cohesion and assimilating into the broader population as their ethnic and religious solidarity is eroded by the overwhelming tidal forces of modernity?
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
The existence of edge cases doesn't immediately invalidate the usefulness of having separate categories, otherwise we would throw our hands in the air whenever we had to define languages (is this rural Galician dialect Spanish or Portuguese?), colors (where is the boundary between blue and green?), or sections of the electromagnetic spectrum (is this extreme UV or weak X-rays?). If there are ever enough half-Asians to matter, we will get our own box on the census the same way Hispanics do. Either way there are still tens of millions of unambiguously White Americans, and that is who the category is for.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Some older relatives of mine say soda-pop, which I always found endearing. I could never tell if that was because they grew up near the boundary line or if it was used nationwide as a compromise term back when soda and pop-sayers were more equal in number (as part of some anti-coke alliance, I suppose).
The gradual Californiazation (Californication?) of young Americans' accents is sad to observe. The only college-educated zoomers I hear with distinct regional pronunciations are from New York City, the deep deep South, and a few pockets of the upper midwest.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Have you considered joining a fraternal or service organization e.g. Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, Rotary Club? They don't have the influence or membership they used to, but many are still around and eager for recruits. Some may require a basic profession of belief in a higher power to join, but it's a lot more vague and open to interpretation than becoming part of an established religion. Now it's possible that reaching out to one of these groups could result in a few elderly stragglers dumping the responsibility for maintaining a centuries-old fraternity on your shoulders, but that would still leave you with more to build on than trying to create a community completely from scratch.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I know a few. Most have African or Caribbean immigrant parents who did their best to insulate them from stereotypical Black culture, up to and including homeschooling. They are granted certain opportunities denied to their White and Asian peers as far as scholarships, affirmative action, and such are concerned, but apart from that have similar educational and career outcomes.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
For whatever reason, I never struggled with these questions as much as others seemed to, but I eventually settled into a Daoist sort of framework of "the world just is the way it is and what can we know about it?" Whether things are pre-determined by physical laws or whether I have a soul with free will or whether there are infinite copies of me out there someplace has no bearing on how I live my life or get on in my little corner of the universe. Or, as the Bard put it: "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances." Maybe some find it sad that there's no great cosmic destiny in store for them (but hey, I'm sure someone out there will be be the lucky one), but I never harbored any such delusions of grandeur.
That being said, if you truly want to feel a connection with the Way or God or whatever you want to call it, there are options such as meditation (the hardcore monastic kind where you fast and don't speak to anyone for days) or doing psychedelic drugs, but I can't tell you what sorts of answers you'll get or if they'll do you any good.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I don't think Gavin Newsom ever really had a shot at becoming president. It would take a political genius of the highest order to thread the needle of a road to Damascus style conversion on the issues of urban dysfunction and public order in California to neutralize that angle of attack, while preventing defections from his existing base of support, so unless he can somehow turn San Francisco into Singapore in the next 3 years all his opponents need to do is show live footage of open-air drug markets and homeless encampments in the streets to end his campaign before it begins.
As far as LA is concerned, the fires are only nibbling away at the edges of the city and not reducing downtown to ash, so not much rebuilding is even necessary. I think a large earthquake would provide more opportunities for that type of renewal, as it would damage or destroy buildings over a much larger area. Not that I hope such a thing happens, but it seems inevitable that one of the major west coast cities will be hit by one within the next decade or two.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
What's your take on the Hapa ethnogenesis?
I'll give my two cents, as I am a product of it. Those of us above a certain age are disproportionately likely to be from broken families (relative to non-mixed families of the same social class) and to have parents who are deeply weird in some way e.g. dad is autistic, a sexpat, or an abusive soldier, mom is a former sex worker or couldn't find a husband in her home country and snagged a white guy to have kids with at age 40, etc. This is not a good recipe for creating successful and well-adjusted individuals, but doesn't necessarily reflect what the results would be if you randomly paired off the populations of say Germany and South Korea.
The younger couples I see around me seem more normal, as most met at school or through some tech job in California, and the gender ratios are less skewed i.e. more pairings of Asian men and White women. It's too soon to tell for sure, but I imagine a nation of their descendants would look like a cross between Finland and Japan: a clean, orderly place capable of making substantial contributions to science, technology, and literature, but with a smaller fraction of truly brilliant, one-of-a-kind individuals. There's a certain type of genius I've seen in a few individuals of European, Jewish, or Indian descent that I have never seen in East Asians.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I don't keep count, but I probably read a few dozen books a year. My childhood reading habit fell off some time in high school and I have not yet fully recovered. I find that while once I was able to read hundreds of pages in a single sitting, I now find myself reading a chapter or two each of five different books in a day (this takes me somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours depending on the day and the books). Presumably I have the internet and my cell phone to thank for ruining my attention span, but at least this way I'm still making my way through a very long backlog of ebooks, impulse purchases at thrift stores, and recommendations from friends, bloggers, and friendly mottizens.
I think around these parts you will find an interesting mix of people with reading habits like yours or mine, defenders of Richard Hanania's thesis that books are a waste of time (some of which is deeply felt and some of which is just reflexive contrarianism), and those whose revealed preference is the latter but feel bad about it.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
The NovaRussia campaign was Putin's attempt to instigate a popular uprising that he thought would sweep the country
As far as I know, the war in Donbass began as the result of actions by individual Russians like Strelkov who crossed the border into Ukraine without their government's knowledge or sanction (though these individuals did believe they were instigating a popular uprising that would sweep the country), and only once their filibuster campaign was on the verge of collapse did Putin finally intervene to save them.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you.
This doesn't seem true to me. Political speeches have been decreasing in sophistication for nearly a century at this point, at least in Democracies where you can have the votes of every thinking person but, in the words of Adlai Stevenson, "still need a majority." If the voters demand something contradictory like "we want to give billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine but not pay more in taxes or suffer any material consequences" then all the smartest politicians will spend their days coming up with ways to trick the populace into thinking they can have their cake and eat it too, praying that they won't be the one left standing when the game of musical chairs ends.
As far as convincing the averge person in the west to support Ukraine, "Putin is like Hitler" will work a lot better than "the system of international norms that have prevented large-scale interstate conflict in Europe since 1945 are dependent on all nations renouncing territorial annexation as a means of resolving their disputes, and any violator of these norms must be swiftly and severely punished to prevent a return to the bloodshed that characterized the first half of the twentieth century", but the latter is there if you want it.
But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back.
There is no way he or anyone close to him genuinely believes this, but it would be stupid to undermine his bargaining position before ever setting foot in the negotiating room. Such concessions need to be made privately to avoid public humiliation (or potential defenestration).
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I have no problems spotting what in old travel guides would be called national characteristics and feel very keenly the points at which my parents' cultures grind against each other to produce sparks (in a way that they themselves never seem to fully grasp). I don't however hold that these characteristics are inherently bound to any given ethnos and that this should be the primary criterion by which political boundaries are drawn.
Regarding cultural change over time, the question, as Bryan Caplan puts it, is what makes cultural change through immigration worse than cultural change through time, if the end result is equally unrecognizable? The honest answer is usually "I want my descendants to look like me" or to put it autistically "I have a biological imperative to maximize the propagation of my genes." To be fair, my descendants looking like me was never really an option to begin with, so perhaps the value of this is lost on me; from where I stand having descendants at all seems sufficient.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I'm pretty sure the individuals in this particular office do in fact speak English. There's a difference between the commands "learn English" and "speak only English in public for the rest of your life." The former is a perfectly reasonable demand, but the latter seems a bit extreme. If I meet an American living in Mexico I'm not going to speak to him in Spanish even if we are both fluent in it.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
There is a path forward for an American nation of some sort, but its relationship to the one that many here want to restore will be akin to that between 10th century Constantinople and 1st century Rome: if you squint there is continuity but it is obscured by changes in faith, language, ethnicity, and forms of government. The question of whether the future Spanish-speaking Catholic integralist American Empire (just to throw out one possibility) is truly American is one I will leave to the historians.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
There are a lot of variables that determine how people will respond to mass migration, including the number of migrants, the speed with which they arrive, the cultural distance between them and the native population, and how innately tolerant that native population is. You probably couldn't move 10 people across a mountain valley in New Guinea without triggering some sort of tribal war, while as we all know Anglos and their Germanic cousins are capable of passively accepting millions of alien newcomers every year without murdering them. This difference is partially genetic, but also in large part due to the development of social technologies that allow for cooperation across groups larger than Dunbar's number, of which organized religion, nationalism, and confucianism (if you consider it distinct from the other two) have been the most successful.
Now overall I'm pretty happy with the fact that most of us nowadays don't kill strangers on sight and think a continued expansion of our circle of care would be a good thing, but advancements in communication and transportation are threatening to overwhelm the capacities of our existing social technologies, and until they either adapt to the times or new ones are born from the ashes of our society, we are in a dangerous and volatile transition period (see all the comparisons between our present moment and European history between Martin Luther and Westphalia). This sense of an impending storm contributes to the growing wave of isolationist and nativist sentiment around the world but, conditional on continued economic growth and us all not getting turned into paperclips, it is in the longer view merely a tactical retreat, as competition between groups ultimately favors those able to marshall a larger population and greater resources.
Bringing things back down to Earth, I've been thinking a lot about my own sense of identity and belonging as a result of the recent immigration kerfuffle. Growing up as a mixed-race State Department kid, I never really had a hometown, a nation (in the blood and soil sense), a church, or many of the other things that root people in time and space (though it turns out a few formative years in sub-Saharan Africa is a pretty good inoculation against many stupid ideologies). To the extent that I have a people to call my own, it is the coastal American PMC class with its mixture of whites and "elite" immigrants. I don't know whether the Indians (and others) I went to school with and whose weddings I attended represent the top 1%, 0.5%, 0.1%, or whatever of their cousins in the mother country, or what visas their parents came here on, but they are good people and at the end of the day no man should betray his friends.
I have looked for the old American nation that this class replaced and found only ghosts and the dusty pages of Tocqueville and Fischer. Once upon a time my grandfather was a school principal and a Mason who read Latin and coached wrestling in a small town with a general store and a train station and town hall meetings out of a Rockwell painting. There was one black family in town, courtesy of the Great Migration, but apart from that there was hardly even an Ellis Islander in sight (I'm told the previous generation had not been fond of Catholics or Jews). Now, half the buildings are empty and the meetings are about how to beg the federal government for grant money to fix the rusty pipes, or when they will have to finally close down the school because the only children born in the county are Amish. Whomever you blame for this state of affairs, the culture that built that place is dead and no amount of nationalistic necromancy will conjure up anything functional out of its corpse.
This could certainly be done, but cutting funding effective immediately and leaving the doctors and administrators of the existing program in the lurch doesn't seem like a particularly sensible way to initiate such a transition.
Because Sub-Saharan Africans are more sexually active with more partners and with worse hygiene than their counterparts in other parts of the world. Transmission of HIV from women to men can occur when both have open cuts or sores and are engaging in some of the practices others downthread have referenced, particulary for men who frequent brothels where everyone else is infected. This lack of hygiene is also why circumcision reduces the risk of getting HIV for men in Africa but not nearly as much in other parts of the world, or so I've been told.
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