deadpantroglodytes
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User ID: 568
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Yeah, I don't think there's a plausible story to explain a widespread deep-state conspiracy. But there are other plausible theories (completely unsubstantiated, to be clear). They would involve either
- an informant with bad judgement going full Leeroy Jenkins or
- an undercover agent assessing the crowd, deciding they didn't pose a real threat, and doing their best to goose the crowd on
In the absence of evidence, those are idle speculation, but I'm a little surprised they didn't come up (or at least not more clearly).
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
As another data point, in my affluent blue bubble, hyphenated children's names are everywhere, partly because of the relatively large number of same-sex couples, but not remotely exclusively.
This includes mine, and while I have to admit that hyphenated names can be a mouthful (paving the way for endless jokes about fitting names on, e.g., swim caps), I love them for surfacing family history. I've always loved the extravagance of Spanish names for that reason, even if they are usually truncated for daily use.
deadpantroglodytes
2yr ago
As an aside, I appreciate the link. I've been listening to Huberman a bit lately because I'm starved for good advice about how to deal with an alcoholic family member, and it's been very hard to come by a trustworthy assessment of his podcasts (like Ritchie).
I wrote "we should not seek the destruction of people that disagree with us (neither literal, social, nor professional destruction)". Your response:
Is the walk of shame supposed to be social destruction?
Were you intentionally dodging the substance here? I don't even have to speculate on their intentions with respect to social destruction: the law students are calling for their teacher (the dean of the law school) to be fired. If you don't agree they're trying to destroy her professionally and that the walk of shame was part of that, we don't have enough common ground to discuss this.
Presuming that was an oversight, I agree there has to be a gradient of offenses and responses. There's an entire universe of proportionately calibrated responses that don't involve silencing or attacking the speaker:
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Ignore them.
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Participate in the Q&A, ask sharp questions.
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Organize a local event featuring a speaker or speakers providing a counterpoint.
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Publish something critical of the ideas.
I'm aware that people often characterize boycotts, de-platforming, and collective shaming as an alternative to violence, but I think the opposite is true: these things all escalate towards violence. Their widespread currency fuels the volatile, scary environment in which we live. I would prefer to see our society establish different norms that would support engagement and follow the examples of Ira Glasser and Daryl Davis.
Edit: "walk of shame wasn't part of that" -> "walk of shame was part of that"
deadpantroglodytes
2yr ago
Here's a longshot: I'm trying to see if anyone else read (or wrote!) a comment on the National Review website ... from a few years ago.
A few months after Trump won the election, I started reading NR's investigation coverage. I stopped when they started paywalling Kevin Williamson, so the comment would have appeared somewhere between April 2017 and July 2021. The comment was an extremely persuasive compendium of offenses the mainstream media had committed against red America. In retrospect, I realize that it might have been copy/pasted from the motte, or perhaps written afresh by someone here (I didn't start reading the motte until 2020).
Does this sound familiar to anyone, or does anyone know of a similar resource?
deadpantroglodytes
2yr ago
Those are excellent search tips, but part of my frustration is that my terrible initial queries were good enough not that long ago - to the point that it often seemed like Google was reading my mind or spying on me (and of course, they actually do spy on us, in a low-key but non-metaphorical way).
deadpantroglodytes
2yr ago
Turchin seems to believe in, for lack of a better term, socio-economic Malthusianism, and his more formal historical work requires Rube-Goldberg-style epicycles to substantiate his grand theory (constantly zooming in and out of geographic regions and gerrymandering timescales to make data fit). But even even though his Spengleresque ambitions won't amount to anything, "elite overproduction" is an exceptional framework for explaining local conditions in varied social environments, like the American media or academia. I can't see any reason to take him more seriously than that.
"The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman."
Can it be a mere boogeyman if it's an explicit progressive goal? Here's Ezra Klein's infamous statement on the matter:
"No Means No” has created a world where women are afraid. To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid.
For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true.
Klein doesn't make policy, of course, but the people that read him do. His writing is deep inside the progressive Overton window (and when he steps outside it, it's usually because he's making more right-coded points), so I'm inclined to think something close to his vision animates the people writing sexual harassment legislation and policies.
You can make the argument that they have been ineffective or argue that these efforts are unnecessary to make men fearful, like Ozy Brennan did, but that's a big project. To be fair, making the positive claim would be a big project too, to establish that efforts to create a world where men are afraid were effective. But those efforts were not phantasmal.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I also prefer the written word, but I like to listen to podcasts when running and driving.
Podcasts also give me an option to avoid the farce of trying to do dishes while thumbing through essays and comments with wet fingers.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Plain old supply and demand drives CEO pay, for the most part, not value-over-replacement.
Even sub-replacement-level CEOs require an extremely unusual skill set. Large companies are like Game of Fucking Thrones. Running one is like herding cats where one of every three animals is actually a serial killer, a thief, or a company-destroying liability risk and three out of four would sell you for a sandwich, must less a shot at your job. On top of that, you're steering (at best) half-blind in a hurricane, an earthquake, and a tornado at the same time (macro-economically speaking).
There are certainly problems, like back-scratching boards determining compensation, but I don't see obviously superior alternatives.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
It seems quite easy to interpose a cut-out for crypto-to-fiat conversion, so that your only real exposure is to tax authorities. The only challenge is ensure there are enough socially acceptable crypto use cases that you don't draw too much attention.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I agree, not much, but the federal government can definitely avoid exacerbating the problem by limiting supply.
deadpantroglodytes
2yr ago
I agree that this is an old phenomenon with a long history: courageous teachers becoming involved with a child's welfare at some risk to themselves. But institutionalizing it changes everything. Guaranteeing state support dramatically reduces the risk to the teacher, which destroys the balance of incentives.
I'm sympathetic to kids trapped in a hellish adversarial relationship with their own parents, but predict that solving their problems by substituting state-approved parental figures will create a different series of problems that will probably affect a much larger number of children. Attempting to solve a tiny minority of problem cases, these laws create a new vector for neglect and abuse, because they cut parents out of the loop, when they are, in most cases, the people most committed to a child's well-being by many orders of magnitude.
This seems correct to me, with two addenda.
First, there's been an explosion of oppressed identities accessible to the majority, in the form of disabilities, queerness, plus esoteric sexualities and genders. This vastly increased the surface of potentially receptive people that would have previously considered themselves targets.
Second, the development of social media, especially Tumblr (as Katherine Dee has documented) provided a vector for the reemergence of political correctness as wokeness.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I was vehemently agreeing with this comment, until the unfortunate conclusion:
I trust that combination of judgement [the student's and school's] a fairly high amount, again especially given the asymmetric dangers involved here
This idealized view of educational personnel doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's mired in the present conflict and lacks perspective: institutions have a long history of abusing the trust of children and do not deserve this level of confidence or deference.
It's tawdry to quote myself, but I don't think I can put it better than I did before:
I agree that this is an old phenomenon with a long history: courageous teachers becoming involved with a child's welfare at some risk to themselves. But institutionalizing it changes everything. Guaranteeing state support dramatically reduces the risk to the teacher, which destroys the balance of incentives.
I'm sympathetic to kids trapped in a hellish adversarial relationship with their own parents, but predict that solving their problems by substituting state-approved parental figures will create a different series of problems that will probably affect a much larger number of children. Attempting to solve a tiny minority of problem cases, these laws create a new vector for neglect and abuse, because they cut parents out of the loop, when they are, in most cases, the people most committed to a child's well-being by many orders of magnitude.
I had a lot of great teachers, people that encouraged and supported me, but I also had egomaniacs and narcissists who took great pleasure in driving a wedge between kids and their parents (with no long-term concern for the children). I saw more than a handful of teachers happy to sexually exploit their students*. And I saw a substantial minority of lazy, time-serving clock-punchers.
* And a few relationships that I wouldn't call exploitative, but imagine most would.
I agree there are many places where driving is a miserable experience (often enough, at least).
Yet people still choose to drive.
Congestion is a highly visible issue, but that's because it's the problem that's left over after cars solved all the important ones.
Cycling, walking, and transit all have advantages, but cars blow them away for the vast majority of people's normal use-cases. Cars:
- Run on your schedule.
- Allow you to haul more than any other modes of transportation. Not just more, but also more cumbersome things. I cannot bicycle my amplifier to an ad-hoc show at a local block party.
- Collapse space, allowing you to live near work and the beach/mountains/trails/relatives/friends/ultimate frisbee league/your band's rehearsal space/etc./etc. This cuts in multiple directions, working for other people at the same time, putting you in reach of a critical mass of people that share your interests and satisfy your needs.
- Are weather-independent. I salute the hardy souls that commute via bicycle in New England, but there's no timeline where a significant portion of the population follows their lead.
- Allow pets.
And that's just the big, widely-applicable ones. I haven't mentioned comfort, the ability to socialize, or benefits for people with disabilities. I also didn't include the benefits they offer families with kids, which is a massive blindspot for a lot of Marohn-pilled types. You can see it when someone says things like "cars only save you 20 minutes on your commute" ... as a parent, there are days when 20 extra minutes would quadruple my free time.
I'm in favor of transit in principle: a first-rate transit system gets close enough to cars on those points that its other benefits net out. But no one has figured out how to bootstrap a first-rate transit system in a US city from scratch in the twenty-first century.
Edit: fussy formatting. Also, I regret that I did not at least mention pollution, another problem left over after cars solve the others, even though it wasn't at issue in context.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I've been with you all the way up to here, upvoting and even reporting one of your comments in this thread as a QC, but this is clearly wrong: the feds can be guilty of luring the protesters/rioters into taking risks that would make them look bad and expose them to prosecution.
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
Streets should be built in a way that is adjusted to people and how people use the streets, not cars.
This bit of linguistic gamesmanship is ridiculous: cars don't use anything. It's all just people out there. Anti-auto advocates ought to find a less saccharine and grating slogan.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
deadpantroglodytes
7mo ago
I don't think Yglesias is committing the pundit's fallacy, exactly. Instead, in the intro to his Common Sense Manifesto he writes:
when you lose an election, a leadership void opens up. And that void will be filled — with people and institutions and, hopefully, with ideas — and I would like the ideas that fill the current void to be good.
One way to read that is "my ideas would have won the election and they'll make us popular", but I think he's going for something more like "my ideas are good, so if we take control of the party that already gets 45% of the vote by default, we'll have a shot at making good things happen."
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Those bullet points are too abstract, too many inferences away from a useful definition of power. Power is the ability to change others, nature, or one's self, and also the ability to resist changes to one's self.
You might laugh and say I'm just repurposing the classic elementary-school-level framework for talking about literature ("man versus man/nature/self"), but it's a firm foundation for thinking about power and I doubt you'll find anything better.
deadpantroglodytes
2yr ago
Google Search Keeps Getting Worse
I am hardly the first person to complain about Google search results circa Fall 2022, and I'm not the first person to recall how search used to feel like magic (1). It's become a commonplace (if a bit overstated) that for Google search to have any value at all, you need to point it at reddit.
Here's a case study: I've recently begun performing with a band so I went to look for ideas about how to improve my stage presence. Ten years ago, I would have just typed two or three words, perhaps just "guitarist live" or "watch guitarist live" and as I recall it, Google was reliably excellent at providing results that matched my intention, by either sorcery or science. Nowadays, perhaps superstitiously, I use complete sentences, so I typed "guitarists that are fun to watch live." The results were very bad. In order:
A group of video recommendations, all four suggestions useless:
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Rock Guitarist Live Streams For The 97th Time ! - With Guitar Solos, Chat, Games and Fun
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Three Chord Dave Live 50 Guitars music and good times
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Three Chord Dave Live 52 Guitars music and good times
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Three Chord Dave Live 51 Guitars music and good times
Next, a few links to articles:
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13 Scorching Guitarists on Tour Today - Ticketmaster Blog
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The best live streams and virtual concerts to watch while social distancing (take note of this one, from April 23, 2020: we'll come back to it later)
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and 8. The next results were the "People also search for" and "People also ask" suggestions, none of which were helpful.
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A link to an Insider article called "Musicians you need to see live in concert". That sounded promising, except none of the musicians were guitarists (none of the headline musicians advertised on the search results - once you drilled in, Lenny Kravitz and the Red Hot Chili Peppers probably qualify).
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A youtube video, "Top 10 Guitarists of All Time (REDUX)". Closer, but not really what I'm looking for.
More useless results followed, including three of the next five focused on streaming ("A Guitarists Guide to Live Streaming").
Finally, coming to the culture war angle, I want to ask why this might be. Why are Google search's results so bad, compared to the five or ten years ago, or even farther back, when they had inferior technology? Clearly, some of the problem is spam, as many people argue. But that doesn't really decribe what I saw. Is it because they are prioritizing social justice in results? I know this flatters the Motte, but it also explains a handful of the noise in my search above, on a fairly anodyne topic. I got three results about streaming performances: sure, maybe "live" is often linked for "livestream" (Plato's pharmakon strikes again, three cheers for auto-antonyms!), but what explains the second non-video recommendation, number 6 above, "The best live streams and virtual concerts to watch while social distancing"? In my mind, I'm trying to find tips about how to perform live on stage for people in sweaty clubs, gleefully exchanging airborne microbes, and Google's trying to shove an article from April 2020 down my throat. I couldn't do better if I tried to parody this.
If you think my expectations are crazy, I get it, except until recently (geologically speaking), Google would have delivered EXCELLENT results on this topic.
Some other possible explanations:
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SEO has gotten better than search - this could explain some of what I saw.
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The internet is crowded now, there's more surface to search! That doesn't seem likely - certainly not substantially more so than five or ten years ago.
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Maybe google never was magic! I have a bad memory or it just seemed incredible because it was novel.
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Goodheart's law / overfitting, definitely part of the story: optimizing for revenue reduces engagement and relevance. But then again, so does optimizing for justice! It's hard not to suspect how the often comical and heavy handed attempts at "alignment" have marred ChatGPT.
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Google engineers are bad. Non-starter, based on the ones I know. Google has lost a lot of excellent people over the years (like Steve Yegge, etc.) but this doesn't add up.
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Google hires good people, but they don't funnel their best talent into search, because they continue to have an effective monopoly, even in the age of Bing, Duckduckgo, and Kagi.
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???
Which is it?
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
The Democratic response is infuriating. The way this is currently playing out is simple: people and families that would benefit from skilled nursing either get no care or, like a close relative of mine, spend weeks in a hospital (soon, months).
As an aside, this has increased my appreciation of the Fed and reduced my enthusiasm for keeping unemployment extremely low as a method of spreading prosperity.
It has absolutely lost its original propagandistic edge and become all-purpose filler. A recent NYT article about a scandalous Russian party made me laugh out loud:
The suggestive photos and videos that surfaced on social media soon after were unremarkable. Yet the blowback was immediate and severe.
“The country is at war, and these scum, beasts, are putting on this,” one of the country’s most prominent propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, wrote on his Telegram channel hours after the event. “Cattle who don’t give a damn about what’s happening.”
Some prominent conservatives went further, claiming, without offering evidence, that the party was a satanic ritual because it occurred, according to their calculations, on the 666th day of the war in Ukraine.
Perhaps it was a joke? Is anyone here willing to own up to entryism at the New York Times?
[Edit - instead of being so snarky, I feel like I ought to give more weight to the opposite interpretation, that it was an occult signal, a quiet protest or a cry for help from within.]
I agree that it would be interesting to see a detailed analysis like that and I realize you aren't saying large QOL improvements would be exculpatory ... but reading your comment made me think about discussions about progressive indoctrination in US schools.
It's plausible that learning progressive manners and beliefs will give children a substantial leg up, socio-economically. Depending on events, graduates of the Evanston, IL public schools system might be on average, better-positioned than those from, say, the Florida suburbs in the US of 2045. But I don't think many parents resisting leftward changes to their public schools would be impressed by that.
The analogy is quarter-baked, but just contemplating it weakens my openness to arguments that material improvements can justify inter-generational dispossession (for lack of a better term)
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