deadpantroglodytes
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User ID: 568
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
This is not, I'm afraid, relevant to Fruck's (accurate) judgement.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Not to come down too hard on what might be an off-hand comment, but exactly what salient or urgent "danger" does fake history present?
I can see how historical narratives (fake or not) could motivate conflict. For example, stories of dispossession can establish a deeply felt grievance that can be pointed to various destructive ends. But:
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Not all dangerous narratives are in fact fake.
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Those stories can just as easily be pointed at various constructive goals.
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Most history isn't emotionally inflammatory.
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Our understanding of history is constantly undergoing revision. Do discarded historical narratives count as fake? Are they prima facia "dangerous"?
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The stories are open for (and usually attract) rebuttals.
When I was a kid, everyone read von Daniken's Chariot of the Gods, spent a few weeks mind-blown, then moved on to adulthoood.
Isn't the real danger here, the great, recurring theme of the internet era, the crisis of authority?
A well-deserved crisis, I'd say, but also genuinely dangerous to a great many people.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
The quoted comment says the Mongols' genes were successful in the appears to say that their genes prevailed, not that their genes caused their success.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr 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
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
1yr ago
I was hoping the search would yield videos of guitarists that do more than look at their instruments, and that audiences find engaging.
That expectation was absolutely reasonable not long ago - five years ago? A decade? Hard to recall. Judging from the response here, people don't believe it, but it's true that, even with shitty searches like that, Google could often approximate my intentions.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr 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
1yr ago
Thank you. That is an excellent rant, but the comment I was looking for was a fairly long list of media statements that were clearly wrong and/or unfair, similar to "Rittenhouse the white supremacist", though the examples were generally less controversial, thus better for the project of persuasion.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
"Strategically dishonest" - I don't think you can read his entire body of recent work and come to this conclusion, if you have any exposure to American progressives, or even the mainstream.
For example, the first paragraph of another recent article, "Man Needs Sex and Violence, Not Top-Down 'Meaning'" ends like this:
Me and the boxer became friends after that (last I heard he had impregnated some black girl in Chicago).
This is not how someone that cares about respectability writes in the USA 2023. The fact that he would include the impregnated girl's race at all will stop most left-of-center readers from going any further. The fact that he doesn't think her race is gratuitous opens a chasm of inferential distance between Hanania and the mainstream media, and he, as a self-confessed occasional troll, knows it.
I oppose the "walk of shame" on the grounds that it is intimidation.
My principle is that we should not seek the destruction of people that disagree with us (neither literal, social, nor professional destruction) unless we're willing to kill or die on the relevant hill. (In case this comes off as melodramatic, I don't mean this in the "I'm an internet tough guy" sense, but nearly the opposite: I think few hills are relevant in this way.)
Edit: "nor", not "or" and added parenthetical clarification.
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"
When speech is directed towards organizing a person's destruction, it's over the line.
Another thing worth mentioning is that I'm promoting this as a normative idea, not a legal one, so I'm not trying to set up a technical test. I think de-platforming Milo was a stupid own goal, but to the extent that he tried to destroy people's lives, he sucked too.
Edit: I want to add that I'm not conflating speech with violence, a lame rhetorical habit. I'm saying that preventing someone from making a living or even just hurting their prospects pushes them into a corner; preventing them from having their say leads them to lose faith in dialogue, making violence look like the only solution; isolating them socially means they've got nothing to lose.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I'm sure I'm testing your patience, but I sense I haven't expressed myself clearly, so I'll try again. My position is at the intersection of The Spirit of the First Amendment and Be Nice, at Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness:
Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Does not get doxxing. Does not get harassment. Does not get fired from job. Gets counterargument. Should not be hard.
I'm not trying to establish a legal standard. I think what the students are doing is and should be legal. But I also think it is appalling: trying to coerce someone into silence is callow, cowardly, and repulsive. That's an emotional reaction that I wish more people shared, because I think our society would be far better for it, but I don't really think I can make other people feel the same way.
However, it might be possible to convince people that harming or trying to harm people that disagree with you may be emotionally satisfying, but it is not an alternative to violence; instead it increases the chance of violence. Based on my observations and understanding of human psychology, I would say that de-platforming Milo, Trump, Charles Murray, & etc. have radicalized orders of magnitude more people than, e.g., 4chan or /r/TheDonald. I wish I could bring more neutral evidence to bear than my own priors, but I'm not sure what that would look like or who would listen.
I will just say I'm not trying to "own" anyone. Moreover, "Black Americans should be entitled to the full benefits of American citizenship in the way that white Americans already are" is my own central example of a hill worth dying on.
Having said that, even if the students really think that's at stake here and are willing to (literally) fight for it, I would like that to be clearer and better understood.
Edit - turning down the heat.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr 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).
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
This was the justification for affirmative action 1.0, and is occasionally still evident as a first line of defense, but aa 2.0 is based on two completely different ideas:
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That diversity makes organizations stronger in a variety of ways.
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Proportional representation is required for organizations to be "democratic", in the somewhat novel sense of engaging the whole population.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Am I wrong to have read the HBD bit at the end as sarcasm? We're supposed to speak plainly here, but every now and then some artiface slips through.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Why should there be such a middle ground? "Cancellation" aims to make someone unemployable, which is several steps short of murder but absolutely moving in the same direction, and not in the slippery-slope sense.
deadpantroglodytes
11mo 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.
deadpantroglodytes
11mo ago
Same world, different screens? I don't know how to reconcile these two comments with my personal experience.
My spouse has been a tenured humanities faculty member at a BAU for 20 years, with several different stints across the country the decade before that. Between our own experience and that of dozens of friends in the academy, everything the OP wrote rang true to me, except the timeline at the conclusion (our institution is 5-10 years ahead of the OP's account).
I'd add that faculty social life is stultifying - it's not that you can't ever have real conversations with people about difficult topics, but it takes a long time to break through the suffocating blanket of conformity. Most social encounters start with progressive consensus-building about the issues of the day, and often can't move past that. It's worse if there are unfamiliar people in the group, or administrators.
These phenomena may not universal, but are, at a minimum, widespread. Above all, I'd love to know what your institutions are doing right that you don't see this.
deadpantroglodytes
11mo ago
That's unfair: atokenliberal's username is a wry commentary on the average orientation of The Motte, plus his/her posting history demonstrates both a solid degree of self-awareness and a reasonable theory of mind of his/her political opponents.
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
This is mostly wrong. It's trivial to decompile a large share of contemporary software - the opportunity is there, but it is vanishingly uncommon for competitors to seize those opportunities. Similarly, my company had a large multinational client who availed themselves of the right to purchase our source code and walk after five years of business. They took the source code, then came back into the fold a few years later after throwing resources at their fork, being unhappy with the results, and missing our on all the great stuff we'd added in the same period.
The reason why is that most software is in a state of perpetual improvement.
deadpantroglodytes
10mo 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.
deadpantroglodytes
8mo ago
I wasn't bored, but as a movie it sucked: it's an artless piece of relentless exposition, a paint-by-numbers Wikipedia adaptation. Nolan doesn't understand the most important unit of cinematic language, the scene, and tries to hide it with garish sound design and 60s-era hallucinations.
It had at least three times too many characters as a movie can really handle. He should have started by cutting Oppenheimer's brother, who adds nothing substantial to the film. If there's no way to tell the story without them, Nolan should have just told a different story, one better suited to the strengths of motion pictures.
Here's a list heavily biased towards the last fifty years:
In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall. Discovery coupled with novelistic drama among our closest relatives. Over the years, Jane Goodall's power over me has attenuated as she's embraced expansive, unfocused activism, but her early research on Chimpanzees is astonishing. I can't think of anyone that can match her powers of observation. Mid way through the book, it develops a novelistic density that made me laugh and cry. I think the follow-up is even better, "Through a Window: Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe", but it hardly makes sense to read it on its own. Don't let anyone tell you that Bonobos are the sexually adventurous primates.
Chimpanzee Politics by Franz de Waal. What can I say? I chose my username for good reason. This is a retrospective analysis of the author's years studying a chimpanzee colony in a Dutch zoo. I read it fifteen or twenty years ago, browsing Amazon's recommendations for good science writing, before reading Jane Goodall, and it changed my life. The backbone of the story is a contest for political supremacy among the chimps, but that hardly describes what it offers. It covers many other aspects of their lives: the way they play, how they deceive each other, juvenile sexual development, how they comfort each other, and much much more.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I *really *love cities. Jacobs carefully builds an argument for what enables their greatness, based on common-sense observations.
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Funny, sad, and deeply intertwined with the fabric of America.
Wolf Hall, by Hillary Mantel. This is a staggering work of imagination that constructs a plausible version of history that more or less inverts the very popular conception of the good Thomas (More) and bad Thomas (Cromwell). One reviewer wrote something along the lines of "I know every twist and turn of this story from high school history and I still can't wait to find out what happens next."
The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry. This is an account of why humans torture, go to war (instead of, e.g., settle disputes via chess), and create things. I can't think of many better examples of how to build an argument. In retrospect, it shares a lot with the best of Scott's writings and the best of the Motte.
Add to those, authors I love, whose work I cannot narrow down to a single recommendation: Nietzsche, David Mitchell, P.G. Woodhouse (especially the Wooster and Jeeves stories).
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