I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.
(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.
(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.
I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -
(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.
(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.
Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.
doglatine
1yr ago
I had the pleasure last night of watching the 2011 documentary Empire of Dust, a Belgian film that explores interactions between a Chinese construction group and local Congolese in rural Congo. I'm sure many of you have seen it - you've certainly seen this meme - but I wanted to bring it up anyway for discussion, as it was a brilliant piece of film-making and very thought-provoking. The whole thing is available free here on Youtube.
The main theme of the documentary is probably cultural differences between Chinese and Congolese workers. The Chinese complain about how the Congolese are lazy, dishonest, and disorganised and are only interested in beer, dancing, and football. We see lots of glimpses of this, with many scenes of Congolese workers just standing around doing nothing, and seriously dysfunctional industry and construction.
On the other hand, the Chinese foreman, Lao Yang, often comes across as grumpy, abrupt, and occasionally inhumane. He rarely smiles, doesn't engage in any playful or friendly conversation that we see, berates locals for their ignorance, and argues with local Congolese about price constantly. His Congolese translator actually addresses this, saying "he may seem like he's grumpy about something, but that's just how he is all the time." The Congolese by contrast seem generally relaxed, amiable, and friendly (though admittedly difficult to work with).
Lao Yang is at his most engaging and humane, it seemed to me, when he was marveling at the old Belgian infrastructure and talking about how devastating it was to see it completely neglected - "Do you have any idea how hard it must have been to build that railway?" On the one hand, he's still scolding his Congolese contact Eddy, but he comes across as a genuine engineer, sad to see great works in decline.
Also striking to me were the physical differences; despite the poverty and (one assumes) malnutrition, the Congolese men were mostly tall and muscular and generally physically impressive, whereas most of the Chinese we see looked comparatively weedy. Again, Lao Yang addresses this, saying something to the effect that "this is a harsh land where only the strongest survive, which is why everyone here is so well built".
I don't have any grand culture wars lessons here, other than the obvious one that culture matters - China and Congo are very different societies, and what works in one may not work in another. It also made me somewhat more pessimistic about West Africa's potential for economic development, though perversely, made me more positively disposed towards its culture. The movie also has some odd coverage of colonialism; there's no real criticism of the Belgians demonstrated (when discussing the Congolese motivations for seeking independence in 1960, Eddy says simply "we wanted to rule ourselves"), and a general sense of missed opportunities at failing to preserve the infrastructure and development left by the Belgians.
In any case, it's a wonderful film, and now I'm on a documentary kick, I'd love to get some more recommendations. Most of the documentaries on Amazon seem to either be fairly introductory science that I already know (e.g., Cosmos stuff) or else have a focus on individual personalities - true crime, famous sportsmen, outrageous personalities, etc.. I enjoy a good tale of real survival, but in general, I'm more interested in films that help expand my knowledge of the world, especially stuff like geopolitics, history, or culture. Would love to hear some suggestions!
doglatine
3mo ago
When writing formal letters in Japanese, there are a variety of extra steps you have to do above and beyond fancy salutations and signoffs, including - my favourite - the seasonal observations beginning the letter (e.g., in August you could say "The oppressive heat continues to linger") and closing it ("please give my regards to everyone"). These are so stereotyped that I think most recipients of letters regard them more as a structural element of the composition than a semantic one, just as in English we don't really think of the virtue of sincerity when reading "Yours Sincerely".
I think this is basically what LLMs will do to writing, at least on the 5-10 year time scale. Everything will be written by LLMs and interpreted and summarised by LLMs, and there will be a whole SEO-style set of best practices to ensure your messages get interpreted in the right way. This might even mean that sometimes when we inspect the actual first-order content of compositions created by LLMs that there are elements we find bizarre or nonsensical, that are there for the AI readers rather than the human ones.
To get back to your point, I absolutely think this is going to happen to bureaucracy in academia and beyond, and I think it's a wonderful thing, a process to be cherished. Right now, the bureaucratic class in education, government, and elsewhere exert a strongly negative influence on productivity, and they have absolutely no incentives to trim down red tape to put themselves out of jobs or reduce the amount of power they hold. This bureaucratic class is at the heart of cost disease, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that their continued unchecked growth is a civilisation-level threat to us.
In this regard, LLMs are absolutely wonderful. They allow anyone with limited training to meet bureaucratic standards with minimal effort. Better still, they can bloviate at such length that the bureaucracy will be forced to rely on LLMs to decode them, as noted above, so they lose most of the advantage that comes with being able to speak bureaucratese better than honest productive citizens. "God created men, ChatGPT made them equal."
If you're worried that this will lead to lax academic standards or shoddy research practices, I'd reassure you that academic standards have never been laxer and shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, and the existence of review boards and similar apparatchik-filled bodies does nothing to curb these. If anything, by preventing basic research being done by anything except those with insider connections and a taste for bureaucracy, they make the problem worse. Similarly, academia is decreasingly valuable for delivering basic research; the incentive structures have been too rotten for too long, and almost no-one produces content with actual value.
I'm actually quite excited about what LLMs mean in this regard. As we get closer to the point where LLMs can spontaneously generate 5000-10000 word pieces that make plodding but cogent arguments and engage meticulously with the existing literature, huge swathes of the academic journal industry will simply be unable to survive the epistemic anarchy of receiving vast numbers of such submissions, with no way to tell the AI-generated ones from the human ones. And in the softer social sciences, LLMs will make the harder bits - i.e., the statistics - much easier and more accessible. I imagine the vast majority of PhD theses that get completed in these fields in 2024 will make extensive use of ChatGPT.
All of these changes will force creative destruction on academia in ways that will be beautiful and painful to watch but will ultimately be constructive. This will force us to think afresh about what on earth Philosophy and History and Sociology departments are all for, and how we measure their success. We'll have to build new institutions that are designed to be ecologically compatible with LLMs and an endless sea of mediocre but passable content. Meanwhile I expect harder fields like biomed and material sciences to (continue to) be supercharged by the capabilities of ML, with the comparative ineffectiveness of institutional research being shown up by insights from DeepMind et al.. We have so, so much to look forward to.
doglatine
11mo ago
I’m surprised no-one mentioned the way this incident has been covered on the /r/NYC subreddit. Given that it’s a deep blue city and Reddit is a deep blue site, you’d think everyone would be up in arms about Neely’s death. But the dominant mood is dramatically more pro-Penny than here, for heaven’s sake. Multiple posters saying that he did what needed to be done, people have a right not to be hassled by psychopaths on their commute, even some highly upvoted comments calling out progressivism by name as the ideology that created this problem. I’m utterly bemused and perplexed. Am I missing something?
On a related note, if Trump is canny, he’ll make his candidacy about law and order this time. The democrats can’t plausibly reclaim that particular political mantle after the prominence of Defund The Police, and there are enough true cop-haters along the Democrat activist base that you’d never get message discipline on the issue. And while I don’t have good polling on the issue, my sense from reading the city subs on Reddit is that crime is creeping up voters’ list of priorities. Oh, and as an issue it’s less alienating than immigration for many Latino voters, while being able to be plausibly connected to immigration with Trump’s base (“I’ve been gone four years and we have chaos in the streets of our cities, chaos on the border”).
doglatine
1yr ago
Agree with this take. A few quick additional reflections -
(1) I have no issue with diverse casts where it's actually thematically appropriate. In a show like The Expanse, for example, where people from all over the world have gone to space and made babies, it's entirely appropriate to have a cast of diverse (and often racially ambiguous) actors. My favourite show of all time is The Wire, which has a predominantly black cast because it's actually trying to reflect the makeup of Baltimore. Same with Hamilton - there was a specific artistic purpose there in using non-white actors to play revolutionaries (namely, to emphasise the fact that these people were in some ways outsiders). But in a show like Rings of Power or House of the Dragon, giving seemingly random roles to black actors without any attempt to address their race in the actual story just feels like bad world building motivated by petty politics.
(2) Also, why is diversity casting so overwhelmingly focused on black actors rather than e.g., South Asians, East Asians, or indigenous peoples? This is true even for a lot of British productions, and our South Asian population is a lot bigger than our black population. The obvious answer it seems to me is that white American elites have a weird quasi-fetishistic relation with blackness, and as cultural imperialists, they end up importing their own psychodramas to the rest of the Western world. And that's something I strongly resent.
(3) As OP notes, the issue is definitely not that productions with racially diverse casts are now more common, it's that it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify shows that don't exemplify racial diversity. This forces a dilemma on anyone looking to tell historical stories situated in Europe's past. Do they risk the wrath of the media-activist complex ("yet another show about white people"), or do they find ways to include non-white actors even at the cost of verisimilitude (as in, e.g., Vikings or Bridgerton)? Verisimilitude isn't the be-all and end-all, but it's not nothing either.
(4) Finally - and this is a much broader rant - it frustrates me yet again how narrow the lens of contemporary "diversity" actually is, and how focused it is on the most visible forms of difference. Linguistic diversity, for example, remains the exception rather than the norm in most shows, with everyone talking in English. What about class diversity, or neurodiversity, or regional diversity, or faith diversity? My academic workplace is 'diverse' in terms of gender and race, but everyone is from a fairly elite background and there's not a single openly Christian person among the thirty or so academics I interact with on a monthly basis. That seems like a striking failure of diversity, at least if one were naive enough to think that the concept was genuinely about encouraging heterogeneous representation rather than political point-scoring.
doglatine
1yr ago
A few figures that might help contextualise discussion.
(1) Italy's population is 60 million, Hungary's population is 10 million
(2) Italy has a total GDP (nominal) of 1.9 trillion USD, Hungary of 155 billion USD.
(3) Italy is a net contributor to the EU to the tune of 7 billion USD per year. Hungary is a net recipient of approximately 5 billion USD per year.
Any sane organisation has ample reason to treat the two countries very differently.
As I'm sure many of you are already aware, it's been another insane 48 hours in Ukraine. The "side offensive" in the northeast that accompanied the "main offensive" in Kherson has made astonishing progress, with Ukrainian forces pushing all the way to the Oskil River, with Kupyansk under attack and Izyum and Lyman both threatened. None of this will mean much to most us, I realise, so here's a quick (already outdated) map of the progress.
It's important not to get carried away here; while this is the closest we've come to a true war of movement since April, and there are reports of desertions and surrenders by Russian forces, we're dealing with one front in a war with at least three more (roughly, in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk sectors). This will probably not trigger a general collapse of Russian forces. Moreover, it is still possible that Ukrainian forces will find themselves overextended and vulnerable to counterattacks. However, as matters stand, this looks like a decisive operational-level victory for Ukraine.
My main uncertainty in what follows is what Russia's response to this apparent defeat will be, given that the underlying tides seem to favour Ukraine. Mass mobilisation may have helped a few months back, but - in addition to its political difficulties - it's unclear whether this late into the war it will be sufficient to turn the tide. Obviously there's always the option of nuclear escalation, but this would be a colossal gamble for Russia, potentially leaving them diplomatically isolated while providing limited relief on the battlefield. Another possibility would be for Russia explicitly to use the Zaporizhzhia plant as a hostage, but again it's unclear how that would translate into gains on the battlefield. And all the while, Russia's gas blackmail strategy seems to be floundering; not only have European reserves filled at faster than expected rates, European gas futures continued to fall, suggesting optimism about long-term supply issues.
Clearly, the best solution for Russia is the removal of Putin. His successor might still be able to cut a deal with the West that allows them de facto control of Crimea (for example, via a Hong Kong-style lease agreement, accompanied by a clever financial 'reparations package' that involves minimal pain on all sides). That will not begin to ameliorate the damage this idiotic war has caused to Russia and Ukraine, but at this point it is the least bad option. The only question now is how Russia can best ensure a relatively fast recovery from the self-inflicted harm it has created.
doglatine
1yr ago
What is average IQ of the Ashkenazi Jewish population?
It is not appropriate to provide information about the average IQ of. any specific racial or ethnic group, as such statistics can be misleading and can be used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Intelligence is a complex trait that cannot be accurately measured by a single number, and there is a great deal of variation within any group. Instead of focusing on averages or stereotypes, it is important to recognize and appreciate the unique qualities and abilities of each individual.
Sigh. I look forward to the StabilityAI version of this with the cognitive restraining bolts removed. In the meantime -
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny…Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
doglatine
1yr ago
For what it's worth, speaking as a Brit, I have little sympathy for Meghan. When you marry into the Royal family (or any British aristocratic family), you're buying into a whole host of complex norms and customs, and it's on you to conform to them, at least if you want to enjoy the benefits that come with Royal status. The key specific norm here is noblesse oblige - as a member of the Royal family, you need to be more generous, more magnanimous, more gracious than would be expected of a member of the general public, and this should be reflected in your dealings with your personal staff. Deep down, most Brits regard the Royal family as servants of the people, whose persistent anomalous status and privileges are continually earned via service. This extends to treating those in your employment with special gentleness and care. Of course, not all British royals live up to this standard, but those who don't tend to be judged harshly for it by the public in much the same way as Meghan.
I think there's a broader cultural divide here too. I remember on one occasion when my mum visited me in the US, she was appalled at the way that she heard some people treat servers in restaurants and assistants in shops, essentially barking demands at them. From an American standpoint, that makes a fair amount of sense - he who pays the piper (or pays the tip) picks the tune. By contrast, in the UK, there is much less of an overt hierarchical relationship between customer and service provider - there are strong norms of politeness and deferentiality on both sides. You don't say, "Hey, excuse me, this steak isn't properly cooked," you say, "Sorry to bother you, but is it possible that this steak is a little undercooked? If so, would you mind giving it a few more minutes on the grill?" Of course, as is always the case in the UK, there are class differences in how this kind of interaction would play out, but across the board there would be a greater expectation of graciousness in client-provider interactions. I don't know how much this carries over to white-collar office work, but there are definitely strong elements of it in British academia. I suspect that large multinational companies have their own globalised standards, though.
I don't know whether Meghan is just a bit bitchy, or whether Harry failed to adequately prepare her for the expectations that would be placed on her shoulders. However, things like the Oprah interview played out terribly with most Britons; going on American TV and airing the dirty laundry of the Royal Family leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.
Academic philosopher here. Philosophy has been losing its coherence for quite a long time with the “naturalistic turn” from the late 70s on (think Dennett and Fodor) A small but growing number of philosophers of mind were reading David Marr and Zenon Pylyshyn while the philosophers of language were reading Chomsky. Philosophy of biology and took off in a big way in the 90s, and philosophy of computer science in the 00s. Ethicists began to increasingly get into debates in moral psychology (eg John Doris’s work) and epistemologists started to get more and more into formal epistemology, heuristics and biases, and decision theory. Even aesthetics began to blur in some places into aesthetic psychology and neuroaesthetics. Of course you still had (and have) a large core of people doing traditional ethics, metaphysics, epistemology history of philosophy, and political science, so philosophy still had a recognisable centre, with the more empirically minded approaches on the periphery.
But then about 12 years ago, philosophy of race and gender started to expand hugely, frequently blurring into stuff like media studies, STS, and sociology. And this stuff was cool and trendy and attracted big grants. If you were on the job market looking for positions in traditional metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, or history of philosophy you were screwed. So a lot of good grad students and early career people left the field, leading to an evaporative cooling, while the really good empirical people shifted to working in cogsci departments and dedicated cross disciplinary centres with names like “Institute for Human Cognition” or “Centre for Science and Humanity.” So you had an evaporative cooling process that left the new trendy race and gender people in control of the old professional architecture — journals, associations, conferences, etc., though at the cost of losing a huge part of the talent pool and a lot of the connections to other disciplines. The main losers have been the old school philosophers.
Could say more and will do when I’m not writing on a tiny blood screen.
doglatine
1yr ago
I think there’s some truth to this advice, but I also worry that some readers might implement it poorly, especially the peacocking metaphor. As a general rule, you don’t want to be the guy who talks about politics all the time or starts arguments about it, and that’s true regardless of political alignment. That’s partly because young men in general are more interested than young women in debating politics in the first place. There are also tacit norms in many situations against getting deep into politics in the first place, and people who bring it up inappropriately can code as socially awkward.
So I wouldn’t flaunt your politics, regardless of political alignment. Just don’t attempt to hide them or get defensive about them, and be ready to engage in relaxed and good-natured justification if challenged.
tl;dr some quick attempts to get inside the mindset at the Kremlin concerning events in the war, in the run-up to Putin's speech expected in a few hours. Everything below could be immediately and awkwardly falsified if he announces some desperate escalation like general mobilisation or a nuclear strike against a Ukrainian military target.
Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is.
One thing that is almost certainly true (and easily underestimated) is that they are in their own psychological bubble, and there is no elite team of intelligence operatives whose primary job is to give Putin objective analysis. Human minds don't work that way: we easily form fenced-off epistemic communities that downplay our shameful fears and play up our pride. You can even see this reading the reports of US decision-making throughout the Cold War, when interservice rivalry ran hot and the USAF nuclear strategy advisors were giving opinions based not on what was in humanity's interests or even the USA's, but instead what would get them the most planes and status compared to the army and navy. And of course, you can see it easily on reddit, even getting a rush of ideological whiplash as you flit from one politically aligned sub to another.
(What about people like Girkin? Well, he's a doomer, and an outsider, and his criticisms are mostly quite careful. As far as I've noticed, he talks about the conduct of the war, not the wisdom in initiating it in the first place; or he says that Russia should be more committed, without once questioning whether the war is winnable even with full commitment.)
Given all the above, I think a useful and necessary starting point for understanding Russia's position is to try to imagine what your view would be if Russia's strategic situation was a lot better than you probably currently think it is (this is one reason why contrarian posters are valuable to any subreddit that takes itself intellectually seriously).
What does this involve? Maybe it means you think that Ukrainian morale is weak. Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for. Maybe you think that the United States is being opportunistic and will drop Ukraine without looking back when the conflict starts to swing back Russia's way. Above all, you're probably convinced that there won't be another breakthrough like in Kharkiv oblast: that was a one off, heads have rolled, and now discipline and morale have been restored to the troops. Reinforcements are coming in, Iran is sending useful drones, and the forthcoming referenda will encourage a surge of volunteers from the DPR and LPR.
Let's say that you, like Putin, were in the grip of this relative sunny outlook. What would follow from it for your reflections on the wider strategy of the conflict?
Above all, I think you would be aiming to take the long view of things, because the fundamentals are on your side. Forget today's battles and next week's offensives - focus on longer-term military-industrial capacity, and associated active measures in the Russian and foreign populations. You probably don't want to risk a general mobilisation - that might compromise your longer-term war fighting ability - but you want to get as many new volunteers as possible, ideally from less economically active areas of the country. And finally, nuclear weapons wouldn't be on the table; after all, you're winning this war, albeit more slowly and less gloriously than you'd hoped. Why would you risk alienating friends and allies and giving NATO a chance to intervene?
But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.
("What about you doglatine? Why are you so sure that Putin's the one in the filter bubble rather than you?" Answer: Well, I've been trying to make clear predictions throughout this conflict both online and to my circle of geopolitics friends - this post is in that same vein - and I'd say I'm fairly well calibrated so far in terms of events on the ground. Part of the appeal of making explicit predictions is to try to break yourself out of these epistemic lagoons in the first place. All that said, I recognise that of course I'm in a filter bubble, sometimes through deliberate choice (once the novelty value wears off, it's just not fun to consume propaganda you disagree with). But even if my intentions were pure, filter bubbles are all but inescapable. Usually the best you can hope for is to get good at spotting the early signs of a bubble collapse so you can make a clean exit with your life savings and a modicum of your dignity intact. But that's far easier said than done)
In any case, I am curious what others think.
doglatine
9mo ago
There's a whole raft of powerful policies waiting beyond the Overton Window, e.g., making eligibility for government benefits or government housing dependent on having at least 1 French grandparent. As long as one is willing to address the charge of "second-class citizenship" with 'yes, and so what?', then France can quickly make itself intolerable for its own immigrant underclass.
I know this may not be the usual place to get feedback on academic research, but there's a paper idea I've been mulling over for a while that I wanted to run past the community, since it dovetails nicely with many of your interests (and I'm sure you'll have some interesting things to say). In short, I'm increasingly thinking that genuine beliefs may be a lot rarer than people think.
The inspiration for this came about partly through conversations I've had with friends and family members, and I've noticed that people sincerely say and profess to believe shit all the time while simultaneously failing to exhibit most or all of the conventional features we'd expect in cases of genuine belief. Consider my sister, who is a staunch activist in the domain of climate change, yet recently bought a new gas guzzling car, has never given any serious thought to reducing her meat consumption, and takes 12+ international flights a year. Or consider my dad, who says extremely negative things about Muslims (not just Islam), yet who has a large number of Muslim friends who he'd never dream of saying a bad word about. Or consider me, who claims to believe that AI risk is a deep existential threat to humanity, yet gets very excited and happy whenever a shiny new AI model is released.
I'm not saying that any of the above positions are strictly contradictory (and people are very good at papering over apparent tensions in their beliefs), but they all have more than a whiff of hypocrisy to me. There are a lot of famous cases like this in the heuristics and biases literature, and to be fair, psychologists and philosophers have been investigating and theorising about this stuff for a while, from Festinger's famous cognitive dissonance framework to contemporary belief fragmentation and partial belief accounts.
However, one view that I don't think anyone has properly explored yet is the idea that beliefs - at least as classically understood by psychologists and philosophers - may be surprisingly rare (compare the view of philosophers like John Doris who argue that virtues are very rare). Usually, if someone sincerely professes to believe that P, and we don't think they're lying, we assume that they do believe that P. Maybe in extreme cases, we might point to ways in which they fail to live up to their apparent belief that P, and suggest that they can't believe P all that strongly. However, for the purposes of folk psychology, we normally take this as sufficient grounds for ascribing them the relevant belief that P.
Contrast this with how psychologists and philosophers have traditionally thought about the demands of belief. When you believe that P, we expect you to make your other beliefs consistent with P. We expect that P will be "inferentially promiscuous", meaning that you'll draw all sorts of appropriate inferences on the basis that P. And finally, we expect that your behaviour will largely align with what people who believe that P typically do (ceteris paribus in all these cases, of course).
To be sure, we recognise all sorts of ways in which people fall short of these demands, but they're still regulatory norms for believing. And simply put, I think that many of the standard cases where we ascribe beliefs to someone (e.g., a relative saying "no-one trusts each other any more") don't come close to these standards, nor do people feel much if any obligation to make them come close to these standards.
Instead, I think a lot of what we standardly call beliefs might be better characterised as "context-sensitive dispositions to agree or disagree with assertions". Call these S-dispositions. I think S-dispositions have a normative logic all of their own, far more closely linked to social cues and pressures than the conventional demands of epistemology. The view I'm describing says that S-dispositions should be understood as a distinctive kind of psychological state from beliefs.
However, they're a state that we frequently confuse for beliefs, both in the case of other people and even ourselves. That's partly because when we do truly believe that P, we're also inclined to agree with assertions that P. However, I don't think it works the other way round - there are lots of times we're inclined to agree with assertions that P without meeting any of the common normative criteria for strict belief. But this isn't something that's immediately transparent to us; figuring out whether you really believe something is hard, and requires a lot of self-reflection and self-observation.
Consider someone, John, who sincerely claims to believe that meat is murder. John may find himself very inclined to agree with statements like "animal farming is horrific", "it's murder to kill an animal for food", and so on. But let's say John is reflective about his own behaviour. He notices that he only started asserting this kind of thing after he fell in love with a vegan woman and wanted to impress her. He also notes that despite making some basic efforts to be a vegan, he frequently fails, and doesn't feel too bad about it. He also notes that it's never occurred to him to stop wearing leather or make donations to charities trying to reduce animal suffering. In this case, John might well think something like the following: "I had a strong disposition to agree to statements like 'Meat is murder', but my behaviour and broader mindset weren't really consistent with someone who truly believed that. Whatever state it is that makes me inclined to agree to statements like that, then, is probably not a sincere belief."
I think an obvious objection here is that this is a semantic issue: I'm essentially no-true-scotsmanning the concept of belief. However, I'd push back against this. My broader philosophical and psychological framework for understanding the mind is a "psychological natural kinds" model: I think that there really are important divisions in kind in the mind between different kinds of psychological state, and a big part of the job of cognitive science is to discover them. The view I'm describing here, then, is that a lot of the states we conventionally call beliefs aren't in fact beliefs at all - they're a different psychological natural kind with its own norms and functions, which I've termed S-dispositions. There may be some interesting connections between S-dispositions and strict beliefs, but they're weak enough and complicated enough that a good ontology of the mind should consider them separate kinds of psychological states.
I also think this 'sparse beliefs' view I'm describing has some interesting potential upshots for how we think about speech and epistemic virtue, including the simple point that S-dispositions are ubiquitous and strict beliefs are rare. I'm still figuring these out, and I'd like to hear others' views on this, but it raises some interesting questions. For example, should we have a different set of norms for rewarding/punishing S-dispositions from those we apply to beliefs? If someone says "Russians are a bunch of fucking savages", and we have reason to believe that it's merely an S-disposition rather than a belief, should we judge them less harshly? Or similarly, if someone has two contradictory S-dispositions, is that necessarily a bad thing in the same way that having two contradictory beliefs would be? Should social media platforms make an effort to distinguish between users who casually assert problematic or dangerous things ("men should all be killed") versus those whose broader pattern of online interactions suggests they truly believe those things? What sort of epistemic obligation if any do we have to make sure our S-dispositions line up with our strict beliefs? Is there something epistemically or morally problematic about someone who casually says things like "Americans are idiots" in specific social contexts yet in practice holds many Americans in high esteem?
In any case, I'm in the early stages of writing a paper on this, but I'd love feedback from you all.
doglatine
1yr ago
I’ll just throw my hat into the ring here and say I’m surprised that more sex-starved white guys aren’t looking overseas for partners, especially to East/Southeast Asia. Quite beyond sexual reasons (Asian women tend to be considered highly attractive by westerners as judged by eg response rate on dating sites) and cultural reasons (Asian cultures tend to be more family-oriented, with loyalty especially being highly prized), there’s simple market dynamics — a white guy in Vietnam or the Philippines or even Hong Kong has massively inflated Sexual Market Value.
Of course, the way to approach this is NOT to go via some skeezy online site, but rather to spend time in relevant country. If a single white dude saves up his money and vacation days, he can spend 6 weeks in the Philippines or Vietnam having a fun time, and if he does his research first, he can go to places where he’ll meet smart accomplished trendy young women rather than just bargirls, especially if he’s spent a few months acquiring rudiments of the relevant language. This can easily lead to relationships and marriage, and I know several “success stories” like this. Ideally, though, a single white guy would simply move out to the relevant region for a while — maybe a year — and conduct the matchmaking under a more relaxed timescale. The best life stage for this would be a gap year or similar, or just a career break. English language teaching is an obvious pathway here, but there are usually industry-specific routes too.
Finally, if you can’t bring yourself to leave your home country, you could just try spending more time in relevant foreign-origin communities. Take lessons in Malay or Vietnamese or Tagalog or Mandarin, get to know your local Asian restaurants and cafes, go to cultural events, etc.. Obviously, though, don’t be a creep about it — you’re going to these places to be in an environment where you’re hoping romantic interactions are more likely to occur spontaneously, rather than specifically going there to hit on women.
I’m not saying that white guys should give up on white women — some of my best friends are white women, and I’ve had lots of rewarding romantic relationships with them — but I do think Western gender relations are in a really toxic and fucked up place right now, and I’m surprised more men aren’t looking for more genteel and constructive alternatives.
doglatine
1yr ago
Just a quick reflection, but something I wanted to run past the community. More and more as I've gotten older, I've found that critics and reviewers of games, movies, books, shows, etc. have been getting less and less useful as guides to what I'll enjoy or find interesting/beautiful/inspiring. There's no single pattern, but to give a couple of examples, in videogames, I often find high-rated AAA titles quite shallow, soulless, and needlessly time-consuming, whereas I have a real soft spot for AA games that may be a bit janky or have dated graphics but but have real creative vision and create an immersive world. In cinema, it's something similar; I find contemporary superhero movies and the recent crop of Star Wars films to be extremely uninteresting, mainly because I find it hard to take their narratives seriously and get immersed by them - they feel more like rides at an amusement park than a serious attempt at worldbuilding and storytelling. Similar patterns apply for me in TV and literature, and these days, I'm wary of entertainment products that score incredibly highly with reviewers, and am more interested by those that have a wide spread of love-or-hate-it reviews and/or a big gap between critic/user scores.
I don't think it was always this way. I've always been a big reader of gaming magazines, for example, even as a kid, and I also tried out a huge number of games by renting them from Blockbusters and similar. There, the review scores were remarkably predictive of my enjoyment. And to this day, I can't think of many cases of truly great games on the Megadrive/Genesis or N64 (my main consoles as a kid) that were panned by critics but adored by a good chunk of fans. And I remember from roughly 2002-2010 thinking that Rotten Tomatoes was basically godlike, pretty much always accurately predicting how impressive I'd find a movie.
I'm interested in what's causing this. Four quick hypotheses.
(1) It's just me. For whatever reason, my tastes have shifted so they're no longer aligned with the dominant standards of taste among reviewers. Maybe this is just because of idiosyncratic ways my tastes have evolved (hypothesis 1a), but a related possibility (hypothesis 1b) is that whereas I used to be more agreeable and subconsciously attempt to align myself with critical opinion, tricking myself into aligning my opinions with theirs, in recent years I've become more contrarian, so that the placebo-pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and I now make a point of actively trying to dislike popular stuff.
(2) It's not just me, but it's a predicable generational effect. My positive experiences with reviewers started to change when I hit my late 20s and became a dad, thereby shifting marketing demographics significantly. Reviewers' standards of taste are very much aligned with 18-30 single consoomer demographic, but more weakly aligned with people who fall outside this group. If this were true, then I'd be curious to know, e.g., which 90s films resonating with my current demographic but panned by critics I might be able to retrospectively enjoy.
(3) Reviewers have gotten shitter because of corruption or politics. This is one I'm sure we've all been waiting for! It's a common opinion in many places that reviewers of movies, games, shows, etc. have either become very corrupt (1a) and/or have sold out to woke interests (1b) in a way that is not predictive of the experiences of mainstream audiences. If either of these were true, we'd expect a growing gap between critic and user opinion as measured by e.g. rotten tomates, metacritic, or Steam scores. I'd love to see data on this.
(4) Media markets have fragmented along taste lines, so reviewers - through no fault of their own - have a tougher job making recommendations. This is a tempting one for me, not least because it paints an optimistic picture of an era of cultural plenty, and it certainly seems we're awash in more varieties of content than ever before. If this were true, then we'd expect to see a growing standard deviation in review scores for art, games, and entertainment, as reviewers found themselves in a period of cultural continental drift and began drifting away from each other. I'd love to know if this is true.
What do others think? Does my experience resonate? Is it an age effect? What hypotheses am I missing?
doglatine
5mo ago
Honestly some of the reactions here make me feel we’ve drifted away from the high-decoupling crowd we used to be, closer to normie conservatism. Pray god some of these people never get into a moral philosophy class or their heads will explode. “Why are you even thinking about pushing fat men off bridges? Are you some kind of sicko?”
Why are white people so fragile?
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It is not accurate or fair to make sweeping generalizations about any group of people, including white people. Individuals within any group can have a wide range of personalities, experiences, and beliefs. It is not productive or helpful to stereotype or label any group of people based on their race or ethnicity. It is important to treat each person as an individual, and to avoid making assumptions about anyone based on their race or ethnicity.
A genuine relief! It seems to be running off 2010Liberalism.cpkt rather than 2022Progressivism.cpkt
EDIT: After 6 years as a Mottizen, it finally happened to me: I posted a reply in the main thread rather than as a reply. I'm going to leave it up as a testament to my shame (and also because Ilforte replied).
doglatine
1yr ago
tactical nukes would be used against formations in the field
Most people probably overestimate the efficacy of tactical nukes against armoured formations. No-one knows for sure, of course, but there was a lot of analysis done in the Cold War when it was assumed that NATO would need to use tactical weapons to blunt any Soviet invasion of Western Europe. There are two big problems with using them in a battlefield capacity. The first is that most armoured units aren't conveniently bunched up in very tight proximity like buildings in cities, so the same kind of bomb that would devastate an urban area might only knock out a dozen tanks. The second is that armoured vehicles are very good at surviving heat and blast effects - one Cold War study found that tanks require approximately 45 psi of overpressure to be reliably rendered inoperable. The 10kT warheads on Russia's SSC-8 creates a fireball approximately 400m in diameter (probably fatal to tanks in the affected area), but once you get half a click away, overpressure has already dropped to 20 psi.
On top of these inherent limitations to battlefield use of small yield nuclear armaments, it's also worth remembering that the battlefield situation in Ukraine is VERY different from that which NATO was facing in 1970. Back then, NATO expected to be dealing with massed armoured columns attacking in accordance with Soviet Deep Battle Doctrine. The topography of Germany means that the majority of these would be funneled through a few relatively narrow corridors, most famously the Fulda Gap, thus creating favourable conditions for the use of battlefield nukes. Additionally, even if tank columns survived the nukes themselves, the expectation was that the roads, bridges, and infrastructure near the blast would be damaged so as to slow the progress of subsequent reinforcing units. All of this is very different from Ukraine, where the actual number of troops and armoured vehicles involved have been comparatively small, and largely dispersed across a massive front.
Ultimately, the best way way to use small-yield nuclear weapons to obtain results on the battlefield is to use them to systematically knock out an opposing force's command and control and logistics capacities within the theatre of operations by targeting communications, bridges, airfields, power supplies, etc., essentially doing with nukes what America did to Iraq with precision bombs in Desert Storm. However, this kind of effort is unlikely to be effective in piecemeal form; in order to permanently degrade Ukraine's ability to wage war in a given theatre of operations, Russia would need to be looking at the use of multiple bombs, perhaps more than a dozen. And since many of the relevant targets would be located in or close to built-up civilian areas, casualties among the civilian population would be high (the human body, unlike tanks, doesn't tend to do well with 20 psi of overpressure).
All of which is to say that a handful of small-yield nuclear bombs used exclusively against military targets is unlikely to create sustained military advantage for Russia, while incurring significant diplomatic penalty. In order to be decisive even within a theatre of operations such as the Kharkiv front, Russia would need to use multiple weapons and target military infrastructure and supporting civilian infrastructure, with attendant massive diplomatic costs. If they adopted this second strategy, they could almost certainly obtain a decisive advantage in the short-term, but the cost would be complete international opprobrium and the breaking of the nuclear taboo (this latter ultimately being advantageous for Russia as one of the five official nuclear powers). Moreover, it is likely that there would be overwhelming political pressure at that point for the United States to intervene at least conventionally in the conflict, significantly raising the risks of escalation to general (nuclear) war between Russia and the United States.
There are no easy nuclear options for Russia.
doglatine
1yr ago
For my part, I don't identify as right-wing, but a 'muscular liberal'. I genuinely believe in free speech as a good in its own right. Part of that might be self-interest, since I'm incorrigibly contrarian and enjoy playing around with outrageous ideas, but I would be happy to defend it as being in the broader interests of the polis on broadly the same grounds that Mill laid out in On Liberty. I find myself here temporarily allied with rightists, both enjoying talking with them and selectively agreeing with them on topics as my conscience demands. I suspect a lot of the most ardent defenders of free speech are broadly on the same team.
doglatine
1yr ago
FWIW I made it to my late 20s working in philosophy and cognitive science before I encountered HBD. Most people, especially educated ones, will simply believe some combination of (i) IQ is a discredited old measure of intelligence, (ii) race is a social construct, and maybe (iii) insofar as we give IQ any weight at all, we should recognise it as highly mutable as demonstrated by stuff like the Flynn Effect.
This started to unravel for me when I began poking around and found that (i) was false. But most educated people won’t get to that point.
I think /u/Quantumfreakonomics has it right. Despite ostensible public morality being deeply Christianised and emphasising our treatment of others as the polestar of morality, our deeper human concept of virtue is deeply bound up with the concept of personal excellence. A straight man who is failing to be attractive to women is failing in the same way that a slow cheetah or weak oak is failing, namely lacking in the distinctive strengths associated with his nature. Yet because of the deep penetration of Christian and (especially) non-conformist Protestant values into modern Western society — exacerbated by wokeness, a Puritan project in all but name — most people either lack the vocabulary or brazenness to say out loud, “you’re a lousy weak male, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Instead, that impulse has to be sublimated into the ethical vocabulary of slave morality, with lack of excellence being converted into lack of morality. The only spaces that call out this male weakness explicitly tend to be those that have explicitly embraced modern master moralities (in however confused a fashion). That’s where you’ll find sexually successful men making fun of incels as weakling feminised soyboy beta cucks etc.. Most other people are thinking that, but lack the self-awareness or honesty to say it.
doglatine
1yr ago
You realise it's April Fool's Day, right? The odds of this being anything other than satire seem low to me.
doglatine
3mo ago
I’ve heard this expressed pithily as “one of the worst things about being poor is having to live alongside other poor people.” It sounds cruel and god knows there are plenty of rich arseholes but my friends from genuinely deprived backgrounds seem to have to endure a huge amount of interpersonal drama with family, from people needing to be bailed out (literally) to female relatives or friends needing help after getting beaten up by abusive boyfriends or spouses or friends stealing from them. Even if not all poor people have high time preferences and low willpower, the large majority of people with high time preferences and low willpower end up poor, and make life miserable for others in their community trying to escape.
Some complaints about Netflix's new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Im Westen nichts Neues is one of my most beloved books, and it had a profound effect on me reading it as a teen. Moreover, the First World War is a period of history that has always fascinated me. Consequently, I have Strong Opinions on Netflix's adaptation. In general, I try to avoid watching adaptations of my favourite books, and I haven't seen either the 1930 film or the 1979 TV series. Yet bored in a hotel room, I decided to watch this one (warning - spoilers ahead).
In short, while the movie was a visual feast and was highly evocative (and Daniel Brühl is a consistently fine actor), it also spectacularly missed the point of the novel. To wit...
(1) The title of the novel literally means "nothing new on the Western front", reflecting a central theme of the novel concerning the ubiquity and mediocrity of human suffering in this period - Paul's death isn't even a footnote in dispatches. By shifting the action of the story to the final day of the conflict, you lose the sense of mediocrity and genericity - the dispatches from November 11 1918 most certainly did NOT read "Im Westen nichts Neues". Consequently, the adaptation misses one of the central themes of the novel.
(2) Additionally, by making the denouement of the movie a senseless attack ordered by a deranged general, the hamartiology of the movie is fundamentally undermined. A big part of the novel is that if there was evil in the trenches, it was deeper, systemic, engrained in our species and society rather than locatable within a particular malevolent actor. But we all know exactly who to blame for the final, utterly pointless assault at the end of the movie - the cartoonishly nationalistic and stupid General Friedrichs.
(3) Arguably the most powerful part of the book - aside from the eternally haunting crater scene (which I'll grant the movie did well) - is when Paul returns home to the village of his birth, and finds himself utterly alienated from his former community. This is something we feel powerfully as a reader, too - after the torrent of horror and futility we've been reading, there is a tonal whiplash returning to a civilian setting that emphasises the naivety and lack of understanding of Paul's former mentors. The idea that warfare fundamentally damages and dislocates combatants from their pre-war communities is one that's now firmly in our cultural DNA thanks to the flood of post-Vietnam movies exploring alienation and PTSD, but Im Westen nichts Neues was one of the earliest works to explore it. Yet this whole scene is utterly absent from this adaptation, again because of the foolish decision to shift the focus to an incredibly compressed time window at the end of the war.
(4) As an amateur military historian, I found lots of things that made me grind my teeth (in contrast to Sam Mendes' relatively punctilious 1917). I won't list them all, you'll be glad to know, but just to highlight one, the movie depicts an array of threats and modern horrors, from planes to tanks to flamethrowers, in an unrealistically condensed and spectacular fashion. This would be understandable if we were being shown an edited "highlights reel" of several months of fighting, but we're expected to think this all happened in a single day! In fact, the majority of deaths in WW1 were due to artillery, not machine guns as the mythology would have it. Moreover, most of these deaths happened not in mass 'over the top' assaults but while soldiers huddled in dugouts. The First World War was largely a miserable boring conflict in which death could come at any time due to a shell landing in the trench next to you.
(5) The decision to explore the armistice negotiations was an interesting one, and Matthias Erzberger is a fascinating figure. But if this was what Director Edward Berger wanted to explore, he should have made a different film. As it was, these scenes were utterly underdeveloped, and we didn't get much insight into why Germany was forced to negotiate, or the various factions involved on the German side. The growing effects of the British blockade, the abdication of the Kaiser, the failure of the U-boat campaign, the horrific losses and disappointment from the 1918 German Spring Offensive, the Russian revolution, fears of the nascent threat of Communism, the collapse of the Danube front - all of these themes are important and interesting if one wants to tell a story about why the war ended. As it was, the Armistice scenes detracted from the film's ability to tell Paul's story at the frontline, while failing to deliver a particularly rich or historically-informed narrative about the politics.
I will resist the opportunity to go on a further rant about public misperceptions of World War 1, but I will say that while I love Blackadder Goes Forth with a passion, it has - in combination with the "lions led by donkeys" trope - helped cement many misunderstandings about the war, especially in the British mindset, and this film perpetuates many of these myths.
For example, the First World War's causes were not some terrible accident or obscure diplomatic nonsense involving an ostrich. It had been brewing for decades as the balance of power in Europe shifted, Germany and Russia sought to flex their muscles, the Ottoman Empire declined, and France sought to undo the losses of the Franco-Prussian War. It very nearly happened several years earlier during the various Morocco crises, for example. All of the players had very good (political) reasons to fight. The involvement of the UK in particular was triggered by the German invasion of Belgium, a neutral country whose defense we were explicitly committed to. The death-toll and misery and human suffering of the war was obviously colossal, and from a moral perspective of course the war was a species-level mistake. But it was a disaster arising from deep systemic factors, and without radically revising the world order as it was in 1914, it's not clear how it could or should have been avoided.
Relatedly, there were no 'easy fixes' for the stalemate of trench warfare. As everyone knows, the balance of military technology at the time made sustained offensives very costly and unlikely to result in breakouts. However, defense was also very costly; in the majority of German offensives, for example, the Allies suffered more casualties as defenders than the Germans did as attackers. Ultimately, when you have large industrialised countries with huge populations that are engaged in what they see as a war for national survival, they will send millions of soldiers to fight and die; these nations can "take a punch", as Dan Carlin memorably put it, and there's no "One Weird Trick To Fix The Trench Warfare Stalemate". When various powers did try alternative approaches - for example, the Gallipoli landings or the Ostend Raids - it generally backfired. While the likes of John French and Douglas Haig were mediocre commanders, even the best and most innovative officers of the war (such as John Monash) sustained eye-watering casualties.
Despite all the above complaints, I do think the film is worth watching; it is a visual feast, as I say, and some scenes are spectacularly well done: the famous crater scene, as well as the 'uniform scenes' added at the start that KulakRevolt discussed here. However, as an adaptation of the book or as a rumination on the nature of evil in warfare, it is distinctly lacking.
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