felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves,
That is a big part of your answer right there. There is an important distinction between reserves and resources.
Reserves are uranium ore that it is profitable to mine and process at current market prices with today's technology. Some reserves are being mined as I type; they are really there, with absolute certainty. Other reserves as less certain. One might want to drill a shaft and get some samples to check. Proven reserves meet a threshold for certainty set down by the financial regulators. Thinking of investing in a mining company? Reading about the proven reserves that they own? Proven is a term of art for investment grade certainty.
Resources are a guess about the amount of uranium that is actually there. In some sense. It needs to be possible to mine it and refine it, but it doesn't have to be profitable today. The guess work can include some guesses about technological advances in extracting Uranium.
It is the same for natural resources generally. The case of oil is notorious. Yes, back in 1920 we only have 30 years of oil reserves. (I've not checked the history, but it is well know that we have many times run off the end of oil reserves) Prospecting for oil is expensive. If an oil company wants to borrow money from a bank to build an oil refinery, the bankers will ask: will the oil run out. If the oil company only has 25 years of reserves on its books, it may be worthwhile prospecting for more. The bankers will take a risk, but for a price. How does the cost of prospecting compare with the price of risk? Bankers rarely look more than 30 years ahead. If the oil company has thirty years of reserves, paying prospectors to find more, and increasing that to 35 years, will not get the oil company a cheaper loan. It is not worth the money.
We only have thirty years of reserves because it is not worth looking for more, so we don't bother. Notice that the results of prospecting include discovering bodies of ore that fall a little short of what it is currently worth extracting. They count towards the resource. But not towards the reserve. However, prices can rise. If the electricity price rises, prices for oil and uranium to fuel power stations are likely pulled up. Now some of the resource becomes reserves. It is routine for reserves to fluctuate due to price changes elsewhere in the economy, independent of consumption and discovery.
You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of uranium resources. The logic of the argument is (maybe) valid, but since the premise is false the conclusion does not follow.
You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of proven reserves of uranium. Now the premise true, but the logic of the argument is invalid, and the conclusion still doesn't follow.
The equivocation between reserves and resources has been going on all my life, and I find most discussions of social collapse tainted by this.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early history, with brave men inventing wings, strapping them on, and jumping out of towers. Jumping to their deaths. Others were more cautious and built gadgets to help them understand wings and lift. Wind tunnels were invented late. Before wind tunnels they used the whirling arm apparatus.
A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.
The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.
The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
Why go to all the trouble? The question reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about Islamic Terrorism. A comment noticing
But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike me as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the inefficient and hard things.
got the response
Every-one thinks that they are the good guy. That isn't just a quirk of psychology, it is also a constraint.
People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good guy in their own head.
They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.
Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.
I think that Reddit Admins are just as much constrained by the need to be the good guy in their own head as Islamic Terrorists or any-one else. They must have a reason. They can cope with ignoring that it is fake reason that they manufactured themselves (humans are good at that kind of cope); but they must have one.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The sociological interest lies in watching people fail to join the dots.
The airplane safety card has a section on depressurization and the oxygen masks dropping down. "Put your own mask on first."
The danger being guarded against is that the parent takes too long trying to fit the mask on their frightened child and the parent passes out themselves. But how could that happen? Surely the parent soon suffers respiratory distress that forces them to fit their own mask before resuming helping their child? No. Hypoxia doesn't work like that. It is the carbon dioxide that makes you want to breath and the parent is breathing that out just fine. You can pass out from hypoxia with very little warning. I think this is now widely know, mostly due to the warning on the airplane safety card. The warning retains its place on the terse card because they want every-one to know.
There are other routes to this knowledge. Starving My Brain of Oxygen…For Safety?!? is two minute video on pilot training
Without proper training, pilots may not recognize the symptoms of hypoxia
More on the hypoxia training story I was looking for a much older video, which I think was an upload of a historical film of hypoxia training for pilots, with the low oxygen environment being some kind of Nissen hut. Hypoxia training isn't new.
There is a classic industrial accident involving a storage tank. Workman climbs down inside to do maintenance after the tank has been drained. But the residual chemicals have reacted with the oxygen, so he climbs down into a nitrogen atmosphere and dies. His safety buddy sees that he has passed out and, forgetting his training, climbs inside to do a heroic rescue. He also dies. Do you prefer Deaths from Environmental Hypoxia and Raised Carbon Dioxide or Confined Spaces Deadly Spaces: Preventing Confined Space Accidents? The YouTube video has a cute animation with a plumber with a mustache (Mario?) testing the air in the sewer. This also happens down on the farm Incident Investigation: Worker Loses Consciousness in Manure Spreader Tank | WorkSafeBC.
News coverage pretends to know none of this
In his Guardian interview, Smith said he feared that if Alabama carried out his execution it would put the new killing method of nitrogen hypoxia on the map.
The news coverage makes it seem that you can blunder into a confined space with little oxygen, gasp and struggle, and face the horrifying prospect that if you cannot escape in twenty-two minutes, then the lack of oxygen will kill you. And that this is a new hazard. I would feel more comfortable with agit-prop headlines screaming: Capitalism has been killing workers with nitrogen hypoxia for decades.
I'm feeling a little lost. Was the execution deliberately botched by pro-death-penalty activists trying to persuade the impalers and the crucifiers that the method is sufficiently cruel? Were the difficulties invented by anti-death-penalty activists trying to persuade us that the method is excessively cruel? I can tell that I'm being lied to, but not why or by whom or which details are false.
I can also see that the lying isn't being called out, perhaps not even noticed. The lies contradict well known stories about how the world works and how to avoid being killed by it, and yet people don't seem to join the dots and complain about the contradictions. That troubles me.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?
This strikes me as a Socratic question. Socrates used to ask Greeks questions that were slightly off. Being polite, the Greeks would refrain from nit-picking the questions, and try to answer. Then Socrates, being an arse-hole, would nit pick the answers. He would entangle his victims with his verbal dexterity, and skillfully obscure that bad answers were down-stream from bad questions.
There are many stories to tell about gravity. Kepler discovered that the planets moved in ellipses. Newton invented a theory of mechanics and new mathematics. Then he was able to respond to speculation that the ellipses were due to an inverse square law of attraction by filling in the details of what that actually meant, and solving the mathematical problems to demonstrate it.
Newton went further, spotting that gravity was "universal". By "universal" Newton meant that the attraction was not a specific property of the Sun (which would leave gravity on the surface of the Earth as a separate mystery) but was about all matter attracting all matter. So a cannon ball fired by an artillery man follows an elliptical trajectory with one focus at the center of the Earth. Obviously an artillery man uses the parabolic approximation (until the Paris gun in 1918. But (unless my memory is playing tricks on me) Newton had the idea that a cannon fired horizontally with sufficient force would cause the cannon ball to orbit the Earth, just as the moon orbits the Earth.
"Universal" creates a loose end. Jupiter is attracting Saturn and Saturn is attracting Jupiter. The Sun is not the only player in the solar system. That loose thread went unpulled until it was noticed that Jupiter was spiraling in. Jupiter's orbit was decaying and it would in time destroy the Earth. Then a French mathematician (LaPlace?) got stuck into the details. Jupiter and Saturn are nearly in a five to two orbital resonance. The difference frequency is about 800 years. Four hundred years of Jupiter spiraling in and Saturn spiraling out get followed by four hundred years of Jupiter spiraling out and Saturn spiraling in. Theory and accurate astronomical observation agreed; panic over.
Other stories include Halley working out the orbital parameters of a comet and predicting its return. That was a big deal at the time, because comets were traditionally seen as bad omens. If they simply moved in obedience to Kepler's Laws, they stopped being frightening. The comet returned as predicted and is now called Halley's Comet.
After Hershel discovered Uranus, both John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier puzzled over anomalies in the orbit of Uranus. Could there be another planet. Verrier go Johann Galle and Heinrich D'Arrest to look, and there was Neptune, discovered in 1846 by mathematics and Newton's Law of Gravitation. Verrier tried to repeat his success with anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, and inferred the existence of the planet Vulcan. Which wasn't there, leading eventually, by a circuitous route to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
For me, this raises questions about the word believe. I'm comfortable with three interpersonal meanings. Do I believe a person's testimony: did the things he tells me actually happen? Do I believe a person's promises: will he keep them? Do I believe a person's predictions: will they actually happen? But how does one extend the word believe to cover scientific theories? The tale that I've told goes well beyond my personal experience. The largest telescope that I have looked through is a twelve inch reflector. Maybe the story about Neptune is made up; I've seen Saturn, but neither Uranus nor Neptune. Interpersonal belief is at issue. Yet when we talk of belief in Newton's Law of Gravity, we assume the honesty of astronomers and are talking about something else. I'm not clear what. Contemplating the long narrative that I have sketched is valuable because it gives a concrete example of what successful science looks like. Trying to abstract a high level concept of "belief"? That is the kind of unmotivated abstraction that confuses things.
I'm comfortable with two meanings of the word true. One is person testimony (again). Did that actually happen? The other is in my books on mathematical logic. When is (A and B) true? When A is true, but not just A, B must also true. Add in first order logic, sets, and model theory and there is lots to read about. But neither notion of truth fits well with generalisations arising from empirical investigations.
The most promising notion of truth, appropriate to empirical investigation, that I have encountered is Probably Approximately Correct learning theory and Vapnik-Chervonenkis Dimension. Those are crap links. To get the basic idea, image rolling a d6 six hundred times to estimate the probabilities of each face. You get numbers like 100, 118, 95, 88, 114, 85 or like 112, 103, 93, 104, 99, 89. Empirical work always has a certain about of random slop and your empirical estimate will never be true in the sense of being exact. But what about being approximately true? Fix an unambitious goal for accuracy and ponder the probability of being approximately correct. Things can still go horribly wrong; an unlucky sequence of rolls could give you 600, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and your empirical work is not even approximately correct. But something interesting happens when the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension is finite. Fix your desired level of approximation and keep rolling the d6. The probability of not meeting your approximation goal eventually starts to decline exponentially with the number of rolls. Exponentially! You are on the route to the practical man's version of certain knowledge. Well, that is nice, but God is it complicated.
Asking "Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?" is doing the 20000 foot overview thing. It can only lead to vague waffle. On the other hand, waffling vaguely is rather fun; what am I actually proposing as a rival ideal? I think that interesting gap is between social science and "hard" science. There is a gap between "hard" science and ideal certainty, but it seems unimportant compared to the gap between social science and "hard" science. Let me give a concrete example of how little we know in social science so that you can see how well Newton's Law of Gravity compares.
Think about Laffer Curve effects. Here are four theories.
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The Laffer Curve is bunk. If the government increases income tax from 40 pence in the pound to 83 pence in the pound, that will increase revenue. Revenue will probably double.
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Rich businessmen are trapped by their commitments. If their take home pay falls, they won't be willing to give up their yacht or their mistress. They will draw more salary from their business, to maintain their take home pay. Rather than pay themselves $1,600,000 to take home $1,000,000 they will pay themselves $5,882,353 to take home $1,000,000. Tax revenue will rise from $600,000 to $4,882,353 Eight fold, not two fold.
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Don't ask where we are on the Laffer Curve, ask when we are. The government is taxing fifty year old businessmen, expecting revenues to hold up indefinitely. But in thirty years time they will all have retired. Will today's twenty year olds replace them? No, once Boxer goes to the knacker's yard, no-one is taking his place.
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Laffer Curve effects are prompt. When taxes are low the rich businessman pays his mistress from after tax income. When tax rates soar, he cuts the money that he withdraws from his business as personal income, and preserves his lifestyle by having his company employ his mistress as a secretary. Tax revenue falls.
What would it be like to have a theory of taxation with the accuracy of Newton's Law of Gravity? The very idea is mind boggling. A good philosophy of science would help us construct a scientific theory of tax revenue. A good discussion of the philosophy of science would look at areas of science where we are doing badly and wonder how to do a little better. Perhaps a good discussion of the philosophy of science would also look at successes, such as Newton's Law of Gravity and try to extract lessons, about how to do science, that we could apply to where we are failing. That is very different from looking at Newton's Law of Gravity and worrying about miracles or something.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
That is an important distinction and worth up holding. The underlying issue is that the economic logic of copyright leads to an awkward compromise. Copyright terms long enough to liberate the Artist from the tyranny of the day job, but not so long as subject the Artist to the tyranny of the copyright office. (Where there's a hit, there's a rip!). Meanwhile the economic logic of trademarks suggests that they should be eternal.
The culture war aspect is that copyright eternalists love the term "intellectual property" because it fudges the distinction. They hope to use the unlimited life of trademarks as an argument for eternal copyright because they are "the same kind of thing".
I've seen this argument before, that if people really believed, it would drastically modify their behavior.
I've made this argument myself. Now I'm worried that its wrong.
Think about type II diabetes and morbid obesity. Call it the fat nurse problem. Nurses know that they are heading for trouble because they have treated patients a little older than they are who have already run into trouble. It is as if you go on holiday to Rome and the Vatican is doing tours of Hell. You wonder what became of some-one who died recently and who lived a wicked life. You take the tour and spot him among the damned, suffering. Later you return to the USA determined to mend your own wicked ways, and like the fat nurse and her diet, you fail to do so.
Yes, we see people who fail to modify their behavior. In the context of religious belief, we feel tempted to draw an inference: they do not really believe. In the context of practical matters, they have often seen with their own eyes. Of course they believe! And yet they fail to modify their behavior. What then becomes of our logic? In the religious context, we lack clear guidance about whether people believe, so we attempt to infer belief from behavior. In the practical context we have a contingent gold standard for belief: sometimes folk have seen the truth with their own eyes so naturally they really believe. There is no need to attempt an inference.
On the other hand, there is an opportunity to check the validity of our inference. The inference that we draw from behavior ought to agree with belief that we infer on the basis of noticing that some people have direct experience and must therefore believe. Whoops! Disaster has struck. In the practical case we notice people who must really believe, failing at responding appropriately. So the inference we want to make in the religious case is invalid.
What then becomes of the observation that true belief drastically modifies the behavior of a sizable minority, but only a minority? My guess is that in times of universal belief in God, most people really believe. They have a sense that they are going to answer personally to God. They sin anyway. They repent. They sin some more. They face death with a combination of fear and cope, sometimes dreading punishment, sometimes hoping the God is love and will not judge them too harshly.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Do you make the same commitment that you will .... absolutely accept the result of this election?
I've added emphasis to a question that I see as a disgusting example of linguistic trickery. I don't know the name for this trick, I'll provisionally call it Schrodinger's Context.
The question is being asked ahead of the election. How absolute is absolute? What if Dominion program their machines to ignore Republican votes and the Democrats win with 100% of the votes counted? Clearly there has to be some limit, at which one notices that the vote is rigged and one rejects the result. So absolute isn't to be interpreted in the most literal way possible; there is an implicit context and that context contains limits on the extent of electoral anomalies the the candidate is expected to tolerate.
The context is not spelled out. It is just understood that the election will be basically honest. But, if after the vote, some amount X of fraud gets discovered, that is like Schrodinger opening the box and discovering that the context was really about accepting the result if there is ≤ X amount of fraud.
I think the traditional context goes like this:
Politicians get to campaign hyperbolically. They can rile their base by saying that the Chinese are building car factories in Mexico and these cars will flood the American car market causing job loses among American auto-workers. Politicians are allowed to describe the these jobs loses as a bloodbath as if the Mexicans themselves will flood across the border, armed with machetes, and hack the American auto-workers to death in a literal bloodbath. No, it is just job loses, no actual blood spilled, but the hyperbolic rhetoric is allowed. "Every-one" knows not to take it literally.
"Every-one". There is a problem here. There is always some-one who gets over excited and attempts electoral fraud, thinking that they are the good guy, because they are averting a literal blood bath. Hyperbolic rhetoric is permitted, and the cost of this is that some people are not quite right in the head and break the rules on counting the votes because the hyperbole wound them up to the point of madness.
So the traditional context has two more parts. First, a few nutters attempting electoral fraud doesn't invalidate an election. It can be literally true that some Democrats cheated, and yet perfectly reasonable that Donald Trump concede the election. Second, there is a gentleman's agreement that rival politicians police their own side and try to prevent electoral fraud in their own cause. If a Democrat cheats, fellow Democrats call them out, and a Democrat Attorney General prosecutes. That is the quid pro quo for Trump conceding despite a small amount of fraud.
That is my understanding of the traditional context. I think current problems are due to the gentlemen's agreement breaking down. If a few nutters are committing electoral fraud, well, smirk Donald Trump should still concede, without asking "how much?" and without expecting Democrats to police their own side.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I suspect that the view of science as disunified and pluralistic is an illusion caused by zooming in too close. Older, rival ways of knowing get neglected and forgotten. That should create the impression of a loss of intellectual diversity, but we actually zoom in until the limited, remaining intellectual diversity fills the field of view.
I first rediscovered older perspectives reading about the Spanish Armada of 1588. Garrett Mattingly wrote 421 pages for his book The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. He gives a largely materialist account in which the superior upwind performance of English ships allows them to stay up wind of the Spanish and pound the Spanish from long range with their superior canon. At 583 pages, Neil Hanson gets to include more on Spanish thinking in his book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, the true story of the Spanish Armada. And the thinking is religious and pious.
The Spanish did have some hard headed military men, but religion and piety also had a say in naval matters. If you had tried to warn a Spanish noble about English technical superiority and tactical advantage he might have replied with the authentic 1580's version of this
That is not how this works, that is not how any of it works. The wind blows at God's command. If we pray ardently, if we are right with God, he will grant us fair winds. Second to God's blessing come our own courage and faith. You make much of minor points such as the English being able to pull their muzzles back inside their hulls for reloading, but such matters trail a poor third behind God's will and man's courage and determination.
Second, I was discombobulated by reading that Hobbes was viewed with suspicion in his own time. I imagined that the throne-and-altar guys would love him. God had divinely appointed Kings and there was Hobbes justifying God's wisdom to doubters: of course we need a King. Without a King we will have a war of all against all and life will be nasty, brutish, and short. Yet his contemporaries found Hobbes' perspective mechanistic, materialist, in a word: atheistic. Not the right way to think about the world at all.
Third, in The Discarded Images, C. S. Lewis attempts to explain the Medieval world view to the modern mind. He selects some earlier work he regards as seminal, include the commentary on Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius. Macrobius divides dreams into five species, three veridicial, and two which have 'no divination' in them.
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Somnium: truths veiled in an allegorical form
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Visio: direct, literal prevision of the future
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Oraculum: the dreamers parents or other grave and venerable person openly declares the future
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Insomnium: daily cares intruding on sleep
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Visum: garbled trash, including nightmares
I cannot believe there was ever a time when every-one took Visio seriously. Dreams must so often fail to come true that many would notice their limitations as a way of knowledge. On the other hand, I assume that Macrobius took dreams seriously, and others followed his lead. What must it have been like to grow up in a world in which the reliability of dreams was accepted by the adults around you and that way of thinking was metaphorically "in the water supply"? It would be hard to see the point of science. Much better to have a good nights sleep and hope, in the morning, to interpret the allegory of Somnium.
There were so many better ways of knowing things than science. You could pray to God. You could study scripture. You could dream.
None of that actually works. It fails hard enough that it is hard in 2023 to imagine taking any of it seriously, yet I believe that people did so. If we zoom out far enough to include such ideas in our field of view, Science shrinks to a small and particular kind of epistemology. Does it have an essence? In the zoomed out view, internal details are too small to be seen and, yes, science has a nerdy essence.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I bumped into an earlier example when reading G. K. Chesterton's autobiography. Born in 1874, he writes that he was taught Christianity at a mainstream school by teachers who were not themselves Christians. This took me by surprise. We are talking about around 1890, and there is a Cathedral near where I live, built 1879, spires added 1913-1917. There is a contradiction between Chesterton's account of his post-Christian upbringing at a time when people are still building Cathedrals.
Chesterton doubles down, proposing that enthusiasm for Empire was a substitute for loss of Christian faith. People need to believe in something, and if Christianity has faded, they will latch on to something else.
My guess at the social history involves Darwin and the debates following his 1859 publication of The Origin Of Species. The London intellectuals of the generation before Chesterton respond by quietly giving up on Christianity. Meanwhile, others are participating in various Victorian Religious Revivals. Christianity looks healthy, but society's thought leaders have abandoned it. Christianity rots from the top down, and elites, such as C. S. Lewis experience a post-Christian country, while others are still happily attending Church.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Think about this in terms of the external audit of a public company.
A public company has its own accountants. They may notice money going missing, track it down, and report the employee to the police for fraud.
As a public company it must also submit to and pay for an external audit. The external audit is not looking for fraud. The external audit is auditing the internal controls and the procedures. Are the internal controls sufficient (if the procedures are followed) to stop money going missing? Are the procedures being followed? It gets a little tricky because a big business is inevitably full of minor lapses and edge cases. The external auditors will not qualify the companies accounts unless the weaknesses of internal controls and breaches of procedure are material.
However, if there are material weaknesses, the external auditors will qualify the accounts, saying that they cannot be fully relied upon because blah blah. This is a big deal. Remember that the external auditors are not looking for fraud. Looking for fraud that is really there is often futile; the fraud only took place because lax procedures that were not even followed, provided an opportunity to get away with fraud. Once the accounts have been qualified the company takes measures (perhaps under a new board of directors) to remedy the problems.
The weaknesses of internal controls and the failures to follow procedures are treated as dispositive. It is presumed that there was fraud and action is taken to prevent it. It would be wrong to say that people don't care about the facts or whether fraud actually happened. If perchance fraud can be found there will be efforts to identify the perpetrators and prosecute them. But there is an acceptance that finding material weaknesses in procedures is as "we found fraud" as it gets.
Perhaps some-one will claim "Sure there are problems with the procedures that might in theory have allowed fraud to go undetected, but no fraud was proven, so I'm content that no fraud happened and no action is required." But where money is at stake, this is naive and silly.
The core of @Hlynka's claim is that votes are as valuable as money, so the same presumption of fraud applies.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The line about living with the Amish misses the depth of the technology stack. Every-one, including the Amish, benefit from access to high carbon steels. All the chisels and saws that carpenters use in a low-tech wooden life-style depend on heat treated steels that retain their cutting edge. Making the chisels and saws depends on hardened high carbon steel being harder than normalised high carbon steel, sufficiently harder that you can use files and hacksaws to form the blanks for your chisels and saws before you harden them in their turn with more heat treatment. It is all very delicate, depending on chemistry and metallurgy to get quench hardening to work right ("Silver steel" has added chromium to improve through hardening. Metallurgists need microscopes to see what is happening with the grains in the steel). (Things have moved on. Now-a-days you heat treat steel parts before cutting them to shape using carbide tooling,...)
I wondered if the Amish use cement. Maybe just lime mortar. It is a tough question. Yes, and attention to price and efficiency seduces you, so that you end up tied to industrial cement making. No, and your building techniques are in some ways pre-Roman; who wants to go back that far?
We are mostly ignorant of the long history of our technology stack and use phrases such as "back to nature" in ways that do no withstand scrutiny
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
I'm happy to join in disputing the "fact that the nazis were far right" but I would emphasize the worthlessness of the left/right spectrum.
Reactionaries, those throne and altar guys like the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, are right wing. Florian Geyer had "no crown, no cross" scratched on his sword, the sword that he used to fight for peasants during the Peasants Revolt; not right wing. Hitler thought Florian Geyer a hero and was happy to have an SS regiment named after him. I'm thinking that Hitler and Stalin had rival takes on how to stick it to the Kings and Priests, but both thought of themselves as acting on behalf of the workers and the common man.
If one really wants to have Hilter->right and Stalin->left, then one gets into trouble with reactionaries, monarchists, and integralists. All the classic right-wing positions have to be kicked off the spectrum to make room for Hitler. You even have to horse-shoe Florian Geyer and get him to the right to have Hitler think him a hero.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
The most scary damage is that universities have been training young people in how to do science. The replication crisis, while bad in itself, also shows that the universities have actually been training young people in how to do science wrong. How does that damage get undone?
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
One complication is the Golden Rule and private autogynephilia. Let me start with a three way sub-classification of private autogynephilia.
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Repression It would be so easy to buy a dress on line or at a thrift shop and dress up and blush. No! That would be wrong. One makes ones mind a battle field and victory is not giving in to temptation.
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Binge and Purge One gives in to temptation, dresses, make-up, maybe even a wig. Then one gets disgusted by what one is doing, and throws them away. But a year later one does it all again.
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Limited, private indulgence One gives in to temptation. Release turns into relief, and one puts ones cross-sex items away, in a suit case or a drawer, knowing that one will be tempted again, and indulge again. But also aware that the over-all effect on ones life is negative. Without turning ones mind into a battle field, one tries to avoid temptation and leave off for months or years.
The Golden Rule is often written as
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
All three classes of private autogynephile see autogynephilia as a misfortune. It takes them away from seeking a girl friend or a wife. It takes them away from sublimating sexual impulses in other, satisfying alternatives. Yet it is so horribly unrealistic. They are a bloke, not a girl; autogynephilia involves fighting a war against reality and reality always wins. And they cannot expect any-one else to join in and humor them.
What would they have others do unto them? They hope that others will refrain from encouraging them. No "woman of the year" for a man. No "Stunning and brave" for a man. No inviting a man to use she/her pronouns. They hope to avoid cultivating and strengthening their fetish. They don't want to get outed. They don't want to have to say "please stop talking about positively about transition, because I'm both tempted and sure that it would work about badly for me." It is the same as when the ex-alcoholic is invited to go for a drink. He doesn't want to reveal his private past and he doesn't want to be cajoled.
And what then does the Golden Rule command them to do unto others? They see it as partly idiopathic and partly social contagion. They keep it private to avoid contaminating others. They oppose publicity and encouragement around transition. This is rooted in compassion for those with autogynphilia. It is a net negative for them. As best they can judge, it is a net negative for others. They wish to avoid harming others by encouraging the fetish, just as they hope that others will avoid harming them by validating and encouraging their fetish.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.
"Racism" has changed so much over the past fifty years that the "Racist" and "Anti-racist" positions have swapped. It used to be that teachers were racist and didn't let the Black children into the Advanced Placement classes because "Blacks are stupid". Back then the anti-racist position emphasized individual variance/merit. The clever children go in the top stream and the stupid children go in the bottom stream. Ideally the stupid children benefit from being kept out of the top stream; it is miserable and harmful to be in a class for which you are unprepared and which leaves you behind.
But one notices that the top streams are White or East Asian or Brahmin. That drives a re-alignment. Accepting individual variance/merit is the new racist position. Modern anti-racism looks to the statistics for groups, and expects all groups to be represented according to head count, regardless of individual merit. (and there is the extra, weird twist where Black under-representation is the fault of Whites, because Whites are bad (and, if they object to this condemnation, fragile (which oddly enough, earns them mockery not gentle handling)))
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The top level comment is about the hostage puppy of tuberculosis treatment. Which suggests how it works. Corruption grows, shielded by hostage puppies. The puppies are very effective at shielding corruption. Corruption grows: 10% corrupt, 90% puppies; 50% corrupt, 50% puppies; 90% corrupt, 10% puppies; 99% corrupt, 1% puppies.
Eventually the anti-corruption campaigners have a vast amount of ammo; there just aren't enough hostage puppies to provide cover for all the corruption. The level of corruption at which the anti-corruption campaigners can break through is determined by how sentimental the general public is. The more sentimental they are, the better the hostage puppies work at shielding corruption, and the more complete the corruption has to be before the dam breaks.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
But I see no reason that an ideological system involving uniting the elites to rule over the rest is a problem
My theory of how society works is that it depends on a competent ruling elite, but there are problems of ossification and egalitarianism, with ossification leading to the rise of egalitarianism. I'm going to make up illustrative numbers. The ruling elite is 10% of the population. Elites don't breed true, but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Half the next generation of ruling elite are the children of the current ruling elite. So that is 5% accounted for. Where do the other 5% come from?
One in eighteen of the children of hoi polloi is talented. 1/18 of 90% = 5%. They are the scholarship boys, talent spotted, educated in grammar schools and inducted into the ruling elite.
My theory of how society works generates two opposing theories of how society fails. First ossification or the protection of the failson. Half the children of the ruling elite are downwardly mobile. As time passes the elite fail to change the heritability of the genetics, but they do change society to save their failchildren from social descent. The second generation of elite are 5% true elite, 5% ordinary, while the scholarship boys are locked out of upward mobility. The third generation of elite are 2.7% true elite 7.2% ordinary. (I'm assuming that the child of a failson has the usual 1/18 chance of being talented). Degeneration continues 1.8% elite, 8.2% ordinary; 1.35% elite, 8.65% ordinary. The asymptote is that the ossified elite regress to the mean and end up looking like the original society. The original society was 10% elite, 90% ordinary. Thus the end state of the ossified elite is 1% true elite 9% ordinary. Their badly governed society also has its hoi polloi. That 90% of the population spilts 9% true elite talent, locked out by the loss of social mobility and 81% ordinary. This either ends in revolution as the 9% fight for their place in society, or in collapse, because 1% true elite isn't enough talent to keep society functioning.
Second, egalitarianism. Meritocracy gets rejected. I like the way that @cjet79 puts it here "A job is work to be done" versus "A job is a ceremonial position". Jobs get redistributed to ensure fairness, ending the elites' lock on the best jobs. The 10% of prestige jobs get filled, effectively at random. 1% true elite, 9% ordinary people. There are too few talented people in the top jobs leading to collapse. It could be worse. Maybe, post-revolution the children of the previous elite are locked out of the top jobs. Of the 10% filling the top jobs, only 1 in 18 is talented = 0.55%. That is less than the 1% of a completely ossified society. Dysfunction and collapse come quickly.
The two tendencies, ossification and egalitarianism play off each other. In a partially ossified society, hoi polloi look at the elite, and compare the official story with what they see. Officially a job is work to be done and the 10% top jobs are filled on merit. But many of the elite are ordinary, and their jobs are ceremonial (except that sometimes a failson has a real job that he lacks the skill for, which is even worse). As the generations turn and ossification gets worse, every-one can see that many top jobs are ceremonial. Ordinary people resent that their children are largely locked out of these top jobs. Meritocracy is seen to be a sham for two reasons. Society is functioning poorly (due too little genuine talent in the ossified elite) which undermines the official position that jobs are given to the best candidates. Some jobs are all to obviously ceremonial and merit doesn't even apply. This boosts belief in egalitarianism until DEI seems reasonable.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
My expectations for bio-security for gain of function research go like this:
Use two small remote islands: Research Island and Quarantine Island. Researchers parachute into Research Island. At the end of their six month tour of duty they sail to Quarantine Island. After a month, a plane lands on Quarantine Island to collect them.
In reality Biosafety level four, the top level, is still situated in a building in a city. It seems odd that we site nuclear power stations in remote locations, or at least, outside cities, yet the much more dangerous, create-a-lethal-plague technology, is conveniently sited so that researchers can go to the theater or the food market after work. Is there a consensus among biological researchers about this?
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
I think that you have got that backwards. If the police are scrupulous about treating crime and punishment as strictly individual, there will be no racism apparent as the cases are investigated and prosecuted one by one. But compile national statistics and racial differences jump out at you. If you believe in individual justice and judging people by their character, not the color of the their skin, you just have to shrug and say "races really are different."
The trouble starts if you insist that the national statistics need to be race balanced. To make the national statistics come out race balanced requires fiddling the individual cases, convicting innocent white men, acquitting guilty black men, and doing the racist thing of telling an individual "we aren't going to judge your case on the actual facts, but on skin color, because we've a quota to fill."
felis-parenthesis
9mo ago
Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.
Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.
Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.
But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.
felis-parenthesis
9mo ago
Democrats are the real racists = Democrats R the Real Racists = DRRR = DR^3 = DR3
Wait, you might not be asking how the weird abbreviation works. You might be asking why people believe that Democrats are racist.
I think that the change that has happened in my life time starts from the position that Black underperformance is due to anti-black racism from whites. End racism, replacing it with meritocracy and Blacks will thrive and do just as well as Whites.
After forty years of disappointment, the new-Democrat anti-racist position is that blacks are inferior, so meritocracy condemns them to an inferior position in society. Therefore meritocracy is bad and must be rejected in favor of racial quotas to ensure that blacks are given equal outcomes to whites. new-Democrats don't word it like that. DR3 is that claim that that is what they mean and it is really racist and bad.
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
The positives have to be weighed against the negatives.
The anti-immigration position starts with endorsing the claim that when Chopin moved from Warsaw to Paris, that benefited the French, and when Marc Isambard Brunel fled France and ended up in England, that benefited England. What makes it the anti position is the additional claim that you can tell whether Chopin can play the piano; you don't have to admit half the population of Warsaw to get the musician. And you can tell that Brunel knew about civil engineering; you don't have to admit any Jacobins to get your tunnel under the Thames.
So no, you don't have to weigh positives and negatives. Let the positives in, keep the negatives out.
The core of the pro-immigration position is "You cannot tell whether Chopin can play the piano. If you want the positives, you have to accept the negatives, so weigh them and choose."
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
One of the dank failure modes of social media obsession is reading and re-reading one's own comments.
- comments that are up voted generate feelings of being valued and understood
- comments that are down voted generate feelings of superiority: those poor fools are not on my level!
- all comments generate a reassuring feeling that at least one person on social media is writing sane comments
Picture the scene in a weeks time when Whining Coil succumbs to the temptation to re-read his own comments. Soon he reaches a big post about how bad all this is for his health. That gives him the opportunity to turn off his computer and play with his dog. That is in line with his goals:-)
The situation is darker and bleaker than that because of the third option: social contagion.
In Scotland, drug overdose deaths have soared to over a thousand a year in a country/(region of the UK) of merely five million. There is a big concentration of deaths in Dundee. The dynamics are rather like a contagious disease. How does social contagion mimic the in-person spread of an infection disease in the internet age? Junkies in Dundee are not going to Glasgow to buy their drugs; it is friend of a friend stuff with-in Dundee. The need to pass physical drugs from hand to hand creates geographically local dynamics.
But I'm old. I'm already familiar with the heroin cycle. Heroin is really cool. The fluffy cloud happiness of the high. The don't-give-a-fuck charisma of the users. The bodies piling up. And piling up. The rising part of the heroin cycle doesn't last. You don't introduce any-one younger to heroin use after your own funeral. And the occasion itself puts a damper on the whole scene. Soon heroin gains the evil reputation that recreational use deserves. "Nobody" uses any more. But every year, Mr Nobody grows a year older. Eventually the young people, who won't touch the stuff because they saw what it did to those ten years their senior, are no longer young enough to be at risk of starting. Those young enough to start, look to those a little older and see neither use nor warning signs. Some of them work out for themselves that heroin is fun. They tell their friends. The cycle closes and heroin in cool again.
I came of age during a low point of the heroin cycle, so I never tried it. But the micro-foundations of the cycle were evident in parallel matters. Things spread by word of mouth and from hand to hand. Friends warn against some things and endorse other things.
He was 35. Which brings my comment to the edge of the abyss. Back when needle sharing made Glasgow the AIDS capital of Europe, the prognosis for a heroin addicted was to become addicted around 20. Use for ten years. 50% die. 50% hit rock bottom (or just age out) and quit. 35 is old for an addict. Now that AIDS is treatable, the prognosis is probably better. Now that fentanyl is on the scene the prognosis is probably worse. I'm not keeping up with the statistics and don't know how it balances out. When some-one dies of drug addiction, we bury an "innocent victim". His "friends" in the drug scene play the role of his personal angels of death. And walking my comment over the edge of the abyss: did he take his curse to the grave with him, or did he manage to pass it on before he died?
I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.
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