hooser
3mo ago
Great post! I want to focus on a minor point you made:
Global poverty has plummeted, lifespans have doubled, and literacy is nearing universality, largely thanks to the diffusion of technologies and modes of thinking traceable back to the Enlightenment's core tenets.
Unlike the other two, literacy is not an undisputed good. It is a difficult mode of communication that takes years to learn, and about 1/5th of adults in the developed world never learn to read for comprehension. We prize literacy because, for now, it's required to navigate our society. Will that still be the case ten years from now, when your phone can text-to-speech anything you point it to, and will not only read it to you but also answer your follow-up questions voice-to-voice? (I already do this with languages I don't know, except I prefer to read the translations myself.)
It's still significant that literacy is so widespread in the world, because it implies that most people have the resources and the leisure to have their kids spend several years pursuing challenging training. Is this the best use of those children's time? I honestly don't know. I have greatly benefited from my ability to read and write, and I continue to prefer to do so even when I have alternatives: I would rather read a blog than listen to a podcast, and I would much rather read a book myself than listen to an audio-book. But I also know many people who prefer it the other way.
So, is literacy (that is, ability to read for comprehension) truly superior to other forms of recorded communication (audio-visual), and does this superiority justify the years of training one needs to master the skill?
hooser
7mo ago
VA had a hiring spree last year, in large part because of the expanding benefits from the PACT Act.
Your impression of a hiring freeze remains partly correct, because VA has budget shortfalls and plans to lay off staff:
More recently, though, the VA told Congress it now expects to have about 5,000 more employees in VHA next year compared to this year. That's created a new problem, as the VA is warning it is facing a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall.
I suspect that VA tends to paint a bleak picture to Congress as a standard operating procedure, in hopes of getting more funding. Though my nephew assures me from his VA experience that more funding would not go amiss.
So back to my off-the-cuff idea of importing doctors: my point is that any VA hospital that finds it challenging to attract a decent US doctor ought to be able to do what the private sector does. Right now, the VA follows AMA's standards, which require any non-US-trained doctor to do 3+ years of residency (plus other things) before they can practice medicine in US. Residency slots are, apparently, the bottleneck for US doctor supply in the first place.
My question is: just how crucial is it for someone already practicing as a doctor in a French or German hospital to do 3+ years of residency in US?
hooser
9mo ago
Male decision making often tries to figure out what he thinks is true whereas female decision making tries to figure out what belief is most popular.
[citation needed]
Flippant quip aside, I partly agree with your assertion. In my experience, women are more likely to seek consensus. That probably generalizes, since women are about half a standard deviation higher on the agreeableness scale than men, on average.
I disagree that the gender analogy (women : popular ideas) is (men : true ideas). Quite frankly, I see as much popular bullshit spewing from men as I do from women. What I agree to, however, is that (in general) when women discuss a subject they are likely to converge towards a consensus opinion without much overt argument, whereas (again, in general), men will overtly argue for their takes, and use the arguments as opportunity to jockey for position among their group.
Here's the thing: I am a mathematician, and I worked and argued with plenty of other women in math, tech and engineering, who tend to be more disagreeable (in terms of Big-5 personality traits) then women in general. The disagreeable women are no more likely to gently gravitate to consensus then the equally disagreeable men.
Meanwhile, when I worked with teachers (who tend to be more agreeable), I had employ extreme teaching techniques to encourage them to push back on another's asinine assertions, men as well as women.
On truth-seeking versus popular-ideas-seeking: engineers and techs are just as motivated to determine the truth, be they men or women, because in those fields, you test your ideas against reality, and reality doesn't care about the provenance of your ideas. Writers and philosophers are just as motivated to determine what will be popular (or better yet, viral), be they men or women, because in those fields, the test for your ideas is the potency of them as memes--how well your ideas compete for memetic space within your society (more importantly, the part of that society that determines your social status).
So I assert that the pattern you observe--that women tend to gravitate to popular opinions while men appear to seek the truth--is best explained by two factors:
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Women are more agreeable then men, in general;
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Men are more concentrated in fields where ideas are tested against reality, and women are more concentrated in fields where the value of ideas are in their memetic potency.
PS. This is also a response to @monoamine and @falling-star, giving an N = 1 sample for how a female Mottizen replies to the post.
hooser
6mo ago
A quick cross-cultural comparison: Wife-beating is common in Eastern-European cultures (say, 1-in-10 couples). A stereotypical Russian phrase, uttered by a Russian wife about to get beaten, is "Just don't punch the stomach!". It's reasonable to suppose that, in the past, the rate at which pregnant women got beaten was higher than now.
I recon that the force experienced from a car deceleration is smaller than an occasional drunken punch on the womb.
hooser
8mo ago
When I drive cross-country, McDonalds has the most reliably clean restrooms, and they don't insist on you buying stuff first. (The one exception to that I found was in a Denver suburb, where they had a sign on the bathroom saying "For customers only". I asked a worker to let me and the kids in, and she did without any questions, and without requiring a purchase. I guess that's to discourage the local homeless.)
The food is also fine. I don't subsist on it, but an occasional chicken sandwich isn't going to kill me any faster than anything else I can get quickly on the road.
hooser
3mo ago
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Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust. The books are fun to read. They do explore issues of racism and serfdom, but in a way that doesn't correspond to the modern world, and the main character retains a grounded, no-nonsense attitude.
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Both the Dresden Files series and Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher. The latter is a six-book completed series, with a cool fantasy-meets-Roman-Empire theme.
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Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy has some of the most vividly developed characters I have ever read in a fantasy novel.
hooser
7mo ago
I especially like your Christianity-as-skill idea, because it fits but I haven't thought of it that way before.
Recently, I [an atheist who grew up Eastern Orthodox] came to the conclusion that, if ever shit hit the fan in my life and my personal social network wasn't up for the task, I would head to Church--of whichever denomination is closest to Eastern Orthodox and physically proximal to me. Church first, then check what safety net the government has to offer. Because the Church tends to respond faster to any crucial need and doesn't require paperwork.
(US governments offer a pretty good safety net to anyone who is willing and capable of (a) accurately filling lots of forms, (b) letting go of all of one's earthly possessions, and (c) waiting up to several years if necessary.)
My atheism in particular, and my non-belonging-to-a-church in general, are luxuries indicative of a life lacking in severe shocks. I recognize this. How fortunate for me, then, that so many Christian denominations share the idea of repentance and return-of-the-prodigal.
hooser
9mo ago
suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline
Or suggest an IUD implant, those are super effective, last for a decade, and don't require sticking to a schedule (like with pills) or proper use (like with condoms). Also, IUD effectiveness leaves those others in the dust even with proper use.
Would you support making a free IUD implant to any female who wants one?
There's a related and well known pattern in relationships, where men focus on fixing things while women talk to feel listened to, understood and valued. Similarly, it's much easier to debate a man and even vehemently call him wrong, and then pat him on the back and grab a beer afterwards. With a woman it usually gets interpreted as an attack on a deep personal level.
I have noticed a similar pattern among people I interact with, but it also overlaps strongly with the divide between those in STEM (especially engineers) and those in more Humanities-adjacent fields.
I like to categorize the patterns of discourse as "n-dimentional social chess". Imagine that you are part of a group of people who together are playing chess against an online opponent. The group discusses strategies for their upcoming move.
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"Zero-dimensional social chess": you focus solely on the merits of the proposed strategies in defeating the online opponent. It doesn't matter who proposed which strategy; you evaluate each proposed strategy solely on its own merits.
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"One-dimensional social chess": you keep track of who said what. You are doing this to help you evaluate the merits of proposed strategies (like, giving more weight to strategies proposed by people with more experience playing chess).
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"Two-dimensional social chess": you keep track of who said what, and how they said it. You are doing this because you are aware that, within your group, people are jockeying for social status. So you keep track not only of who said what, but what that means for everyone else in terms of social status within the group.
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"Three-dimensional social chess": you not only keep track of who said what (and how they said it), but also who didn't say what (and how they didn't say it). You are doing this because you are aware that the group members are jockeying for social status, and you also assume that they know that everyone else is doing it too. Therefore you expect to see shifting alliances, communicated subtly through the phrasing of support, or withholding support where it was expected.
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"Four-dimensional social chess": you not only keep track of who said what (and how they said it), but also who didn't say what (and how they didn't say it), but also have a good working theory of the level of n-dimensional social chess that each person in the group is at.
I find that (at least in my social circles) most engineer groups (and majority-male groups) tend to play two-dimensional social chess; most humanities-adjacent groups (and majority-female groups) tend to play three-dimensional social chess. People who move fluently between engineers and humanities circles either play four-dimensional social chess and code-switch, or play one-dimensional social chess and are blissfully unaware of the status games.
The trope of a frustrated girlfriend saying "If you don't know what's wrong then I am certainly not going to tell you!" would be my example of a situation where the girlfriend by default plays three-dimensional social chess and can't imagine that others (including her boyfriend) don't. So she's definitively not playing at four-dimensional social chess, since she fails to have a good working theory of her boyfriend's level.
[Edit: Edited the lower categories, upon further reflection. Zero-dimensional social chess is just chess, with some pooling of strategies. One-dimensional social chess takes relative expertise into account, but it's still all about the chess. With n>1, the "social" part becomes a competing goal.]
hooser
3mo ago
The issue at stake is whether the US House of Representatives will have proxy voting, which was not allowed except, temporarily, during Covid. Once any exceptions are allowed, those exceptions will get expanded until proxy voting is fully normalized. Except for the few that plan to make statements, a Representative always has something better to do than attend the House vote (make calls to raise money, meet lobbyists). So once proxy voting gets established, there will be strong pressure against attendance.
I understand why Johnson is dragging his feet on the matter.
On the other hand, I wonder how much of the "deliberative nature" of the in-person House vote has already been destroyed by C-Span. If all statements are prepared in advance, and anything you say can and will be used against you in an edited video clip during the next election cycle, does anyone present at the current House floor deliberation change their minds on anything?
hooser
5mo ago
The statement "equality between men and women in all aspects of life" has lots of hidden assumptions, which feminist philosophers have interpreted in radically different and contradictory ways. Let's take a specific case and clarify what such equality would mean to you.
Incarceration: Which best describes your advocacy of equality: (A) the length of a person's sentence should be independent of one's gender, or (B) the penal system should be set up such that the burden of incarceration falls equally on men and women? Version A is "equality of opportunity", version B is "equality of outcome". The US penal system falls short on both versions of equality: women get much shorter sentences for similar crimes, and females make up just a bit over 7% of all prisoners in US.
So in this specific case (an important "aspect of life"), which kind of equality do you advocate for?
hooser
7mo ago
I do not care that someone on the internet may actually bring to life the strawman assertion that "[A Song of Ice and Fire] is some kind of nihilistic, grimdark, pornographic deconstruction of all that is right and good in the world". Your essay remains a response to a strawman. For comparison, here's the whole text under the "Criticism" of GRR Martin's wikipedia page:
Martin has been criticized by some of his readers for the long periods between books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, notably the six-year gap between the fourth volume, A Feast for Crows (2005), and the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons (2011), and the fact that The Winds of Winter, the next volume in the series, hasn't been published since. In 2010, Martin had responded to fan criticisms by saying he was unwilling to write only his A Song of Ice and Fire series, noting that working on other prose and compiling and editing different book projects have always been part of his working process.
I have went through all five stages of grief and have come to accept the fact that the last two books in the series will likely never be written, with the HBO's crappy last two seasons will remain the one-and-only allowed fan-fiction. I am at peace now.
So I have to be honest with you: I did not read your essay past the first three paragraphs. The framing of your essay is I-will-put-on-full-armor-and-destroy-this-strawman, and it turned me off so badly from what you have to say about one of my favorite fantasy series that I don't want to read the rest--even as I recognize by skimming the headlines that you may have something interesting to say about ASoIaF.
And maybe that's just me, and other people here will find the strawman a delightful hook. However, if you do get similar complaints, please consider reposting a revised version of your essay, where instead of this-nobody-thinks-X-but-I-think-Y framing it's just Y. I will gladly read and engage with that essay then.
hooser
8mo ago
Whereas only 5% of prime age males weren't employed in 1968, today it's nearly 14%.
For your consideration: the US army doesn't enlist anyone scoring below 10-th percentile on their IQ test. That's 10% of men that the US army considers untrainable, despite having vastly more control over a soldier's life than another employer. Based solely on that, I would expect that there should be at least 10% of men who ought to not be employed.
Where were those men in 1968? Probably institutionalized, and thus not counted in LFPR.
There has been a massive de-institutionalization in the 70s.
hooser
2yr ago
I am fascinated by your idea of what actions make a scientist. If an experiment I am conducting needs some beakers washed, does it make me less of a scientist if I have a freshman undergrad wash them--so long as I check that it's done properly? If the experiment that I designed needs some chemicals mixed in particular proportions and sequence, does it make me less of a scientist if a senior undergrad does it--so long as I check that it's done properly? If I design three experiments to test a theory, does it make me less of a scientist three first-year graduate students carries each experiment out--so long as I check that they are done properly? If there are multiple competing theories in my field and I have good ideas about how I can test them but to design the experiments in detail I would need to have a thorough and detailed knowledge of several disparate sub-fields and possibly fields in adjacent disciplines, and also I would need to raise substantial funds to finance such experiments, does it make me less of a scientist if I recruit a team of grad students and post-docs, each specializing in some particular sub-field and tasked with designing and carrying out experiments there, while I use my broader expertise and established credentials to convince whoever I can to finance these projects?
Are you less of a programmer because you don't program in Assembly? Or because you import modules? Are you less of a software engineer if you spend your time with the client determining their needs, then oversee the development of architectural design, APIs for relevant modules with appropriate testing system, and then hand off the actual code writing to a team of programmers?
Also on Stanford's list: "abusive relationship" should be replaced by "relationship with an abusive person", because:
The relationship doesn't commit abuse. A person does, so it is important to make that fact clear.
Firstly, they are breaking their own guide of "Person-First", which is the section just prior to that entry. According to the heading,
"The use of person-first language helps everyone to resist defining others by a single characteristic or experience if that person doesn't wish to be defined that way.
So, shouldn't that be something like "relationship with a person who occasionally makes an action that is perceived as abusive"?
And secondly, in my experience, it really is the relationship that's abusive, where the spiral of negative reinforcements for obsessively pushing each other's buttons cannot be laid at the feet of a single partner.
hooser
1mo ago
I suspect that the discount is so small that it wouldn't be worth the time for 99%+ of their shoppers.
However, you are correct that, on occasion, businesses don't think their promos through.
My brother was buying an expensive pair of shoes (over $100), when the sales guy pointed to their special of Buy-One-Get-50%-Off-Second. My brother asked if he gets to choose which pair of shoes counted as second, and the sales guy agreed. My brother then asked for the cheapest pair of shoes in the store, which turned out to be women's $10 house slippers. So he bought those first, and then got 50% off for his expensive pair of shoes.
Ironically, the expensive pair of shoes wore out in a year, but my sister-in-law still wears the slippers.
hooser
5mo ago
If it's not about praising him, can you explain to me why the sentence "TracingWoodgrains was right" is so important to you?
I can't speak for OliveTapanade, but for myself: it's important because it means that Trace remains a trusted source. I have read his stuff and interacted with him online for years now, and he remains a nuanced thinker and a careful reporter who holds himself to a higher standard of journalism than many professionals. I therefore continue to place high trust in Trace's reports, and I continue to value his analyses for their thoughtfulness even when I reach a different conclusion.
hooser
5mo ago
All your examples present the idea of various sensory technology whose use is so seamless it feels both natural and unobtrusive. I agree on this: if one needs (or wants) to use sensor technology, seamless is better than clunky; and if one needs (or wants) to have continual or immediate access to the sensor technology, then it's hard to imagine something more seamless than an a permanent augmentation that your brain fully adapts to.
Our disagreement rests on all those ifs. I have far more senses than I have attention, and my attention is very limited and therefore precious. I spend more time trying to minimize sensory input than augment it. I'm not just talking about earplugs and blindfolds for when I try to rest. Like, filtering out background noise when I talk to someone. Ignoring visual distractions when I read.
Do I really want to add ultrasound sense? Why, what am I going to do with that information? And do I need that info with continual or immediate access, all the time, to justify an implant?
By the way, you can totally do that with current technology: take a hearing aid, set it to receive ultrasound. You'd still need to use some of your actual senses for receiving the input, like taking those ultrasound waves and translating them down to normal hearing range. That will unfortunately interfere with you hearing the usual sounds, and if you don't want that, you can use some of your less-used senses. Like, have it be a vibrating butt-plug or something. I'm sure one can train the brain to distinguish different vibration pitches after a while.
hooser
5mo ago
That's a responsible use of AI as a tool to refine your thinking and communication. I place that in the same bucket as using spellcheck or a calculator. Similarly, I would not expect a disclosure of the tool's use.
hooser
6mo ago
Can I bring back semi-historical figures? Because I would love to bring back Saul of Tarsus (aka Saint Paul), Judas Iscariot, and Jesus of Nazareth, and have them simultaneously do the talk-show/podcast circuit to promote their various new books:
- "The Art of Sacred Sass"
- "Kiss & Tell"
- "Loaves and Fishes: a Cook Book"
hooser
7mo ago
How very Confucian:
The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.” Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”
Yes, this reflects badly on Biden as US President, and by extension on the Democratic Party. Giving such an unprecedently-broad pardon to his own son--prior to sentencing--is hypocritical on so, so many levels. And yet, one of my favorite Borges short story is the Three Versions of Judas:
"God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas."
hooser
7mo ago
Glad you brought up Richelieu. In the book, he and Milady are aptly juxtaposed because of these very qualities: smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, and seeking power. The difference is that Richelieu (for the most part) uses that accumulated power to make the state of France strong, while Milady (when not kept on a tight leash) uses it to pursue her own passions, including murder and revenge. That is Milady's one ultimately-fatal flaw: whatever her intelligence and talents, she ultimately serves her baser instinct. It's what makes her such great villain, while Cardinal Richelieu is merely an antagonist who aptly pursues goals contrary to whose of the protagonists.
She's not exactly portrayed as a role model by Dumas.
Exactly: Dumas develops her as a villain, not an anti-hero. And as a villain, she is absolutely the tops. She has her own clearly developed story arc. She has a great back story. She grows as a character. Her resourcefulness gets developed and revealed and stages. By the time of the "boss fight" scene, the reader really believes that it indeed takes four musketeers and a professional executioner to finally kill her. All that, and the only time she lifts a weapon is to pretend to wound herself.
Men hate when women characters like this are empowered.
You know, I have never met a man who likes the Dumas books but was incensed that too much time gets devoted to this Milady character, or how it's bullshit that she's so powerful. Dumas chose to devote many more chapters to Milady. The chapters about her mission to kill the Duke of Buckingham are from her point of view. Dumas published the chapters serially, a lot of his readers were men, and I take it as evidence that he responded as much to popular demand as he did to his own creative urges.
I mean, how much more empowered can a character get? The Duke, forewarned by a lucky fluke, captures Milady, imprisons her, puts an incorruptible guard over her. In a few short days, she not only gets that guard to help her escape, but to carry out her ultimate mission: kill the Duke. I mean, damn! that's Power!
That observation is a very useful starting place. When I find myself in a similar confusion, I try to switch my perspective to a more traditional view by imagining it involving my kin. Like: "What would I want to do to the guy who did this to my 18-year-old daughter?"
If a guy uploaded to pornhub a realistic sleazy deep-fake porn with my daughter's image and distributed the link within my community, I'd be contemplating the percussion sound of a baseball bat striking his kneecap.
Now that I have an anchor to my reaction, I can explore its possible reasons.
The modern US culture is (broadly) a culture of dignity, where "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is an aspirational ideal. If I aspire to this ideal for myself and my hypothetical 18-year-old daughter, then the sleazy deep-fake porn is "words" that I and my daughter ought not allow to hurt us. We would then treat the incident as we would one where someone created a fake Linked-In account for my daughter, or a controversial blog post written in my daughter's name, or if someone hacked my daughter's Twitter account and posted some unsavory tweets in her name.
In a culture of dignity, I would assume that my daughter's dignity cannot truly be compromised by something she didn't do (in this case: make a sleazy porn video). I would understand the need to correct the record--have pornhub take down the video, issue a clarification within our community --and I would regard that task as an annoyance.
However, underneath that culture-of-dignity veneer lurk centuries of cultures of honor. It doesn't take much for me to get into that mindset. By creating the deepfake porn and distributing it among my community, the guy compromised my daughter's honor--altered for the worse her reputation among my community--and by extension he compromised my honor. Swift baseball-to-the-kneecap plus spreading the word about the retribution is pure restorative justice.
(But what if the guy didn't distribute the deepfake? Like, what if I found it by browsing his laptop? The threat of distribution is there. So my gut response is to get immediately angry and see that he erases the video and promises never to do that again. Presumably, if I am browsing the guy's laptop, the guy is part of my community and I will have social levers to ensure compliance.)
The question is then: what culture does my community have?
If it's Blue Tribe PMC: my daughter's reputation will rise by spreading word about (a) her stoic response to someone's attempt at reducing her dignity, (b) our levelheaded pursuit of legal means of redress, and even (c) our high-brow discussions on why our culture regards sex as shameful in the first place.
If it's Red Tribe Appalachia: out comes the baseball bat.
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