kky
1mo ago
Well elaborated. Thank you!
I agree with most of what you’ve said, so I’ll just riff on a few of the differences or gaps.
In my mind, part of what’s great about kids is spending time with them. That loving, intimate relationship is hard to get outside of family, and it’s built up through closeness and time, just like in a marriage. And while some of that time is spent in obligations, like the family dinner (not always thrilling, always very important), it’s good to spend time together doing something you both enjoy. Playing, in short. Much of my closeness with my own father - and we are very close, I have sought and followed his guidance on some of the most important decisions of my life, and I’ve independently directed myself at considerable expense to bring me physically close to him so that he can stay in my own life and so I can care for him as he ages - comes from the time we spent together in my youth, playing in all kinds of ways, and talking about the world, and learning all number of things. That time was deeply worthwhile, and I’m trying to raise my daughter (more on the way, God willing) the same way.
At the same time, the parent is obviously not responsible for the child’s entertainment, but instead their wellbeing. (My dad: “If someone complains that they’re bored, I can’t help but think: you really have no imagination, do you?”) And what’s best for the child is that they have plenty of places to find whatever they want and need outside of you, such as from themselves. The love of a parent doesn’t need to be smothering and all-encompassing to be felt. It just needs to be warm and present.
And I have a great time with my toddler, and play with her plenty, and leave her to others plenty, or to her own devices, and by the measures I value she seems to be growing up well indeed. Couldn’t be happier.
kky
1mo ago
The Western World and Japan, George Sansom. At some point I’ll have to write a review on it.
kky
1mo ago
Free markets
I suspect the reason free markets took so long to catch on is that the most valuable commodity in human history does not respond particularly well to free markets - namely, annual staple crops.
An ideal free market good is fungible and does not spoil, easy to transport, and has flexible supply and demand. Excess goods on the market can be absorbed through lower prices and reduced production, while deficiencies spur increased production through higher prices, resulting in rapid recalibration towards efficient prices for the good.
Staple crops are obviously not like this at all. They spoil fairly rapidly if overproduced (mostly through pests eating them), and excess food is worthless at any price - a person can really only carry so much fat on them. Meanwhile, underproduction is a literal life-and-death affair, and bringing the goods to market a few months late is going to be less profitable, because everyone involved is dead. To reap crops you need to sow them well in advance, and even when you do, you really have very little control over what is produced (good year? Bad year? Who knows?). Even with all that in mind, most people are self-producing anyway, so the “market” would only be skilled labor and up, which is what, under 10% of the population? Finally, they’re really not efficient to transport on anything but a boat, and even then it’s somewhat risky and therefore expensive business.
So the right model for staple crops is a lot less free market and a lot more risk mitigation. Most of that risk mitigation is decentralized, but central authorities were very interested in helping out, like the Roman dole or the Egyptian granaries. Either way, there’s more demand for theory on agriculture, harvests, and models of good and bad kingship than for free markets, and that’s exactly what we get for most of history.
It’s only once advances in European sail coincide with the durable products of flexible industrial manufacturing to create new centers of value that the free market becomes a more relevant abstraction, and just at that point, the theory emerges to explain why merchant powers are dominating the old land-bound interests. C’est la vie. (I’m sure the spice trade factors in too.)
kky
1mo ago
This is a reasonable explanation, although I think it buries the lede just a little - the real premise being covered over is the “free men.” Their implicit ability to join or foil any particular military action is reigned in their explicit vote. And for some reason that legal fiction persists under the extreme authority of the paterfamilias! Why would the vote not be delegated to him? In an abstract sense, it seems very practical, but apparently it was not in the running.
On the flip side, the Japanese had military service as a sort of corvee labor in the distant past, for suppressing the natives still on the islands. But at a much later point, during the warring states period, the increasing militarism of the region percolated down to the farm level and generated a system of “farmer samurai” (or really, petty barons) who would mobilize independent of lords. That could have been a turning point for the vote, as the prerequisites are in place, but the warlord Toyotomi established a rule forbidding farmers from owning swords or sword-owners from farming. But the question there is: why was he able to make that rule? Only because it did not particularly offend anyone’s sensibilities - because for the most of them, they didn’t particularly want autonomy and the vote it would imply.
Culture is a hell of a thing. Probably you’re right that something akin to the free association of warriors was central to the old Indo-Europeans, maybe as an expression of the liberty and power of horse-ownership, but the fascinating thing is how powerfully that sentiment has persisted. I have a feeling that culture is the great unexplained, because nebulous and unmeasurable, factor of history, and the genius who finally cracks it open to even elementary analysis will gain superb explanatory power over the past. So far I’ve only read one book which attempts this with any seriousness, but the author admits his own limitations and wisely stops before doing anything too foolish…
kky
1mo ago
I’m not sure voting was ever really common in the East. At minimum, I can’t think of any instances of it in Japanese history at all. Even now, the vote is more of a bellwether than an actual mechanism for decision-making. When the Meiji architects of modern Japan were selecting their political system, once they had decided on a democracy (because it was the best-recognized on the global stage at the time), and specifically a constitutional monarchy for obvious reasons, they spent the rest of the time searching for a system that would nevertheless keep power in the hands of the elite (themselves) and settled on the Diet of the Prussian Junkers.
If I had to offer a guess - Japanese culture hates open confrontation, and has done since essentially forever. The early Chinese-inflected system of ministers from Heian and earlier was somewhat ornamental, and the real decisions got made behind closed doors in private tea ceremonies and the like. One of my favorite little scenes from Japanese cinema is in Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, in a council of war. Everyone of importance is sitting on their dedicated cushion in highly regulated order of importance from the lord, who heads the affair from a raised platform. They speak in turn, paying superlative respect to their master in precisely flowery language, offering alternatives and arguments with all the structure and stiffness of a five-paragraph essay. Finally, the lord speaks, and with a few laconic phrases dictates his will and the plan of action. Of course, the real planning happened the previous evening after dinner, with the generals talking it over in casual language while simply standing in a circle, at which point they assigned roles for the next day’s performance.
Communal decisions, certainly. People need to be pointed in one direction to make progress, and they need to agree to align. But voting is notably visible and combative. Two sides need to make their case in public, and it really is win or lose. People who worry about losing the election start doing dangerous and erratic things. There’s no polite and mutually congenial resolution available, except through the ritual mercy of the victors. Of course non-voting has its faults too, but voting is far from a human universal - why is it then so popular in Europe?
kky
1mo ago
For hiring an FTE, keep in mind that you are typically on the hook for all the fun things like healthcare and retirement plans that you never see the costs of as an employee. Those can run hideously expensive. It’s possible to hire someone under the table, but there are risks associated because it is quite literally illegal.
I looked into nanny costs, and in my state, it really isn’t $20/hr. And this is true for most affluent states, to the best of my knowledge. A good daycare built around a tight-knit and inherently somewhat exclusive community will almost always run you cheaper, like the church-associated ones that others have mentioned. (I saved significant cash going from 3/wk to 5/wk from a downmarket nanny to one such daycare.) I think the arbitrage is way less than your instincts are telling you.
kky
1mo ago
If you have time for an addendum, I’d be interested in hearing what your wife has to say, since it sounds like she was doing the lion’s (lioness’s?) share of the in-person raising. Or not! Might be wrong on my read.
For instance, mine gets a lot of mileage out of the library, playgrounds, stroller walks with friends, pretty much anything where she can chat with other women and let children be children.
kky
1mo ago
I mean, for Scott I empathize that he’s dealing with toddlers right now. They’re the perfect mix of capacities and incapacities for demanding hands-on intervention. They climb on things, get into things, scream for attention… obviously they spend some time playing quietly by themselves or napping, and you can get some things done with them around, but it’s a sharp curve when they graduate from immobility to crawling to walking to climbing!
Overall it’s not bad, but it would be worse without other people to help around. I don’t really know what his full circumstances are like, but caring for a toddler more or less solo for a full day, no friends or family around to hang out with, is pretty rough. It’s always best when you can be communal, and for deracinated Bay Area sorts, that’s what you get all the time.
So I have a little more pity. There are things money can’t buy.
kky
1mo ago
Extreme emotional lability, or rather, all over the place. Consider the extreme positive affect and the sudden cold feet as expressions of the same flaw. Best to stay away if she can’t even keep herself together.
You did the right thing by staying firm and stable. Don’t let that kind of woman suck you into her aberrant emotionality. And, like many things, dating sucks until it doesn’t.
kky
1mo ago
Why ask the internet about generalities instead of going to an orientation for the actual and specific schools in your area? Even if the information you get here is absolutely statistically true, it means jack all if your schools buck the trend in some fashion.
Yes, this is racist - about schools, not people. You’re in a position to judge them on the contents of their characters, and instead are asking strangers to judge them by the colors you believe will be on their students. Morality, who cares; but why are you hamstringing yourself?
kky
1mo ago
Presumably because of demand. As I figure, the HOA is basically a way of forcibly excluding people who can’t “fit in” with the community or follow the rules. Reading in between the lines, that was what was going on in this case, as in, classic bullying. Probably the people trying to force defendant to fit in were a real mess of busybodies, obviously, as they brought a dumb case to court, but this is the function here.
In a more sympathetic case, imagine a family moved in who left rusting cars on the lawn and other obnoxious but not quite illegal things that nobody of your class or background would do. How do you make them stop? I know a lot of the people here are libertarians, principled or otherwise, but the average Joe ain’t and would rather keep those families out, or else coloring within the lines. Personally I don’t empathize and enjoy my freedom more, but I get that’s a rarity overall.
And apparently HOAs are overall popular. People like em. Or at least, they aren’t the kind of radioactive that would stop people buying these properties, even with the very obvious downsides, and encourage developers to not enforce them. I know revealed preferences is a meme, but it seems to apply here.
Relating this out. I’ve seen a lot of people on this forum arguing pretty directly for a shared US culture. Well, the HOA feels exactly like what’s being asked for here - an association that punishes deviance with process, and upholds normalcy. Japan is a pretty culturally centralized place, and from what I hear from my friends there, pretty much every little village and neighborhood has its own little HOA (micro-local government). They organize things like who goes to sweep out the graveyard, sure, but also make certain nobody gets too far out of line, in that distinctive passive-aggressive but unmistakably Japanese way. And I think of that, and of the fuck-you American spirit, and it makes me laugh a little. Conformists are allowed their little liberties here, but why think they’re remotely popular? An American will only subject himself to banding together once he’s exhausted the alternatives for keeping the undesirables out.
(This is ignoring the little associations that are just about funding shared resources, like an HOA that pays for the community pool. Those have a straightforward reason to be.)
kky
1mo ago
I guess your point on romantic signaling is probably true, though I hate signaling and reflexively oppose the position on principle.
But I actively disagree that the most important thing is to push moneymaking degrees, on a couple of points.
First, the whole degree-to-job pipeline is overrated. The degree is a proxy for, roughly, intelligence, and as long as you have the real meat you will be able to leverage the actual work. (This is my life story. Started in humanities and trivially switched to work in STEM. I’ll admit software makes this easy.)
Second, while cash obviously matters, I think the most important thing is to learn wisdom and be a good and broad-based parent to your children. This is what my parents were to me. And while I decry the sorry shape of the liberal arts in universities, the actual subject I consider paramount. So rather than just add work training for women, I think bringing refinement and rigor back to the degrees would be better. (And helping people who have no business being in college get out. That’s another topic.)
kky
1mo ago
You’re right about divorce as a path for extremely cynical women. If I were writing about the man’s perspective, this comes front and center. He’s devoting so much of his life to her! What if she just takes it from him, with the blessing of the courts? It’s genuinely unsettling. But, in that other hypothetical post, I wouldn’t be talking about cads. I don’t think (or hope) my audience is cads, or people interested in cads, and the same goes for the female equivalent.
Divorce is honestly another point of risk for an honest woman, just like it is for an honest man. Risk hitting your mid-thirties with no loyal man, and either no children or worse - children? It’s kind of awful to think about. But the post was already meandering a little for my tastes.
Yes, of course I agree a man needs standards. I have standards, and I insisted my wife meet them (kindly and firmly in the dating stage - and no, not about petty things like how I wanted my breakfast cooked).
But that doesn’t undercut the fact that what underwrites those standards is a man’s reliability and character. I’ve been performing a little personal ethnography on this forum, and in my own life, and the men who are happily married tend to be extraordinarily solid and secure in their opinions, thoughtful and caring about women’s perspectives (NOT a dogwhistle for mainstream feminism), and with a great focus on their own ability to be trusted. And this is something that good women, women who clearly enjoy the high opinions of their husbands and of me (should I meet them), deeply desire.
Anyway. I don’t think women have greater risks in dating, or that men do, for that matter. I tend to agree that the risks are mostly around discerning good from bad, and that’s hairy both ways. But learn good from bad one must do, or at least learn the methods of getting wiser friends to help, if one wishes to make anything of oneself. But I’m sympathetic to your worries, and hope you find a woman who allows you to lay them aside.
kky
1mo ago
What kind of woman does that? Would you consider her in your league? In the college league?
Besides, this was advice for reproducing, not dating. Dating advice is a different kettle of fish.
kky
1mo ago
If you have a woman who you’re dating who is a good candidate, learning to trust her goes a long way, and trusting yourself the rest. “Learning to trust” is not an abstract journey of the soul. Select things to trust her, and yourself, on, and see how they go when things get hairy. Stressful situations are effective here!
Buyer beware: I’m not recommending a good time, here.
kky
1mo ago
Baby boom was in a sense a last gasp. Huge wealth changes the equation. But it was the specific experiences of the baby boom that sparked feminism; when second-wave feminists deride the life of the housewife, they are and can only be specifically talking about the baby boom housewife. Daughters saw what life was like for their mothers, and they wanted out. You can’t declare feminism as a premise; feminism was, like any social movement, a reaction to prevailing conditions. Those conditions were, first, the Victorian era and second, the baby boom.
The advice is distilled from my own life and my successful friends and coworkers, who are by and large married and with or currently having children. It’s not advice on how to get laid, or how to attract women initially (I have opinions but consider it besides the point), but how to convert a relationship into a companionable and loving marriage with children, which is what I consider valuable. Take it or leave it, I guess.
kky
1mo ago
I’m interested in your view on how the quality of men and women has gone down, and as a treat, why. If I were to give a description, I’d say that the lowered quality was literally that they weren’t interested in making things work, rather than separate elements. That sort of intentional, serious attitude towards life is basically what you want out of a partner as table stakes, right? That they’ll have the hard fights with you and want to get through them instead of taking them out on you, that they’ll commit materially sooner rather than later, that they’ll stick with you if things aren’t breezy. Obviously material concerns matter too, but people (in my circle, maybe unrepresentative) make plenty if they’re even slightly dedicated. What’s your take?
kky
1mo ago
Downthread, in the discussion on cheating in college and the decay of institution, @hydroacetylene brought up a frequent topic: is the college-to-work pipeline good for society and for women? Rather than the high-level moral or strategic view, I wanted to look more at the countervailing forces here. Even assuming that early family formation is good, desirable, and pleasant for women compared to schooling, why would they choose college? Not to bury the lede: I think it’s risk mitigation.
A woman’s life is, not to an infinite extent but nevertheless to a great extent based around vulnerability. She is especially vulnerable to men, who are stronger than her and yet want something from her. A man who wants something from her more than he cares about her is not a curiosity but an active threat. Even if no such threat manifests, her very nature makes her vulnerable. A pregnant woman, or a new mother, is incredibly dependent on those around her. If any part of that support should go away, she could be in serious trouble. Women’s life strategies, unsurprisingly, center around mitigating these risks.
These strategies fall into two major camps: finding a center for her protection and support, and making damn certain that she has excellent control over that center. (For men this is simple: he is his own center of protection and support, always. Everything else is just a fallback for extenuating circumstances, or part of his larger ambitions.)
For her center, a woman can choose, in essence, a man, an institution, or herself. For herself, she will obviously be unable to reproduce. This is a fallback, the spinster’s last resort. No more needs be said. An institution is impersonal and uncharitable, but (say) a widow will find it tolerable, and she has some modicum of control. If she follows the rules, support will not be retracted. So what is preventing her choosing a man? Her lack of control over him.
Men are famously fickle. A man will sing a woman’s praises to the moon, and maybe even believe himself, and vanish as soon as he gets some. He will spend the family’s money on dice or drinks. He will say that whatever he earns is his by right, and ignore the duty he has towards the flower he plucked in the prime of her life in an explicit contract to care for her forever (till death do we part). Even if he is one of the rare, dutiful ones, his simple preferences become domineering imperatives, and you have to think on every one: is this worth fighting over, if he might just leave? To say all men are cads is to go too far. But there are cads out there, and their attentions are disastrous.
(I know women who have had their men: get fired and refuse to work, get addicted to painkillers and refuse to work, allow their mother to browbeat their wife, and support an entire separate family in another country, off the top of my head. I also know women who have had loving husbands with no problems who are in old age. But would you want to simply gamble on the outcome here?)
So what women need is leverage. Historically this was twofold: the highly salient and important labor they performed, and their tight bonds with their (and their man’s) immediate community. For reference, before modern textile production, a woman would quite literally make the clothes on her husband’s back and the food he ate. Were he to get them elsewhere, they would be much more expensive and less tailored to him. This makes any argument inherently easier for the wife to win. He depends on her, too. Meanwhile, if he were to stray, her connections to the local wives, perhaps including her own parents and his, or moral leaders like a priest, would allow her to bring wide-ranging pressures down upon him. Or, say, if he were to romance her but fall short of his duty to propose to her, a brief word between their fathers would end in a joyous wedding officiated by shotgun. I’m not trying to imply the distant past was a glorious feminist utopia, but these were to the best of my knowledge the mechanisms of women’s power back then.
Woman’s work was eviscerated by the Industrial Revolution, and her community was shattered by the car. Bluntly, there is nothing coarse and material that a housewife can offer a man in this day and age which he cannot get for an acceptable amount of his own money. Food and cleaning are trivial, and the only real limitation on sex is whether porn is sufficient (it generally is). The only things she can offer are on a more sophisticated or higher plane, like the abstract of a continued legacy through childcare or loving intimacy and affection. These are important, but have a lower valence than the material, meaning that the man’s opinion is dramatically privileged. And in a postwar suburb of friendly acquaintances, in and out of the house on errands and excursions, there’s nobody to drop in on and talk to and organize with - and even if there were, why would the man not simply get in his own car and leave to find those who “understand“ him better? As the last nail in the coffin, the pill and the Sexual Revolution deny women even their power over sex. If it’s pleasurable and has no risk, what right does she have to demand that her man do something in exchange - except pay as her john? With pregnancy on the table, it’s obvious: he risks what she does, together with her. But without, it’s harder to argue the obvious truth that she is risking time, because he does not have the same pressure to make the most of the flower of youth.
This is the foundation of our current moment, and given the premises women choose independence. They do not perceive a reasonable alternative by which they can have a marriage where they are respected and equal. The life plan changes accordingly, and becomes: go to college (to protect you in your most vulnerable and desirable period and increase your status and the treatment you can demand), take a job with a good healthcare plan (including maternity leave), find a man who sticks with you for several years (while you are on the pill, and proving he is not a cad), and finally, around 30, get married to a man you TRUST to support you and your children. Of course, this costs a huge amount of time and money, but it’s more palatable than taking a dive for the first schmuck on the street with no good way out. (And even if he is a good man, get stuck in a suburban home near HIS job with an infant or two and an absolute dearth of friends to see during working hours and little sense of what you’re really bringing to the table. At that point, why not just get a job working alongside other ladies and stick the kids in daycare?)
So that’s my analysis. College is just a means here; if it were not available, women would go for anything else that could protect them, probably an employer. The problem for women is that they feel like the whole deal is raw, that they’re going to struggle to get a man who works for them and supports them and who they can influence. Unless they feel their own power in their own relationships, they will scrabble for every edge they can get. If you want to fix this on a personal level, as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily. As a woman - can’t comment with quite so much authority, but valuing men for their private (i.e. directed at you) virtue over their public (i.e. abstract and status-seeking) virtue might help. On the societal level, focus less on pushing women into childrearing and more on pulling. What are the advantages? How do they mitigate risk? And what’s in it for them, on a practical and day to day sense?
Long-term I feel this will shake out. Men and women who figure out how to bond and partner quickly and effectively will be aspirational and fruitful, and they will be the new model. But for those of us alive now, I think it helps to be intentional about our own lives.
Interested in the opinions of married mothers on this (I think we have a few). I’m a happily married father, so I have some insight, but it’s all third person to me.
kky
3mo ago
Interesting - I do think there's a pretty major intermediate step of using static analysis-type processing to control the excesses of AI, and worldinfo is a plausible first step. But that lack of real memory just keeps coming back and kicking any in-depth efforts right in the teeth.
Probably a good place to stop this particular conversation, but not before Claude updates. It's still at Mt Moon, but there have been some interesting developments (timeline:
- It almost got out of Mt Moon! Unfortunately, then it died.
- After dying, it managed to convince the oversight layer ("Critique Claude") that there's a secret passage to Cerulean City that skips going through Mt Moon, and all it needs to do is find it. Now both AIs are convinced that this is the one way forward.
- But the only way to get to that secret passage is by dying again. So it's trying to black out on wild Zubats in Mt Moon to reach Terabithia or something.
- Now that it's converted to Gnosticism, it doesn't need any knowledge of the world of the Demiurge. So it's been scrubbing data out of its memory banks in favor of the holy book "black_out_strategy".
- At some point it managed to crash its internal tooling. This hasn't helped matters.
This is absolute peak comedy. Somehow the AI has managed to go completely nuts, seduce its parole officer, and start a death cult. We're not even past the linear part of the game yet!
kky
3mo ago
I've seen things... cough you people wouldn't believe...
LOL
fun exercises in tard wrangling
Is that a full TTRPG campaign set up for an LLM to execute on? How well does that work, and how extensive can it get? Is there some kind of external scaffolding for selecting things like random events, or does it have the capacity to toss all the events together in memory and then select? How long does it go before it totally loses the plot? (Maybe not an appropriate Culture War Roundup topic, but w/e.)
I considered playing around with some of that stuff a while back but I just couldn't justify the costs to myself. It's interesting, but so are a lot of other things that are WAY cheaper (and I'm at this point morally opposed to interfacing with large companies if I can at all help it). If cost-to-performance comes massively down over the next decade, maybe I'll try a local model off a reasonably priced GPU. Otherwise, idk, it's cool hearing stories.
kky
3mo ago
The primary question was whether conflicts in Japan can be classified as ethnic. If you want a definition, here you are: coethnics recognize themselves as the same "kind" of people. An ethnic conflict is a struggle between mutually recognized "kinds," where the direct competition between the "kinds" is driving everything involved. The groups in conflict will directly reference the underlying cultural or genetic differences (especially material) in identifying the group they oppose. Think slurs here.
The modal ethnic conflict is Israel/Palestine: two self-identified groups competing over specific territory and resources. When one wins, they move the other off the territory entirely. When they win they enforce their cultural habits and obliterate the practices of the losers in any ways they care about.
I'd go so far as to say that NO internal Japanese conflict maps to that, except the conflicts with the barbarians, which the Japanese very explicitly labeled as a conflict between their "kind" and the barbarian "kinds." (Maybe the stuff with the Christians could be labeled as an abortive ethnogenesis.) Japanese conflicts are typically one of the following: jockeying for position under an accepted sovereign power; attempting to overthrow the sovereign power; attempting to create an independent hierarchy parallel to the sovereign power (this never worked outside of the Sengoku period; they all got cleaned up and subdued by the start of the Edo period). One group of elite warriors fights another, vassalage agreements are reordered, anyone who doesn't fit in gets killed, and the village headman starts paying taxes to someone new.
You know what doesn't happen? The people of Satsuma expelling farmers from the outskirts of Kumamoto and settling the territory, destroying the local art and buildings and replacing it with their own. The Japanese do that to the barbarians, sure, but not to each other. Therefore, not an ethnic conflict.
What I would argue, though, is that regardless of whether we think the word 'ethnicity' is appropriate or not, historically Japan has been often divided, and people from different parts of Japan understood themselves to be meaningfully different to one another - certainly to the point of fiercely conflicting with one another.
Only somewhat true. Let's start from prehistory and round dates aggressively:
- 300 AD - 500 AD: probably interfamilial conflicts; largest one is plausibly between followers of Amaterasu and Susanoo (roughly corresponding to the people who followed the coast of Honshu to the south and north respectively out of Kyuushuu). Result of that conflict was that both sides apparently agreed to live with one another, and the winners badmouthed Susanoo in their myths.
- 500 - 650: no notable internal wars.
- 650 - 675: coups, major government reform.
- 700 - 1150: no notable internal wars. Samurai emerge in this period; alternately fight barbarians and one another (for stewardship of outlying farmland, e.g. Tokyo area, in the name of Kyoto nobles). You may not believe it, but Japan is not especially martial up to this point. Their manpower generation is feeble; their political elite doesn't know how to fight; they have a huge problem with half-trained thugs working for Buddhist monasteries extorting the capital (until someone figures out that samurai have been invented and bring a couple dozen home to clean house).
- 1150 - 1200: major civil war between samurai over who gets to take the government from the nobles.
- 1200 - 1300: no notable internal wars. Government gets its legitimacy from fairly judging disagreements between samurai and precluding violence.
- 1300 - 1400: comedy of errors. Starts with an imperial succession crisis; in the middle of that, a notable general decides he wants to become shogun. He succeeds, but totally loses control of the country. Succession crisis continues for some fifty years in the meantime. Finally the grandson of the shogun gets the country mostly together, but now Japan is more like the Holy Roman Empire than it was before: lots of petty princes.
- 1400 - 1450: intermission.
- 1450 - 1600: the show continues. Warlords get mad at one another and decide to cage match in Kyoto, burning it down in the process. (Shogun lives there.) Rest of the country falls to pieces. 21st-century crews descend to film the bulk of the country's historical dramas. Finally a warlord manages to reunite Japan, then gets assassinated when he really would rather not have. His lieutenants have a cold war, one of them dies of natural causes first, the other wins the following hot war, and installs himself as shogun. Most lords are his direct vassals, and get reorganized into being more like corporate salarymen (with mandatory relocations!), and the rest are kept on a tight leash. Christians are exterminated.
- 1600 - 1850: no notable internal wars. Country mostly closed for renovations.
- 1850 - 1875: foreign influence forces country to open. Ambitious retainers of the independent lords decide that this is their chance. They swiftly take the country over and industrialize.
- 1900 - present: no notable internal wars.
So, adding that up, when was it divided? Maybe in prehistory, but if we start from the appearance of writing, we have around 600 years of general unity with a single period of civil war oriented around who gets to lead the government. Following the appearance of samurai, things get a lot more spotty, but there's a couple of unified governments, and even in the rough times nobody is arguing that one cultural subcategory of Japan should exterminate another. Still, from 1150-1600, you have about 150 years of unity and 300 years of disunity. Following that, you have one (1) more internal war (which I will overestimate as 25 years of serious internal instability) in the 400 years leading to the present and otherwise total unity.
Across this time period, although I have no idea what is sufficient in your eyes to be "meaningfully different" - perhaps it's the Edo-period complaint that the Kantou or Kansai eat their noodles like fucking animals, perhaps not - no people in Japan felt their "meaningful differences" were good reason to start a war. Directly competing ambitious elites certainly had a reason to start wars with one another, and did so frequently, but just as frequently took vassals and intermarried and felt no particular need to enforce one way of producing miso over another. That was the concern of peasants, after all.
The thing that irks me about your initial comment isn't that it implies Japan was ever violent. Certainly it was violent! Certainly there was great discord and strife! Coethnicity is no panacea against human conflict. The second story in Genesis is about someone killing his very brother. What irks me is that it seems to be based on a definition of "ethnic" that has no meaningful subject, or else is based on a representation of Japanese history which is not reflected in reality. The reality of Japanese history, and Japanese conflict, is something I've found deeply interesting, and it has its roots in petty court intrigues and the powerful and chaotic dynamics of feudal vassalage. But there is no ethnic side to these conflicts, and they do not need an ethnic side to be interesting. Trying to color them as ethnic loses the real hue of that history, which is what changes as conflicts cease to be feudal and begin to be ethnic - which, incidentally, is a good description of what happened over the course of the Napoleonic Wars.
kky
3mo ago
Outfits: (For each character their current clothing and underwear.)
and underwear
This site needs emojis for shit like this. Text doesn't do it justice.
Hobbyists have no shame.
Yeah, I hope nobody tells them about worldinfo or something. I'm still convinced the median /g/oon still has the median researcher's ass handily beat wrt "prompt engineering". Arguably this is a testament to how powerful a tool SillyTavern is, but afaik every feature has been initially conceived and pitched by the community anyway.
It looks like they actually implemented something similar to what I was talking about earlier - I watched Claude sit and churn for a while after it left Pewter, moving all information about that city into long-term memory (with explicit tags!) and clearing up local information. It's now back in Mt Moon, so we'll see whether this has made it more effective at navigation. What it's definitely doing is taking meaningful and extended "clock cycles" to manage - so this kind of improvement is definitely not free or cheap at present implementation/with present models.
Very cool tool from WorldInfo. I like the idea of bringing word definitions into context transparently based on the prompt.
I expect that wouldn't change much, arguably it'd make it get lost even more, at least now it seems to have a fairly clear objective in mind (beat children defeat gyms), which it can even translate into lower-level "tasks" like navigating routes.
Besides, the minimal prompting seems to be the point; from my understanding the dev is unwilling to hold Claude's hand any more than necessary and he wishes to see how it holds up on its own, even if it takes it days to get out of every stupid loop he gets stuck in. I wish I had unlimited credit think it's dumb, even with crutches to streamline progression and break loops this would still be pretty interesting to watch, but oh well.
Yeah, watching the money burn is a little eye-watering, but I appreciate how seriously the guy seems to take it. He seems to have known from the start that it wasn't going to be a magical success, but wants to see what it takes to get it working. I'm here for that. My only complaints are: there's no summary of where it's been/what it's done (so I can't track progress easily) and there's no export of the knowledge base over time to show what it's learned. Getting to read the knowledge base would be incredibly interesting.
kky
3mo ago
In contrast to the previous comment, I DO disagree. Japan's only ethnic groups are the Yamato and the pre-Yamato "barbarians" (and the Ryuukyuuans, although those were annexed much later and are not in the main archipelago).
The Yamato did historically understand themselves to be one people organized under the priesthood of the Imperial family, which performed a yearly ritual to ensure good rice harvests for all. They used one language, with various dialects - similar to the way most languages work, like English. They shared an overwhelming proportion of their material culture and religion (local cults and the abortive Christian movement notwithstanding). For multiple extended periods of Japanese history they were united under central rulership, although in earlier centuries this was pretty distant rulership.
Modeling Japanese conflict as regional is nonsensical - the better model would be family (or clan) conflict, with only a few interesting exceptions like the militant Buddhists around Osaka during the Sengoku period (or the rising of the farmer-samurai, same period). The closest thing I can think of to a strictly regional conflict was the east-versus-west conflict of the Genpei war - which is, once again, even named after the two families in conflict. The regions in question are mostly important as the places where the warring parties have their farms.
If you want the clearest evidence, consider that every group that succeeded in WINNING one of these conflicts sought out the SAME goal: entitlement to lead the Japanese people, typically as Shogun but in one memorable case as Emperor. (On the small scale, it was the right to rule over a local group of Japanese in a pretty typical Japanese fashion, which is to say with high taxes.)
Your requirements for a given people being "one ethnicity" appear utterly unattainable anywhere. What standard could possibly be met? If there's ever a conflict between two groups, isn't that - from the argument as you have stated it - sufficient proof that these were not coethnics in the first place?
the different states of the Holy Roman Empire were all German
But didn't the people in those states agree that they were German? Or else what was the pan-Germanism movement that arose in response to Napoleon's invasions?
kky
3mo ago
but when spatial navigation is not prompted directly because it is presumed to be implicit in the task
Is this an artifact of the LLM having no side-effects while processing outside of the explicit textual output? e.g. if you tell them to process it explicitly but include that in a sidebar like the <thinking> block, would they have an easier time keeping the anime chicks where they oughta be? Human communication assumes that there's subtext in every conversation, and the deepest part of the subtext is that the other party is thinking and remembering certain things. But there's no equivalent for an LLM.
Actually yeah I believe this is exactly the problem, my experience with purely chat-based MUD-adjacent scenarios has shown that it can barely keep track of even that. Some kind of consistent external state of the world, or at least of the self, seems sorely missing, and the 'knowledge base' doesn't seem to successfully emulate that.
Memory, in other words. And all the hairiness that entails. I wonder why the knowledge base approach seems to have fallen flat. It's a very plausible idea on the surface! If there's too much for me to keep track of, or I'm worried I'll forget the details, the correct solution is to write it down and refer to the notes.
Actually, re-reading the design, it looks like the knowledge base isn't so much like a binder of notes as it is a single post-it note stuck to the screen - Claude doesn't query it deliberately, it apparently gets the entire contents of it shoved into the prompt. Wild! That would explain part of why it's so useless. It's hard to fit anything very detailed in there and means that Claude can't get a new set of "notes" for whatever area/task it's currently attempting to handle.
I'd guess it was given an explicit task - beat the game, which requires completing the objectives, which constrains its focus to the general idea of the game's progression it has from training (see its obsession with Route 5 during the tard yard arc). Exploration is basically you the player exercising agency in ways permitted by the game structure, agency of which Claude has none. Actually I wonder if explicitly prompting something like "beneficial items found in out of the way areas can help in beating trainers by making your mons stronger" would make it get lost even more actually explore.
Yeah, on a strict level Claude can't possibly be agentic, but it could definitely be given a richer set of goals. What if you gave it something open-ended like "Pokemon is a game that children play to explore, befriend Pokemon, and win tough battles. Play this game the way it was meant to be played"? Or, if it needs more hand-holding, "explore the world of Pokemon and defeat the Elite Four"? Although this would only be helpful if it learned from exploring. Otherwise it would find every corner of MOMS_HOUSE as magical as the first time it explored it.
OTOH it's interesting how it doesn't seem to take a step back here and define a meta-strategy, an approach that makes pursuing future goals easier. That comes naturally to humans as a function of learning. Whenever you try doing something new, you play around with it a little first rather than directly attempt to achieve a goal, right? I suspect one reason that this AI doesn't do it is that it's not trained to learn, as it is incapable of learning.
Are you kidding me? You weren’t able to find real numbers, so you asked a system that has a well-known propensity to provide the kind of answers it thinks best match the question. I.e. you got a guesstimate, and you didn’t even bother getting it from a human. Nobody reading your post has gotten any information from it. There is no information there. It’s all just hunches and feelings, all the way down.
I get that you feel there aren’t many good women. Probably there aren’t. But this post makes a claim of objective reality that simply is not substantiated by its contents.
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