problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
There's not too much I can tell you outside of the general info that's been floating around in the news cycle. Don't really have any family members or friends in Indonesia myself, so there's no real inside view to offer on that, and I have pretty much zero stake in Indonesian politics.
As far as I can tell things under Prabowo have been quite tumultuous and uncertain. He was a person that many Indonesians would have been afraid of at some point - during the Suharto era he was a special forces commander that may or may not have been involved in disappearances and killings (I believe he has himself admitted to the kidnappings of democracy activists in 1998), and after that he tried to restyle himself as a strongman candidate, a tactic which saw him losing elections in 2014 and 2019. This election he was able to do better, partially because he softened his image and restyled himself as "gemoy", and partially because he was able to appeal to a large base of young voters who didn't really remember the Suharto days and who cared more about his promises of economic growth and improvements in cost of living than they did his past. Oh and he gained the support of Jokowi.
He has promised 8% economic growth during his first term. There are challenges, though: the tax base he's inherited from Jokowi is one where the budget deficit's capped at 3% of GDP and the debt-to-GDP ratio's capped at 60%, so he has relatively limited room to increase spending. And Jokowi's presidency already reduced spending heavily, leaving little room for him to slash further to fund his objectives. To circumvent these constraints, he wants to elevate the tax-to-GDP ratio to 16% and the revenue-to-GDP ratio to 23%. But he's also ended up inheriting a weak, inward-looking manufacturing sector, crippled by protectionism and riddled with inefficiency, which poses yet another problem for him. So there are a lot of factors that means it isn't very likely he'll ever achieve that lofty goal in the first place. He's been put in a fairly bad situation here, having run on a populist platform which promised ambitious economic growth and big improvements in QoL, but with very few tools to actually make it happen.
His regime has introduced costly programs like an expensive $28 billion free meal programme and created a sovereign wealth fund which ended up not attracting the foreign investment it wanted due to fears of mismanagement. State revenue actually fell during this period, too - so in order to fund his spending, he has had to implement austerity measures and slash many ministerial budgets, and this hit infrastructure as well as other basic services. All of this got investors to panic in March of this year and caused the Jakarta Composite Index to fall by 4%, triggering a trading halt. Worse, the purchasing power of Indonesians has only decreased. So there's been a whole lot of economic uncertainty and upheaval, and then the public start hearing about increases in politicians' housing allowances to 50 million rupiah (about 10 times the Jakarta minimum wage, note this is on top of their already existing salaries). Then the delivery driver gets hit. Suffice to say there are lots of reasons for the rioting.
Now this is all speculation, but a lesser-discussed aspect of all of this is the possible role of politicking in the unrest. Jokowi retains some influence over the police and the AG's office, and the alliance between him and Prabowo seems to be at risk of fracturing. There have been funding conflicts between Jokowi's infrastructure projects like Nusantara and Prabowo's social programs, and Prabowo has possibly been trying to consolidate his power over Jokowi. The two seem locked in a power struggle at the moment - Prabowo has made entreaties to Jokowi's enemies, and has even pardoned them of convictions. And while the police have been harsh on the protestors, the military seem to have been standing by in many cases and at some points even handed out drinks and cash to rioters, which is very strange. It would be very helpful for Prabowo if the police were weakened significantly by this and the military were made to look good. It's not impossible that some of this has been orchestrated or capitalised upon for personal gain.
It'll be interesting to see how all this shakes out.
EDIT: clarified some things
I'm not certain this refutation of qualia's validity as a concept really works unless you also throw out a large portion of commonly-used language, in other words, it proves too much. "Qualia" is just meant to be a descriptive term for a phenomenon that is experienced and individually confirmable. Claims about why qualia arises and whether it is present in someone or something else are unfalsifiable and do not meet the standard for scientific inquiry or analysis, you could argue that debating that is a waste of breath (and I may even agree, actually), but that doesn't invalidate the concept of qualia.
The structure of this argument is kind of like stating that we should discard the concept of "feelings", for the very same reasons why qualia would be invalid. Or any kind of evaluative statement, really; "good", "bad", "immoral". Sometimes we just want to be able to refer to things. People aren't making testable predictions every time they open their mouths, and as such the purpose of language serves functions outside of making such statements. Hell, people even do this in the scientific world - for example debating interpretations of quantum mechanics is a common pastime among physicists, many of which are not testable and do not meet the criteria for science.
The rigor is that you know what pain is, that's the rigor.
Assuming you're not talking to eliminative materialists/illusionists that believe phenomenal consciousness is a complete myth in the first place. "Consciousness don't real" is certainly a take, and I have always wondered if these people are actual, honest-to-God p-zombies.
If I remember correctly it's never explicitly woke, but it fucking sucks. It actually made me yell at the screen multiple times because of how bad the plotting was. Almost all of the characters are utter morons, and the structure of the narrative is awful.
The arcs of the two main characters (Lucy and Maximus) are structured almost like a game, in that the main characters get involved in a whole lot of irrelevant and often stupid sidequests that contribute nothing to the ending - which doesn't work nearly as well when you're operating in a film medium. In addition the characters are hilariously unagentic. They often don't have any control over where they end up, so it feels like they are all just endlessly reacting to what the wasteland throws at them, instead of forging their own path. As a result there's a real lack of direction within the show, and I would say maybe more than half the episodes are unnecessary filler that doesn't directly affect the ending. A huge amount of your time is also spent going over narrative-interrupting flashbacks into the life of a mysterious character called the Ghoul before the bombs dropped. The big reveal that both plotlines build up to is downright nonsensical.
The only plot thread that actually worked for me was Norm's arc, which on paper sounds the least exciting since it all takes place within the confines of the vault. But that subplot actually had a central mystery which was presented in a gripping way, a story which didn't waste much time on random bullshit, and a PoV character who was by far the most agentic, intelligent and likeable character in the show. It was much less bombastic than the main plot following Lucy and Maximus, but it was far more interesting and felt like a completely different person wrote it.
I hail from Kuala Lumpur, but am currently living in Sydney.
Dunno if there's anyone else in this city on this forum, but I have never been attracted to these kinds of Mottizen meetups anyway; I'm awkward as shit around unfamiliar people and would probably make a fool of myself.
I will cop to being a serial breaker of Overton windows. It's really quite hilarious the things people say when one does so
Fellow serial breaker of Overton windows here, and can confirm; I’ve gotten a slew of these insults myself. Most of them I’ve forgotten by now, but one that really sticks in my mind is the time I was called an “incest porn aficionado who roofies women”. I mean fucking Christ lol.
Hell it’s quite noticeable how much even the more charitable descriptions of me conflict with how I actually act. I imagine most of these people would likely find me to be rather good-natured in real life.
I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like.
In contrast to you, I think the ideological reason is very important here - it's not the only problem, but ignoring it brushes over a big part of the picture.
I doubt their explicit goal was to alienate men, but there's an exceptionally female-biased undercurrent behind a lot of Disney's decisions that can't be ignored - see: Star Wars, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, etc. They certainly believed they were regressive franchises that alienated women due to their supposed focus on male characters and upheld harmful stereotypes by failing to depict strong female heroes the way they wanted. As such they were very intent on portraying "powerful and strong women", and creating storylines which preached to men about their supposed privilege and shoved women in their faces which were ostensibly supposed to be admirable but just ended up being odious. Hell they placed ideological messages in media for female audiences too - see: the Snow White reboot. But these narratives are particularly repulsive to men due to the consistent portrayal of them as incompetent, oppressors, or dutiful little allies whose only role within the story is to lift up the strong female Mary Sue. They chose to belittle their male audience instead of appeal to them. You get what you deserve.
I think what happened here is that once they acquired Star Wars and Marvel properties, many of the creatives behind the scenes saw the opportunity created by the fact that these were primarily male-dominated IPs which they could use to incalculate the existing male fanbase into feminism while bringing in a fresh crop of female viewers. They assumed they had a lock on the existing fanbase due to their significant legacy power. When that didn't succeed, and their audience then went on to complain about the fact that they were being forcibly shut out of cultural properties that they were patrons of in the beginning, the answer was always to double down with something along the lines of "If you're not progressive enough to get with the times, you deserve to be alienated. How sad for you to live in a world where men aren't catered to all the time, you misogynist". Then the original audience left and Disney panicked. In practice, they did in fact "alienate them by pandering to girls", and some of that was intentional on Disney's end.
What really gets me is that Disney is actually capable of creating pieces of media that are worth watching if they didn't prioritise progressivism over actually good storytelling (in practice, this does end up being a tradeoff; if you prioritise irrelevant metrics of success, that will sometimes come at the cost of other considerations, especially when it means your main female character might need to fail and be very imperfect in order to be a realistic and relatable character). Andor is a sterling example of this, with a grounded premise, nuanced character writing and believable portrayals of the banal nature of evil that resonated with mostly everyone. Disney's not entirely incompetent and are actually capable of creating properties that cater to the original fanbase, they have just chosen not to in favour of other considerations due to heavy ideological capture.
Until they learn to stop doing this and openly issue a grovelling apology for the last decade, I hope they keep losing their male audience. Vote with your feet.
Do you have any local cryptids that haven't worked their way up to the national stage? Do you think they have a plausible natural explanation?
In and around the Blue Mountains in New South Wales there's the Lithgow panther, over 500 sightings of which have been reported in a 20-year period. Big cat sightings have been reported around the region for about a century, and there are a range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.
This is actually a more interesting story than most of the cryptids that often make their way into local folklore because there have actually been government enquiries into the subject - four in fact - a number of which actually state it was "more likely than not" that a big cat lived in the area based on scat and hair study. The most recent report, written in 2013 by an invasive species expert, concluded no evidence of a big cat in the Blue Mountains, but he later privately disclosed to the ABC that the existence of a small population was possible. Wiki article here.
Now this one isn't local to me, but there's also the obvious example of the thylacine, where the idea that it may still be extant in remote parts of Tasmania persists with many sightings of it to boot. There are even sightings reported on the mainland, in some cases. Some of the sightings in question are by zoologists and other experts, with the most famous being Hans Naarding's assertion in 1982 that he did see a thylacine and that it was unmistakeable. This analysis of sightings suggests it may have persisted until the 1980s and that there is still "a small chance of persistence in the remote south-western wilderness areas" of Tasmania.
Really I would say these examples of cryptids are actually... fairly plausible, as far as cryptids go. As for me? I'm still a firm skeptic, but of all the cryptids out there, these are the ones I'm most likely to believe in.
Nice. Been a long time since I've had a dream that I remember, nowadays I'm too tired to have any of those. And maybe that's for the better, since most of the dreams I do remember end up being hopelessly surreal or fucking terrifying.
One of my most realistic dreams to date involved a scenario where I had died as a kid and my family had made an android copy to replace me due to their failure to cope with the grief. Here I was the copy, filled with memories I knew could not possibly be real, and acutely aware of the fact that I had been modelled off a person whose internal perception of the world may actually have been nothing like mine. Out of obligation I just went about my days like nothing had happened, like everything was normal, and my family in turn treated me as if I was actually the child they had lost. It wasn't a nightmare in the traditional sense - there were no sudden bouts of panic - rather, throughout the dream the existential horror of the whole charade just sat passively in the background, and it actually stayed with me for a while after I woke up.
In yet another dream I got rather badly jumpscared. I was at some event or something, or party, and at one point I turned around and the entire dream went black and white, almost like early photographic film. There was a person standing right behind me, looking straight at me with this intensely malicious stare, and their face just kind of... popped forward, in a really fucking creepy way that I can barely describe. All I can say is that to date, there is not a piece of horror media that has viscerally freaked me out that badly.
I also tend to get recurrent dreams which are endless loops of waking up, realising I'm actually still asleep, then waking up again in the dream. These can go on for a while - I think at one point I "woke up" six times before finally successfully forcing myself awake.
Pretty much all of the dreams I remember are fucky in some way or other. You can probably endlessly subject all of this to Freudian psychoanalysis, but I don't care for it.
For the purpose of discussion I'm just taking his assertions at face value and assuming they're sincere. If you ask me though, I'm cynical enough about academia and the kind of environment it fosters that I don't think it's a given that any of the statements he's made about politics can be assumed to be genuinely held (including this writeup that's attracted so much controversy). It's possible they're all informally coerced in one way or another.
Somebody with a profile like him probably gets harangued by colleagues to "speak up" and "do some good" a lot, and it's not hard for me to believe that making the right mouth sounds is a low enough price for him to pay to keep doing the maths he likes.
I don't think most of the people making this argument believe Trump is doing it because he specifically wanted to penalise Tao. They're just making the point that Tao did insert himself into the culture war and can't claim he was Just A Normal Guy Doing Research Things until politics found him, that in the "tranquil past" he did not solely "focus on technical or personal aspects" of his own research, teaching, and mentoring, nor did he "leave the broader political debate and activism to others".
I mean the context here is Tao expressing disgust at the Trump administration's supposed imposition of politics upon academia and thus crippling it, something which is difficult to see as anything other than exceptionally hypocritical when Tao himself actively participated in the politicisation of academia (the open letter). The point of bringing it up is not to justify Tao's defunding but to respond to what he wrote about it.
As others have already noted, Tao isn't specifically targeted here. UCLA got its funding cut on the basis that it was illegally discriminating on the basis of race in admissions and creating an anti-semitic environment (among other things, UCLA sat back and allowed pro-Palestinian protestors to block Jewish students' access to classes, something which it resolved with a settlement of $6 million dollars). Then Tao throws a shitfit.
The broader issue here is that academia serves a couple of interrelated functions. The first is performing research and discovering truths about the world that can be used to help others down the line. The second is one of using academia to "liberate" people socially based on a certain political ideology, which the proponents of said political ideology conflate with the first aim because they have already subscribed to a number of tenets their opponents don't hold. This kind of thing has serious knock-on effects in academia, where people will often discriminate against conservative candidates - in fact only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives, and that's only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher. Papers that support the liberal instead of the conservative view are more likely to be published instead of file-drawered. Etc.
In effect the left turned academia into their political tool, and made it such that it was impossible for conservatives to defang them of their influence without also indirectly crippling knowledge-producing institutions. This puts conservatives in quite the bind - every time they wage war on the institutions that also serve as factories for leftist propaganda, they also run the risk of stopping up legitimate research and can be attacked on that basis. It's a situation the left created, not the right, and one can hardly blame the right for deciding "fuck it, we're going to flamethrower everything anyway".
Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."
Lack of experience, for one (so yes, I have other things to do with my time). Also a lot of Malaysian food requires exceptionally high heat to get proper wok hei, and the stove in my apartment and in fact many Western kitchens do not allow for that.
In addition, it is easier for me to recreate Malaysian dishes having tasted it before. If you don't, how in the world would you ever be able to recreate a food you've never tasted an authentic version of? Note a lot of Asian food also does not rely on strict codified recipes and often rely on the chef to improvise until it tastes "right". Cooking Asian food is traditionally something you just gain a feel for overtime by tasting and replication, and most internet recipes won't get you 100% of the way there. In practice I would say it's not going to be easy to make authentic Malaysian food without actually having tasted an authentic version before.
If you have someone with you who possesses the ability and equipment to cook authentic food, then yes it's trivially easy to obtain. In practice this condition does not typically hold. Maybe you think all these differences are minimal and that you can get most of the effect of a food tasting an inauthentic version of it, and that they're not meaningful enough to travel for (as a bona fide foodie I disagree, but that's a claim I can't contest by virtue of it being a value judgement).
But then there are foods I just straight-up haven't been able to find in Sydney, and I find nothing else scratches that itch in quite the same way.
Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?
Of course there's no intrinsic reason, but authentic Malaysian food in other cities is just nearly impossible to find in spite of the theoretic possibility of its existence. And no, the amount of flavour and texture combinations in existence isn't infinite, it's just way larger than you will ever be able to experience in your lifetime. Which means @George_E_Hale's assertion that the variety on Earth is enough to satisfy most people is correct.
And there are indeed some foods where the taste relies on it being made in a specific place. Korean makgeolli has a lot of variation and since it is a fermented drink made from a wild starter, at least some of its taste is reliant on the regional climate it's produced in. You also can't import it and expect to get the best version of it, since it then needs to be pasteurised to improve shelf life and this shits up the taste. As someone who has been to Korea and tasted the nectar of heaven that is makgeolli, then tried to get one in Sydney and found it tasted like watered-down piss, I can attest to this, seriously makgeolli overseas is so fucking bad compared to the real shit I swear to god.
The world has gotten smaller as time has gone on. Globohomo is quite real. That doesn’t mean that travel won’t yield you new cultural and sensory experiences.
It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.
I actually took the time to subject that to further analysis.
The major Asian countries with low birth rates relative to death rates are, unsurprisingly, the hyper-modernised ones: China (death rate 8.3, birth rate 6.3), South Korea (death rate 6.7, birth rate 4.3), Taiwan (death rate 8.8, birth rate 5.7) and Japan (death rate 12.3, birth rate 6.0). Interestingly enough, Japan's birth rate is the most unfavourable compared to its death rate across all East Asian countries and is thus depopulating the fastest, in spite of all the focus on SK - likely because its population is older and birth rates tanked earlier there. These results are largely consistent with your article. But I will note there are a small handful of Asian destinations which are actually quite wealthy and also have higher birth rates than their death rates; e.g. Singapore (death rate 4.8, birth rate 8.2) and Macao (death rate 4.8, birth rate 6.3). Southeast Asia is doing pretty good in general, with Malaysia clocking in at a death rate of 5.2 and a birth rate of 12.4 (I can testify that Malaysia isn't that much of a shithole, in spite of people's perceptions, and it doesn't seem to be disappearing any time soon). This is all still not great, and I agree that East Asia faces a lot of challenges regarding that in the future.
What I think is illuminating about this is that large swaths of the west seems to be depopulating as well. Many places in Western Europe possess birth rates well below their death rates, for example Austria (death rate 10.2, birth rate 8.2), Finland (death rate 10.7, birth rate 7.8), Spain (death rate 9.3, birth rate 7.0), Italy (death rate 11.2, birth rate 6.5), Portugal (death rate 11.1, birth rate 8.3) and so on aren't doing so good. Oh and don't look at Eastern Europe unless you want to see horrific depopulation. Even where they seem to be doing okay, this isn't the full picture. For example, I notice your article states that US births still exceed deaths and that its population is set to increase. This is trivially true on its face but it's misleading since that obscures a shit ton of heterogeneity - non-Hispanic white American deaths exceed births, and this has been true ever since 2012. The fact that the US still has a higher birth rate than death rate is being driven by the immigrants they have brought in. Does this bode well for the survival of "American culture"?
Western countries are depopulating, and have been for a long time. Unlike Asia, they're just stemming that by bringing in immigrants who don't hold the same culture and values who breed like rabbits, so their overall birth rates look better. But that does not imply cultural survival, and this tactic certainly doesn't allow Americans to escape reproductive oblivion just because they've decided to replace the kids they're not having with a bunch of people who have as much relation to them as they do the Chinese.
I agree we're gonna lose a lot. We may all be boned. Except for maybe Africa, who - if they ever modernise - will also face the same issues, and begin to go gently into that good night.
Okay I'm quite bullish on space exploration, but I really don't agree with this. At all. Even a little bit.
EXCEPT that the magic of internet recipes and globalization means that pretty much ANY COUNTRY'S CUISINE is available to me in at most an hour's drive in my own state! There is no such thing as food that is truly 'unique' to a single geographic area anymore!
Globohomo is a thing but this is seriously overstating the point. I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for nine years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me nine years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.
Of course, it's a single restaurant, and it serves approximately 0.001% of Malaysian dishes. There is still no substitute for going to a country and trying their food there. The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.
Something that's also becoming more evident is that outside of the West, especially outside of the tourist areas... most places are just shitty to visit. Beggars, pickpockets, scammers, filth, and aggressive cultures that would see me as a mark for exploitation.
Have you... actually been to East/Southeast Asia recently? Not 50 years ago. Not even 20. Recently. I have, and this is usually not what it's like there. Hell it wasn't even like that when I grew up in Southeast Asia. Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison). In addition, I routinely see more homeless in Western cities than I do in Asian ones, and more insane people who just do crazy shit on the subways and streets. There's a real sense of hope that things are getting better in many Asian countries.
In contrast, many areas in the West feel like they're stagnating. My recent trip to Toronto was eye-opening - the sense of torpor was palpable, the subways were fucking falling apart with water damage and exposed wiring in a lot of areas, and homeless were so common that it was hard to walk a kilometre without encountering one of their encampments. I would much rather go home to third-world Malaysia than visit Toronto again. Really, it's funny - I used to want to leave Asia, and now I really yearn to go back.
At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.
I think space colonisation has become an attractive symbol because it's an indisputable display of human advancement, and it requires a whole lot of technological know-how in a wide range of fields, possibly more so than any other goal. Developing technology that's both speedy and durable enough to cross light years' worth of distances, keeping humans in stasis or sustaining a viable colony during these prohibitively long travel times, setting up a workable society in a completely alien environment etc are insanely difficult goals way beyond anything we've attempted before.
Every step of the way you're straining against the laws of physics as much as possible - finding a propulsion method that can feasibly bring you anywhere near relativistic speeds is difficult, and if you do, there's the interstellar medium to contend with, which at these speeds basically becomes hard radiation bombarding your starship, its travellers, and all the equipment aboard. And keep in mind, deep space has no significant energy source to speak of, meaning you have to carry all your fuel with you if you want to power a ship (Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, anyone?). Don't even speak about Bussard ramjets that harvest hydrogen from the interstellar medium for fusion, because that's undoable too. Once you reach your destination, you've likely landed on a planet that's nothing like Earth and where the raw physical environment threatens to kill your colonists every step of the way.
I can't think of another goal that's nearly as difficult or aspirational as space colonisation. Not even "understanding how the human mind functions" feels as infeasible to me as colonising another star system or galaxy (and, unlike setting up a colony outside our solar system, there's no clear and hard condition you can point to as proof of success). Space colonisation just runs up against a whole lot of sheer physical limits that are difficult to overcome, and I don't think size and expansion is the only reason for why a lot of people romanticise it - rather, I think it's the fact that large-scale space colonisation requires bending the infinite, indifferent, uncaring universe to your will. It is an assertion that we matter.
Then there is also the possibility of discovery and finding ayy lmaos. That's cool too.
Well of course you think that. I imagine that on the EQ and SQ tests, assessing interest in people and interest in things (linked here due to your previously stated interest in psychometric testing) you would probably be very strongly skewed towards the former. Most people here, including me, are not.
I'm personally not interested in effervescence or projection or power for power's sake, I'm interested in knowledge; I find the idea of understanding more about the universe we live in to be an inherently interesting and valiant goal, the existence of other minds not necessary. And unlike faceh I don't take it as a given that we're probably alone (and in fact think it is likely we are not). It just so happens that this lofty scientific goal dovetails well with the imperative for expansion, and hedging against X-risks.
That being said I see the study of human minds, human biology, etc as being of immense value as well. Porque no los dos? There's value in expanding one's sphere of knowledge in more than one domain at a time.
I’m well aware that this is a romantic view of it - the lives of premodern merchants were undoubtedly harsh. And I have done something akin to what you describe before, as I mentioned to Ioper (though less extreme than that; typically the duration of the stay wasn’t two days). The number of times I’ve actually flown eludes me now, and I don’t disagree that the exhaustion of constantly moving and never staying someplace for long sets into your bones after a while. Your experience really does depend on the length of the trip though - shorter trips where you have no time to do anything else outside of what you went there to do probably suck, longer-lasting trips are probably more favourable and (for me at least) are a net positive.
Regardless, the compulsion to travel still remains, and I get atypically antsy after having stayed someplace for too long. In spite of the energy that traveling constantly takes, there’s just something about the constant change of scenery that’s refreshing, and it stops you from getting bogged down in the same routines. The dullness and repetition of everyday life seems to grind me down badly in a way it doesn’t for many others.
I've ping-ponged between countries at one point, not for work but to fulfil other obligations. It got tiring and I got fed up at many points, yet I still somehow romanticise the idea.
The highly wistful bent of the third paragraph isn't meant to say "travelling is great" but to illustrate the strong compulsion I feel towards doing it in spite of the bits that aren't great. Which comes back to the idea of adaptation promoting certain behaviours.
So I've been looking at my family history recently and can't help but notice that some of my personality traits are exactly what you would expect given where I come from. I can't prove my hypothesis is true, but the suspicion is unshakeable. My question is: Do groups with merchant history have consistently different behaviour from other groups?
I'm about three-quarters Hokkien and one-quarter Cantonese, and while I haven't been able to trace the ancestries of all of my grandparents I know at least one of their fathers grew up in Quanzhou. It was an important port city for four hundred years during the Song and Yuan dynasties, and many people there were traders - in fact, the name for "satin" comes from the Arabic name for the city. Given its importance, it saw merchants from all over the world and played host to many religions - it was a place where Buddhists, Confucians, Taoist, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and even Manichaeans would have congregated (many of these religions, including Manichaeism, still exist in Fujian). A gigantic proportion of overseas Hokkien trace their history back to Quanzhou, and it is likely their ancestors would have been involved in a whole lot of trading and seafaring along the Maritime Silk Road. (As previously noted, I'm not sure where my other two Hokkien grandparents trace their ancestry, but it's not unlikely they trace it back to some similarly large trading port like Amoy which became the hub in Fujian after the decline of Quanzhou. And Cantonese were also, unsurprisingly, big traders and merchants.)
Five months ago - before I started looking at any of this - I had written a post about my inexplicable need to wander, and in that post I even mention the romanticism and pull of the Maritime Silk Road. When I was six or seven I had claimed ownership of many of the travel books my parents owned, and placed Post-Its in these books to mark destinations for future reference. I have always lacked a need for human interaction and connection, while also possessing an unusually high openness to experience as well as a deep longing for exploration and novelty. Some part of me has always wanted to be a nomad of sorts, and the idea of being tied down to one place doing the same thing for the rest of my life - even something I like - actually sometimes induces low-level panic. It feels uninspired and uninspiring. It feels domesticated. I recently watched a video where an old hippie recounts his time travelling through Southeast Asia on the Banana Pancake trail, and couldn't help but feel nostalgic and wistful while watching it.
I've seen this urge in other male members of my family too, who seem to have this compulsion to travel and wander and see new things. I don't know if this is real or if it's just me inappropriately pattern-matching, but it's weird and disconcerting to look back into your history and come across a glaringly obvious selection pressure that might have produced your specific pattern of behaviour.
Haven't been commenting since most of this has been simple evolutionary-biology stuff I'm already intimately familiar with, but you stated last post that part 3 would ruffle some feathers - in contrast, I see the conclusion this part comes to as transparently and obviously true. The very way you view and perceive the world is strongly genetically-linked, this would have been clear to people in some way or other until the Enlightenment idea of tabula rasa fucked most people's conceptions of this basic truth (though there was prior precedent in earlier concepts of mind-body dualism as well as the Christian concept of everyone being equal in the eyes of God). I don't think most people on TheMotte would disagree with this though, except for maybe Hlynka who is long gone.
The fact that human mental architectures are just irreconcilably different has always been plainly clear to me, since I strongly suspect that many personality traits of mine lie somewhere around two or three sigma from the mean. I have always found the way most people form their moral and factual beliefs, as well as how they experience the world, to diverge so significantly from mine that they may as well be lizard people. That applies to members of my family as well in spite of the shared genetics (albeit marginally less so). As I've grown older I have since learned to model the minds of other people, but I have always been an individual without a clear tribe or any place in which I "belong", and am perpetually mustering up a facsimile of normal human interaction in order to get by.
EDIT: Your post is also related to a thought I've been having recently, detailed here.
Lol, indubitably based. Are you aware of the Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) and the results that have been derived when comparing the sexes? Here is a post by Emil Kirkegaard talking about it (note a higher total CART score implies higher performance on the test).
A 2016 book by Keith Stanovich found on the topic of sex differences: "[I]t can be seen that the total score on the entire CART full form was higher for males than for females in both samples and the mean difference corresponded to a moderate effect size of 0.52 and 0.65, respectively. ... Moving down the table, we see displayed the sex differences for each of the twenty subtests within each of the two samples. In thirty-eight of the forty comparisons the males outperformed the females, although this difference was not always statistically significant. There was one statistically significant comparison where females outperformed males: the Temporal Discounting subtest for the Lab sample (convergent with Dittrich & Leipold, 2014; Silverman, 2003a, 2003b). The differences favoring males were particularly sizable for certain subtests: the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning subtest, the Reflection versus Intuition subtest, the Practical Numeracy subtest, and the Financial Literacy and Economic Knowledge subtest. The bottom of the table shows the sex differences on the four thinking dispositions for each of the two samples. On two of the four thinking dispositions scales—the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale and the Deliberative Thinking scale—males tended to outperform females."
There is also a possibility to indirectly measure sex differences in rationality by checking who believes irrational things, but "it is important to sample widely in beliefs without trying to select ones that men or women are more apt to believe". Kirkegaard draws attention to a 2014 study that does such a thing. This study instructed participants to select on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with a claim, and "scores were recoded such that a higher score reflected a greater rejection of the epistemically unwarranted belief". The unsupported beliefs were grouped into the categories "paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscience". In all of them, men scored higher than women, suggesting greater male rejection of unsupported beliefs in every category.
In other words, the supposedly "misogynistic" traditional belief that women are less rational and more flighty than men... is probably entirely correct.
Values are fundamental. To a first approximation, no one actually wants values diversity, whether in their fiction or anywhere else. Good things are good, bad things are bad, more bad things are not good.
You would probably hate all of my worldbuilding then. I'm currently working on a science fiction story involving two city-states with distinct value systems, which are mutually opposed to each other without one being painted as clearly right or wrong. The philosophical basis on which they ground their outlooks are comprehensible while also being clearly self-serving, and both outlooks would probably be abhorrent and hellish to most modern readers while still serving a pro-social function within the Hobbesian tragedy-of-the-commons that characterises the world they live in. Part of the point is to break apart any conception of “The Good” as much as possible.
I love this kind of shit in storytelling. While I have accepted that shared morality is probably necessary for social cohesion and these values get expressed and reinforced through outlets like fiction, I love it when writers attempt to paint a world entirely in shades of grey while never telling the reader what to think, and find morality tales dubious at best and anger-inducing at worst; they try to simplify complex moral questions down into simple thought-terminating cliches and easy copouts.
In the YIMBY / NIMBY realm that I'm active in, a housing project will only receive funding (tax breaks, grants, etc.) if it can prove that a certain number of its contractors are women-owned businesses.
This is a classic example of "spending money to incentivise a change in outcomes". It's not legally enforcing that a certain number of a housing project's contractors must be women-owned businesses, it's just providing additional funding to those who employ a certain proportion of women-owned businesses. In much the same way that initiatives like providing women with supports, extra networking opportunities (see page 44 here) or extra education + credentials indirectly results in the hiring of women into certain occupations by favouring one half of the population in such a way that they will be more noticeable by or desirable to employers, this policy structures things in a way which indirectly gets people to select women-owned businesses, thus changing outcomes via changing incentives. I don't agree with the idea that the examples provided in my post are materially different from the one you've provided as an example of DEI. You could possibly draw another (IMO even more arbitrary and fine-grained) distinction between the two which doesn't rely on the distinction between "mandating an outcome" vs just "incentivising it via funding", but that conflicts with the prior definition of DEI you've set out and suggests that you likely did not have a clear understanding of the supposed distinction in the first place.
I will also note that in one of the budget statements I referred to, "employers, training providers, schools and community organisations" were being provided grants to "facilitate career opportunities and pathways for women, particularly in non-traditional industries and occupations" (page 40 here). Employers being provided grants to create career opportunities for women is pretty on-the-nose, and I'm not sure how any of that particularly differs from the "women-owned businesses" example you provided.
In addition, I disagree with how you've generally approached defining terms throughout the span of this conversation - your definition of DEI is overly centred around extreme levels of hair-splitting about means in spite of any shared ends, and I think your "retroactivity" argument fails as a defence of it (nor is calling it a "broadbrush" particularly convincing to me). For my part I can't help but argue against the repeated insistence that one should adopt terminology which "acknowledges" three million fine-grained gradations of difference while depriving people of large-scale concepts; it’s almost as if you want people never to refer to broad concepts like "blue" because there are differences between powder blue and ultramarine - but that won’t change how people feel about movements and initiatives that are clearly closely and intimately related. The very idea of categorisation exists so people can collectively refer to meaningfully related phenomena, and you can have different levels of categorisation which are more high or low-level. As such, I steadfastly reject the accusation of broadbrushing, and maintain that the usage of the term "DEI" to encapsulate all of the described initiatives is more or less appropriate.
EDIT: added more
The entirety of It's Such A Beautiful Day by Don Hertzfeldt (also the creator of Rejected) is a big comfort movie for me, but in particular I watch the part detailing Bill's family history, the mediation on death in the middle of the film, as well as the finale again and again and again. There is a lot in this film that resonates with me; it's bizarre and existential and scratches an itch virtually no other film does.
In the hands of anyone else it would have been pretentious, absurdist schlock, but there's a sincerity to the film that makes it feel meaningful.
Both. My parents are flawed people with some good in them. I have a good relationship with my father, and try to retain a good relationship with my mother, despite having a lot of memories of what I would describe as serious narcissism and controlling behaviour from her directed towards many members of the family (particularly towards my dad, who is probably the most loyal person I know of). At one point it was very difficult for me to talk to her without experiencing a visceral disgust reaction, and I often consciously try to avoid acting like how she did when I was growing up. My politics are also probably the opposite to what hers was then.
Probably the biggest failing they had was anything even remotely relating to academic achievement. They had such a focus on academics that I failed to learn other essential life skills because of just how much stress was placed on it. I was expected to study an undergraduate degree in a subject I really had no interest in at the ripe old age of 12, and getting anything below the very highest grades was treated as failure (upon which point my mother would lose her shit and scream her head off for three hours). The thought of this induced nothing short of primal fear in me, and eventually during a particularly stressful period I ended up developing a chronic inflammatory disorder that resulted in constant, unremitting pain and discomfort.
Even long after I have gotten that degree, after I have recovered from my health issue, after I have progressed on to bigger things, I still think about that whole period of life and shudder. It's all too easy for an attempt to foster an environment that creates excellence to slowly slip into an attempt at forcing one's wishes through, and while I think the former is beneficial, the latter certainly isn't. If I ever found myself taking care of a small human, I would definitely try to do the opposite of all that.
But they had a lot of good values I still try to hold onto. Taught me to avoid substances as much as possible (something I notice a lot of western people are fairly laissez-faire about and which has always weirded me out), taught me how to save and invest, taught me the value of delayed gratification, taught me the value of self-reliance, and so on. My dad is probably also partially responsible for fostering a love of travel and photography that has persisted until the modern day, either that or I'm inherently more similar to him in more ways than I would care to admit. I wouldn't say I try to make them proud anymore and if anything have tried not to care about that, but I do try to live up to certain values they instilled in me.
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