roystgnr
8mo ago
Novak already had covid. Why did he need a vaccine?
I sometimes wonder if "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is an even more effective description of human psychology than it was intended to be.
In the technological explanation of how vaccines work, the fact that they resemble the disease-causing virii is a good thing: the closer a vaccine molecule resembles the virus, the more effective the antibodies we learn to produce in response to it will be in response to the virus. We can't make a vaccine resemble a virus perfectly, because we would like to have it be a lot less harmful than the virus, but a virus has a perfect resemblance to itself, so a priori we'd expect the virus to produce the most effective immune response. There are possible second-order complications we might discover, but with Covid-19 we didn't. The benefit of a vaccine isn't "you're more likely to get better immunity than from an infection", it's just "you're much less likely to be debilitated or killed in the process".
In the subconscious magical explanation of how vaccines work, the Law of Contagion imbues them with persistent magical links to other people/objects/contexts, giving them power independent of the mere molecules they're made of. Sometimes these bonds can be removed by a "formal cleansing, consecration, exorcism, or other act of banishing", as Wiki says, so the same molecules which when bonded to Trump's Vaccine Can't Be Trusted might later lose that non-material bond to evil Trump and be instead bonded to The Science, which Says Everyone Needs a COVID-19 Booster Shot—and Soon. But sometimes those bonds are more immutable: a vaccine can be bonded to Medicine and Health and The Science, but a virus is irrevocably bonded to Disease and Death. How could something bonded to Disease and Death make you less likely to get a repeated disease later? That's just not how magic works.
roystgnr
7mo ago
What a ridiculous conspiracy theory. I should ask for a source just to expose how utterly ... wait, what the hell, that was actually a thing that happened?
roystgnr
2mo ago
White Protestants
The two top SF authors of all time are arguably Jules Verne, Catholic-raised deist, and Isaac Asimov, Jewish-raised atheist.
two White men
Juan Rico and his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez?
roystgnr
11mo ago
Getting punched by anyone large enough to knock you down (outside a controlled environment) is legitimately, non-sarcastically, a totally super scary thing, and if you don't feel threatened when it happens to you then the outside view says that's probably just because head trauma can negatively impact your ability to assess threats. Homicides with "personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc)" typically outnumber homicides with rifles 2-to-1 in the USA. A handful of those each year are deaths from a single punch. Gunshots are much more lethal, but "much more" is still only a 22% fatality rate from handgun gunshots.
the rational response there, given that he was not restrained from retreating in any way, was to walk away and call the cops.
This is legally correct (though I'd walk backwards and not take my eyes off the assailant...), if the premise is true. "He's currently punching me" can be justification for lethal force (ref: George Zimmerman); "he hit me 26 seconds ago and now I'm pissed" not so much.
Is it morally correct, too? Someone commits battery and risks committing murder, but because they haven't (yet?) escalated to a higher probability of death I should be upset that their victim does so first? The outcome was still a tragedy, but I'm not sure "always trust that a violent assailant is going to carefully calibrate their violence level" is a Schelling point that doesn't lead to greater tragedy in the long term.
roystgnr
1yr ago
In contrast, the course my bro is going through; all the fallacies have revamped English names, and alternate meanings. "Appeal to authority" is switchdd for "appeal to questionable authority". And all the examples are political, by happenstance the left wing pov is the non fallacious one. Quite a few fallacies original meanings were extended.
This is disturbingly fascinating to me; like the slogan edits in Animal Farm. I don't suppose you could get your hands on the course material (or a citation for it), and/or a complete list of names to share here?
roystgnr
6mo ago
Assuming that is true
I wish @ArjinFerman had provided a reference, but I have the itch to look up ridiculous claims ... and what the hell, that was another thing that actually happened. The interview is here, with the money quote at 37:50:
"In my mind, if someone in that crowd had a gun and had shot and killed Kyle Rittenhouse, our office would not have prosecuted; our office would not have found that person criminally liable."
He provides some context, but it's not "self-defense is completely obvious" context, it's "remember when a gun owner stopped a mass shooting and then the cops blundered in and killed the hero" context, and that was supposed to be in support of his thesis. He claims Rittenhouse running away with his gun after killing Rosenbaum is sufficient reason to kill him ... but what else was Rittenhouse supposed to do? Drop his weapon for the angry mob to pick up? Not retreat? The idea that you can identify and kill an active shooter because you see them running past a ton of people without shooting any of them is such obvious nonsense; you'd hope he would stop and rethink his life after that came out of his mouth.
I can't believe this interview didn't get more play! The only relevant Google hits for 'binger rittenhouse "would not have prosecuted"' right now are the author's blog I linked, a single episode of a video podcast with 50k subscribers, a meme, and a tweet from this April.
roystgnr
1yr ago
all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism
Nah; those are the arm in the door. The foot first slipped a toe into the door a hundred thousand years ago.
I wear artificial skins, because otherwise my own skin wouldn't protect me from dying of exposure or being crippled by sunburn.
I wear artificial soles on my feet, because my own can be worn out by too much running on a nice surface or badly injured by one unlucky step on a rocky surface.
I partially predigest most of my food in artificial fires, because my own teeth are too small and my stomach and immune system too weak to handle everything I eat otherwise. My meat is cut up with artificial claws, because my own fingernails are even more pathetic than my teeth.
I wear artificial lenses over my eyes, because my own don't focus well enough at far distances.
In the next decade or two there's a 50/50 chance I'll only be alive due to artificial thyroid hormone; I'm getting close to the age where my father's and grandmother's own natural production went haywire and had to be replaced by pills.
About a third of my countrymen born today came out through artificial incisions rather than their mothers' own vaginas. Within 6 months, three quarters of them get artificial milk in addition to or instead of their mother's own breast milk. About half of them wouldn't have made it past their own birth and childhood if not for post-industrial medical economics and technologies.
Today most of my work time is spent telling silicon artificial brain extensions how to think better, to solve problems much too big for our previous graphite-and-wood-pulp-based extensions, much less our own brains alone. Right now I'm communicating with a silicon "voice", because even if my own voice could shout a hundred times as loudly as humanly possible you'd still never hear it.
On the one hand, I do totally get the appeal of (small-c) conservatism here! In general the proposition "Let's just all try this new X because it's better and it won't have any side effects and we won't change to become dependent on it and it'll never go away" is a train of thought that derailed from "reasonable" to "wait, shouldn't we at least worry about possibly being wrong?" very very quickly. I think we've been pretty lucky with it so far, but even just being a little wrong with each new change is a sobering thought when applied to an unlimited set of possible changes over unbounded time scales. I've certainly abandoned some traditional values that my ancestors held precious, and although I could fairly point out to them "you did the same to your ancestors, who did the same to theirs, so what did you expect?", I can't say I'm happy with all the implications of the expectation that my descendants will do the same to me. At this point I agree that there's even a serious risk of not even having anything I'd recognize as "my descendants", of having everything I value either quickly destroyed or gradually outcompeted by the results of drastic once-unimaginable changes.
But the catch is, for many lifetimes this fact of constantly changing traditions has been a longstanding tradition. It's no longer even logically possible to avoid major changes, because the ability for society to squelch unprecedented changes would itself be an unprecedented change! Trying to use persuasion alone is laudable but just isn't universally effective. How could world culture be so easily imbued with far more overwhelming agreement and totalizing enforcement? (if you think "potential airstrikes against rogue data centers" is hard to popularize, wait until you try "potential police raids of rogue families") But without some mechanism to ensure overwhelming buy-in, even if we were to Retvrn to whatever year N we somehow all agreed had gotten things right, in roughly 2023-minus-N years we'd find ourselves right back here again, because "evolving into N+1" is one of the things that happens in year N. Is there an alternative? Should we come up with some altered revision of older beliefs and traditions, some Neo-N ideology, which preserves the best things about year N while making every change necessary to make Neo-N a stable rather than a constantly evolving environment, maybe even allowing new changes if and only if we're actually sure that they're really long-term changes for the better? It might be a good idea, and we could certainly try. If we're lucky, this new ideology might be better, might not have any side effects, might not change us, and might never go away. Wait...
roystgnr
11mo ago
"I wish Musk would stop doing brain-damaging stuff like wasting so much time on Twitter", I say, as the monkey's paw curls another finger...
roystgnr
1yr ago
Ross Douhat described it as: "one of the [Espenshade and Radford] study’s more remarkable findings:
while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission
to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in
organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers
of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or
unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline
against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or
“Red America.”"
Espenshade's subsequent characterization was that "We mentioned, as a relatively minor point in the book, that students who had participated in career-oriented extra-curricular activites—especially if they held a leadership role or won an award—had a slight decrease in their chances of admission to these elite colleges".
roystgnr
7mo ago
The Japanese weren't all initially able to do so. Tens of thousands of soldiers tried to kidnap their Emperor and assassinate their Prime Minister to stop the surrender, and that was after two nukes (plus a few tens of millions of incendiary bomblets) had already been dropped.
After that, though ... was the institution of the Japanese Emperor a blessing in disguise? Anti-terrorist tactics consider "decapitation strikes" killing enemy leaders to be high-value goals, but if there's nobody left at the top who's respected enough to order the foot soldiers to stand down then ipso facto the foot soldiers never stand down. From a moral standpoint it feels like assassinating a "mastermind" is greater justice than killing tons of poor grunts who merely got persuaded or coerced onto the front lines, but maybe the rules of war are more useful in the long run than the rules of anti-terrorism, if wars can come to an end but terrorism just goes on and on?
roystgnr
8mo ago
constantly referring to Russians as “invaders” like some sort of marvel movie speech
Are you suggesting they're not invaders? "One who invades", and all that? Surely if an accurate description of actions makes them sound like Marvel villainy, the way to correct that is "don't take villainous actions", not "hope they won't be described accurately".
It’s a ridiculous, nationally suicidal vanity project
"Resist invasions by foreign armies" is almost definitional to being a nation. Don't do that and you're just prey.
by a former television actor
Do you really not understand that it's not inherently ridiculous for a former television actor to stand up to Russia? This is even more obviously reaching than your sartorial complaints.
roystgnr
1yr ago
I saw someone point this out very clearly the other day: we associate "post-apocalyptic" with Sci-Fi, so we don't immediately recognize the Lord of the Rings as post-apocalyptic fantasy!
There were civilizations who carved statues and skyscrapers out of mountains, who turned forests into pocket universes of magic and beauty, who uplifted other forests to sentience, who built subcontinent-spanning empires ...
And we're walking through their ruins, terrified at the likelihood that even the few remaining places that people can call home are going to be lost as well. We see remnants of magic fading away, remnants of high culture in retreat, we've been outright told that past victories were hollow and temporary, and we can see that even another victory here would be merely the beginning of hope to preserve just a part of what's left ...
And what's left is still beautiful enough to want to preserve, if only a part of it, for however long it and however much of it can last. "We have fought the long defeat", says Galadriel, but even that length itself is a form of victory.
roystgnr
1yr ago
There's got to be a social aspect to the instinct. That's the only way I can see to explain the seeming unanimity of the response here vs the contrary unanimity at e.g. Uvalde and Broward County. We're not looking at two different models of human, right? There have to be at least a few potential heroes and a few potential cowards in all places? But if you want to be a hero and yet your peers and/or your boss are dithering about "establishing a perimeter", maybe that's enough to keep you from advancing on a gun-toting murderer by yourself; conversely, if your peers are charging forward, even someone who'd rather be elsewhere might not want to be the only coward who doesn't have his friends' backs.
roystgnr
1yr ago
"Your prices are too high! They're charging half as much across the street!"
"So why don't you buy from across the street?"
"They're out of stock."
"Ah; then when I run out of stock, I promise to start charging a third as much!"
It's generally agreed that the guy out of stock, with an effective price of infinity, is a good guy, while the guy "price gouging" is a bad guy, and the only sense I can make of that is to interpret it under the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. How else could it make sense that, if I drive a truck full of generators into a hurricane zone to resell at a markup, they might just be confiscated when I'm arrested for being so awful, while if I sit on my butt refusing to sell generators to blackout victims at any price somehow I'm still a good guy? I fear human ethics only evolved to deal with around a Dunbar number's worth of tribe mates, a situation where basically everybody's family, everybody you give and receive with has an obligation to sacrifice for you if you fall under hard times and vice-versa, and rationing can be done by explicitly considering every single individual's need for a particular good ... which means our ethics don't work out so well in cases where there are orders of magnitude more people to potentially trade with, trying to enforce charity or insurance based on implicit cultural understandings without contracts or at least government programs can backfire horribly, and our only scaleable rationing mechanism is pricing.
roystgnr
1yr ago
He's mostly correct. It annoys me to see tech leaders hauled before Congress to get lectured about what a nice platform they have except for all that excessive free speech, and how bad it would be for something to happen to it if they don't fix the excesses themselves ... but isn't essentially the story behind the Hays Code? The Comics Code? The Hollywood Blacklist?? I suspect that most current "supporters" of free speech are just fair-weather friends who would be more than happy to reverse their support and double their zeal, if only they were the ones in charge.
But the other reason I have that sad suspicion about much of the right is simple induction from the sad certainty about the reversal much of the left has already made. It was so much nicer when I innocently assumed that everybody opposed the Hollywood Blacklist because we were all actually pro-free-speech and anti-blacklist, not pro-Communist. To be fair to the right, their future betrayal is still merely hypothetical. Maybe it's not just wishful thinking to imagine that some actually learned something.
"Surely it is better that the immoral learn morality through adversity than that the moral forget morality in prosperity."
Isaac Asimov character, "Robots and Empire"
roystgnr
8mo ago
I’m saying that constantly referring to them as “the invaders” instead of The Russians is performative.
No; it's precise. Most Russians, even considered by nationality, have not invaded Ukraine, and something like a third will admit to pollers that they don't even support the invasion. There's little reason, when concerned with the armies who have invaded Ukraine, to use a less precise term for them. When considering Russians by ethnicity the distinction becomes even more important: many have been among the victims of the invasion. It might be an understandable accident to lump them together with their killers when speaking imprecisely, but why would anyone ever want to do so on purpose?
their “resistance” to Russia’s invasion is going to lose them their nation, not keep it.
That's not how game theory works.
Do you think that, if they'd allowed their capital city to be taken by the columns of invading tanks, that would have allowed them to keep their nation? Don't you think that's quite gullible? Putin made no such promises, and it's not even safe to trust agreements he does make.
Zelensky’s adventure
This word choice is performative nonsense. Nobody thinks that shooting back at the people sending bombs and missiles and tanks and soldiers to try and conquer you is an "adventure".
It's weird that you assign so much agency to the Ukrainians here, and yet I haven't seen you assign any to the invaders. Since your concern for the Ukranian men isn't feigned, surely you agree that the choice to invade was an atrocity, right? Even the most ardent honest pacifists will agree that starting a war is more evil than fighting back instead of surrendering.
generation of lost men
Ukraine has had those before. If we assume for your sake that the low death estimates there are correct and the high death estimates of the current war are correct, the war has to get about 30 times more deadly before the death toll of opposing Russia exceeds the death toll of being controlled by Russia.
roystgnr
8mo ago
" ... it would have steamrolled the entire planet."
Illiberal violence was steamrolling the planet, until the "blame the Kulaks!" international socialists got backstabbed by the "blame the Jews!" national socialists, leading to infighting twice as deadly as the western front.
The aesthetic of totalitarian movements is a bunch of obedient little soldiers marching in lockstep, but the pragmatics of totalitarian movements is that getting to the top relies on figuring out exactly when and how to turn against your allies before they can turn against you, over and over and over again.
If America or Britain had turned fascist, there's a good chance they'd end up too busy steamrolling themselves to make much more progress on the rest of the planet. "Live and let live" isn't a perfect Schelling point, but it works way better than "there can be only one".
roystgnr
1mo ago
nit-picking about whether I'm being 'fair' to Rowling
Is that a nitpick?
You started out by complaining about slander. Was that because you think slander is a serious, non-nit-picky thing, or was that just rhetoric targeting all the people here who do care about slander? Hopefully it's the former, but then since making untrue accusations of Rowling is slander, shouldn't you be horribly upset by even the possibility that you've committed it unwittingly?
Amping up the level of seriousness, you continued by complaining about blood libel ... but let's go back and look, and ah, there it is, "eradicate trans people". Either Rowling does want to eradicate trans people, or you personally have just committed blood libel. It is in fact a very important thing to determine whether you have done something so horrible or not - not a nit-pick! If it still feels like a nit-pick, which does seem like a potential consequence of the attitude of "frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this", that's not an excuse for evil, that's a confession of evil, but whether or not you strongly care about blood libel, you really shouldn't be surprised when other people do.
Even if you haven't committed blood libel, if there's some hot mic recording where we can hear Rowling talking about how she totally wants to murder all the transpeople, it would still be wrong to make the accusation against her in the awful, no-evidence-except-false-evidence way you have. The Boy Crying Wolf is not actually acting to protect people from the wolf! The next time your readers see such an accusation, even if the new accuser provides better evidence behind it, you've made "dive into the evidence, that won't be a waste of time" a slightly less safe conclusion for them to reach.
sure, whatever, Rowling is a perfect angel who has never done anything wrong, if that's what you want to believe
Has anyone actually said they believe that, or are you now putting words in their mouths too? Wasn't this a big part of the vicious cycle that eventually got Hlynka permabanned? When you find that making up strawmen is the only way to feel like you've brought your interlocutors down to your level then it's time to consider climbing up to theirs instead.
if I thought that would get anywhere
This is another confession, though framed as an attempt to blame the victims. You aren't supposed to avoid telling falsehoods because you expect to gain something out of unnatural self-restraint, you are supposed to avoid telling falsehoods because avoidance of evil is worthwhile for its own sake! And then, if you are incapable of that, the blame is entirely on you, not on any people who might not have rewarded you as much as you would have wanted otherwise.
the interesting issues are the larger factional concerns.
There's a naive-utilitarian inside me that's tempted to agree! On the meta level alone, this thread is a fascinating microcosm of them, even! We can see how factionalism gets exacerbated by outgroup homogeneity bias. We can see how our faction's noble goals get used to excuse harsh tactics while our enemies' dirty tactics reinforce our disdain for their hypocritiical goals. And when we zoom out far enough, we come to perhaps the most interesting question: isn't it at least sometimes okay if we "don't give a fuck about one person"? If with such an eagles-eye-level view we learn something helpful to a hundred other people then we're still ninety-nine in the black, and that sounds like a win, doesn't it?
And yet ... do we actually have an eagles-eye-level view, just because we'd really like to have one? Here you are, purportedly trying to get people to care about slander and blood libel, while you're in the middle of committing it and trying to make excuses for it. You don't help even the victims you do care about by trying to normalize the crimes being committed against them! Letting this kind of rhetoric slide wouldn't clearly be sacrificing one person's reputation to save 100 others, it might just as likely be sacrificing one person's reputation to harm 100 others!
Since we're this bad at trying to figure out all the second-order and third-order effects that a non-naive utilitarian would need to consider, maybe it's just time to back off and look at virtue ethics instead?
There's a quote from Dostoyevsky dialogue that comes to mind here:
"...the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams, I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. ... I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me."
From a moral standpoint, it's very dangerous to lose love for individual people but then hope to make it up to humanity in volume. A lot of people who decided to care about fighting "principalities and powers" at the expense of mere "flesh and blood" just ended up shedding a lot of blood without actually improving any balance of power - we easily promise to repay today's certain nearby moral debts with interest after tomorrow's vaguely-expected distant moral credit comes in, and yet that ends up being an excuse to increase the debt, not a real plan to make good.
But even from just an epistemological, pragmatic make-my-ideology-win standpoint: a "faction" isn't a smooth undifferentiated mass that you can stuff a bunch of people into to avoid having to look at each one's particular flaws and virtues. The more details you ignore, the more mistakes you're going to make! If you do the rhetorical equivalent of air-striking a wedding party because you're certain there are terrorists nearby, don't be surprised if you end up creating more enemies than you neutralize!
I appreciate you coming here and representing locally-unpopular points of view, even when you're getting dogpiled for it, but can you imagine the damage if your readers started to assume that everyone who might be considered part of your "faction" or "people like" you was guilty of the same logical and moral flaws you've exhibited in this thread? At least try to imagine, and then consider what you could change to moderate their future reactions accordingly? Outgroup homogeneity bias is a common human failing, and I doubt I've managed to even cure you of it in the space of a few paragraphs, so I surely haven't cured most of the people with that failing who don't see themselves in you and don't realize how much of these warnings might apply to them too. Now might be a good time to show them that their outgroup can admit mistakes and do better. The psychological foibles that sadly lead us to factionalism and division are indeed an interesting object of study, but if you really want to be sure you know a subject, then the most important part of studying isn't the reading, it's working the exercises at the end.
roystgnr
8mo ago
we have done experiments and have mathematical models and so on that have been verified.
I've seen experiments verifying modeling with the Navier-Stokes equations, finite-strain elasticity equations, Cahn-Hilliard equations for phase decomposition, Laplace-Young for surface tension ... and yet I can't help but notice that all of those equations are continuum mechanics, whereas with other experiments we've become very confident that atoms are things which exist. Set up other experiments where a critical length is in Angstroms (or just one where the Knudsen number isn't negligible, for the Navier-Stokes case) and you'll get a result where the otherwise-well-verified continuum model fails. Perhaps "All models are wrong; some are useful" is too pessimistic to be true forever, but it's a good one for now, because the idea that we have a model which is never wrong is currently false.
And that's not just a matter of engineers being lazy about avoiding expensive atomistic models. Even in the most fundamental physics, there are no mathematical models currently in existence which do not fail verification in experiments outside their individual range of applicability. The goal of finding such a model, a "Theory of Everything", is naturally at the top of our list of unsolved problems in physics, but scroll down that list and you'll find our existing models failing to fit the bill because of a number of cases that are much worse than the continuum/atomistic divide. At least atomic models converge to cheaper continuum models in the limit.
A trillion years from now, F=ma will still be true as will E=mc^2
F=ma isn't even true today, except in the special case where both are 0. It's a simplification of F=d(mv)/dt which neglects that inertial mass m is itself a function of velocity. You might say it's "mostly true" - our fastest spacecraft so far hit a speed a bit over 150 km/s, and at 0.0005c Newton is 99.99998% accurate - but the difference between "mostly true" and "relativistic effects are a thing" is where E=mc^2 came from. So at that point, I guess the question is, what would you count as "massively wrong"? If Newton got things 99.99998% right, but hidden in that 0.00002% was "there are rocks with a million times more energy than coal", does 0.00002 count as tiny or does 1000000 count as massive?
Our current theories seem to have gaps bigger than 0.00002. We've been unable to directly observe 95% of the mass-energy in the universe. Five times more than what we've observed is "dark matter", which we don't yet know the identity of but can indirectly observe via galaxy dynamics and gravitational lensing, and double that is "dark energy", which we can only infer by looking at the local shape and accelerating expansion of the universe. From a practical sense, perhaps none of that will turn out to be important - we discovered barely-interact-with-normal-matter neutrinos a lifetime ago and we haven't accomplished anything more than a little interesting astronomy with them, so the prospects for interacts-even-less-with-normal-matter technology don't look good to me - but from a theoretical sense, our best theories say there are gaping holes in our best theories! We are bound by the laws of physics, but we don't actually know what all the laws of physics are yet.
roystgnr
1yr ago
It was even starting to be noticed by Soviets, by that point.
September 1989 was when Yeltsin made headlines by visiting a random US grocery store and being so astonished that he thought it might be a Potemkin fake, because "Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev." He predicted "there would be a revolution" if average Soviet consumers all saw what he was seeing.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Why does it seem impossible for Hollywood to write stories about people? Regular people, working-class salt-of-the-earth human beings?
The theory I've heard is that they can't sell the stories afterward.
Currently they're making their profits off blockbusters, where after putting a quarter billion dollars into production and marketing you've got too much on the line to risk your dialogue not being trailer-worthy and lowest-common-denominator approved, and if you know your best sequences are going to be CGI kaiju fighting, why would you shorten those just to buy time to make a side character slightly more well-rounded? But mid-budget films, the ones where they used to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to get back a few more tens of millions, aren't working out so well as they used to ... and yet it's the mid-budget range that used to occasionally spiral into massive box office successes and Oscar takeaways for the biggest winners, because they were in the sweet spot where they were cheap enough for directors to take risks, too cheap to replace characterization with special effects, and yet expensive enough to exhibit real production quality behind the risky ideas that worked out.
I have no idea whether this theory is actually true; there doesn't seem to be nearly as much overlap as I'd like between "people who actually know something about the movie industry" and "people who back up their theories with quantitative analyses".
roystgnr
2mo ago
But no one in academia officially uses the term Critical Race Theory.
Google Scholar reports 4,000 citations from the 20th century, which hopefully is an old enough cutoff date to clearly precede the current backlash, and another 200,000 citations since, which probably aren't all part of the backlash to the backlash.
It sounds a bit cringe when Republicans say they want to ban CRT, because officially it doesn't exist.
Wow, that takes me back down memory lane. I never understood how this sort of historical revisionism was expected to work, when we don't actually have a Memory Hole to drop actual history into, we have an Internet. But if the first history you see on the internet is still the revisionist one, it's hard to fault the revisionists for their choice of tactics. Perhaps someday even still-problematically-factual summaries will also learn to love Big Brother.
It's tempting to wonder whether the enraging pattern of gaslighting isn't to persuade, so much as deliberately to enrage. But that's unfair; to the people who actually complain that we aren't all jogging along the euphemism treadmills as fast as they demand, the complaint appears to be a mix of standard attempts to rebrand themselves to avoid "scorn and sarcasm", just combined with very non-standard attempts to condemn anyone who doesn't immediately keep up with the rebranding.
roystgnr
2mo ago
People work 60 hours a week instead of 40.
A few of them, sure? 5.6% of workers averaged 60 hours or more last year, according to BLS. People who worked under 15 hours a week were nearly as common.
You might be in a bit of a bubble. There's a lot of variation between industries (full time mining, quarrying, and gas workers average 48.3 hours, so you know there's a lot of 60 hour stretches; my mother quit her veterinary career after a decade or so because the local "60+ hours or don't bother" jobs available were too much with a kid), and variation between companies and subsectors within an industry (I'm told the AAA game developer work ethos is something like "you can sleep when you retire"?). Perhaps you're in one of the worst of those?
They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real.
And yeah, I empathize with this. People were shocked when "The Millionaire Next Door" talked about how many people with 7-figure net worth were driving 20 year old beat-up cars, but that's a goal I started aiming for! I still remember my mom trying to explain to toddler-me that Happy Meals were too expensive right now (soon after she quit her job, my dad lost his...), and enjoying fewer luxuries now seems like a more than worthwhile price to pay for never having to do that with my own kids later. But again, is this the median American, or are we in cultural bubbles? People have spent more on restaurants than on groceries for most of the past decade. Even when my parents found stable new careers it was a treat to visit a buffet every couple weeks.
"Theodore Dalrymple" described the same pressures on black people in pre-Zimbabwe Rhodesia:
and the same effects are at play in modern Senegal:
And (though I don't have a source for this one) I've heard the same problem reported in multiple underclasses of the USA. If you have a sudden windfall and you save or invest it responsibly, then from that point until the point when you're broke again, any time a friend or family member asks if you can spare some cash, you have to choose between lying to them, telling the truth but then being seen as a heartless monster who won't share with them, or sharing and getting your savings drained away by them. In that context, blowing all your cash on a fancy new pickup truck (or whatever other splurge is appropriate to your particular subculture) isn't just foolish overconsumption, it's the closest you can get to actually saving money, by putting it into something that your community won't ask you to sell so you have money in your pocket to give them but that you could theoretically sell (albeit at a loss) if you needed money for a true emergency.
So anyway, it's not just a Romani problem (though you're not the first person I've read who reported it there). It seems to be almost a human universal that if you tell someone "he's not giving his money to friends and family" they see that as a moral failing, if you tell someone "he's not working harder to earn money for friends and family" they don't see that as an equivalent moral failing, and if you tell someone "those two attitudes combine to form an incentive mechanism that condemns whole cultures to poverty" ... well, it's better to try to explain differential equations to some people than game theory; they may not get it either way, but at least nobody looks at a Laplace transform and concludes that the mathematician explaining it must be evil.
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