thejdizzler
2d ago
I counter your example of Napoleon with the example of Pablo from Dreaming Spanish who learned English, French, and Thai through immersion learning. There's a whole community built around Dreaming Spanish that has learned that language in the same way that Pablo has. I too have learned Spanish and considerable amounts of Italian merely through reading, watching TV and YouTube, and vocabulary lookups. So I call bullshit on your theory: you can indeed learn in the same way that a small child does. Of course I doubt either myself or Pablo used the pure immersion learning you speak of in the immersion school. The amount of time a small child needs to learn a language is immense: 12 hours a day for the first 5 years of life, plus constant exposure for the next 10-15 to truly reach fluency. No adult has that kind of time, unless you only interact with speakers of your target language.
Adult language learning is different from child language learning because we can use higher level reasoning processes to accelerate the acquisition process. We can deliberately review and study vocab, we can make comparisons to our L1, we can look up grammar rules. We can choose specific immersion opportunities that maximize acquisition. Thus we can accelerate a process that requires 10s of thousands of hours into a process that requires mere thousands or perhaps even hundreds of hours.
Taking your 6 words a class example: assuming 200 days of language education a year, multiplied by 12 years of grade school, you should get to around 14,440 words, which is more than enough to read most basic texts.
thejdizzler
2d ago
I don't know if it's any better elsewhere: I've only ever studied in America.
I think the economic opportunities + sheer volume of media makes sense as an explanation.
thejdizzler
2d ago
I think you need to look harder if you're skeptical of immersion as an adult strategy. It is the current thing on language learning YouTube and has some pretty impressive results. That said, I think it's swung too far in the immersion direction: grammar and vocabulary drilling immensely accelerate the process. Pure immersion by itself isn't incredibly efficient.
You can, however, become fluent through immersion alone: see the millions or maybe even billions of Chinese and Europeans who learned English through watching TV. I don't think the same is true for grammar/translation: Latin instruction is probably the best example of this, where you have professors treating each sentence like it's grammatical puzzle to be solved rather than just reading the text like they would have been able to if they'd incorporated more immersion.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Why is second language education so routinely terrible in the United States? (not sure if it is like this in other countries as well, but speaking to what I know). Not only do students almost never achieve fluency after nearly two decades in the system (grade school through college), but the entire academic structure seems completely in denial about what actually is effective at generating fluency. Research on second language acquisition has consistently shown that immersion based approaches with a small amount of grammar at early levels is much more effective than the grammar/translation method. Yet every language class I've been in, from middle school on has been laser focused on verb conjugations, and direct translations. I can excuse this at the high school level because teachers aren't exposed to the latest pedagogical research. But at universities where part of the job of many of these instructors is pedagogical research, this approach is frankly embarrassing and a huge waste of student's time.
I have two theories on why this might be the case. Firstly, immersion learning doesn't really lend itself to test-taking, which is a necessary part of the academic system. Secondly, there is no incentive to actually teach language effectively at scale: Americans don't need to understand foreign languages, and the ones that do want to become diplomats or do business in other countries eventually seek out immersion approaches on their own.
I think this applies in a lesser sense to the entire educational structure in the US, baring maybe doctorate level education. There's so much useless crap in the system that doesn't help with the learning or retention of relevant information. Bryan Caplan makes a compelling case in The Case Against Education that this is by design because the point of education is signaling. I think he's mainly correct, which is why the lib bandying of education as a panacea to society's problems makes me want to tear my hair out.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Finally finished Marx thank god. Expect an effort post about this in March. Am currently working on Spinoza, The Knight by Gene Wolfe, and The Golden Compass in Italian.
thejdizzler
6d ago
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Work: Been using the fact that flies are still growing up to tackle some long term analysis and presentations that I've been procrastinating. This is going pretty well, and highlighting that I need to wrap up experiments completely before moving on to something new. Have my committee meeting friday, which I generally feel prepared for.
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Fitness: 9.5 hours last week. Huge breakthrough the weekend where I ran an 8k at 5:30 pace, and last night, where I did a tempo ladder ending at 4:40! Unlike last week got in this morning's session as well. In a good place with this: just need to make sure I don't start compromising aerobic volume as I build intensity going into Boston. Should be 11-12 hours this week.
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Intellectual Stuff: About to finish Marx and enjoying Spinoza! Having trouble balancing Italian and Spanish, but this should get easier as my work calms down slightly.
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Finances: Unexpected huge windfall. ZIM, an Israeli shipping company that's about 10% of my portfolio is going to be sold to a German shipping firm for $35/share. I bought at $19 a share, and have been accumulating extra shares through dividends, so will end up making around $3000 from this. Also got some cash back from PT, and spending is looking like it will be under $3k this month.
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Dating: Masturbated once to porn this weekend, but removing stimulus has helped a lot. Decided firmly not to date right now.
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Tarot: Really good session with my ex-roommate who's started a teaching job that he likes much more.
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Socializing: Cooked tempura with my friend nick, and hosted track night Tuesday last night. Going to co-host a Chinese new year party soon.
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Screen time: 1.5 hours.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Added to the list!
I think fiction can be really really valuable for understanding psychology and philosophy, but you have to be careful not to take it as the truth about how people behave, or worse about the world facts. I try to keep my intellectual diet quite balanced between fiction and nonfiction, but I'm thinking I should try and stay away from historical fiction in the future, as it really seems to grind my gears.
I think there are a few reasons.
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A lot of people don't have liquid cash. If you're living paycheck to paycheck you can't do this.
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This checking account isn't earning any MM interest. I either need to keep 1500 in there for perpetuity or go through the hassle of closing the account (which also would only take an hour or so). At less than 4% money market it's still worth it to keep the money there after the $400, especially as I can use it to just pay off my credit card every month.
thejdizzler
13d ago
I've heard good things about McCullough from people who criticize Posteguillo, so I'll have to check him out.
I have no issue with Caesar being portrayed as charming or a prodigy: he likely was. What Posteguillo does that grinds my gears is sweep every flaw that Caesar had as a human being (probably in context the wife-fucking and huge ego, but I also consider the treatment of the Gauls to be pretty terrible, if not too far outside the norm for the time) under the rug so he can be a "perfect" hero.
thejdizzler
13d ago
I think I'm just going to stop reading historical fiction, except from authors I know are good (Bernard Cornwell).
thejdizzler
13d ago
I will usually post them here first! Thanks for the offer though!
thejdizzler
13d ago
I think a big part of it for me was also the writing style but in addition to that I had two main other problems. There is a huge amount of sex and sexual assault, while which I'm sure happened plenty in the Middle Ages, reflects our modern culture's obsession with sex more than it reflects the lived reality of the characters. This also an issue in the The Cathedral of the Sea, which uses the quasi-mythical practice of the first night to show us how evil European nobility was.
Then the stonemason also has a very modern attitude towards his work on the Cathedral. Not a whole lot of doing it for the glory of God, which probably the main motivation for the average peasant. He seemed to have a very careerist attitude towards the whole thing (like building cathedrals was his passion) which I found odd.
Then there's also the unhistorical widespread literacy, lack of cultural conflict between England and Wales, and the lack of language barriers between the nobility and peasants (remember this was set less than 100 years after the Norman conquest of England)/
How accurate should historical fiction be?
What do we owe to history?
I just finished Aquitania by Eva García Sáenz de Urturi (what a mouthful), a “historical fiction” novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine’s first marriage to Louis of France. This book was one of the nine I brought back from Spain; I picked it up because I had really enjoyed the Kraken police thriller novels that made Garcia Sáenz de Urturi famous, and generally enjoy historical fiction as a genre, although I am not sure this will continue to be the case based on the way the genre is heading. Unfortunately, I didn't like the book very much: the plot was all over the place because the author tried to insert an unconvincing thriller element into what was otherwise a period piece, the characters were at best two-dimensional, and the writing tried far too hard to be poetic. What really riled me up however was the absolute lack of concern that this book had for historicity. García Sáenz de Urturi took every salacious rumor that surrounded Eleanor of Aquitaine, ramped them up to 11, and then added in her own fabrications for good measure. Below are some of the more egregious events that I believe to be non-historical.
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Eleanor was raped by the brothers of Louis the Fat when she was 8!!! after her older brother died while her father was still alive to attempt to claim Aquitaine for the Kings of France.
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Eleanor was lovers with her uncle Raymond from the ages of 10-13 before she married Louis the Pious at 13. When she saw her uncle again on the 2nd crusade once she was actually married to Louis she refuses to have sex with him. Historically, the rumors of a tryst between Eleanor and Raymond only surround her visit to Antioch during the Second Crusade. I think these rumors are pretty unlikely in any case.
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Eleanor is the director of a secret spy network called the Aquitanian cats that she uses to investigate the death of her father and undermine the Capets. She also a secret handbook filled with #inspirationalquotes from her ancestors.
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The Abott Suger is actually Eleanor's uncle because Eleanor's grandfather had a secret brothel where he fucked nuns and Suger was the son of one of these nuns. Suger is also responsible for Eleanor's father's death because he has him murdered after he tries to kill the nuns rescued from this brothel to hush up the whole thing.
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Eleanor is actually a secret pagan and so doesn't give a shit about the church or God because the Catholic Church is #corrupt and #political.
Aquitania is not unique in this sensationalism. Almost every historical fiction book I've read in the last five years plays at least this fast and loose with history and with historical figures. In Santiago Posteguillo's immensely popular Saga of Julius Caesar, Caesar is portrayed as a paragon of virtue who protects the poor and also is god's gift to women in bed, while his enemies, namely Sulla, are portrayed as twist sex-fiends who get off to young boys getting whipped and just want to oppress people for fun. Posteguillo's even more famous Africanus trilogy is just as bad, with Scipio subbed in for Caesar, and Fabius Maximus for Sulla. Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, while fairly historically accurate, completely fails to capture the medieval mindset. Sharon Kay Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept tries so hard to be historical, but ends up making the Empress Maud and Stephen to be caricatures of themselves.
But @thejdizzler, why do you even care about all this ? These people died thousands of years ago, and we have sparse, if any, historical documentation of any of these people. The political and social conflicts of the roman world, and certainly the medieval world have little to do with the conflicts we have today. Let the people have their fun!
I disagree with this attitude for three reasons. Firstly, I think the truth is important in of itself. Lying about long dead people is a short step to lying about more recently dead people which is a short step to lying about people who are still living. Of course the amount of missing information increases substantially as we go back in time, but in the novels I've cited above, the portrayal of characters and events goes knowingly against the historical record. Where there is a gap, such as in the adolescence of Julius Caesar, or Eleanor's childhood, what we do know about character and era can be used to attempt a faith reconstruction, rather than a juvenile telenovela.
Secondly, a biased reading of history leads people to make specious comparisons to the present day. Posteguillo is guilty of this. During the tour for his first Julius Caesar book, he compared the struggle between Sulla and Caesar to the Russia-Ukraine War, with Putin being a stand-in for Sulla. Dude, do you really want to make that comparison? Pretty sure Putin doesn't have a sex dungeon in the Kremlin, and last I looked Zelensky wasn't committing genocide against the Celts. This is present a bit in Aquitania too, where Eleanor feels like her Occitan language is being oppressed and dominated by the French. Not only was Eleanor probably raised to speak French before Occitan, but repression of minority languages didn't really begin in France until the age of Napoleon. Nationalism wasn't really a thing until the 19th century.
Thirdly, and most importantly, historical fiction doesn't have to be written this way. If you want to change the outcome of a historical event because it makes your story better, you can write in a heavily inspired parallel universe like Guy Gavriel Kay, who has El Cid go down fitting Muhammad ibn Ammar in the Lions of Al-Rassan and Belisaurius becoming Emperor after Justinian in The Lord of Emperor's. You can also can be entirely truthful: Javier Moro's El imperio eres tú has biographical levels of accuracy on the life of Pedro I of Brazil, but reads like a novel. You can even make up your own characters, like Bernard Cornwell does in his Saxon Tales series and use the historical setting as a backdrop of what would otherwise be a fantasy novel.
Perhaps this is an unfairly high-bar to clear for authors, but I don't think so. No one is forcing you to write historical fiction, and if you don't want to do the research for a book to at least pass the sniff test of this amateur historian, you should just stick to fantasy.
New Year's resolution check in
- Work: Terrible week at work. Boss forgot to plug in the water supply to the fly incubator, so humidifier ended up cooking all our flies, including some stocks that it took me years to make! This sets me back a month or two which is really annoying.
- Fitness: 11 hours last week! Started track night Tuesday's again and had a surprisingly low heart rate for what I hope will be my marathon pace in October (workout was 8x 3 min at tempo, I averaged 5:50 pace and my heart rate was around 170, which is right at the edge of Z2/Z3 for me). I woke up a little wrecked this morning and skipped this morning's session: hoping this doesn't compromise volume for the week.
- Intellectual Stuff: Finished my first Spanish book this year and HP7 in Italian! Got my blog posts for this month planned, and got another paid subscriber on substack (it's my friend emory so it feels like it doesn't count.
- Finances: Going well this month. Earned $400 extra from opening a new checking account at Wells Fargo (guess they want my mortgage) and will be earning extra on cat sitting throughout the month.
- Dating: Had a pretty disregulated Sunday as I got super drunk at tavern run (~13 mile run+bar crawl) and ended up bypassing all my controls and masturbating to porn. Decided to pause all my dating apps and focus on building real life connections that may or may not turn into anything.
- Screen time on my phone is at an hour/day, despite my binge on Sunday. Need to update my controls to better prevent binging in the future.
- No tarot this week. Giving the ex-roomate some space.
- Socializing: Tavern run was awesome, always great to hang out with the whole running community here. Otherwise have had a good balance of social activity and rest this week. Would like to host a dinner party this month or next.
How goes it @FtttG and @oats_son? I enjoyed your blog post on rejection quite a bit last week FttG!
thejdizzler
14d ago
Option 5: I can’t find a partner so I can’t have kids. Many such cases.
thejdizzler
14d ago
You're missing one. Pollution! The most obvious aspect of this is climate change, where we are wrecking the climatic conditions that allow stable agriculture, but there are many other aspects of pollution including microplastics which I mentioned, and heavy metals that will heavily impact our fertility rate.
I don't believe we have unlimited energy resources like you seem to, but this is an argument for another time. In terms of space, we already use the vast majority of arable land on this planet.
thejdizzler
15d ago
I don't think this is true for a number of reasons. Firstly, declines in fertility are somewhat due to endocrine disruptors from microplastic pollution we've caused. That isn't going away for anyone any time soon. Secondly, there seems to be a deeper link between modernity and fertility that most want to admit. We may see high fertility as you say, but it won't be in the world we currently live in culturally, socially, or technologically. Finally, as many on this forum are loathe to admit, we have actually outrun the carrying capacity of this planet. There won't be another fertility explosion in this culture because the planet literally will not support it for much longer.
thejdizzler
16d ago
The main thing I’m noticing is that’s there’s an unwillingness to examine priors deeply. Spinoza just takes things like causality as a given, just like the EA people take utilitarianism as a given.
thejdizzler
16d ago
Just started on Spinoza after a few philosophy book club sessions of reading Kant, and I'm surprised by how similar the errors of the modern rationalists are to the errors of their 17th century counterparts. The philosophies of both suffer from an inability or unwillingness to really interrogate their assumptions (which is also Nietzsche's critique of most philosophy in general). I'm also reminded by how annoyed I was a couple years ago to discover the parallels between Yud's thought and various branches of ancient and modern philosphy that Yud likes to pass off as his own original thoughts. Maybe not really that surprising given how devalued humanities education is, and how inaccessible a lot of philosophy is.
thejdizzler
18d ago
Thank you but I think I have a general idea of how to do this myself. I have a detailed budget with spending categories that I allocated cash to every month. I track expenses every week to make sure I'm on track. I just need to allocate more to the saving category, which means less spending on eating out/frivolities in general.
- Work: Had a good week at work this week. Doing more by doing less: getting more done by putting less stuff on my calendar.
- Fitness: Got sick again (ugh), which has reduced both my desire to exercise and the positive feelings it gives. Still will hit 10 hours this week, but need to prioritize sleep and rest.
- Intellectual stuff: feeling very overwhelmed on this angle: I've committed to too many things. Marx book club will end this month, and extra time from reduced screen time has also been nice. Thinking of limiting blog posts and YouTube to one a day each to make more space for books!
- Finances: Made 3.8 (post tax) last month. Only spent 3.2k, which is about a 16% savings rate. Would like to get this closer to 20%.
- Dating: Only masturbated one time (which took 5 minutes, excellent time reduction) and not to porn. Went on a date with a medical student: there won't be a second date, partially from my end (her hobbies include "watching short form content") but mainly from her's (ghosted). I wasn't particularly interested but it still #feelsbadman. Unsurprisingly, ghosted by Argentinian chick. I continue to talk with a girl I met in Spain and a girl from swim club but I feel like those are more of friendships. I plan to not give out any likes on dating apps for the next month, and then pause my accounts.
- Didn't do any tarot this week.
- Screen time on my phone is at 45 (!!) minutes and dropping. There just isn't that much to do on there once I took away all the fun sites.
- Socializing: I'm overbooked on this front and need to leave 2-3 nights a week for personal projects or just catching up on self-care. I have a social activity every night this week except Monday, which is too much.
thejdizzler
23d ago
Maschi veri: Italian remake of Machos Alfa! General criticism of modern dating and male/female relationships. Absolutely hilarious.
thejdizzler
25d ago
Kautskyism. Democratic socialism without revolution.
thejdizzler
27d ago
Total agreement. Seems like an amazing drug to get metabolically healthy. I think I would prefer the lifestyle interventions that Attia recommends once I'm there to stay in that condition though.
Well you would eventually learn the conjugations through immersion, it's just slow. I've experienced this through learning Italian where I eventually just figured out how to conjugate some basic verbs (esssere and avere for example). Of course in practice it would be dumb not to just learn them through grammar study: I've learned far more conjugations in a few weeks of Italian class at Hopkins than I learned through osmosis in the ~150 hours of immersion that I've done in the language.
My own personal approach is hybrid of the grammar study and immersion methods for this reason. Certain things are much more efficiently learned through deliberate study, like conjugations or prepositions, and honestly even vocabulary words. But to truly internalize them, immersion is key.
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