thejdizzler
5hr ago
True, but Musk is responsible to his shareholders now (or at least partially). He chose to make spaceX a publicly traded company, which comes with expectations of profitability, at least eventually.
thejdizzler
12hr ago
This post gets to the heart of what my problem with the space colonization hype train that seems to be popular on this site. What exactly is the profit motive? Starlink seems very useful and profitable. Colonizing Mars? Not so much, unless investors are willing to eat losses for many decades.
thejdizzler
13hr ago
- Work. At a class in the UK for the next two weeks, then vacation in Germany. Travel to the UK was a bit of a shit show (cancelation, missed connection, and finally a lost bag). Research environment in Europe is much more chill, but also very inferior to the US.
- Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions again last week and 60 miles. Weight is continuing to drop as I have kind of lost my appetite with the heat.
- Intellectual stuff: finished a blog post for this month, and working on my Spanish/Italian as usual. Almost done with Blood Meridian, but it's like pulling teeth.
- Finances: Not even thinking about this until the end of the month.
- Dating. My roommate convinced me to redownload dating apps, which I think was a mistake.
- Tarot. No session.
- Socializing: nice change of environment has got to me excited to socialized and meet people!
- Screen time: 1 hour!
- Mental health: Pretty good, although lots of anxiety on this travel trip
thejdizzler
5d ago
I need to read Huysmans before I read this novel again, because I'm almost entirely convinced that François' piece that he writes about Huysmans during the book (as an introduction to a new edition of the collected works) is cynical and wrong. From my understanding of the second to last chapter, François basically labels Huysmans as a hedonist whose real interests lie in just submitting to his passions, exactly what François plans to do when he converts to Islam. Right before he decides to probably convert, François also takes a trip to the monastery where Huysmans had his revelation/began his conversion. He lives within about 12 hours because he can't handle the austere environment and also I think because he feels guilty about what he's about to do when he gets back.
I think the conversion has to be completely cynical, and Huysmans serves as a foil rather than an emulation. But again, I'd have to read Huysmans to be more sure.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Yea, I mainly did that (see the markdown elsewhere), but missed this one. Thanks!
thejdizzler
5d ago
No I don't, clarified!
I’ve already reviewed Submission once, back in 2024, but I found myself drawn back to Houellebecq, and Submission in particular earlier this year. Maybe it’s because he’s the equivalent of romantasy for dudes [1], and I remain unfortunately single at the time of writing this article. Maybe spring in Baltimore was too nice and I needed a dose of depressing nihilism. Or maybe I just needed to reread something that I’d already read in English in Spanish. Whatever the case, I was not planning on reviewing the book again when I started my reread: I felt like my last review covered all the bases of the book pretty nicely.
However, both when I suggested the book for a potential summer of fiction in philosophy book club, and when I posted a short positive review on instagram for my June book summary, the reaction from friends and family was overwhelmingly one of disgust and negativity. Why in the world was I reading a near-porno by a creepy old islamophobic misogynist about a fantasy scenario where 10% of the population somehow takes over the government of very secular France? I tried to respond as best as I could, but my on the fly defense of Houellebecq and my last essay didn’t seem to actually cut it.
What follows is my attempt to define why exactly I think this is a good book: that it’s witty and effective satire that holds up a dark mirror for the intellectual classes in the West, and also why you should maybe be more open to reading things written by people you disagree with [2].
Short Plot Summary (spoilers)
Like all Houellebecq novels, the main character, François, is a 40-something Frenchman with little going on in his life. His proudest moment was over 15 years ago when he defended his gargantuan thesis on Joris-Karl Huysmans, a pessimist novelist from the end of the 19th century. Because of this work, François was able to land a faculty position at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he halfheartedly teaches a class on 19th century literature and tries to seduce a couple of his students a semester. At the beginning of the novel, François is attempting to reignite a relationship with one of his former student lovers, Myriam, but after the surprise election of the charismatic Muslim Mohammed Ben-Abbas to presidency, Myriam flees to Israel and François is relieved of his faculty position at the Sorbonne because he is not Muslim. After a hectic few months in which his parents both die, and he very tepidly attempts to reconnect with Catholicism, François returns to Paris and is courted by the new minister of education, Robert Redinger, to convert to Islam and return to the faculty of the Sorbonne. François is bribed with the promise of a lot of money and multiple hot young wives, as polygamy is now legal in France. The novel ends with his choice being left up in the air (heavy use of the conditional tense, especially obvious in Spanish).
Islamophobia?
Numerous critics and friends have described this book as Islamophobic. I have to wonder if we read the same book. Islam is presented in no worse a light than the trad/RETVRN movement in Christianity that the left-wingers crying Islamophobia love to criticize themselves. Ben-Abbes’ party, which mainly has control of education as a result of the deal that his party, the Muslim Brotherhood, struck with the socialists to win the presidency and prevent the election of Marine Le Pen, merely reduces the educational opportunities afforded to women [3], and also heavily encourages them to leave the workplace and focus on caring for family instead. There are no crazy suicide bombings, unlike another of Houellebecq’s books, and the Islamic movement is basically portrayed in a completely nonviolent light.
As I’ll get to later, Houellebecq really doesn’t like Islam. So why does he pull so many punches and make Ben-Abbes’ government seem reasonable or even laudable in a certain sense? I’ll argue that critiquing Islam isn’t really the goal of this book. If it was, Houellebecq certainly wouldn’t have concocted this frankly ridiculous scenario where a group that makes up 10% of the population of France (and even less in other European countries) seizes the reins of not only political but also cultural power in the span of a few months. No, the purpose of Islam is to hold up a dark mirror to François and the other real-life intellectuals like him.
The treatment of women in mainstream and conservative Islam is something a lot of people, including me, have trouble with. François, and the narrative itself, are even worse. Women basically only appear in this book as “tetas y culo” or as house help in the background, and François only ever thinks of his students as potential sex objects, and his colleagues as washed-up and useless. Even the woman that François supposedly loves, Myriam, is conveniently thrown under the bus as soon as the political situation makes it so that he has to lift a finger to actually interact with her. Even in conservative households where women’s freedoms are severely restricted the men usually actually you know, love their wives and treat them with some measure of care and respect. That’s a little too much to ask apparently for mister François PhD.
Intellectually it’s perhaps even worse. In the novel, Robert Redinger, the new dean of education who converted to Islam many years before the book began, tells us that the word Islam literally means “submission”. I took this to imply that there would be some level of censorship of what François and other professors were producing. Yet censorship seems far preferable to inactivity, which is basically what our protagonist has been doing since he finished his dissertation. And it also doesn’t seem very necessary: François seems perfectly willing to self-censor and twist his interpretation of Huysmans to suit his new masters, and seems much more concerned with how many wives he’ll be getting rather than if he actually believes in the propositions that Islam makes about the world.
Of course François is a product of his atomized and rootless time: his parents are divorced and dead, he has no long-term relationships to speak of, and he’s never had to do a single hard day of work in his life, except for perhaps on his thesis. Yet that does not excuse the pathetic abdication of all moral and intellectual responsibility to the world in which he lives.
Death of the Author
Of course if you haven’t read the book (carefully), it’s very difficult to avoid the interpretation of this whole thing as bigotry when the author has said things like:
The most stupid religion is Islam.
Islam is a dangerous religion.
When you read the Koran you give up. At least the bible is beautiful because Jews have literary talent.
or
Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realize that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead.
Michel Houellebecq is an islamophobe and he is a misogynist. Yet that doesn’t have to change your interpretation of the text, and, if anything, I think it’s a reason to read Submission rather than avoid it.
We live in times of impending great change. Just as Rome went from pagan to Christian within the span of a generation [4], we live in a time where the cultural and ideological makeup of our communities and nations is at a tipping point. The total fertility rate (TFR) of almost every country outside of Africa is less than 2. Western nations in particular are reliant on a pyramid demographic scheme that has already begun to collapse under its own weight in countries like Japan and Italy. Modernity, and its atomized striver culture, is making us lonely and miserable. Business as usual means a future almost certainly like the one that Houellebecq predicted here: cultures with the highest TFR don’t seem to care too much about the liberation of women. More than 50% of the United States and nearly 50% of France voted for Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen, whose views are just as challenging to the neoliberal consensus, if in a fundamentally different way to Ben Abbas. We must have the courage to engage with books like Submission that don’t paint the future in such a pleasant light, and the imagination and fortitude to create and fight for one that we do believe in.
1 Including the abundance of extremely uncomfortable sex scenes. No dragons unless it’s that tattoo on one of the Thai prostitutes in Platform.
2 Houellebecq actually is Islamophobic and misogynistic.
3 By denying them scholarships at public universities. Women who really want to can get an education at private universities.
4 Houellebecq draws many parallels to Rome in this book
thejdizzler
7d ago
thejdizzler
7d ago
You sound like my boomer dad. Just resist all social engineering and social pressure and muscle through. What bullshit.
thejdizzler
7d ago
The medium is the message bro. Our material environment fundamentally changes how we interact with each other. Yes humans are agents that can make decisions, but those decisions are heavily influenced by our environment. No technology is a blank slate, but conditions us for certain behaviors via its design. The smartphone has been engineer very deliberately to alter your behavior. Don't believe me, just ask Tristan Harris. Your logic doesn't follow.
thejdizzler
7d ago
I can't tell if this is satire or not, but if not I could not disagree more with this take.
thejdizzler
7d ago
Is it the damn phones?. A new article from one of my favorite energy bloggers suggests that the cratering of fertility rates (which were stable for much of the late 20th century and early aughts) could be driven by the adoption of smartphones. I'm personally rather convinced by this hypothesis, as many of the other explanations given by both people on this forum (status) and in-real life (economics, fear about the future) fall apart with counter examples. You're really telling me that motherhood is now equally low status in the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Africa to depress fertility below 2, or that middle-class young white people are so economically oppressed that they can't have kids? I don't buy it. The smartphone, and its related access to a 24/7, truly global media environment seems to the only material change that could cross so many geographic and cultural lines. There's also a ton of causal mechanisms: hypergamy for instagram baddies, less time interacting with people in person so fewer marriages and thus fewer babies, and atrophied social skills for when interactions do happen in the wild.
Of course a lot of the effects of the smartphone can't be decoupled from high-modernity in general and its culture of extreme convenience and isolation, nor from related technologies like social media and short-form video content. And the groups that seem to avoid this depression in fertility seem to avoid all of these technologies.
I haven't killed my smartphone just yet, but I did delete all my dating apps about a month ago and have stayed off of them for the longest time since I last had a girlfriend. More in person relationships for me in the future I hope.
thejdizzler
7d ago
- Work. Still feeling a bit unmotivated this summer. Heading to the UK for a class on July 4th (very patriotic of me).
- Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions again last week and 61 miles. Up to 28% of Baltimore City. Weight has finally dropped to 168. Guess I was holding on to a bit of water weight for a while which allowed a sudden loss. This gives me some hope I can get into the low 160s high 150s by the Chicago marathon.
- Intellectual Stuff: attended a degrowth/abundance salon which was very inspiring, although I worry that most of the people there made it into a bit of an echo chamber! Hoping to read a bit more this month. Also realized how filled with typos many of my posts and texts have been. Something to work on in the next few months.
- Finances: -7% savings rate this month which while bad could have been a lot worse with increased travel and rent expenses.
- Dating. No dating apps continues to be nice. Kissed the girl I made pizza with at the end of the date. Not sure if there's a connection, but we both want to hang out again.
- Tarot. No session.
- Socializing: Still feeling a little unbalanced on the socialization side.
- Screen time: 1.4 hours phone. I'm honestly not thinking about this much, but I could scroll on instagram and Strava much less than I do.
- Mental health: Pretty good, although I wake up to a cortisol spike a bit too early I the morning. Would like to be able to get to bed a little earlier than I do.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Whatever happened to the Catalonian independence movement?
thejdizzler
14d ago
I’m 6’0” so I dont need to lose weight. However I will be faster at running if I’m closer to 155. The extra body fat isn’t doing anything for me.
thejdizzler
14d ago
- Work. Still feeling a bit unmotivated this summer but have been getting some stuff done slowly and surely. Seeing some of my cohorts thesis presentations has also made m realize how unfairly high of a standard I'm being held to by my advisors.
- Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions again last week and 60 miles. Up to 27% of Baltimore City. Weight is still at 171, no progress on the weight loss front.
- Intellectual Stuff: wrote a blog post on my values that I'm very proud of. Finally doing some immersion again and making slow and steady progress on my various novels.
- Finances: Spending is very much in the red this month because of increased rent and travel expenses. This is stressing me out too much which is stupid.
- Dating. Not having dating apps has actually been really nice. Pizza making date tonight.
- Tarot. Good session about destiny and weight loss.
- Socializing: Still feeling a little unbalanced on the socialization side.
- Screen time: 1.5 hours phone. This could be better
- Mental health: had some anxiety about my finances, but generally feeling pretty good.
thejdizzler
21d ago
- Work. Summer slump, but about to finish the final replicates of a very annoying experiment, so will happy to be done.
- Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions last week and won a pride 5k in ~16:40, slower than expected but I've stacking the mileage. 61 miles and gym+sauna once.
- Intellectual Stuff: Been having a great time having Claude coach me through writing an Anki add-on to calculate lexical coverage/ CEFR level from Anki cards. Wrote my Italian update last week and novels are all going well.
- Finances: Spending is going to be pretty high this month with higher rent and having to book hostels for Germany. Still hopefully should be in the black.
- Dating. Deleted my dating apps because I was tired of them/not meeting people I liked. Independently my friend Bella asked me out and we are going to make pizza together at her house Thursday.
- Tarot. No session this week
- Socializing: Went to the beach with some EA people, Spanish happy hour, and hanging out with running friends.
- Screen time: 1.5 hours phone. This could be better
- Mental health: feeling more relaxed without dating apps on my phone, and finishing up some work deadlines.
thejdizzler
22d ago
I have to keep reading unfortunately because it's for book club. Other people seem to be enjoying it, so will have to see what they say.
thejdizzler
22d ago
Maybe old news to this forum, but I stumbled upon two articles. The first is a Harvard professor using Claude to write a paper that second year graduate student could, and the second is a Less Wrong post about how Go players have disempowered themselves to AI.
I bit the AI bullet finally a couple weeks ago: first using it to help me fix up my software package that had some pretty annoying bugs, and later to help me make a couple Anki add-ons I had sitting in my brain. Even the free version of Claude is very good, and although it made mistakes, at least for coding, it's as least as smart as me and works 100s of times faster and doesn't need to take breaks. With some back and forth I can get it to make something functional it a tenth of the time it would take me to do it by myself. This is almost exactly the experience the Harvard Physics Professor has with trying to get Claude to write the theoretical physics paper: it takes about two weeks of back and forth, but eventually Claude manages to produce what the author and other experts think is a pretty solid paper, in 20x the time as a graduate student.
This is all great for experienced faculty: at least in theoretical disciplines they can already greatly speed-up the research process without spending more or time on pesky grad students with the bonus that Claude doesn't mind if you're mean to it. For younger faculty, postdocs, and graduates students not so much. Not only do these students/researchers not have the experience or knowledge to critique Claude in the way to actually produce usable research, the fact that more experienced faculty can use AI in this way means that there's less demand for educated individuals in general, and slowly but probably surely, the pyramid scheme of Academia will collapse.
Which brings me to the second article. In contrast to chess, which has been a "solved" game for a long time and thus has had time to develop antibodies against heavy AI/computer use, the Go world has been taken completely by storm by AlphaGo, which has led to rampant cheating with AI and rapid deskilling of the player-base. The author of the article highlights that this was a choice made by the community, both not to punish cheaters, and to care more about abstract values like ranking and points rather than having fun or development of some kind of genuine skill.
How does this relate to the first article? I worry that this Harvard professor is missing the large scale implications of wide-spread adaption of his AI practices on the university system, and how on emphasis on one aspect of the system (solving problems efficiently) can destroy the whole thing if not left unchecked. Many people both inside and outside academia take the purpose of the academy to be the generation of new knowledge, mainly in the form of research papers. This is certainly its most important role, at least to society at large. But academia also needs to perform two other key functions: disseminate that knowledge to industry/the general public so it can actually be used by society, and to reproduce itself so knowledge can continue to be generated. AI puts both of these secondary functions in grave danger.
Consider two scenarios. In the first, AI agents get no better than they are now at solving scientific problems. In this case they are still useful to higher level faculty in producing novel research output. Due to enhanced productivity at the top, there is a lesser need for graduate students, postdocs and younger faculty, and the ones that do remain in the system receive inferior training because of heavy reliance on AI to pass coursework and generate their own novel research questions. Over time as traditionally trained professors retire the effectiveness of the system declines because the new professors aren't as competent and are thus unable to use AI as effectively. In the long-term output shrinks, and less knowledge is able to be translated to the general public.
In the second scenario AI continues to improve its capabilities. In this scenario research output continues to go up indefinitely, but we begin to lose the ability to comprehend what much of it means or how much of it can be applied. Academia basically stops needing to exist at all, and we are reliant on the proper alignment of AI to get anything of value out of the research it performs.
In both scenarios, academia has basically signed its own death wish. For the reward of extremely high-productivity for very AI-savvy professors over the next few years, the system that brought us so many world-altering discoveries will basically be dismantled. Like the Go players who have seen all enjoyment and skill taken out of the game by heavy AI use, I think we are going to see the same in academia, except at the very top. And if you're not effectively training students to take your place, the system can't last very much longer.
Luckily being in biology I still have quite a bit of time left before AI can automate away my hands, but this whole thing has made me very personally scared.
thejdizzler
24d ago
Starting Blood Meridian. Surprisingly readable given what I've heard, but comically over the top violence and McCarthy's disregard for useful grammar objects, especially quotation marks, grinds my gears just as much as it did when I read The Road for a class in undergrad. Otherwise listening to HP 3 in Italian and reading a light Spanish book about a love triangle between three roommates.
thejdizzler
27d ago
I'm coming to realize this as well. When I do a single thing at a time almost anything is relaxing.
thejdizzler
27d ago
I forgot to mention it. It's still in my routine, it's just kind of stagnated at 5 mins when I wake up/5 minutes when I go to sleep/breaks throughout the work day. It's something I would like to spend more time on, but I have to get over this attitude of always needing to be "productive"/in motion. The ideal goal would be sitting for 30 minutes in the morning and doing a 30 minute walking meditation in the evening and spending a bit more time on it during the weekends.
thejdizzler
28d ago
Yea but I'm the one who has to express that not her, it hurts my self esteem to be rejected (mainly kidding).
thejdizzler
28d ago
- Work. Paper was published! Feeling a bit anxious about work because of the possibility that we don't have microscopes when I get back from the UK and just poor time management in general
- Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions last week and hit 57 miles with some biking. Did not make it to the gym: will be better about that this week.
- Intellectual Stuff: Novel clearing is going well, and writing my Italian update for this month.
- Finances: Nothing to report
- Dating. Brazilian women is "too overwhelmed" by living in a new country to be in a relationship, which is such bullshit because she just changed all her hinge photos. I just wish people would be honest when they rejected me. Anyway, have a date with someone else this weekend and a third person the weekend after.
- Tarot. No session this week
- Socializing: EA meetup, Spanish Happy Hour, various parties. Again too much socialization.
- Screen time: 1.4 hours phone. Getting that last little bit below an hour is proving to be a big challenge.
- Mental health: feeling bad because of rejection and poor time management at work.
The thing is I believe there is no accurate comparison to space colonization because it basically completely detethers us from our own ecology and biology in a way that transatlantic voyages did not. The kind of person that thinks that they want to colonize Mars (the cowboy/Lone Ranger archetype) is incredibly ill-suited to such a venture because of the extremely tight constraints that will inevitably exist in terms of resource usage and time allocation in the first mars colonies. The first mars colonists will basically be living under martial law in caves where they rarely if ever see the sun. This sounds much better suited to the corporate drones who already do very well in existing hierarchies here on earth.
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