what_a_maroon
No bio...
User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Maybe part of the reason the average American is obese is because they drive everywhere, and walking 30 minutes a day would have tremendous benefit.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
A computer and reliable internet access aren't free (nor a VPN), and many people rely on the library for the internet (ironically enough).
I don't think the internet replaces what libraries currently do, even around getting books. Being able to easily browse, to find books you never even thought of... a physical space like a library is way better than the internet.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
We used to have a bare links repository subthread back on reddit, but it was removed (I don't actually remember why; I think it just generated lots of heat for little gain, gave people an excuse to put low effort content in the main thread since "if it's ok in the BLR it isn't that bad to put it in the main thread", and generally lowered the level of discourse).
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
But the ancient Arab world didn't lack large and rich cities, centralized empires, writing, art, mathematics, etc. either. Even today some Arab countries have most of those things; yes, it's unsustainable decadence due to oil rather than true economic development, but they still managed to maintain a reasonably stable government, something resembling property rights, etc.
Actually, Arabs are Semitic, so yes the current inhabitants of North Africa are not directly descended from pharaohs or Carthaginians, but they aren't that distantly related either.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
This is obviously hypothetical, but I disagree. Taking a streetcar (or tram, bus, light rail, whatever) into the city, and walking to your final destination, is very different from living in a far-flung exurb that, at best, involves commuting for work (and by the 80s, often didn't even involve that much). And building such places is far less destructive to the city itself. One could argue this just subjects the middle class to the awful conditions of the cities in the 70s without any alternative; on the other hand, maybe if they stay, they vote for better crime policies, provide stabilizing social forces, don't displace lots of inner-city residents, and improve the tax base in the city. (My inner libertarian is outraged at that last one, but usually whenever the urban/suburban arguments start to happen on TheMotte, someone tells me that it's ok that car-dependent suburbs are subsidized because one function of government is to provide public goods for the benefit of all, so I figure what's good for the goose is good for the gander).
As far as I can tell, this "long-term decay" lasted a few decades and has generally been on the reverse since the 90s (in general; obviously some cities continued to decline, but e.g. NYC has had increasing population over the past few decades.)
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
If the street cars are gone (and not replaced with some other transit) it's not really a streetcar suburb anymore.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I'm not sure how to measure/check that. I briefly googled but mostly got sources that only included a few states or didn't seem to be based on solid data.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Neither that argument nor any supporting evidence for it are in their post. It's mostly just complaining about the outgroup.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
The theory I heard is that Hussein was trying to pretend he had WMDs in order to intimidate potential rivals in the region like Iran, and accidentally did too good of a job.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
I think walking 30 minutes every day would add up over time.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Is your idea of the Enlightenment accurate, though? I'm aware that the term is loaded with positive affect. Should it be, given the historical record?
What historical record are you referring to? If you mean the very question we're discussing, then that seems circular. Anyone can claim to be implementing some set of ideas, but that doesn't mean they actually are. Marx and the USSR claimed to be following "science" and "democracy"; does that mean science and democracy were the cause of those tens of millions of deaths?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment#Religion
There doesn't seem to be anything here about forcibly getting rid of all religion. E.g.
Locke said that the government lacked authority in the realm of individual conscience, as this was something rational people could not cede to the government for it or others to control. For Locke, this created a natural right in the liberty of conscience, which he said must therefore remain protected from any government authority.
and
In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson calls for a "wall of separation between church and state" at the federal level.
Maybe there are other Enlightenment thinkers with more hard-line stances, but when I read Locke the individual choice interpretation was definitely what I understood.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
I'm able to see it fine and I don't have a twitter account; not sure what's going on
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Looks similarly cursed on firefox on my laptop
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
The website seems to have eaten my comment, so I'm going to be lazy and summarize a bit. Feel free to ask for more details.
Yes, for all of these categories, you could consume them at an 1800 level for relatively cheap (I could pedantically debate this, but I won't because I don't think the overall point is affected). However, we consume vastly more per person. We use more energy per person, for controlling the temperature of our buildings, for transportation, for shipping goods all over the world. We have more advanced medicine. Yes, some additional cost is artificial, but some of it is because people want things that didn't exist in 1800. Building the same building now is probably easier than in 1800, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about replacing a one-room log-and-thatch cabin with a multi-story structure with many rooms, electric wiring, plumbing, glass windows, etc.
And, even if it were legal to raise a child in 1800s conditions, most people would freely choose not to, I think. Of course, there's also no need to have 12 kids, since survival rates have improved (one of the effects of consuming more per child!). Overall, I don't think there's any confusion as to what people mean when they say that kids are expensive, or why this is the case.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
For most of that time, when people had lots of children, many of them died in said wars, famines, and plagues, or just from everyday diseases. The mother often died in or after childbirth as well.
not a single thing related to raising children should be expensive given the capabilities of modernity.
What is the saying? Consumption always expands to meet the income available? Children are just one example of this--possibly one of hte clearest examples, in fact. Obviously calories are cheap, and people are rich enough to afford much more space per person. But if you tried to raise a child like an 1800s farmer (minimal or no schooling, having them work on your farm from a young age, 12 people in a 1 room house, everyone sleeping on the floor, no electricity or running water, letting them walk to a neighbor alone, etc) you'd be locked up for child abuse (and they wouldn't be set up to do very well in the modern world).
Even if you think about these labor saving devices... many of them correspond to tasks that weren't done at all or were much easier in the past. When your house is small and 1 room, cleaning is much easier than when it's large with many rooms. A simple wood floor is easier to sweep than if you have a mix of tile, wood, carpet, etc. You don't need a dishwasher or laundry machine if you have the absolute bare minimum of dishes and clothes. Or take medicine: If the only medicine you could possibly access is what you can make from herbs, well that's certainly cheaper than buying something expensive at the pharmacy! It just might be completely useless and your child might die.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Income isn't just skewed, it has a very long tail. Many variables have much more compact distributions. Happiness doesn't have natural units and could be distributed however you want depending on how you measure it, although it would be weird to me if the range of feelings human brains were capable of expressing spanned such a wide distribution (also something something CLT handwaving arguments, emotions are the sum of many small features).
1 SD can be a substantial impact, but if the result above is correct, it would be very difficult to obtain by increasing one's income from typical means (promotion, career change, getting an advanced degree, etc).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You can continue to try to be overly literal for the sake of scoring fake points, or you can address the substantive argument being made. I'm not sure what you think you're accomplishing with the former.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
There's not "no evidence" in the sense that you can certainly find papers claiming narcissism has decreased over time. However, you can also find ones saying that it is flat over time, or has increased over time. E.g. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_surprisingly_boring_truth_about_millennials_and_narcissism
In a foundational 2008 paper, Jean Twenge (coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic) and her colleagues reviewed 85 studies that surveyed more than 16,000 college students between 1979 and 2006... The researchers found that college students were becoming more narcissistic—by a full 30 percent from 1982 to around 2006. UC Davis’s Kali Trzesniewski and colleagues responded in 2008... The results indicated no change in narcissism... In yet another 2008 paper, Twenge and Joshua Foster re-analyzed data... they found that narcissism rose among both whites and Asians from 2002 to 2007. But because Asians tended to have lower narcissism scores in general, and the Asian population at UC campuses increased during the time period under scrutiny, the overall trend may have been obscured. Twenge and Foster also objected to the data that Trzesniewski and her coauthors had used... Further studies in 2009 and 2010 found no rise in narcissism. But a 2010 paper by Twenge and Foster objected to their methods... “The debate on changes in narcissism [is] seemingly settled,” Twenge and Foster wrote in 2010. “Seemingly” being the keyword: In late 2017, a new study appeared in Psychological Science that called all the previous ones into question... They found a “small and continuous decline” in narcissism throughout that time period.
The actual section is several paragraphs with a lot more details, but you get the gist. It then points out that the instrument used has a constant wording, which may be interpreted differently. Other sources don't provide a single simple answer, either, such as https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191210111655.htm or https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171115-millenials-are-the-most-narcissistic-generation-not-so-fast (which I think summarizes some of the same evidence as the first article).
Crime by native whites is low
It looks low in comparison to the AA rate, but the US white-offender homicide rate is still higher than most developed European countries' total rate (and many of the poorer ones as well). Even if you assume that none of the "unknown" in the first link below are white, it's still 2.1 per 100,000. If you use the distribution of victims as an estimate (2nd link) since most murders are same-race, you get 2.5; if we assume the unknowns are distributed the same as the knowns (41% white), then we get just under 3. Countries such as Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France, the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are all below 2, as well as Poland, Spain, Albania, and Croatia, among others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Vital_statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I'm all for facing certain risks head-on and accepting that some amount of risk is unavoidable in a life worth living. I don't know what's to be gained from neglecting even basic safety regardless of context. At least Pasha's post from today is about taking risks to have fun, explore, and learn things. Risking disability or death when it's easily avoidable for misplaced machismo is the opposite of masculine, in my opinion. "Duty is heavier than a mountain. Death is lighter than a feather." Your duty as a traditional man is to take care of your family. Can't do that if you're crippled or dead. Put aside your ego and do the boring but important things; that's actually the hard part.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Do you see the shape of the problem?
I don't understand your claims in this paragraph at all. Britain, its former colonies, and the other states that those places controlled or influenced, can't possibly be an "outlier" when they represent such an enormous amount of people, land, wealth, and influence. There were only so many major powers at the time or in the immediate aftermath.
And what does Marxism have to do with this? Marx's main works were published around 50 years after the end of what is generally considered the Enlightenment, and represents a very different intellectual tradition. Maybe Marx and some his followers thought they were the following in the Enlightenment tradition, but I don't see it at all, except to the extent that you could group literally all Western philosophy into one big tradition, but which is far too broad to ask a question like "Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?" Each generation of thinkers presumably takes influences from their predecessors, while also rejecting some of what came before. While you can have fuzzy boundaries for sure, I feel very comfortable placing the late-1800s socialists, the early- to mid- 20th century socialist states, and their apologists in Western academia, outside the purview of "The Enlightenment."
Doesn't it behoove the ideologues to account for such vagaries when designing their theories? If you're going to claim to know how to make a better society, shouldn't you account for the real-world conditions that will cause your system to fail?
I'm not really sure I follow, but it is impossible to anticipate all of the possible ways in which someone might misinterpret or misuse your ideas. Aside from the infinite range of human excuse-making and rationalization and stupidity, if someone can ignore what you write about individual liberty, they can also ignore what you write about not ignoring the part about individual liberty.
When the ideology itself claims that the nature of the political problem is that there are good people and bad people and the solution is for the good people to kill the bad people, I don't think you get to blame the outcomes on bad actors.
Ok, but did Enlightenment thinkers actually say that? Or did some people just hamfistedly glue their unrelated complaints to vague ideas about equality and distrust of authority and hierarchy?
For Christianity, you gave examples spanning a thousand years and several continents.
It wouldn't be hard to give examples that are much closer in space and time. Just look at the reactions to Martin Luther's theses, for example, which split down the middle of countries or even families. Or the differences across the groups of Albion's Seed.
Then your argument would be that the French Revolution was not a central example of the Enlightenment, and that individual liberties are a defining characteristic?
I think it's less central than the American Revolution, but also, the new system didn't even last that long. Napoleon took over, then the Bourbon monarchy was restored, then you had the revolution of 1830, then another in 1848, then Napoleon 3rd declared himself Emperor until 1870. While this initial event had something to do with the Enlightenment, it seems weird to me to over-index on this one fairly short event. Modern France's government is based on what happened many decades later, while America is still using the same Constitution we had in 1792. As I described above, I might just be biased as an American, but violent revolution against the existing powers is nothing new. For example, do any of the things you identify as negatives in the Enlightenment also seem to describe the Hussite wars of 400 years prior, and if so, why?
If so, what do you make of all the people arguing the opposite throughout history?
People also argue that the American Revolution is a central example of the Enlightenment, and your post is largely about the differences between the 2 revolutions. So do you argue the American Revolution is not a central example? Do you agree that 2 things can be wildly different while still being part of one big intellectual movement? Do you think that all of those people you mentioned are just confused?
You originally asked, "I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?"
In order for this question to be meaningful, there has to be an "essential spirit" which is not simply defined by the behavior of people in those revolutions, as the latter would be circular. It seems like your answer is to define this "essential spirit" as being closer to the French version mostly because that version was more... popular? Globally influential? Which is something you can do, I guess, but is mostly an empirical question and I'm far from sure that you're correct, and in any event seems fairly close to saying that Catholicism is closer to true Christianity simply because there are more Catholics than any other branch.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky
How about neither?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pg
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pi
As far as major economic trends, nothing seems to have even changed when Trump was elected. These graphs show % change from 1 year prior, but they're easy to modify to show raw level or whatever else. I guess he was "lucky" in the sense of being elected after the recovery was well under way but even that seems like a stretch.
Amadan can disagree, but I don't think I have seen a modhat comment explicitly invoke that rule in a long time. Since the migration off of reddit, at least. If they have receipts, I would be happy to see them. @ZorbaTHut, since this is a meta-thread do you mind if I tag them in this thread (or you can let them know or whatever you think is best) to ask for specific examples?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
It makes sense to me that the vaccine could cause very different symptoms than COVID itself. It's not the most intuitive, but it wouldn't be the weirdest fact about biology by far. However, I'm still very skeptical that the vaccine could cause hundreds of different syndromes covering every single system in the human body. Is there any single cause that causes such a wide variety of medical symptoms?
Something like this is possible, or even likely. Another point, often made by urbanists, is that having more regular people in spaces makes them safer, and feel safer, because of safety in numbers. However, mainly what I was trying to get at is that the policies that allow lawlessness to continue and spread are orthogonal to policies that favor driving/other modes of transportation, and so it is entirely possible (easy, even, aside from the political constraints that seem to be unique to America) to make walkable places that are nothing like what firmamenti describes.
Streetcar suburbs are the opposite of a car-dependent development and are not a problem.
I think you should re-check your history. Homicide rates declined from the mid 30s until the mid 60s, which is exactly when American governments started demolishing urban neighborhoods to build highways, subsidizing homeownership, etc.
If you're just going to drop a thinly veiled claim that being near black people is a public safety hazard, you should have some evidence for it. "Controversial claims require evidence" etc.
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