Corvos
3hr ago
Yes, I see. I remember being very worried when I was doing the paperwork for my heart op and saw that risk of death was perhaps 1:200 to 1:100.
Then I got to the ward, looked around at my fellow patients (all over 70 and mostly very frail) and thought ohhh... And I felt better :P
I wish I understood the nature of resilience in general, really. The fact that the brain continues to work essentially as normal when doused in brain-altering chemicals like alcohol is really staggering when you think about it.
Corvos
3hr ago
Then perhaps I was harsh. I still don't think it's really for me - the 'isn't gender interesting' stuff palled for me halfway through le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness when I was 21 - but I take your point.
Re: WW2 there was full male conscription and rationing of every foodstuff except bread, heavy propaganda, the works.
“Tyranny” has a moral valence one can agree or disagree with but it was extremely authoritarian. And as with COVID it was very dangerous long term because certain segments of society loved it - Labour tried hard to make rationing a permanent feature of British life long after food shortages had been resolved.
Corvos
8hr ago
To be honest, I got about ten pages into that book a decade ago. Read the bit about how their society considers it taboo and obscene to gender people and noped right on out.
Corvos
17hr ago
Of course. I just read and wondered if some patients had an innate susceptibility to side effects while others never did. Would be interesting if so.
As a lay person, it’s always complicated looking at lists of side effects. Take a side effect of:
Very rare: stroke.
Does that mean that every time you take it, you are rolling a 1:10,000 chance of stroke. Or is it 1e-9 for a young healthy person and 1:10 for a very elderly person who’s already had one stroke? And so on.
Corvos
17hr ago
at a relatively continent 6.2% rate of nocturnal enuresis
Per dose or per patient?
Corvos
1d ago
Can't do spoiler tags multi-paragraph, I think. You need separate tags per paragraph. The preview operates on slightly different rules. Click 'view source' on my post.
(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.)
Corvos
1d ago
I see, thank you for clarifying. As I understand it, these other sects include Greek and Russian Orthodox but that's about it, right?
I think, and @OracleOutlook will put me right if I go wrong, that the Catholic Church considers that Christ founded the church and gave supernatural authority (the ability to perform sacred rites and have them be genuine rites, not placating) to Peter and only Peter. Likewise Peter received the authority to reveal Christ’s truth. The Church in a very real sense is Christ, the Body of Christ on Earth, it’s what he left do us.
So rather than the world being made of Catholics, non-Catholic denominations, and non-Catholics, the world is split into:
- Catholics
- People who do not yet know that they are Catholics (ie that they belong to God)
- People who deliberately reject the Church.
Everybody except those who have wilfully, deliberately cut themselves off from the Catholic Church are in communion with the Pope.
Corvos
1d ago
Nothing much to say except awesome analysis. I quite liked DA2 despite the copy-paste, the scaling of it worked well and the characters were great. But your write-up is better.
For me it worked, because I genuinely started to get carried away during the
Corvos
1d ago
While I agree with both you and Scott that people who have supposedly been guided by meditation to transcend the self do not seem to show the godlike serenity one might expect, I don't think that this is a very kind or helpful way of putting it.
Corvos
1d ago
I think Brave Story uses the term ijiwaru baba when MC's mother is forbidding him to see his beloved uncle, with whom she has a vendetta.
This is probably true to some degree, if by "people broadly in control of the culture" you mean the Left, because pretty definitionally leftists want to change society, and that is going to upset lots of people. There might be a correlation between "likes brutalist architecture" and "likes immigration" but I am not convinced it's coming from the same place or that "upsets people/is bad" is its defining characteristic.
Perhaps I'm still not expressing myself well, but I would also ask you to read a little more charitably. I am not talking about 'the Left'. The Left is maybe 30%, 40% of society. It comprises people who believe in socialist economic theory, people who believe that social hierarchies need to be rejigged, unionists, feminists, ethnic minorities, all sorts of people who have a reason to want society to change in certain ways that they believe are good in general or good for them in particular. Lately it also includes a certain number of temperamental conservatives, because certain left-wing causes have been causes long enough to become the status quo, as in Scott's essay "Gay Rights are Civil Rites".
I am talking about a much smaller group of people, perhaps 5-10%, who seem to have tastes that are broadly anti-correlated with the majority of people. That does not mean that the defining characteristic of their tastes is "upsets people". I'm not really equipped to say what the defining characteristic of their tastes are, because I don't share them and I don't have the right equipment to pick up what they pick up. If you haven't, please do read Ozy's essay, where she explains her viewpoint much better than I can. Just in case, I will quote:
consider aesthetics. One could very reasonably make the case that the natural human aesthetic sense prefers realistic paintings of beautiful landscapes with water, trees, large animals, beautiful women, children, and well-known historical figures. The Wikipedia page provides an example of a generally preferred image [...] However, art of this sort leaves me cold.
The first time I saw it, Joan Miro’s [abstract painting] moved me to tears from its sheer beauty. I make a special effort to visit it every time I am in New York City, including taking my husband to see it on our honeymoon so he could understand my aesthetics better. (Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t capture it; the painting is much more beautiful in person.)
Needless to say, my aesthetics don’t line up with normal human aesthetics very well at all. Does this mean I should try to shift my aesthetics to correspond to what normal humans value? Is there, perhaps, some deep evolutionary wisdom I am missing in why trees are prettier than abstract shades of grey? Of course not. I like what I like; the things that give me pleasure are the things that give me pleasure. It is irrelevant that this is an unpopular human preference. And while evolution did give me my aesthetic sense in the first place, its purpose in doing so was maximizing my number of grandchildren, which is not a metric I particularly care about.
This cluster of people have, for the last hundred years or so, clustered on the Left and been disproportionately represented at the top of cultural institutions. They are clustered at the top of cultural institutions because their tastes have broadly become the marker of what culture is, and they have historically been clustered on the Left partly because 'changing things' is what you want to do when your aesthetics are unpopular and not established, and when you have a far-greater-than-normal hunger for novelty. Partly also because their aesthetics have generally dictated the aesthetics of the Left in the non-Soviet countries, and therefore the Left is the champion of their aesthetics. Chicken, egg; egg, chicken.
To some degree, the affiliation with the Left may change, because the Left has got rather more boring as it's got more powerful and more established, which is why you see some of the 'obligate edgy' like perhaps Walt Bismark moving to the alt-right. I don't think that will take, long term, but I don't know for sure.
The reason I bring up immigration is because there while are a lot of economic arguments and non-aesthetic on the pro- side, as someone who has spent a lot of time in university towns and known a lot of pro-immigration people, there is also a deep, fundamental hunger for new, different culture on your doorstep. Often this coincides with a boredom and a certain repulsion towards the culture of their birth. Take the recent Iran and Palestine rallies for example. I know some people who don't really express a strong opinion on the issues but they love that they're happening. It's historical! You can go and watch people shouting and yelling in Arabic and it's like being in a different country. So I note in various different fields a strong desire for alien-ness and I believe it's a very underappreciated driver of the cultural conflicts that have been happening over the last 100 years.
EDIT: just to quickly address your other point.
I think perhaps we disagree about cause and effect. I think if something is universally popular, it's almost certainly because it's good. You seem to be arguing that popularity makes it good by definition.
Yes. I don't think 'technical goodness' beyond a base level, as measured by technical experts, is very predictive of popularity. Indeed, I think in many areas it's smuggling popularity through a back door. What makes Harry Potter's plot so good? Well, the characters are written in a way that makes people care for them, and events are written in a way that excites people...
In something like poetry, where people supposedly have much finer sensibilities for technical skill, we find that the most lauded poets are generally considered execrable by the majority of people while Britain's favourite poem is 'If' by Kipling who is regarded by those in the know as a hack.
Can you give me an example of a work that is loved by 95% of the population but which you think might be arguably "bad" on a technical level?
Not really - genuinely terrible-all-round stuff doesn't get popular. Harry Potter is known for not having great prose but good story, Fate Stay Night has terrible prose but good story, Higurashi had terrible art until they remade it (look it up if you're interested) but good story etc. I'm mostly pointing out that 'technical skill' is not a good indicator of popularity and therefore of 'goodness' by my lights beyond a base level.
By my own definition, I don't think something almost universally beloved can be bad. The idea that one can 'snooker' people into liking something that is actually bad seems like a confusion of terms to me. Of course, if one says something like, "Potter's plot is great, everyone loves the plot" then we are in a fully circular realm.
When you conflate bauhaus and brutalism with immigration, you kind of lose me. Bauhaus and brutalism are not to my tastes but I've seen works of both that I thought were pretty good and I am unconvinced they are some deliberate construct imposed on the masses by the same elites who do all the other social things you disapprove of.
Did you read that one famous debate between architects where the Bauhaus guy basically said, "I love disharmony, I love that I can put it in the middle of the city, and if the vast majority of people find it uncomfortable that is their problem not mine"? On immigration, my brother has a genuine preference for both brutalist architecture and the parts of London that I find extremely culturally uncomfortable, he actively enjoys the strong non-Britishness of it all. I'm genuinely trying to take his expressed preferences and those of @Primaprimaprima and Ozy seriously and at face value.
I tried to be clear that I wasn't writing a polemic or positing a malevolent conspiracy, it's just that the people broadly in control of the culture genuinely have preferences that can't be publicly satisfied without making lots of other people unhappy as a side effect. There's other stuff going on, economics and technological changes and so on, but I believe that the taste incompatibility is a hugely understated influence on what has become the Culture War and it's why these questions have been bubbling up with increasing frequency lately. Scott's essays, the failed efforts by both the UK conservatives (Build Back Better) and Trump to enforce building styles that are popular against furious institutional resistance, and so on. I'll also say that the idea that much of this stuff arises from an unfortunate incompatibility is much, much more charitable than the position I held when I started thinking about this a decade ago.
I do think to some degree there is such a thing as "objectively" good and bad art, but that is mostly in the realm of technical skill, and perhaps to a lesser degree, does it accomplish what it intended?
How do you feel about popularity? As a very simple toy model, say that society's tastes as judged by 'this is bad', 'this is good' boil down to a predictable 95%/5% split of obligate normie vs. obligate edgy. Lots of room for individual preferences within that, but basically two clusters of markedly disproportionate sizes.
Would you accede to the proposition that a work of art which is loved by much or most of the 95% is 'objectively good' and one which disgusts and repels them is 'objectively bad'? To my mind, whether a given work will delight the vast majority of people seems like a far better indication of its quality than technical skill or whether it accomplished what the artist wanted.
Personally, I've enjoyed lots of things that were technically bad - everyone dunks on Rowling's prose, the art for Higurashi is genuinely terrible, etc. And I have relatively little interest in whether the artist succeeded in his wish to discomfort and repel me (tragedy is a bit more complicated) vs. failing to please me if the result is repellent.
it's telling that most of the critique seems to come not from a genuine analysis of the work, or even a particular dislike of the style, but because of culture war reads.
I think you have this exactly backwards. This is the Culture War. It's the beating core of the culture war, far deeper in many ways than immigration or politics. For complex reasons, in the West a group of extremely unrepresentative people rose to control of the beating organs of our society including but not limited to the arts and the universities. They enjoy disharmony, extreme novelty, and 'modernism' for lack of a better word, and their tastes are broadly genuine but anti-correlated with the tastes of the vast majority of the population. To please and delight themselves, they acted in a semi-coordinated way to move society towards what pleased them, aided by the cultural and literal razing of the two world wars. The built environment (bauhaus and brutalism), the social environment (immigration, the more culturally dissimilar the better), etc. This wasn't necessarily malevolent in intent, though it was sometimes selfish. Often they thought of themselves as uplifting the normies, albeit by force. However, they completely overlooked or even applauded the long term psychic damage it did to the normies who were forced to live in their world and to bow to their tastes thanks to their control of the institutions.
Contrast with Japan, which has certainly changed over the last 150 years but in which normies remain firmly in charge, and with even the very early Marxists. (Marx himself once said that the point of Marxism was to give every man the privilege of being a hunting, shooting, fat, happy aristocrat.)
TL;DR: The binary of objective vs. subjective obscures that you can have a 'subjective' question where 99.9% of people agree. It's not objective in the way that 'the sky is blue' is objective, one can perfectly well hold the opposing opinion without being mad or evil. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to me to be particularly subjective in the, 'what's better? no way to say, really...' way where we have to abandon audience reaction and go for something explicitly relativistic like 'is the author skilled at doing this thing that almost everyone hates?'.
Corvos
2d ago
Right, but at the moment it's largely funded with public money for the edification (theoretically) of the public. Especially if you go beyond visual art to the other inbred arts (theatre, poetry, literature as opposed to bestsellers, much architecture).
I broadly agree with your diagnosis - I've watched e.g. Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation go from having relatable, good recommendations to really much more of 'does this reanimate some spark of life in my breast' and he even disavowed many of his original recommendations that were too normie because he thought they were dull in retrospect. But the weirdos need to be given their own private space to work and we need to acknowledge that they're weird and shouldn't be doing things for the general public.
Corvos
3d ago
Market-Dominant Minority iirc. Basically locally economically successful despite being politically and literally a niche group.
Corvos
4d ago
I think usually, “if it still hurts in a couple of days, or if you can’t move it properly (not because it’s stiff)”.
Primary might be better than sole, but I'd still add bonding and pleasure into the top 3 of the telos of sex. And I think there is ample historical and anthropological evidence to support that being the case throughout history and cultures.
Sure, though different cultures would certainly dispute the circumstances under which that bonding and pleasure are intended to apply.
With respect, you seem to be flattening a perfectly sensible argument, viz. "sex fairly regularly makes babies, if you are terrified of having babies then don't do the thing that regularly makes babies" into "Ha! Don't you see you're identifying biology with morality?! And if you don't accept this arbitrary list of repugnant conclusions that I have drawn up, then you must be a hypocrite."
Sex fairly regularly produces foetuses ->
Foetuses regularly develop into babies absent molestation ->
At some point in this process - opinions vary on which point - everyone agrees they acquire rights that must be taken into consideration alongside yours ->
Therefore if you are really determined to protect your freedoms, you would be best advised not to begin this chain.
One doesn't have to be a hypocrite or to swallow a dozen repugnant conclusions to see this, only able to accept the basic nature of cause and effect. From where I am standing, the only real reason I can see to deny some level of personal responsibility is a firm conviction that complete sexual freedom is such an important and wonderful thing that nothing must ever cloud or impinge it in the slightest.
If you're interested in discussing how we trade off the rights of the unborn at various ages, the pleasure and freedoms of people having sex, etc. etc. I've given some thoughts elsewhere but we certainly can.
It's being forced to participate in a blatant, obvious lie that literally every human being in history except 5 weird tribes in the middle of nowhere would recognise as a lie.
If it were publicly sayable and reified that trans people are insane and think they're the wrong gender, the existence of trans people in the vicinity would be broadly okay. One would feel sorry for them, but not necessarily feel compelled to say so to their face. The fact that there has been a vast activist-indoctrination effort to punish people who don't play along is what people find uncomfortable.
I've discussed before elsewhere but it's incredibly unpleasant to interact closely with a trans person in a Blue workplace, consciously choosing every day to lie because you're a coward who's afraid to be thrown out of the program you've invested years of work into, dreading the day when you slip up and absent-mindedly call the squeaky-voiced 5ft person who was a girl six months ago 'her'.
2016: We should Unite the Right!
2024: We have United the Right, sweeping all before us! Look at all these guys!
2026: ….yay?
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