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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   4163 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 18, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Imagine being Glenn Ellison. You’re a highly respected academic at the top of your field, Department head of economics at MIT. One day you wake up and see your daughters face all over the internet. Half the world is calling her ugly, stupid, and evil. At the office, your colleagues are too polite to mention it, but you can see the disgust on their faces. What are you gonna do, blame it on the Harry Potter fan fiction? How does the daughter of the chief MIT economist not understand margin requirements or decreasing marginal utility? Everyone knows you failed as a father, and you just have to sit there and take it.

Sorry to be a killjoy but I don't believe this is what's happening (though there are American academics here, they should know better). Everyone is a hero of one's own story. And on top of that, academic elites are a highly conscious class as a whole, a guild on the level of a discipline, and a mafia on the level of a department. They are intensely clannish, prize loyalty over reason, and are largely incapable of taking responsibility or seeing things from the perspective of strangers. It's always the children, the profane masses, who are wrong. Doesn't matter if this is about replication crisis or collapsing an entire financial ecosystem. It is natural for an academic to fail precisely in the way he teaches not to, and to refuse to acknowledge it, appealing to his authority in the domain. Even more natural to excuse allies for the same. If anyone is disappointed, it's people who were already critical.

This is how I see it (modulo tone which I admittedly can't mimic well enough):

– Glenn... I was so sorry to hear about Caroline. Is she doing okay? If she has time, I can refer her to Pasternak, he's got an opening after getting rid of that crazy piece of shit. He's a real pro.

– Mr. Ellison, you should know we of the Nth Lab always have your back! Do not blame yourself and don't listen to those vile haters on the Internet! Tell Caroline we looove her!

– So G, I'll be blunt, this is a valuable life lesson for the kids. They got into a seedy market for criminals and tried to turn it into candy. Sounds nice, doesn't work like that – some things, some people, some communities are just rotten to the core, no point even trying to help. Yellen says they'll slam this crypto stuff with regulations over the next year and it'll die at last. And uh, you've other things on your mind, but just an advice: they should lay low now, maybe come back to Jane Street for a few years. Okay? Anyway, don't beat yourself over it, they'll come out stronger on the other side.

– What an awful situation. This ugly cunt Zhao, or what's his name, will rot in jail for what he did! I think she should go and set the record straight, even if it's stressful. What about an interview with The Economist?

– Ugh, so many Nazis have crawled out of the woodwork, on Twitter and other places... But you know how they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. I've called Jonathan and there's an expert group forming to bring attention to those fuckers and put heat on the platforms.

– Caroline and Sam, you know how I've always thought about them, both brilliant kids, very talented, real doers. I've told you on Sam's Bar Mitzvah «that boy's gonna make a splash», and he sure did. It's such a great thing they met. A terrific project, too!. Losers love to see great people stumbling, so there's all this noise. Bah, everyone makes mistakes. I am sure Sam's going to get back on his feet and they'll do many more amazing things together. Just don't lose heart. Don't you and Caroline dare let the bastards see they're getting to you, you hear? It wasn't her fault.

I admit I do not have any definitive reason to believe that they are, but Sam is; and the general pattern of association, occupations, credentials, the whole attitude and math-nerd-girl-geeking-out-about-moral-hypotheticals angle, makes this a priori likely. Anyway you can strip the Jewish aspects from my post – most of those lines do not hinge on it, Gentile academics are similar.

Contra @orthoxerox I don't think their appearances are much of a clue, Ellisons don't look distinctly Jewish in my book (in the way e.g. Zelensky or Yudkowsky do) – Glenn can easily pass for an Anglo, his wife for a Southern European, their daughter for a not very attractive product of such liaisons. The surname is also not definitive.

But maybe I just have poor Jewdar, miscalibrated in one or the other direction.

other than a few scattered examples of the word chutzpah, which of course has equivalents in many languages

«Of course». Well, that's about what I expected.

The late Leo Rosten, author of "The Joys of Yiddish," wrote that chutzpah means "presumption plus arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.

This assertion of exclusivity itself sounds like chutzpah, ironically, but I'd rather believe this expert than you. Very many words do not have exact equivalents in other languages, and there are such words which do communicate a great deal about the culture and are only properly interpretable in its context – usually according to native speakers. For example, according to Vladimir Nabokov, «No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause...». An argument can be made that it's just depression plus a bit of narcissism, but that in itself communicates an important shade of Russianness (expressed both in our literature and suicide rates). Grozny, too, does not have an «equivalent» in modern English (but is evident in the Russian attitude to command chains).

Nor does chutzpah. Sapir-Whorf is wrong because it confuses cause and effect: much like evolution increases the density and diversity of receptors most vital for the species, a language develops finer distinctions to address things most relevant in the people's cultural and ecological environment. You know, Inuits have a trillion words for snow. Swedes have their Lagom – and their perfect taste. Jews have a ton of concepts that others have either not grasped at all, or found novel. Why do you think loanwords even exist – because they sound cool? Because native speakers narcissistically claim they mean something special?

I don't seen any argument that chutzpah is special

Except all arguments made by all Jews who've ever written on the topic, I suppose, starting with Rabbinical scholars cited in Wikipedia. Do you assert, say, that Catholics recognize the right of an individual to haggle with God? Do you not see how that is different from «courage, mettle or ardor» some Gentiles assume «chutzpah» refers to?

Or consider Bernar-Henry Levi, «The Genius of Judaism», speaking audaciously of what I believe can be seen as the intellectual foundation of chutzpah:

The idea of the wager, the sublime leap into the unknown of a Pascal who, tired of flitting between the computation of probabilities, pleasant diversions, and the silence of infinite space, decides to scale the wall toward the sound of the voices that he hears sighing in the shadows, to go faster than the music of the spheres though he is resigned to never knowing their ultimate secret, and even to travel beyond the light of the most powerful human understanding (his own) that the century had produced but that, despite its power, understood nothing: his wager took him beyond all that and, in a single bound, propelled him to the summit of creation and its end. But what could be more different from a Talmudic effort that never offers itself freebies, that skips no steps or rungs on the ladder, that forgoes no audacity of thought and will be satisfied with itself only once it has arrived at the end of the end of what it can think (not believe, but think)?

You pooh-pooh my examples. Care to show how they are unrepresentative, or point to a qualitative study of some rigorously defined form of chutzpah per religion or ancestry, say, comparison in rates of complex swindles and heists and exploits, adjusted for SES, perhaps? (Who would even have the boldness – if not chutzpah – to propose it?)

Look, this is very boring. I get it: Jews can be casually discussed as being special in positive ways, both well-evidenced and speculative (IQ, talents, «work ethic»), but cannot be special in negative ways (except ones that are compliments in disguise, like «excessively curious» or «too much empathy»). This is one of the cornerstones of Western culture, and all opposition to it is supposed to be defended with the rigor of a philosophical treatise, lest it be taken as evidence of a severe moral defect; while its affirmation can be as intellectually lazy as yours. «Of course there are equivalents».

But I'm not a Westerner and feel entitled to point out the obvious. There aren't.

would a non-Jewish fraudster like Frank Abagnale be a truffatore in the Italian tradition

Maybe he would. I, for one, agree that chutzpah, understood in line with my posts, is the correct term with which to label his actions. Or rather, the stuff he has asserted he had done, but apparently did not. Lying about being a cool sexy clever fraudster (but a harmless one! All victimless, baby!) to get book contracts, on the other hand, is not chutzpah – it's just, like, sad. It's telling that you have not reached for a less controversial example.

I'm curious now, do you even have any? Something on par with Soros or Madoff or Epstein or SBF or Bibi's scheming, if possible. Do provide it, before you leave.

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