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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2679 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Did theMotte get DDoSed in the past couple of days? I wasn't able to access it for quite a while.

Relatedly, is there a designated off-site “rallying point” in case this place ever goes down indefinitely? Maybe my time on imageboards has made me too paranoid of a permanent site closure, but I feel like it would still be useful to know to, say, check the ACX open threads if this site is ever gone for more than a week.

Two chats (Telegram and Discord) are "recommended" in the sidebar of the front page (which is not visible if your browser window is too narrow, including mobile browsers).

which is not visible if your browser window is too narrow, including mobile browsers

So that explains why I can’t see them. Maybe it’s good to keep us phoneposting hordes out, though. Thanks!

Not to be rude, but how can it be so hard to run a functional website that never has any new features and has a userbase size in the hundreds?

It's harder than you might think... I also run a little website and while it hasn't gone down, sometimes I change things and it breaks stuff in strange and unpredictable ways that only show up later. All the cybersecurity stuff you have to do complicates things enormously too.

To be fair, it was surprisingly annoying to get Discourse to be consistently performant just shy of a decade ago, and that was before you risked being bombarded by random and poorly-written AI scrapers. My impression, admittedly as a not-web-dev, is that the rdrama codebase is somehow one of the better options, but it's still easy to get surprise problems even in good codebases.

To be fair, it is a random piece of custom software, rather than something with actual tenure and documentation.

It appears that @ZorbaTHut has been using an LLM for recent changes to this website's code. Perhaps that is the culprit. ;-)

Honestly if anything it's better at fixing these problems than I was :V Webdev has never been my speciality.

As near as I can tell, the basic issue we're running into is that load is increasing, heavily thanks to bot scraping, and that's resulting in various things that weren't problems becoming problems. The earlier one turned out to be a massive leak in our Currently Online Users reporting; this wasn't a big deal when we had maybe a few thousand users, but as soon as we started having tons of "users" (including IPs as users!) it blew up and become a gargantuan perf issue.

I'm honestly curious if rDrama ever ran into that same problem.

Anyway, the latest one was kind of sitting around passively; we did a redesign to improve performance, but it turns out we missed a bunch of stuff, and thankfully Claude knows these tools better than I do and can put in automated warnings for various performance thing. So that should cut a few hundred SQL queries on big pages.

Coupled to that was a nasty bug that would kill threads faster than they should be killed, which itself would cause server crashes, and that was a lot of boom.

The biggest problem is that I never had a good way to instrument this and figure out what was going on perf-wise, and now I have . . . some tools for this . . . so hopefully it's just a matter of squashing issues as they show up.

Are there many lurkers on this site? Not counting the scraping bots.

I honestly don't know how to distinguish the two.

Almost certainly, though. I've never seen a community that wasn't, at least numerically, "dominated" by lurkers.

90% consumer, 9% generator, 1% leadership seems to be the pattern for communities in general.

Yeah, something's up. It might not even be over yet, there was also a brief moment of respite yesterday, and then the site went down again.

Can anyone explain the Mexico civil unrest to me? I know that a major cartel leader was killed, but why does that lead to widespread violence?

There's... a lot of messiness, and a lot of different motivations. Someone like Dean could probably give the better Rules For Rulers analysis, but from what I've been told:

There's a complex relationship between cartels and local police. The cartels obviously don't want any interference with their people or operations, but they do at least like if their corrupt police stay bought and collaborative, and it's not worth losing the latter just because of a parking ticket. Small enforcements happen without too much (condoned by leadership) fuss; big enforcement starts street warfare. A decade ago in northern Mexico I'd had it summarized in the Juarez/El Paso area as 'you screw around with a pot shipment it's just a game, you screw with cocaine shipments you'll get a show of retribution that could hurt someone, you screw someone that matters over on a lot of money you die, you screw with the leadership or take a bribe and double-cross then they'll kill you and your family'. Dunno how accurate that is on the exacts, and I'm sure it's drifted since, but that's the rough theory. The cartels had a threat raised if anything targeted their higher-ups, their higher-ups were successfully targeted, the cartels don't want to let those threats seem empty. See Culican as a well-known prototype, but it's supposedly common knowledge among Mexican government officials.

The economics of cartel mid-level employees are a mess. Like most tournament economics, the average member gets crap pay, but is motivated because the winners get massive prizes. Even 'better', there's always dead men's shoes available above you. Killing any member of leadership means there's now a lot of empty slots on the ladder, either because they've been directly emptied, because the guy got a promotion, or because they were emptied as a result of conflict between the tournament contestants. Some seemingly-random violence is negotiating who and what gets to win, some of it's to prove capability, some of it's to distract military and police presence so that those attacks aren't readily achieved, and some of it's psychopaths thinking they can prove themselves or just wanting to have fun while management is distracted or a little more bloodthirsty than normal.

All (or at least almost all?) cartels get funds through 'protection' money. My impression is that most of it by count is more a nice bennie for the mid-level people running the 'protection' schemes rather than any serious effort the cartel leadership likes, but it's a thing, and some industry-sized protection schemes are big enough the leadership does care. Sometimes unrest means higher 'protection' fees someone might not be able to pay, sometimes the new boss needs to be paid in addition to the old boss, sometimes this rando might be a good example of why 'protection' fees are important even if he wouldn't normally be asked to pay them.

The interfaces between cartels (and other gangs) are, unsurprisingly, worse.

CJNG is a cartel which was run by a guy called "El Mencho". El Mencho was killed during an operation where Mexican authorities allegedly attempted to arrest him. They failed to arrest anyone, but did end up killing El Mencho and everyone else he was with. Which you might expect, because he doesn't seem like the taken alive type. Some might even say he was a pretty ruthless guy. When he was on the come up -- killing old guys, consolidating territory, and all the other cartel-like things -- he took a hard line against cops and slaughtered them in set piece ambushes on more than one occasion. That's probably harder for the state to forgive than the standard cartel doings, like dumping truck loads of rival bodies in some disputed city. It seems that once the boss man was killed orders went out to cause problems for the state for having the gall to do such a thing, so you have hundreds of roadblocks, burning cars, firefights, and so on.

I'm not sure there was widespread civil unrest? So many fires to put out at once does lead to some unrest. I think the worst of it was in their territory but a cartel needs and has a lot of dudes with guns. They retaliate against the state to remind them what misbehavior leads to. The state responds, brrrrrrrt.* Eventually some new guy takes the crown and it's back to business. Bygones and all that.

Some say the widespreadness of it has been greatly exaggerated.

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.

My grandparents didn't get the French beat out of them at school for me to have to learn two languages.

If every American only knows English, then the rest of the world will have to learn our language.

I think some countries/cultures are just better at certain things than others, and it's almost random as to what and why.

Like, sure, we could make excuses why Americans don't need to learn other languages, and that's certainly part of it. But early Americans didn't need to know Latin, and yet apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities. We also don't need to be good at niche winter olympic sports, yet we still consistentlly do well and are currently 2nd in medal count, behind Norway (which has the advantage of basically inventing most of the winter olympic sports). We are consistently bad at professional international football/soccer, despite spending increasingly large amounts of money on it, while tiny poor countries like uruguay and croatia do increasingly well at it.

Looking internationally, the pattern becomes increasingly strange. Germans do great at learning English as a second language. Dutch, even better! French... not so much. Swiss people learn English, but struggle with whichever of French/German is their non-native language. Meanwhile Belgiuns, Luxembourgians, and Alsace–Lorrainians (in my highly subjective experience) learn all 3 languages with no problem. 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics in the US are all over the place in terms of language skills, but tend towards English-only as they get more removed from their parent country.

In asia, it's even stranger. Japan has been heavily promoting English since the 50s, but is still terrible at it, despite massive amounts of English loanwords. Korea used to be pretty bad at it, but now seems very strong. Taiwan is incredibly strong at teaching ESL. I challenge anyone to find a consistent pattern there.

My only guess is that you need the right balance of resources and motivations. You need enough money to properly teach children a second language, but not so much money that they feel like they don't need to bother. They need to be constantly immersing with the second language, but not so much that they just forget their first language. They need to feel like the target language is "cool" and exotic, but not so distant that it's overwhelming. Basically, they need the right mix of "want" and need" to feel like "I will learn this language within the next 5 years"- not so quick that they give up when faced with drawbacks, but not so distant that they slack off and feel like it will never happen. Willing to spend some money to help them learn, but also willing to just grind and memorize.

But early Americans didn't need to know Latin, and yet apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities

Honestly this might be part of it. You can't really immerse yourself in Latin without a time machine, but you can get by pretty well if you spend a long time banging on the grammar, which is exactly how we teach most languages today

apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities

The university educated percent of population was, it must be said, quite small. Latin was simply expected of educated people at the time, and a college prep education would have included it(and Greek).

As somebody who studied two foreign languages not in the US, I can testify it's not uniquely US problem. In USSR, studying a foreign language was a requirement in the secondary school. Almost nobody achieved fluency this way, and the typical result was abysmal. The only way to achieve any result was to use a private tutor (either one on one or group), this is how I learned English, and the difference between approaches had been very pronounced. I suspect it's still pretty much this way (though now, given the Internet, there are better options). Well, there were also venues for diplomats, scientists, spies, etc. but those weren't for common people. I suspect many if not all major public education systems look this way.

This is also contradicts the assumption that it's only a matter of incentives. Knowing English (or, to a lesser degree, any popular foreign language) gave a person access to a variety of opportunities, but the purpose of the school system had never been to provide these opportunities. The purpose of the system were to drudge through the motions, put the appropriate checks into the appropriate checkboxes, and be done with it.

On the other hand, Israel had somewhat different problem, when accepting huge mass immigration who mostly did not speak any Hebrew at all. The ulpan system that was created to handle this, I think, largely served its purpose adequately. While you wouldn't be exactly native-level Hebrew speaker after finishing the ulpan, if you studied diligently and aren't especially incapable of learning languages, it would grant you a working knowledge sufficient for day to day function, and then immersion and personal effort could take you the rest of the way. Of course, the incentive here is more pronounced too.

I've found as well that the only people that actually successfully learn a language either consume large amounts of media in the target language, or are immigrants/expats who end up immersed in their new country's language and have very strong economic incentives to learn.

Out of the people I met online while teaching myself Japanese and Chinese, the only people who made it to a reasonable level of fluency were the people who spent a large amount of time reading/playing/watching books/shows/games in the target language, and the people from the poorer South-East Asian countries moving to Japan and China for work who really needed to know the language to a decent level.

Realistically there's just not enough motivation from either side in American high school to teach and learn a language well when everyone knows its going to be pointless. English education in China and Japan is similarly shambolic.

Every single immigrant I know who achieved fluency in English did so using TV (or immersion). They all started with shows in English audio with their language subtitles then as they got better at English swap to English subtitles and finally no subtitles.

It's sad that we pay teachers to do something that's less effective than sticking a TV in the front of the class room for an hour.

I'd like to add a third theory: properly doing immersion is more expensive than single-instructor blackboard teaching. I'm not sure you can do it properly with the same resources you'd have for some other class. From personal experience taking Spanish, "you can only speak Spanish until the bell" doesn't help that much if only a few native speakers are in the room, leads to "immersive" conversation between two students are barely speaking the language.

Although maybe there is a space for "fun" language learning media to exist --- I know a at least a few people who learned Japanese to read manga and watch anime.

ETA: LLMs probably introduce ways to do authentic immersion better/cheaper, but also can automate translation in ways that abrogate language learning requirements.

I'm not convinced it's America. A lot of countries seem to have working mass English education, with some notable exceptions being Japan, to a lesser extent China, and historically (though not anymore) France. At the same time, a lot of European countries force kids to learn a third language at school too, and at least in Germany I have not observed that going any better than second-language instruction in anglophone countries.

The best-fit model for this is something like "school does nothing, and kids will learn a language if and only if they need the pop culture of that language". The rare examples of masses failing to learn English are just the rare countries that produce enough good stuff of their own.

Yes, except that it's not the pop culture. That's just a bonus. The need is much more basal than that.

In the Netherlands for example, you will need English for any kind of higher education, even when the classes themselves aren't in English, the textbooks and articles will certainly be. You will need English for any office job. Advertisements, shop signs and other public texts are written in English more often than not. Computer software is usually in English. The Internet is, obviously, mostly in English.

There are two languages in common use, and you need to know them both; not knowing English is almost as bad as being illiterate. That means everyone is constantly getting a lot of practice, also outside of school. It means the benefits of having good English are very obvious, and the friction of not having it is bad enough that it'll motivate you to practice more if you need to.

In fact this may be a good way to describe it to an English speaker. It is quite like literacy. You don't acquire it naturally at home, you need to be taught it. But then, society presents you with a lot of text, even if you do not seek it out. Society expects you to be able to read information in that format, if you are to participate to any degree. You are always reading and often writing. Perhaps not capital-B Books all the time, like the literature teachers who complain that "kids don't read anymore" would like you to, but Internet forums, manuals, street signs, official forms, labels in the supermarket, text messages, someone's blog, your co-worker's E-mails, and so on. You get all that practice in, and as a result most people end up fairly decent readers.

Imagine if you had no use for reading, and you never actually used that skill outside of a specific "reading" class in school a couple of times a week. You would never get anywhere near decent at it, and you would forget it as soon as you're out of school. I have an actual real-world example of this exact thing happening, the Laotian literacy campaign of the 1980s.

An intensive adult literacy campaign was initiated in 1983-84, which mobilized educated persons living in villages and urban neighborhoods to bring basic reading and writing skills to over 750,000 adults. Largely as a result of this campaign, those able to read and write had increased to an estimated 44 percent. According to the United Nations (UN), by 1985 those able to read and write were estimated at 92 percent of men and 76 percent of women of the fifteen to forty-five age-group. Because few reading materials are available, especially in the rural areas, many newly literate adults lose much of their proficiency after a few years.

You can, obviously, go into what is essentially a pre-modern village and teach the peasants to read, certainly to the point where the guy from the UN will be willing to count them as literate. But they're still pre-modern peasants whose lives haven't otherwise changed. They've never needed to read anything, they still don't, and they have no access to reading materials, save perhaps a few government pamphlets about literacy. They have no real reason to seek out any more reading material, nor any real way to do so. How could they even know what exists? So they just forget it again and when you go back to the village after a couple of years, they'll all be illiterate again. (I bet nowadays, all those villagers have cellphones and thus retain their literacy.)

And so it goes with language instruction at school. It's not that school does nothing at all: English is not my native language, I did have to be taught the basics. I remember not understanding the cartoons on the TV. You don't get there by osmosis unless it really is your native language. But once you do have that basis, it becomes self-reinforcing given all the societal exposure.

At one point I knew enough French to say 'where is the bathroom?', and I could recite the conjugation tables. There may well be French books worth reading, but I never got to that point. I could struggle my way through a newspaper article at one point. But why would I want to read a French newspaper that badly? I needed the high school diploma, not the French. My French is now just as nonexistent as the literacy of one of those Laotian villagers.

I have to agree with your best-fit model. It's not schooling, but exposure and necessity. Primarily in regards to the internet, if my own experience generalizes as well as I think

If you really want to doompill, America can barely teach people english, much less a second language.

As much as I wouldn't mind hearing French or German in casual parlance in my day to day wanderings, I think we've got a ways to go.

(I hate the New York Times and expended an unholy amount of work trying to find an archived version of that article.)

Also, there are alot of historical reasons as to why second languages were stamped out.

In Canada, we have French Immersion schooling, where students are to speak, and be spoken to, only in French from kindergarten to gr 9, and from grades 10-12 are to take some high school courses in French (French, and usual history, and gym in slacker schools). I was involved in this system for years, as a student and then as a teacher. It doesn't work. It's effective at the early stages because the bar for "early stage speaker" is so low, in the same way that you can do almost anything at the gym if you are a total beginner and still see results.

"Immersion" means "oral language only," but the only people who learn languages that way are toddlers. After age 3 the paths of those who can read, those who are read-to, and those who get only oral language are set, and the latter group are never going to be good at language (among English-speaker, these are the people who seen a movie last night where a guy drownded). The midwit meme would show the midwit saying "actually, having the sort of parents who read to you is what makes you good at reading, not the reading itself," but it's definitely the reading. Spoken language flies by too quickly for you to grasp the nuances of the grammar, and your conversational environment is extremely limited in the sorts of topics it covers- home, maybe work; in school, French immersion students know all the different words for binders, folders, duotangs, etc, but that isn't very useful on les rues. The only way to broaden your vocabulary and build even a descriptive theory of grammar is to read widely and see the different constructions so you can look back at them and puzzle over them a little bit every time, which compounds into understanding. In English, when this doesn't happen, you get "what I wish I knew before I started med school," "I swum in the pool," "irregardless," "the ancestral tenants," etc. And that's after 25 or 30 years of immersion- with little kids, after a couple of years of immersion, you get "Last day we goed at school," which is how most immersion students sound when they speak foreign languages.

My theory of language learning is that you can't learn the way a small child does if you are not a small child. Adults improve their native language skills by reading and writing, and so foreign language learning needs to yank you up to read/write level as fast as possible, and that requires boring grammar drills and vocab practice (with translation exercises being the funnest possible combination of these) until you become literate in the language, at which point you get better very quickly. But since boring grammar drills are boring, few people make it out of this stage.

So language classes don't work because in North America, school is supposed to be fun or stress-free or whatever, and so language teachers have to play restaurant or grocery store with the kids, and these allow everyone to learn maybe 15 words in 90 minutes, which is six minutes per word, assuming no one forgets anything. So taking a couple of classes in highschool will never get the average person there, just as gym class won't make you fit. As Napoleon himself complained: "Since sixt week i learn the Englich and i do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word for day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two years. After this you shall agree that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged." If a genius on St Helena (nothing else to do) couldn't do it, why would a vaped-out TikTokker in grade 10 be able to do it?

PS: The immersion-equivalent for teaching native English speakers is called "whole language," and it bears much of the responsibility for the terrible literacy results sweeping the continent. So if we don't trust English-immersion to teach English speakers English, why would we trust immersion to teach foreign languages?

French immersion students know all the different words for binders, folders, duotangs, etc, but that isn't very useful on les rues.

Is this just kindergarden / early elementary level? Otherwise I'd expect them to pick up some vocabulary related to math, science, history, art... the stuff they're supposed to be learning while at school. Reading classical literature and writing essays about it in French should help too.

The top 10 or 20 percent get very good, but the average student never gets to the point where all that reading pays off because they resist the earlier drudgery and therefore can’t understand the readings.

Math and science are the first subjects to be dropped from the French program because students tell their parents that their crappy marks are because it’s all in French (untrue since most words are the same: triangle, fraction, oxygen, mitochondria, energy, every word that ends in -ation, etc).

It’s so bad that, at a meeting of the hardest-core French teachers in my province, I learned that I was the only making grade 12 students read; everyone else had them “read along” with the teacher, which means “zone out with the book open.” This was because, after 12 years, even the teachers didn’t expect the kids to understand literary French. Note that we’re talking stuff like Camus, which is stylistically similar to Hemingway- not linguistically taxing. You might chalk this up to the education system’s usual ineptitude, but if immersion works then the French-rich environment should be inculcating French despite whatever the teacher is doing. It works like that until about grade 6, at which point students are celebrated if the hit A2 proficiency. You would expect an adult to hit A2 after 300 hours of study, which is 60 five-hour days. There are nearly 1200 days total in grades 1 to 6. The children do not even learn the language like children. Immersion doesn’t work.

I learned that I was the only making grade 12 students read; everyone else had them “read along”

That's deranged...

Shout my name when the angry mobs come for the teachers, I'll try to tell everyone you were one of the good ones.

You might chalk this up to the education system’s usual ineptitude, but if immersion works then the French-rich environment should be inculcating French despite whatever the teacher is doing.

What? No....

The children do not even learn the language like children. Immersion doesn’t work.

Well, depending on what you mean by the former, I might agree. Children don't learn just by passively absorbing things spoken in their environment. They figure it out because it lets them get what they want from their parents, interact with their peers, etc. Every such activity is an exercise, that's how they get better at it. Later, when they go to school, they're forced to exercise even more, by reading, writing, and interacting with the teacher and each other.

When you tell me there's an "French immersion school", I assume this is a school that forces all the school activities to be done in French (minus, maybe, student interactions). An "immersion school" that doesn't make you do that defeats the purpose!

And if you're wondering what's the difference between what I consider immersion, and just studying a language, it's that you don't try to teach people by taking the language apart, feeding them it's rules, and hoping they'll be able to reconstruct it from that, you force them to do stuff using thr language, correct any mistakes they make, and otherwise make them figure it out on their own.

The immersion schools/classes force everything to happen in French. Students resist it, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much what you’re picturing, minus English class and a day off now and then for the science fair or pride parade. End result: 60 hours of study in 6 years.

And it’s not just one bad school or province. It is a national issue in Canada. Every year there is a teapot tempest about how ineffective this is, but we keep doing it (the political reasons are long-dead by now).

The immersion schools/classes force everything to happen in French. Students resist it, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much what you’re picturing

I'm definitely not picturing students being able to "read along" with the teacher. I can believe this is a national issue, I just don't think it's an issue with the methodology as much as it is a simple case of low standards.

If a genius on St Helena (nothing else to do) couldn't do it, why would a vaped-out TikTokker in grade 10 be able to do it?

If Napoleon's English was that bad, how did he communicate with his best friend? Was this a teenager who randomly knew French, or did she struggle through his pidgin?

Betsy Balcombe was able to befriend Napoleon because she was the only member of the family to speak fluent French, so she acted as his unofficial interpreter while he stayed with the family before relocating to Longwood House.

As the daughter of a successful English merchant during the regency period whose parents presumably had designs to marry her up the status ladder, it is likely her education focused heavily on French, since it was seen as the language of high culture.

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.

"reading" is the first method in your list of ways you learned Spanish.

So? You can do immersion with reading the same way you do it with listening.

Ah. That’s not what immersion means. “Immersion” means there’s no way out, you are totally submerged; the metaphor connotes sink-or-swim. All language coming at you is the target language, and the only outgoing language that will work is the target language. For Japanese immersion, you have to move to Japan so that you can never English your way out of a situation. If that’s not practical, you need to go great lengths to create those conditions elsewhere. And these conditions need to be in long chunks- all day, preferably all your waking life for whatever period. Therefore you can’t get “immersion” from reading if you’re reading at home, because you can just close the book and read something else, and you have dictionaries and translators available. YouTube immersion makes even less sense, because you can just watch another video. It’s studying, it’s learning, but it’s not immersion. It’s bathing or showering or something.

What do you guys mean by immersion?

Therefore you can’t get “immersion” from reading if you’re reading at home

Eh... I feel like this is way too strict. Arguably this would make immersion impossible these days, because the gateway to your native language is right there in your pocket, whether you live in a foreign country or not.

What do you guys mean by immersion?

Learning by interacting with the natives, in any form. It can be talking to them, it can be reading books, or consuming their media. The more you do it, the more "immersed" you are.

gog is correct in the sense that's how they formally define "immersion" as a learning method. When a student enters the study environment (such as, the classroom), everyone will engage only in the target language, native speakers present or no. You are forced to join the conversation and other activities, feeling immense social pressure to get out any words, hopefully with some fluency lest you look like a dim-witted idiot. Actually travelling to foreign countries used to be even better, because not only you'd come across as dim and rude, you couldn't achieve anything. (And yes, today you have to artificially limit yourself to use your own brainpower instead of using translator tools nor give the natives another free lesson to practice their English.)

That's fair enough, I think I went too far by restricting it to natives. But check his other comment, apparently these schools put hardly any pressure on the students at all, no wonder they don't work!

More comments

Imo, most people's grasp of grammar and structure in their native language is not great. One advantage of the grammatical approach is that it forces people to finally confront the structure of language in general and thus also their own.

Imo, most people's grasp of grammar and structure in their native language is not great.

They might not know any grammatical terms, but native speakers speak grammatically in their dialects.

If only that were true. Native speakers have incorrect grammar all the time. For example, people who say "him and I went to the store together". Not all the rules are something you pick up naturally, and a decent number of people simply do not care about using the language correctly.

It's not intrinsically incorrect to say "him and I went to the store together," though it's not standard American English. It's also not intrinsically incorrect to say "I and Bob went to the store" - even though grammar textbooks will tell you that "Bob and I" is correct, even SAE speakers usually don't find anything wrong with "I and Bob" and will use it.

Not all the rules are something you pick up naturally

Language is an emergent phenomenon and there is no central authority controlling what is acceptable and what isn't, especially in English. What's grammatical is defined by what is accepted as grammatical speech by native speakers of that dialect.

It's not intrinsically incorrect to say "him and I went to the store together," though it's not standard American English.

What's grammatical is defined by what is accepted as grammatical speech by native speakers of that dialect.

We are going to have to agree to disagree here. You seem to be a descriptivist, and I am very much a prescriptivist. So I think that "him and I went to the store together" is intrinsically incorrect, no matter how many people say it that way. They are using an object in place of a subject, which is incorrect grammar.

I think prescriptivism has its place when it comes to helping individual people communicate more smoothly or socially appropriately, but trying to apply it on a larger scale is basically nonsensical. If enough people start saying "him and I went to the store together" then the analysis of the language simply updates to recognise "him" as functioning as a subject pronoun in that context (or more realistically, acceptable in a certain register of the language, but that's another topic). I'm fairly sure you already do this sort of thing: for instance, I'm going to bet you say "It is me" when you answer the telephone, rather than "It is I", despite the latter being technically "correct", according to prescriptivists.

I get a lot of the motive behind prescriptivism, particularly in an era when it seems like it's difficult to recognise the value of certain standards in behaviour, dress, or indeed language without some relativist going all "akshually" about how it's all just some cis-heteronormative construct or whatever. And if I'm helping a younger relative write a university or job application letter I'm definitely going to make sure they get their "he and I"s the right way around. But if I'm doing the same thing in twenty years and everyone is saying "him and I" by that point, then I'm going to tell them to write that instead.

They are using an object in place of a subject, which is incorrect grammar.

Hopefully ye are always careful to use "ye" when ye mean the second person singular subject, and reserve "you" for the second person singular object - as was intended by our forefathers. "You" as second person singular subject is a sixteenth century corruption of English grammar.

In that case we can also say beginner-level students don't make mistakes, they just speak in beginner dialect.

It's not a real dialect because there are no native speakers.

Now, if you had, say, generations of people brought up speaking in ""beginner dialect""...

What even is a native speaker? Children have to learn their language too.

A native speaker is one who learned a language as a child.

People have been able to tell if kids are speaking grammatically since long before there were grammar books, so the relevance is not clear to me.

A native speaker is one who learned a language as a child

That's way too loose of a definition. I learned English as a child, and while I consider myself fluent, I'm definitely not a native speaker.

People have been able to tell if kids are speaking grammatically since long before there were grammar books, so the relevance is not clear to me.

My point is just that the kind of deconstruction games that are used to argue against prescriptivism can be used to argue against descriptivism as well. I think each of those frameworks has a grain of truth to it, trying to make sense of the world with just one of them will lead to absurd results.

That's way too loose of a definition. I learned English as a child, and while I consider myself fluent, I'm definitely not a native speaker.

When I say "as a child", I mean in the critical period. I don't mean as a twelve year old.

My point is just that the kind of deconstruction games that are used to argue against prescriptivism can be used to argue against descriptivism as well. I think each of those frameworks has a grain of truth to it, trying to make sense of the world with just one of them will lead to absurd results.

It's simply a fact that language rules are an emergent phenomenon determined by the, let's say, ummah made up of speakers of each language or dialect, and when Internet people say a particular construction is "incorrect English" they usually mean "incorrect SAE" even though it's grammatical in some other dialect. None of this should be construed to imply that there aren't tremendous benefits to being fluent in SAE or the local standard dialect. If you've got an argument against this, let's hear it.

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Imo, most people's grasp of grammar and structure in their native language is not great.

Yes!

One advantage of the grammatical approach is that it forces people to finally confront the structure of language in general and thus also their own.

Nooo...

Only a few language nerds find topics like present imperfect or the dative case interesting and understandable. The rest treat it like algebra; arcane nonsense that you have to memorize just long enough to pass the exam and then never use for the rest of your life. And they are right. Nobody learns to speak a language like that. Nobody writes like that. It's useless knowledge.

I don't know what a dative case is, but I would say that most people don't even have a decent grasp of objects in sentences or infinitives (especially English speakers for the latter).

Shit, I’d say I’m unusually interested in linguistics, and I don’t think I understand formal grammar.

Only a few language nerds find topics like present imperfect or the dative case interesting and understandable. The rest treat it like algebra; arcane nonsense that you have to memorize just long enough to pass the exam and then never use for the rest of your life. And they are right. Nobody learns to speak a language like that. Nobody writes like that. It's useless knowledge.

It might be useless knowledge (unless you're a language teacher) to know what "present imperfect" means. It is not useless knowledge to know how to use it correctly.

Yes, but the Venn diagram of native English speakers who understand advanced grammar and native English speakers who generally speak (and less generally write) using such grammar properly is practically two separate circles. Maybe 10% of even extremely profficient English communicators could tell you what "present imperfect" means. I never learned any of it, because the teachers of my advanced placement english courses all assumed we already knew it/thought teaching it was boring and would rather have us read their favorite books instead. Luckily, I was never really tested on grammar in a way I couldn't just sort of intuit my way through. The academic instruction is clearly not the load-bearing component here.

Just like how literally none of us were explicitly taught proper adjective order, even though English definitely has one (it's a big brown dog, not a brown big dog, and I have no idea why), but we tend to get it right anyway based on subconscious vibes of what sounds right.

Well, this is the point. Native speakers intuitively understand the difference between "I eat," "I am eating" and "I have eaten" and when to use them, even if they couldn't name the tenses. But to learn (or teach) English, it's a big help to explicitly name them.

Likewise the "royal order" of adjectives, or OSASCAMP. Most native speakers can't list it, they just know "brown big dog" sounds unnatural. But you need to know it to teach it and while you can pick it up through immersion, it will be faster to study a chart that actually explains it

Why is second language education so routinely terrible in the United States?

Is it worse than second language instruction anywhere else? The main argument I hear for this is that Americans (and Brits) only speak English, while educated people everywhere else speak English as well as their own native language. But I'm fairly sure this has less to do with the superiority of their teaching methods and more to do with the following:

1/ The sheer amount of English-language media means they can spend hours every day being exposed to engaging content in their target language. 2/ Economic opportunities in English speaking countries mean there's simply a much stronger motive for these people than for a teenager in the US sitting through a French or Spanish class (you allude to this in your second paragraph)

I'll second this. Theoretically I learned english for my entire school time. In practice, I was pretty terrible at anything but the most basic texts, and completely hopeless at even understanding normal english speech. And let's not talk about having to speak myself.

A small breakthrough was going to the UK as a teen for two weeks, but there were too many other german students with me. The big breakthrough for understanding happened at university. Well, actually, in the evenings, because I watched so much english TV with subtitles that I noticed I could increasingly just forego the subtitles. Then the breakthrough for speaking it myself came when I went to work at a Max Planck Institute with >70% foreigners, so there was just no option but speaking the english.

School wasn't entirely useless, since I also watched a lot of subtitled Anime, yet didn't learn japanese nearly as well (though I do know quite a few words and stock phrases). You need some basic framework to make sense of everything to begin with. But its benefits top out pretty early.

Yeah, a lot of other countries that have English as a required second language throughout primary school and secondary education (Japan and Korea, for example) are terrible at it. University students who have theoretically been studying English for 12 years often arrive barely able to manage basic introductions or simple phrases.

Aren't continentals generally expected to learn their own country's official language, English, and a third language?

Schoolchildren in Germany certainly are. It's entirely mandatory...for the middle class. If you end up in the lower strata of the educational system, then no.

And even when it's expected, success isn't guaranteed. There are millions of Germans who "studied" French in school, and retained none of it.

I live in Sweden. The vast majority of people I come into contact with speak English and Swedish. Almost none speak a third language (that I know of), unless they're originally from another country.

IME the whole "Europeans all speak 3-4 languages" meme is standard reddit European superiority complex.

Perhaps this is a class thing? Me and most of my friends can at least make our way in countries speaking our third language and understand media in it.

It is a broken form of the languages but enough of it is there to make yourself understood and would serve as a solid base for immersion based learning.

How much fluency do you really need to make your way as a short-term tourist though? It's not hard to familiarize yourself with the basic pleasantries and key phrases in a couple of weeks, and that's always been sufficient (with a bit of miming) to get me through as an American with no foreign language skills to speak of. 2 years of high school spanish and 22 years of living in Southern California lets me travel around much of Mexico without too much trouble, even without resorting to English, but no one would praise my public school Spanish education as particularly comprehensive or effective.

Or do you mean you're capable of muddying through actual conversations with locals beyond basic transactions, directions, etc.?

The latter. My wife does the former studying up on the flight to whatever country we're going. I'm sure having perfunctory prior knowledge helps but that isn't really what I'm talking about, but I guess it's a sliding scale.

Perhaps this is a class thing? Me and most of my friends can at least make our way in countries speaking our third language and understand media in it.

Yeah, me too, but all my friends are IT guys that moved to another country, so that lines up perfectly with what he said. Either way, it being a class thing throws a wrench into the "generally expected to" idea.

IMO it's a sensible expectation. Non-Europeans will rarely be in contact with lower-class Europeans. Middle- and Upper-Class euros do tend to learn more languages.

"Tend to", sure, but my experience of the middle class (I only had very rare and short brushes with the upper strata) is that they rarely can actually use a third language. They certainly study them, but push comes to shove, they wouldn't even be able to ask for directions.

I responded more the "almost none speak a third language", which I found to be false. In my experience, plenty of people do but it's by no means some universal thing and is mostly restricted to a subsection of the university educated.

I'd say the third language education generally doesn't teach people a third language, it provides a base for effective immersion based learning.

I don't get it. Even though I'm in the same situation as you - my friends tend to know 2 foreign languages - that's still "almost no one".

I'd say it's perhaps 15-20% of the population without foreign parents. I would define almost none as <5%, IE lizardman constant territory.

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No. You might say they are expected to learn English, and even then the variance you'll see in the population is going to be pretty big. They definitely aren't expected to learn a third language, and in the case where they studied one, they're usually unable to actually use it.

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.

The US actually discouraged second language learning for a period out of patriotism/final assimilation of Ellis islanders.

I'm also very skeptical of immersion as an adult language-learning strategy. The results based experts on adult language learning use grammar-translation- places like the US military's language academy, or missionary training hubs, use... classes, with blackboards and verb conjugation exercises and vocab flashcards. They also do immersion on top of it, but they start with grammar-translation.

Immersion as the sole means of learning is not as efficient as jump-starting it with grammar and translation drills. But it is key to actually becoming fluent. And you can eventually become fluent with immersion alone. You will never become fluent with grammar and translation drills alone.

Exactly so.

People should also realize that immersion teaches the language and register that you immerse in. I've met Europeans who immersed by watching South Park and posting to imageboards as teenagers ... so they are fluent in Cartman and 4chan. Great for informal communication and memetics, not so great in white-collar professions.

Grammar, vocabulary and essay writing can be useful tool learning the other registers at scale.

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.

It seems worth noting that English is pretty hard on the uninflected end of world languages- for Spanish or Russian you have to memorize conjugation tables. I don't deny that immersion is a real thing that greatly accelerates previous lessons(which those chinamen and euros did have, even if they didn't make it all the way to fluency). I deny that it's sufficient for fluency in itself.

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.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Macpherson's Possessive Individualism and the rest of the backlog. Slow progress. Also reading Legend of the Galactic Heroes again.

Well, I finished A Canticle for Liebowitz. I was not expecting the mutant murder wasteland sections to be the least bleak parts.

I am very glad that we don’t live under the same pall of nuclear holocaust.

Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension.non-amazon link.

Started it today and I like that it isn't written in the typical academic philosophy structure. Which is partially why, according to the forward, Polanyi never got any real traction within that community (in a relative sense; he was lecturing at a bunch of prestigious universities for decades).

I'm reading it in the context of "lol, is AI gonna make us all permanent serfs?" and, in that context, it's quite uplifting. "We can know more than we can say" and tradition, broadly defined, being not only advantageous but necessary to the true production and development of knowledge means the clankers, as effective as they are, can't actually cover the entire area of human-level problem spaces.

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.

Also reading Legend of the Galactic Heroes again.

I tried watching the anime, after it seeing it shared as an example of a "rational"(ish) anime.

The first episode (all that I bothered watching) disappointed me greatly. The so-called strategic genius won a fleet battle against all odds by using tactics obvious to a particularly bright seven year old. Someone tell me if it's worth persisting despite poor first impressions.

The so-called strategic genius won a fleet battle against all odds by using tactics obvious to a particularly bright seven year old

I'm curious now as to how many works involving strategic geniuses actually do involve tactics that wouldn't be obvious to a 7-year-old? I don't recall, say, the Honor Harrington books generally relying on amazing tactics, so much as well-executed tactics and knowledge.

Very few, but still non-zero. Classic examples would be Ender's Game; then we've got HPMOR and other rat-fic.

I did enjoy my listening of HPMOR, but it IMO also gets pretty silly at times. I don't really remember examples of the top of my head unfortunately since it's quite some time ago, but I do remember coming away with the impression that there isn't a lot that Harry is doing which would work nearly as well IRL as it does in the book.

Increasingly I think that the fundamental problem is, not only would very few strategic (or tactical, for that matter) genii write a book like that, if anything writing fiction like this anti-selects for competence in harsh competitive environments, since it's fundamentally escapism. And there's no way out of this inherent contradiction.

Most military action currently is one dominant side enforcing its will unilaterally on a weaker enemy, or a slow boring grind like Ukraine. If a weaker side wins, it's usually on morale and propaganda terms as opposed to military genius.

So the closest thing we've got currently IRL is probably gaming competitions, I guess.

Strategy-wise, don't expect anything too impressive.

LoGH runs on the strength of its (many) characters, the variety of its situations, its sometimes impressive handling of serious topics, the fairly well-developed political and social standpoints of the two main protagonists, and the remarkably high quality of the dialogue. And of course, the unforgettable Yang Wen-li.

(I'm talking about the original anime. The remake is quite good, but not as good.)

I finished No Life Forsaken. It was okay. I feel like Erikson has lost some of his touch. The "hidden" characters were too on the nose. It felt too much like an avengers-slop style full of team-ups/guest appearances. The dialogue was boring and without gravitas, the only interesting thoughts were those about worship which has been done better in his other books. Even the tropes just felt well-trod which is something I remember, maybe incorrectly, as something he was better at pathfinding previously. Lastly for a Karsa Orlong series there is a specific dearth of actual Karsa appearances, which is disappointing.

Still on Ubik, about halfway through.

I'm working on finally reading the backlog of books I acquired towards the end of 2025. Just finished Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, the only book of his that I've read. It wasn't bad, but didn't really inspire me to read more. There is some wit there, but I didn't find the book as funny as the author's reputation would've had me think. And the plot, while serviceable, was nothing super interesting (and also the everyone is secretly a girl thing got kind of old by the end). Overall, meh/10.

I also read but didn't finish a book called The Expectant Detectives by Kat Ailes. Honestly not something I would normally read, but my local book store had "blind date" books and I thought it might be interesting to go with something unknown. The blurb on the wrapping promised a "funny, cozy British mystery" which sounded promising enough, but I didn't enjoy it at all. The premise of the book is that an eight months' pregnant woman moves from London to a small rural town with her boyfriend, and gets caught up in a murder mystery when the shop owner hosting her prenatal class dies in mysterious circumstances. Unfortunately, the book also reads like it was written by Reddit. Partly in tone, but also in frequent asides for the protagonist to preach the good word of feminism, and comments about "adulting" that leave you no doubt whatever about how much of an adult the speaker isn't. The worst part came towards the end of what I read, when the protagonist shares with a friend that she's worried her boyfriend is "getting into right-wing politics", and goes so far as to say that she would more easily be able to accept him having an affair than that. It was a really awful book, don't read it. I made it through a third before giving up, and flipping to the back to see who the killer was.

Next up is Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson. I don't expect it to wow me (as the novella it is based on didn't), but I also don't expect to hate it either. We'll see.

If you’re interested in Pratchett, you should read something older. Monstrous Regiment was written only a few years before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis and several years after his writing started to show signs of his mental decline (e.g., reduced vocabulary). Also, I haven’t read all of his books, but of those I have read, Monstrous Regiment was my least favorite.

Good to know. I didn't choose this one (it was a Christmas gift from my sister), so I'm open to the possibility of reading another. Any in particular which you would recommend?

Guards is great. Men at Arms is even stronger, IMO. Unlike some of the other sub-series, they transition pretty smoothly into more complex novels as the cast matures, so basically all of them are worth reading.

I’m personally fond of the Moist von Lipwig novels, where a con man is placed in charge of the postal service and then the central bank. But it’s been a long time.

I started with Guards! Guards! as a teenager and honestly the Vimes books from Guards! Guards! through Thud! are the best. I only read other Pratchett books because I enjoyed The Watch books and became comfortable with the style.

Though Hogsfather has a special place in my heart, I think it should be read after you are familiar with the setting.

I'll second the Guards series as Pratchett's strongest work: it has the broadest and most serious engagement with the philosophy, and the Thud! and especially Night Watch have some masterful writing. Only real downsides is that Jingo is a pretty dated, and The Last Continent is merely good and sets up later stories, rather than being great. If Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms don't do it for you you're not going to like any of Pratchett's writing, but they're really good stories.

Rincewind's saga is rough and early enough that it barely fits into the rest of the setting, and even the standalone Death works like Thief of Time require a lot of buy-in. The Witches series can be a good second set, starting with Wyrd Sisters, but they have kinda the opposite problem, where they're very much send-ups of mainstream stories that can be a little trite if you've seen other Shakespeare or Disney pastiches.

True on the witches stuff, Shrek 2 is basically Witches Abroad.

Any of the following are good places to start:

Pyramids

Guards!Guards!

Wyrd Sisters

Reaper Man is good but it's best to read Mort first

FWIW I have consistently found Pratchett to be overrated.

He's an absolute mindblower if you're a teenager, though.

He's a great Young Adult author who is treated like a writer of adult books because he doesn't include teenage throuples in his writing.

After realizing that consistently successful investing/trading is to a very large degree a mental and emotional game.

Knew a career Wall Street guy who once said something to the effect of "If monks didn't take a vow of poverty, they would crush all of us" (can't remember the exact quote. It was more pithy).

Ground State: Expeditionary Force Book 19 by Craig Alanson; I ended up wanting his brand of humor again more quickly than I'd anticipated!

Not a question as such, but I'm currently reading Tom Holland's Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar.

Holland does not like the artist who will be known as Augustus. He can't insult him and his motivations enough. And yet, funnily, he also gives him full credit for indeed bringing peace to Rome after the Civil War and ruling well.

Funnily enough, bits of the description remind me of Trump (not that I think Trump is on a par as a ruler with Augustus, but he certainly would share the taste for and admiration of marble and gold in pulling down the old shabby and putting up shiny new buildings, for one thing):

Indeed, the Princeps was widely known as a man who could enjoy a joke against himself. Meeting a young man who looked just like him, he asked, ‘“Tell me, was your mother ever in Rome?” “No,” came the answer. “But my father was – often.”’ Anecdotes such as these did wonders for the Princeps’s image. It helped as well that he could give as good as he got. Augustus’s sense of humour, like that of the vast mass of his fellow citizens, inclined to the raucous. Dwarves, cripples, people with gout: all prompted him to celebrated witticisms. Maecenas was joshed by the Princeps for his ‘loose, effeminate and languishing style’, Horace for being fat. Augustus meant it all affably enough. That he addressed the poet as ‘the very cleanest of pricks’ was a mark of affection, not contempt – and he was perfectly capable, in his dealings with those he cherished, of displaying sensitivity and charm. Yet there remained a toughness, an asperity about his character that reminded those with a taste for snobbery of the small-town conservatism from which he had sprung. Whether cheering on boxers in back streets, sporting a battered sunhat or roaring with laughter at the sight of a hunchback, Imperator Caesar Augustus retained just a hint of the provincial.

None of which did him any harm among the mass of the Roman people. It gratified them to think of the Princeps as a man without airs and graces. Intimate personal details, carefully leaked, helped to cast him as a citizen of honest, simple tastes. It was common knowledge that a man whose name served to place him midway between the earth and the heavens ate much like a peasant, that his bread was coarse and his wine of an unfashionable vintage. Divine appetites, even in the son of a god, were capable of causing bitter resentment. Augustus had discovered this the hard way. ...At a time when Rome was in the grip of famine, he had held a drinking party to which all the guests had come dressed as immortals. The groom himself had starred as the golden and eternally youthful god of light and music, Apollo. Down in the streets of the starving city, outrage at the news had blended with bitterness and scorn. ‘Yes, to be sure,’ men had cried, ‘Caesar is Apollo – Apollo the Torturer.’

The same parallels seem to have occurred to a Guardian reviewer back in 2015 when the book was published!

Tom Holland has gradually become one of my favorite authors, and one of the best working historians alive today. Though my beloved old history professor liked to refer to Augustus and the other imperatores of the late republic as "the Godfather and all those other little mafiosos" so perhaps I'm a little more receptive to some good-natured ribbing of the Princeps than the average bear. Dominion and In the Shadow of the Sword are also particularly good reads.

Lo and behold, he is not a formally trained historian, and actually got his start writing paranormal horror novels. Just goes to show how necessary the modern academy is to actually producing good, impactful, and readable history when a failed horror novelist with no credentials to speak of is eating their lunch.

I've enjoyed everything I've read by Tom Holland, he's great. Currently I have read Rubicon, Millennium (weirdly title changed in the US to The Forge Of Christendom), and Dynasty. Recently I was at the used bookstore and saw Dominion and Pax, and I'm really looking forward to both.

I have some interest in participating in Scott's Book Review contest, but I'm having a very hard time figuring out what to review.

I have a few things already up my sleeve:

  • A detailed review of the Golden Oecumene series by John C.Wright, comparing and contrasting it with the Culture novels by Ian Banks. This is roughly complete, but needs a bit of polish before I'm ready to hit submit. In the domain of fiction, I feel like it's my best shot. I have thoughts.

  • A psychiatrist's take on Wuthering Heights, focusing on the obvious mental illness in most of the dramatis personae. Unfortunately, this would require me to re-read the damn novel, and that brings up PTSD flashbacks from a BPD ex who tried to force feed me Victorian period dramas.

  • Blindsight? Unfortunately it's very well known in SSC/Rat circles, and I'm not sure there's much to add beyond a discussion of some minor advances in cognitive neuroscience (and massive advances in LLMs).

  • An even more in-depth review of Reverend Insanity? Tempting, but niche.

  • This Is Going To Hurt, the memoirs of an ex-gynecology resident in the UK. An incredibly funny, poignant, and moderately depressing look into how the NHS functions. Written over 10 years ago, so you can only imagine how much worse things are today. Well, if I do write it, you'll no longer have to try very hard imagining.

  • The Denial of Death. Prime candidate for a transhumanist takedown, leaving aside that like many grand theories of the human psyche, it proves too much. Unfortunately, I've yet to read it, and I don't know if the views it espouses are still fashionable enough to be worth skewering.

I was 70% through my planned submission for the Anything But A Book Review contest last year, namely a comparative analysis of the NHS and the healthcare system in India informed by both data and my personal experience, but that was unfortunately derailed by a combination of depression and work/exam pressure. Oh well, perhaps I can salvage it for next year.

I'd appreciate suggestions! My main blocker is that I rarely read non-fiction or "Big Picture" books these days. Those are typically winners, from my analysis of past results, and I haven't read anything in the past few years that even remotely inspired me to engage in that level of analysis. Controversial take: I find that the most interesting material dealing with the real world is found in blogs or online essays, not in books. Sue me.

Edit: To be clear, I'd appreciate both suggestions on options I've already curated, as well as books you think might be a good fit (in terms of me having something useful to say, plus being suitable for the actual contest).

IIRC, in last year's non-book-review contest there was some controversy regarding whether it was permissible for people to say which reviews were theirs and beg for votes on social media, as such behavior was considered by some to be a violation of the spirit of the anonymous contest even though it was not explicitly prohibited in the official rules. So you may want to avoid stating what your final decision on this topic is.

Well, I don't see myself crossing the bright line of actually posting my essay here and then begging for votes. I think simply soliciting suggestions and mentioning a rather extensive list of potential candidates I've come up with is probably fine. I don't think @ScottA would mind.

So you may want to avoid stating what your final decision on this topic is.

Fair enough, but I'm still in the concepts-of-a-plan stage.

Another vote for This Is Going To Hurt

I'd be curious about your review on Blindsight. I'm rather fond of the book in question, so I'd be interested in reading your take on it.

I'd have to write the review from scratch, but if you want a TLDR:

  • Watts posits that consciousness is an evolutionary spandrel and that it's possible to have intelligence/superintelligence without consciousness. While not mentioned in the book, the usual supporting evidence is observation of sleepwalking humans or blackouts (in which case we haven't ruled out that the person isn't partially or fully conscious, they might simply lack the consolidation of longterm memory required to remember being conscious, this is pretty strongly evident in alcohol blackouts). Not only does he claim it's not strictly necessary, he posits that it's suboptimal, and a drag on performance.
  • Our best theories of consciousness like IIT and GNWT seem to be partially supported and partially discredited based on recent research. That means that it's possible to salvage Watts's claim, but no strong consensus either way.
  • We've found clear correlations between consciousness and statistical phenomena on the whole-brain scale. You could look up edge-of-criticality models for more. The gist of is that what we perceive as normal consciousness, the type optimal for normal life, is a very fine balance in neuronal activity with chaos on one side and rigidity on the other. This is actually a blow against consciousness-as-epiphenomenon, as Watts claims. These models cash in with actual predictions, and they can measure "degrees" of consciousness from stupor to full alertness using physical metrics.
  • LLMs are the first real xenointelligences. A few years ago, the case for them entirely lacking consciousness or internal qualia was the default. Now, we have very interesting evidence suggesting active ability to introspect and awareness of their internal cognition in a way not specifically trained into them:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

  • I still wouldn't go as far as to claim that LLMs are conscious, since we're awful at conclusively identifying consciousness in humans, let alone animals or AI, but they seem to possess at least some of the necessary elements.

  • I fucking hate the Chinese Room, it's an impoverished excuse for a thought experiment with an obvious answer: the room+human system speaks Chinese, even if no individual component does. You speak English, even if no single neuron in your brain does. I find it ridiculous that it's brought up today as if it means anything. The aliens in the story are specifically described as Chinese Rooms, and you can guess what I think of that. If I was writing a full essay, I'd add more about the sheer metaphysical implausibility of p-zombies in general, but those aren't original observations.

  • If I'm nitpicking (some very annoying nits), the baseline humans and their pet AGIs show suicidal incompetence in universe. You've got hyperintelligent autistic superpredators on the loose? And you let them walk around? Break their spines and put them in a wheelchair while on enough enough oestrogen to give them brittle bones/spontaneously manifest programming socks. The only reason that the primary safeguard was an aversion to straight lines intersecting at right angles is Watts trying to launder in the classical trope of vampires being averse to crucifixes. It's deeply dumb as an actual solution. Also, why didn't the supersmart AI actually do something about the vampire takeover? Are they stoopid?

Summing up: the case for the theories in Blindsight is weaker than at time of publication, even if no one can outright falsify them.

Edit: It's worth noting that I still love the books, it's in my top 10, maybe top 3. I even separate art from the author, I'm not sure if Watts is terminally depressed or terminally misanthropic, but I suspect that the combination is the only thing preventing him from becoming a low-grade ecoterrorist (this is mostly a joke). I still highly recommend it to new readers, as long as they don't overindex from the existential crises.

Watts is terminally depressed or terminally misanthropic

I think so. I had the misfortune of reading the Rifters trilogy. Book one is great. Can't recommend it enough. Book two is a huge drop in quality, but not horrible. Book three has multiple lengthy portions focused on the sexual torture and mutilation of the only moral character in the series. Raped with jagged broken pieces of furniture; breasts cut off and seared with hot irons; hips dislocated for easier access. It was shocking reading the descent of this author from good writer to the lowest. I'm entirely soured on him at this point. He's capable of good writing. He chose this instead. The weirdest part is the rest of his writing doesn't have this. Just one horrible unforgivable book of sexual torture fetish. I tried googling what the hell happened and found his personal website in which he gets super salty with fans. He's a mean misanthrope who also can write well.

At the end of Blindsight it explains that the AI were in charge the whole time. The AI speaks through the vampire right at the end to explain this by burrowing electronics into his brain and using him as a puppet. Maybe mankind was doomed merely by making the AI. Adding in the vampires certainly didn't help.

Hah. It's funny; while I do indeed like Blindsight(I still find it a fun read), I've never actually agreed with the take as presented in the book. It's always good to remember that the PhD he has in Marine Biology, and while that gives him some chop, he's nowhere near an actual neurologist, and even when I first read Blindsight, I could poke holes in a few things just on pondering it for a while.

(He says, arrogantly, having neither a PhD or degree focused in matters of the brain.)

In alot of ways, Watts reminds me of Michael Crichton, who would basically stumble across a bunch of neat ideas among various scientific disciplines, autistically obsess over them for a bit, and then stitch them all together into a cohesive whole.

(And I know I just likely threw at least one Peter Watts fan into a vitriolic rage at the comparison.)

And as fun as I find the idea of actual, science-based vampires as the way Watts presents them... he goes far, far too much into passing off thier neurological capabilities as 'fucking magic'. It gets even worse in the sequel, imho.

And if you've ever read any of his other novels, you wouldn't have to guess, you'd know - he's basically a full on, 10/10 raging misanthrop, with a weird obsession about praising China.

Mind, it's been a while since I delved deep into his stuff. Don't know if his attitude has changed any over time. I doubt it.

While not mentioned in the book, the usual supporting evidence is observation of sleepwalking humans or blackouts

I don't know if we read a different edition or something, but I read Blindsight recently and IIRC it mentioned the sleepwalking thing a lot.

I'm probably misremembering. I think I've read the book at least 5 times, but the probably over a year ago.

The point still stands: we have limited insight into the actual degree of consciousness in a sleepwalking state. It's clearly abnormal, but our understanding of neuroscience can't confidently say that since the ability to form longterm memories is largely disabled, that means that consciousness, if present, can't be reported by the sleepwalker later (the same reason you start forgetting a dream as soon as you wake up).

If you've ever lucid dreamed (I haven't, sadly) then that demonstrates the ability to be aware and at least partially conscious during REM sleep. Sleepwalking is NREM behavior, sure, but it's not possible to say that the sleepwalker is entirely unconscious, we just don't know.

Even if they're performing complex motor behaviors, I strongly suspect that overall performance is hampered. They might (in rare cases), drive a car, but I doubt they drive as well as they would fully awake. I could be wrong, but without the ability to subject an active sleepwalker to a battery of cognitive tests, I'll stay here. It's a very tricky subject to study.

If you've ever lucid dreamed (I haven't, sadly) then that demonstrates the ability to be aware and at least partially conscious during REM sleep.

I've never lucid dreamed, but I do experience vivid dreams in a REM state and would describe it as a variation of consciousness. I usually forget my dreams, but immediately after waking I can typically remember the whole narrative experience of a dream, which felt real while I was in it. I tend to think of REM as a state of consciousness where sensory input is turned off, things that would set off "this isn't normal" alarms are somehow disabled, and conscious awareness is redirected to... randomness? emotionally unprocessed experiences? fears? Something like that.

With how vivid my dreams are I do experience them as places where I am making decisions, they're just decisions that are enthralled to the content of the dream. Lucid dreaming is the ability to know you're dreaming, and thus control the content of the dream to an extent.

I don't know how that lines up with current neuroscience, but that's my impression of how my own dreams work.

Re: Watts' vampires, they were boring. I did like the nod to "and this is why vampires are repelled by crucifixes" but the rest of it? Oooh they're scary dangerous predators that would murderise us all if they could. Yeah, and so could great white sharks, with their dead shoe-button eyes. We're not going to be murdered by sharks any time soon, and the sentimentality around the way some people treat them accords perfectly well with the stupidity of, as you point out, letting the vampires walk around unfettered. I can easily believe some people would be greedy and stupid enough to think they could make pets out of vampires and use them for PROFIT. But the vampires themselves? There's nothing there, they're just automata. Or sharks, perfect killing machines but no higher goal than that.

Eh, I have mixed feelings on the topic. Watts did his best to rationalize the concept with evobio, but that only gets you so far with vampires. It's kinda cool, but they're far from plausible organisms.

Oooh they're scary dangerous predators that would murderise us all if they could. Yeah, and so could great white sharks, with their dead shoe-button eyes.

Unlike sharks, vampires are depicted as both amoral/murderous, and more intelligent than us silly humans.

We're not going to be murdered by sharks any time soon, and the sentimentality around the way some people treat them accords perfectly well with the stupidity of, as you point out, letting the vampires walk around unfettered. I can easily believe some people would be greedy and stupid enough to think they could make pets out of vampires and use them for PROFIT. But the vampires themselves? There's nothing there, they're just automata. Or sharks, perfect killing machines but no higher goal than that.

The thing is, they don't roam around entirely unfettered! In-universe, they're recognized as highly dangerous, and mitigation measures are put in place:

  • The original vampires were highly territorial hypercarnioveres who couldn't stand competition. The resurrected ones had those tendencies ramped up, they were described as murdering each other if allowed to enter close proximity. Think shoving two male tigers into the same enclosure.

  • Their handlers thought that this instinctual intolerance of their own kind would prevent scheming and conniving. They were very, very wrong. The exact mechanisms by which the vampires coordinated their rebellion are excellent, probably one of the best depictions of the power of decision theories for modeling and coordination. They just imagined what they'd do if in the place of another vampire, and vice-versa, solved for the equilibrium, and acted, independently and simultaneously, without ever having to actively exchange information with their kin. Hats off.

  • The crucifix glitch was weaponized against them, the belief was that if they went off the reservation, they'd die painfully as soon as the drugs that stopped them from having painful and lethal seizures wore off.

The humans weren't entirely complacent, but they were still unforgivably insufficiently paranoid about creatures smarter than them, which they knew to be hostile by default. The Vampires consistently use their superior physical prowess to murder normal humans, not just their brains.

So why even let them have that physical prowess? It doesn't take a genius to say that "hey, maybe we should give them the grip strength of an obese 4channer". The Vamps were kept around for their brains, not their brawn. It added nothing while making them a greater threat. This is, as far as I'm concerned, giving the humans an idiot ball. The ways the vampires circumvented their other shackles is understandably hard to predict without the benefit of hindsight. Tearing people apart with their bare hands isn't.

The hyper-intelligence didn't really convince me, not as Watts tried to sell it. Sharks don't need to be hyper-intelligent, and neither do the vampires. They're apex predators. They were able to kill their way to dominance over the humans until humans figured out survival strategies. But Watts is the author, and what happens in a book is what the author wants to happen, and since Watts is all in on "humans are dumb and smelly and should all die, horribly if possible, and my wonderful no-consciousness hyper-intelligent murderbots will do that and take over from them, stupid dumb humans ha ha", then that is what we get.

"Imagining what another vampire would do" requires some degree of consciousness, I would argue. But Watts wants to eat his cake and have it, both. If I am imagining what another vampire would do, I first have to imagine that the other vampire also wants to rebel and escape. Maybe not all vampires want that? Okay, they hate humans and are murderbots, let's grant they all want to escape. After that, though: I instinctively know that my vampire-others will all be in places where they can do things in unison so the plan will come off with perfect timing. Well, that's convenient: no single one of the vampires is going to be held up in traffic, as it were? Nice things happen when the universe decides to drop the plot keys into your lap!

EDIT: I forget, how do vampires reproduce, if they can't be in proximity without ripping each other to shreds? Watts must have found some way around it, but I can't remember and can't be bothered to look it up. Hyper-intelligent murder machines that die out in one generation because they can't have offspring because they murder one another if close enough to mate aren't going far.

Not only does he claim it's not strictly necessary, he posits that it's suboptimal, and a drag on performance.

The characters do seem to think this but it's not clear what in the story actually supports the suboptimality claim. Sure Rorschach is more advanced than humanity, but that obviously doesn't prove that consciousness is a drag any more than someone taller and balder than you indicates that hair is keeping you short.

The funny thing is, that's not necessarily true. They make a point in the book that the tele-matter drive that allows Theseus and the explorer probes to pull off it's bullshit was enough of a surprise that it caught Rorschach with it's pants down.

So it's technically not a complete one-sided stomp. Score one for consciousness, atleast.

Sure Rorschach is more advanced than humanity, but that obviously doesn't prove that consciousness is a drag any more than someone taller and balder than you indicates that hair is keeping you short.

Rorschach is explicitly described as a p-zombie/Chinese Room, and is used as an existence proof for superintelligence without qualia or consciousness. I struggle to separate in-universe speculation from author fiat, I doubt that Watts is the kind to devote that much screentime to an idea without partially endorsing it.

It's the most technologically advanced entity in Sol, it's doing very well for itself, and all without being conscious. I think that constitutes a claim that consciousness isn't particularly important.

Anyway, after writing this, I had GPT 5.2 Thinking check the version hosted on Archive for direct quotes:

From Siri’s internal monologue near the end (the book’s most on-the-nose anti-sentience passage):

“It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion…” � Internet Archive

“Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.” � Internet Archive

“The system weakens, slows… advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence.” � Internet Archive

“This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness.” � Internet Archive

That last line is basically your exact request in one sentence.

In the Notes and References: consciousness as interference, nonconscious competence In the back-matter discussion of consciousness (Watts stepping partly out of “story voice”):

“Consciousness does little beyond taking memos… rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself.” � Internet Archive

“The nonconscious mind… employs a gatekeeper… to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering…” � Internet Archive

“It feels good… makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us.” � Internet Archive

“While… people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few… wonder… if… it isn’t more trouble than it’s worth.” �

It also found a full interview where Watts, out of universe says:

It finally occurred to me that if consciousness actually served no useful function – if it was a side-effect with no adaptive value, maybe even maladaptive – why, that would be a way scarier punch-in-the-gut than any actual function I could come up with. It would be an awesome narrative punchline for a science fiction story. So I put it in.

Of course, not being any kind of neuroscientist, I had no doubt that I’d missed something really obvious, and that if I was lucky a real neuroscientist would send me an email setting me straight. At least I would have learned something. It never occurred to me that real neuroscientists would start arguing about whether consciousness is good for anything. In hindsight, I seem to have just blindly tossed a dart over my shoulder and hit the bullseye entirely by accident.

https://milk-magazine.co.uk/interview-peter-watts-sci-fi-novel-blindsight/

The irony being, our attempts at AI are now all circling around "are they really conscious or beginning to be?" because in order to be agentic, they have to want things, and in order to want things, there has to be something there to do the wanting.

Watt's Very Smart Machine is perfectly fine, I don't think machines are or will be conscious. So load it up with programming about being Very Smart and winning at trading on the stock market or whatever, sure. But that's not at all the same thing as "now invent an entire system from scratch to be part of"; the AIs are operating in the system we humans have created. Ex nihilo, why would they care about scientific discoveries or whatever, before we asked them to think about these things?

To get back to the analogy with sharks, I don't think sharks are conscious, or very much if at all. They don't have to be, they're optimised for what they do and they do it so well they really haven't had to evolve with the times. So murder machine vampires? Yeah, sure, why not. Hyper-intelligent, though? Not needed if not conscious and if optimised to be murder machines. Very finely tuned to be the optimum at being murder machines in their environment might look like hyper-intelligence but I think instinct would be doing most of the heavy lifting there.

But Watts wants these creatures in order to show that humans are a mistake, so let him have his toys.

It's the most technologically advanced entity in Sol, it's doing very well for itself, and all without being conscious. I think that constitutes a claim that consciousness isn't particularly important.

Rorschach proves that you can be very advanced without consciousness. Does it imply that consciousness carries no benefit, or even carries a harm? Plainly, no.

Sure, if we're being strict about things. But then there's everything else Watt says, which makes me feel justified in saying that was his subtext/implication. He comes out and says so!

While we're on the topic of subtext, the subtext of my comments is that even in this alternative world Watts created in which humanity is powermogged by Rorschach, Watts fails to demonstrate a compelling reason that consciousness would be maladaptive.

I've read a compilation of his short stories, aptly titled An Antidote to Optimism in Polish. I don't think your "mostly a joke" is actually a joke, at least for me.

Huh, I haven't heard of that one before, and up till this point, I thought I'd read pretty much everything he's ever written. Maybe it's even more misanthropic when translated to Polish? You guys aren't known for your sunny vibes and general optimism.

In general, I agree that Watts is deeply, borderline-fanatical levels of misanthropic. I regularly check in on his blog, and a running theme is his sentiment that humans have Wrecked The Planet (ecological collapse, global warming), and we're going to pay for our sins/hubris by quite possibly going extinct. There is such a thing as overstating the seriousness of what is otherwise a real problem. Global Warming is an eminently solvable problem, for very little money should we get over our civilizational allergy to geoengineering. Of course, the idea of using technology to solve things instead of degrowth and industrial regression is deeply antithetical to his worldview. Recently, he's slowly migrating to AI-bashing, which is a very modest directional improvement.

For now, he's busy writing polemics and giving talks at moderately populated scifi seminars. A retired academic in Canada has largely aged out of active terrorism, that's a young man's game.

Huh, I haven't heard of that one before, and up till this point, I thought I'd read pretty much everything he's ever written.

It contains nothing new, it's just a compilation of some of his short stories, in a chronological order.

The one good thing I can say about it is that it made me dislike Charles Stross less, because up until that point I had them mixed up and I thought Incorruptible was Stross'. About two stories in that compilation I thought to myself "wait, I recognize that brand of misanthropy" and the mixup resolved itself. If anything, this proves that this voice is strong enough to be recognizable across translation, as I read the linked story in original English. Btw, in mind mind that story kinda rhymes with The Giving Plague, only more edgy and worse.

Anyways, to Watts and people like him I'd like to present the following question: suppose you get what you want materially - the environmental issues get reversed and healed - but nobody get hurt and punished. Would you take the deal? Or is, as the kids say, the cruelty the point?

Recently, he's slowly migrating to AI-bashing, which is a very modest directional improvement.

Oh? Why? Shouldn't he love AI, here is proof you don't need to be conscious to be smart?

I regularly check in on his blog, and a running theme is his sentiment that humans have Wrecked The Planet (ecological collapse, global warming), and we're going to pay for our sins/hubris by quite possibly going extinct.

The moment in Blindsight where Sarasti the Superpredator (watch out, he looks at screaming faces to visualize data!) berates our clueless hero for not caring about climate change was absolutely kino.

Did you know that visualizing data in the form of faces is an actual technique?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face

Making them screaming faces? Subtlety is a lost art.

I realize it's an "actual" technique in that a guy published a paper about it and it's been included in a couple of scifi books. It isn't an "actual" technique in that I've never seen it used anywhere and it seems unlikely that in the future we'll realize we've been sleeping on this.

https://x.com/lauriewired/status/2020006982598685009?s=20

This is the closest I've ever come to seeing usage in the wild, and Laurie claims it's applied by some flavor of analyst. I suppose it's neat?

More comments

Wuthering Heights and This is Going to Hurt sound like winners to me.

Thanks! Out of curiosity, do you plan on throwing your hat in the ring?

I was considering submitting my review of Rejection, but I decided it's probably not the sort of thing that would appeal to SSC readers, so I just went ahead and published it. If I think of something else I might give it a go, but at the moment I have no plan for a specific book to review. My not-a-book review got a fairly positive reception in spite of not making the finalists, which I was pleased with.

Incidentally if you'd like me to read over your draft and offer feedback, I'd be more than happy to.

I was considering submitting my review of Rejection

The collection of short stories? I agree that it would have been unlikely to win, but that's on the basis of general ACX-audience inclination, and not because of your chops as a writer (very real) or the quality of the book (I have no clue).

Incidentally if you'd like me to read over your draft and offer feedback, I'd be more than happy to.

Thank you again! This reminds me that I really need to apologize for asking you to send me your draft and never getting around to giving suggestions :(

If it's any consolation, I have consistently felt bad/embarrassed about it ever since. I try and keep my promises in general.

I can take an actual look this time, assuming you still want a second set of eyes on it.

the quality of the book (I have no clue).

I think you would really enjoy it.

A detailed review of the Golden Oecumene series by Chris Wright, comparing and contrasting it with the Culture series by Banks. This is roughly complete, but needs a bit of polish before it feels like a strong contender.

Do you mean John C. Wright? He's the one wrote that, and so far as I know none of his names are Chris.

Oops. I'll fix that brain fart, thanks.

I’d like the first sci fi one. I read that series on your rec and liked it well enough!

Thanks! It would the be the easiest option, since well, I do have the essay written already.

Do we have any reasonable estimates how many cruise/ballistic missiles China will be able to produce and how fast they could scale it if they put their minds to it. Right now Russia and Ukraine seems to be able to push production rates to single digits per day, but they obviously don't have the china automation and scaling capacity. Or China money.

Not really... I tried to look into this and there's a huge continuum of 'missiles'. ATACMS is a missile, Tomahawk is a missile, GMLRS is a missile all in that general ballpark but wildly different to eachother in quality and performance, let alone PRSM or the air launched stuff... Same with their Chinese equivalents. So when this random Chinese factory says 'oh we can produce 1000 a day' nobody really knows what they're talking about. Are they talking about missiles or just components? Probably the latter.

The Chinese military is pretty secretive and there's also a deadening layer of propaganda.

But there's also been a huge build-up in production capacity in the last few years, so maybe high tens of thousands per year once the new factories all come online? As for scaling, producing advanced missiles is quite difficult in terms of machining, it's a bit like advanced engines which are hard for anyone to produce at scale. But China does have an enormous industrial base so they should be capable of making the cheaper sort at phenomenal scale.

Are you asking about tactical ballistic missiles like the Iskander?

Yup. Conventional warheads. If they just want to flatten Taiwan for example.

What is music?

Whatever was in vogue when I was your age, young man.

This is an excellent analysis video that answers that question.

I enjoyed that video thoroughly.

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