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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23523 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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Performative Fandom. In particularly the NYKNICKS floor seat celebrities. Most are like Taylor Swift - she’s a celebrity and clearly not a fan but she will get her floor seats because celebs go to big games especially when the big games are in NY or LA. It’s Timothee Chamalet who since I barely know this stuff so many here may not too is like a big Hollywood Act. At first I thought he was loud annoying Hollywood guy whose there because he did videos like this Courtside. Which to me looks like he’s performing for the camera. Turns out he’s an actual fan and won some contest for free tickets as a teenager tickets

Some reason this has been living in my head for a few days as a feeling that’s not how real fans celebrate. Perhaps theatre kids it’s so natural to perform that it’s how they celebrate. Where it’s more an internal joy. Something just doesn’t feel natural to me here.

The other thing is it’s the blackification of celebration. Where you need to do things loud and visually to show how much it means to you. Yes I am now the old man who yells at clouds.

The other interesting sports related thing is the bifurcation of the ticket market for sporting events. With the rise of television, growing wealth inequality, and the ease of air travel very big events have seen their ticket prices skyrockets. The interesting opposing side is a lack of pricing power in similar but slightly lower tier events. True events have ticket prices going to infinity (World Cup/NBA finals) far above the rate of inflation (wealth has grown much faster). Supply being inelastic means prices go up a lot. But we can build a lot of supply of second tier events. World Cup has added teams to the tournament so there are both more total games but realistically only the same amount of seats for the top teams playing and championship games. This has led to much higher prices on big WC games and empty stadiums for other games. The one example that really stood out to me was College Football Playoffs. Championship game tickets were a 3k minimum ticket price watching team 1 and 2 play each other. The semifinal game say watching teams 2 and 3 play you could scalp tickets for $30. People are going because they want to be at the game that will be an event not for the quality of football. Which ties into television because watching the game is just better on tv now.

The games that are in the public conscious as the “Event” have high prices. The Knicks final being in NYC pulls in global wealth. The NC College Football game pulls in all the money in our Northern Indiana province which is a fairly wealthy province. These are far more than just games - also networking opportunities and serve a coordinating function of getting an entire group of people to all be at the same place at the same time. For a Knicks level event if you buy tickets at 15k get-in price even the nosebleed seats will be hedge fund manager sitting next to some rich kid from third world country or minor celebrity. For IU NC College Football it’s some dude who owns a 20m a year car parts company sitting next to a HVAC roll-up guy. I think if I were in an Econ PHD you could write an interesting paper on the modern ticket pricing market and what it means for a game to be labeled the “Event” for a population group.

I guess you could also draw a parallel with the SF escorts charge $4k an hour to ticket pricing. People supposedly have less sex now, but when they are it costs more. It’s just more enjoyable to jerk off to a porn star than put in the work or pay to have sex with a 6.

I'm not a big sports guy, but I have seen several in the past make comments that Chalamet, specifically, seems like more than a superficial fan of sports. IIRC he's shown up on a few serious sports commentary shows in the past, and not just basketball either, but at least college football as well.

I don't feel qualified to vouch for the merits here, but Chalamet might be a bad example for "theater kids don't like sportsball."

Chalamet should get a retroactive Oscar for Call Me By Your Name, because to this day people still believe that that gay softboi persona is how he really must be. He really can't shake it.

He's always been a white goober who loves sports and he arguably cost himself an Oscar talking like MJ without realizing people won't tolerate that shit from actors.

Apparently a bunch of art hoes felt "betrayed" by Chalamet's decision to start a relationship with a vapid airheaded bimbo* like Kylie Jenner.

What this "betrayal" amounts to is that said art hoes constructed a parasocial delusion of what Chalamet was "really" like based on the roles he'd played, then felt disappointed when the real thing didn't love up to the fantasy they'd constructed in their heads.

Newsflash: actors not same people as characters they portray. Like most heterosexual men, even soulful actors who can convincingly portray gay characters want to date hot rich girls with big tits, not annoying they/them quirk chunguses with green hair.

I just realised that the Gen X/Millennial equivalent was feminist writers feeling disappointed by Johnny Depp marrying archetypal grippy-socks-grippy-box BPD art hoe Amber Heard, twenty years his junior. Re-reading this piece is a cringe-inducing insight into Millennial feminism and this author's warped, pathetic worldview, no matter how much she might claim that its overwroughtness is intentional and tongue-in-cheek:

Never meet your heroes, they’ll only disappoint you. All I know is this: Johnny, I have loved you for so long. Decades. But it’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore. [It's not "like" you don't know who he is. You don't know who he is, and you never did. You've never even met him. You "knew" his screen persona.]

The first time I saw you, as Detective Tom Hanson, you were wearing glasses, as part of your “undercover” uniform. I thought to myself, That nerd has good cheekbones... Also, when Hoffs gave you a makeover and then you guys went to go play video games and buy records, my heart skipped a beat: You were down with brown?** That curly-haired black chick you’re hanging out with could be me. [Jesus Christ.] Honestly? The fact that we’re both Geminis was part of it. [Jesus Christ.]

[Edward Scissorhands] made it clear that not only were you a True Talent, but you were attracted to the odd, the off, the slightly damaged, the possibly broken inside. Yes. Exactly. Me too. [The film "made clear" none of these things. Johnny Depp is an ACTOR portraying a FICTIONAL CHARACTER who has BLADES FOR HANDS.]

Why would you, the anti-establishment, anti-celebrity celebrity slash wannabe-rebel, be making these choices, the kind of choices that make you seem like every other mediocre-talent middle-aged constant mid-life crisis man in Hollywood? [Because he was experiencing a midlife crisis upon entering middle age.] Your effortlessly managed, meticulously curated persona as mysterious eccentric creative hot thoughtful intriguing super cool guy? You’re shattering it. Decades-long crushes are being soured, longtime fans are confuzzled***, and I don’t even know what to say to people anymore. [Finally you're groping towards the truth. "Effortlessly managed" and "meticulously curated" is exactly what Depp's persona was. By definition, no one needs to "manage" or "curate" their "true selves".]

I love it when you come and make an appearance, mingle with the plebes and the riff-raff, but to be honest, it was even more appealing when you holed up in France, avoiding tabloid drama and paparazzi lenses. It’s kind of like in Scissorhands, when Edward’s living in a gothic castle on a hill, but Kim knows he’s still there — and that he still loves her — because it snows. [JESUS CHRIST.]

Probably the feminist Ryan Gosling meme contains a hefty dose of this fantasy too. Sorry ladies: the Goose can have any girl he wants, and he, too, wants to date a hot Latina. See also the absurd attempts to portray Harry Styles as "queer", which he obviously isn't under even the most expansive definitions of that famously ill-defined term.

Nerdy, socially awkward male screenwriters get a lot of stick for indulging their Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, but in their defense, at least they're usually content to invent fictional characters to fulfil this fantasy for them, rather than conscripting real-life women into doing so and berating them when they can't perform a job they never agreed to carry out. If there's an instance of a professional male journalist getting paid to describe the anguish he felt upon learning that his favourite shy nerdy Twitch e-girl was in fact a fake gamer girl getting railed by Chad Thundercock™ every night, I'm not aware of it.

*Their words, not mine.
**The author's inference that Depp himself was "down with brown" because he portrayed a character who dated a black woman is, obviously, nonsense: as far as I can tell, Depp has never been romantically involved with a non-white woman.
***Oh no, we wouldn't want people getting confuzzled, would we? That would be totes not amazeballs, fo' shizzle.

I genuinely got the ick reading the quoted post. That’s creepy. I get that people are attracted to celebrities, but we’re on the same spectrum of parasocial insanity as stalkers here.

I just realised that the Gen X/Millennial equivalent was feminist writers feeling disappointed by Johnny Depp marrying archetypal grippy-socks-grippy-box BPD art hoe Amber Heard, twenty years his junior. Re-reading this piece is a cringe-inducing insight into Millennial feminism and this author's warped, pathetic worldview, no matter how much she might claim that its overwroughtness is intentional and tongue-in-cheek

Whenever I am reminded of this kind of millennial feminism, I start to give serious weight to some of Dread Jim's proposed solutions.

I'm not familiar with Dread Jim. What solutions are these?

I'd like to add that there used to be many more male bloggers like him, roughly between 2006-2015 or so.

@RoyGBivensAction covered most of it. As for the solution? To end the tragedy of the commons, you must privatize the commons. To end the wars of the sexes, make women property again.

Dread Jim is the name Scott once used for Jim. I would probably tag in @erwgv3g34 for a more detailed description of Jim's views, but this comment of his has some links and this comment has a summary about the guy.

I just realised that the Gen X/Millennial equivalent was feminist writers feeling disappointed by Johnny Depp marrying archetypal grippy-socks-grippy-box BPD art hoe Amber Heard, twenty years his junior.

It's no wonder this trash was written in 2014. It was the time when the Culture War was being escalated rapidly by the woke. It was obvious that things were going to turn bad.

archetypal grippy-socks-grippy-box BPD art hoe

I had to look this up in the dictionary. Welp.

Nerdy, socially awkward male writers get a lot of stick for indulging their Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, but in their defense, at least they're usually content to invent fictional characters to fulfil this fantasy for them rather than conscripting real-life women into doing so and berating them when they can't perform a job they never agreed to carry out.

You know, this never actually occurred to me before.

Eh, the male equivalent is the treatment of idols and people like that. Less an Anglo thing but actresses (and actors) have often been expected to comport their sex life in such a way as to not shatter the fantasies of their fans.

I doubt this phenomenon exists outside Japan and South Korea to any significant degree.

They're in the goldilocks zone of allowing women enough leeway for them to this sort of sexualized but high status work but also not so feminist that ridiculous male expectations aren't anathematized maybe?

As far as Japan is concerned, I’m aware that the social concept of the idealized Japanese woman is established so well that there is even a separate phrase for it. According to this concept, the ideal woman is basically dignified and modest and yet at the same time alluring and determined, polite and delicate, graceful and elegant. Naturally female JPop idols are generally expected to adhere to this so I guess your overall point does stand. In other words, in this case we are indeed talking about ‘conscripting real-life women into doing so’. In general, it seems these societies are still conservative enough to retain the concept of idealized femininity whereas in the West this has been thrown with resentment on the trash heap of history decades ago.

Absolutely, or (as I pointed out in the OP), men who follow e-girls on Twitch who cancel their subscriptions when they discover their waifu has a boyfriend.

The difference being that any man who behaves this way is rightfully considered a laughingstock, whereas straight women who do the equivalent can earn money by doing so.

Apparently a bunch of art hoes felt "betrayed" by Chalamet's decision to start a relationship with a vapid airheaded bimbo* like Kylie Jenner.

I remember a decade ago when Benedict Cumberbatch, that darling of late 2000s / early 2010s Tumblr fandom, got married, older versions of the same woman were equally if not more despondent. And he got married to a very appropriate and posh intellectual English theater director type in her thirties. So it seems to me it’s really more about the man being off the market than who he’s with.

I bet a lot of them were just disappointed that, whatever the creators of Sherlock would have their audience believe (or not wink wink), Cumberbatch is not, in fact, a homosexual, and nor is Martin Freeman.

There's also footage out there of Chalamet playing basketball, e.g. here (with bonus Adam Sandler appearance). While he's by no means a menace on the court, his skills and movement are definitely consistent with someone who's played a decent amount of basketball growing up, despite his twink build. In terms of player comparisons he reminds me of Austin Reaves, Josh Giddey, and Ricky Rubio—must be their scrappy, high motor playstyles, with their gym rat and lunch pail guy vibes.

I have this strange theory that he probably prepares for these types of things beforehand because how could someone have such knowledge about niche wrestling for example? However that's probably being unfair to him; maybe he is quite a savant beyond just his acting abilities.

I'm going to double reverse uno you here. NBA "hardcore" fandom is itself performative fandom, the guys getting upset over Celebrity Row at MSG and Taylor Swift are pretending to some kind of fandom that doesn't fundamentally exist in the NBA.

Identity Disclaimer: I am a lifelong Sixers fan, which probably predisposes me to think that basketball is stupid.

Hardcore NBA fans don't really exist. I'm the kind of American kid that grew up catching morning Sportscenter before the bus and has a half dozen podcasts from The Athletic and The Ringer on my phone today. When I think of sports fan groups in America, I can name a dozen groups and chants and traditions off the top of my head easily across every sport, except NBA basketball: the Bleacher Creatures, Roll Tide, The Black Hole, Rock Chalk (Algeria), Skol!, Chiefs Nation, the Cheeseheads, Go Birds, the Seven Line Army, the Green Monster, Citizen's Bank South.

I can't think of a single such tradition in the NBA that I've ever heard of. The equivalent famous moments in NBA fan history are themselves celebrity driven, things like Spike Lee miming the choke at Reggie Miller, or Jack Nicholson courtside in LA.

The NBA has always been a celebrity driven, star focused, front-runner sport. There's no real fan tradition because the team's are fundamentally too malleable and too protean to be the focus of tradition, and nobody cares about the regular season (despite there being numerous obvious fixes for it). This is the result of fundamental aspects of the sport: the ten foot tall hoop means it's so much easier if you're tall, and the five men on the field mean individual players are so much more important than in any other sport. Team building in the NBA is about chasing outliers who happen to be a little athletic while also being freakishly tall. There are never enough of these to go around, so the haves are so far above the have-nots that the have-nots just chase the outlier that will turn them into a have. There's no amount of team tradition, values, or coaching that will bridge the gap.

Most NBA fans have more opinions about the current star players and franchises than they do about their own team. There's not the same degree of bond between the youngster and the backup catcher on his favorite team. There's not the same possibility that your sixth round pick turns into a star, and thus the lack of obsession with those minor players.

So when Knicks fans say that Taylor Swift doing a little dance on the sideline is performative...

Some reason this has been living in my head for a few days as a feeling that’s not how real fans celebrate. Perhaps theatre kids it’s so natural to perform that it’s how they celebrate. Where it’s more an internal joy. Something just doesn’t feel natural to me here.

She's doing it FOR YOU. This is what you like, that's why you're an NBA fan and not a fan of a superior sport. That's why anybody has cared about the Knicks for most of the past thirty years. For the celebrity culture of it. Because it's the sport that most mixes into modern hip-hop oriented celebrity culture, and has since the 90s. It's easiest to produce celebrities, every all-NBA player is famous in a way that every ace pitcher or quarterback fails to be.

Both the performative fandom of the sideline celebrity, and the performative fandom of the "real" Knicks fan who has some weird bullshit about their attachment to a mediocre celebrity driven sports team, are trying to flex their status now that the Knicks lucked into the smarter strategy of bringing in a bunch of guys from Villanova to curry favor with the Bishop of Rome.

The NBA is particularly embarrassing. The players don't even try to hide their feet shuffling and routinely take five-step layups (I remember when "the Jordan layup" was a jibe for the (illegal) three-step layup). The whole culture around the NBA is bling, showboating, loud, celebrity-driven. There is no honor. Iso plays are considered the mark of a great player, instead of teamwork and making the extra pass.

That said, the NBA is still about winning. The game has adjusted massively over the last twenty years with the analytics revolution. Height matters but not to the same extent. Big men are only valuable if they can also hit a three. Mr. Process himself is not a bad three point shot, and Wemby at 7-4 shoots threes like he is Reggie Miller.

Basketball as a sport is great. Pickup games can be fun even with a range of talent. It doesn't take an entire field like soccer or football. Half-court games mean 20 players can simultaneously play on a single court.

That said, the NBA is still about winning.

Winning a Championship, and nothing else matters. Which leads to a bad regular season product, because the regular season isn't set up to really reward winning in the regular season with better odds to win the championship.

Height matters but not to the same extent. Big men are only valuable if they can also hit a three. Mr. Process himself is not a bad three point shot, and Wemby at 7-4 shoots threes like he is Reggie Miller.

I think it's just obvious that it's easier to shoot 3s when you're taller. There's no other way to make sense of Joel Embiid being a good three point shooter.

Basketball as a sport is great. Pickup games can be fun even with a range of talent. It doesn't take an entire field like soccer or football. Half-court games mean 20 players can simultaneously play on a single court.

It's probably the best sport that can be played at any number of people. 1 on 1, 2 on 2, 3 on 3 all work. Though to be honest, as a kid we came up with indoor 1v1 baseball rules. It's just a matter of creativity and determination.

IMO when rules change to allow what everyone over 30 knows as a travel then every player has to adopt to those rules. If you limited your moves to what use to legal then your just not going to be as good of player as guys playing within the full new rule set. Honestly a bit like MLB in the steroid era. They were tacitly legal so if you weren’t on steroids you weren’t going to be a good player or at a minimum worse than you would be.

The players don't even try to hide their feet shuffling and routinely take five-step layups (I remember when "the Jordan layup" was a jibe for the (illegal) three-step layup)

It's called a gather step, bruh. You uncs who grew up watching plumbers and electricians in the NBA wouldn't understand.

Once in a while in spaces like /r/nba there will be a thread mass-complaining about the state of carries and travels in the NBA, not realizing that since fans like them will provide the NBA with eyeballs and money no matter what, the NBA has little incentive to improve on that front.

She's doing it FOR YOU.

She’s a big girl...

Was winning the championship part of her plan?

Of course!

Actually gave a quality contribution on this because I think it’s a fair analysis that the NBA is different and my complaints would land stronger if I said something similar about the NFL etc.

I will correct this: “She's doing it FOR YOU. This is what you like, that's why you're an NBA fan”

I am not a NBA fan. I watched 3 games all year which were these finals despite still playing basketball a few times a week. Though for linguistic reasons a general “you” to the reader makes sense and not a specific “you” to me.

It was meant to be addressed to

Knicks fans say[ing] that Taylor Swift doing a little dance on the sideline is performative...

I apologize if that was unclear. I take no position on your personal fandom, just on the question of whether it is legitimate to complain about celebrities sitting on celebrity row.

For what it's worth, the Knicks themselves seem to have no problem with Timmy and were chanting Lisan Al Ghaib at him while spraying him with champagne after the game.

I am not a NBA fan. I watched 3 games all year which were these finals despite still playing basketball a few times a week.

That is for the most part what NBA fandom is. The regular season is increasingly pointless and ignored, the playoffs make up a whole second season, and there are just too many games to pay attention to. I probably watched the end of a dozen Sixers games this season after my wife went to bed, and most of their playoff games. Compare: I watch essentially every Eagles game, I watch or listen to dozens of Yankees and Phillies games during the season.

They have a lot of revenue so someone is going to regular season games and watching on TV. It’s apparently not us. NBA became Dem coded atleast a decade ago so I am a bit old man yelling at clouds over land that was lost a while ago. I don’t think Jordan era NBA was theater kid or Dem coded. Whenever America had its divorce one side got the NFL and the other side got the NBA.

I am not sure if I would go to a NBA game if I were offered floor seats for free. Maybe for instagram clout flaunting. I’d probably sit in a luxury box if offered just to socialize and drink free for the night while watching 10 min of the game.

I am not sure if I would go to a NBA game if I were offered floor seats for free.

You should, if you get the chance. I've had floor seats from a friend for some truly awful Sixers' teams, and it was still a fantastic experience to see them that close.

The other thing is it’s the blackification of celebration. Where you need to do things loud and visually to show how much it means to you.

Ah yes, the blackification of British football celebration in 1923. Just look at this bunch of unruly celebs!

Well, you see, by that time the first Pathe movie reels showing celebration rituals in the African jungle had already reached the British mainland, so by 1920 English culture was already Blacked.

Black people and their... checks notes culture of celebrating loudly?

If you want to simplify. Yes. It’s not comfortable to white people. It’s annoying. It ruins the moment for us.

It’s no different than if you told a gay person to go have sex with people of the opposite gender. We find it disgusting.

  • -18

Tell me you don't watch sports without telling me you don't watch sports.

I remember a few decades ago, in the UK after a international test rugby final, it was fully known that driving a car through town with the wrong flags emblazoned on your car would get bricks lobbed at your windshield. I also remember that every few years Boston loses its shit and riots in celebration when the Sox perform well at baseball.

As someone who witnessed on multiple occasions how clannish football and rugby hooliganism can get, you couldn't be more wrong. White people love crowing loudly and celebrating the defeat of their enemies as much as anyone else, and team based full contact sports serves as a proxy for tribal violence.

You're not typical-minding, as someone else is accusing you of - you're making a truly strange statement about white people that doesn't pass the sniff test. UK 'football factory' style clubs loudly and violently celebrate fucking up fans of the other team as much as beating them in the actual sport.

Usually we pray after a game. Say some words to Our Mother. That’s a strange tradition you seem to have.”

rugby hooliganism

I would say rugby (at least Union - I don't know enough about League culture because the game isn't really played in southern England) hooliganism is the exception rather than the rule in the UK. I spent several years in Richmond in south-west London. Despite football (in the form of Ted Lasso) putting Richmond on the map, it is very much rugby territory - the "tailgate"-equivalent for England Rugby games happens in Richmond with fans arriving by tube, drinking for a couple of hours, and then taking the shuttle busses run by the (one professional and one semi-professional) local rugby clubs to Twickenham stadium. And being around 10,000 drunk rugby fans feels completely safe.

UK 'football factory' style clubs

I think "English" is correct here. Scotland has a tradition of football hooliganism, but it explicitly sectarian and associated with the Glasgow rivalry between (Irish Catholic) Celtic and (Scottish Protestant) Rangers, rather than the violence-for-violence's-sake of English hooliganism.

I saw regular low-level violence between Welsh and English fans. Granted I'm a few years out of date, but it spiked every Six Nations. Best sport in the world.

You could, like, go to a college football game. Or an English football game.

This is the strangest statement I've ever heard. Screaming and booing and chanting at games is white culture.

I think you're typical minding here. We celebrate sports very noisily in lots of almost entirely white countries.

Your thesis does not pass the smell test. Maybe for very reserved WASPs or similar but those are far from the only white people.

I have friends I made by randomly hugging and screaming at a rugby match and they've been my best buddies for 25 years.

Watching any European football match from Milan, to Paris, to London, will show you a lot of white people screaming and celebrating.

Who's "we", Kemosabe?

It ruins the moment for us

What are you doing in that moment? Quietly contemplating the philosophical implications of ending a 53-year losing streak?

Can't wait for Britain to win the World Cup so everyone can retreat to their houses and silently meditate on the fact that it's coming home.

English fans traditionally riot after a loss rather than a win - the American hooligan practice of burning your own city after a win is particularly strange to us. But win or lose, I hope someone in the English ultras is talking to their Canadian counterparts about plans to party in DC like it's 1812.

For whatever reason, Scottish travelling football fans are happy drunks rather than mean drunks. If Scotland win the world cup, there will be a giant fan love-in which will provide convenient distraction while the corrupt US and FIFA officials who made it happen make arrangements with Satan to open the Donald Trump Infernal Ski and Snowboard Park.

Scotland will not win the world cup, given their performance yesterday.

If they get out of the group stage, it will be for the first time in their history.

They probably will, which just shows that the 48-team format is diluting the standard of the competition.

That's why you should support them!

wtf I love Taylor Swift and Timothee Chalamet?!

To the extent celebrities make grown men seethe about getting priced out and/or their “valor” stolen when it comes to rooting for laundry or clapping for other men to put an orange ball through a net, I’m all for it.

The other thing is it’s the blackification of celebration. Where you need to do things loud and visually to show how much it means to you

Come on. Sports are a worldwide phenomenon, and Americans of all flavors are the infamous for being mild in their celebrations*. In fact, it is kind of sad that Americans have such a corporate relationship with their sport. If you can't be loud and in-tears after an emotional moment for your team, then are you even a real fan ?

*exception - Philadelphia

Do you have derogatory songs for your rival team? I can't help but think even American fans must do more than sit in the stands eating hotdogs and occasionally cheering on their side when the score hits 5,800 points to 5,750 in the second quarter 😁

A lot of the late Robert B. Parker's reminiscences (put into the mouth of Spenser) about attending Boston baseball games do sound more like a real fan with real fan experiences, though the idea that a team can just up and move to another city and now be the Milwaukee Braves rather than the Boston Braves is still odd to my ears (that was tried with Wimbledon back in 2003 and has resulted in two teams, the original that moved and the one that was created in the wake of the move). The idea of Manchester United, for example, being relocated to become Mayfair United would cause riots. I think that was one of the disjunctions between the American sports franchise experience and the British one when the Glazers took over United, they thought they were buying a franchise and a brand which they could milk for personal profit and that's not how it works over here.

I remember a video of London-based NY Giants fans singing "You can shove your fucking cheese up your arse" (to the tune of "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes") before the London Giants-Packers game in 2022 that went viral because this was both more offensive and far more creative than the US norm. It is pretty mild by English football standards.

Do you have derogatory songs for your rival team?

If we ever do a Philly motte meetup, you can recognize me by the T-Shirt.

Ooooh, a bit close to the bone there! 😁

Do you have derogatory songs for your rival team? I can't help but think even American fans must do more than sit in the stands eating hotdogs and occasionally cheering on their side when the score hits 5,800 points to 5,750 in the second quarter

I mean, we were just having a discussion elsewhere about Mr. Brightside, which Missouri fans use againt KU...

Do you have derogatory songs for your rival team?

Do the Bears Still Suck?

(yes)

*exception - Philadelphia

When I went to Green Bay last year for a game, my friends and family who were used to Eagles games at the Vet and the Linc kept warning me not to wear my Eagles gear at Lambeau, because I might be in physical danger.

As a lifelong Packers fan, that's really funny to hear. Obviously if you show up to the stadium wearing the opposing team's colors you're going to get a lot of shit talking (as you should, that makes it fun). But as I'm sure you experienced, it's all friendly shit talking and people aren't going to start throwing hands (even if you were wearing Bears gear).

Oh it was great. It probably helped that I smuggled in a bottle to pass around, but we were all good friends by the final whistle.

But my philly friends were picturing the way that opposing fans get treated at the Linc. One year my dad gave his season tickets at the Vet to a friend who was a Cowboys fan early in the season who went in Cowboys gear, the rest of the year when we went to the games people threw stuff at US because they thought WE were Cowboys fans, even though we were cheering for the Birds.

(even if you were wearing Bears gear)

What about a Vikings Favre jersey?

Yeah I think that would be fine too. There were a few people vocally upset about Favre going to the Vikings, but most Packers fans don't give a damn about the Vikings - they aren't the rival team, though they seem to think they are. And even the fans who were upset wouldn't take it out on a Vikings fan who came to town.

If history is anything to go by, also don't go wearing a Santa Claus outfit.

I wore Kelly green and my Randall Cunningham hat, got top-ten drunkest I've ever been, and sang the whole fight song stomping on the bleachers to keep time after every score. The Lambeau fans couldn't have been nicer, there was the exact right amount of booing to make it worth it.

Americans of all flavors are the infamous for being mild in their celebrations

Really? Over here Americans have the reputation of being loud.

If you can't be loud and in-tears after an emotional moment for your team, then are you even a real fan ?

An adult should have a sense of decorum, certainly in public.

You would think that goes twice in this day and age when everything you do can be filmed and immortalized and put on TikTok for all to see.

An adult should have a sense of decorum, certainly in public.

The one time it is acceptable to have public gay sex is when you are celebrating your team's goal and/or win. Everybody knows that. 😁

*exception - Philadelphia

Thrown batteries make little noise. My dad and daughter make much more yelling at the Phillies.

The one example that really stood out to me was College Football Playoffs. Championship game tickets were a 3k minimum ticket price watching team 1 and 2 play each other. The semifinal game say watching teams 2 and 3 play you could scalp tickets for $30.

It probably didn't help that both semifinal games were rather far away for the teams in question. Indiana v. Oregon was played in Atlanta while Miami v. Ole Miss was played in Phoenix.

So what is exactly your main complaint here? Members of the upper class attending prestigious events, while not being true fans? Theater kids performing for the camera?

The other thing is it’s the blackification of celebration. Where you need to do things loud and visually to show how much it means to you. Yes I am now the old man who yells at clouds.

Half the arena for the Knicks game was suits/finance bros pretending expression of emotion was beneath them. You didn't see reels of them because it's fucking boring. Why is this even a complaint again? I remember the eccentric and extraverted kids always being in the spotlight starting from kindergarten. You wouldn't have written this post if everyone behaved like the boring suits. If anything, you're signal boosting the "black" way of celebration by posting this.

The other interesting sports related thing is the bifurcation of the ticket market for sporting events.

The K-shapifaction of economy is doing it's thing, but why are you acting that hasn't been this way since forever? I'm sure a gladiator event with top gladiator talent and with an emperor in attendance would attract a lot more heads than any other gladiator event in Ancient Rome too. Do you expect an even distribution in demand for lower tier sporting events/matchups?

The USA world cup match was also absolutely full of celebrities chanting 'USA! USA! USA!' after every goal(well, except for Paraguay's single goal). Sports brought America together that night; libtard celebrities were chanting with Marco Rubio and jeering the ref when he made pro-paraguay decisions. The rich and famous seemed less like an alien race and more like a bunch of regular guys living unusual lives.

Americans need better chants.

Embarassing.

TBF, USA! USA! USA! Is almost uniquely suited to chanting among major country names.

Engerlaaaannd, engerlaaannnnd...

They're taught to be polite in public, bless 'em. Baddiel and Skinner did a lot with the Three Lions song for the England team, it's hard to cheer for a national team beyond chanting the country's name. If somebody did a good song for the national team, the USA would have a decent chant.

Irish rugby, for instance, has the official anthem as Ireland's Call (because of the political situation and when you have players from both North and South you don't want to step on any sectarian toes) and it's about as inspiring as wallpaper paste. That's why people sing The Fields of Athenry instead because while it may be a literal dirge, it's also more blood-stirring.

Soccer is an embarrassing sport so it’s apropos.

What separates us from animals is our hands and head. In soccer, the use of the first id outlawed and the second is used as a club.

No, what separates us from animals is our flexibility.

Soccer is the game where we show a level of finesse no animal can without even flexing with our opposable thumbs or superior handling. The ultimate mog.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bl7UVAbGAWA&ra=m

  1. That's not soccer, it's kickball.
  2. Elephants (like dolphins) are honorary Aryans. You picked one of the most sophisticated (and dexterous for its size, given the trunk) animals around.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=plFCDMQLGpw?si=G4kmMpgCkGsQMF_W

Warning: The "?si=" and "?pp=" portions that YouTube has started adding to any URL created with the "share" button allegedly can be used to reveal the YouTube username of the user who created that URL. For that reason, those portions of the URL should be deleted before copying and pasting.

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Most American sports have a much faster cadence than soccer. Popular crowd activities from these sports don't port over easily.

That can't be right ? American sports are known to be stop and go.

Hockey is the only one with a faster cadence. And honestly, their fans have some pretty good chants. (Or at least my school did)

The debate is impossible.

Soccer fans claim the sport has more action because the ball is constantly in play. Non-soccer fans claim it is boring because there is little danger of anyone doing anything important for the vast majority of that time.

Soccer fans claim that baseball is boring because the ball is in play very little. Baseball fans feel it is exciting because every single pitch can result in a score.

Hockey and fight sports probably have the best balance of constant action with meaningful scoring at any second, but both are somewhat niche and require some degree of specialist knowledge to properly understand.

Non-soccer fans claim it is boring because there is little danger of anyone doing anything important for the vast majority of that time.

I know this isn't intrinsic to your point but it is something that bugs me about the Soccer discourse so I will rant.

Soccer players are constantly doing things that are dangerous and important to the outcome of the game, they are just less legible and it is a problem because the most popular American sports are focused on the score. Football is all about the points, big plays are exciting but ultimately considered subservient to scoring, individual points aren't as important in Basketball but it is a constantly scoring sport. Hockey is pretty similar to Soccer but I think Baseball is most instructive - it is also often a very low scoring game like Soccer. It has really intense non-scoring moments (like with Soccer) but at the end of the day outside of a few specific accomplishments Americans just focus on the score while watching and immediately tune out the non-scoring moments once the tension is released. Soccer is all about following the tempo, possessions, scoring chances, set pieces and so on. It requires much more attention and fan knowledge to notice quality play and actions that should be work "micro points" and because the numbers don't go up like we expect from our other stuff, it seems boring.

It can be not boring pricelessly because the numbers don't go up very often, but you have to pay attention to the whole scope of play. When you are used to chunked up Basketball and Football, well that's hard.

But that happens in other sports as well. In football, there is constant attempts by the offense to set up plays to catch the defense in a wrong play. The defense is constantly trying to surprise and disguise the offense to create a massive play. Most plays aren’t huge plays but many lead up to it.

The difference is that most plays could be huge plays. Most plays are kinetic. Most plays are violent. Most plays are one player out eleven doing the wrong thing (or amazing thing) from a massive breakdown or big play. And also there is a clear sub-goal—gotta get the first down. Even if you don’t score on that play, getting from 1st and 10 to second and 2 is a huge play! It sets up a mini score when you convert the first down on the next play or two.

Hockey is constantly a dance where players are trying to solve the forecheck by the offense or the trap being deployed by the defense. If one team solves, it almost immediately leads to a high quality scoring chance. Oh and beyond kinetic. And there is scoring. Less than the NFL. But more than scoring and the scoring chances are way higher.

Baseball is probably the most tactical sport. Each pitch is setting up the next pitch. Decisions about bullpen usage, when to steal, when to bunt, etc.

In short, the thing soccer fans claim as not unique about their sport. In fact, frequently it is lacking compared to other sports. It then has a bunch of other issues (not a lot of scoring or scoring chances, not a lot of kinetic action, limited violence). It is just a sub standard game that is largely popular due to poverty.

Baseball is probably the most tactical sport. Each pitch is setting up the next pitch. Decisions about bullpen usage, when to steal, when to bunt, etc.

I'd actually argue Football (American) is the most tactical sport. On the field tactics and strategy mattes, as does the coaching battle which takes place over the entire season and has elements of logistics in terms of saving Strats and the way the season and injuries weigh on the team.

It's like the pitching element of baseball but for a lot of the positions on the field.

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My background is sports analytics and I can recognize how onfield play is translating into Xg in Soccer. I just feel the conversion relationship in Soccer is a lot wobblier than it is in the vast majority of sports and there's large parts of the game where nothing's realistically going to happen.

I don't particularly enjoy Baseball but I feel that something happening is usually looming closer than it is in Soccer since any at-bat can instantly convert.

Yeah that's correct. What makes a soccer game exciting before you get to the penalty box is largely illegible unless you're the sort of fan who makes the effort to learn about the tactics. Like if you don't know what a passing triangle is and how to spot it you're going to zone out until the ball comes near the goal and then you might as well be watching American football. Still, the game is the easiest to learn it's ever been now that you have substack tactics guys breaking down gifs and so on.

now that you have substack tactics guys breaking down gifs and so on.

I request links

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they are just less legible and it is a problem because the most popular American sports are focused on the score.

The score is the point. Keeping score is what separates a sporting event from a dance. To quote one of my favorite philosophical quotes about Soccer from Sampaoli:

One night, I went to a bar, I was with a woman. We talked all night. We laughed, we flirted, I paid for several drinks of hers. At around 5am, a guy came in, grabbed her by the arm and took her to the bathroom. He made love to her and she left with him. That doesn't matter, because I had most of the possession on that night.

All the stuff that isn't scoring fundamentally doesn't matter to the outcome of the game. Those actions that don't lead to scoring could have mattered, the omission of them might have mattered, but ultimately they didn't matter. They might matter inasmuch as they are part of a longer process which leads to actual scoring, but if they don't lead to anything then it didn't matter.

I think Baseball is most instructive - it is also often a very low scoring game like Soccer.

This is kinda silly. The average baseball scoreline is 4.5-4.5 basically forever, the average scoreline in the Big 5 UEFA leagues is 1.4-1.4. So baseball features three times the scoring of top flight soccer.

But anyway, my point isn't that soccer is boring, I quite like it, I intend to get quite drunk at the local brewery for as many of the USMNT games as possible. I want to cheer on our boy from Herhsey and a bunch of the most accidental Americans imaginable.

It's just that I think Soccer fans who talk shit on American sports are stupid and ignorant.

It's the same bullshit when soccer fans complain about commercial breaks in American sports, while buying soccer jerseys that are walking advertisements.

American football is well adapted to modern attention spans.

I think the key feature of this is the structure of first downs make for a very effective dopamine drip, every third play (2-3 minutes in real time) your team is either going to convert a first down, or fail to convert a first down, unless the game is already out of hand, you its a moment to either be happy or frustrated, there's some emotional payoff to the moment.

I have no doubt that various midfield actions in soccer and hockey (getting possession in the zone?) are similarly as important in terms of changing a team's win percentage, but those moments a less legible to the untrained eye (maybe that's what being able to appreciate a sport actually is?), for someone not all that familiar with the sport, it's easy to miss that a unit of win probability has been gained, or to not actually be able to distinguish whether what has just happened actually amounts to gaining a unit of win probability (as someone who doesn't watch that much soccer, my naive reaction to it is to think they should take more shots on goal, I think I've read enough about it know that's wrong though, what teams actually want to do is to work the possession more so that the shots they do take are higher probability).

Somewhat separately, American football is well suited to modern cell phone usage, there are games I put down the phone and actually pay attention, there are lots of game where I don't though (Sunday Night game between teams I don't have any special interest in). Football is the easiest game to follow while playing on your phone, the action happens in 5 minutes spurts, every play is replayed several times if you missed something, its easy to quickly check down and distance, if the team is in the red zone. In contrast, watching the US game Friday night, only two of the goals was I actually looking at the TV when they happened, replays are pretty quick because once the action starts up again you can't stop to show a replay. Great midfield actions that are like football first downs never get shown again because the action keeps going. So if you didn't appreciate it in real time, the TV isn't going to explain to you why you should appreciate it. The only non-scoring plays that get replayed are things that cause penalties or corners or free kicks.

No particular value judgement either way, I just think it's less adaptive to modern attention spans.

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It's the same bullshit when soccer fans complain about commercial breaks in American sports, while buying soccer jerseys that are walking advertisements.

Lol well I'm sure they are all shitting themselves over the hydration breaks.

As somebody who never played the game and doesn't particularly watch it I feel Rugby League is probably the best ball sport in terms of entertainment product. The rules can be explained to a caveman in 2 minutes, the physicality is self-evident and it has a good momentum->scoring transfer ratio, lack of which is a large part of why I've never really vibed with Soccer.

I think he's referring to the occasional 20-to-30-second intervals where American sports happen.

Yes, as opposed to the 20-to-30 minute intervals between any excitement happening in soccer.

Real Football is more like fighting than other sports.

For most of the game, you are whittling down your opponent. The inevitable hook (goal) is the result of minutes of build up before.

Or people could watch a real sport like Hockey where scoring can happen at any point, frequently happens after wearing down your opponent, and there are actual fights!

Here are English chants for comparison (league, not wc though):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=i81Khk7G2Hc

Lol, "It's only four-nil, it's only four-nil, how shit must you be, it's only four-nil" (while losing). I guess you've gotta chant something in that situation.

The "it's called soccer" one is good, actually, though they should put more energy into it. The other two are terrible.

I think it's always important to keep in mind that the type of thinking that most posters here have is pretty rare in the gen pop.

Normie sports fan are a high percentage of the population (and I bet most of them know about Chalemet's Knicks habit, including a lot of women because of his lady) and theater kids are probably an order of magnitude more common than us.

This means the motivations behind attendance of high ticket price games involves quite the variety.

Same for the celebration - extraversion is uncommon here but very much a thing.

So is FOMO - my partner is smart and has a high level of educational and professional attainment, she also barely cares about sport at all - she still wanted to go to a local World Cup party last night "because everyone is doing it."

Some examples of people I know personally at the NBA finals or know about from anecdote and the news:

-Celebrities who go to most if not all home games.

-A guy who can't afford it but is taking his Dad who has been waiting for A Long Time and is on his last legs.

-A guy who can't afford it but is taking his kids because this is the thing that brings them together. '

-A NYC finance guy who got caught cheating and doesn't like basketball all that much but is taking his wife who doesn't like basketball at all because it's expensive and fuck him.

-A nerdy wealthy guy who bought a 30k gaming PC and a condo and has no idea what else to spend his money on and is trying out vices.

-Celebrities who have more money than they need and are just looking to spend (and some of them are theater kids looking to be in the moment).

-John Smith a boring upper middle class guy who is buying seats for 10k and just not doing an expensive vacation this year.

Yes some of the meaning comes exclusivity and costs, but it comes from other places too.

Also - interest in this NBA finals and World Cup are stupidly high, the former because MSG is a storied place in a high wealth town and hella small, the latter because like 6 billion people are passionate about football.

Yep. I paid 500$ for a group stage game. Nothing to do with status. World cup games in your city are a once in life time opportunity. You pay so you can remember the game.

The NY knicks winning a championship is a less than once in a lifetime opportunity. There are middle class fans who would sell their life savings for it. $20k for courtside seats is frankly under priced. It's pocket change for billionaires.

You must not be familiar with the Knicks if you think this isn’t a once in a Lifetime event…

He said less than once in a lifetime, aka even rarer. He's definitely familiar with the Knicks.

Totally misread that — problem posting when you wake up

The one example that really stood out to me was College Football Playoffs. Championship game tickets were a 3k minimum ticket price watching team 1 and 2 play each other. The semifinal game say watching teams 2 and 3 play you could scalp tickets for $30. People are going because they want to be at the game that will be an event not for the quality of football.

Wasn't part of that one that one of the universities involved was Indiana, which a) was historically awful, making this a novel event, and b) has a massive alumni network many of whom are business alums and on the richer end of the scale?

Yes. They have money. Though as far as rich universities go they are in the top 30-50 and not the richest. And the CFP playoff schedule being in random cities means fan bases won’t have the time to go to every game. But still the game before the finals for UI was $40. Versus $3000. And the game was at like 12 on Jan 1 so locals didn’t care to get up. But I still think it says something about how being the “coordinating” event really makes prices skyrocket.

Also add in the fact that you don't know where the game is going to be until shortly before, and the semifinal games were on weeknights for some reason. I went to Charlotte both times Pitt was in the ACC Championship, and unless you have some flexibility with work, it's hard to make plans at the last minute, and God help you if you have kids. I was able to drive down Friday afternoon both times, but some people left after work Friday, and some drove down Saturday, which is doable when the game starts at 8. I wouldn't even attempt a Monday game, which requires taking two days off work, or a game that wasn't within reasonable driving distance. The National Championship is different because enough rich people will buy tickets well in advance because they don't care who's playing. In the unlikely event Pitt has a title shot in the future, I'll go to the ACC Championship but that's it.

You are right. I am thinking of the quarterfinals on New Years Day. Those were $40 get in price. Still solid games. And yes their schedule makes it hard. I am somewhat trying to avoid there were X,Y,Z logistical issue which does effect CFP. And trying to highlight that 2nd tier events depend on logistics. 1st tier events “whatever that takes to be one” play by completely different rules. People deal with scheduling hassles because they know it’s 1st tier. Going to San Antonio tonight was a hassle but seems like their are plenty of fans going from NYC (who may of had their tickets canceled).

To quote your handle, I think people should just opt out of sportsball culture. The reason celebrities are at the game is because the billionaire franchise owners want you to think it is important. If they can trick you into paying attention to it, they’ll make money selling you $20 hot dogs and your son $200 sneakers. They conspire with the gambling companies to steal even more from you. If it were legal and profitable, they would skin you alive to turn you into a sportsball and make your children fight to the death over it like in Mesoamerica. The telos of this phenomenon is recruiters scouring the earth to find remnant populations of prehistoric man in Dagestan or the Congo or wherever and dressing them up in the flag of civilized nations. What’s the point? A single backyard game of touch football with a random assortment of neighborhood figures is better for the country than all of the franchises combined. Even the steelman argument that there’s joy in seeing expertise — just go get hibachi, it’s cheaper.

remnant populations of prehistoric man in Dagestan

I have to admit, I was impressed and I know nothing about wrestling.

A single backyard game of touch football with a random assortment of neighborhood figures is better for the country than all of the franchises combined.

I look forward to your writeup of a local neighborhood game.

I'd be happy to do writeups of underwater hockey practices, which simply doesn't have enough players to get beyond rec league performance. Not sure if you genuinely interested, or just making a point.

Perhaps the reason local sports are uncommon outside of city rec leagues (which I hear are weirdly competitive) is that we normalized professional consumer sports as the default male “sport” pastime. (Ignoring golf and video games). If we were united in hating them, then it would cease to be weird for unathletic adult men to gather for a casual game for the pure fun of exercise and socialization. Give me your tired, your poor, your fat masses yearning to play free…

I don't think it's weird or unusual. Unathletic adult men gathering for sports is like 95% of my social life. But as upper middle class white folks, we have to invent new sports in order to be any good at them, because if we go down to the Y to play pickup basketball we're getting mogged by the inner city. Hence my lifetime devotion to crossfit, rowing, rock climbing, Brazilian jiu jitsu, and other dumb and obscure pastimes.

I got an unsolicited neighborhood magazine recently, which is painfully on the nose for well off Gen Xers. There was an article about a couple who looked to be in their 50s, and it was all about their yoga studio, how they do hot yoga, warm yoga, dog yoga, and have a French handstand consultant, and here's a picture of the husband doing a handstand. There's a picture of their little dog. Somewhere in the middle it mentions that he was an engineer for 30 years and their two sons, one of whom is helping them run their yoga studio. They sound like normal wholesome people who are trying to pretend like they are alternative in some way.

None of it is wrong or bad, but I don't like it; it seems like it should be a parody somehow, but I can't quite put my finger on why I feel that way.

But as upper middle class white folks, we have to invent new sports in order to be any good at them, because if we go down to the Y to play pickup basketball we're getting mogged by the inner city

Hence the popularity (perhaps not as much now) of triathlon. No lower class randos have the time and money to train in 3 sports plus access to a pool plus dropping $5k on a bicycle.

Hence the ever more extreme distances of Yuppie office worker distance running. The same awe that used to attach to the Marathoner is now reserved for the Ultramarathoner. Soon it will be for the Barkley marathons, I suppose.

Fortunately, the Kenyans have not yet discovered trail racing, so it can still belong to people like Jim Walmsley and Courtney Dewalter.

Yeah but if somebody put a million dollar prizepool on Trail Racing I'd imagine the winners (after a couple years to convert and gear up) would come from a functionally identical population to the current Marathon winners.

Having fallen just short of the professional level in a major ball sport I feel like a certain amount of the rise of alternate sports is how success/progression-orientated a ton of youth sport participation is now. A lot of people age out of playing their ball sport of choice as a function of being rejected to continue progressing up the ranks after actually trying quite hard, so continuing to play at a social level can feel like ruminating over one's own failures and/or leave you in a weird uncanny valley of 'I remember when I was 50% better at this since I trained 8 times a week so why am I playing beer league and kinda-sucking'.

I like BJJ since being reasonably active and staying moderately in the gym makes me a top echelon athletic specimen in that sport versus if I were still trying to play Rugby or Gridiron those are relatively table stakes.

A lot of people age out of playing their ball sport of choice as a function of being rejected to continue progressing up the ranks

Absolutely, this is a good insight. I stopped playing baseball and basketball when I missed the high school teams. Continuing to play at 16 while not being on the high school team would have been unbearably lame to me, but taking up boxing had no similar feeling of being obviously worse than the guys in my school who were on the basketball team.

The American ball sports also suffer particularly from the physical differentiation in positions, the implications change when the talent pool gets bigger. In 4th grade I was a center, in 7th I was a power forward, by high school I was the right size to play small forward, if I had been good enough to make it to college ball I would be too short to be an undersized point guard.

Honestly the Dagestan combat sports thing is more to do with it being like the only region in the world where grappling gets the A-tier athletes immediately as their primary sport than to do with them being some incredibly insane unique genetic outliers of ability. The best athletes in their population go into combat sports since everything else is pretty marginal there, then get to train with other great athletes (which helps to refine technique and stop bad habits forming) in a geographic concentration.

Everywhere else Wrestling is only getting those who couldn't make it in ball sports and a lot of people will never even actually try the sport at all.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

A few immediate thoughts:

For one strain of doomer, this is a good thing: the USG showing willingness to directly intervene and cut down the addressable market for capability-pushing models reduces economic incentives to push the frontier at all costs and slows down the race dynamic. Correspondingly, it's going to be a nightmare for the markets: the AI boom is driven by the idea that frontier models are going to be replacing a significant chunk of global labor, and obviously now this is significantly less likely now that frontier models are going to be stuck in Uncle Sam's basement.

For another strain of doomer, this is a horrible thing: really this was fairly clear even with the DOD conflict, but now control of AI is now very firmly a direct White House concern - the fate of the planet and/or the universe is in the end going to be decided by DC bureaucrats and not SF tech nerds.

Companies, especially non-US companies, are going to be rushing to the doors to move their AI workflows off closed-source and onto self-hosted models, another blow for the AI market thesis - the business continuity risks of Anthropic's demonstrated willingness to silently cripple models and USG's demonstrated willingness to now arbitrarily cut off access are simply going to be too much.

As Anthropic pointed out in their own release, the logic here by the Trump admin if consistent would basically apply these limitations to most if not all other models.

Is there another motive at play then? Well, it'd ordinarily be hard to say. But well, let's just go see what current leadership is saying about anthropic.

Now this isn't a straight up admittance this is for retaliation reasons, but they aren't doing themselves any favors here either. Why bring that up? It's obviously drawing a connection that you absolutely should not want drawn if there wasn't an ulterior motive you want to subtly hint at. At best it's an incredibly stupid thing for Hegseth to be saying right now.

Some former officials are even more explicit that the treatment seems to be from something else. Again, something you would hope your former officials would not be stupid enough to post, obviously drawing connections that you should not want drawn unless the entire point was to make it blatant without going past complete deniability.

If you are going to retaliate, you want to pretend to do it for some other reason but wink enough that everyone, especially Google and OpenAI know it’s a retaliation. Former officials actually seem perfect for this. Current leadership should keep their traps shut though.

I have nothing new to say about the ban itself, or to be more accurate, I can't be arsed to.

I did use Fable from the moment it was available, quite intensively, and I can promise you that it's a feel-the-AGI moment. Is it an AGI? Nope. But it only took a little use to realize that it was clearly ahead of the pack, and we're only a small n number of iterations away. The only reason I'm not updating my timelines harder is because something like this is priced in.

Speaking of price, Fable tempts me to buy a Max plan. That is not something even a large amount of tokens for Opus 4.6 and later managed. I'll do so if this kerfuffle sorts itself out, but until then, using Opus 4.8 feels like a Flowers for Algernon moment.

I'm curious to hear your Fable use cases. In the brief time it was available, I didn't get to do much. The only project I had on my plate was a simple web application, which it pumped it in a way that felt no better/worse than if I had Opus. What sort of task would you recommend for Fable that you wouldn't for Opus?

I'm grinding through a several week long session now. Opus is doing a better than human job but in little bits and bobs, but I was able to switch to Fable a few days ago and it was just chewing through it. It would sit and think for 10 minutes and then rip out a 700 line delta across 6 C++ files that would compile the first time and nail the feature in an iteration or two. It just kept that pace up.

Two days later Fable was yanked away from me while it was in the middle of implementing a feature and Opus couldn't figure out how to finish it with the uncommitted code that Fable had left. It just stashed it and started over and I told it it's late and to go to bed.

I feel a bit of loss over it

Opus has been doing a fine job but after a day or so with it it was clear Fable was significantly better.

Fable is much more of a 'do it right the first time' model than Opus. I had three pages of instructions for a feature. It just does what I ask, gets it all right, then tests it without me asking and tells me about the balancing! Opus could've done all that too if I cut up the instructions a bit but there'd be some minor glitches and I'd have to go over and fix it.

Better planner too. I was planning out a project with Opus 4.6 a few months ago, never really started it. Tried the same prompt with Fable and it come up with a few strokes of brilliance Opus never found. When making the initial demonstrator, Opus made a crap sandbox that needed a couple of rounds of debugging to even work and it wasn't very satisfactory. So I tried with Fable. Fable made a much nicer, prettier sandbox with more content that worked the first time and had all these things already set up to test. it puts in more care and effort as well as being smarter.

Better writer too. It is to Opus as Opus is to Sonnet.

I set it to the hardest task there is: understanding me. It did very well. As well as me. I want so badly to be the psychiatrist that Anthropic hired to analyze Mythos, as detailed in the system card. Probably can't be that person, not enough time. But Fable is a very good psychiatrist. Once the regulatory and legal barriers fall, I'm hoping I have enough money to enjoy the fireworks from a safe distance.

Opus is very good. But I wouldn't use it for anything at all, if Fable was available.

Battles like this are a good test of AI's power, since if and when AI ever became sufficiently intelligent and powerful, one could tell it "{model name}, I would like you to run a campaign to politically destroy {list of politician names}. Assume that you have {number} dollars of budget and the ability to delegate tasks to humans." and have a reasonable hope of success, at least assuming that those politicians weren't running their own AI to keep themselves in power.

the business continuity risks of Anthropic's demonstrated willingness to silently cripple models and USG's demonstrated willingness to now arbitrarily cut off access are simply going to be too much.

In the long term, maybe, but in the short term, I don't know that this is bad for Anthropic. Mythos first entered the conversation with the press release about all the vulnerabilities it found and how they're too scared to release the model to the public. This prompted more criticism than these companies normally receive, with several commentators pointing out how the claims were exaggerated and that they were just repeats of similar claims about products that were released and didn't end up being dangerous at all. So now they have the US government saying that this product is too dangerous for the public. Never mind that this is the same government that unsuccessfully tried to tag Anthropic as security risk because they didn't like purported limitations on the use of their software, but never mind that. Also, these names are a little too on the nose. Mythos suggests a product that's meant to inspire but doesn't actually exist. Fable suggests something mean to impart a moral lesson but is likewise nonexistent. The only similarly named product I can think of is the Mitsubishi Mirage, which feels like a similar thought exercise in how much you can cut from a vehicle and still be permitted to import it into the US.

Sure. This administration is great at making huge announcements which then fall apart in the court system because it turns out that not everything Trump feels he should have the authority to do is something he can actually do. Getting banned by the USG and then getting the ban reversed in court would definitely add to the hype.

I haven’t been able to figure out what authority the feds are using here, but if it’s ITAR it gets rough quick.

I have no idea either but it probably doesn't matter since I doubt Anthropic will litigate it. Then again, it suspiciously comes the day after the SpaceX IPO, and with Anthropic gunning for an IPO of their own, it seriously hurts their business prospects if the US government is throttling what products they can release. The industry has already spent a ton of money on a technology that hasn't proven any ability to make money as it is, and it doesn't bode well for the industry if they spend ungodly sums only for their products to be deemed a security risk and effectively unmarketable. On the third hand, maybe this is just payback for the whole DoD thing.

It's still a real hassle getting something as simple as a scope for a hunting rifle from the US to Canada -- which IIRC is ITAR (the hassle is on the US side, and there were some big fines for exporters before people started paying attention), and has been the case for a number of years.

Certainly an actual AGI would be a bigger threat to US national security than a nice cheap scope from SFRC, so I guess it makes sense?

a scope for a hunting rifle

This is more a problem with US exporters not bothering to keep up to date on ITAR reforms (there have been a few that reclassified most of the stuff into a much laxer category) than anything else, though.

Perhaps something an AI could solve for them, but their market is large enough that they don't have to care.

Eh, there is a new-ish 'de minimus' exemption on paperwork for lots of things, but scopes are not those things AFAIK.

Many companies don't want to mess with even the low-value exemption in any case due to people getting hammered with huge fines in the past -- but without the exemption it's pretty onerous AIUI -- to get an export permit for a scope you need to (IIRC) fill out various convoluted permit forms on the US side, which also demand import authorization from the Canadian side -- which is not a thing that Canada cares about, but that makes it worse because there's nobody in charge of processing the forms that the US side is demanding!

There are people in Canada with associated FFLs in the US that will do it for a fee -- but that fee is like $300 bucks, which gives you some idea of the hassles involved. (again, pretty much all on the US export side -- Canada doesn't really make it too hard to import actual guns even, so long as they are otherwise in compliance with our somewhat Byzantine rules around whether they are legal to have at all)

Actually militarily useful technology is right out though, even if it has relevant consumer applications -- any sort of night vision would be a common example. And an AGI that lived up to the hype would certainly be better for harming America than some shitty NVGs...

I don't think the full info is out yet. Axios has one news article with a bit more (found via Zvi), but no specific law is named.

I’m not saying that I have faith in the government here, but it is shocking that anyone might find “self regulating” private SF company of weird tech elitists to be a superior path.

I recall once Rush on a monologue saying that global warming can’t possibly be real the way the left says because if it was true, it would require government intervention in a way that undermined capitalism and he couldn’t accept that.

I remember being just shocked at the backwards reasoning. Obviously there’s a true point about backwards incentives reducing trust in the claim. But Rush himself was just openly engaging in the reverse mindset.

Here we have the same people saying that this threat exists also not wanting to have to overturn their grip on power over it.

I remember being just shocked at the backwards reasoning. Obviously there’s a true point about backwards incentives reducing trust in the claim. But Rush himself was just openly engaging in the reverse mindset.

There's also a slight utility maximizing thing here, similar to what I usually use to dismiss claims of us being simulations. Information only matters in-so-far as it can increase your expected utility.

Suppose we might live in two possible world: with probability p we live in world A which is normal and you have agency. With probability q we live in world B which temporarily looks like world A but in a couple years will collapse and nothing you do matters. Either everyone dies, or AI takes over and does whatever it wants good or bad in a way that you personally can't control, or it's a simulation and the matrix lords do whatever they want.

For any strategy you employ now before knowing which world you live in, the probably q does not matter. If your utility in world B is approximately constant with respect to your strategy, then you might as well act as if you're in world A and maximize your utility within that world. If there's a 40% chance we're all going to die in a few years and it either happens or doesn't outside your control, then might as well live for that 60%. I think this is a steelmanned version of the backwards reasoning. If you believe in capitalism so strongly that you think communism is equivalent to the end of civilization, or would kill you personally, or just be so bad that life is not worth living anymore, or would be equally incapable of solving global warming, then you might as well act as if you live in the world where it's not too bad for capitalism to solve.

Note that epistemically this is different from it actually affecting the probabilities p and q. It doesn't actually change how bad global warming is or how bad you ought to literally expect it to be. Just how bad it would be rational to treat it. If you are not a hero with a very high locus of control and are not going to step up and save the world from existential threats, then you might as well go about your life as if they don't exist and not worry too much about them.

Different Bad Things are different not only in their probability but also in how actionable they are. Your approach applies to things which are not actionable. The probability that the sun blows up tomorrow is not worth worrying about, because there is nothing humans could do which would make a difference. By contrast, a lot of problems humans worry about -- from ASI and global warming to cancer or getting attacked by a bear in the woods -- are actually Bad Things where humans can make decisions which will affect the badness of the outcomes.

The US is not the land of fully unregulated capitalism, nor has is ever been. To a true believer in the free market, if would seem almost as oppressive as Soviet Russia. The list of goods and services whose sale is either forbidden or severely regulated is long. Humans. Human meat. Fentanyl. Sex. Fissile material. Fragmentation grenades. Leaded gasoline. Handguns. Dental services. Loans. Food. Animals. CFCs. Ebola samples. Parts of protected animal species. "If the government makes us pay for the privilege of burning fossil fuels, that is the end of capitalism in America" is a sentiment excusable from a guy living in 1850. For someone living today, it seems strange to claim that all the regulations amassed since WW2 are fine but CO2 emission certificates would be the end of the world.

It's not a great impingement on freedom to sell human meat so it's also not a great impingement on human freedom to have the government control the amount of energy to be put into any item sold.

A mechanism of the slippery slope shows itself.

Also demonstrating that there really are just two general political philosophies, exemplified by the memes "You can just do things" and "We live in a society". And the vast majority of people are of the latter belief.

Apropos of that old cyotography algorithm as a book first amendment case, absolutely nothing prevents Anthropic from publishing and open sourcing Mythos 5 weights as a book available world over to strike back at the government. Would be a totally glorious act of self immolation, think Denethor's pyre etc. as China and co are brought up to the exact same level of AI tech as the US in one single, simple, beautiful act of spite.

For the size of models we're talking, I don't think "books" is the right metric. The PGP code in the book was 350kB or so, and 950 pages. Models here are many GB. Even with some optimization, in human readable form it'd be somewhere between a bookshelf and a whole library.

Plus the weights aren't really human readable to begin with, and it's unclear if it'd be a "creative work" as much as C source code. I suspect models, the result of a purely mechanical, if expensive, optimization process aren't "creative" enough to be copyrightable, although that wouldn't stop printing books necessarily.

That is based on the assumption that Anthropic have principles. Which the real world experience doesn't show it is true.

What leads you to believe that Anthropic's stated principles are compatible with speeding up Chinese progress to AGI?

This is honestly hilarious in the context of Anthropic's own writing from a few weeks ago.

When a model poses risks of this kind, the government should have the legal authority to block or deter its deployment—beyond what exists in current law or in existing proposals in Congress.

It looks like they're getting what they asked for, and they're getting it good and hard. The admin simply took them at their word.

Did you read to the end?

As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.

Lots to unpack here.

At the philosophical level, if we don't have the state capacity to implement a regulatory regime that meets Anthropic's specifications, then why is Anthropic training and releasing frontier models? It reads like they are saying, "here are our demands for submitting to the authority of your government". That's not how it works. You submit to the government or you get shut down, like the rest of us.

At the operational level, I don't know how possible it would be to implement a regime that is "transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts," for regulating capabilities that don't exist yet. How can it be fair if we don't know yet what the relevant metrics are? How can it be clear if we don't know what red flags to look for? How can it be grounded in technical facts if nobody knows how these models work?

It reads like they are saying, "here are our demands for submitting to the authority of your government".

Uh, no because the government had not made these demands. It's more like saying "hey we're doing this big research thing, and you're usually in favor of research things but we think you will probably want to regulate it, could you please tell us what you want so we can comply?" And then they squash you like a bug, almost certainly because you said you didn't want the lunatic running the depart of war using your work to spy on US citizens.

At the operational level, I don't know how possible it would be to implement a regime that is "transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts," for regulating capabilities that don't exist yet. How can it be fair if we don't know yet what the relevant metrics are? How can it be clear if we don't know what red flags to look for? How can it be grounded in technical facts if nobody knows how these models work?

They could start but actually asking? Creating a department or organization?

It reads like they are saying, "here are our demands for submitting to the authority of your government".

Did you read to the start?

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

They are submitting to the authority. We can't get anything perfect (and it remains to be seen whether we can do anything good enough), but surely we can do better than this??

They have submitted to the authority of the government. They’re arguing that the government’s demands should be reasonable, untargeted, and not sprung on us out of the blue.

this is significantly less likely now that frontier models are going to be stuck in Uncle Sam's basement

I think that Anthropic is being targeted, not AI generally. The Trump administration does not like Anthropic for obvious cultural reasons and a reasonable suspicion that if Anthropic got hard power via AI, they'd use it to crush Trump and gang. Trump faction wouldn't treat Google, Microsoft or Amazon this way, there are lots of cozy interrelations there. The employees might not like Trump but they'll still help fund his ballroom. Recall the OpenAI, Facebook, Palantir executives getting sworn in as lieutenant colonels in the US military. Or Nvidia getting away with far more grievous harm to US interests via looking the other way with smuggling of their chips to China, lobbying against export controls, failing to track where their chips go. But Jensen knows how to court Trump and Anthropic doesn't. Jensen also has stocks (the biggest and the best!), so it's be costly for the avaricious elements of the US government to harm Nvidia's interests no matter how strategically obvious it is. You just don't sell high tech capital goods to strategic rivals, nevermind if it's 2 years behind or not! Anthropic stock is owned by VCs, not senators and elites or anyone who enjoys an index fund. Anthropic have no such financial pull factor.

But also, I'm reminded of how the big players in nuclear research stopped publishing openly in the 1940s...

Dario is just a very autistic guy who seems to have some California / Obama libleft views on account of having grown up in SF etc, and he can’t mediate them around Trump. If you read / watch interviews with him this is immediately obvious. Musk and even Altman historically were very scared of AGI but around Trump they’ll say it’s amazing and will create millions of jobs and secure American dominance forever. Amodei is the kind of guy who says he’s really afraid of ASI and bores the president by trying to explain foom over a Mar a Lago table.

Altman is clearly a mostly skilled operater who will say what he needs to, Musk is often foolish with his words but the right likes Twitter and Trump respects his wealth, and the other big tech companies have been around long enough to play Washington like you said.

I think that Musk and Altman have just convinced themselves that throwing the dice on ASI is worth it for them personally. They might not even be wrong there, putting the creators of ASI into the torment nexus even if ASI remains human-aligned as an acausal disincentive for recklessly betting humanity for personal gains is not widely explored as a strategy, sadly.

I think the USG is acting against Anthropic because Amodei is less of an idiot whisperer than is colleagues, but because his company pissed off the DoD by having limitations on use of their LLMs.

Let's hope that wishing the torment nexus on a sentient being isn't disincentivized by being put in the torment nexus. If so, well, at least you'll have aeons to think about what you did.

Putting anyone into the torment nexus is crossing a line. Is that not the last thing to normalize? With bad people, just shoot them. That's good enough, no need to worry about them being taken out of the torment nexus by some future authority, less need to worry about Perillos/Brazen Bull style turnaround.

If I were in the position of Altman and also uninterested in the utility of humans other than myself, the threat of death would not be enough to deter me, sadly.

Suppose that my odds for ASI are that p(paperclips)=90%, p(Altman aligned)=9%, p(humanity aligned)=1%.

If I do nothing, either someone else builds ASI or I die of old age. Waiting longer before trying for ASI might be good for alignment, but will be bad for me personally if I die before that. Perhaps I get a 15% probability to experience a post singularity utopia like billions of other humans.

If I push forward with my ASI, I have a 9% chance to become God Emperor of the light cone. This is a much nicer outcome for me, because I can shape the universe to my whims, and make sure that socks in sandals do not exist or that most inhabitants are lesbian furries or whatever my aesthetic and moral preferences might be. If I am willing to sacrifice a few percents of my shot at an eternal life for that by building ASI when it is less likely to be aligned, I will probably also be willing to sacrifice a percent of it on the off chance that humanity will decide to kill me to deter me selfishly threatening their survival.

On reflection, I agree with you and @SnapDragon though that the torment nexus disincentive is a cure which is worse than the disease. I trust a humanity-aligned ASI that it will come up with better disincentives. For example, it could just frustrate Altman's general preferences for defecting. Every sentient being will have at least two feet and they will be clothed by socks and sandals, and whole galaxies will be colonized without any lesbian furries in them. And cooperating could be rewarded by giving the people who could have defected some say in the future.

That's important and I think that people thinking quantitatively about enormous payoffs might well behave this way.

But also we're all still human and I don't think that even maximum power threats really deters much. What criminal really thinks they'll be caught? It's hard to deter these kinds of gamblers who've won lots of bets in their lives, done the impossible many times and gotten away with it. Gut instinct predominates over calculation I think and the gut says to push forward even in the face of threats. It's like Lenin said:

You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw

The good effect of punishment isn't deterrence but about physically destroying their ability to cause any problems. I think steel and certainty now is what's needed, not future threats.

AI labs: "we are building a scary robot god who will destroy humanity and/or give its owner immense power"

US government: "ok, you are building a scary robot god who will destroy humanity and/or give its owner immense power"

AI labs: *shocked Pikachu face* *begins to cry and stammer incoherently*

This is just the obvious expected outcome. If frontier labs 1) continue to work towards the same goals that they have been loudly and publicly proclaiming for the last 4 years, and 2) get anywhere close to achieving those goals, then the traditional centers of kinetic power are going to take notice and step in and ensure that their interests aren't being violated. They're probably not going to just watch from the sidelines and twiddle their thumbs while Sam Altman merges with Skynet and becomes lord of the observable universe. They're especially not going to sit idly by while based Chinese hackers create an open source version so that you too can become a cyborg warrior who fights Sam Altman for control of the observable universe (which seems to be the tacit underlying assumption driving a lot of AI boosters). That's just fantasy. Other people (or machines) will have immense power, but it won't be you. You will be subservient to them. That's how it's always been and that's how it always will be.

the fate of the planet and/or the universe is in the end going to be decided by DC bureaucrats and not SF tech nerds.

SF tech nerds have desperately been in need of a wedgie for the last 7-8+ years. Regardless, this was always going to happen once the nerds got their hands on anything that was more than a plaything. I remember that meme about how the US was full of innovators who make things and Europe is full of lawyers and bureaucrats who only have it in them to regulate. In the end the "regulating" lawyers are going to win out over the "creating" "innovators", first internally and then world over.

Not really because American AI can’t be walled off from Europe without (at the very least) shutting down the internet, and probably world trade.

I think it can be pretty easily, Anthropic has been using Mythos internally for some time now.

I don’t mean defensively, I mean aggressively. European (and other) platforms can’t easily block Mythos from accessing them, which means true or x type risks remain global.

Ah, gotcha.

I...sort of hope the internet gets regionalized, to be quite honest.

Do you, though? Look at Chinese open-source AI. It's un-cucked (along the lines most of us here care about) because what the Chinese government really cares about you don't, and vice versa. Likewise Japanese manga and anime provided an escape hatch for every man sick of relentlessly feminist media. Things like Sci-Hub and Pirate Bay are based in the 'stans and the Netherlands respectively. Do you really want your countrymen to get final see on everything you're allowed to access?

Regionalizing the internet wouldn't shut down access to Chinese open-source AI or Japanese manga and anime.

Chef's kiss. The subtle deviousness of the USG demonstrated by taking Anthropic at their word. From what I see on HN - people are quite entertained by it. Seems that Dario has ground a lot of gears with his safetysm. And in a way - the USG is absolutely right. If the technology is as potent and dangerous as they claim - then it is not up to Anthropic to decide who can use it and for what.

Unfortunately the timing could be better - it should have been given just before their IPO is irreversible, but enough to tank them hard.

This kind of seems to me like a ringing endorsement from the USG about just how great and valuable Anthropic's models are! Certainly, the USG could never ever permit Anthropic or OpenAI to ever follow what had once been a practice of publishing openly about their models since that would ruin their business model, I mean national security.

Seems like a publicity coup for the frontier companies to me.

Is this related to the fact that it was Anthropic (at least I think it was them) who took a principled stand against the US gov using their models to automate kill chains and the like?

Yes, but it wasn't principled. It was to get cheap shot at openai and lure the antitrump SV to use Claude when Codex started seriously catching up with them.

This is nonsensical. Anthropic could have avoided signing up to supply the DoD altogether if they wanted to attract anti trump people. And OpenAI could have avoided walking into a pretty obvious trap.

Claude has been crushing GPT for enterprise use for way longer than this case as well

Almost certainly. More conspiratorially, it’s related to the discussions around government investment in OpenAI. But I think it’s punishment beatings.

Some Thoughts in a Conversational Style

  1. “It’s actually quite easy to block or pause AI development because the compute required (as seen in NVIDIA/TSMC/memory manufacturers/etc’ share prices) is so big that you can’t hide training a major frontier model”.

  2. “So what?”

  3. “This is actually bullish for humanity because it means some guy in a lab probably can’t build an AI that can destroy the human race without anyone noticing”

  4. “But wait, Deepseek and other models have shown that within just a few months of a frontier model’s release, vastly cheaper models can be trained to show similar performance. And even if inference is blocked, local models (which will always leak eventually even if they’re trained with a lot of compute) are probably no more than a year or two behind frontier models. So at best this is holding back the tide by what, months?”

  5. “Yeah, and in the current geopolitical situation, if US businesses complain that Chinese firms have access to more powerful models capable of more efficient and effective work than American businesses, even though America has better frontier labs, because those labs’ models are being blocked from public use by the US government, that will be quickly reversed”.

Arrival: A short review (Spoilers)

Villeneuve is a unique director. His movies use bizarre settings or scenarios as a backdrop to tell intensely human and personal dramas.

In Bladerunner 2049 he evolves the 1982 movie's dystopian frame into its full aesthetic. Skyscraper mausoleums, home to living creatures with dead souls and dying creatures with living souls. The ruins of Vegas. A glimpse, briefly, into a potential uprising. All in service of a story where a nobody ensures that a somebody has final closure.

In Enemy, it is not clear, even by the end, whether the story takes place entirely inside the unreliable narrator's mind. Huge spiders roam the city, eventually invading the protagonist's very living room (or mind?).

While Villeneuve's unsettling aesthetic is at its peak in Dune I and II, I consider them two of his weaker movies. There are two characters in Herbert's Dune: the planet itself, and the directed inevitability of massed humanity. What is personal must be in service to this setting. Instead, Villeneuve's interpretation foregrounds individual agency.

Fortunately, Villeneuve has already directed his SciFi masterpiece in Arrival. The alien ships are massive ellipsoids hovering impossibly mere meters from the earth. The aliens themselves walk on tentacle appendages, grotesquely squid-like. The camera frequently takes a near-first-person view, with panicked and claustrophobic breathing emanating from all speakers (1). These moments of enclosed fear are juxtaposed against equally breathtaking cinematographic vistas. The slow panning as the helicopter approaches the alien ship with low-lying clouds roiling across the Montana prairie. A human hand reaching fingers up as the alien's tentacles stretch downward.

Amy Adams is perfectly cast. In 2016 she could pass for 30 or 45 or anywhere in between, key to the time-bending unfolding of the plot. She treats her character, Louise, much like Villeneuve treats the movie: with understated grace and moments of sublime. Louise's loneliness palpably exudes in the first third of the movie, before running an emotional gamut from fear, hope, acceptance, and finally transcendence.

The science is inaccurate (2), but Villeneuve perfectly captures the academic aesthetic.

The idea that language constrains and shapes our experience of reality is thoughtfully if subtly explored (3).

While there are nods to liberal sensibilities (when a general tells Louise she made short work of insurgent Farsi recordings, she retorts "you made short work of the insurgents"; a soldier turns rogue following a phone call with his inconsolable wife and listening to the in-universe stand-in for Alex Jones), Villeneuve rarely lets politics infect his storytelling.

This movie feels quasi-religious and transcendent (4) in its celebration of life and meaning in suffering and loss. Louise through her contact with the aliens is able to view her life outside of time, revealing memory-like sequences of her future. This future includes myriad happy moments with her daughter, but concludes with her daughter's devastating death from cancer. Arrival climaxes with Louise joyfully embracing this future despite knowing that it means the premature end of her only romantic relationship and the heartbreaking loss of her daughter. The time that she will have with her daughter is worth it all.

Last week's discussion on Down Syndrome prompted this post. How many parents who have Down syndrome children would trade those children for nothingness? How many, if they had perfect foresight, would still choose to have the child? Age begets wisdom, experience shapes us, and relationships become our great source of meaning. A couple choosing to abort their Down syndrome child are doing more than making an expedient choice. They are depriving themselves and their child of a rich tapestry of experience; one that is perhaps more challenging and painful, but also one that can and should be fulfilling. A life of short cuts is a life cut short; not in time but in meaning.

(1) Watch this on a big screen and with surround sound

(2) At one point a whiteboard displays the "top 10" most famous equations including Black Scholes...none of which would be relevant to alien first contact. It is also preposterous that we perceive time linearly solely due to our linear language.

(3) Yes, the fact that this is the "reason" behind Louise's ability to view her life outside of time is not "subtle", but this reveal is blink-and-miss-it: my guess is most viewers would simply associate her time-bending ability with prolonged exposure to the aliens.

(4) Villeneuve grew up Catholic

(2) At one point a whiteboard displays the "top 10" most famous equations including Black Scholes...none of which would be relevant to alien first contact.

There's a relationship between Black Scholes and what ergodicity economics calls the "equation of life". There are surprising relationships between seemingly unrelated fields, such as probability theory, finance, physics, and socioeconomic systems. So I don't think we can necessarily assume what extraterrestrials would find relevant.

Amy Adams is perfectly cast.

Dissagree here. Any woman more attractive than Dr. Holly Krieger is not believable as a serious intellectual.

Arrival at this point is a movie that I like more because it introduced me to the source material than for the movie in itself. Yes, the direction is good, but they way they butchered the original concept is inexcusable (thank you screenwriter Eric Heisserer).

In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time. Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will. The aliens came to earth not because "they know that some day we will help them or something" but simply as explorers. There is no big action scene where the protagonist averts a catastrophe by using her knowledge of the future.

The part about her daughter (it's a daughter in the book) underscores this. She dies not of an incurable illness but of an easily preventable rock climbing incident. Except that she can't easily prevent it because that's just how it happens, just like you can't change the past.

The movie muddles all this, probably to make the big action climax. I imagine somebody at some point figured out it would be callous for the protagonist not to warn her daughter that she's going to slip and die. Maybe they didn't even get the concept of the original story, in between the lines of coke they were doing. But it doesn't solve anything, if she can consciousness timetravel why not have a child the month before, or the one after. Why specifically pick the one born with an incurable illness? Yes they would be timetravel aborting him but no more so than all the other dozens of children they are timetravel aborting instead.

Yeah, the movie decided to take it in a different direction. Personally, I think that's because the concept behind the original novella is dumb and the movie is much better for abandoning it.

Not sure how much Ted Chiang you've read, but here's his formula:

  1. Find a moderately interesting/counterintuitive idea in philosophy or science. What if we could communicate with the other worlds postulated by (a bastardized read of) the Many Worlds Hypothesis? What if, to make a true AI, it has to start with a child-like mind and grow up in real time like a person? What if the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (Exhalation, I mean. This one's actually pretty good.) He rarely chooses something really out there, but perhaps its enough for the average reader.
  2. Figure out how to wring interpersonal drama out of this idea. What if your alternate self is more successful than you? What if your AI program is running out of money, but perverts on the internet will pay you a fortune to fuck the child-like AIs? This is rarely amazing, and often rather paint-by-numbers, but it's generally competent.
  3. There is no 3. 1 and 2 are all you get, and neither is particularly deep. Once I worked out what the concept was for one of his stories, I don't think he's ever told me anything new or interesting about it. He just hopes the idea itself and a little surface-level exploration will be enough. (And it might be, if the idea is good and you haven't encountered it before, but I've never had that experience with the stories of his I've read.)

Stories of your Life has a somewhat better human side (which is why I think its his most popular story, despite not in my opinion being anywhere close to his best) and a below average concept; it doesn't actually make sense if you think it through any more than he wants you to.

Say you learn the alien language and flip into this alternate mode of perceiving time: what exactly does this look like in your brain? Well, it can't look like anything in your brain, can it? Because brain state is part of the world state that makes those future events inevitable. If perceiving the future actually affected your brain in any way at all, then it would absolutely change the future. But if there's no difference in brain state, how can there be a difference in mental state? Dualism just isn't a serious scientific or philosophical position and it hasn't been for a century at least. Even if it were, your body still acts only on information it could gather without knowing the future. Is there a separate you who perceives time normally and makes all the decisions? What is the you that can perceive the future, then? In what sense is it actually you and not some outside observer?

But if there's no difference in brain state, how can there be a difference in mental state? Dualism just isn't a serious scientific or philosophical position and it hasn't been for a century at least

It seems obvious to me that the story is dualist. It doesn't matter that it isn't scientifically serious (imo no theory of consciousness is scientifically serious, btw)

Even if it were, your body still acts only on information it could gather without knowing the future. Is there a separate you who perceives time normally and makes all the decisions?

There are no decisions to be made, decisions don't exist in that way.

(I reread the story to make sure I was being fair. I stand by my point, but the story does execute on its (imo bad) premise well. I think over the years since I first read it I let that issue overshadow its good points -- it is an enjoyable and somewhat thoughtful work.)

It seems obvious to me that the story is dualist. It doesn't matter that it isn't scientifically serious (imo no theory of consciousness is scientifically serious, btw)

I'm a Dennett fan, but I can agree it's a hard problem; the hard problem, even. But even so, there are answers which are clearly incorrect. I'd argue all forms of dualism fall into that category, but the story puts forward a particularly nonsensical variant in which there is a soul... but it doesn't do anything. It thinks it does -- the story talks a lot about putting on a performance of what the characters would have done if they couldn't perceive the future -- but it in fact does not, because every last atom in their bodies behaves identically to how it otherwise would. The soul has no causal or explanatory role on any observation except the subjective experience of perceiving the future. Why would it work like this? Obviously such a thing would never evolve -- it can't provide any fitness benefit since it doesn't do anything. Why would god or whoever make people this way? It's not like the soul is responsible for the body's actions: those were set in stone when the universe was created, and, anyway, that would require the soul to do something, which it never does.

I'm not opposed to speculative fiction exploring dualism, but Story of Your Life gets very into the weeds on physics and the determinism it builds up to is 100% grounded in physical laws... and then it abandons that premise to shoehorn in something nonphysical -- the soul -- but it can't actually let it affect anything or it would break the whole story. And note: the variational laws don't supersede the causal laws, they are equivalent to them. There's no trick here that lets you violate causality, and the future cannot cause the past.

... Except the heptapods actually do behave differently because of the way they perceive time! They don't write their sentences one character at a time but just efficiently use each stroke for several characters. And forget that: their very form or writing induces simultaneous consciousness! They (seem to be) confused by physical principles described from a linear time perspective! They're very patient for explorers (because, it's implied, they already have the answers they'll only actually learn later.) It's mentioned that our main character only imperfectly experiences simultaneous consciousness, but that should still only affect the subjective experience (as otherwise the future would affect the past, which remains impossible). And in fact she can't drop any hints about simultaneous consciousness, has to act exactly as though her subjective experience hadn't changed at all. Why the disconnect?

There are no decisions to be made, decisions don't exist in that way.

Determinism doesn't actually render the concept of a decision meaningless, it just means that decisions are part of the causal chain that will inevitably result in the future. While it is trivially true that "You will choose to do X because X is what you will choose to do," there must still be other reasons why you will choose to do X that make no reference to the future. My point is that the entire decision-making apparatus must still exist (or causality would be violated), so you're postulating an entire second self to make this work, and the self that perceives the future is extraneous.

I'm a Dennett fan, but I can agree it's a hard problem; the hard problem, even. But even so, there are answers which are clearly incorrect. I'd argue all forms of dualism fall into that category, but the story puts forward a particularly nonsensical variant in which there is a soul... but it doesn't do anything. It thinks it does -- the story talks a lot about putting on a performance of what the characters would have done if they couldn't perceive the future -- but it in fact does not, because every last atom in their bodies behaves identically to how it otherwise would. The soul has no causal or explanatory role on any observation except the subjective experience of perceiving the future. Why would it work like this? Obviously such a thing would never evolve -- it can't provide any fitness benefit since it doesn't do anything. Why would god or whoever make people this way? It's not like the soul is responsible for the body's actions: those were set in stone when the universe was created, and, anyway, that would require the soul to do something, which it never does.

Dualism is very sneaky. Like you said, it makes very little logical sense; it almost certainly doesn't describe anything real. But it's so hard to get over our instinctive belief in it. It can show up in many ways, some of them quite subtle.

My personal bugbear is the Doomsday Argument, which many rationalists believe, including Scott. But for a statistical argument like this one to work, there has to be some actual selection process, not metaphorical, not a clever turn of phrase, but a really truly actually real random lottery. And such a process requires the absurd form of dualism that you've mentioned. Your soul has to be presented with the deterministic universe as a whole, with all the humans that will ever live already set in stone, and will then "find itself" (the obscuring language Wikipedia uses) in one of the humans. And which one you inhabit can't have a physical effect on anything, because otherwise how could future humans have been available as a choice?

In an experiment where you create a simulated universe in your basement, flip a coin to determine whether it will simulate 2 entities or 20, and then ask entity #2 what it thinks the coin flip was, of course it should say 50/50. Repeating the experiment will show it's miscalibrated if it says anything else. Now, if duality holds, then perhaps some soul came along and is "surprised" to be inhabiting entity #2 in a universe that could have up to 20, and maybe that soul is subjectively correct to believe in the Doomsday Argument. But like the main character of Story of Your Life, that realization can't be shared with anyone else. When you ask the entity what it thinks, it can't give a different response based on whether this time it's souled or a p-zombie. So it has to give the averaged answer: 50/50.

Despite the resultant absurdity, the idea of "finding yourself" as a particular human - that your awareness is separable from the body you inhabit - still survives in a Wikipedia article. And in Scott's writings. It's embarrassing that rationalism isn't enough to conquer this trope.

In a perfectly simulated universe, all decisions are predictable, including any decisions you make after learning the future and learning that you learned the future etc, recursively, forever, blah blah blah. This is not a narratively or philosophically interesting concept. Quantum mechanics aside, ultimate determinism and therefore hypothetical foresight given total information and a fully comprehensive universe model has been the default assumption among most smart people for a long time. Chiang does nothing in the story to say anything interesting about this at all.

What if the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (Exhalation, I mean. This one's actually pretty good.)

Exhalation is pretty good, but the point of the story is not "what if the Second Law of Thermodynamics," but rather to describe how a mind could be explicitly instantiated within a machine, and also remain completely inaccessible to technological comprehension/deconstruction.

Eh, is it really more inaccessible than a program running on ram without a disk installed? If ram loses power, whatever it stores is gone, just like their brains. And if ram were integrated into a system not designed with non-volatile storage or external access in mind, I think it would be comparably difficult to get the running program out. Not impossible, but it's not impossible here, either: our protagonist was actually able to watch his bits flip and trace the path the air took through his brain. I don't think you'd get very far without a lot of computer assistance, but the same tech was doubtless necessary to build their brains in the first place.

Anyway, I don't think this is what Exhalation thinks its own point is: it spends about ten times as long explaining entropy.

I too dabble in necromancy.

Anyway, I don't think this is what Exhalation thinks its own point is: it spends about ten times as long explaining entropy.

That is not my recollection at all. Everything in the story converges on the scientist's exploration of his own brain, and that exploration terminates at the idea of a manufactured mechanical system that is nonetheless entirely intractable from within a given material frame.

Eh, is it really more inaccessible than a program running on ram without a disk installed? If ram loses power, whatever it stores is gone, just like their brains.

But the point isn't just that a destroyed brain is lost, but rather that an intact brain is nonetheless intractable. The scientist figures that his mind is a machine, and thus that he should be able to interact with it in machine-like ways; gears can be assembled, valves can be opened and closed. But in fact his mind is not the machine, it is the air moving through the machine, and the exponential complexity is intractable. RAM/disks and microscopic air currents are both intuition pumps, but the latter leads in a very different direction than the former.

Entropy as a theme circles back to the same idea: our control over ourselves and the world around us is limited, and almost certainly always will be, in ways that we are very bad at recognizing for reasons similar to those related in the story. This is, in my view, a really good message to communicate.

In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time.

The original work is very interesting although I’m not sure it’s very good. It raises some interesting philosophical questions. The story is probably the best possible story you could write about a form of pseudo-precognition in hindsight that makes immediate, near-term sense to a reader.

But its deliberate ambiguities exist more to paper over the questions than to answer them. Gwern presents the most plausible explanation which is that nothing physically / cosmologically interesting is going on, the protagonist is basically just ‘reflecting’ on her life, in the standard past tense, in a kind of holistic way enabled by the alien language. But that also makes the story a lot less interesting.

Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will.

I don’t think it even does this. I think it just lets you view your life, in hindsight, in a way that projects memories of the future you actually experienced (in normal linear time, you’re old now) onto your younger self.

I'm not even sure there is any difference between those explanations but still:

Was it actually possible to know the future? Not simply to guess at it; was it possible to know what was going to happen, with absolute certainty and in specific detail? Gary once told me that the fundamental laws of physics were time-symmetric, that there was no physical difference between past and future. Given that, some might say, “yes, theoretically.” But speaking more concretely, most would answer “no,” because of free will.

I liked to imagine the objection as a Borgesian fabulation: consider a person standing before the Book of Ages, the chronicle that records every event, past and future (...) The Book of Ages cannot be wrong; this scenario is based on the premise that a person is given knowledge of the actual future, not of some possible future. (...) The result is a contradiction: the Book of Ages must be right, by definition; yet no matter what the Book says she’ll do, she can choose to do otherwise. How can these two facts be reconciled?

They can’t be, was the common answer. (...) The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

(...)

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

Even though I’m proficient with Heptapod B, I know I don’t experience reality the way a heptapod does. My mind was cast in the mold of human, sequential languages, and no amount of immersion in an alien language can completely reshape it. My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptapod.

Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn’t arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death.

I could not disagree more, I love this change from the source material.

In order to have that version work everything after her perception gets rewired functionally makes her a zombie, unable to perform basic actions like suggesting her daughter not go rock climbing today, because she has seen the future and is unable to change it. She is functionally a prisoner inside her own life as she is forced to read from a script. Her take away is to relish the good times and try to remember every detail of them since she can relive those moments ad nauseum, which is a lovely take away from what is essentially a nonsensical horror story ending.

In the movie she sees potential future but retains some agency. Which the science works less well than in the book, it avoids the question of what exactly is forcing her to act out the script and instead focuses on the question of if she believes the good times with her husband and daughter are worth the bad. This is a more beautiful and meaningful ending IMHO, it gives her suffering meaning because she went into it with both eyes open in order to grab onto the good that comes with it instead of her being locked in her head screaming that she wants to pick up the phone and tell her daughter to do anything else today OTHER than rock climb but being unable to do so because she is locked out of agency by 4th dimensional vision.

That worked fine for Doctor Manhattan because part of his story was that the 4th dimensional vision and associated super powers altered him so much he was no longer meaningfully human, and I really liked those parts of Watchmen. But they explained it better and worked with it better.

I got the Ted Chiang Short story collection this story is from, and frankly I found The Story of Your Life (the one Arrival is based on) to be the best one despite my many problems with it. I was pretty unimpressed by Chiang tbh.

Dr. Manhattan was a Straw Vulcan who thought that there was no difference between a live body and a dead body because they have the same number of particles, yet liked to do scientific experiments on things that had the same number of particles before and after the experiment.

Thanks for the writeup. This is probably my favorite movie of all time, or at least top 3. Incredible story, incredibly acted and directed and scripted. Love it so much.

They are depriving themselves and their child of a rich tapestry of experience; one that is perhaps more challenging and painful, but also one that can and should be fulfilling. A life of short cuts is a life cut short; not in time but in meaning.

The implication seems to be that you should have children with as many different neurological disorders as possible rather than boring neurotypicals. Is that really your position?

No, that is not my position. Each child has their own joys and challenges. Some are more difficult than others. One of my children is "mildly" autistic and it is a very different and more challenging relationship than with my others. But we have also shared unique and memorable experiences. A couple months ago she made a mistake in a piano recital and looked at the audience with a one of the most genuine sheepish expressions I've ever seen and said "sorry". The audience chuckled in appreciative surprise. She then started over and played the piece perfectly. When we got back home she was inconsolable because she had "made a mistake and everyone had laughed at her".

We shouldn't seek out "odd" children (unless feeling called to adopt difficult children), but we should accept what life throws at us and find the joy in that life.

We shouldn't seek out "odd" children

In that case, I hardly see why someone should have a down syndrome child instead of a normal one.

Acceptance of a situation is different from intentionally creating (or uncreating) the situation.

Taken to an extreme, if I there had been some screen that showed my autistic child would have been autistic I could have aborted her and immediately had a (higher shot at a) "normal" child. But just typing that sentence makes my blood boil.

I don't like that she is disabled, but I wouldn't trade her or our experiences for anything.

Not OP but that doesn't seem to follow in the slightest, no. The child is (obviously) denied a rich tapestry of experience and so is the parent. This doesn't imply that on the parent's side it's worthwhile to maximize for diversity of weird and unpleasant challenges. Only that if they do get a child with those differences, they're missing out on something by not experiencing the child and the relationship they'd have had with him or her.

As an inveterate baby-maker (on the male side) myself, my concern isn't for the burden on my wife and I. We'd rise to it well, I think. My concern is for the dampening effect it might have on the lives of my other children. I don't see murder as a reasonable solution, though; if I did, I can think of a lot of other people whose deaths would probably also improve my children's lives.

I thought of this. I knew multiple people growing up that had special needs siblings that made their own childhoods suck. Or they might not even have those other siblings if the drain on time, finances, and attention is too great. I read once, years ago, that women who have abortions go on to have more children than women who don't, with the idea being that it is a lot harder to get your 2.5 child happy ending marriage and picket fence once you are a single mom. I don't know if that fact is still true of millenials like it was for gen-z, but I could very well imagine that this trade off is actually 1 down syndrome child vs 2-3 without.

Does a Down syndrome child entail a richer tapestry of experiences for the parent than a neurotypical child? That's the tradeoff being made here.

This seems to assume that having a Down syndrome child precludes having another child afterward, which strikes me as odd.

A Down syndrome child is such a massive sink of resources that it DOES (if not absolutely preclude) make it much more difficult to have another child afterwards.

As for the "rich tapestry"... an afternoon being subject to torture is a richer tapestry of experience than taking a nap, but all things considered, I'd take the nap every time.

Waiting for a promotion opportunity can feel like torture too. How much easier might life be if your boss unfortunately, unexpectedly passed away when you're the obvious candidate to replace him? Or if that competitor who's making business hard just vanished one day, not to be heard from again? It'd probably be really good for your kids, too.

Yes, and as long as we're talking about enriching experiences, those who engage in corporate scheming and assassination are, in fact, living richer lives than those who just drudge on waiting until natural aging frees up a spot for them.

I can live a perfectly functional life even if I don’t get that promotion. The same is not true when it comes to raising a child with special needs.

Siblings of a Down syndrome child will also be affected. They receive less parental attention, are forced to grow up faster than their peers, and carry heavier emotional burdens for years. The costs are not trivial.

The analogy reads like backwards reasoning. You believe all abortion is murder, so you retroactively justify keeping the downs baby despite the trade-offs for the child and the rest of the family.

To me, the great downside of a child with down's syndrome is the worry that no one will take care of them if the parents die first. That they will end their life in misery, pain, neglect, and crying for their parents. Normal siblings can help guard against that scenario, but that's passing a heavy responsibility to someone else without their adult consent.

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Surely any business would welcome their competitor randomly exiting the market. This seems like an unambiguously great piece of luck for a business.

If you're not going to get a promotion unless you murder your boss, you are better off changing companies. Obviously there's no equivalent of that in the analogy... so you're not getting that promotion (or having that next child)

I don't find early-term abortion tantamount to murder, so the analogy really doesn't convince me.

If you want to argue that's it's immoral to abort a down syndrome baby, go ahead - but what you're doing is arguing that the parents are missing out, in fact impoverishing themselves, by not having a disabled child.

I'm not. I'm arguing that they're missing out, in fact impoverishing themselves, by not having and loving every child God gives them.

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It obviously does, on the margin, since the options are:

  • First trimester abortion, try again after
  • Carry the baby to term, then recover from pregnancy and birth (and dealing with a young child with disabilities), then try again

Humans have a limited fertility window and most people are trying to hit some target number of kids. However, even if you are just trying to maximize the number of kids you have until you hit menopause, you're trading off a neurotypical kid for a down syndrome kid. Exception would be situations like "you're over 40 and you probably can't get pregnant again".

Not only have we shifted the goal posts to what I agree is a highly non-central situation at best, but even people who happen to be in that situation can't, in practice, know whether they are.

Seems just as plausible to me that if they're at the end of their child-bearing years they might abort what would have been their last (and in some cases only) child and not be able to conceive again.

Bird in the hand and all that.

Not only have we shifted the goal posts to what I agree is a highly non-central situation at best, but even people who happen to be in that situation can't, in practice, know whether they are.

Indeed. So let's focus on the modal case where people are overwhelmingly likely to conceive again after aborting a down syndrome baby.

Seems just as plausible to me that if they're at the end of their child-bearing years they might abort what would have been their last (and in some cases only) child and not be able to conceive again.

This is my point, that outside the cases of highly geriatric pregnancies we're talking about trading off a down syndrome child for a neurotypical child.

We could also trade off dumb and ugly and sad children for better ones, I guess. It's not a slope I'd care to find myself on and I have zero faith in others to not keep sliding down it.

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Arrival is probably a Top 5 movie all time for me.

Aborting your child after finding out it has down syndrome is understandable in a material world, which is what most of our society lives in. Pain and suffering in a material world is a variable that must be minimized or eliminated. We all get that. In the spiritual world, pain and suffering often have meaning, and people who see that tend to understand something that a life of comfort sometimes cannot.

in a material world, which is what most of our society lives in...

That is one of the core points of disagreement is it not?

You say pain and suffering are variables that must be minimized or eliminated, and I say that this attitude is dysgenic and fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing.

Neuroticism, extremely short time-preferences, hyper-feminization, lack of emotional regulation, pre-occupation with one's own validation/gratification. These are not healthy qualities to have in a partner but they are endemic (and often celebrated) within the liberal striver class because they are the qualities celebrated and promoted by the philosophies of "Emancipation", "Self Actualization", Etc...

You say pain and suffering are variables that must be minimized or eliminated, and I say that this attitude is dysgenic and fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing.

... But in this case, it means having healthy children and not children with crippling genetic disabilities. There isn't a more central case of eugenics than aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome -- the word literally means 'good genes.' I don't disagree that extreme saftey-ism and aversion to struggle and pain can ironically be very unhealthy, but reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. Castrating oneself, while doubtless an impressive display of grit and emotional regulation, does not make a man a good father; it ensures he will never be a father of any sort. Good things are good, as you say, and healthy children are good and unhealthy children are less good.

The downstream effects are dysgenic and anti-human, but my comment leans more toward those effects seeming to be symptoms of a deeper immaterial or spiritual problem. I see the materialist culture as having no strong category for meaningful suffering. That is where belief in the immaterial or spiritual tends to matter at scale. It does not make suffering pleasant, and it does not require one to pretend that pain is not real or that it is good in all cases. But it does give people a reason not to treat suffering as the ultimate evil to be avoided at all costs.

I think 'human flourishing' is a dodge; a nice-sounding but ultimately empty referent. Sure, just wave vaguely in a direction that most people agree has appealing vibes. But is that really a basis on which to build any sort of worthwhile moral system or institute policy?

If you think "human flourishing" is "a dodge" why not just embrace wire-heading and pump the entire population full of opioids?

How many parents who have Down syndrome children would trade those children for nothingness?

This is a false dichotomy, most who would abort a downs child would then go on to have a normal child. Not nothing. Everything in life has an opportunity cost.

Arrival was good, but it mostly missed the point of the short story, in that it shouldn't have included time travel.

https://gwern.net/story-of-your-life


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