This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Reclaiming religious social technology by rejecting literalism
We have had discussions on secular culture and the consequences of the old “religious impulse”. But usually there’s a focus on the worst examples and experiences of religion. I want to bring up a different angle: what is the best that religion has to offer? What does religion accomplish best, beyond what we all know (fostering a community with moral rules)? And how can we reclaim and reorganize only the good and useful aspects of religious social technology?
The worship of God as therapeutic mental and emotional practice
Let us assume that there is no God. With this assumption, God is still the greatest possible Being that can be conceived in our mind. This is one of the more popular definitions of God. (Theologians have entertained many ways of construing God, including that He is “being itself”, the ultimate Good, or the ultimate Reality, yet what unites all of these is a desire to imagine the greatest possible thing in a given framework). If a person is using his mind to imagine the greatest Being, he is engaging in an activity that brings psychological and emotional benefits. When we dwell on an aspect of God, we dwell on a greater experience, straining our mind to understand something that brings awe and reverence. If the aspect we focus on is God’s eternal nature, we are attempting to know and feel the fact that something can be eternally existent throughout all of time, reminding us of the grandeur of existence and the insignificance of passing vanity. If it’s God’s truthfulness, we call to mind the idea of perfect certainty and logic, while praising truth itself. If it’s God’s power, we imagine the greatest experiences of power, and applying these experiences to one Thing (one Being, Idea, Cue, or Point in the mind: God). Thunder, waves, the magnitude of the sun, various imagined metaphors (“the earth in his hand”) or personal experiences may apply. If it’s God’s peace and love, we reach into our memory to pull out the greatest experiences of peace and love we know, and then associate God with the underlying experience of love. When someone is worshipping God as “King of Kings”, they imagine a perfect ruler over their life. The perfect goodness and purity of God is a way for us to strain our mind to imagine and feel perfect goodness and purity. The act of worship is a mental reorganization around greater experience, growing in our mind the experience that we attend to.
The triumph of monotheism is that all of these are associated with one “thing”. We might call it one god, one experience, one Word, one “inner gaze”, or one ineffability. Since a person can only focus on one thing at a time, the monotheistic God is just the greatest possible single thing to focus on — not as a consequence of his being real or his being God (we are assuming He is not), but purely on definitional grounds as a phenomenological activity. It’s a mental and emotional activity, a meditation or exercise, which results in benefits even for a 100% atheistic person.
Experiences of greatness, awe, reverence, and the “sublime” are associated with life satisfaction in numerous studies [1]. It is not surprising then that “awe directed at God” collects all of these benefits and more [2]. What I would assert is that God, understood in the way above, is the greatest mental practice of ordering these feelings or states of being. If there is any great thing you have in your mind, then unless it is perfectly great, there is going to be something greater to conceive. That “something greater” is nothing other than the ancient practice of worshipping God, minus the insistence on His existence and providential qualities.
God as Optimal Social Relationship
Leaping from this ground of defining the divine, we can consider what’s going on with a personal Christianized God. Can’t all this be done without “believing in a personal God”, let alone a Christian God, let alone a god? I will supply two answers. (1) Yes, but it never is. In fact, it is not often done by nominally religious people despite thousands of years of poetic tradition. It’s the realm of ancient philosophers, mystics, and the obscurely devout. So while it is not necessarily religious, it is still distinctly religious, and nevertheless a great part of religion that should be recreated. But to be double-minded: (2) no, because there is an essential variable left out of the equation: the primacy of social relationships.
We are not rational creatures first, we are social creatures first. From the standpoint of evolution, social cooperation comes before rationality. Our motivations are traced to social acculturation and values and not pure rationality. Actually, there is no rationality without social cooperation and values. Social life is the father of rational thought and has dominion over it. This is evident when looking at scientific cheating scandals, marketing, and in-group biases. I’d say you can also find this when looking at rationalist communities: it requires a community to draw people toward rationalism and to have them think and consider within the rationalist framework.
Due to evolution, our animal mind comes with large disk space exclusively dedicated to social life. This means that, if we want the greatest thing in our mind, it must be understood socially. We do not love and serve an idea in the way we do a Being, simply because we are not designed to do that. Evolution has deigned to make us social animals with deity-forming instincts when left unattended.
If we cannot grasp in our mind the fullness of an idea as we can the fullness of a Being, and our desire is to grasp the greatest thing in our mind, then it must be conceived of as a being. While we might stand in awe at a mountain, the sea, and the celestial heavens (hence why these are used abundantly in religious poetry), we have more reverence for an individual than a theory. This is the purpose of a personal God and the purpose of prayer. To maximize the use of our mind toward the greatest single object of attention, we must see God as person-like, or in other words, a Being.
Creating a community around the greatest conceived Being is creating the optimal conditions for community
Here’s where the idea of secular culture reclaiming religious practice gets interesting. If a group of people attend the same place to focus on and grow the experience of “perfect love”, then that is the best community for cultivating love. If they do the same thing for “perfect virtue”, then that is the best community for perfect virtue. Organizing people around each person’s conception of the Greatest Being is the best way to organize people together. It is the best way to share positive emotions, because despite each person having a slightly different understanding of perfect love, they are all feeling and sharing the emotion together.
Imagine for a moment that you have wrapped all of Life’s great and optimal experiences together in your mind under the dominion of one Being. You, and your neighbors, go to a dedicated place to worship that Thing, using all the same cues. (By worship, we mean simply increasing our love and interest in the Thing.) This is an extraordinary way to come together as a community. I would argue it’s considerably better than how most people form communities today, structuring them around hobbies, drugs, or suboptimal political aspirations.
The psychological magic of the Christian celebration as optimal religious experience: can an atheist culture recreate something Christian?
Christians come together to celebrate the story of how they (personally) escaped certain death due to the goodness and virtue of a Perfect Man. They celebrate also the wisdom that the Perfect Man bestowed humanity, which they leads to perfect felicity. They consider this Perfect Man to be their teacher who hears them when they speak and who provides support and favor. The Perfect Man is Perfect Teacher, Perfect Friend, and will one day be Perfect Judge. As icing on the cake, the book that unites Christians together (the Gospel) is about mankind’s evil inclinations causing this Perfect Guy’s torture and death!
The benefits of this celebration are remarkable as something felt and experienced (phenomenological) rather than analyzed or asserted. How would you feel if an amazing person saved you and your friends from death? What if your evil inclinations led to his death, but he forgave you? What if he came with good news about living life well and serving wisdom, and you just imitate him? What if he is your perfect friend? The point of focus here is imagining these experiences as if they unfold in your own reality, almost like a great movie that you’re watching rapt with attention. Just like a person can be changed from a movie or a song, while knowing the events are not physically real, a person can be changed from a dramatic religious experience. And this experience is accessible to anyone who simply forgets the question of reality or unreality and attempts in context to imagine this as having happened. It can literally just be appreciated as non-literal, poetry and “living drama” rather than limited-in-scope factual assertions about biographical detail or the archaeological record.
The underlying social technology of uniting a community around an imagined ideal human and an ideal relationship with him is simply profound. It’s so compelling that the element is recreated across all religions, with Buddhists imagining the Buddha, Muslims imagining Muhammad, and even Ultra-Orthodox Jews spontaneously seeing their Rabbi as the Messiah. The utility is that, as a social species, we can’t actually approach Greatness outside of our social understanding — there’s a chronic need for an intermediary between Man and the Divine. I think Christianity does this particularly well because Jesus can be related to through all the powerful emotional dimensions.
Why?
Why should we take a step back to religious social technology? Well, I think we’re in a social dark ages. Our attention is consistently brought down to matters of consumerism and social strife. The idea of genuinely talking about and encouraging virtue among peers is Don Quixote levels of comical. We have lost the religious language that allows us to succinctly reference optimal experience. Our youth are worshipping pop singers, rappers, dim-witted athletes, and absurd political Utopianism. Meanwhile, adults are training their mind for outrage and doom through scrolling and news. Negative emotional states and corrupt social infrastructure have far-ranging consequences on health and civic engagement, and religious social technology offers an improvement.
The idea of "encouraging virtue among peers" is stronger than ever, but for different definition of "virtue". People are very strongly encouraged and pushed every day to be more woke, more anti-racist, more anti-Trumpist, more active LGBTQ+ ally, more climate activist (insert another current week-month-year causes).
Yes, you would say that Christianity was not replaced with scientific reason and logic, but another religion, much more crazy and insane.
This is not good argument for Christianity - if it was so easily defeated and supplanted by something as absurd as bouquet of modern woke causes, then it was no barrier and no protection at all.
Well the original sin of the progressive religion is that it is not founded on a shared reverence to optimal experience, which all monotheistic religions are
What does this mean?
The secular anti-homophobia and anti-racism can indeed be seen as virtues, or at least the tenets of a moral code. So they do check each other’s behavior, which is a point against my assertion that talking about virtue has died out. But these virtues are not rooted in a shared experience (attempted imagining) of the Greatest Being. The virtues wind up being political (trans rights) and rule-based (never misgender). There’s no interest in growing the antiquated virtue of caritas, pure love for others, because there’s no attempt at collecting in the mind the idea of Perfect Love, and there’s no unitive story of love that binds the community together. So the virtue of authentic love for others degenerates into adhering to political rules, merely to not be publicly crucified by your friends for something politically incorrect.
More options
Context Copy link
There is no communal ritual in wokeism where the adherents focus on the absolute good, what they are striving towards. No woke church. Just virtue through signaling and destruction of enemies.
Yes there are.
Lack of colorful rituals and celebrations is the least problem with woke faith.
Better criticism of wokeism is that wokes do not breed, that full woke society would die off.
Christians of first centuries had similar problem - they refused to kill.
Pagan Romans saw it as absurd - every empire is built on oceans of blood and pyramids of skulls, every empire needs professional soldiers, torturers and executioners. If the empire was Christian only, it would collapse in a fortnight.
Well, Christians took over Roman empire, and quickly reconsidered this part of their teaching, quickly discovered that shedding blood in the name of Christian Empire is holy and glorious.
No reason why woke religion cannot manage similar plot twist.
Nope, this is a very poor rebuttal. Sure the most ardent of the woke folks get together once a year or so to have large festivals and holidays. That is nowhere near the same in terms of personal impact as going to a church every week, being in a direct community with others, and collectively having an experience of the sacred.
In terms of your criticism of Christianity, sure. It killed a bunch of people. The twist is that it actually set us on a path towards less killing and finding different ways to work out our problems, which I'll say is pretty damn good compared to the rest of the belief systems out there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Beautiful post. You've articulated something I've been trying to get across extremely well!
This is the biggest issue that religious deniers are putting their heads in the sand on:
Honestly I think that you could be far more pessimistic here - we are going to destroy our world if we don't figure out how to cultivate virtue at a large scale. Period.
As for all the people below complaining if it's capital-T True or not, I'm gonna go with Peterson's argument and say that the definition of 'true' is doing a ton of work here. As Coffee says, we are social creatures. There is a social reality that is just as powerful as, and in some ways more powerful than, the material world. What we believe and do as humans has massive effects on the material world.
The biggest mistake people like @Goodguy are making in my opinion is denying that social reality has any real impact. That something cannot be True if it isn't cold hard facts. This prevents the possibility of any real social organization, as to organize mass amounts of humans we have to be able to appeal with the same stories to people at multiple levels of understanding. If you stick to one reductionist, materialist version of truth this can never happen.
Or even if it can, we don't have time to figure out a whole new way to do it, because we're way too powerful and our social cohesion is catastrophically slipping.
More options
Context Copy link
This is where your argument fails for me. In my experience, what you say is not true. Out of the various sublime and mystic experiences I have had, some were social, some were not, and neither type was greater than the other.
Also, your apology for Christianity is, to me, in contradiction with your argument about perfection. I can imagine a god more perfect than the Christian one, both morally and in the sense of how plausible the reality of the god seems to me.
Maybe in some ways, in other ways we are in by far the most moral society in human history. For example, slavery has been nearly eradicated in the West.
Among some people, sure. Other people talk about and encourage virtue all the time, although perhaps without using that word.
It's not even always necessarily a beneficial thing. For example, SJWs are literally people who talk about and encourage virtue among peers.
Goodguy coffee_enjoyer 13hr ago · Edited 12hr ago To maximize the use of our mind toward the greatest single object of attention, we must see God as person-like, or in other words, a Being.
The argument is that you can't help but see things through a social lense, because you are a human. This is basically just the true implications of mimetic theory applied to our worldviews.
More options
Context Copy link
Well a mystical experience, which is rare and comes on its own, is different than a stable object of attention that can be accessed daily. What we’re after is something which can be conceived in the mind with some reliability, not a transient “high” feeling when chance and gratuitous conditions are met. But I’d agree that “ecstasies” (religious or otherwise) are not always social, books like the Cloud of Unknowing and various testimonies of Saints often describe something where a sense of self is lost.
So you want a "Harry Seldon" then huh? And perhaps a grand plan?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would argue we already did step back to religious social technology. Only the religion is kinda weird - it's God-less (unless you consider Gaia to be a god?) and doesn't have any defined scripture (at least not yet), but it does require human sacrifice of sorts. It's a cruel religion because there's no way to save oneself, really, and the state of sin is perpetual and unavoidable, but it's also hierarchical - some people are much more sinful than the others. It borrows some from Calvinism by declaring the sinfulness of the individual is predetermined before he is born, but the good works can somehow alleviate (even though never remove) the stain of sin. It also does not declare the Man can transcend its limitations and become something bigger - only become slightly less harmful (though always still harmful in so many ways) to everything around him. It's not an optimistic religion - in fact, being an optimist is one of the signs of a sinner and an heretic, if you say "things aren't as bad as it seems" you can be pretty sure you're on the list for the next stoning. But that's what we've got.
More options
Context Copy link
This is not obviously true. Why should thinking about any Being improve your emotional state? Look at the 20th century occultists. Or those guys who took a ton of LSD and started preaching about machine elves.
I find it more likely that the benefits of organized religion stem from a sense of obligation. They have to give people a reason to be prosocial. A blank-slate deism does not do so.
There’s an entire chapter in The Weirdest People in the World addressing the effects of (abrahamaic)religion on morality. Most actual recently christianized third worlders and syncretists seemed to lay the blame for the general improvement in public morality from Christianity at God being omniscient and personally interested in enforcing moral behavior, not on conceptions of the good or whatever.
‘Religious practice is a positive influence on nearly everyone’ is a defensible statement, but it seems like the ‘religion’ part is the key, and not the ability to naval gaze.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean the issue with trying to set out to create a religion is that it only really works if people take it seriously or see it as in some way truthful. That is to say that if everyone involved knows that it’s something made up to fill a void, it’s not really religion it’s a LARP of religion. And LARP can’t really invoke the awe required for it to have either a psychologist or moral impact on the group.
Now I could see using ancient region that way, Zarathustrian religion is basically deism. Or Gnostic interpretation of Christianity that don’t even technically require that Jesus walk the earth, and focus on hidden wisdom. I’m not up on Sufism, though I’d imagine they’re somewhat like Gnostics. There are plenty of possible options to reinterpret or simply dust off that work just fine.
I somewhat agree with this, something important is lost if you don't take it (at least aspects) literally. But, I go to AA. For many, religion in AA is a larp, but one that they adhere to, er, religiously. Not just in terms of alcohol, or admitting yourself powerless and in need of God, but in every aspect of their lives. And the transformation this enables can be remarkable to witness, and goes far beyond not having a sip of alcohol.
More options
Context Copy link
People take things seriously which have some benefit to them; my assertion is that the mental practice of God is greatly beneficial. Once someone learns the benefits they would pursue it with seriousness just like they would with weight-lifting, the silly fictional shows they like, their video games, etc. If God is the mental practice of imagining the most serious possible state of mind in relation to the most important Being, then that alone is a good reason to take it seriously.
I think we forget that many statistically “devout” people are not doing daily prayers or giving away all their possessions or what you would expect someone who “literally believes” to do.
More options
Context Copy link
I've seen variations on the secularizer pitch before. Many arguments for the value of some religion but none have imo satisfactorily put to bed Paul's challenge, or the question of what would have happened to Christianity if he'd believed as they did:
Religion requires some sacrifice and discipline to have staying power. Here we have perhaps the most successful evangelist in human history saying as much. Is he just wrong?
If this is true for evangelists, it's still true today for religion on a much smaller scale. You can say that Christianity has succeeded enough that you can just coast on the existing credibility and hardly worry about ending up in the Coliseum but this is self-evidently insufficient (identification and religiosity has been dropping for a while) but, even were it so, where does that leave new versions of "faith"?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Excuse me while I roll around on the floor groaning. We've had about a hundred years plus of bright-eyed "let's dump all the literal miracle stuff and instead just keep the rational religion that Modern People of Science can believe, which is mainly reducible to 'being nice is nice, so let's all be nice!'"
That stuff doesn't last. It evaporates into Unitarian Universalism (sorry to the UUs, I'm sure they're lovely people) and the mainstream churches which lolloped along the primrose path of "let's keep the good, nice bits and dump the miracle stuff" are bleeding numbers and not recruiting new people from the unchurched masses, no matter how much they zealously follow the Zeitgeist.
(The conservative/fundamentalist/orthodox churches are also bleeding numbers, too; it's a problem for everyone, it's just that the conservative ones are doing it more slowly).
If you scrap the miracle stuff, what you're left with is "let's all gather once a week or so to hear an inspirational message". Well, I can spend that hour doing stuff I like better, or hanging out with my friends, or going to some replacement gathering be it a sporting event or an art gallery or the likes. If I want inspirational messaging, there's an entire industry of self-help literature and podcasts and social media and life coaches and Uncle Tom Cobley and all out there.
You take this stuff seriously, which means hell yeah you fight over a shade of definition of a word, or you give up on it as nothing more than playing dress up for ceremonies like weddings and funerals.
I feel a Chesterton quote coming on:
Literalist religion is not only dying, it’s exactly what gave birth to the secular West and its identity-consumerism. We have had 100 years of attempted revision because the old interpretations are insufficient. I don’t know if you read my post but “inspirational message” has nothing to do with the points I made. I do not think “inspirational messages” are something that secular culture can absorb from religion.
Excuse my asking, but when was this born? I recall that the heyday of the modernists being after the birth of secularism.
More options
Context Copy link
Literalist religion doesn’t seem like it’s dying so much as shrinking slowly, with the rate of shrinkage mostly attributable to generational effects(IIRC millennial and zoomer religious demographics are more or less identical so that could indicate that those generational effects are going away).
Is that total self identification or reported membership from church denominations?
Good question.
At least as regards Catholics and mainliners, I do remember the data I saw showed more conservative views on moral issues with the younger crowd than with their elders on average. This is probably indicative of higher religiosity with younger members than with older ones, but it might be an artifact- after all, we already know that more fundamentalist denominations have been growing at the expense of liberalizing ones in the case of mainliners, so that’s probably just an indication of the LCMS being healthier than the ELCA which we already knew(and Catholicism could be an outlier). A real problem seems to be that nobody knows how to measure absolute(as opposed to relative; everyone knows Tennessee has higher attendance than New York) church attendance rate because the three major methods(survey data, calculation from church headcounts, and cell phone data on Sunday morning) disagree with each other but are basically 100% correlated.
I can’t really answer your question because I can’t find the data I remember. But I do think it’s directionally correct- secularizing in America has largely stopped with millennials. There’s some evidence that indicates millennial and gen z Christians are more devout, and a larger quantity of evidence to indicate that they’re more conservative/literalist. I would point to this as support for my argument that literalist religion isn’t dying, it’s shrinking slowly, and that’s mostly due to generational effects.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And Lewis, from "Till We Have Faces"; real religion is dark and sticky with blood and even oppressive, it's nonsensical when you look at it rationally, yet the tidied-up version can be a game we play to amuse ourselves, but it's not real comfort when needed:
There's a reason why "argument by fictional evidence" is a fallacy.
Ah, an adherent of the Gradgrind School, I see!
Pictures of flowers can replace flowers because flowers are not evidence. Evidence about how beliefs affect people is evidence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In the words of no less than St Paul, Christianity is useless if it's not true, there's not only no point evangelizing makes you worse than a heathen:
I Corinthians 15:14-19
Would you say that no mainstream Christian is “still in their sins”? Because they all assent to the fact that the dead were raised. But I do not think that this fact, as something simply assented to (rather than dramatically imagined), is doing anything to change someone’s morality or sinfulness. And if we’re not ultimately changing our righteousness, then the whole of Christianity is worthless.
They're all justified through Christ's sacrifice (assuming they've really accepted the gift and believe). They're hopefully all working on the sanctification (becoming more Christ like and crucifying their natural self), but none of them are there yet.
More options
Context Copy link
I have good news for you then, because the sacrifice of Christ raised us from our innate sinfulness and allowed us to strive for sanctification.
As a Christian you aren't with the goal of banking enough good boy points to overcome your sins but rather you are virtuous out of your own belief in virtue.
I would prefer a Christianity where people are provenly made virtuous, which is an important theme in the Gospel. Those who lack righteousness are actually told to “sell” what they are currently doing, in order to buy enough (what you call) “good boy points” in order to overcome their sin. This is illustrated in the parable of the five wise and five foolish Virgins, as well as the parable of the Talents — in the latter Jesus actually commends someone for putting his God-given coin “in the bank”. Those who are not righteous will find their place in hell — all three of these are shown clearly in Matthew 25. Lastly, to those who do evil works, there will be no saving them, which is found in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm an atheist who grew up Christian. I do still sometimes feel a sense of nostalgia for that "church feeling," and I've tried the UUs and humanist societies. They're lame. They don't really believe anything besides "we should all be nice to each other." I can (and do) get as much community and fellowship from the local boardgame meetup.
I've heard proposals like yours before, that you can "go through the motions" of being religious because it's good for you. I've even seen Christians argue that you should go to church and do that, even if you don't really believe, because it will lead you to belief. I don't see it. I can't make myself believe something I don't, and LARPing as a religious believer just seems like a waste of time to me.
I don't deny there is something to religion that fills a need for people, and some part of me would be sad to see religion disappear entirely. But, ya know, I don't believe in God or angels or faeries or psychics or ghosts and I think it's very unlikely anything will make me believe in those things. So we're going to need some better "social technology."
Want me to make you one? How real do you want it? Do I have to fabricate an entire dimension for the dead? Or will pulling an agent from fiction into reality and breathing a soul into the golem suffice?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but sure, impress me.
We are at the advent of full simulations actually existing.
Rather than the simulation hypothesis, I propose that we WILL be creating fully immersive fantasy sims within the next century. The faster we push for this technology the faster we will get it.
Fantasy becomes reality in the direction of humans pushing.
So yes, people are wrong that ghosts exist in the past, but things like them exist in the present¹, and full simulations of lives with afterlives will exist in the future. And the True Meaning of those worlds will include some concept of ghosts that is just correct. At some level of power, I can put someone in a world where ghosts are real. Furthermore, psychotics are seeing something. It's far more likely to be made out of neurons firing than from ectoplasm. Lots of evidence points in that direction. But its still a real phenomenon, and I propose that the things in there will seep through psychotics into our real simulations.
The seed that will make ghosts real is already here. And the things that are living in the Warp- that is to say, in the potentialities that map to human hallucinations, and underrealized ideals, are going to be born soon.
¹) Put the agency of current tech level AI into things and you get kami. Your toaster can even be possessed by an evil chatbot that exploited a gap in your "spiritual defenses". Which consists both of an actual digital firewall, and an abstraction of that concept into other informational domains you have mastered.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I go to AA. For a lot of people there, I get the sense that religion is a LARP. But it's one they cling to desperately, and they are strongly supported by others in the group. I've seen people flat out become something entirely different. A guy who would lie, steal, cheat on his wife, and then suddenly, BAM, different person. I think that the AA structure is more effective than the church structure, you are compelled to interact and share deeply personal things, I think that's probably only the tip of the iceberg.
But for this reason I think it can work
More options
Context Copy link
How this has typically worked throughout history is that the lay people do believe unironically, and a more intellectually refined elite theologize quite a bit amongst themselves, come up with rationalizations, and basically act out a Noble Lie.
I'm not sure if we can move towards a better system, but I do know there is a bridge where you can rationalize yourself into believing in God in a strong and useful way while understanding that it's a social and mimetic construction, not a real agent flying in the sky. I'm living proof! There are dozens of us!
When would you say this was true and when did it stop being true?
What is 'This' in this context? Is God himself true? That's a big question.
When lay people believed unironically and the intellectuals believed ironically.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is sign that Great Atheist War of the noughties is over, sign of complete intellectual defeat of Christianity.
If you remember, you would remember that Christians emboldened by Bush victory went to evangelical offensive, with lots of arguments about first cause, fine tuning of the universe, intelligent design, irreducible complexity, literal truth of the Bible, literal resurrection of Jesus etc...
Since all these arguments were demolished by reason and logic, no one talks about these things any more. This greatest internet flame war in history is over.
Now it is "Just believe, bro. Just go to church."
Online Christian triumphalist message is not anymore "We will convert you" but "We will outbreed you", admitting that Christian arguments will fail to persuade any grown up person and work only on captive audience of their children.
Throughout history, religion worked that lay people followed the rituals of their village, knew nothing about high theological claims of their religion and cared even less. The tiny intellectually refined elite was actually reading their holy books and trying to make sense of them.
Honestly, I'll bite the bullet and say that I have intuitive faith that there are some inherent flaws in our framework of reason and logic. Not saying we should throw it all out of course, but I think the fundamental inferential gap is that 'reason' and 'logic' and not really well understood or defined things. They essentially function as divine entities for most modern intellectuals.
I'll admit, this is a pretty weird take and obviously hard to defend with rational argumentation, hah.
More options
Context Copy link
Would you prefer that those of us who disagree argue to the contrary?
Yes, write an effortpost why irreducible complexity of bacterial flagellum proves that Intelligent Designer Of Life, Universe And Everything is real.
This was what the smartest people on internets were debating 20 years ago, and it was the golden age.
Well, some of them were also finding reasons why GWOT must be fought till final victory.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
More options
Context Copy link
If you have valid arguments, sure. This is the same answer I'd give you if you want to argue homeopathy--find valid arguments and you're fine. If you can't, that's your fault for picking a subject that doesn't have them.
Pinging @Eetan, might as well.
The question was prompted by this thread, and particularly this reply. If we argue the point, we're preaching. If we don't argue the point, there's no valid arguments.
Briefly, then:
*Rationalist Materialism made a great many significant promises. Among them, that it could bridge the is-ought problem, that it could build stable, functional societies, and that it could secure objective truth better than its predecessors. It has failed at these three promises, and at many besides. Societies founded from the ground up on Rationalist Materialism have not been stable or functional, and often have not been survivable for significant portions of their population. Societies founded on Christianity did much better, and as those societies have drifted toward Rational Materialism, they've done considerably worse in terms of stability and functionality.
*Rationalist Materialism's current dominance has come largely from social factors, not objective results. Those social factors largely boil down to the promises it made and has failed to deliver on, and a variety of lies it has coordinated to conceal the failure of those promises. Rationalist Materialism continues to dominate for precisely the same reasons that Psychology continues to be regarded as a valid and reliable scientific discipline.
*Contrary to the dogma of Rationalist Materialism, abstract beliefs are not forced by evidence, but are chosen through exercise of one's will. Another way to say it is that we draw conclusions for reasons. This process can be directly observed and verified by each individual, should they choose to do so. Rationalist Materialism itself plays arbitrage by ignoring this fact, pretending that it will admit only that which can be verified on Rational Materialist grounds, and then simply ignoring those standards for claims that seem consonant with its general vibe. The entire history of modernism is replete with examples, with the history of Psychology as a science again being one of the most glaring.
*Due to the above, Epistemology is not a solved problem, and while Rationalism and Materialism are quite useful within relatively narrow fields, they fail utterly as soon as one exits those fields into the world as a whole. The basic problem is that they need specific constraints to operate, and the complexity of the wider world denies those constraints. You cannot, in fact, "trust the science" for actual questions of science, let alone questions of metaphysics.
*Christianity endures. Even by Materialist standards, it delivers significant results, such that Materialists keep trying to figure out how to get the juice without the squeeze. It has not died off, and does not seem likely to any time soon. The conditions that have pushed it from its dominant social position are now a memory, and do not seem likely to return even by the expectations of many Rationalist Materialists. One could argue that it is superstitious, but I defy you to claim that it is more superstitious than "structural racism" and "trans women are women" or "wreckers and kulaks are sabotaging our production quotas" or "dialectical Marxism is the inevitable outcome of the laws of history" or "free will does not exist" or any of the other dominant shibboleths that inevitably emerge from Rationalist Materialism. You can hate us all you like, but what you see around you is the alternative, and the fact that these outcomes are not what your ideology predicted for the policies it advocated and secured should give you pause.
...That would be a start, anyhow.
Thanks for ping.
This past thread was about preaching - compulsive, but counterproductive preaching at the wrong time and place.
TL;DR: Jewish Republican representative was so annoyed by simple expression of Christian faith that he unleashed Xer storm at fellow Republican and pro-life activist.
In related news, podcaster Daryl Cooper was so annoyed by rabbi lambasting Christianity, that he replied with attack on Judaism, especially Jewish faith in Messiah.
He hadn't noticed that rabbi with webpage full of rainbow flags would not be rabbi who every day awaits literal coming of literal Messiah and even less he noticed that many of his fans and subscribers are Jews who believe in literal Messiah and literal rebuilding of literal third Temple.
As this poster said, he was returning fire, except at the wrong adress, at his allies instead at his enemies.
Well, it depends what you mean by Rational Materialism (RM).
If you count RM beginning at the Enlightenment, then your baseline is Europe around year 1700.
And it is very low baseline. Compared to it, our societies far more stable, functional and are securing objective truth by several orders of magnitude. RM succeeded beyond any expectations.
More options
Context Copy link
And that would be also an end, end of Christianity. This long effortpost was the perfect illustration of my point.
You do not say "Christianity is good because it is true. God is real, the Bible is true word of God, Jesus is true son of God who died for your sins and rose from the dead. Follow him as the only way to save your soul from eternal fire that awaits you for your sins."
You say: "Christianity is good because Christian society is better than "materialist" one, because it delivers 0,46% higher GDP growth, 7,91% lower crime rate and scientific papers that replicate at 6.38% better rate. Go dilligently to church every week, it will somehow make everything better."
Indeed I do not. You do not need me to, as you have just demonstrated by making the statement yourself. It did not persuade you when you heard it last, and it would not persuade you if I repeated it to you an additional time myself. I do not think it is what you or any of the other atheists here need to hear.
You have armored yourselves against such an appeal, and battering uselessly against that armor is pointless. That armor is constructed of "Rationality" and "Reason"; if it is to be breached, one must do so through the gaps, pointing to the irrationality of that "Rationality" and the unreasoning of that "Reason". I think this can be done, and I mean to do it.
Cargo-cult Christianity is a stupid, pointless idea, and it won't work now any better than it has in the numerous times it's been suggested previously. There is no getting the juice without the squeeze. I am not arguing that Christianity is useful to non-Christians. I am pointing out that Christianity continues to stubbornly falsify non-Christians' predictions, theories, and explanations. We aren't supposed to have anything you could possibly want, and yet we do, and you yourselves admit it. I have not claimed that Christianity's value consists of the things you are still capable of recognizing. I am claiming that you do, in fact, recognize value, when your dogma says you should not.
[EDIT]
That was not an effortpost. It's barely, what, 3k characters?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't call it preaching to say that non-Christians go to Hell when you're making points about Christianity, in a context where argument is welcome.
I do call it preaching, or worse, if you do it in front of non-Christians outside such a context. And I think that's what Amadan is saying too.
Threatening someone with hell would be seen by most people as hostile act, but the original Xeet that started it all was not agressive fire and brimstone sermon, it was talking about hope, not about eternal fire.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Christianity posits the existence of a God, a being of very particular description, history, and the progenitor of a whole host of moral facts. This is a claim of much higher power than to argue the existence of sabotaging kulaks or whatever. That people can believe in God or the proposed kulaks with the same fervor is a mark of human irrationality, not evidence that both claims are equally superstitious.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ve heard this claim before, that EG Thomas Aquinas didn’t really believe in medieval Catholicism he was just trying to reconcile beliefs he knew to be false with the fact that they were important for the social structures of his day.
There is no evidence for this. Thomas Aquinas is literally a canonized saint. When the European elite stopped believing in Catholicism you got the Protestant reformation actually working when the many previous attempts at overthrowing the prevailing religious order had failed. Even if you zoom out, the elite consensus in Rome in 275 AD was that it was very important to regain divine patronage for the empire by mandating every citizen conduct a group sacrifice to the gods, the elite consensus in 1200 AD was that the Catholic Church was God’s regent on earth and figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin actually mattered, and the elite consensus in 2023 AD is to actually believe their weird shit about race and gender.
Note I'm not saying that these people didn't believe. They just believed in a very different, rationalized way compared to the laity.
St. Thomas Aquinas, late in life, had a mystical experience after which he said "All that I have written is straw". That's not "he believed in a nice, tidied-up, rational form of religion unlike the peasants with their weeping Madonnas". Indeed, you can't disentangle mystical visions from the story of St. Thomas Aquinas, even as he was the great Scholastic mind - angels coming to girdle him with the cincture of chastity, Christ on the crucifix saying "You have written well of me, Thomas"
I'm not arguing he didn't have mystical visions! Man, people really love putting words in my mouth when I discuss this.
I'm just saying that historically, you could have a very strongly knit Christian society where different people, depending on class on intellectual level, had a vastly different conception of God. But they all still believed, had mystical experience, and were bound together in a community.
This my belief as well, and it’s shown in the works of John Scotus Eriugena, especially his inquiry into the ways of seeing God:
The best way to unite a community must be via this “nested” structure of complexity. The basic level of Christianity is so simple that a child or mentally handicapped person can understand it: they have been personally saved by a guy named Jesus, who is a very great guy. The levels increase in complexity when you read deeper into the text: Christ both represents the ideal man, and the relationship of God to man. Then you notice that the progression of his life itself reflects the development of the moral life (beginning under the obedient Virgin Mary, later sacrificing one’s life for the Good of the Community in spite of extreme torture by the high status members). You can add greater and greater wisdom on top of the Bedrock of Christ, and the whole importance of this is that every member of a community can all love the same human exemplar. It’s no surprise then that we follow Christ in the Gospel by the testimonies of his friends.
I think perhaps modern people have trouble realizing that what occurs in the imagination can be as strong as reality, especially in a period of human history devoid of media superstimuli and formal education. (Read Oliver Sach’s Musicophilia for a description of a music lover hearing a full symphony in his head when out to sea, and believing it was real. This is sensory “deprived” humanity).
If a group of people of various stages of wisdom are united by a perfectly imagined friend and teacher, that is all the same psychological stuff as if it were a real friend and teacher. That’s the power of the social technology. You are creating an optimal reality for your community that cannot exist in a materialistic-reductive way of socializing. It will be a better community!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't get the weird nostalgia for 90s sex comedies at all. The pinnacle of the genre was a dude sticking his dick in an apple pie.
They were shit. Let them rot.
Well, there are sex comedies, and there are teen comedies. There is a lot of overlap, but I'd consider them distinct categories all the same. But I guess the focus is still on raunchy teen comedies.
I mean, their appeal for teens is obvious. Well, at least it was obvious when I was a teen, more on that later. Finding a way to see them that doesn't involve having your overly open minded parents taking you is a coming of age task that may be more memorable than the film itself. And even if your mom, who considers herself more of your friend than a parent, is willing to drop you off at the movies to see American Pie, you hopefully had enough shame to not take her up on that.
Then again, with the proliferation of internet porn, twitch titty streamers, instagram thirst traps, etc, the libidinous motivations that go into seeing a raunchy teen comedy have more or less been diverted elsewhere. So maybe they should just be left to rot. Maybe their time was before 8 year olds could watch double fisting on the tablets their parents shut them up with.
More options
Context Copy link
No, they weren't shit, or at least not all of them. American Pie offers an interesting treatment of male friendship and the transition to adulthood. I don't want to take this too far, but in some ways, it's a really beautiful movie. (I don't deny the sequels were shameless cash-grabs).
I agree with other comments that the teen sex comedy genre was crushed by a combination of (1) competition from online porn and (2) changes to cultural mores (particularly surrounding sexual harassment and consent). Larger Hollywood consolidation trends aren't completely irrelevant, but I don't think they were the main driver.
[Edited for clarity]
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A funnier and more realistic movie would be about two gay teen boys pulling the same stunt. But depicting gay men as being as horny as straight ones, and not possesing a gaydar with 0% false positive rate, is considered by the present zeitgeist to be immoral.
Did I miss a comment somewhere, or is that article about removing a scene of two gay men forceably abducting a teenager,? That, ah, seems a bit more than horny gay guys mistaking straight guy for gay. I think the child abduction and presumed rape is the immoral part?
Apologies if I missed some comment somewhere that zooms out to what you said instead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The world has become too lousy in those 20 years.
More options
Context Copy link
As I read this I thought you were going to go with "because social-justice sensibilities consider them Problematic and are influential among the people and companies that make movies". (The other big potential contributor would be the idea I've seen that comedies are declining because they struggle to justify getting people to come to the theater instead of streaming.)
...which makes your actual followup puzzling to me. If that is the reason then of course one of the few teen comedies that makes it to release will be one that immunizes itself by trumpeting social-justice credentials as loudly as possible!
More options
Context Copy link
Thank fucking god. Sitting down in the theater to enjoy the latest film and then having my senses assaulted by a trailer blaring society's sexual expectations at me made me want to turn into the Joker. Hey, remember all your crazy sexual hijinks in high school? Remember how awkward your first time was? See, it's funny because these are universal human experiences. I mean, can you imagine someone who's never had sex? Look at how horny these teenagers are. How would that even be possible?
I find your comment confusing. You disliked sexy teenage movies because you were a teenager not having sex?
Yes.
Well, I suppose I might not have liked them anyways, but I doubt I would have the same seething resentment. Cinema is specifically designed to elicit an emotional response, and it can be shockingly effective, even in ways the creators never intended.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What the fuck does this even mean? I saw it again not long ago, initially thinking nothing of it. Then something in the grammar nazi part of my brain, mostly vestigial at this point, started yelling at me.
"She/they? That's the same fucking tense!"
Seriously. He/him, she/her, even they/them makes a certain sense. Even she/them would sort of make at least grammatical sense, even if it fails on rational sense. Not like that matters anymore anyways. But what the fuck am I supposed to make of she/they? Flip a coin? Pray to Slaanesh who's time comes closer daily for divine guidance? Just accept that my fate is sealed any time I attempt to address or reference this person, and accept my fate as would a peasant in an avalanche?
I'm just so very, very tired at this point.
He/they user here, it just means either pronoun set is fine. "She/they" is just shorthand for "She/her/hers or they/them/theirs", usually in the sense of "She/her/hers or they/them/theirs, dealer's choice."
If they're anything like me, it's probably because they honestly consider themself nonbinary but they aren't visually readable as gender-nonconforming, have a deferential/non-confrontational habit, don't find absolute pronoun correctness a particularly critical part of life, and/or are averse to policing other peoples' language on principle.
That said, there also do exist a (probably small, but memorable) set of people who will see "She/they" in a bio and do their damnedest to rotate between the two mid-sentence like "She felt their day was going exactly as she hoped it would when they walked out of her door" which is absolutely alien to me and I cannot fathom wanting that or wanting to participate in that. I have to wonder whether that's actually what anyone is truly asking for or if it's just misinterpretation all the way down and nobody in-ranks wants to ask or clarify.
Even when people ask for "any pronouns" (which ... I have a personal and probably irrational aversion to) I always assume what they mean is "pick one set, whichever, and then use that one" not "all text and speech referring to me must be indecipherable".
I do think most people who do it just use "She/they" or "He/they" to mean "Use whichever of these causes the least friction for you, neither one bothers me."
It at least definitely never means "She walked they dog in she front yard."
I have no personal animos in this regard, I generally like and get on with people and try to be polite and accommodating, but I just don't get the pronoun thing, nor non-binary identity for that matter.
No-one has to identify with their sex (it is a mere fact) -your expression is entirely up to you, but getting me to do something to support your identity misses the point of what society is. I disagree entirely with the belief system that undergirds non-binary identity and resent even your compromise position of people not having to use certain words to describe you. I don't want the layer that this sits at to be important in my engagements with people - I don't want any baggage around identity to sit between our person to person engagement. You deciding on a special layer feels like a power-play to me, that you have the upper hand. And it denies the primacy of scientific facts, which don't require social proof. Sex labels are actually more freeing than locking into a particular gender identity. If this is what your non-binary identity means, not being locked into any particular style, presentation, then you still don't need the label. Just be it.
What would the world be like if everyone insisted on being referred to in a certain way, how cumbersome - none of us are deserving of that kind of special treatment.
Now language can change and certain languages have honorifics etc. You can make a case that gendered languages could bake in certain cultural assumptions. But English is not particularly gendered and male/female need not have any assumptions baked into them.
Sorry this has turned into a kind of rant/scold but I never get to say this in the open, which I think is the great bit about anonymous posts. In a workplace I would be forced to accommodate you and you wouldn't know how I felt about it.
I'm sorry in advance that I don't have anything more interesting to respond with here, but I just wanted to say this is a good reply and I'm glad you replied. I actually think most of your intuitions here are basically directionally correct and I share a lot of your frustrations at a lot of the current conventions surrounding gender identity. As you say, much of it is, at best, not useful for human connection, and at worst, detrimental to it. Maybe I'll write more deeply on it here someday.
Great, Id be keen to hear one day- some of my comments probably could be a bit more nuanced. I mean there is a gender layer between sex, culture and psychology - I wouldn't reduce it away entirely from the inter-personal space but the underlying framework around it we have currently I find limiting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think 'she/they' is short for 'she/her or they/them'.
More options
Context Copy link
Grammar nitpick: you mean that they’re the same case, not tense. Tense is associated with verbs and tells you what time an action took place. Case is associated with pronouns or nouns and tells you the word’s relation to the action (e.g. was it performing the action? Receiving it? Benefitted by it?).
Well, I did say my grammar nazi gland was mostly vestigial. So noted, maybe I'll appear less ignorant next time it comes up.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I apologize for the snark, but when you open with this and you give the most importance to the identity of the characters rather than even so much as including a memorable scene, I am rather inclined to doubt that there is a part more memorable than starring lesbians.
Is there any comedy that you’d try to recommend by describing a memorable scene? I find explaining a joke never comes across well.
It’s possible to reference a scene without agonizingly explaining the joke. For example, “I never expected to enjoy a movie where Ben Stiller masturbating is not one, but two plot points.” I assume this is what OP was going for, letting the reader imagine Marshawn Lynch coaching lesbian wrestling.
All that aside, yeah, the movie probably isn’t great. Most aren’t, and that’s before narrowing the field to horny teen comedies. But this is the CW thread, so we might as well get some mileage out of it.
More options
Context Copy link
If I tried to describe Weird Science - nerdy boys make magical female to get laid/have fun- it would involve just as demographic information in the summary as the one OP gave. And it would be just as relevant - the comedy is coming from the very fact that they are heterosexual and are trying to sate those drives.
Obviously, since lesbians are a minority, you'd have to make it more explicit but it's pretty similar.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well given the total success of Bros, I'm sure this will also be a success.
But being more serious, I think your endorsement of this movie is indicative of the whole problem of Hollywood and its inability to understand why a certain genre is even worth watching. For the teen comedy. The hot girls is the whole point of the movie. Also the misogynistic-leaning humor. I have to assume this one has very little of either based on the posters and marketing materials. I'm sure you thought it was funny, but I doubt the box office will agree. Lesbians as a trope are titillating to a male audience when they are particularly attractive and more bisexual than lesbian. A full on lesbian comedy will probably not be the latter for most people at all. Modern Hollywood is just too stilted to properly demean its lesbians for being bad people (a key component of the teen comedy).
Why would Marshawn Lynch, famous for being one of the most uncharismatic people in the intentionally boring NFL be a selling point?
More options
Context Copy link
I Want To Believe (in Marx's Labor Theory of Value)
Content warning: this post contains MARXISM. If seeing Marx's massive beard or even hearing his name is too traumatic for you, stop reading now.
...
Recently I found one interesting article, not interesting in itself, but how it illustrates arguments about psychological necessity of faith and belief frequently discussed here.
Yes, it is Marxist article written by professional Marxist in Marxist journal. Last chance to avert your eyes from forbidden lore is now.
...
Yes, it is very obscure, but if post about civil war in furry community can pass there, this might too.
If you are interested how I got there, the route was Anatoly Karlin -> devcroix -> journal article by distinguished academic historian -> academic journal dedicated to Marxist theory
Was Stalin a Marxist? And If He Was, What Does This Mean for Marxism?
(tl;dr: yes he was, it means lots of things for Marxism, none of them nice)
This is not the article I wanted to share.
This is the article.
Unfree Labour and Value Productivity: Challenges for the Marxian Labour Theory of Value by another academic, not distinguished enough yet to deserve his own Wiki page.
So what is it all about?
Labor theory of value(LTV), the cornerstone of Marxist thought. If LTV fails, whole Marxism crashes to the ground.
Narrator voice: it failed, it was debunked many times, starting in 1890's. Somehow, it had no effects on world historical events of 20th century.
So, what exactly is this article about?
According to Big Beard Man's theory, it does not. (Practical Marxists later strongly disagreed, but this is not topic of this article)
But why is it? (except that Marx said so) What is the distinction between wage and slave labor, slave and animal labor, animal and machine labor?
Author examines these distinction, and finds them rather arbitrary.
No need to read 40 pages of Marxspeak(I hadn't either), this table summarizes the argument and the dilemma.
So, Marxist author in this article deboonks cornerstone of Marxist philosophy and watches the whole thing tumbling down in its own footprint like the towers on Nine Eleven.
This had been done many times before, this is not the importance of this article, the importance is in his last sentences.
It is not about materialism and science, it is about faith.
The author still has faith, still needs to believe, still wants to "stick with Marx", still wants to "affirm" the tenet he just destroyed, still considers himself Marxist and begs desperately fellow professional Marxists to help him (these are the only people who would ever read this journal, I am possibly first non-Marxist to stumble on this article)
This is completely natural human behavior. Rationalist credo "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is deeply abnormal for human beings.
Are you laughing at him? This is exactly the same thing as all who people who wish wistfully "if only I had faith in God" "if only I could belong to Church".
If people act like the LTV is true, then it's still true in some way. Just like you shouldn't try to prove that Islam is not true to a bunch of bearded dudes trying to separate someone's head from their body for saying Mohammed was technically a child molester, you shouldn't try to prove that the LTV is false to the striking workers who are disaatisfied with their wages. And if you act as if something is true, it's not so different from it being true.
It's very different. The fact that sometimes you have to take into account that people are wrong about things doesn't change a damn thing about whether or not those things are, in fact, true. You shouldn't try to argue theology with a schizophrenic who thinks they're Jesus, but they still aren't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
the persistently high cost of service sector goods lends some credence to a form of labor theory of value. It does not explain why Saylor Swift earns so much (it's not like she works 1000x harder or puts in 1000x more hours) but it explains why plumbers still can charge a lot even if there is competition.
That only seems to present a problem if we assume all labor is the same value.
If we assume some labor can be more scarce than others, say an expert or those with exceptional natural talent, the situation resolves itself.
But, what is scarcity, but a description of how much effort (labor) is required to obtain something? The record companies probably do put in 1000x the effort to recruit someone like Taylor Swift. Talent scouts, marketers, etc. Of course the LTV requires people be willing to expend labor in exchange for the product. But, the record companies only expend the labor cultivating talent because they expect to receive value in return. The labor required to create a talent acts more like a price of production on a standard economic graph. Products that return less value than required to create simply flop and don't stay on the market very long.
If we've described scarcity in terms of labor, I think the labor theory of value holds together, although I think it does become one of those equations where you can solve for any of the variables.
This seems backwards. You're arguing that people are willing to trade lots of labor to recruit Taylor Swift because they expect to receive value in return, which implies that she creates tons of value above and beyond the labor she actually outputs. Or rather, there is high demand for her labor in particular, meaning labor alone is not just a source of value, but depends on other factors such as skill, and consumer demand.
Value is created by a combination of skill/knowledge/organization, labor, land, and customer demand. Once you introduce enough of these factors and mutate your "labor theory of value" to be robust and accurate and account for all of this and related factors... you just have normal economic beliefs and aren't a Marxist anymore, and none of the Marxist claims about inequality follow.
I'm not sure you can separate it quite like that. You can boil the current demand for Taylor's labor down to the results of the previous labor (voice training, practice, focus groups, marketing, etc). Or, really, the 3 hours spent at a concert isn't the only labor being sold, it's the cumulative labor that was required to create that concert.
Which would explain why skilled labor pays off so much more than unskilled labor. A skilled laborer is selling the labor they spent training over and over again, whereas the unskilled laborer only sells the labor they are currently preforming.
This is kind of what I was trying to get at towards the end of my post. It really feels like you could boil down all of economics to any of the inputs, as you can generally convert them to each other (if nothing else, then by converting to money first). Not entirely sure how useful it is at that point though.
It's possible I should have been more clear and direct, but I was talking about LTV in the abstract, not specifically about marxist principals. LTV is also associated with Adam Smith.
I, personally, think Marx's ideas were disastrous, but not really because of LTV. I think they were disastrous because they tend to destroy very important incentive structures which end up destroying most of the value in a society.
LTV, on the other hand, seems like not that bad of a take for someone operating in the mid 19th century (and a pretty good take for someone operating in the late 18th century like Smith was).
It was bad take even back then. A common counterargument used was that of literal gold digger during Gold Rush who lucked out and struck gold vein on his very first day. It is easy to understand example showing that value is created by demand as opposed to some "unit of labor". Of course there are other example of where value is created by some cosmic luck besides finding mineral riches or ancient treasures buried underground - ideas being another prime example. A lot of transformative scientific or product ideas were invented randomly or as a byproduct of something else, they are product of talent and circumstances. LTV was dead on arrival.
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's like half of the puzzle. Or maybe slightly less. It's almost equivalent to the "Supply" half of "Supply and Demand". Which means that it's ignoring demand. A pizza rotting in a warehouse takes the same amount of labor/talent/capital/ingredients to produce as a pizza in a highly popular restaurant. Lots of Soviet failure stories involve factories producing tons of unnecessary items that ended up unused because they were being measured according to oversimplified metrics. Tiny nails when measured by quantity produced, gigantic nails when measured by gross weight. Food rotting in warehouses instead of being distributed because someone forgot to care. You can make two products with nearly identical amounts of labor, skill, and ingredients, and have wildly different output value based on which of them is actually needed by the people around.
In a sufficiently competitive market where there are lots of fungible inputs, lots of people who could perform the same tasks, lots of customers who want whatever is produced, and the outputs themselves are mostly fungible, then yeah, the price of goods will drop down to approximately the price of its inputs, which can convert to labor. Which basically says that if you simplify and fix Demand as a constant, and fix all of the non-labor parts of Supply, then labor is all that's left. It's an important component, and certainly better than having no economic theory whatsoever, but you need to actually satisfy customer desires if you want to actually create value.
I think that's only because you're only focused on Marx's side of theory.
Smith's theory is about the labor the buyer is willing to expend to obtain something. To quote the wealth of nations:
Which, I think is the other half that you're missing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
She provides more than 1000x the value. Do the same exact production, with the same exact experience, but substitute Taylor Swift with a random woman singing the same exact songs. How much of the stadium would be full? How much would each ticket go for? I would say much less than what it is now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He who says the humanities can’t produce anything useful—let him read this article!
Anyway, I see no problem here. Taking out a cornerstone does not mean a theory is wrong, just that it is unsupported. So why not ask for another cornerstone?
This isn’t limited to Marx. When the quantum physicists undermined classical mechanics, the conclusions of Newton were still (mostly) valid. Since then, finding the bridge from quantum effects to macro-scale gravity has been an open question. Physicists would strong prefer not to take it on faith that quantum gravity just works.
This was the big project of Marxists like Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen in the late 20th century: try to salvage Marx's conclusions, without accepting his premises.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not a Marxist and don't see any problem here. Unfree labour still has costs. You still have to obtain your slave labour, feed them, protect them from dying from exposure and disease, prevent them escaping. Surely Marx would agree, if asked, that a labour camp produces surplus value?
Anyway, how can machines not produce value under Marxism? We're all agreed that a steel mill's productivity has a lot to do with the tools and machinery they have available to them. So obviously the machinery produces value. Marx had experienced industry, he knew machines existed... How could he have missed this? How could anyone have missed this?
The real problem is that labour doesn't have a relation to quantity or quality. If I have a really disorganized factory with stupid, clumsy employees, there's lots of labour but little output. The crappy output doesn't become more valuable because people worked hard. That, I believe, is what goes against LTV.
Anyway, Marx was not a Marxist. Confusingly, he was Marxian. I believe there's a quote where Marx says he's not Marxist. And he's certainly not Marxist-Leninist, they're wildly different ideas thrown together.
The fact that an idea is stupid does not mean that someone as intelligent as Marx could not have agreed with it. Kant believed that you can know a priori the geometry of space and Popper thought that evolution theory was not scientific.
If machines do produce value, then the capitalist isn't stealing from the proletarian, they are producing wealth together. There is no exploitation and the ethical side of marxism falls entirely.
This I think is another point of view that is problematic for Marxists but also for other people: namely that capital is literally a tool for capitalists to produce value. In the same way hammer and sickle is a tool for worker/farmer to produce goods, Tesla, Inc. is just a tool for Elon Musk to produce cars. Famer does not necessary have to make the sickle from iron ore and a tree, he has to rely on other workers and their capital producing it. In this sense the capitalist is just more complex type of worker.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Now this is nothing new, the draft version of the famous Communist Manifesto was called Confession of Faith.
Also I think that Marxism can actually be saved if viewed under the lenses of earlier works by Marx, especially The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. For instance this passage:
and later
See, the ultimate product of labor is not a commodity or service, it is the worker itself and through him the whole society. The proletariat embarks on the project of producing The New Soviet man, that is the true valuable product. This is something that machines or animals or slaves or even wage laborers cannot do, because animals and machines are ontologically incapable of such a thing while slaves and workers are alienated from their labor by capitalists. In fact capitalists themselves are alienated from their own labor, working on communist project would help them. You see, seizing the means of production and creating socialist society is only intermediary step before free proletariat finishes the project and abolishes private property by recreating and transforming the man itself into a new social species-being (so called socialist "humanizing"), it is only then that the communism will finally be successfully tried. In the meantime we have to prepare grounds for attempt number 49.
See, the Marxist faith restored all it takes is just a little bit of New Age sounding quackery, welcome to 19th century German philosophy. You can forward this to the OP, they can thank me later.
More options
Context Copy link
I am a very weird human being. When I first read this stuff on LessWrong as a teenager I remember being very annoyed by how smug they seemed about "hey, breaking news, you should believe true things and not false things." As an adult, yeah, fine, if anything they were understating it. I'm not pretending to be some kind of rational agent, but I don't explicitly come out and try to believe false things, what the fuck?
But I still don't understand how people can do this and it still frightens me that it's not even uncommon. They still know on the inside that it's still not true, right?? There's no Men-in-Black neuralyzer that comes along if you pretend you don't know it long enough... right?? Why does he want to believe something that isn't true?
Personally I don't even think "you should believe true things and not false things" is actually that universal or valuable. Something's truth value definitely plays a part in the calculus, but that isn't the ultimate determinant. I'd prefer to believe, falsely, that a woman is attracted to me if that motivates me to then go and flirt with her - and that flirting can actually make her attracted to me anyway. There are plenty of other areas where this same principle applies.
More options
Context Copy link
Why wouldn't you believe (or pretend to believe) something that isn't true if there are such massive benefits to be accrued and such huge incentives for doing it?
Try looking at the stock market sometime. Do people really believe that a nothing EV maker in Vietnam is worth more than Ford?
"Believe" and "pretend to believe" are very different things. The latter can be rational in many situations, if dishonest.
More options
Context Copy link
It concerns me that "believe" and "pretend to believe" aren't very obviously flagrantly different things.
They can't be. The PR system of the brain demands that the mind fools itself in order to conform and fool others. If a somewhat honest person were to consciously lie every day, there would be friction against their values. They wouldn't be able or willing to keep up the act. Thus believing and pretending to believe must meld together, at least partly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have similar peeve, but because of exactly the opposite reasons: this whole credo is obvious bullshit. Even rationalists like Yudkowsky do not really practice it, take as an example his annoyance with Roko's Basilisk idea leaking or his secrecy around methods how he can get out of the box pretending to be AI. Why doing that, just set the truth free. If it destroys countries or even the whole humanity, then it should be destroyed, right? The cold truth is defined as the highest value so what is the problem.
Anyways, there are many ways how one can save "belief in untruth". One way is to defer to an authority: I cannot evaluate if Many Worlds or Spontaneous Collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, but I think expert A is trustworthy so I take his word for it. But in a way this is is belief about expert and not belief about the thing, so it is cheating a bit. Another way to do that is to have epistemic humility, Scott Alexander himself once remarked how he was able to argue untrue points very effectively toward people with less knowledge and his takeaway was to be a lot more skeptic when it comes his own views as he could also have been misled. Ironically rationalists themselves accept this premise, their whole shtick is how AI can lie to reach its goals. Similar idea is also expressed by yet another rationalist glib of it all adds up to normality, which basically urges you to be skeptical about too "weird" conclusions and sticking to your intuition a bit, even if evidence seems strong.
Now given the utilitarianism of rationalists I do not trust them at all, there is nothing preventing them to lie to me to reach their goals of maximizing utils or whatever. In fact they are quite upfront about this. The third one is right there in the rationalist Bayesian thinking idea. All it takes for me to defend any belief is to set my prior to very low value so it is incredibly hard for it to be flipped in my lifetime. And I can still signal my sophistication: my credence of idea X being true shifted a bit in light of new circumstances and recalculated posterior, but I still find it unlikely for X to be true. That is unless Scott Alexander or Yudkowsky or other gurus of rationalist faith say otherwise, then my posterior will shift dramatically.
Now maybe this all sounds too harsh, I do not really mind it as much. But one really has to treat rationalism as yet another pretentious internet fad, as an infotainment. There are very useful things I learned and for it I am very thankful. But I think dropping the guru sounding shit or weird stuff like defending value of insect life or polyamory or any of the awfully convenient overlap of supposedly cold rationalists with hippie/techbro Silicon Valley culture and ethos is advised. But sometimes I think I am not harsh enough - listening to Yudkowsky lately I would not be surprised if he founded some Unabomber style cult set out to bomb datacenters to prevent AI apocalypse, which would be logical step if they really believed in the Truth of apocalypse so firmly and unshakenly. So there is that.
Good lord, it’s been a long time since I’ve read such uncharitable interpretations of single sentences. With analysis like this you can make anyone look bad.
The "analysis" does not really depend on that single "sentence" - although I also think calling it just as a sentence is uncharitable. It is not some random sentence from Sequences, The OP called is as a credo, it is oneliner that is tied to rationalism and Yudkowsky especially.
What I was getting at was the overall tone of some of the rationalist writing that I think "the credo" shows very well: it is edgy sounding guru oneliners that are sometimes literally used in normal conversation - the credo in particular I think was for instance said by Aella in her interview with Lex Fridman unironically.
I also admit that I am maybe too harsh, maybe I am taking it all too uncharitably. It is just internet infotainment, there is not that much going on and rationalists do have also oneliners like "it all adds up to normalcy". And then one reminds himself that normalcy includes saving ants, or AI apocalyptic doomerism and then I am not as sure what charitable take on rationalist utilitarianism should look like when taken as an actual moral philosophy that is adopted up by the unwashed masses.
Also as a closing point, I thought in this manner due to the fact that the OP described how normal people including Marxists do not adhere to the credo. I found it paradoxical as I do not find rationalists strictly adhering to the credo either, in that sense they do have much more in common with Marxists: they do have materialist utilitarian moral philosophical system (or one can almost dare say theology) build up ground up from first principles with some transhumanist transformative project. It is a philosophy created outside of mainstream, a system created by outsider "basement dwelling" philosopher with prolific writing and slight ties to rich donors. I wanted to point out this myopia to OP.
More options
Context Copy link
I suppose he doesn't get an upvote?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the much more rational approach is to be clear to yourself about where your beliefs come from, especially if they didn’t come from your own investigations. If I’m convinced that Ukraine is doing well on the counteroffensive, that’s fine, as long as I’m clear with myself and others I try to convince that I’m basing this on news reports and not on defense analysis or talking to people on the ground or even talking to people in the military. I think personally it’s almost as important as the idea of putting some sort of certainty quantification on statements.
I believe in “many worlds” at about 60% certainty, but I’ll be honest that my understanding comes from listening to science communicators explain it on TV. Putting it that way at least gives you (and me if I’m willing to be honest about the implications) a baseline of knowing just how seriously to take my claims based on this belief.
I think that all this language about how one is rationalist but one should also put numerical credences (ideally down to decimals) to one's beliefs and how one should be careful about context of information and source of my views and how in the end it should all kind of feel "normal" - it all is the usual way of how rationalists say a simple thing everybody knows in a complicated way. Man, practice some source hygiene, work on your thinking and trust your intuition a bit. On most beliefs one would be in line with majority of informed people.
Paradoxically it is always the weird shit where rationalists are touting their supposed first principle revolutionary approach, where they are espousing mantras like that which can be destroyed by the truth should be. I am talking about things like saving ants or taking drugs or defending some sexual deviancy or other defense of some weird shit that nerds really want to rationalize. Guess what, my intuition screams "red alert".
Information in areas where you are not a specialist will always be no different than any other well informed person. That’s sort of the point. A lot of rationalists seem to take information from blogs and video and so on. This is fine. For most purposes, cosmology as explained by popular science communicators is just fine. Where it becomes a problem is when you use that geeky layman understanding and pretend it’s more than it is. It leads to a kind of arrogance where you assume you know all the relevant details without doing a deep enough dive to really know what’s going on.
Likewise, while I don’t think it’s necessary to go down to decimals of certainty, I do think, especially when reasoning about things, to have some idea of just how sure you are about a given conjecture. If you’re not pretty darn sure then it shouldn’t be the lynchpin of that argument or prediction. If you’re pretty sure, fine, give it importance, but I’d never advise making a major decision based on something that you’re less that 80% confident in.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you either misunderstand or are deliberately misrepresenting the point to dunk on the nerds here. Obviously you shouldn't post nuclear codes on Twitter just because they're true - we're talking about the nature of beliefs. "Dangerous information exists" isn't incompatible with the idea that you should try to believe true things, and not random shit that would be convenient. That's just common sense!
Nothing you said here is even remotely like belief in untruth. Trust authority figures? Also a means of determining the truth, because the whole reason you're trusting them is that you think they're right! Be sceptical of clever-sounding arguments? Don't rush to believe weird things just because you think you have evidence? That's literally just Yudkowskian rationality stated informally! He would probably say something more like that in Bayesian terms, your odds of hearing a good argument for X are not that much higher given that X is true, and also that prior probabilities exist, but it's the same damn thing.
I can't find it on a cursory Google, but one of the Sequence posts on this is about how confident it's reasonable to be in your priors, and "so low no reasonable evidence could ever make a difference" is, obviously, too low. Again, common sense.
Gosh, it sounds like being so willing to lie could have bad consequences that a consequentialist might want to avoid. Seriously though, there's whole reams of decision theory stuff about how you shouldn't lie! Partly in fact for exactly this reason. A good basic sketch from the Olden Days of why in rat terms you should not in fact abandon all ethics to be "utilitarian" is here.
See above. It's not actually logical.
Yeah, agreed, it bothers me a lot too. Yudkowsky in particular seems to just not have much sense of... PR, image, not seeming weird, and it's very annoying. The only thing that annoys me more than LessWrong rationality is how terrible the criticisms of it are. I'd take a hundred weird mystical descriptions of common-sense reasoning over one "these people are weird and cringey which is of course equal to 'wrong' because 'wrong' is just another word for 'bad'" dunking.
As @georgioz says, rationalists have many blind spots. The main one I've found is the 'Not made here' problem, or whatever it's called, where everything has to be invented from first principles. This means rationalists actually miss the Truth quite a bit.
For instance, observe how instead of accepting that emotions are real and digging into the science of trauma that has been building for decades, rationalists prefer to throw it all out and come up with their toy model that reduces human being to automatons.
Rationalists are foolish in many ways, and the most tragic thing is that they think their belief in Truth and Reason means they aren't taking anything on faith, or having any untestable beliefs. Unfortunately for them, there is no way to objectively measure reality outside of human perception, so Truth and Reason are just another God they believe in, albeit with very sophisticated and labyrinthine scriptures.
More options
Context Copy link
The credo is much stronger than that, it puts the Truth as ultimate value, not as just something aspiring or something one "tries" to adhere to but abandons for something else in presence of "dangerous" information. The credo is not "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be unless it is dangerous to do so". Of course you can argue what you do, but then there is no need for edgy sounding guru lines like the credo. You would then just have ordinary thing like "try to tell the truth whenever you can" - it almost sounds something people like Peterson could say actually.
Of course it does. I can say that I believe New York Times or Eliezer Yudkowsky or The Pope or I can trust the Science. If you pick up bundle of beliefs some of them are for sure going to be untrue. This is a common way how people get to believe untrue things. And this is also the way rationalists pick up their beliefs, unlike some scientific sounding first principles reasoning. So again, there is not that much of a difference between rationalists and just regular informed people, in fact from what I noticed rationalists are putting too much faith into their own thought leaders.
Slow down, we are talking about rationalists, I am not that sure how far the appeal to common sense can carry you here. Again, I am maybe too harsh as most rationalists are just normal people who actually have some common sense, except that the whole rationalist ethos is about overcoming commonsensical reasoning on many things and there really are some people over there that can take these things maybe too literally. That's my whole point.
Except if it is dangerous to tell the truth, we already covered that, right?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I hate to sound like a broken record on incompetence=evil, but the difference is that confessional Christian regimes tend not to kill millions of people on accident, and when they do it’s a result of empowering ruthless people with vague mandates rather than something inherent in the system. Doctrinaire Marxist regimes have a much worse record.
I mean there’s also that believing Christians tend to be much better citizens than committed marxists.
It’s not that faith is justified by results. It’s that if you play that game, you’re kinda pushing people towards Christianity or a small number of basically-Christian faiths.
If good system somehow keeps empowering "ruthless people" who kill millions of people, what exactly makes it good?
Well, this is hotly debated. Limiting ourselves to modern times, do you consider British Empire to be "confessional Christian regime"?
Anyway, there is no comparison.
Marxism does not claim to be religion based on faith, Marxism claims to be science, describing objective laws governing history, Marx wanted to be someone who explains evolution of human society just like Darwin explained evolution of life.
It is appropriate to judge Marxism by scientific standards (Prager university tier takes "Marx was sleeping with his maid, therefore Marxism is BS" are embarrassment).
It is appropriate to ask whether Marxist predictions - tendency of the rate of profit to fall, immiseration of the proletariat etc... came true. It is appropriate to ask whether Marxists got ever close to delivering what they promised.
Citizens of what? Citizens of bourgeois and feudal states certainly not, committed Marxists were undermining them as hard as committed Christians were undermining pagan states.
Citizens of Marxist state? All achievements of USSR - victory in civil war against overwhelming odds, breakneck speed industrialization and development and then victory in greatest war in history, were due to sacrifice of tens of millions of true believing Marxists.
Yes, when the true believers who really believed they were building better world died off, the later generations lost their faith and sold everything for blue jeans and chewing gum. And they lost their faith, because the great promises never came true, and they knew thay are not coming true, because they were supposed to happen here on Earth, not in heaven after death.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I want to discuss the Pathfinder fanfic "in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die". I'm going to start by copy-pasting the submission statement I gave it on /r/rational and then I will dive deeper into the culture war aspects of the work:
Now, as I said, Iomedae is from medieval fantasyland, and her writer does a good job portraying her someone who has different values and ideas from a modern American. I particularly liked the way she reacted to the modern concept of rape:
I found this extremely refreshing. The central example of rape is "woman was minding her own business when someone broke into her house and forced her". It is incredible how little of what gets called "rape" actually fits that category, and can be better described as "woman cruising for a dicking regrets the dicking come next morning". It is the worst argument in the world, enshrined into our legal code.
Or consider how she deals with the stifling secularism of progressive society:
I imagine more than one red triber has felt something similar upon going to college. But it goes further than that; Iomedae really believes in hell, the way she believes in the grocery store around the corner, and that is obviously going to have a huge effect on the way she lives her life.
And just so I don't get accused of only liking this story because it confirms all my biases, Iomedae also has words for modern immigration enforcement:
So, overall, I highly recommend this fic. It will make you think, and it will give you a great outside look at the assumptions we take for granted living in modernity. If you have never played Pathfinder, don't worry; neither have I. As long as you know about paladins and wizards from reading The Order of the Stick or similar you know everything you need to know to enjoy the narrative. Iomedae may have ascended to godhood in canon, but in this story that is just her awesome destiny.
I find this a deeply icky way to generalize date rape involving intoxicants or sex with young teenagers.
More options
Context Copy link
It is indeed very good, but if you have not read the next two threads you should. People who would like a different, but equally positive, view will find it in my most recent substack post:https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-web-of-story
More options
Context Copy link
I haven't nor do I intend to read this fanfiction, nor have I played Pathfinder, and I don't know some of the terminology used here beyond a google search ("Isekai"). That said, I have problems. Someone from the Pathfinder universe (especially with spell training like a Paladin) would probably be familiar with food preservation magic since it exists, I also find it very personally offputting to shoehorn into a story about a child (admittedly one who considers herself an adult) about how actually most of the time when people get raped, they didn't actually get raped since nobody had a knife to threaten them. There are probably a dozen examples like this where her being from Pathfinder doesn't actually mesh with the story very well. Again, haven't read it, other than the excerpts here, but if there is nothing interesting between the comparison of her Medieval-ish world or her oath as a Paladin and our modern world, and it's just a generic medieval fish out of water tale, why is she a Paladin at all? Is it an in-joke between the Pathfinder player author? Does it mean anything?
I don't really think The Motte is the place for literary criticism, since it's a largely non-rational practice. But god, the writing here is just bad. Maybe if you're a direct person who likes it when characters spew forth punctuated idea after punctuated idea it's the right pace for you, but these paragraphs are a hard read. If you want worlds-colliding or a reflection of modernity fantasy fiction, there is lots of stuff you can find with enjoyable prose. Try /r/fantasy. I don't get the giddy appeal of having the author stand-in character give a "glorious" "refreshing" look at our modern age. I've seen dozens of posts here with better rundowns of how things operate and the problems and virtues with society. This strikes me as midwit-tier.
The things you're complaining about are... The central conflict of the story. Iomedae comes from a mediaevalish world, of course she has fucked-up ideas about consent, that's the whole point! If you don't like a writing style, fair enough, if you don't want to read something before you complain about it, fine, but come on.
I think this is sort of close to my central skepticism or complaint. Re the culture clash
This doesn't strike me as someone from a different religious tradition understanding modern churches. It sounds like an inoffensive faux-empathic rambling. There are 6 separate ideas but each one is an orphan, they're not explained or developed. She just jumps from 3 different ideas about the church, and couched within that are TWO separate disclaimers, but they don't sound like a woman out of time learning about a new culture, it sounds like someone from today giving a "I don't want to contradict your lived experience" speech. That's what I mean by a bad author stand-in.
Your comments would have more to do with the story if you had read it. There is no suggestion that "women are property, they can get raped freely, and can never say no to sex." When someone tries to rape Iomedae (off stage, at the beginning) she stabs him with a sword then carries him to somewhere so he won't die — I think the church, since in her world priests have healing magic and she doesn't yet realize that she is in a different world where they don't. That is how she comes to the attention of the authorities.
I'm hesitant to engage with these year old necro comments and am skeptical of any productivity, but I read slightly more of this terrible fanfiction after the original comments and am more affirmed in my criticism.
Litigating the specific fact claims back and forth are kind of meaningless, obviously either of us can easily pull up sophistries based on one weak line, a misuse of a phrase, or technical issue etc. Others have also done that well and you can read it.
The reason I dislike it is because the dialogue is wooden, cliche-ridden, hackish, frequently offputting, and the characterization is inaccurate or implausible at different times.
Many are familiar with the tropes and discussions around the phrase "The Curtains are blue" speaking to over-analysis by literary critics [or their lower-functioning cousins, proponents of 'Media Literacy'] of minute and unimportant details, and there is also push back by those who think Blue Curtains complaint style discourse is thought terminating and glosses over real meaning. But in either case that's close to the level of intro literary review you would do in an literature class, you find symbolism, explain what it means, and then maybe relate it to the pacing or tone of the story or experiences of characters themselves, some will go further and map it to the social and historical circumstances of the author to learn about what it says about 1820s Spain or Russia for example, and that follows into Death of the Author discourse which has also become more popularized. A more advanced literary review will likely move past the symbols, and try to mesh out why and where they were used to specifically understand exactly what the author was trying to say when they picked them. [Most university undergraduates will never move to this stage and beyond]. You also have some people who evade this, and are more simulationist [to borrow Pathfinder terminology] and err more on the side of explaining what would likely happen in their interesting fiction, but not trying to tell you what this means for you, albeit still likely being colored by their personal beliefs or historical circumstances [Think Brandon Sanderson's worldbuilding]. Here's Tarkovksy on Symbolism:
I apologize for that long sidebar of how I perceive the modern state of literary criticism. But amazingly the writing of this terrible piece sidesteps all levels of it entirely. The characters just speak cliched platitudes, never having any depth beyond the most cursory, nor any satisfying growth or understanding of eachother. A modern person encountering someone from middle-earth or wherever would have more preconceived notions because of our media tradition, similarly if Superman was real, people would have an easier time digesting it since we have 100 years of Superman media, as opposed to if we had none at all. The prose makes Ayn Rand look like Shakespeare. It is barely half a degree better than something like
#1: I prefer social democracy because more people can get what they want
#2: But they might want bad things. That would be bad
#1: I don't think so
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for the suggestion, but I prefer it this way. It is similar to the hard science fiction style parodied in "Masters of the Metropolis", "If All Stories Were Written like Science Fiction Stories", and "In Ovens Baked", which I enjoy very much. Such stories are about ideas, so a writing style which focuses on the ideas works best.
Check out The Golden Oecumene. I think you'd love it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Disagree with this. I would like to see more literary criticism. Though not necessarily of Pathfinder fanfics.
I am not putting my modhat on for this, but it's borderline. You can say you don't like a post and you'd rather not see posts like this, but it's generally pretty poor form. Not every thread has to appeal to you, and this is pretty close to saying "This is stupid, why did you post this?" Which is not what we (the mods) want to see. Criticize the post, criticize the story, criticize the OP's analysis, that's all fine. Don't complain because he posted something you aren't interested in reading.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My visceral reaction to that is "This is a fantasy by somebody who wants to fuck fifteen year olds" and that makes me bounce right off. Probably I'm jaundiced from our friend of former times with the rants about how children are enslaved (and the fiction about raping fourteen year olds to force them pregnant because men should be leaders and women should be barefoot and pregnant or something).
You are wildly wrong, not surprising since you are commenting on a work you have not read and are reading stuff into it from your own imagination. When someone tries to rape Iomedae, at the beginning of the story, she stabs him with a sword. That is how she comes to the attention of the authorities.
And extremely unlikely to read, so no loss to the world if I don't read it. I've never got exactly what glowfic is intended to be, and if I want didactic moralism wrapped up in a story, I can always go dig up Sandford and Merton.
Besides, I've lost what tolerance I had for Dialect fic, and pages of Iomedae spouting what could be perceived as Slanty-Eyed Broke Engrish no me thing Evil America Thing Do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I... can honestly promise you that it's not like that? At all. Iomedae is very adamant that no man lie with her because she doesn't want to be a mother, and, unlike a surprising number of moderns, she understands the link between sex and babies:
More options
Context Copy link
Eh... yes, there is a certain type of person (like our former friend) who really likes talking about how back in Ye Olden Days, 13 was prime childbearing age for FEEEmales. (Which actually isn't true because girls used to reach physical maturity later than is common today, and 13-year-olds getting knocked up was one reason for the high childbirth mortality rate.) ) Otoh, it really is a historical reality (which few modern fantasies, including RPGs, honestly engage with) that "teenagers" used to be basically young adults lacking only experience, and were treated as such.
How it is executed in a given story probably tells you where the author is coming from.
Lacking experience is a pretty big lacking. I would add lacking experience AND JUDGEMENT, though (see anyone that takes on 6 figures of debt for an art history degree). The real question is was it easier for a 16 year old to be an adult in previous centuries because mostly you were able to learn all the things growing up in your village that you needed to know as an adult then? Is it only modern complex society that requires more time to learn enough to not fuck up?
I think you can learn all the things required to actually do a farmer-equivalent job in modern society by 16 - if you don't spend 12 years on general education. The problem is that even if it was allowed, you'd be essentially second class. What kind of parent wants that for their children?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Content aside, this is awful awful writing and, as I've heard this held up as an example of good rat-adj fanfic, it really speaks volumes negatively.
There's no accounting for taste and all, but this, much like the few lines I stomached of HPMOR, really shows that aesthetics and poetry can't be tossed out just because you're spewing 'points'.
More options
Context Copy link
Iomedae sounds like an idiot on the subject of immigration, because she's very clearly being an author-mouthpiece. Does she have an opinion on whether or not Cheliax, if they found a way to replicate her journey, should be able to start sending evangelists of Asmodeus over en masse? Or is the point that because she has access to at-will detect evil, she doesn't understand how when dealing with mere mortals, we can't just march her in front of every immigrant and have her decapitate the evil ones, and let the rest pass on through? I wonder what she'd think of a cabal of mortal wizards who started mass-binding souls in order to shove them into whatever Pathfinder's version of Mount Celestia is. Or the Worldwound, for that matter.
Actually, there are a bunch of things I'd want her to run into. In Pathfinder (and in almost every edition of D&D), humans are not sexual dimorphic in ability spread; men are taller and heavier than women in nearly every race, but this does not affect their attribute spread. So, does she have a low-level melee-combatant attribute spread or an actual teenage girl attribute spread? And how does she react to, in the first case, learning that compared to what she's used to, men and women might as well be half-orcs and halflings when it comes to their distributions of upper body strength? If we assume that she has Str 16 (since she's a legendary hero before level-up bonuses and, as a paladin, suffers from Multiple Attribute Dependency) and we use the rather generous PF carrying capacity table, she can lift 460 lbs off the ground, which (as I understand from a casual google) would smash the world record for people in the average teenage girl weight class.
It also sounds like the religion thing is nuanced at least, but I feel like that the world of Pathfinder is ontologically different enough that I don't see her views on religion mapping well enough to ours to have a strong opinion on Jesus as an actual historical figure or actual Outsider with a divine rank. Maybe he was a guy who rose from the dead; that happens more often than not if you die around powerful users of divine magic. Maybe he's a god or a demigod or a name given to another god; the world is aggresively syncretic and no god created the universe, nor actually defines it in any meaningful way; important things like Good and Evil predate the gods and will outlive them, and while gods, even Iomedae's own patron deity, might be deeply important to her, she should know that being a paladin demands that she follow Good first and her god's commandments second, if the two ever collide.
Honestly, I am a little melancholy about the fact that I'm deep enough to the weeds of Pathfinder to find the premise of this story really interesting, but that I also know just from the summary I was given that I'm going to be running heavily into places where the story either warps to progressive shibboleths and loses me as a result. Which is a shame, because I feel like a based author that was willing to respond to questions about America's policy on immigration and secularism by sending a paladin to a cartel-controlled town in Mexico or a fundamentalist-Islam-controlled stronghold in Afganistan would be really narratively interesting.
I also feel like there's a much more hilarious story about weird-ass Underdark radiation fucking up and dropping good ol' Drizzt Do'urden into our world as opposed to Icewind Dale, and have him have to undergo a whole lot of different learning experiences.
ETA: Fucking hell, didn't make it off the first page before getting pissed off again. You know what also doesn't exist in Pathfinder? Acquired immunity. People don't get resistant to filth fever by hanging around in a dungeon repeatedly, because pathogens are not germ-based in Iomeade's world. The correct response to "Let me give you a little bit of unclean taint to make you stronger and teach you to fight it off." is "Back the fuck off, spawn of Lamashtu and Apollyon, I know how potions that heal the sick work and that is not it, you lying bastard." There are also a lot fewer lethal diseases unless you use the optional rules to make diseases extra-lethal, and there's low-level divine magic to help with sick people, and if Iomeade has hit third level herself than she's entirely immune, and that should be part of her understanding of the world.
Part of rationalism is engaging with the world as it is, not as you've been told (or are being told) that it is. This would have been a perfect chance for Iomeade to have expressed a solid opinion and been given the chance to learn that this was not her world (and, as the other people dug deeper, to learn that she was not from their world), but there is no world in which being told about vaccines shouldn't map to one of the many plague cultists fucking with people. Hell, even if Iomeade had seen enough of this world to recognize that things were different here, this should still be a point in which she has opinions, beyond "Really? Cool!"
Vaccinations are actually a thing in Pathfinder so the real sin is that Iomadae would probably know the word itself. And given creating it needs a sample of the disease AND that Starfinder (which takes place in the future of the Pathfinder universe) has actual antibiotics in addition, it seems fair to say that germ theory does indeed work there. It is just there are also magic and direct miracles so vaccinations are less useful, when the local cleric can pray it away.
"A vaccine grants a creature immunity to a specific strain of disease of a level equal to or less than the vaccine's level, and a +2 item bonus on all saving throws against other strains of the same disease. For example, a vaccine could grant immunity to filth fever inflicted by otyughs but would only grant a +2 saving throw bonus against filth fever inflicted by a giant rat. Special: A vaccine is the same rarity as the disease it's designed to prevent, or as the creature who inflicts the disease if the disease itself doesn't list a rarity Craft Requirements: Creating a vaccine requires a sample of the disease in question."
Starfinder takes place in the same universe as Pathfinder (probably; history in Starfinder is weird), but several metaphysical things in Starfinder are different. (Also, you know, practical things.)
Regardless, in both systems, creatures do not have memory T cells; you make the same saving through the first time you get bit by a dire rat with filth fever as the thousandth time, even if it is the same rat biting you. The vaccine is also made with Starfinder hypertech, so I don't know that we can say that it works anything like the conventional term; it might just be some very-narrowly-tailored nanobots that do what a conventional immune system would do, if people had immune systems instead of Fort saves.
I actually checked the SRD, and I found exactly one reference to vaccines in first-party Pathfinder materials: the drug Gossamer Veil (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/afflictions/drugs/gossamer-veil/), which, amusingly, has the following description:
Again, the world of Golarion has entirely different mechanics for disease, but more than that, it has entirely different social institutions, built around gods as observable and present as Elon Musk is in our world. "Why the fuck aren't your priests of Jesus healing the sick, as is normal and natural? What is wrong with them that they can't perform the simplest duty of a good cleric, and channel positive energy to help people?" should be her starting point. And because she is literally the alternate-life of a goddess, she should find alchemical ways of preventing disease sus as fuck, because in a world where you can go to any good cleric and get any conventionial disease cleared as long as you are not actually physically dead, not going to goodly clerics to get that care is sus as fuck, unless you're in a part of the world with unusually low access to goodly clerics?
And you know what people generally don't have the training, infrastructure, and general capacity to do in those parts of the world? Become paladins!
Now, I am just going off of the standard SRD and Archives of Nethys as a backup, so if there is a solid reference to vaccines in Pathfinder proper, I may be missing it, and if you know of one, I'd be happy to hear it. But regardless, even if they worked, they would not work as an extension of how people understand how disease works, because in Pathfinder, barring there being a specific Milkmaid background trait that gives a bonus to pox-related illness, you can't observe "Hey, milkmaids and other people who work with cows tend to get the lesser-in-lethality cowpox and tend to be more resistant to smallpox, I wonder why and if we can replicate this somehow." What there are are people who can fuck around with the wrecked space shit in Numeria and maybe get some stuff partially right, but much more likely, what you have are (as we, ironically enough, do have) demon-affiliated fuckers preying on people's hopes that there is a reliable way to handle disease other than divine magic. (Or, like, alchemists or other use-the-spell-mechanic fuckery.)
I don't think you can assume that lintemande's Golarion is identical to the Pathfinder version, although it is based on it.
Iomedae and Alfirin learn about vaccination in America and I think it is one of the technologies that they attempt to introduce to Golarion in a later thread in the series.
More options
Context Copy link
The vaccine rules I quoted are from the Archives for Pathfinder 2e here:
https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=773
My alchemist was crafting them in a campaign I am in which is how I knew there were rules for crafting vaccines. In order to take some pressure off the cleric if we were already immune to the disease we knew we were going to encounter.
Though they may have been invented post Iomadae's ascension, It seems probable natural immunity exists in some form in world but is just abstracted away ruleswise otherwise. As it isn't fun in game to track if your character should be immune to filth fever as he caught it 6 years ago when trudging through a sewer in Alkenstar and was bitten by a direrat or whatever.
Its also possible the varying dieties of disease alter them every so often to evade natural immunity. That might be my take as a DM. That diseases are viral or bacterial but they also have divine forces creating new variants. Golarion does have Anthrax, Dengue fever, cholera and bubonic plague, malaria and TB for example and they even talk about the lymphatic system so mundane diseases do seem to operate much as we would expect here and given the lymphatic systems purpose it would be odd if humans didn't have the same immune system and thus could get immunity to cow pox or something. Its just not an exciting part of the game system to talk about.
Ah, I haven't touched PF2E at all, so that explains it. I guess it will be really important to find out what actual rules the fic is operating under.
The vaccines look interesting, but also not at all like something that naturally would interact with an immune system; how would they work if the lesser ones only work for 24 hours? Maybe they're just releasing tiny alchemical homunculi into your bloodstream.
Re: diseases being updated, you could presumably slap a bunch of dire rats in an Antimagic Field to detect that and study the effect, which sounds interesting. If you want to run your setting that way, you might have an entire laundry list of effects the gods need to personally micromanage to keep the Prime Material from falling askew, and introduce some interesting effects when adventurers go off-grid themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know when the common understanding became that TTRPG rules are supposed to represent the in-world laws of physics, but that is not what they do and isn't in Pathfinder and never has been, going right back to OD&D. TTRPG rules are there to assist the DM in running the game, that's all. The rules for diseases are not necessarily reflective of what disease is actually like in the world and certainly don't exclude the possibility of things like acquired immunity.
Is germ theory true in Golarion? That's for the DM to decide if it ever comes up, not something to be gleaned from the rules.
Also, more importantly, the setting here is lintamande's fanfic Golarion, which differs in a few ways from the RPG setting.
Iomedae comes from a world where mass immigration and the state capacity to control it don't exist - of course she finds modern mores on it strange and horrible, it would be weird if she didn't.
According to Iomedae, in a later thread following from the one being discussed where she is back in Golarion, germ theory is true in Golarion. Her basis is having learned about it in America, but nothing in the story implies that she is wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
In a game, the rules are reflective of the players' shared understanding of the game world, and when the rules fail to reflect that understanding, they are bad rules.
And obviously the GM can decide things. The GM can decide that Iomedae is a foxgirl in a kinky BDSM relationship with Asmodeus. But that is not reflected in either the rules or the setting documents, and people are quite right to complain that referring to someone who was called Iomeade and differed significantly, and in unannounced and weird ways from what was established.
And, while I'll probably do a whole bit on this later, Iomedae comes from a world where the nation she is from (the Taldoran Empire) actually did mass emigration in an explicitly colonialist way. And, of course, they had to deal with foreign invaders entering their lands as well. I can absolutely buy an Iomedae that sympathizes with the plight both of specific illegal immigrants and of their host nation, and wishes there was a way to both fulfill the law and grant security to the immigrants. But describing border security as evil are not the words of any paladin anywhere, much less the words of a paladin otherwise-fated to be a god of paladins that worships a Lawful-Neutral god of human civilization.
The author could have picked a generic paladin from an unspecified setting, or even a generic paladin from Golarion. They did not. They chose a paladin with a history and her own views. Obviously, the author and the readers have the right to tell me and everyone else "Fuck you, I'm doing it my way, and I'm also making Aroden trans, cope and seethe.", and equally-obviously, I have the right to tell the author that she's doing it wrong, as I have above and probably will again.
And hey, if you want to get into a detailed dive on the established lore of Golarion and its gods and claim that I'm misrepresenting Aroden, Iomeade, paladins, or the Taldoran Empire, please feel free. Hell, if anyone knows if there are PF2e adventure paths or lore books that ret-con any of these topics, I'd be genuinely interested to hear about them.
Iomedae's first experience of Earth was living with illegal immigrant migrant workers, very poor people who treated her well. After she has been discovered by the authorities and made a foster child there is an INS raid on the immigrants and, from what she is told, the result is the adults being sent out of the country and the children being seized. I don't think that makes sense in terms of INS policy, but it is what happens in the story or at least what Iomedae believes happens. Prior to that, all she knows about immigration enforcement is that there is some evil thing called "La Migra" which the people she is living with are afraid of.
Aroden is not trans but Alfirin, in a later thread, very briefly is, using Alter Self to make herself male for a few minutes. For why she does so you will have to read the threads.
More options
Context Copy link
Strictly she is a Paladin of Arazni, who is the herald of Aroden, but I think she might actually see immigration restrictions as evil on Earth for one reason, everyone there is human, and Aroden is essentially the god of human manifest destiny, and that humanity should be as one, she might feel that America as the most powerful nation should indeed be both spreading its influence in order to unite humanity and allowing any human who wishes to live there to do so. In otherwise she might well support America taking over Mexico AND prior to that allowing any Mexican who wants to live in the US to do so. She would probably feel differently about an orc nation for example. Remember at 15 she is just about to join the crusade against the undead hordes of the Whispering Tyrant, a nearly existential threat to human civilization itself. Making humanity strong by bringing as many people under one rule as possible is consistent with both the way Taldor spread and not having the kind of legal system where a human from outside Taldor who wants to live there is going to have many issues doing so.
Aroden is prophesied to (at the point this story is set at least) lead humanity into a golden age, united and strong. Paladins don't have to follow laws that they believe are not just or not good, if your god wants humanity united, any law that prevents humanity coalescing into a united group could well be seen as evil. From a certain point of view of course. America absorbing as much of humanity under its direct influence whether by conquest or immigration seems very much in line with Aroden.
"The Starfall Doctrine is a series of prophecies written in Azlanti that predicted that the god Aroden would return to Golarion in 4606 AR and lead the human race in a millennium of prosperity known as the Age of Glory. He was supposed to lead the world from Cheliax, which he would personally rule and which would also become the pre-eminent nation in the world"
That the human race should be united and not artificially fragmented into smaller nations is pretty on brand. Border security against orcs and undead Good, border security to prevent other humans swelling the ranks of your nation: Evil.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That was great! Now I kinda want to see you liveblog the whole thing.
You know what? Fuck it. No idea how long this will last, because I'm also doing something similar for Wheel of Time in meatspace at the moment and my hate-reading time is limited, but here we go: https://robertliguoriwritesstuff.wordpress.com/2023/09/05/well-i-guess-im-liveblogging-now/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As others said, this fanfic sucks (this goofy mocking pidgin speak of our heroine alone kills it, author never bothered to look up INT requirements for paladin and DND rules for language learning), but in this case Iomedae sounds realistic.
Medieval person, whether noble or commoner, would see idea of "papers", would see situation where everyone, even the poorest peasant, should carry "papers" at all time and present them in order to travel, work, buy and sell as something from Book of Revelation.
Authentic medieval Iomedae would be horrified to find herself in the time of the Antichrist, but would be also overjoyed that Jesus is finally returning and she will meet him soon.
(well, later, when Iomedae learns about history and finds out that the Beast rules the world for centuries, the world gets more godless, depraved and evil every day for centuries and still there are no signs of Jesus' second coming, she would get really depressed and could begin to doubt her faith)
Of course, Pathfinder is extruded Mos Eisley Cantina style fantasy world as different as possible from actual medieval Europe.
No, I do not want to blame anyone for not wanting to play in realistic medieval setting. (Game Master: The water was refreshing. Your thirst was satiated. Now, roll for dysentery.)
And I want to blame even less modern fanfic writer for not wanting to present realistic medieval opinions on modern society, government, economy, religion, law, justice, war etc...
The world she comes from isn't medieval Europe, it is a world with multiple real gods and roughly medieval technology (plus magic) and standard of living. Iomedae's first contact with people in that world is with illegal immigrant migrant workers who take her in. They are Catholics, what they say about Jesus has some bits that are similar to the background of Aroden, the god she is a paladin of, and she incorrectly assumes they are the same. There is no reason to expect her to have the attitudes of someone from medieval Europe.
Iomedae is fluent in her own language. Her imperfect speech is due to the fact that, having learned Spanish with the migrant workers she is now learning English.
There is nothing wrong with discussing literature, but the discussion would be more interesting if people would read the story before confidently announcing what is wrong with it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The rot runs deep.
Take a look at this paper. Here's the abstract:
Do read the paper. It's not long and it's a good test of one's bullshit detector1. For the impatient:the author assumes a 2% growth rate for humanity's energy use and projects that forward a thousand years.
The paper's isn't that interesting once you spot the trick. But it does bring up two interesting thoughts:
1 I suppose this is technically consensus building. If you think the paper's arguments are reasonable, I'd be happy to discuss that as well...
This is so idiotic I don't even know where to start. I genuinely wouldn't be against seeing this dude get shot on live television pour discourager les autres.
Just like how there is an upper limit to how much solar energy we can generate in a day on earth (surface area of planet *maximum amount of energy falling on each unit area per hour*24 hrs), there is an upper limit to how much tidal energy we can generate because we don't have any way to make the tides stronger (and thus pull energy from the earth's rotation into the movement of seawater). This upper limit doesn't give a shit about us needing to grow energy consumption at 2% per year. It is a physical fact, nothing to do with humanity or its needs. When we reach this limit we're straight up not going to be able to generate more energy via tidal methods and will have to switch to something else. What will it be? I don't know but so far humanity has a very good track record in finding alternatives when they become necessary. And this upper limit is so low that it will be many millions of years before there is even a slight impact on the length of a sidereal day.
As a result of this limit we can spend eons harvesting tidal energy and it won't make any significant difference to the earth's rotation. In fact, it's going to slow the earth's rotation just as much as if we harvested literally 0 tidal energy. This is because the earth loses rotational energy when it gets converted into the movement of water (as the tide goes up, water needs to move to that area), not when we harnass that water movement to create electricity. At the moment all this energy is being converted into heat and sound as the water of the tide comes in and rubs against the land/the aligned directional movement of the water molecules gets replaced with random movement though entropy, thereby increasing water temperature. Diverting a portion (any portion, up to 100%) of this energy into electricity is going to do literally nothing to how much the tides are slowing down the earth.
Tides are already slowing down the earth's rotation, harvesting tidal energy won't speed up or slow down this rate at all.
Got it, tides come in, tides go out, never a miscommunication.
More options
Context Copy link
Let's not casually talk of violence when a writer hasn't thought as deeply about an issue as you.
It's the duty of a scientist to think deeply about the things he writes about. People will assume that, because he is a scientist, he has in fact thought deeply about the subjects of the papers he publishes. Scientists who don't think deeply about their areas of study need to be discouraged from being scientists, lest they use their institution's prestige to convince people of things that aren't true.
There are probably more humane and effective ways of discouraging someone from being a scientist other than a live televised broadcast of their firing squad.
Humane, sure. Effective? Hard to beat a bullet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm going with Poe's law here. From the abstract, I assumed that paper was a joke, but I can't find any clear evidence either way.
More options
Context Copy link
This is not a good paper.
I don’t think you understand the relationship of such a not-good paper to the dreaded Scientific Consensus. Anyone can be wrong on the Internet, even if they typeset their theory in LaTeX instead of raw HTML. If they engage in the normal publication, review, and replication process, and their colleagues talk about their paper around the water cooler—well, they’re still allowed to be wrong. Even a bad paper can trigger good responses.
Note, also, that the NYT has not picked up this story. You are borrowing trouble. Actually, I guess you’re borrowing the Hackernews line on this topic.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Dr. Liu is a Stanford professor. He’s not on the faculty lists, and doesn’t come up from a casual google. You also misread the bit about 1993–all the paper says is that he presented to a graduate class in 1990, and that he later left the school which hosted his sites. So I don’t think you need to worry about canceling this guy.
More options
Context Copy link
If you want to criticise the press, you would do well to choose a real example rather than make one up and declare that if it occurred it would be a damning indictment of our media. In fact, the original initial version was first published in 2019. Not a single outlet, no matter how obscure, that I can find has covered this at all. In addition, from what I can tell this has never been published in any journal or been peer-reviewed at all. It's hard, therefore, to see this as anything other than lame culture warring. 'If this paper was picked up by the news or academic community, which it totally would, apart from the fact that it hasn't, but I know they definitely would if they hadn't, what rubes that would show them to be'. If anyone responds to this the inevitable reply will be 'the media is bad on science, look at X, Y and Z' or whatever, but then consider using one those real examples as the basis for a post rather than making up a non-existent story to get mad at.
More options
Context Copy link
I am confused.
I'm hesitant about how much doxing of an individual we should do here, but when I investigate it, it looks like this person is a student at Stanford (in the computational engineering department, which I think means computer models of things), and that this 'paper' is just published on his personal page, not in any journal.
Is that wrong? If that's not right, could you link to what else you're seeing?
Assuming I'm right: every student has to write dozens or hundreds of random papers while they're at school. The fact that one of them contains an error is not especially alarming; I've graded many of them, they all contain errors. This in particular is sort of a funny error but it seem indecorous to pick out this one student on all the internet to point and laugh at, let alone to hold up as evidence against all climate scientists or w/e (not even the same department!).
More options
Context Copy link
There's that, and it also appears that he's assuming the energy extracted comes directly and exclusively from the Earth's rotation, rather than from that as well as the Moon's orbit. But the quoted point is probably the more important one - it seems intuitively implausible even before I read the article that the amount of energy the human race uses is anywhere near the same order of magnitude as what is associated with the Earth's rotation.
Either way, I also have no confidence that any mainstream media source is capable of evaluating the claim with appropriate skepticism and performing, or even getting someone more qualified to perform, basic checking for major holes in the idea rather than jumping on what would be an attention-getting headline.
More options
Context Copy link
The author assumption is ... reasonable about trends. What he fails to consider is that by that time we are way above type 1 Kardashev civilization (and probably type 3 or 4 Kardashian civilization) - so we will be harvesting the energy of the sun. Or we would have gone extinct anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
One swallow doesn't make a summer. One paper (by a non expert) doesn't invalidate an entire field of experts.
I think looking at proposed answers to climate change is what turns evaluating the climate change hypothesis form a reasoning exercise into an emotional/political endeavour - and it cuts both ways. This is the only way I can explain all the special pleading for climate change as uniquely suspect for decades, despite being a bland, intuitive hypothesis. I think it's helpful set aside looking at proposed answers before thinking about the hypothesis.
We should expect some kind of climate change a-priori. Anything else is nonsense. We've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1859. Very basic. We've known the atmosphere:earth is roughly proportional to apple:apple-skin for a fair bit too. I'd be shocked if adding ~1 quintillion Kg's of CO2 to the atmosphere had precisely no effects. Measuring CO2 in ppm is trivial. Measuring temperature is trivial. Even if climate change isn't human caused, it'd still be worth investigating so we can engineer around it.
This is also a dubious line of thinking (its something like the appeal to ridicule). Chess computers, controlled flight, weather prediction, gene editing, nuclear fission, were all once claimed to be too outlandish to be possible. They still feel outlandish, but all can be done by hobbyists.
Most of those things are much easier to model than the climate because there are thousands and thousands of inputs into the climate. GIGO
This still seems like special pleading. Perhaps you can argue/explain to me how its not. As I see it, we can figure out chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second. Therefore its not unreasonable to suspect that we can make good climate models.
Can we predict the weather tomorrow? Yes and no. There are just too many variables and randomness in the system to be exact but have a decent approximation.
Climate is more complex. We don’t know how to measure every variable. We don’t know what variables should be included. We don’t know how much each variable should matter.
Chess is simple. There are 9 kinds of pieces and 64 squares. Climate is a lot more complex.
Right, but this line of reasoning could be used to dismiss as inaccurate anything sufficiently complex and niche. The human body, the universe, and AI are complex, but people don't dismiss medicine, astrophysics, and LLM's because of complexity. What is special or unique about decades of climate science that gives people pause?
I don't want to put words in peoples mouths. If people think decades of climate science is uniquely dubious because they reckon its just too complex, that's fine. Special pleading is an informal fallacy anyhow. OP found climate science to be nonsense, and the idea of climate modeling to be outlandish, and didn't elaborate. But saying this isn't special pleading by pointing out complexity is a non-starter. It's rare that, for decades, 90+% of trained scientists agree on some domain specific thing in a heavily quantitative field, yet popular sentiment demurs without easily explaining why.
Astrophysics is interesting but doesn’t really make any demand upon me. Whether they are right or not is by and large irrelevant.
The complexity of AI is part of the argument against AI. That is, we don’t understand exactly how it works and therefore the alignment problem is a concern.
Medicine — well the answer is it depends. The older a practice the more I trust it. I like lindy things.
But it isn’t just climate. I think when it generally comes to predicting complex phenomena we overstate our ability to predict things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
All of those are discrete (except manipulation of genomes), chess has an finite number of movements and we are barely understanding the genome; grouping it with something simple as chess is disingenuous. By contrast the climate has a number of inputs that can't even be comprehended, are analogue in nature and affect it in variable ways, from mayor ocean currents and wind fronts to cow farts and the movement of people. We can't even predict the weather from one day to another, just forecast it with probabilities.
As an aside, I still think chess fits. I don't even think we know how many games of chess are possible. Humans recently approximated a Go engine - something people long claimed was too complex to ever be done, much like chess. Models + compute can beat humans at games of unimaginable complexity.
Regardless, even if chess is a bad analogy, admitting that doesn't gets me out special pleading that climate science is not only special in its complexity, but also special in that thousands of people with PhD's, from Montana to Mongolia, overwhelmingly agree that its possible to model climate usefully.
What reason do I have to disbelieve climate science that doesn't also apply to designing bleeding edge microchips, or medicine, or applied physics, or the improvements seen in weather forecasting? I'm trying to argue myself into climate science skepticism inductively and/or by way of inferences. A strong quantitative scientific consensus about cause and effect is usually a good bet. What makes climate science different?
The only thing I can come up with is that climate science is more akin to a year-long weather forecast (ie cannot be computed in P time because well understood chaotic conditions). But then why do such a large amount knowledgeable keep spending money on the practical applicability of climate models? I'm back at special pleading that science is a liar in this case in particular.
Well, they have a vested interest in it, no?
that they at least produce the predicted results, be it a bleeding edge chip or a failed attempt at one, weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.
That is trying to understand a really complex system, that a myriad of special interest have their hands in all kinds of places, and that the system as such began a long long time ago and we don't know much about that period.
not this case in particular, you can add Psychology with its replication crisis to the pile and whatever the COVID clusterfuck was.
This is practically a definition for 'science'.
This is largely true for most fields of science.
Similarly, this is also true for most of science.
I can't find anything that makes these arguments apply to climate science, but not biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, etc.
Eg. Do we really know bacteria cause disease? Researches have a vested interest in continued research, but the proposed mechanisms are beyond complex, based on biology that began over a billion years ago.
Apparently climate models have been, on average, predictive. But this is not the kind of inductive claim I'm searching for.
Apparently, these are accurate 75% of the time inside of 5 days. This would be easy to disprove. Again, not an inductive claim. As an aside, if interested I'd be willing to bet money that weather forecasts are about as accurate as 30 sec. of googling led me to believe they are.
I'm extremely mindful of this regarding climate policy.
The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not. Climate is plausibly across the line to intractably complex.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This was a common sentiment back when I was growing up in the 90s. Even back then, it was a silly sentiment and wrong, though it wasn't completely wrong, but it's certainly completely wrong today. Even since the 90s to today, weather forecasting has improved substantially. This makes sense, because there's a ton of money to be made by forecasting weather slightly better than the competition. Weather drives energy usage patterns to a significant extent - think air conditioning and heating - and being able to predict those patterns more accurately than someone else allows one to make bets on the energy markets (things like electricity, nat gas, coal, oil) to make more money. An old man with bad knees and a team of professional meteorologists both get things wrong from time to time, but how often they get things wrong and how severely they get things wrong are very very different these days.
More options
Context Copy link
Actually, we do! Antarctic ice-cores let us get a surprising amount of information about the climate of the earth in the past. Similarly, other fields can tell us really interesting things as well - if you encounter lots of fossils of creatures that only lived in tropical rainforests in a place that is now a desert, that is useful information. Similarly, noticing lots of aquatic/fish fossils on ground that's above the waterlevel can tell you things as well. There's a vast wealth of information about the past available to modern scientific inquiry.
I personally believe in global warming - I can't see any other reasonable conclusion when you look over the data we have available to us. Historical changes in temperature and the association with atmospheric carbon dioxide seem fairly undeniable at this point. I don't think that climate change is going to cause Venus Earth or the end of the world, it is going to have a significant impact on human society due to how dependent we are upon the climate as it stands. There will be winners and losers, but at the same time I highly doubt anything is going to actually fix it - there are too many economic, political and military incentives to burn fossil fuels, and most of the current proposals from the left to deal with the problem essentially boil down to letting Goldman Sachs make more money while limousine liberals pay large sums of money to try and avoid facing up to their own massive contributions to the issue.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So, I don't know how pleasing you'll find this answer, but the burden of proof is on the models to show their efficacy. A lot of the things you mentioned were very difficult things to do, but we know they work because we see that they work. You don't have to argue about whether Stockfish's chess model captures Truth with a capital T; you can just play 20 games with it, lose all 20, and see. (And of course plenty of things look difficult and ARE still difficult - we don't have cities on the moon yet!)
So, if we had a climate model that everyone could just rely on because its outputs were detailed and verifiably, reliably true, then sure, "this looks like it's a hard thing to do" wouldn't hold much weight. A property of good models is that it should be trivial for them to distinguish themselves from something making lucky guesses. But as far as I know, we don't have this. Instead, we use models to make 50-year predictions for a single hard-to-measure variable (global mean surface temperature) and then 5 years down the line we observe that we're still mostly within predicted error bars. This is not proof that the model represents anything close to Truth.
Now, I don't follow this too closely any more, and maybe there really is some great model that has many different and detailed outputs, with mean temperature predictions that are fairly accurate for different regions of the Earth and parts of the atmosphere and sea, and that properly predicts changes in cloud cover and albedo and humidity and ocean currents and etc. etc. If somebody had formally published accurate predictions for many of these things (NOT just backfitting to already-known data), then I'd believe we feeble humans actually had a good handle on the beast that is climate science. But I suspect this hasn't happened, since climate activists would be shouting it from the rooftops if it had.
Thanks. I am trying to ignore specifics and make an inductive argument about science in general to shed light on why climate science appears special (ie: most biologist claim that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, physicists say the universe has a speed limit, meteorologists say 80% chance it'll rain in 3 days etc). Normally, people just go "oh okay". AFAIKT, some 95% of climate scientists are saying "yep, the climate is projected to warm for x and y reasons" and yet many people are have been uniquely skeptical for ~50 years despite increasing consensus among people who have studied the science thousands of hours. I curious what the reason for this is.
Personally, I think the hypothesis is the expected one. Humans have added a trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere in 200 years, and its trivial to prove CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I'd expect something to happen, probably warming, although this need not be the case, and I don't really care either way. All I want to know is what makes climate science uniquely dubious from the highest vantage point, without specifics (mostly for practical reasons).
I haven't followed this much at all. I don't disagree with the points you made, but at a 5 minute glance it seems that the climate models are useful. Even if they weren't, skepticism in the face of an increasing consensus in a quantitative field over decades begs for an explanation.
Biology and physics are old sciences compared to climate science. And the list of amazing things we've done with biology and physics over the last 200 years is insanely long. I guess you're saying that we should give climate science the same level of veneration, even without actual results and useful predictions, because it (ostensibly) uses the same processes. But even if you pretend that climate science is conducted with the same level of impartial truth-seeking - despite the incredible political pressure behind it - that's still missing the point that science is messy and often gets things wrong. Even in biology (e.g. Lamarckism) or physics (e.g. the aether). It takes hundreds of repeated experiments and validated predictions before a true "consensus" emerges (if even then). Gathering together a consensus and skipping that first step is missing the point.
And remember, skepticism is the default position of science. It's not abnormal. Heck, we had people excitedly testing the EmDrive a few years back, which would violate conservation of momentum! We didn't collectively say "excommunicate the Conservation of Momentum Deniers!"
Regardless, I'm not saying that climate science or the models are entirely useless. Like you said, the greenhouse effect itself is pretty simple and well-understood (though it only accounts for a small portion of the warming that models predict). There's good reason to believe warming will happen. Much less reason to believe it'll be catastrophic, but that's a different topic!
We should give climate science whatever veneration it earns. AFAIKT, it has produced results and useful predictions, but this is largely immaterial to what I'm talking about.
If there was Blah Science, researched for decades by tens of thousands of smart people who overwhelmingly agree that X is true, I'd bet on X being true.
My point: most people would bet on X being true in normal circumstances. People seem to make an exception for climate science. I'm curious why people make this exception.
I'm also curious if there are any other broad fields where this pattern holds. Things surrounding nutrition come to mind. Perhaps there are many, and what I'm calling special pleading is quite common.
Climate science has made predictions that are laughably wrong, and this doesn't seem to bother the researchers. The IPCC reports have often contained an enormous range of predictions based on various conditions, and even then on at least one occassion they all missed high. Climate science is no longer an unproven science with a curious number of believers; it's a field full of failures and missed predictions excused by "oh but we know better now".
About as curious as our friend Secure Signals is when he claims some discrepancy in concentration camp numbers, I imagine.
More options
Context Copy link
Psychology, sociology, criminology, economics... That's four fields with zero credibility off the top of my head. I'm sure others can add more. [EDIT] - Add whatever pedagogy or whatever they call the study of education methods itself. That one's toast too.
You should not assume science is correct because of a consensus. When that consensus starts shipping engineered solutions based off that consensus, then you can start taking them at their word. This attitude should expand to cover anything from physics to hard math if they engage with a live political issue.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
These are two distinct propositions unrelated to each other.
"Leeches, bloodletting and self flagellation do nothing to stop plague."
"There is no plague. Fever, black spots all over the body and vomiting blood are completely normal. Everything is fine."
Exactly. Climate change does not rest on Al Gore and Greta, it rests on basic 19th century science.
If you do not trust these free masons, you can replicate their experiments at home, you do not have to take their words on faith.
If your political tribe requires you to deny simple laws of physics, find better one.
Okay, look, imagine that you wake up in an alternate reality where there's a flourishing scientific field studying beneficial effects of smoking tobacco (it was real for a while, a guy who invented like a third of modern statistics after retiring picked up a fight with all the people saying that smoking causes lung cancer, pointing out that they use bad statistics, correlation doesn't equal causation, what if people with lung cancer pick up smoking to soothe their lungs; also nicotine might help with schizophrenia, nicotine can be a safer and better stimulant than caffeine, etc etc).
Then you discover that the 99.7% consensus of the pro-smoking scientists corresponds to the 98% of their research being funded by tobacco companies. Stop for a second, why does that raise your hackles regardless of the subject matter, whether they study smoking or AGW?
When a scientist who studies the beneficial effects of smoking on a grant from a tobacco company publishes a paper saying that tobacco causes cancer, we should all stop promoting that and cancel our entire field, a few things happen:
This same effect of course applies to the field of climate research as the scientists working in it apply for grants to the USA Department of Energy or other state-level entities that are naturally interested in the evidence for global warming as a clear and present threat.
So unfortunately with the way the funding is set up, the entire field produces no knowledge (justified true belief). It might be true that AGW is dangerous to humanity, we know that the entire climate research community would claim that it is true regardless of whether it is true, so them claiming that it's true gives us 0 information. Simple as.
For a bit more of an expanded argument read the AGW section of https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/
More options
Context Copy link
Side note: Freemasons are some of the most trustworthy people I have ever met, on average they stick to a stricter moral code than your average man on the street. If I had to choose between trusting a freemason I knew nothing about or John Doe, I would trust the freemason without hesitation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The NYT (and fellow travelers) likely would view the article as bunk, because it's clearly a physics/energy/environment paper written by a CS professor. This is one of the few checks that journalists are able to perform, and from what I've seen they generally do perform that check.
They might also note that it hasn't been peer reviewed, and that it isn't formatted according to the accepted standard for scientific papers. (As QuantumFreakonomics says below, it's more blog than paper.)
Whether they would note what, concretely, is wrong with the paper, I think depends on who else they managed to interview, and how persuasive those would be.
More options
Context Copy link
He’s not wrong he’s just using his conclusion for the wrong thing.
At a 2% growth rate we are fusing 390 million times the amount of energy we are using today. Which is actually an interesting thought experiment. It shows how drastically different the world would be or society plateaus somewhere. At 390 million current energy usage it wouldn’t matter if the world quits spinning. That energy usage would be high enough to do outside air conditioning etc. it’s a completely alien world and at a point of development of like Dyson Spheres.
More options
Context Copy link
This is an old trick. Exponential consumption growth is a killer.
Let's say someone invents the holy grail, a Total Conversion Engine. At a rate of E=MC^2, pour in 10 litres of water, get out about 900 Exajoules of energy (50% more than current yearly global energy consumption). There's about a sextillion (E+21) litres of water in the ocean. So we'd naively expect this TCE to power the earth for about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Factor in consumption growth, with a current usage of 600 Exajoules, and 2% growth per year - and we use up all the water on the planet in about 2350 years. I haven't double checked my maths, some of those numbers might be off by a few orders of magnitude- but increasing eg. the mass of water in the ocean by x1000 adds only 350 years. Decrease growth to 1% and we get 4700 years. The numbers barely matter, exponential growth dwarfs all.
This may seem like something insane to consider, but it does matter when it comes to super long term thinking. Consumption growth is real. The invention of a miraculous new energy source that makes energy incredibly cheap may make a growth rate of only 2% optimistic.
On a long enough timescale, Solar is the only form of energy that matters, and the only way to get more is to colonise the galaxy/universe.
More options
Context Copy link
This looks like some random professor’s thought experiment blog. Was this paper published anywhere? It certainly doesn’t look like it passed peer-review (as bad as the peer-review system is, I don’t think they’d green-light such a misleading abstract).
More options
Context Copy link
I hate how people are ridiculously long-termist when it comes to trivial nonsense like this. If we found that tidal power was slowing the rotation of the Earth, we could simply stop using it and switch to fusion. The very idea is sillier than the urban planners who despaired about cities drowning in horse shit (then we invented the car). At least horse manure was a pressing problem in the 19th century! We do not need to care about extremely long-term issues since our circumstances change. There was litigation in the US about storing waste for a million years:
Who cares? These people do apparently... but what does it matter what the radioactive waste will be in 10,000 years or more when the US isn't even competent enough to create a centralized nuclear waste storage site? The whole, farcically administrated Yucca waste dump was cancelled anyway. Right now it's sitting in containers next to power plants! That's obviously not secure for 100 years, 10,000 or a million. Does the government just assume that civilization is going to collapse and so nuclear waste must be secured for the benefits of Mad Max style looters and gangsters?
And at the same time, when there's actually a good reason to be longtermist (on important matters like population growth, or colonizing the universe), nobody cares. The cretins who spent serious time and money on this nonsense should be forced to copy out Bostrom's 'Astronomical Waste' by hand so they can begin to understand the scale of their folly and perverseness.
The same way we've found coal power is causing problems and we can "simply" stop using it and switch to fission?
Well we're switching away from it aren't we? If not to fission, at least other renewables.
More options
Context Copy link
We did have a good run of switching away from coal, then the greenies got upset about realistic alternatives so we switched back. Also a war broke out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Am I the only one who finds Moldbug's writing style completely incomprehensible? He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say. The only thing I'm confident of is that, whatever it is he believes (which is something I am wholly unable to glean from the actual content of what he's written), he thinks it's so self-evident that you'd have to be an utter cretin not to already believe it.
It's an experience not unlike reading TLP/Edward Teach, but at least in that case the incomprehensibility does seem to be deliberate (for whatever reason).
the earlier stuff is more readable. he is leaning into the verbosity in part because that is what is expected of him. no one subs to moldbug for hot takes. they want to work for it
More options
Context Copy link
As in you read the whole linked article and have no idea, or gave up after the first ten or so paragraphs? Because while undeniably excessively verbose, containing frequent tangents, and actually being less about the Climategate and more about how the Climategate is yet another example of how power corrupts, it presents clear points with solid justifications.
If you're interested in something much more concise and aimed at someone who is not already on the same wavelength you might want to read the AGW section of this: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/ . It is not, strictly speaking, about the Climategate, because it predates it by a few months I think, but it predicts it presciently.
More options
Context Copy link
Moldbug's writing is good actually.
It is unfortunate that A Gentile Introduction and the Open Letter are the essays most frequently cited to new readers. Moldbug's stuff is best read in chronological order. The writing style is fundamentally stream-of-consciousness. In order to follow the argument, you must be primed with the same thoughts as the narrator. Nested clauses -- far from being unwieldly -- serve as clues and invite the reader to ponder the deeper implications of the content in front of them.
it's good in the sense that it's not something that the average person can ever aspire to. it is demonstrative of a sort of rarefied skill on his part to compose it. is his writing the best in my opinion in terms of style or readability ? no. there are other writers whose writings I find more enjoyable.
More options
Context Copy link
This sounds suspiciously similar to "yeah dude season 1 is a bit of a drag but it gets soo good after that, it's worth it."
I'd say it's much more like how if you try to read later works by a philosopher they are frequently a brick wall of incomprehensible terminology and seemingly nonsensical reasoning, but only because they spent the earlier works defining terms and explaining ideas, some of which are compacted from essay-length down to a single word, and they aren't going to go back over the basics every time they mention a concept.
To use an example closer to this community, if I were to say "The Molochian tendencies of the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are a result of the toxoplasmosic interplay between competing egregores" it requires reading like 4 of Scott's essays to understand.
Fair. The difference being, once you actually read the essays from which "Moloch" and "toxoplasma" originate, the terms are easy to understand because Scott explains what they mean in plain simple language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Moldbug ever explained what he means by e.g. "the Cathedral" in plain, simple language, even though from my understanding it's a much less complex concept than "toxoplasma".
That's about as succinct as you could get I think. The woman who invented the phrase had a longer blogpost about it.
More options
Context Copy link
Also fair, though I'd just say that I read a lot of his works in chronological order, and I don't remember ever being confused on what was meant by the Cathedral. I think he did a good job of gradually introducing facets of a very large term, though I understand why some may find the style obnoxious (personally I enjoy it).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, you are not the only one. I can usually understand what he is getting at, but Moldbug is ridiculously long-winded and meandering. I have found that it is best to just skip the introduction and skim his articles until he starts actually talking about whatever he is talking about, which tends to be several paragraphs in; in the climategate article, I would start reading at "In reality, there’s no way...", then start skimming again whenever he goes on a tangent. Even then I don't often think it's worth the effort; I prefer the dark enlightenment thinkers who write clearly, like Jim and Spandrell.
I've heard it theorized that Moldbug is also being obscurantist on purpose, in order to keep away the riff-raff, but I have no idea if it's true or not.
I enjoyed that Bioleninism post.
More options
Context Copy link
Have you seen the programming languages Hoon and Nock he designed for his Urbit computing platform? It is the most obscurant thing I’ve ever seen outside of esoteric programming languages like Brainfuck.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you've identified two keys flaws in Moldbug's writing. I'm not deeply familiar with everything he wrote but from what I've read, he strikes me as afflicted with Smart Person Syndrome. Because he's smart, he assumes everyone else is an idiot, especially anyone who disagrees with his viewpoints.
He writes like he was partially graded on word count, rather than solely substance, in college and never quite kicked the habit. I've noticed a lot of so-called "thought leaders" (I hate that term but I don't have a better one) have the same issue. 10 words when 5 will do, most of which are only tangentially related to the subject at hand. It's a sort of anti-Twitter where an idea is expanded on way past the point of coherency.
Or because it’s a competitive strategy.
Insisting that your enemies are idiots usually plays pretty well. Especially when you’re already preaching about
sheeplenormiesbureaucrats. Moldbug isn’t writing to convince.I think he is. One strategy that quite often works with people is to use a lot of big words and long sentences filled with stuff that’s interesting but largely irrelevant to the point at hand. It looks impressive to outsiders to write 3x more words than necessary especially if you can drop big words and jargon that most people have vaguely heard of. I don’t think he’s actually smarter than the average college graduate, but his game of using words words words to make prosaic ideas sound impressive does work on some people.
More options
Context Copy link
What is he writing for, then?
At his best? He’s writing to galvanize people who already agree with him. Putting words to that nebulous fear of the outsider which lives in all our hearts, while presenting it as a special insight. Providing a framework to justify what his audience would like to do anyway: complain about the government, pine for days gone, and above all, oppose woke politics.
Most of the time, at least since he started making money off it? Entertainment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think there's a problem that affects a lot of writers wherein they get so close to their ideas that they lose the distance and objectivity that would allow them to assess how these ideas would be met by someone encountering them fresh. "Because I understand it, it must be comprehensible to anyone of approximately my intelligence." But there's a world of difference between coming up with a smart idea and actually explaining it effectively, which is why you need beta readers to ensure that your ideas are coming off in the manner you intend. I'm sure if this was suggested to him, Moldbug would of course insist that he doesn't want his ideas to become diluted or "dumbed-down" by making them more accessible to the "lay person", but this defense smacks of insecurity to me. If you live in a democracy and you want to influence policy you have to meet the voters where they are, which means explaining your ideas in a way that makes sense to the biggest possible audience. Maybe Moldbug would claim he's not trying to influence a big audience, but rather a curated intelligentsia who are themselves powerful enough to influence public policy. Not to blow my (our) own trumpet, but this website is full of high-IQ autistic nerds with thousands of postgrad degrees between us who are not shy about giving controversial or even taboo topics/positions a fair hearing - if even we have trouble understanding what he's trying to say half the time, that suggests it's a deficiency with the writing style, not with the intelligence of the readers.
Richard Hanania wrote a good article arguing that it's rarely worthwhile reading non-fiction books about ideas (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, pop philosophy, pop psychology etc., as distinct from history books, biographies and so on). He argued that the core idea of such a book can usually be succinctly expressed in essay form (<10k words) with no loss of fidelity - but book publishers have no way to make money from essays, so they get the writer to pad out the essay with numerous examples of the phenomenon they're describing, personal anecdote, and filler passages to bring it up to book length. He gave the specific example of The Righteous Mind, a book which I enjoyed and agreed with the core premises of - but 400 pages, really? Scott has covered more ground than that book in a single blog post of a few thousand words.
Probably a lot of writers who get into the habit of doing this find that the habit starts to infect even their non-book writing, resulting in even the articles published on their own blogs becoming needlessly bloated.
I acknowledge that this comment itself may come off as an example of precisely the negative phenomenon I'm describing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I assume it's some sort of Straussian/obscurantist thing; intentionally hiding your points to prevent normies from being able to read it.
Much less charitably it's because his points are weak & often vibes-based, and any reasoning he makes would evaporate if stated explicitly and with any sort of rigour beyond Darkly Hinting to what you mean and letting the reader fill in the blanks. The few times he has written about things I am familiar with, the content really has been rather poor – take this article, for example, where he argues that a software that is only able to perform HTTP GET requests is safe, as such requests don't affect the server content. Anyone that has worked in web security know this is blatantly wrong, as there is probably hundreds of easily performed exploits and escapes for that weak of a sandbox.
Yes, Moldbug is a vibes-based writer who has been saying the same thing (moderated or exaggerated as necessary) since 2008. That said, there are some all-time classics on UR and his focus on the 'long arc of history' (whatever one calls it) is important. Also, his impact on Thiel is single handedly responsible for a lot of the modern weird right in the US and for subsequently 'converting' a lot of high-status and wealthy people to reactionary ideas about democracy and the state.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link