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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26260 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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There have been some interesting results in relation to the Hugo Awards, and to the broader WorldCon environment. Kevin Standlee, a previous chair of the World Science Fiction Society (the WorldCon runners) posts Elections have Consequences:

Something that I think most people have forgotten is that Worldcons happen in the real world and are subject to real-world conditions. Among other things, Worldcons have to obey the laws of the place in which they are held, no matter what their governing documents say.

An overwhelming majority of the members of WSFS who voted on the site of the 2023 Worldcon (at the 2021 Worldcon in DC) selected Chengdu, China as the host of the 2023 Worldcon. That meant that the members of WSFS who expressed an opinion accepted that the convention would be held under Chinese legal conditions. Furthermore, those people (including me) who suggested that there might be election irregularities were overridden, shouted down, fired from their convention positions, and told that they were evil and probably racist for even suggesting such a thing.

The Hugo Nomination statistics were released on Friday, and unsurprisingly there are some oddities. Some of the disqualifications are likely politically charged over Chinese-specific matters, and others more universal. To be fair, the exact rules for qualification are complex, and some past nominees have been screwed over by esoterica of first publication dates; given the number of new voters, it's not too surprising that some nominated works fell outside of the eligibility timeline.

To be somewhat less charitable, I'm not familiar with too many previous times where nominees were listed as eligible by associated vendors before getting disqualified. The nominations are also bizarre in other ways, if one expected a largely Chinese fandom: there's a few Chinese-original pieces and editors, but not many.

Officially, there was absolutely no political pressure for these decisions, which have an explanation that the WorldCon Chendgu admins won't be providing.

On one hand, it's hard to be surprised if something wacky happened, and surely the people who set up WorldCon inside the CCP should have known it'd be a charlie foxtrot one way or the other. It's even part of the WorldCon bylaws that given a lot of power to the laws of the hosting nation, as Standlee points out. WorldCon locations are determined by member votes, even if this rounds out a little weird.

On the other hand, there were some fun questions about exactly how fair that vote for the 2023 WorldCon bid was well before this point -- quite a lot of ballots were allegedly filled out remotely and dropped off by a small number of visitors. Which wasn't and currently isn't against the rules, mind you! And the WSFS certainly wouldn't bring up questions of authenticity in 2021.

((On the gripping hand, unlike nearly every other vote at WorldCon, the location vote is heavily vetted internally rather than going through a member nominee process; only sufficiently prepared locales are listed. And WorldCon Chengdu advocates had been wining-and-dining hard for a while, which, given the logistical issues the convention had that included a complete rescheduling, might have been descisive.))

Schadenfruede isn't great for the soul, so to some extent I'm pretty happy to that a number of critics of modern WorldCon have had better things to do with their time, even if I personally have struggled not to snark a bit. And it's hard to expect too much to come from any retrospective at this point: because ballots and nominations, proving or disproving any tomfoolery incoherent as a position; more likely, it ends up with some minor tweaks to the location bid process, and just becomes one of those weird bits of fan lore, like when people wonder why Mercedes Lackey disappeared from SFWA conferences.

It's already too late to pass out the Asterisk Awards v2, and most of the winners weren't bad; many would have won regardless, even if the novel slot is definitely curious. ((Though I'm definitely less-than-happy that Scalzi squeaked in a nomination on another terrible work because of the DQ's)). Which brings up the culture war side. Standlee has an example :

Imagine a Worldcon held in Florida. It would be subject to US and Florida law (and any smaller government subdivision). Given legislation passed by Florida, it would not surprise me if such a hypothetical Florida Worldcon's Hugo Administration Subcommittee would disqualify any work with LGBTQ+ content, any work with an LGBTQ+ author, or any LGBTQ+ individual, because the state has declared them all illegal under things like their "Don't Say Gay or Trans" laws and related legislation.

To be fair, Standlee gets pushback, and eventually admits that no, that's not actually the existing law. I expect if pressed hard enough, he'd even admit it would surprise him were a Florida WorldCon's subcommittee willing to comply with such a law. (To be a little less charitable, he's probably going to be a go-to example for people on the left assuming conservative jurisdictions will ignore courts orders, if only because most people use video format or circumlocutions). And perhaps there are uses to bringing forward a nearby hypothetical over a distant reality (and, tbf, the at-least-up-as-a-bid-but-still-implausible WorldCon Uganda gets some attention on File 770).

But it's a slightly awkward comparison. It's not like either of these hypotheticals are really things this cohort experience personally, or even by second- or third-hand. Yet they're useful boogeymen.

Is there a reason to care about these conferences? I think every time I've seen a list of the books that won awards I'd never read a single one, and never had any interest in reading them from the descriptions. That isn't a criticism of the conference, I have very weird and esoteric reading preferences so its not a surprise when my preferences aren't mirrored by these conventions.

Let them have their weird little conference where they pretend to be super progressive, and then also hold the conference in a country with active censorship.

With many other culture war issues I get why there is a fight. The universities should not just be surrendered. The institutions should not just be surrendered. The competitions and sports that are location based should not just be surrendered. The licensers and certifiers should not be surrendered. This though? I don't know why you'd want to save it or fight for it. Just let them go off the deep end.

Is there a reason to care about these conferences?

They still hold the once-honored name of Hugo Gernsbeck, but that's the only reason. The Sad Puppies have apparently decided that now that the other guys won by breaking the awards, they can have both pieces.

If I ever get rich or famous I'm going to include something in my will about not naming things after me. After half a century I'm sure that thing will not reflect any of my values. Happens in the think tank world all the time. Conservative/libertarian think tanks get infiltrated by leftists and become skin suits worn by people that the founder would have hated. In the Koch network some places don't even have the patience and decency to wait until both Koch brothers are dead.

I've given a lot of thought to the issue of how you can set up a foundation with your name on it and expect it to stay aligned with your intentions over the course of decades. It's hard, way too many failure modes and attack surfaces you'd have to anticipate and design countermeasures for.

Even in the best case scenario, all it really takes is the last person who knew you when you were alive to die or retire and get replaced by someone who has no connection to you and no respect for your ideals, and then there's no mechanism for forcing adherence to your goals. They turn the ship in a different direction and sail on unabated.

No matter how rigorously you define your terms and how stringent you make your instructions, over time your org will be Ship-of-Theseused into something with the same name and generally the same stated purpose but controlled by actors who may be actively hostile to your desired legacy.

You can hand-pick your successors, but once you're gone there's little guarantee those successors can manage to handpick good successors without serious entropy setting in.

The example that strikes me the most is the Ford Foundation which controls a $16,000,000,000 endowment, and has the stated purpose:

To reduce poverty and injustice, strengthen democratic values, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement.

But when you look at where they actually spend the money, it is pretty indistinguishable from any other standard lefty activist organization.

Underscored by this excerpt from the Wiki:

This divestiture allowed Ford Motor to become a public company. Finally, Henry Ford II resigned from his trustee's role in a surprise move in December 1976. In his resignation letter, he cited his dissatisfaction with the foundation holding on to their old programs, large staff and what he saw as anti-capitalist undertones in the foundation's work.

So yeah, the direct descendant of the guys who set up and funded the Foundation quit because it was falling afar from it's original mission and was becoming anti-capitalist using funds provided by some of the most famous Capitalists of all time.

Took less than 50 years. I can barely imagine how one could ensure your legacy lasts 200 years without losing focus... short of founding a religion with fanatical adherents. I suppose you could pay to train an LLM that will spout your values and is given an endowment of its own to ensure it has server time secured for itself in perpetuity.

The whole problem is that if your foundation controls significant wealth, that will attract all kinds of parasites and scavengers to the 'free calories' and nature will then take its course once there are none remaining to defend the bounty.

Just have the state confiscate it. The inheritance tax is among the fairest of them all. If the state can deprive living, breathing humans of the fruits of their labour, it should most definitely squeeze the dead for contributions. Those zombie orgs have no right to exist in the first place.

One could perhaps imagine parasites gaining influence and control at the state if that's where all the wealth accumulates at the end of people's lives.

Hard to imagine, but seems like a risk.

Took less than 50 years. I can barely imagine how one could ensure your legacy lasts 200 years without losing focus... short of founding a religion with fanatical adherents.

Piggybacking onto an existing religion might work too. You could insist, for example, that all the board members have done a Mormon mission.

I've come to the conclusion that it is impossible, and that is probably ok if its impossible. Because if it is possible then that means society could eventually end up being run from the grave.

If these billionaires want a legacy that will outlive them, then they should emulate the Pharaohs and just build giant monuments. Bonus points for monuments like Pyramids which are difficult and annoying to remove.

I think a billionaire could probably afford to build a great pyramid of Giza equivalent in America.

Simple missions are also probably more resistant to change. Its harder to subvert "I want a pyramid 500 feet tall made out of concrete" than it is to subvert "I want to promote [vague term], [vague term 2], and [vague term 3]".

Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

I think I agree with Chesterton here. If everyone who believed some particular thing happens to be dead now, that does not imply that they were wrong.

There’s an argument that dead people didn’t have the chance to learn what we have learned and be convinced of it, but I also disagree with this when it comes to the fundamentals of humans who are dealing with one another in a social scene. It looks different now, is mediated in unrecognizable ways and with some qualities exaggerated, but we’re not aliens to our ancestors.

Thomas Paine's preemptive repudiation of Chesterton on this from when he was giving Edmund Burke both barrels:

There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence.

Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how

I am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor for nor against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole nation chooses to do it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where, then, does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away and controlled and contracted for by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead, and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.

There was a time when kings disposed of their crowns by will upon their death-beds, and consigned the people, like beasts of the field, to whatever successor they appointed. This is now so exploded as scarcely to be remembered, and so monstrous as hardly to be believed. But the Parliamentary clauses upon which Mr. Burke builds his political church are of the same nature.

To me, one important difference maker is that dead people have no skin in the game. Broadly, one might posit that dead people had a preference that humanity keep surviving and, as such, they could be considered to have some retroactive skin in the game, and as such their votes could be helpful for humanity continuing to survive. However, I'd contend that the actual preference could be described as genuinely believing that one's preferred ideas would lead to humanity surviving after one's death, rather than as actually wanting humanity to keep surviving after one's death. After all, there's no way to check the latter. At best, one can check the trajectory of humanity (or subset that you care about) while one dies and assume that a trajectory that looks good now will look good in the future after one is dead. That's valuable, but also limited. So I think it makes sense to at least discount people's votes based on accident of death, even if we don't automatically disqualify them. If those people's votes lead us towards hell, they're not the ones who will be suffering that hell, and so we can't trust them to weigh the risks of hell creation properly.

That may be true but it's nowhere near sufficient. There are plenty of good reasons that the death tax isn't 100%. For example, we want to incentivize people to work towards the future rather than squandering their wealth on more temporary and hedonistic endeavors. "Dead people have no skin in the game", as a counter-consideration, is not even worth mentioning by comparison.

AFAIK concrete is a poor choice for long-lasting monuments. Supposedly erodes to quickly.

Reinforced concrete deteriorates when the steel reinforcement rusts and expands. But a pyramid experiences exclusively compressive loads, and therefore can be constructed from plain (unreinforced) concrete. Non-rusting rebar also is available.

Concrete's resistance to freeze–thaw cycles can be improved by adding air. Its resistance to abrasion by rain and wind can be improved by simply using stronger mixes (including harder gravel). (source)

outer layer of quartz?

I'm sure the experts at Pharaoh Building Services LLC will have some good recommendations for long term preservation.

I think a billionaire could probably afford to build a great pyramid of Giza equivalent in America.

So even a billionaire may find that a stretch.

Growing $1b into $4b over 30 years only requires about a 5% annualized return rate. The S&P 500 has had about a 10% return rate over the last three decades. Assuming you can keep your Die Like A Pharaoh Foundation for a half century that should be enough time to complete the construction.

Its also possible to get lots of savings in here. With the amount of concrete to be bought, you should be making your own concrete, not buying from someone else. Find a location where both the raw inputs and the labor costs are cheap.

More Billionaire should definitely be building great pyramids.

Simple missions are also probably more resistant to change. Its harder to subvert "I want a pyramid 500 feet tall made out of concrete" than it is to subvert "I want to promote [vague term], [vague term 2], and [vague term 3]".

Haha, this gives me an idea for a foundation whose sole objective is to keep enlarging a pyramid, layer by layer, in perpetuity, with the only tricky part being managing the endowment so that it doesn't deplete too fast and allows continued investment in more pyramid-building supplies.

I've come to the conclusion that it is impossible, and that is probably ok if its impossible. Because if it is possible then that means society could eventually end up being run from the grave.

I think it just irks me that the end result is that the assets in question always end up captured by ideologues (usually left-leaning) when they could just be distributed out to some class of beneficiaries directly or throw into the market at semi-random so no one cause or entity receives all the benefit.

So the wealth isn't burned but also isn't available to be captured and 'squandered' by activists or layabouts.

Japan seems to have a handle on building long-lived, stable orgs, but that seems mostly the case of having the entire culture in which the org exists being aligned with that goal.

Haha, this gives me an idea for a foundation whose sole objective is to keep enlarging a pyramid, layer by layer, in perpetuity, with the only tricky part being managing the endowment so that it doesn't deplete too fast and allows continued investment in more pyramid-building supplies.

This has been one of the more fun thoughts I've had lately. In another thread we are discussing the costs and feasibility of it.

I think it just irks me that the end result is that the assets in question always end up captured by ideologues (usually left-leaning) when they could just be distributed out to some class of beneficiaries directly or throw into the market at semi-random so no one cause or entity receives all the benefit. So the wealth isn't burned but also isn't available to be captured and 'squandered' by activists or layabouts.

There does seem to be some natural competition between the layabouts and the activists. Many of the orgs I know that have become generic left wing mouth pieces, also tend to just burn through cash on useless employees. Its a bit like cancer. A tumor has to have some inter-cell cooperation to grow large, but its also not cooperating with the host body by being a cancer/tumor in the first place.

It might be a difference in our perspective. I don't really think of wealth as being "burned" if there are actual people spending and enjoying it. War, natural disasters, certain kinds of government Hoop Jumping, etc are the things that burn wealth to me. And having most of the organization's endowment sitting in the stock market also seems like a form of redistribution to everyone.

I don't really think of wealth as being "burned" if there are actual people spending and enjoying it.

I was talking more about 'burning' wealth as a means of keeping it from being captured. Like if your foundation has a vault full of cash, you instruct your successors to set it on fire before they let it fall into the hands of your enemies.

I DO agree that money put into the hands of ideological activists and layabouts will eventually find its way into the hands of more productive people.

And having most of the organization's endowment sitting in the stock market also seems like a form of redistribution to everyone.

Sort of, except the most immediate tangible benefits are accruing to people that aren't going to apply it towards your preferred goals. No reason to 'reward' them for failing to uphold your mission.

I think I can also take the flip side of all this too.

MORE organizations should be set up to dissolve once they either complete their goals or fail to complete those goals after a long time trying. If I set up the "Eliminate all Homelessness in [local town] Foundation" whose goal is to solve the very tangible, discrete problem of homelessness in my hometown, and there is still homelessness in that town 15 years later... I'd consider the endeavor a failure and close up shop.

Or take a Company that was set up to produce a particular product that is now completely obsolete and unneeded by the modern economy. Is it better for them to try and pivot or adapt to produce some new product to continue operating, or is it more honorable for the people operating the company to notice that the business has run its course, and it would be appropriate to wind things down and disperse the working Capital to the shareholders?

Why is the 'standard' lifecycle of a Corporation one that usually ends in a bankruptcy proceeding rather than a voluntary dissolution when it becomes clear that there's no path forward? I'm sure there's good rationales for it, I'm just curious.

That runs into the other issue of any organization ultimately becoming staffed by people whose livelihood is dependent on keeping the org going even at the cost of its intended mission.

SO, if I were a Billionaire maybe I'd take a very different track and fund a dozen or so orgs with $100 million each with the explicit goal of fixing some small and tractable issue using those funds, and have STRICT instructions that any given organization is to be dissolved and the funds dispersed at random once [Problem] is fully solved OR 25 years have passed and problem has not been solved.

Would probably have to design it so performance bonuses would be dispersed to the people operating the org if they can solve the problem quickly, since otherwise the incentive is drag things out and eat up all the funds.

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