domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
FtSoA
15hr ago
I don't know why anyone take him seriously after the hilariously manufactured pipeline attack story.
FtSoA
15hr ago
I can't think of a worse set of arguments made by proponents of the US letting Ukraine suffer a defeat.
- Putin defeating Ukraine and then being emboldened to threaten small NATO neighbors increases risk of WWIII way more than supporting Ukraine does.
- The US/West failing to sufficiently back Ukraine emboldens China and other would-be aggressors when they do their risk calculations.
faceh
15hr ago
Ukraine didn't want to agree too even though they have, at present, a snowball's chance in hell of regaining any territory and are inexorably losing more at an escalating pace.
Curious about where the "escalating pace" point comes from.
I'm too bubbled up on this, I think. I occasionally see videos of Russians getting mowed down by FPV drones or the Ukrainians pulling off a strike inside Russian motherland territory, and then usually Russian retaliation, but very few updates on battle line movement.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
15hr ago
I'm trying to suggest that Ada Lovelace (much as I respect her) wasn't a leader of people by any stretch of the imagination. You can at least argue for Tubman in that she was a kind of leader. It's not a very good case, but you can make it. Lovelace? There's absolutely nothing there besides pure diversity quota thinking.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
15hr ago
I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time
That is definitely what I understood you to be arguing when you said "All of the video game equivalents of crack cocaine have generally released within the last 15 years". If that's not the case, fair enough.
Either way I disagree with your broader point, lol. Gaming really is in a slump after the golden age of the 90s-00s imo. But I don't have any arguments you probably haven't seen before, so we can agree to disagree on that point.
TowardsPanna
16hr ago
Are you trying to suggest that Harriet Tubman was not one of the great leaders and stateswomen of civilizations? Do better.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
16hr ago
Oh yeah, already played that one. It's very fun and the beavers are cute. Timberborn has actually been the reference point I've been giving friends for CoI, because both games kind of feel like someone had fun programming a physics engine (water/soil), and then came up with a game to make use of it. Which isn't a knock on either game, I think they're both great! Just a funny similarity that stood out to me.
magicalkittycat
16hr ago
Fundamentally there's only one way for an invasion to stop and that's for the invaders to either win or give up (either voluntary or by force).
If Ukraine stops fighting back and lets Russia win easily, then the US just has major egg on our face, especially when we've been able to help hold back Russian forces for this long while barely even lifting a pinky. We're supposed to be this big strong global superpower, leader of the free world, and our allies in Asia are watching how we treat our allies in Europe. Taiwan is watching, South Korea is watching. This is one of the big pressures on Trump, a losing Ukraine and a winning Russia is a morale victory for anti-American demagogues and a strong sign to China that we will fold on Taiwan.
We leave the vacuum out of cowardice and fear, our enemies will gladly fill it.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
16hr ago
The politicians who claimed to be picking the "be fucking reasonable" option turned out to, by revealed preference, favor the "let them all in, yes, even the obvious fakers and criminals" option.
Trump has mostly followed legal procedure. Legal procedure on paper for immigration law is actually quite harsh -- and yes, third party deportation is right there in the statutes. The big exception is the Alien Enemies Act stuff. (Maryland Dad was a violation of procedure, but almost certainly just a normal fuckup)
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
16hr ago
Civ 7 looks so bad. It's not even Civ any more, just another game with Civ branding. Then on top of that you have the legion of bugs that it launched with, and... yeah it's not a good look for Firaxis. People try to defend the game by saying "oh the new Civ game is always controversial on release", but I was there for Civ 5 and 6. Neither was even close to being as negatively received as 7 has been.
And don't even get me started on the sheer level of "diversity hire" leader picks they sunk to. This problem was in 6 as well (looking at you, Catherine de Medici), but 7 takes it to the next level. It's ridiculous.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16hr ago
Yeah, Frozen II songs were a little too on-the-nose.
This will all make sense when I am older
Someday, I will see that this makes sense
One day when I'm old and wise
I'll think back and realize
That these were all completely normal events
Ah
I'll have all the answers when I'm older
Like why we're in this dark enchanted wood
I know in a couple years
These will seem like childish fears
And so I know this isn't bad, it's good
There is a certain type of "Children's" entertainment that is really geared towards Parents. Books like "Love You Forever." Episodes of Bluey (I know this is controversial, but there are more than a few episodes of Bluey that have little interest to kids but is more geared toward teaching the parent.)
Frozen II is kinda there. Or rather, it's geared towards the 20 year olds who will never have kids but can reflect on their own childhood.
oats_son
16hr ago
I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time, I'm just trying to push back against "gaming's golden age ended decades ago" point. I like that there's good stuff in the 90s. I'm happy it mostly still exists for weirdos who want to play through the best stuff. I would be very sad to give up the more recent stuff in some hypothetical world where gaming was executed for writing crimes against humanity sometime in the mid 2010s, like I suspect some hardliners might want.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
16hr ago
To be fair wide is perfectly viable in Civ 5, I play that way myself. You will have a harder time in the early game (pro tip: settle cities on top of new luxuries so you get the happiness bonus immediately), but it's quite doable. Unless you're playing against humans, 4-city tradition is an optimization, not a necessity.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
16hr ago
Civ dates back to the early 90s, and Dwarf Fortress to the early 2000s. For another example, people used to get in trouble playing Doom at work because the game was just that good. There were very addictive games being made 20-30 years ago too.
Yeah, this case seems ridiculous on its face. But then, Trump is a ridiculous figure.
All that needed to happen , anywhere, was for someone else to have picked the "be fucking reasonable" option. Part of the reason I'm so contemptuous of the moralistic line is that people seemed to have gotten drunk on their own Koolaid and made everything worse.
ArmedTooHeavily
16hr ago
You're trying too hard, obvious bait is obvious.
Blueberry
16hr ago
If Zelensky were to make peace, he'd have to fight the nationalists who won't give up this easily
Isn’t that true for any Ukrainian President? How would a US replacement/puppet be accepted?
While Russia is currently winning, they are winning very very very slowly. The war can go on for a long time.
crushedoranges
16hr ago
The Chinese have a parochial and xenophobic term for foreigners of all stripes, 鬼佬 (Gweilo). literally 'ghoul man' or poetically, 'foreign devil'.
It is a useful term for an malevolent foreigner who intends you harm, who acts disingenuously with lies and deceit.
A man who asks you to define your self-worth by the good treatment of foreigners and not the consideration of your countrymen is definitely a 'foreign devil!'
Americans would be well advised to rectify this appropriate name for such individuals, and recognize such people as for who they are.
WhiningCoil
16hr ago
If it weren't for health insurance and my daughter with a chronic condition, I'd consider myself done. It's not a super bad chronic condition, mind you. Honestly it's barely an inconvenience we've gotten so used to it. But... it still exist and could theoretically rear it's ugly head in a major way.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
16hr ago
I’m not seeing the problem with Francophone. Vicky 3 starts in 1830, right? [At that time, t]hey’ve been doing business in French for longer than the U.S. has existed.
IMO, allowing Corsicans to have two different languages is unreasonable when other cultures do not get such an opportunity. It enables gamey behavior like playing as Germany, releasing the country of Corsica as a puppet, and granting to it both French land and Italian land. And it makes Corsicans more accepted by the French govt. than they should be.
For an analogous situation, look at the Ashkenazi culture. Realistically, Ashkenazi should speak German as well as Yiddish. But a comment in the game files explicitly notes that the German-Speaking trait was not given to the Ashkenazi in the game because it would increase their acceptance to an unrealistic degree.
Speaking of which—how likely is it that a pro/anti-slavery culture which has triggered a civil war actually would enact the relevant policy? I would expect it to be near 100%, which is presumably why Paradox hardcoded it. And are there other hardcoded war→policies?
Normally, the USA will be in the middle of enacting Slavery Banned, the CSA will secede rolled back to Legacy Slavery through the normal secession mechanic, and then the events will immediately force the USA into Slavery Banned and the CSA into Slave Trade. If the forced law changes are removed: It is possible but unlikely that a CSA politician with the Slaver ideology will enact Slave Trade. (Note that the Pro-Slavery ideology espoused by the CSA's Landowners interest group likes Slave Trade no more strongly than it likes Legacy Slavery, so without a special Slaver leader it will not go all the way to Slave Trade.) And it is possible but unlikely that the USA's in-progress natural law change to Slavery Banned will fail, causing it to keep Legacy Slavery.
Likewise, I imagine that a pro-slavery USA could enact Slave Trade, and then a seceding FSA could roll back only to Legacy Slavery rather than going all the way to Slavery Banned. But that's just speculation, as I haven't actually seen it happen.
If there are any other forced law changes, I haven't noticed them.
You’re going to have to explain what “incorporation” is supposed to represent if you want commentary on those.
Essentially, Victoria's "incorporated states" are the same as Europa Universalis's "core provinces" and Crusader Kings's "de jure subject titles". The people in incorporated states have to pay taxes, but also can vote and receive the benefits of govt. policies like schools and hospitals.
In the words of Wikipedia: "American territories are under American sovereignty and may be treated as part of the U.S. proper in some ways and not others (i.e., territories belong to, but are not considered part of the U.S.). Unincorporated territories in particular are not considered to be integral parts of the U.S., and the Constitution of the United States applies only partially in those territories."
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Not at all implausible, assuming the language is Spanish, to just… go about life not using English in the USA. There’s plenty of Spanish-language services available and immigration services is used to speaking Spanish. It probably means languages aren’t the strong suit here, but not much else.
Completely normal. My mom has been in the US 30 years and she doesn't speak English. It helps that a lot of businesses are bilingual, and there are even some that are exclusively Spanish. For example, before the internet took over television, she could watch Univision and Telemundo. And, of course, South Florida is full of Hispanics, so she has plenty of other people to talk to.
My mom has tried to learn English, even taking classes at a local community college, but she failed. This is not surprising. Most people lose the ability to learn a new language after they become adults, and most people only have the intelligence to speak one language really well anyway.
From "Language is Culture" by Spandrell:
Mr. Lee held the popular idea that language was a zero-sum game? No, Mr. Lee understood the commonsensical idea that your brain has limited storage capacity. Like anything else. Your brain is made of atoms. It is not made of magic. It is not made of godly dust. It is a material thing. It is, in a sense, a container of information, and information takes space. It obviously does in computers; pray tell, NYT, why the brain should have infinite capacity? It doesn't make sense.
Now I don't know if LKY thought of it in these terms. I think that, as a language learner, he went by experience. I guess the more time he spent practicing Mandarin, or Hokkien, or Malay, the worse his English prose got. And that's exactly how it works. Happens to me all the time, and happens to anyone who uses 2 or more languages regularly. The more different the languages, the less commons structures they share, the more acute the problem. Again, there is no reason why it should not be so. Information takes space. It isn't hard.
Alas, it is true that academic linguists will not tell you this, even though they probably did in the 1950s. That is not because common sense has been "refuted". It is because since the 1960s academia has morphed into a worldwide racket of fraud and deceit. If you read this blog you already know that; economics is bogus, climate science is bogus, psychology is bogus; even more than half of medical papers are bogus. Well, surprise surprise, linguistics is also bogus. The language learning industry is huge. There's a lot of money in telling people that the brain is made of magic dust, that they can learn whatever they want whenever they want, as long as they give you money. 3 languages at the same time? Go for it! Kids are like sponges, they can learn anything. No, they can't.
Now of course, all human traits are distributed in a Gaussian curve. Some kids are pretty good, can learn 3 or 4 languages given some exposure. Some can't even speak 1 language properly by the time they enter primary school. Lee Kuan Yew, who was in charge of spending Singapore's money, realized he didn't have money to waste, and he took what was the most rational decision: let's focus on having everyone learn English, then let's make some half-assed effort at teaching a "mother tongue"; mostly for political reasons, so tribalists didn't complain. Some kids will learn the mother tongue well; most won't. Not the government's problem. Lee Kuan Yew was CEO and what he wanted was an efficient workforce, so English it was. And English he got. Well, kind of.
Japanese researchers, fortunately isolated from their American comrades because of their ineptitude at learning English, have long found that Brazilian immigrants in Japan often end up not bilingual, but "halflingual". They end up speaking shitty Portuguese and even shittier Japanese. Because Japanese is hard, they don't speak it at home, and whatever they speak at home tends to have very low vocabulary levels. So they end up sounding retarded even if they really aren't.
You know who else sounds retarded? Singaporeans. OK, sorry, that's overly harsh. I apologize to my Singaporean readers, I love you all. But I had to say it. With all due respect, Singaporeans in general don't speak proper English. They speak Singlish, which is a pidgin English with a fair amount of Chinese grammar and vocabulary baked in, and a pretty weird (and what sounds to me a pretty big Indian influence) pronunciation. As you may remember, even Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, by every account a 150 IQ genius, speaks what can only be described as pretty goofy English. Again, it's not their fault, it's just the unintended consequence of public language policy.
How did this happen? By forcing diglossia (widespread bilingualism) on Singapore. After independence most people spoke some either Chinese dialect at home, Malay or Tamil. The schools taught English, what is a foreign language to everyone. So yes, they learned, the minimum required to pass the exams, and went on with their daily lives. Given that kids spent almost more time at school than at home, eventually the exposure of English was greater than their respective languages. Let's say a random Singaporean teen was exposed to 65% English and 35% Hokkien during their formative years. So, surprise surprise, he ended up speaking a language which is 65% English and 35% Hokkien, and so did most everyone else, with all languages and dialects getting some of their stuff in this hodgepodge lingua franca that evolved into Singlish. And once that got widespread it became almost impossible to change.
My mother is going to die without ever learning English. But that's OK. I speak heavily accented English, and if I ever have children they will speak English as their native language. Assimilation is a generational process; just like no individual organism ever evolves, but rather the population evolves, no individual immigrant ever fully assimilates, but their lineage does.
From "Immigrant Assimilation Is Obviously High" by Bryan Caplan:
In The Culture Transplant, my colleague Garett Jones writes as if there is overwhelming evidence that assimilation is slow. So overwhelming, in fact, that you’d have to be a blind fool to deny it. I think his reading of the academic research is deeply wrong. But even if he were correctly summarizing what we know from the data, he’d be deeply confused about the actual facts about assimilation.
What are these “actual facts”?
First, if you compare first-generation immigrants to people from their countries of origin, they’re very different. First-generation immigrants proverbially do straddle two worlds. Yes, most seem very foreign to natives in their new country. But they also seem very foreign to friends and family from their original country! I’ve travelled all over the world, and met hundreds of first-generation immigrants in the U.S. My wife is a first-generation immigrant. I see with my own eyes that their assimilation, though far from complete, is high. If your eyes are open, you’ll see it, too.
Second, if you compare the children of immigrants to their parents, they are very different. A contrast of night and day. Indeed, I’ve never met an immigrant parent who failed to notice that their kids had massively assimilated. Usually, though not always, to the parents’ dismay. And again, I’ve known many hundreds of second-generation immigrants. They’re some of the people I know best in the world. All four of my children are second-generation immigrants. If any of them still had one foot in Romania, I would know it
If you want to quickly assess an individual’s assimilation, your best bet really is to listen to how they talk. If they can’t speak the local language at all, they’re probably not assimilated at all. If they speak the local language with a thick accent, they’re moderately assimilated. A mild accent? Highly assimilated. No accent? Then their assimilation approaches 100%. If you’ve met a lot of immigrants, you know this to be true.
Crowstep
16hr ago
Please, stick around. Every forum needs new blood.
If you're interested, the origins of the forum are that there is a blogger called Scott Alexander. His subreddit had a politics discussion thread. This thread moved to its own subreddit (r/themotte) and later to this site.
The aspiration is for civil, charitable political discussion and a place where tone is moderated rather than content.
I agree that BC and AT weren't banned for leftism.
I was more saying that the forum can be perceived as a "right wing secret club" because, for example, a feminist might consider some of the writings about feminism to be boo outgroup, only there are no feminists here. Whereas a comment that is around the line of boo outgroup towards the right will be read by many people who are right leaning, so there are many more chances for an individual reading it to decide that it is over the line and create a hostile discussion.
This isn't necessarily an insult against the mods, because it is admittedly hard to decide when things are right on the line.
Suggestion:
Phrase your replies as prompts for Grok or any of the image generators.
For example, @FiveHourMarathon would obviously be:
an anthropomorphized wawa sandwich that lifts a lot of heavy barbells, Graffiti art style.More options
Context Copy link