domain:pedestrianobservations.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
I thought I remembered reading this, but it turns out I was thinking of Scott’s classic Against Murderism.
Anyone got any tips for alleviating psycho-spiritual damage?
Been in a pre-existing sour state for a while, but having just watched a guy walking around a local art museum taking pictures of Brueghel the Younger paintings and loudly asking ChatGPT to explain to him over speakerphone what the artworks were and how he should feel about them seems to have taken a chunk out of my soul that I didn’t realize I still had.
haroldbkny
1d ago
Well, good on you for reading that and trying to steelman it. No matter what, I always believe that all ideas should be considered at their own merit.
However, I'm not sure I fully agree with your analysis. I'm not the best at understanding those sorts of jargon-upon-jargony passages in this type of philosophy. I'm inclined to, at a certain point, simply write it off as something that's so detached from reality as to be worthless. I can understand a little better if I go really slow, but even so, I'm not really seeing how what you said relates to the passage you quoted. It seems to me that her point has something to do with (arbitrarily) claiming that metaphor is more like a solid, and metonymy is more like a fluid, presumably because fluids in real life have the capability of changing shape. But this to me already is an overstep into the ridiculous, because she is simply using her own personal associations to claim two unrelated abstract concepts are related, not justifying it, and then going on to use that towards her own end.
I don't really know where you're then getting this notion that we can draw any conclusion from what she says to how theoretical objects are thought up for use in scientific scenarios.
And in reply to the point that you think she's trying to make, I'd say, if people are choosing spherical cows for their thought experiments (not something I've personally heard of myself, but I'd believe that it's a thing if you say so), it's likely because it is a simpler concept to do math with, than fluid cows. And it's not un-justified, since our bodies behave more like solids than fluids under such conditions; we generally take up a certain volume, give or take a very small amount for our ability to deform our skin by pushing into it. Certainly the outside of our bodies generally stays together under normal conditions, and holds inner fluids inside, such that they have little effect on how we'd interact with an incline.
I'm well aware, and I'm against it. I'm a leftist at the object level while strongly disavowing cancel culture and persecution. This is an awkward position, awkward enough that I am not optimistic about the Left reforming itself from within. Hence, I view the anti-woke Right as potential allies in the shared project of bringing an end end cancel culture, with the aim of restoring a status quo that's better for everyone than a crab bucket where everybody is constantly persecuting everybody else.
Fair. And I do get where you're coming from, then, and I even agree with you to some extent that "these are dirty tactics, and our enemies are inherently rotten for using them, never mind whatever crazy stuff they're fighting for". Please bear in mind that 15 and even 10 years ago I was saying, with absolute sincerity, "I don't like what you're saying, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it".
The point where I part ways (I think) is:
the only hope was that the opposition would provide a credible alternative; for a while it seemed as though they might; but now they look like they're just content to stoop down to their enemies' level, abandoning all the high-minded principles they rightly criticized their enemies for flouting ten years ago. And thus we sink a little further towards total collapse
I don't think the result of seriously, fiercely enforcing neutrality will end up in a reasonably civilised, open academy. Partly because:
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'neutrality' is in the eye of the beholder: confirmation bias is often enough to dismiss non-woke conclusions as wrong or to (subconsciously) judge them much more harshly than friendly arguments. It's an improvement to go from 'X should be fired' to 'nobody takes X seriously and he can't get funding for his silly ideas', but it's still not great.
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I think we tried neutrality in the 90s and the result was to delay wokeness by 15 years max, maybe making it worse when it arrived. People bring up the metaphor of the tide coming into shore wave by wave and that is broadly how I see it. Putting a halt on overt politicking just means right-wingers being slowly frozen out anyway, without being able to point to any overtly bad behaviour and therefore without much recourse. The old theories are never actively repudiated (because that would be political), they become just something that ‘everyone knows’ and then the new generation arrives with no antibodies and apply them and we get woke. Contrast anti-socialism in the US (where there was a huge counterpressure and even in the 90s people would spit at the sound of the word), versus the UK where even in the post-Thatcher period you were broadly allowed to do it as long as you didn't say it. I know you're Left-wing and may consider that an objectively good thing, but I'm just comparing the results of the two backlashes.
That’s why I think that you with your stated goals should support some level of pushback past the point of, say, viewpoint neutrality as conceived of 10 years ago. Liberty in the traditional sense arose when all participants were tired of fighting the Wars of Religion, but you do have to have the wars first. Otherwise it’s just surrender and you will swiftly lose any power to enforce the conditions of peace.
On a purely personal note I have other reasons:
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As a base principle, I believe in fairness, which I define as 'equal treatment'. I don't like the idea that if someone hits, the other guy shouldn't hit back. He might choose not to, and that's admirable or foolish depending, but he absolutely has the right to.
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Personal disclosure: I was treated quite badly in academia by certain pre-woke academics, just before wokeness really kicked off and when I was much less right-wing than I am now. I'll be honest, I want payback. They made my life miserable when I stood up for just the principles you describe, and I want them to get the same back. Not more - I believe in fairness, as I said - but just the same. I don't claim that it's a noble impulse, but I'm adding it here as a disclosure.
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
Sure but the chaos would be limited to a single subthread instead of being scattered everywhere
birb_cromble
2d ago
At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process
You know, this reminds me of some of the studies done on flat hierarchy companies. By not using explicit organization and hierarchy, you get implicit organization and hierarchy, which is almost always dominated by people who are really good at deniably using soft power while pretending they aren't.
I wonder if something similar is happening in the sciences. By ignoring explicit politics, you accidentally optimize for people who are really good at politicking with plausible deniability.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The mechanism is that instead of limiting free speech and punishing academics for wrongthink, we win at free speech by fighting for the principle. This is what principled libertarian first amendment groups like FIRE are doing.
They failed. Utterly.
Yep, agreed. It's so fucking dumb and idiotic because it's sacrificing the ability to actually take a scientific approach towards solving problems in the future. Every time I hear this kind of shit from my colleagues I want to shake them: you are burning political capital for short-term gain.
Also see what I wrote above:
At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process. Gell-Mann amnesia is very real in academia: not just about the hot-button topics like race and gender, but also made-up shit like "learning styles", the efficiency of renewable energy, and a general understanding of politics and human psychology. Combine this with a massive ego because of success in one specific area, and you have the idiot savants that Nassim Taleb likes to harp on who cannot compromise or think outside the box. What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
It appears nobody has attempted to deport Tom Macdonald for that video. As I understand the law, one may only be deported for First Amendment protected activity on the personal (that is, not delegated) determination of the Secretary of State that it compromises a compelling US foreign policy interest. This means that "The Devil is a Democrat" is not deportable -- Macdonald would in fact be on thinner ice if he criticized Canada, as that would implicate US foreign policy interests, though it is unlikely Rubio would make such a determination.
This has nothing to do, however, with the Tao situation. And that particular law seems like it's going inevitably to head to the Supreme Court.
roystgnr
2d ago
There's an understatement. Looking at the most popular semi-objective metric for research output:
Tao's h-index is 116, with his 116 most-cited papers since 1998 having 116+ citations each (the top one is over 20,000), giving him an annualized h-index of 4.3. Hirsch's original suggestion was that a "successful scientist" after 20 years would be around 1 annualized, an "outstanding scientist" around 2, and a "truly unique" one around 3.
IMHO (very H, ironically, because of low h), a high annualized h-index is neither necessarily nor sufficient to say that someone's a good researcher, but it is pretty solid proof that someone didn't just burn out.
birb_cromble
2d ago
To ignore the input of scientists on these issues, like many on this forum want to do, seems incredibly myopic.
This stance would be far more defensible if the last five years hadn't happened. When it comes to "science" and "scientists", the institutions, their leaders, and their rank and file members have displayed what could be charitably described as a certain flexibility on topics where they should be trustworthy.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534
“In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”
Remember this one? Am I genuinely supposed to believe that was fair, impartial, disinterested Science talking?
From where I'm standing, it looks like the people that spent the last five years throwing their credibility on a big credibility bonfire and setting it on fire are upset that the fuel is gone.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
That will still inevitably devolve into separate discussions regardless unless I make the assumption that everyone is a hive-mind and will continue to have similar responses to follow-up posts without divergence would it not?
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Yeah no matter what way it is awkward and will still inevitably devolve into separate discussions regardless unless I make the assumption that everyone is a hive-mind and will continue to have similar responses to follow-up posts without divergence.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
we win at free speech by fighting for the principle.
Then it is never won. And that is fine! I admire Tolkien's long defeat, but we should not confuse it with something winnable.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?
I don't think so because I have principles about free speech that apply regardless of who started it, but if I understand you correctly revenge is a perfectly suitable argument for going against one's words.
The Left already is doing such things while mouthing banal principled platitudes, and has been for decades. It has won them near-complete control of the knowledge-making and -legitimating institutions in the country, including academia, journalism, with significant inroads into corporations and the legal profession. It has enabled the Left to take its social program from radical fringe to state-enforced orthodoxy. They have hijacked bureaucracies, lied about their intentions, ignored or subverted laws they did not agree with, including court decisions, and more.
They did these things not even for such a good reason as revenge, but instead out of pure will-to-power.
Remove the beam from thine own eye before complaining about the mote in another's.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
That argument would be a lot stronger if the dems hadn’t already done this, multiple times. There is a reason that all of the conservative leaning talent leaves for industry (it isn’t just about money)
The world isn't only made up of "allies" and "enemies", there's lots of people who have been fighting against censorship from the left who are fighting against it now too. You're always free to join us and keep your principles.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Yes, exactly. This is why current complaints about the lack of academic freedom cannot be taken seriously.
Do you think the only complaints about academic freedom come from the same people who were censoring before?
I hope you are aware there are tons of free speech and first amendment advocacy groups, left and right leaning libertarians, and other stuff like that who opposed left censorship before and are opposing right censorship now.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
A third of voters with postgrad degrees voted for Trump. Those people are probably not on-board with the SJ agenda.
While JT may well be opposed to everyone that went through college, I'm guessing the percentage that works for universities is much, much lower than 1/3.
But that's just it; I do pass bulletin boards in universities, and I despise those signs.
I am glad to have gone to university in less fraught times, and that I do not have the daily temptation to just remove the signs.
It’s only a “slow news cycle” because most of the other going-ons look bad for Trump, and posting anything that looks bad for Trump is tactically unsound for the right-leaning posters here; assuming it’s even crossed their new feeds.
Guess I could be too cynical about it, but I assume that’s why there’s been minimal discussion about other happenings, like the sweeping new steel & aluminum tariff expansions, Trump attempting to get his fingers into Samsung, administration staffers drawing up an “enemies list” of “woke corporations” to target for being insufficiently supportive of the OBBB, Oklahoma’s groundbreaking innovation in PragerU-based loyalty tests, the administration’s latest attempts to purge the Federal Reserve and install loyalists, the ongoing D.C. takeover that the administration has been looking at expanding to other Democratic cities, the escalating gerrymandering feud and mail-in-ballot targeting signifying the GOP’s looming attempt to try and ‘steal’ the midterms, and the much-vaunted Alaska summit amounting to a big fat nothing, etc.
Though TBF I guess there is an ongoing discussion about the continued fallout of the MAGA movement’s attempts to dismantle the country’s institutions up in the Terrence Tao subthread, so there’s that, I suppose.
Inspired by the discussion on science and scientists below, I want to bring up a series of books that I read as a teenager, and recently revisited this year: the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
1. Red Mars
Out of all the books in my childhood, this looms the largest. This book is almost the entire reason for me wanting to go to MIT (become an astronaut so I could bring life to dead planet like Sax), and my interest in political philosophy (so I could figure out who was right between John, Arkady, and Frank). Just as KSR shows Mars here as a canvas that people use to paint their idealized image of society, society that will really truly be constructed by ideology, rather than history, I used this book as a template for my own life trajectory: a way of prescribing meaning to another-wise empty scientific materialism by coopting some elements of ecoism (which I should have always known I liked, but anyway). I also recently discovered that one of my favorite board games, Terraforming Mars is heavily inspired by this book, which was also cool.
It's funny coming back to this and seeing what worked and what didn't. The science fiction elements are very obviously unbelievable. We can barely launch people into space these days, much less send millions of times more mass than we've ever sent to space far out of Earth's gravity well to Mars (I know that most of the delta G is from the surface to LEO but still). Aging won't be cured by simply repairing damaged DNA, and terraforming is likely to be a much slower process than as depicted in the book, if it's even physically possible at all.
The geopolitics is a little bit better. The overpopulation crisis on Earth that drives much of the plot is solving itself right now, but the hegemony of transnational corporations (a big element of the board game too) is happening before our eyes. Knowing a bit more about the other cultures (Arabs and Swiss mainly) depicted in this book also allowed their adaptions to the planet to carry more weight for me.
And of course the personal is still fantastic. The love triangle between John, Frank, and Maya. The enigma of what Frank actually wants out of Mars (even though we get two POV sections from him). The solid dependency of Nadia, the fiery revolutionary fervor of Arkady, and the conflict between desire for death (Ann CLAYbourne) and life (Saxifrage Russel), all were much more interesting to me this time around. And how each of these characters reflects their own emotions on the landscape of Mars (which I know much better because of the game). And perhaps that this reflects my philosophical shift too: away from materialism and towards something more interested in life itself.
2. Green Mars
If Red Mars was the book that made me want to be an astronaut, Green Mars is what made me want to become a biologist. There is just something so magical about turning a dead planet alive (not only through the introduction of plants, but also culture). Maybe what really will follow in the death-throes of rationality is a kind of Viriditas, or worshipping of life, that we see come to life in the green movement in this book.
In terms of plot, this book follows our protagonists from Red Mars (the first hundred) after they have fled underground following the failed revolution of 2061, as well as some of their children: the first natives of Mars. The plot spans the course of 60 years, and is all over the place. One part focuses on Terraforming, another on a political conference to decide the fate of Mars, and still another on the quiet semi-retirement of one of the expedition leaders around the shore of the expanding Hellas Sea.
The characters were hit or miss for me. I really connected with Sax Russell, who is a scientist like myself. Sax is pretty autistically interested in science and the natural world, until a traumatic brain injury causes a radical shift in his personality and he grows interested in other humans. Nirgal, one of the native martians, and Art, a diplomat sent by one of the "good" transnational corporations I also liked reading about, but the female characters (Maya and Ann) were a huge miss for me. I found Maya to be a horrible, self-absorbed person, and found it hard to relate to Ann's obsession with maintaining Mars in a pristine, but dead state.
In terms of themes, a couple things stuck out to me. Firstly, science is political. This is very obvious in the novel, as the terraforming efforts are a scientific endeavor, but also a thorny political problem whose resolution very much depends on scientific feasibility. This is no less true in our world: the debates about global warming, pollution, veganism, etc. are all political as well as scientific questions. By refusing to engage on the level of the political, as if it is somehow beneath them (or worse, like we see below with Terrance Tao, considering social issues "solved") scientists are shooting themselves and their interests in the foot.
Secondly, Robinson wants to highlight the effect that geography has on culture. We get extremely long (and often boring) descriptions of Martian geography to help us place the adaptions that various immigrant cultures are making as they come to Mars. No culture is unchanged, and this is at least partially because of the unique geographical (and other physical) quirks of the planet.
Finally, as some of our characters enter their ~15th decade, Green Mars brings into question the continuity of our identity and its dependence on memory. Are we still the same person that we were 20, 30, 100 years ago? At what point do memories become indistinguishable from facts we could have read in a textbook?
3. Blue Mars
This was my favorite book growing up as a kid, but I found this entry on re-read in the series to be hopelessly fragmented and meandering in its focus. Much of the plot of the book is concerned with the formation of a new government for Mars (a vaguely socialist federation with strict limits on immigration from earth). There's some exploration of colonization of the outer solar system, but it is also hopelessly myopic and bohemian: there's no true political or cultural diversity in any of the colonies that are visited. On a personal level, very few of the first hundred have survived, and the ones that have have basically completed their character arcs. There's some interesting stuff with dealing with memory but other than that I found this book rather forgettable on a personal level.
Conclusions
So why is this culture war? We live in a society that is, for better or worse, driven in large part by scientific progress and research. Many of the big questions of our time: climate change, artificial intelligence, the obesity crisis, the fertility crisis, etc. are not only political, but also scientific questions. To ignore the input of scientists on these issues, like many on this forum want to do, seems incredibly myopic. At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process. Gell-Mann amnesia is very real in academia: not just about the hot-button topics like race and gender, but also made-up shit like "learning styles", the efficiency of renewable energy, and a general understanding of politics and human psychology. Combine this with a massive ego because of success in one specific area, and you have the idiot savants that Nassim Taleb likes to harp on who cannot compromise or think outside the box. What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world. As Miguel Unamuno once said, perhaps apocryphally, vencer no es convencer (to defeat is not to convince). The strain of liberal (and perhaps now woke) thought that currently dominates universities is not going to be able to beat the world into submission to its ideas, it has to learn how to participate in the political process and convince people (and perhaps be convinced in turn). Perhaps too this is a lesson that the rationalist community could learn as well, although I think most of you here at TheMotte have absorbed it plenty well.
For me on a personal level this series of books has helped to clarify what a future spiritual belief system might look like for me and the world. I’ve always struggled with the anthropocentrism of Christianity: perhaps something like Viriditas combined with Nietzchian vitalism could expand on the weak points I see in the Christian system.
FistfullOfCrows
2d ago
He's not a neutral party. I actually would also like whole divisions of X studies wiped off the universities, so my views aren't neutral either.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
Do you expect demands of political loyalty to result in better science when they are coming from the nationalist right rather than the woke left?
Quite probably yes, except some strains of conservationism.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
2d ago
Of course. I believe we need another 30 years war like cycle to remind everyone why the tech of liberal tolerance was developed in the first place.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
The other position is that the academics forced to parrot spurious diversity statements to keep their jobs are, you know, the victims, with ideologically-captured admin as the bad guys. The second position seems trivially the correct framing to me, and wanting to punish the academics as collaborators looks about as absurd as saying you're going to topple a tyrant to liberate the people, then executing anyone who ever saluted the tyrant at gunpoint.
Various other fictional examples to mind: "We have finally invented the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel, Don't Invent The Torment Nexus;" "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." A non-fictional example could be underrated details of the Scopes "monkey" trial.
And of the examples you've chosen- climate change, artificial intelligence, the obesity crisis, the fertility crisis- they are also the product of scientists! Are they the only solution to problems they created? Bit of a racket, don't you think? (I'm being a bit facetious, as I think deep green ecology is even worse)
I think you're gesturing towards something interesting but I'm not quite grokking what "this" is, exactly. The tendency of scientists towards arrogance and Gell-Mann amnesia? Their tendency to consider the world perfectable and to be shaped in their image?
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