domain:astralcodexten.com
anon_
1m ago
The WSJ isn't just a newspaper in the same way that Lord of the Rings is not just a book.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3m ago
Thanks for this post - it's an interesting collection of observations/opinions, though having experienced almost all the places on your list I do not agree with some of them. Regarding your Dresden guy, it seems very natural to me how he would end up with that preference. If you live in Dresden, you spend approximately your whole life having European baroque built at any possible budget, preserved in any state of (dis)repair, and restored anywhere on the spectrum from convincing to cheap China/Las Vegas themeparkery shoved down your throat.
To begin with, liking the middle ages is not a particularly intellectuality-signalling preference in the German context - if he wanted to score those points, by his background he would in fact more likely have been dissecting the details of whatever Rococo creamcake topping stucco you were marvelling at. Are you sure you weren't inadvertently rating him according to an American scorecard? I recall noticing that at my grad school (NE US), there was a clique of locals who were frequent renaissance faire/medieval reenactment festival goers and this slotted into a wider strategy of signalling sophistication to each other, while in Germany the counterparts to those are largely considered an extremely basic and plebeian pastime.
roystgnr
4m ago
reject the axiom of choice
I get your point, but this is a bad example - the reason (AC) is an axiom and not a theorem is because you can reject it and still have a self-consistent system of mathematics at the end. There's stuff you can't prove without it, but there's much more you can still do without it, and also proving exactly which theorems do or don't depend on it is sometimes an interesting contribution to mathematics in itself. That's probably a politically acceptable category of contribution, too, despite flirting with (AC), if the results are phrased like "Look what foolish falsehoods the imperialist oppressors could have tricked you into if not for Dear Leader's wisdom that Choice Is A Lie!"
Rejecting an actual theorem in this fashion would be a disaster. The Principle of Explosion is bad enough that I wouldn't be surprised to see mathematicians deciding that they'd rather go out in full Kaczynski style with non-metaphorical explosions.
I think the important thing for avoiding political targeting of a field's theories isn't whether the field is "pure", but whether its complex-to-apply theories lead to simple-to-verify results. Math often does this, with problems whose solutions require advanced math to find but only basic math to check, but really much-less-pure engineering is the king here. Eventually either a nuke goes boom or it doesn't; either a rocket goes up or it doesn't. Being good at engineering rockets eventually got Korolev a reprieve from the Gulag, whereas being a perfect historian or economist would have probably made his fate worse.
JarJarJedi
13m ago
Thanks, the first one looks good, even though I don't see a single D cosponsor, but at least the majority of Dems voted for it. One has to wonder though if it were about denouncing Nazis, would there be 86 congressmen saying "nah" and another 14 saying "I don't care so much I can't even form an opinion on this".
For the second one, it sounds like communism is so much dead the Congress feels they need to pass federal legislation to counter its influence in the schools (despite school programs traditionally being a local matter and not the federal Congressional matter). If it's politically dead the politicians certainly don't think so. But again, it is encouraging to see the majority of Dems voting for it.
phailyoor
17m ago
Wow! You asked chatgpt to solve a dead simple toy problem, and it solved it! I'm so impressed!!!! Surely this means that chatgpt is definitely capable of handling actual real world tasks.
Shrike
21m ago
My point isn't that a totalitarian system couldn't have decided to do fake physics. My point is that if you, Supreme Dictator For Life decide to do real physics it's probably just a bit easier to stick your head in from time to time and figure out if they are doing real or fake physics, because you can see if people are landing on the moon and making ballistic missiles that hit their targets and so forth.
The softer the discipline, the harder it becomes for people without specialized training to articulate the problems with the discipline when it goes off the rails (for instance you don't need literary training to complain about modern literature, but it helps – whereas if someone's rocket misses the moon, it missed the moon and you don't need to understand rocket science at all to notice that.)
Now, arguably today physics has advanced to the point where it's less tangible at the cutting edges! But I think you see my suggestion.
Ioper
24m ago
Fun fact: Japan has almost 2x the tfr of korea. Japan has managed to stabilise and even reverse their negative the trend somewhat while Korea breaks new records of low tfr every year.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
35m ago
Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life
Farage has, fairly obviously, not had his life destroyed. He makes more money in his Saturday job as a TV talking head than the average professional makes in a 50-hour week.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
40m ago
That's because dispatching (at least for the food delivery company) is like playing an RTS that isn't fun. On that note I do find it amusing and maybe a little bit disturbing that there are food delivery simulation games.
oats_son
44m ago
I don't really understand how you can characterize South Korea as being on the way up whereas Japan is rapidly declining. Japan is older at median age 49 vs South Korea's 45, but 45 is still pretty old. They both have similar economies with similar awful work cultures and similar face cultures. Spaces are clean and well designed in both. Technology is cutting edge in both. What outdated traditions are suffocating you in Japan? Are you sure that outdated traditions aren't suffocating you in South Korea? There are some things worse than outdated traditions, like shudder kpop...
roystgnr
44m ago
Apparently they cut some kind of dog cancer research program that my mom always thought was dumb
I know this is only a side note to your main point, but could you explain why?
We're getting better about allowing terminally-ill patients access to experimental treatments, but even in a libertarian utopia there's always going to be a lot of cases where you'd like to learn faster via experiment but where you have a tough time getting volunteers - e.g. with cancers these days there's typically a non-experimental treatment that's not ideal but that's good enough to not leave people desperate for a still-in-testing alternative. Plus, with any research of medical conditions which are linked to aging there's always going to be some benefit to being able to do studies with a population that ages five times as fast.
On the other hand, I could see an argument that dogs specifically are pointless here - start research in mice where you get even faster aging and less ethical concern over their deaths, finish (the animal testing phase of) research in monkeys or apes when you need closer relatives to humans, and then maybe you want to just skip right over dogs.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
45m ago
Roughly speaking, it'll get me back to grossing what I was working full-time at University 2 Go in 2023 (so, around a 30% raise depending on where the final offer lands at), except with a W2 and nice benefits package instead of a 1099 and buying my own Obamacare, and without having to run my car into the ground driving ~30K city miles a year for work (I'm a decent shadetree mechanic, so I was able to save on expenses there, but post-covid price increases in used cars, insurance, auto parts, and shop labor have made being any variety of self-employed driver harder than it used to be.).
So, in short, I'm not going to be impressing anybody but it's an honestly life-changing difference while hopefully starting an actual career instead of a comfortable and easy but dead-end job at a tiny business (that I stayed at way too long; there was nothing comfortable about working for draft beer corp). I can go back to not worrying much about money, should be able to retire my debt fairly quickly, and so on.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
45m ago
· Edited 42m ago
It depends on what you're looking for and what your interests are.
I've been part of a lot of tight-knit communities in /vg/ over the years, where we play games together, watch streams together, etc. I've made actual friends based on our shared interests in certain games. Lots of very memorable anime watch-alongs on /a/.
/pol/ was a magical place during the 2016 election, and also during early 2020 at the start of covid, although it's declined a lot since then. But even then I still check the Ukraine threads there sometimes.
I agree that TheMotte is a very valuable and unique forum. Certainly the highest IQ general-purpose forum I've ever encountered on the internet. There's no other place where so many people are willing and able to speak eloquently and at length about politics/philosophy from an anti-woke perspective (you can discuss similar topics on 4chan's /lit/ and /his/ boards, but the level of discussion doesn't match what you get here). But I still feel that ultimately, TheMotte would be easier to replace and there are more alternative venues that serve similar functions for me. 4chan occupies a very unique place in internet culture that nothing else could ever fully replace. A lot of small indie projects that eventually got big, started out with just word of mouth on 4chan. It's the central communication network of the counter-culture; it's the last major online forum that isn't fully controlled by the mainstream narrative.
Basically, TheMotte is like a beloved local pub, whereas 4chan is Renaissance Florence. If I had to choose, I'd rather sacrifice the pub than the whole city.
UrgentSloth
45m ago
Can you actually write a law that can be enforced without the need for a trial?
I said "without prosecutors", as I was thinking of civil causes of action. That wouldn't take it out of the courtroom totally.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
52m ago
YouGov ran the poll under Nteta's direction:
“Hours after assuming the presidency, Donald Trump signed a string of executive orders aimed at ending the federal government’s DEI programs, policies and mandates,” says Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
53m ago
Your response made me reflect on my own secondary education, where my school district certainly punched above its demographic weight in terms of educational quality. When I look back at it in terms of my personal experience, I remember specific teachers who were highly effective and probably had a profound impact on the way I think and reason about things. I also had plenty of teachers who were completely uninspiring and gave no indication during class that they had an IQ above room temperature (maybe they were different in their personal life). I actually don't think about the textbooks or exam structures at all, but maybe that's because it's a bit easier to remember human beings rather than pens and paper.[1]
In retrospect, I think what made those highly effective teachers exceptional is that they really seemed to know more than I could imagine even learning at that time in my life. They also seemed genuinely keen on sharing not just that knowledge, but in little ways their own personal philosophies on how to properly learn. Is the "industrial scale" version of this identifying these highly effective teachers at scale, properly compensating them, and just letting them loose on our youth?
Tying into the second paragraph of your response, I think I just got real fucking lucky that my father's blue collar job transferred him to a semi-rural Midwestern town that somehow managed to gracefully keep up with the regional transition from a populace working on assembly lines to working in cubicles. Our sister city across the county line didn't fair nearly as well: it smelled twice as shitty, had 75% of the median household income, and sent almost no one to our state's flagship university. The question it provokes: what's the incentive structure for the ruling class for organizing education in these two cities over the coming years?
- [1] Actually, funny anecdote, there was one AP class that a lot of the "jocks" took because the teacher presented as hypermasculine while he wasn't teaching (I think he was the strength coach for the football team?). But the thing was, he was actually a pretty damn good teacher as well. A bunch of boneheads accidentally got a pretty good European history education because of masculine vibes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
56m ago
Mars' gravity well is shallow enough that you can build a space elevator with present-day materials technology, which means that to a civilisation capable of colonising Mars getting out of the gravity well is cheap.
ControlsFreak
57m ago
What about provision as an alternative to deprivation? What would that look like?
Indeed. What would that look like? Any ideas? Given that you seem to sometimes use not-quite-standard language, I think a whole lot can be cleared up if you just describe what you think your use of this language looks like.
ChickenOverlord
57m ago
Do you mean Libya?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
This is the way pretty much any sort of energy thing from environmentalists goes. As long as it is expensive, small, and impractical, it's something they point to so they can claim their banning of all the good stuff won't actually leave us shivering in the dark. Once someone demonstrates the new "clean" thing can be done at scale, it's the Devil. Dams kill fish, wind kills birds, solar damages the delicate desert ecosystems (and reduces the albedo of the planet), the transmission lines for all cut off animal migration corridors, and electric cars help Bad Orange Man.
But really, Musk aligning with Trump just pushed up the timetable a bit. The idea was always to take most of the cars away, not replace them with electric ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
One of the nice things about hard sciences like math and physics (and, if I had to guess, one of the reasons the Soviets performed so well in it - aside, of course, from having a good pool of genuine talent) is that you can run standardized objective tests for it pretty easily...and you can maintain oversight of it pretty easily, I would guess, relative to softer sciences.
Biology is somewhat softer than physics, but not enough that the totalitarian system that did Lysenkoism or lied about the death of Laika couldn't have done Arische Physik if it wanted to. The CPSU leadership made a deliberate decision to give physicists in general, and nuclear physicists in particular, a level of intellectual freedom it denied to everyone else.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
but was prevented from cutting the welfare-warfare state
Nice use of the passive voice here. Reagan explicitly supported expanding the warfare state, and his big idea on the welfare state side was that free market policies would allow the economy to outgrow the cost of an aging population. Reagan's White House economic team were believers in starving the beast and the two-Santa theory - not in cutting spending themselves.
Shrike
1hr ago
It won't generate literally zero revenue in an accounting sense, though it might damage overall tax revenue, on account of depressing economic activity while not raising much money. Tariffs are highly distortionary.
Sure.
The proper remedy for this would be heavy investments in industrial automation (the US is embarrassingly under-roboticized considering it's the world's most advanced economy) and closer trade ties with allied countries (e.g. Mexico).
Yes, I agree with this. I'm not sure this is enough for reshoring, though, based on conversations I've had with others.
Autarkic economic policy [...] We don't produce a lot of cheap consumer goods, but I don't see a reason to care that we're buying t-shirts from Vietnam instead of Mississippi.
Right, I care a lot less about cheap consumer goods than I do limited autarky by which I mean "do we have our energy, food and basic staples, and military supply chain secured against hostile actors." Obviously this doesn't preclude trade – I think there are a number of foreign suppliers (like a number of our European allies, or Mexico) that it would be safe to rely on.
We don't have this, and we should.
More importantly, the crude transactionalism doesn't speak highly of the current admin's thought processes.
You can be impressed or not, but my point was that the administration was using a "whole cloth" approach to thinking about what they were doing militarily or economically. (Or at least Vance is. Perhaps his thinking does not carry over.)
Personally I think this approach is a baby step towards a grand strategy that the United States needs to actually have and follow daggumit so I hope that the administration continues to refine it.
I guess you're going to have to clarify what you mean by "secret sauce",
Fundamentally, just nonpublic knowledge.
I think this is grading Trump on an outrageous curve.
Less grading on a curve, and more withholding judgment.
I don't see much reason to extend him charity on this
One of the things that I have found is that my charity or lack thereof can't change policy. However, I sometimes can learn things when I try to figure out why things I don't understand are happening, instead of chalking it up to incompetence. I hope I've made it very clear that I don't rule incompetence out, but assuming that isn't really very interesting or educational.
Indeed. What makes you think it's a durable solution?
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