domain:dualn-back.com
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
6d ago
Sometimes slaves were actually paid. I've seen some account books and journals from one particular mediumish farm in the 1850s-60s (to the best of my recollection, the total population was the owner and his wife and about 5 children, plus maybe 4-5 hired workers and 20-25 slaves, who were about 20% men, 20% women, and 60% children). Speaking only for that one location, and purely from an accounting perspective, there wasn't much difference between hired workers and enslaved workers, except that the enslaved workers were usually paid less per capita. Most of the pay wasn't in money, it was in produce, which could be consumed by the workers and their families (this was how they got their food for the year), or be taken to market and sold for cash or bartered for other things. Bacon was a big deal. It's been a while, but as I recall, the hired workers were only paid on merit (agreed upon wages, but the better ones were paid more, and there was some arrangement about produce vs. cash), but payment to the enslaved workers was based on both merit and family size. (That is, when a slave had a baby, that family got more pay, which is to say, more food.) The owner's family also worked, but weren't paid directly, of course.
All workers lived on the farm, but I have to assume that the hired workers had better quarters, and the family had a nice house. In other respects, like health care, the slaves seem to have been treated as kind of a disreputable offshoot of the family, like an adult child with Down Syndrome, who had to be looked after and kept out of trouble and put to as much productive work as possible. But one or two of the enslaved workers were actually trusted as much as the more reliable hired workers, to be able to independently take goods to market, sell them for a fair price, and return with the proceeds.
I don't recall seeing any incidents of leaving, during the period I looked at, but I'd assume that local law enforcement would be harsh, not to mention that most people in the area would at least recognize them. They left the farm every Sunday to go to the "colored people's church", after all. And I seem to recall something about one of the young (black, enslaved) men courting a (black, enslaved) girl from another farm, which implies that they had some sort of a social web.
That's just one particular time and place, of course, and I suspect it was much better conditions than average.
It's never left my mind, and is both the reason I posted the OP and the reason I'd be interested in hearing what people liked about HPMOR.
This thread, via Orwell, is me poking at the same general idea. Sherlock Holmes is another example, as is Orson Scott Card from Ender's Game, and I think Tolkien's negative assessment of Frank Herbert's Dune. For examples of the opposite, one of my favorites is Hammer's Slammers, by David Drake, especially the first chapter of the first book.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Sure, but it's not competing with most series. Some people are looking for a more sprawling project. See comparisons here.
I don't know a lot of people who would buy an entire series of doorstopper fantasy novels and then read them back-to-back. It's a different story for buying the new Sanderson book when it comes out. Following a serial is even less of an imposition.
That's not to say it makes for good literature. If you're looking to uplift your human spirit or to gain cred with humanities majors, Tolstoy will be much more efficient.
YouEssAyyy
6d ago
A cynical political reading would be the democrats want to be seen as “doing something” on immigration. Immigration is the 1st or 2nd best issue for Trump (along with inflation) so the democrats are trying to paint the republicans as blocking immigration reform in order to please Trump.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
OK, the dollar's doing poorly against bitcoin, shares, real estate and commodities (via inflation). It's roughly even on silver and doing badly against gold.
The only thing the dollar compares well against is other currencies (which are fundamentally the same kind of thing). So a dollar v anything chart would not prove that the dollar was strong, as your argument suggests. Unless by anything you just mean currencies.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
6d ago
Other criticisms aside, I think EY was trying to do three things at once, but fell short with two of them due to internal contradictions. He wanted it to be 1) a teaching tool for rationality, and also 2) to have a literary character arc where Harry learns and grows, and also 3) to max out his personal sense of cool (hereafter "EY-cool"). But 2 and 3 hide 1, making it hard to tell what's actually a recommended course of action, because the bad stuff seems precisely as EY-cool as the good stuff. And 1 and 3 hide 2, because Harry is relentlessly portrayed as EY-cool, whether or not he's making mistakes. And so what comes through is a lot of EY-cool, sprinkled with a bunch of rationality lessons where you need to read the entire thing, possibly several times, to figure out what's a recommended approach (not to mention keeping up with the replication crisis), and a character who goes from being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly silly, to being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly sad. (But maybe that's how EY views his own personal development.)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6d ago
Ideally I'd go with my wife, and for the last decade and change we've been raising kids so I haven't made time. These days it's more doable, you're right.
Sloot
6d ago
Have you tried being newer and having your incense being on the more correct side of history?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
But why does the signaling competition devolve into Progressive shibboleths? Why not something else? I think the boring answer is that it started that way. If this alt scene were originally Confucian, then all new members would have adopted Confucianism. But it started progressive because no one with a strong traditional morality would dedicate their whole life to hosting licentious music. They cared more about school, they prioritized health, they had reservations about playing music bad for the soul. Meanwhile those without morality have no such concerns, and also use drugs as a lure for their power. There’s probably also an element of progressive shibboleths being boosted because the primitive wisdom that kids learn in early education is “everyone is the same, be nice”. So naturally, any devolution would go back to the shared morality which encites even the dumbest person. If everyone in school learned that the ultimate evil was being racist and mean, then that becomes the criteria for ostracisation. If you’re in a group of not very intelligent or moral art people, you can imagine the difference between accusing someone of being racist versus accusing someone of “a sophisticated ruse in which they themselves accuse others of being racist in order to elevate their standing”. The second one makes less sense when you are drunk or high, and it’s way too many words for me to read on Twitter at 2am. The first one contains the word “racist”, which I have been trained to bark at like a dog.
I don’t think it started that way. I think a big problem with shibboleths is exactly what you mentioned in contrast to Confucian societies. The signal is super cheap to use, and it’s almost never called out as either going too far or for being insincere. I think that signals like this would be greatly reduced if the person were required to put either sweat equity or cash into all the causes they’re concerned about. If all the people screaming at anyone who isn’t denouncing Israel had to give $100 or raise money for the Palestinian relief efforts, the cries of denunciation would probably decrease by a lot, probably the protests as well.
yofuckreddit
6d ago
many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity.
Man I want to believe this but I just don't. It happens every once in a while but as far as I can tell it's only ever cyclical. The country getting out of a low-trust hole can only do it for 10-15 years before the next coup based on tribal lines.
You can't even read the Africa section of the economist regularly without losing your mind. There's such a constant background simmering of rape, mass murder, and corruption going on at some level on that continent it's just impossible to fathom.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Immigration is the 1st or 2nd best issue for Trump (along with inflation) so the democrats are trying to paint the republicans as blocking immigration reform in order to please Trump.
To do this, they need to portray immigration as a problem that needs to be solved. This is difficult, because they have been blasting their base with the message that all concerns about illegal immigration are illegitimate racism for like thirty or forty years now, have actively worked to massively undermine border security for something like two decades now, spent four years attacking Trump's every attempt to secure the border, and directly caused the current crisis. I don't doubt the media's willingness to step up to champion the lie that this is all Red Tribe's Fault, actually, but I am skeptical that it will work all that well.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6d ago
I just don’t see it as something that always and universally applies to everyone in all situations.
And that's why I posted it in the Wellness Wednesday thread as mental wellness advice instead of the Friday Fun thread as lexical insight porn.
As far as agonizing or guilt-tripping over whether a given "should" is a problematic should inspired by bad boundaries or anxiety or low self-worth etc., sounds like an anxiety problem I don't have and thus don't need to worry about.
In other words, I shouldn't worry about shoulds, and nobody should worry about my shoulds either. And I don't, except when someone makes a particularly poignant or potent point.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
The general theme of the blog was that essentially everyone is a narcissist basically incapable of forming strong natural bonds with other people because they lack a “core self” to connect to other people.
The blog itself was titled The Last Psychiatrist and it was a stand alone website of the same name. It hasn’t been updated to my knowledge in over a decade. There might be an archive of it somewhere, and I think that some fans of the blog wanted to gather it for a pdf.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
This is the kind of story which humans once had as their foundational tales. Less “crime bad”, more “withhold judgment until wisdom, because corruption worse”. Kids would have learned this story instead of “racism bad”. And for artists, the story of Susanna was one of the most popular scenes in the history of Western art. Think how beneficial that is! You require your artists to draw Susanna, a beautiful semi-nude figure, and then you require him to draw the corrupt licentious high status figures, ready to blackmail her before being executed. It not only creates a good moral tale for children but it ensures that your artists don’t become regressives.
Who is the 'you' in this paragraph?
Isn't the popularity of Susanna bathing, as a subject of art, significantly attributable to artists themselves wanting to produce it? And isn't that desire also largely explicable by the fact that it's a very sexy scene? I'm not sure we need a big explanation for why painters were very enthusiastic about painting an attractive woman in the nude. It seems a popular theme in general.
What about Bahamas or Mauritius?
I enjoy how, even for two supposed counter examples of Sub-Saharan African self-sufficient capability, the former is a tourist-dollar-rich series of islands whose “natives” have substantial European admixture (especially those who are running the show) and the latter is an African country predominantly composed of Indians, with ample whites and Southeast/East Asians having chimed in.
But maybe that’s the joke and I got semi-whooshed.
roystgnr
6d ago
natural-number mathematics defines 1 axiomatically as the multiplicative identity!
In what axiom set? Peano arithmetic just defines 1 as the successor of 0, and showing it's the multiplicative identity then requires a proof by induction.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6d ago
The world doesn't need everyone to have a job where everyone needs a 130 IQ to function.
No, because the current world is built around a 100 IQ. In a world where 130 IQ was average, systems would be built in such a way that 100 IQ people would struggle and be mostly useless/a net negative. This doesn’t necessarily mean we need to rebuild our systems around 70 IQ individuals, but it does call into question if building it around 100 is optimal. There are many ways that 70 IQs could be put to use with enough structure, though the increased structure would likely mean the 130s would be even more needlessly constrained than they already are.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
You know, I just got through a book about the Irish potato famine and the parallels between the 'Democrats run modern welfare plantations' narrative and Trevelyan are pretty interesting.
In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?
More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism? I'm gonna bet it's racism. But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve. Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?
Trevelyan may have been correct that the situation in Ireland was untenable (TFR >4, increasingly small plots of land that necessitated subsistence potato farming, rampant poverty and illiteracy), but his actions directly led to the preventable deaths of 750,000-1,500,000 Irish and the emigration of a million more.
Indeed, which is an excellent argument for why Trevelyan was dead wrong in his case. What does this tell us about our case?
Perhaps more germanely, are you confident that slashing welfare programs in the US would lead to the outcomes you (we?) want, and do you have any examples of underclasses being cut off from welfare and becoming prosperous within a generation or two?
...And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.
They need tight-knit communities who deliver immediate punishment to defectors, with those continuing to defect written off. "aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.
Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically. Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.
You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!
I have previously proposed Reverse-Segregation: give blacks an area that they control completely, where every public official and government position must be held 100% by black people, by law. Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit, irrespective of the American constitution, and grant it leave to enforce and adjudicate those laws as it sees fit, completely outside the jurisdiction of the rest of American jurisprudence. Fund it with a per-capita percentage of all outlays legitimately payable to black Americans equivalent to the percentage of black Americans who actually live within it. People, white or black, can move there if they want, and leave if they want; no one can be kept there against their will, and no law-abiding citizen be prevented from going there by the rest of America if they choose to go. Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else. No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law. Race-based discrimination is equally illegal no matter which race it's applied to. If certain words are evidence of bias, they're evidence regardless of who speaks them. Claims of bias will no longer be entertained unless they come with ironclad evidence. And if anyone doesn't like this, there's a place they can move. Welfare can even continue outside the zone as well, we just use cellphone data to track who's inside and who's outside and apportion the money appropriately. Anyone not-black who wants to can move inside the zone, they just can't hold office or vote for anyone who isn't black, presuming the zone decides to keep voting. Maybe even through in something about the zone expanding if its population rises too high.
Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely. Given the current trajectory of Blue Tribe, it's entirely possible one of their cities would even be willing to implement such a zone in-situ rather than trying to build one from scratch. Chicago, maybe? Detroit? Maybe give it two years' lead time so people can move in or out according to preference. Whaddya think?
...In closing, I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill, and again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along. People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Interesting analysis, and exactly the sort of thing I was asking for elsewhere in the thread. I read the whole thing in more or less one sitting for fun, and so while I wasn't terribly impressed and definately think it suffers from some a lot of the problems I perceive in rationalist fic generally, I'm not at all confident that I really got the intended message.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
if you don't mind adding some more spoiler tags, how did
sun_the_second
6d ago
I assume this refers to the moment where
Sloot
6d ago
Were there some Titanic developments that recently popped up?
It does slightly bother me that most of the (remaining) wreckage will be consumed by sea creatures in the coming years/decades.
Some discussion we previously had on 90s Titanic-mania, albeit more focused on the film.
NullHypothesis
6d ago
I gave examples of how 130 IQ people can benefit from 100 IQ people because 100 IQ people have utility. 70IQ people have almost no economic utility.
Why don't you give some examples of these supposed systems that would exist if that median IQ matched that to current day 130 IQ people, and how 100 IQ people would be a net negative in such a system?
@2rafa at least gave an example of a 100iq person navigating Princeton or Jane Street. But in this case, the 100 IQ person can serve many functions in those places. Cooking, cleaning, plumbing, maintenance, research assistance, etc are all tasks a 100 IQ person can easily do and excel in. Yes, the 100 IQ person would never be at the top of their class, but a 100 IQ person can still learn and specialize in tasks that don't require a genius-level IQ.
The fact is the gap in the ability and capability to do tasks is not equal in both directions. You could consider IQ as a barrier of entry to be able to accomplish certain tasks. A 130 IQ can easily find a use for a 100 IQ person. A 100 IQ person working with a 70iq person sees the 70 IQ person as a liability because the 70IQ person is incapable of following directions. You can't trust a 70 IQ person to do something like run a dishwasher.
You can't seriously be saying a 130 IQ person looking at a 100 IQ person will see them just as incapable as a 100 IQ person looking at a 70 IQ person will.
Sloot
6d ago
Like duh, if I was a woman being told there's nothing special or different about being a woman except that it makes you a victim, I wouldn't want to be one anymore.
Sure, but you’re a man with presumably a male-brained orientation as to how you perceive yourself and your relation with the world.
By their revealed preferences when it comes to rape fantasies, true crime, hybristophilia, dark triad men and whatnot, a substantial proportion (perhaps the majority) of women rather enjoy envisioning themselves as victims, or at least potential victims.
I remember this post of yours where you floated psychoanalyzing the mindset of rational fiction after finishing Worth the Candle. I’d be interested in hearing what you had to say about the genre based on what you’re saying here.
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