domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
Lizzardspawn
6m ago
Do you think that the school does that in 12 + 4 years? The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed). I was able to read and write at age of 5 - and i was hardly among the most gifted. To know programming you only need to understand recursion, pointers, boolean algebra, hash tables, monads and O(n). That takes an afternoon. I think you really overestimate how much does it take to be mediocre at something - and mediocrity is what schools aims for. And kids are pretty good at investing in stuff that really interests them and becoming gods. Check games.
When people were having problems with integrals in Math 101 in college - I was just explaining to them - it is just the area of a function. Guess what - they understood it in 15 min.
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
The school is a combination of daycare and job program. This is why it is so inefficient.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8m ago
The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT
This doesn't work in the Ivy league, where you are admitted without committing to your major. It is a big deal at Oxbridge, probably the last surviving rich-kid backdoor.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11m ago
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
Back in the day, elite career paths included an early training job that was supposed to force you into contact with the reality of working-class life in a way which reflected your status as a potential future ruler. Leadership with training wheels, effectively. The canonical example was sending young officers into the field with an experienced platoon sergeant, but something similar was happening in old-school corporate life where the wet-behind the ears graduate management trainee would be given a shift manager role in their first or second rotation where they would work alongside an experienced foreman.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
15m ago
(but then why have representatives in the first place?)
The good answer used to be "because the infrastructure doesn't exist to do direct democracy on a greater-than-city scale".
The okay answer with major caveats is "because unitary executives are more effective at getting shit done than a Roman system". This obviously only applies to the executive branch.
The bad answer which I suspect is like 80% of why we still have parliaments is "there is no procedure in most nations for abolishing a parliament without the parliament's own consent, which 100% of its members are strongly incentivised not to give".
aldomilyar
21m ago
Why would I want to let my gifted kid nerdsnipe themselves into a track with likely minimal real world applications so they can then be runover by academic hiring affirmative action after accumulating their paper qualifications?
pbmonster
35m ago
Dota is arguably one of the multiplayer games that deals best with this - just by cranking the complexity up so high, it takes the min-maxers weeks or sometimes months after a patch until the meta has settled completely. And even then, individual disposition/skill can still make non-meta strategies very viable, because the game is overall pretty well balanced.
Now, you can argue the game was more fun 20 years ago, when played with 9 friends sitting in the same room, with nobody having any idea what they were doing... but that's probably nostalgia.
RenOS
something is wrong
38m ago
You need to distinguish some things.
First, you need to treat technological and social progress separately. Our civilization has been steadily progressing technologically for several centuries at this point, but it has been one of the biggest lies/self-delusions that the social changes happening alongside were consistent improvements. Some were, some weren't, and mostly it was just a change in the trade-off curve the ramifications of which we still probably haven't fully experienced and can't appropriately judge.
Second, the current state and the pace & direction of change; I agree that western society increasingly seems sclerotic, overregulated and overinterdependent. Nevertheless, the peak we have reached is pretty damn impressive, and even rome took centuries to fully break down, with golden ages lasting decades, long after its eventual fate seemed sealed.
Third, private and public. The reason why conservatives lean happier is that they are, on average, grillers. If you just ignore the public dysfunction, pretend there is nothing you can do about it and focus on ways to improve your own life, it's actually quite easy to get by and be happy. Imo this is the reason why civilizations peak; After reaching some level of prosperity, it's much easier to just pay off dysfunction to not bother you instead of fighting against it. At first it's a great deal, since in % terms it's very little, and there is a lot of inertia about not falling into dysfunction staving off the bad incentives. But what is incentived, grows, and eventually it's "suddenly" substantial, but now so many people depend on it that there is now way of getting rid of it without a revolution. Usually the society is still overall quite prosperous, so they just try to limit the growth at this point, or if you have really competent & conscientious people in charge they may even manage to find a way to slowly whittle down the dependency a bit. But it's a lot of work for almost no return for yourself, while frequently making lots of unnecessary enemies. So, the smartest and most competent at best actively avoid politics & just improve things in small localized ways, or at worst take advantage of the situation to redirect more stuff their way while paying off the important interest groups.
pbmonster
53m ago
Can you elaborate?
Do you really think you can take a random sample of 12 year olds from "playing outside all day" to "enough reading/writing/arguing/calculating to do productive work in the modern economy" - in 4 years?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
53m ago
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Most Western Democracies aren't electing either far left or far right extremists mostly the policies stay the same. Wasn't Biden a steady moderate elected by a skittish electorate? It didn't seem to have much effect even if he wasn't demonized the way Trump or Obama were.
Tree
1hr ago
I would prefer it if someone was just trying to harpoon an heir or heiress like some Becky Sharp or Bel-Ami. You wish to live on yachts? I respect your moxie.
Some women love you because you have a french accent, or you made them laugh once. I’m told some wives love you because you leave a love note on the fridge for five minutes everyday. But others want the whole 8 hours. Just in a cubicle, being miserable for money, so you can hand it over. It’s as costly a signal of love and commitment as it gets. For the one ‘buckling up’. The requiring party’s love and affinity is more doubtful.
Anyway, nothing against you, obviously it’s a very very common requirement. Some people say it’s hardwired in the female psyche, although I don’t know how nature would hardwire a wealth preference into humans in an ancestral environment where wealth was just ‘being fat’, and some sticks and shells. How could Lucy in the savannah have learned to be turned on by zeroes on a bank statement. By contrast the male ‘gaze’ seems more clearly hardwired to like certain aspects of the female form which have remained the same.
2rafa
1hr ago
I’m a soft doomer about the US but much less so than I am about (Western) Europe.
Mass immigration has seen fit to proffer the United States a gentle decline toward a high-inequality, mid-tier country with Some Third World Characteristics but probably with semi-functioning politics and many centers of high economic and industrial development. What is coming for Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Britain, and increasingly also Spain, Ireland and Italy is much, much worse than that.
It's relative. Supporting the NEP was right wing in its time too despite being literally a Lenin proposal. Mao once called himself a right winger when he disavowed the Cultural Revolution. Politics moves and shifts.
Not wanting to tax unrealized gains, destroy crypto or engage in literal price fixing makes Trump the right wing option. I don't make the rules of hellworld, I just live in it.
FD4280
2hr ago
Doomer. If a civil war couldn’t happen over Covid, it’s not going to happen at all. Maybe an uncontested secession or three.
Botond173
2hr ago
Things like showing up to work on time, doing tasks as instructed, going to work even though your friends have something more fun in mind, time management.
This. If you're an average normie chump just out of college looking for entry-level work, your potential employer cannot really tell if you'll turn out to be a reliable wage slave or not. If, however, you've probably done various summer jobs without getting fired/arrested, you're much less of a risk in that regard. On the other hand, if you belong to a PMC family, doing unpaid internships for state institutions or NGOs and other front organizations of the Deep State is a more efficient use of your summer breaks.
Zephyr
2hr ago
I mean, not everyone is at the top; you could easily have mid level bureaucrats in the party blackmailing other mid level bureaucrats, or someone higher level (but not at the “throw your enemies out the window” high).
A lot of the time, the blackmail is the excuse you use to remove someone - you keep them around and use the blackmail to make them publicly support you, then (when they know too much, or are making noises about possibly not being 100% on your side, or are simply embarrassing now that you’ve used their support to climb higher) you reveal it to have a public excuse to remove them.
Hell, you could argue they’re more effective in totalitarian countries - if you are exposed in the US, you are definitely not getting the death penalty (you probably won’t even serve jail time if you were powerful). If China discovers you are acting against the party, you may just disappear.
2rafa
2hr ago
Jews have been bankers for far longer than modern meritocracy has existed. In any case, given the probably twenty or thirty fold increase in the number of white collar jobs created since the Industrial Revolution (on a per capita basis, let alone overall), some degree of meritocratic advancement was always inevitable. Even in 1400 someone very smart of humble birth wasn’t necessarily tied by fate to that origin - social advancement is a feature of all human society. As the total number of certain jobs increases, of course there’s space for people to move up the ladder.
But the rigorous nature of our meritocracy, combined with slower economic growth and elite overproduction, has created more perverse incentives. The only way out - the only way to protect children - is either a lottery system (structurally bad in so many ways) or some kind of hereditary structure, even if only in part.
What are the solutions here?
Imperial Japanese biopolitics included a range of policies designed to increase the Japanese race in number and quality via pronatalism and eugenics. The pronatal policies included restricting female employment, a bachelor tax, career penalties for being childless, family allowances, bigger houses for those with more children... Their whole culture spoke with one voice too, there were next to no dissenters against the message. There'd be big posters explicitly explaining the need to expand Japan territorially and demographically, it was a theme expressed in their cultural output. Accordingly they had high fertility rates (TFR around 3-4 during a major war when many men were deployed overseas) and in an urbanizing, industrial society too. Japanese fertility peaked in the 1920s due to still-low urbanization. But even in the 1940s with urbanization around 50% and a war they were far above replacement. Relationships were just a side effect.
Then when the US won WW2 and rewrote Japan's constitution, they added a section on women getting full political and economic rights alongside men. Japanese fertility never recovered from this.
Another solution in my opinion is mass-scale cloning, if the family is obsolete (we've lost the technology, we don't know how to do that anymore) let's go all-in on technology. Or have AI do all the work (romantic, physical, economic).
What's unlikely to work is tiny fiscal tweaks, a tax break here, subsidized childcare there. We know that doesn't work. A full totalitarian effort is needed to really put in effort along economic, social, legal, cultural dimensions. You have to make pro-natalism as big as anti-racism is today for it to really have a strong effect. You can be fired for being racist in a business, what about being fired for not having enough children? Hate speech is a thing, what about hate celibacy? The concept seems so cartoonish and silly to me, the horseshoe version of anti-incel rhetoric but that's the kind of normalizing power, the push-power that media and govt has. 'Hate speech' is just sparkling xenophobia, one of the oldest and most longstanding ideas in history.
I don't see any mechanism for a social fix to work outside of China, even they may lack the totalitarianism needed to push people back into having families and children. A technical fix is a lot easier, despite being a far more radical transformation.
Botond173
3hr ago
One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job.
I'm assuming the main reason is that Asian-Americans are the least likely to belong to the working class or the underclass.
Botond173
3hr ago
Dating sucks and gender relations are likely going to get worse as the social media experiment continues, to South Korea levels. It can only get worse from here.
I disagree with the parallel (not with your general argument). It's not sociologically possible. South Korea is a rather particular greenhouse in that regard, ethnically homogeneous and largely insulated from external trends, with distorted Confucian and cyberpunk tendencies taken to social extremes. None of that applies to the US or Western Europe either for that matter. I believe in the law that that which can't continue indefinitely, won't, even if it gets worse short-term. The hypergamy crunch is just around the corner. We're already at a point socially where there are three women to two men among new college graduates. This clearly cannot last.
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
David Sirlin's Playing to Win is the canonical essay on this point. His day job was balancing console fighting games, but he also develops viciously competitive two player board games as a side gig.
More options
Context Copy link