domain:felipec.substack.com
Tollund_Man4
23hr ago
This isn't direct evidence but the IRA were definitely aware of the propaganda potential of reprisals from government forces. From the Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army - Notes on Guerrilla Warfare 1956 version:
The strategy of guerrilla warfare is to build up resistance centres throughout the occupied area and confine the enemy to the larger towns by restricting his movements and communications. In time the resistance centres are knitted together into one liberated area. After that the job is to drive him out of his supposedly safe base: and thus out of the country.
The essence of all strategy is to bring, by the use of surprise and mobility-or a combination of both-the greatest possible strength to bear at a chosen time and place. It must be ensured that the enemy does not-or is not able to-assemble Mi* strength at that point. This holds true also of guerrilla warfare. But it involves clever manoeuvre and here the skill of the commander, the organisation of his forces and his mobility, play an important role.
The guerrilla attempts to do three things:(1) Drain the enemy's manpower and resources.
(2) Lead the resistance of the people to enemy occupation.
(3) Break down the enemy's administration.He achieves the first by the very fact of his existence and his constant harassment of the enemy. He remembers that his own task is not to hold ground but to ensure that in time the enemy will not hold any either.
He achieves the second by remembering that the people will bear the brunt of the enemy's reprisal tactics and by inspiring them with aims of the movement. In this way they will be made tenacious and strong for in the long run it is the people who can stop the enemy: by their backing of the national movement.
And he achieves three when the enemy imposes martial law and thus recognises he can no longer rule that area in the old way. In effect he is recognising that the people no longer want him.
*Typo in the original PDF document.
hooser
23hr ago
Can I bring back semi-historical figures? Because I would love to bring back Saul of Tarsus (aka Saint Paul), Judas Iscariot, and Jesus of Nazareth, and have them simultaneously do the talk-show/podcast circuit to promote their various new books:
- "The Art of Sacred Sass"
- "Kiss & Tell"
- "Loaves and Fishes: a Cook Book"
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
23hr ago
I do agree that story #2 was an achievement. The entire bit with
Forgive me, I thought you were arguing for density. Partly from pattern recognition, partly because you appeared to be expecting resistance from people who 'live in large single-family homes in locales whose character would be damaged by large-scale construction'.
I don't think I've ever seen people arguing for less density, or for replacing awful postwar buildings. I always thought this kind of thing didn't happen because left-wingers are pro-density on principle and builders are pro-density on profit grounds. I think that people in general would be more keen on this, and would be more keen to suspend environmental concerns if the results looked good.
Lewis2
23hr ago
The other way around. If it weren’t for the beatings, the average Russian would reach his natural IQ of 130.
BurdensomeCount
Sub(s)t(and)ard humans are now deprecated in Humanity v4.5.3!
23hr ago
The UK absolutely needs to build more even if immigration drops to 0. The UK has ancient housing stock that desperately needs replacing and the so called Green Belt is strangling the country. New builds should be beautiful yes but what counts as beauty should not be up to people living locally because they're personally incentivised to veto construction that's beneficial for the country. More density would be good but barring that more houses anywhere is good as well. If you don't want density you should absolutely hate the Green Belt because it forces dense building in cities by raising land values on buildable land to the point where the only thing that makes economic sense is apartments.
Imaginary_Knowledge
23hr ago
The pipeline absolutely differentiated. Maybe URMs didn't formally have to meet a lower bar, but if one of them failed the bar, recruiting would send them back through the loop to collect more "signal" until that URM passed. Given that interview performance has a random component, what tech did is statistically indistinguishable from lowering the bar for URMs.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
23hr ago
I handle a lot of cases involving mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure and, though this is completely anecdotal, immunotherapy seems to be working wonders on that front. It seems like a few years ago meso was a death sentence, and now there are people who, while not exactly cured, seem to be living with it for years
I don't know mesothelioma because it's relatively rare, and I don't see patients - just lines on a graph. That being said, it seems like a pretty similar story with 2 year survival rates of 41% versus 27%. Don't get me wrong, if I get cancer I'll take the pembro, but we're laughably far from curing cancer or LEV.
If you get diagnosed with a solid tumor (i.e. not a leukemia), basically you're either lucky and we caught it early enough to remove it entirely by surgery or you're going to die from it with vanishingly rare exceptions.
One case involved a 60 year old woman who had a resection and subsequent immunotherapy after being symptomatic for over a year before doctors even figured out the correct diagnosis, and she was judged to be completely cancer free, which is something I thought impossible.
I imagine that's bad for your bottom line. Or she lived long enough for you to collect?
I honestly wonder for a guy his age who wasn't having any problems if the treatment is worse than just living with the disease until he needs palliative care, considering that he was otherwise active but was wiped out by the cancer treatments.
Yeah. That's the choice to be made. Hopefully he was of sound mind and deciding for himself.
naraburns
nihil supernum
23hr ago
We already told you to use the contact form. Or you could respond to this comment! Spamming the site does not endear you to us.
FistfullOfCrows
23hr ago
Paul Rudd is 100% ashkenazi
Press X to doubt. He's like at least 50% Italian by SOME kind of proxy.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
22hr ago
That's just what being an ashkenazi is: Some sort of combination between Levantine and Italian.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22hr ago
Most HFT shops are mostly doing market making. Market making (i.e. quoting bid and ask prices and making a profit when other people cross your spread) is essential for well-functioning markets, and computers do it better than humans (and have done since shortly after 2000). The problem is the sheer amount of elite human capital going into a competition for speed which is now effectively zero sum because computers are placing and cancelling orders faster than a real-money investor can make decisions. To fix this without chasing away the market makers the markets rely on to function, you would need microstructure-level reform carried out by someone who knows what they are doing.
The most interesting proposals I have seen are:
- All orders entering the market place are held until the end of the second, and then orders arriving in the same second are processed in a random order
- Allow pricing in units of 1/10th of a cent per share (for trades which are not a multiple of 10 shares, the total price is rounded to the nearest cent in favour of the market maker) - this makes it an order of magnitude easier for a later order to outbid an earlier one on price, reducing the incentive to compete on speed.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
22hr ago
Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation
I didn’t know that Huemer had written about this, but this same exact thought occurred to me independently. It seems somewhat obvious and I’m surprised that more atheists/materialists don’t bring this up when discussing the possibility of life after death.
If it happened once, it can happen again. Very simple argument.
5434a
22hr ago
There's a risk of conflating serious danger with personal discomfort and using the first to justify the second, and also a parallel risk of using the second to dismiss the first.
In the first case you end up avoiding everything that isn't immediately pleasant and personally gratifying, and in the second case you fail to avoid a dangerous situation because you haven't given it the chance to prove your intuitions wrong right.
It's not without merit but I think the advice to "trust your fear instinct" is another one of those messages that is more likely to appeal to and reach the wrong audience and reinforce their fearfulness rather than attenuating their fearlessness.
2rafa
22hr ago
In the sense that the most widely-accepted theory is that all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Jewish-Roman intermarriage in the first few centuries CE, sure.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
22hr ago
As you might have found out I ended up converting to Christianity. I’m more of a mystical Christian though so I do still contemplate these questions.
I believe God didn’t give us answers because He wants us to wonder.
thejdizzler
22hr ago
Just finished In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz I found this in a Free Little Library in Baltimore where I live and picked it up because I lived in Israel in 2019 and heard good things about the author, Amos Oz who is a famous fiction writer in Israel. This isn't your usual Amos Oz book, or even a work of fiction. Rather, it is a group of roughly transcribed interviews of Jews and Arabs across the territory of Israel, including the occupied West Bank, in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, and the phalangist massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut (for more on this war I would recommend the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir: I have never seen an animation style like it, and it also follows a similar interview format to this book).
These interviews serve to highlight the diversity of opinion and culture among the Jews and Arabs of Israel and the occupied territories. The book opens with a description of the ultra-orthodox demographic takeover of the old city of Jerusalem, follows a winding route through the newly occupied West Bank (where Jewish settlements have already sprung up), the Galilee, and endsin the city of Ashdod on the Medditerranean Sea. Oz is an anti-nationalist former Labour Party member who favors a two (and eventually one) state solution, but he honors the opinions of all the people he interviews (even the crazy, unnamed Z who advocates for explicit genocide against all Arabs, not just the ones in Palestine) by transcribing their words truthfully, and not distorting their arguments with his own judgements. Everyone, including the afformentioned Z, came off as rational under the strokes of Oz’s pen, and at least somewhat sympathetic.
This book should shatter your conceptions of the entirety of Israel or the Jewish people as some kind of elite mastermind class controlling global events or a people who want to take over the entire Middle East. There are certainly some Jews who advocate for that: the citizens of the newly minted Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, as well as Z, certainly do so. Others, like the Ultra-Orthdox in Jerusalem have no interest in such worldly things, or frankly anything other than studying Torah. Kibbutzniks, like Oz and the “Cosmic Jew” he interviews in the last chapter of the book, are more distraught about the influence of American money and weapons on destroying the original agrarian character of the Zionist movement, while still others, many who live in Tel Aviv, basically just want to party and be secular Westerners.
In the 40 years since this book was written, many things have changed. There is now a wall between Israel and the West Bank, settlements have sprung up all over Judea and Samaria, and slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed. Yet the same divisions exist in Israeli society (or did in 2019 when I was there), and none of these fundamental problems are any closer to being solved. This, I think would sadden Oz. It certainly saddens me: Israel is a beautiful country, and its seems like the biggest threat to its continued existence is not Hamas or other Arab countries, but civil war.
Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read. It's about a research station on a sentient planet where the planet communicates with the researchers by reflecting their worst memories back at them in a manner that's impossible to avoid. In Spanish I'm reading Las Palabras Rotas by Luis Garcia Montero. It's a mixture of poetry and prose that's reflecting on how certain words have become corrupted by our politics and needed to be reclaimed personally, if not on a societal level.
Folamh3
22hr ago
I have never seen an animation style like it
You may like Waking Life by Richard Linklater. He used a similar style for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, but Waking Life is vastly superior.
Aapje58
22hr ago
He doesn't wear blue contacts. You can see that he has blue eyes in images of him as a pubescent youngster.
Poultice
22hr ago
Entirely coincidentally I have recently started reading this series (I have only the most surface level understanding of WH40K and was looking to dip my toes into it.)
I started reading the series and after a few pages I had to flip back to the introduction to see if Sandy Mitchell acknowledged his debt to George McDonald Fraser, which he did. I resumed reading and have been enjoying it as very light fiction in between the heavier stuff I'm reading. It's an homage and while the characters are similar Mitchell's take is much misanthropic than Fraser's.
It's light but it's not trash, as a novice I've been enjoying it.
yofuckreddit
22hr ago
Thank you for having tactical answers to this question. From the basic research I've done, it seems like the primary way to fix this stuff is to slow things down.
The only convincing steelmen I've heard for keeping things "as fast as possible" is:
- Sub-second trading helps prevent more massive price swings
- If US markets artificially slowed trading or rounded prices, activity would move to other countries
Any others you can think of?
SigurdsSilverSword
22hr ago
receive both the credit and the success he was denied by his first few years under a rudderless and inept regime.
Herbert haters remain undefeated!
Seriously though, he seems to be overrated by the "football nerd" class and underrated by the bar-watchers. Like he's clearly good, but he's not on the level of the real elite guys. A back half of the top 10 type guy, rather than a front half.
RenOS
still waiting for his official theMotte anniversary doomsday bunker™
21hr ago
To bad nobody else has answered; I don't really have the time to write anything about it, but some things have to be said, so I will.
Scott is right that a) Priesthoods are a naturally arising organising principle among humans and b) Science has been a priesthood for a while before wokeness became a large issue. And it's somewhat reasonable to conclude that therefore, maybe nothing was wrong with science being a priesthood before wokeness, which means maybe there also is nothing wrong with science being a priesthood nowadays in itself.
There is, however, some objections that should automatically come to mind here (and which imo old Scott would have noted):
First, his definition of priesthood makes little sense considering real priesthoods that have existed. Those mostly fulfilled criteria like the following: a) credentialism separating the priests from the masses b) a strong preoccupation with (personal) purity according to some internal set of moral norms. And given the central importance of religion to past societies, these moral norms were usually religious in nature. Hence, priests. But sovjet-style political commissars are fundamentally the same. It has little to do with "smart people only"; Many priesthoods didn't optimize for smartness much and had no problem with having clearly stupid people between their ranks, as long as the moral criteria were fulfilled. Instead, it is about being a coordinated group that can give benefits to insiders, control the public and punish competition. Priesthoods are clearly optimized for wielding and extending political power for a certain class of elite people. Finding truth has nothing to do with it. At the most charitable, they are about keeping peace and order in society.
Then further, we can ask:
-
Are there contemporary examples of sciences that don't work like priesthoods?
-
Are there past times during which science overall wasn't like a priesthood?
So for the first question, (theoretical) math immediately comes to mind for me. When reading up on theoretical math news , I regularly encounter solutions to problems that have stumped mathematicians, sometimes for centuries, which only were solved with the help of laymen. How does math do this? Pretty simple, actually; It uses its own specific language that generally has high requirements on your intelligence to learn, and which intrinsically serves as a barrier against low-effort swipes. Even just shortly talking with someone makes it quite obvious whether they know what they are talking about. Credentialised science obviously is the fastest way to acquire this understanding, but certainly not the only. There is often little interest in who you are, whether in terms of credentials or moral considerations, as long as you can contribute.
I'll certainly not be able to give a comprehensive overview, but just a few examples of science as practiced in the past; Let's start with the greeks, since they are the oldest with quality records (it's correct that the ancient near east scientific tradition probably predated the greeks, but the records are terrible, like a single tablet with some pythagorean triplets which may indicate knowledge of the pythagorean theorem, but also may just have been derived by brute force, we just don't know).
Greek science was mostly disorganized, some doing it as an extension to their actual craft with which they earned money, some priests, some just considering themselves "natural philosophers" with no clear occupation (first NEETs?). There were specific schools which sometimes could veer of into cultish, priesthood-like behaviour patterns internally, but science as a whole was always a mix of multiple competing schools with different interpretations of basic reality as well as many unaffiliated yet respected philosophers. Arguably the most influential philosopher, Socrates, was forced to to kill himself for his perceived clash with prevailing religious/moral sentiments. Yet, as a philosopher this did not diminish his standing in the slightest. And the greek scientific tradition is still considered one of the greatest, often explicitly labeled as the origin.
Islamic science in the middle ages explicitly saw themselves as inheritors of the greek tradition of science, and the way scientist were generally judged primarily by their results as opposed to their person and character is often considered one of the primary reasons why they advanced faster than the west at the same time; Mind you, I'm not claiming that they had no moral/religious requirements - Islam can be quite strict-, just that having less than the western monastery-dominated scientific tradition of the middle ages gave them a distinct advantage.
Which leads us to science in the late european middle age and the resulting renaissance. As mentioned, european science in the earlier middle ages was almost entirely done by monks in monasteries with all the resulting moral/religious blocks. Starting around the beginning of last millenia, partially caused by more excess resources, partially influenced by the success (and threat!) of islamic science, there was a clear progression from the very priesthood-like early monastery tradition, to the religious universities with obvious carve outs such as protections from certain wordly punishments and "ex cathedra/hypothesis" opinions allowing inquiry into moderate taboo topics. Together with the religious upheavals of the 16th century this progressed further into the Renaissance, which outright identified itself by its allowance to question everything.
Incidentally, this is usually considered the time of greatest scientific progress. Similar to contemporary math, while credentialed university-educated scholars certainly dominated science, laymen, whether self- or otherwise privately educated, were tolerated as long as they were capable of speaking a certain language and bringing results. The early british royal society included multiple members who had little meaningful credentials despite universities having existed for quite a long time at that time. It was more-or-less founded by Robert Boyle, who had the equivalent of a modern high school education in terms of credentials but who was privately taught and ran his own laboratory with his families' money. Only after having established an informal "invisible college", he later simply rented space near Oxford University to run a better lab, profiting from Oxford's University but AFAIK never officially being affiliated with it directly, yet his contemporary and later academics respected him; Make a guess, how would current universities, journals and the general educated class talk about & treat a rich kid with a high school education running his own lab?
So to summarize everything and give my own thoughts on the matter: Priesthoods are an okay institution to generate some scientific output. It has happened multiple times in the past, especially during difficult times when people are unwilling to spend money on long-term endeavours such as science intrinsically is (but they still might be willing to spend for "a good cause"). Early middle ages are a good example here. Knowledge is power, therefore priests want to extend some of it as long as it does not call into question their grip on power.
But science as its own optimized institution, capital-S Science, doesn't really mesh all that well with it. Scientific output is reliably highest when scientists are individualistic and willing to question everything, when there is no single, easily captured institution, when they are judged by output, not character (and the output itself is also not judged by how well it fits in with prevailing sentiments) and especially when it gets regularly checked against a hard reality that is difficult to socially engineer. Scott cites his Bauhaus review on the norms of scientists, but the people involved in these discussions clearly had no scientific objections whatsoever, just read it again, they didn't even claim to; it was all strictly moral considerations. At best, they aped, in the cargo-cult fashion Feynman described, some superficial properties of science.
So imo he misidentifies multiple negative priesthood-like tendencies as sensible "bulwarks". The best scientist, from whatever age, era or field were almost always occupied to degree of obsession with answering some question or attaining some knowledge. They didn't care much for giving the impression of separation from the public. They didn't care for separation from capital, often they worked with it for their own advantage. They have no tendency towards intra-social-class political games and purity spirals, often even having a distinctly amoral streak (or strong personal moral convictions that don't fit well into any particular class of people). They often have a surprising overlap with the stereotype of the eccentric, obsessed, overworked but extraordinarily smart start-up founder.
These bulwarks are instead very good markers of a priesthood that successfully managed to subjugate the institution of Science again after it has temporarily managed to wrestle itself free, while doing what it always has done. Since this process was continuous & slow, and since even priesthoods want knowledge being generated, universities have still been working somewhat well for a long time even after being taken over, just like they have worked somewhat well every time priesthoods ran science. But good science is something else.
Of course, one sneaky objection here is that, if priesthoods are optimized for power, they will always win any conflict against a non-priesthood eventually. Therefore, Scott is engaging in the long-term correct course of actions: Molding a new priesthood that is maximally optimized for science while still retaining the critical traits necessary to stay in power. I don't really disagree with this view, but it's not really a objection on content, rather on pragmatism.
We do need to build more, because the UK has the smallest, ugliest houses (barring some good stock inhabited by some rich people and/or pre-1920ish in construction) in the West. We need to be razing entire neighborhoods of shitty 1930s-1970s semi detached streets and replacing them with much larger, better homes, which will require more land.
Since that kind of demolition is going to get blocked on environmentalist grounds, the best option is just to build more and better in the hope that these ugly places collapse in value and homeowners lobby the government to be allowed to demolish and replace them.
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