100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
Was 100% thinking of the island.
Also you might like this ArcGis story map about the Mon Valley @Rov_Scam
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4hr ago
Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I'm going to try to combine a culture war style post and an "interesting
person" post. We've had a few of these "interesting person" posts, with this
one
being one of the most upvoted posts all time. Hat tip to @naraburns. The good
news is that I'll be using a real, live very online person that we can all
directly reference instead of an example from my own life.
And that person is Shagbark.
Shagbark is a twitter personality I stumbled across several years ago by accident. Sometimes, you gotta love the algo. In about the last year, he's developed a legitimate following. 52,000 followers as of this morning. I believe 50k is the "famous on twitter" threshold.
Shagbark is eclectic to say the least. I could try to spin a narrative, but I think it's more impactful to go with the bullets:
- Early to mid 30s
- Coast Guard Veteran
- Homeless for, IIRC, 8 years - by choice.
- Devout Catholic (is he a Trad though? This is a point of controversy)
- More or less a self-confessed luddite or neo-luddite. Hates not only AI, smartphones, and the usual list of "bad" modern technology, but also airplanes, cars, and objectively good modern building advancements like air conditioning.
- A New York State hypernationalist. Specifically, very far upstate New York around areas like Plattsburgh and Messina. See this tweet about upstate NY
- (Related to the above) Has a penchant for desolation. Often writes poetically about the harsh beauty of derelict old steel towns (Utica) and little, out of the way villages no one has a reason to go to (Elko, Nevada).
- Is married to a woman and, of late, has a child. The woman has her own twitter and is proudly undocumented. Note that she is not an immigrant, but, from what I can tell, part of a line of weird conservo-hippie-anarchists. Her parents never got her a social security card.
Part of Shagbark's rise was due to his wife. I searched for, briefly, but cannot find the tweet exchange where in an young(ish) Asian woman from San Francisco made fun of Shagbark's wife's appearance. Paraphrasing, she said something along the lines of "Good news if you're a weirdo NEET; you can still get married if you're okay with your wife looking like this." Shagbark demonstrated some knowledge of the game by not directly replying and letting his defenders go after the bug lady. Not only did it work, but some rather large accounts came out of the woodwork to do it. Shagbark's signal was boosted and he now, by his own account, makes most of his money off of twitter monetization. On this last point, I am a bit skeptical; as a USCG vet, he's entitled to a pretty hefty basket of goodies that can go a long ways to supporting his bohemian lifestyle.
In sum, Shagbark is a technology hating somewhat-trad Catholic who LARPs as a kind of beatnik nomad / homesteader / flaneur / dirtbag entrepreneur and ... makes most of his income writing on Twitter and Substack. Contradictions abound, yet I cannot help think he does have genuine intent. This is not some multi-levels of irony deep parody or satire account. This is a real human, with real emotions, and many of them are unsupervised.
The Culture War Angle
Recently, Shagbark has been going through a bit of a crisis. After having his child, he realized that he couldn't actually raise her in a dilapidated shack in the New York hinterlands. He's now considering a move elsewhere. The suburbs are a non-starter (cars and soullessness) but any major metro is too expensive both in terms of money and ideological selling-out. So, he's started to look at old busted up cities that could be cheap to live in. His list, from this tweet is:
Utica, Las Vegas, El Paso, STL, Montreal, St John's NL, Brownsville, Yuma, Barstow, Ojinaga, Fargo, Houma, Wheeling, Atlantic City.
Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.
Stemming from this look at cities, Shagbark wrote this tweet. The primary point of it is covered well in the second paragraph:
There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have to WORK more than they READ. You simply cannot live as a "starving artist" in cities where the median rent is $2k-3k/mo.
Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap
neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and
High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough
bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know
, sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around,
nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about
random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first
encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing
ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of
talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real
intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you
mean and the build an argument and evidence around it. You discover your own
weaknesses, assumptions, holes. You often end up writing a totally different
thing that you set out to, which, just as often, is a good thing. You've dug
through the dirt and mud and found gold.
Pontificating in a bar is not this. It feels like it the way that LLMs feel like you're chatting with a human. But even a momentary bout of self-awareness dispels the idea that you're really doing the thing. We get drunk and debate in bars to form and sustain relationships of various sorts. We're not there to write the next Tractatus.
Obviously, you can tell I'm thinking of The Motte now. Part of what sustains this site is a culture of effortposts and even effortful comments. I believe most of our AAQCs are responses to topline posts, not the original screeds themselves. If you want to spout off about something random, that's what the Sunday thread is for. Mostly, I think, it works. As the holder of both several AAQCs and multiple temporary bans, I can say that most of the time if there is a "break down" it's because of the personal irresponsibility of individual posters, not something systemic or cultural.
The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?
Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.
Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Modern American commentators(like most of this forum) tend to forget how heavily Catholic American religiosity would have been in the 50’s
Yup. It definitely tripped me out when, several years ago, my Dad told me about Fulton Sheen's radio show and how you could find a national broadcast of the rosary at least once a week.
I have also heard anecdotes that some of the midwest catholic strongholds (Cincinnati in particular) had things like fish in public schools on Fridays in Lent. Imagine the blowup that would have today.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Secular humanism.
Tracing Christianity from the reformation through the enlightenment, all the way to Vatican 2, you see a lot of theological "innovations" that reinterpret divine revelation as allegory instead of literal fact. Faith, including theological virtues, becomes more of an elaborate world-building around classic virtue ethics; be honest, be kind, don't lie, etc. etc.
This kind of thinking gets a lot of traction because it demands less of the faithful. It's a lot easier to feel like you're a good person (and also a good Christian) if life is more about trying your best to be a "good person" and isn't full of pesky zero-or-one rules for sin.
Layer on top of that that secular humanism explicitly rejects the supernatural which is inextricable from, at least from the Catholic tradition, the doctrine of faith:
And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
To your original post, the only thing I have to add that others haven't done a better job of commenting on is in regards to this part:
People on the left are by and large much more focused, in my experience, on experiential states, following the heart, and of course contemplative, mystical spiritual practice.
Problems arise when people on the left, or, anyone, really, resists admitting that their experiential states, following of the heart etc. are subjective and not objective truths. "Living your truth" is a nonsense statement. Truth is one thing, it's objective. Your personal experience is absolutely your own, but there are objective facts embedded within it; you're a man or you're a woman, you are old or you are young and so forth.
I'm not an expert on the Catholic church's responses to mysticism around the reformation, but it would seem to me that's always going to be a sensitive subject. If anyone can just run around saying they had a vision of Christ or The Virgin Mary and we're all expected to take it at face value, then we've lost the plot, haven't we? This is exactly, literally, exactly! what's going on in the culture war at present. Both all sides are fighting over facts, which isn't necessarily new, but at least one major faction (wokes / progressives) is, while fighting over facts, also rejecting the premise of objective truth in the first place. Which means they're fighting for ..... ?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
Is Zorba competent?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Rough summary:
At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
Can the cultivation of excellence survive an egalitarian world?
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
This type of experience is often mediated by external barriers such as discrimination, limited access to gender-affirming care, or lack of support—not by changes in identity or self-understandings.
There are a couple of perplexing things here. First, and most pedantically, the mention of "external barriers" implies the possible or likely existence of "internal barriers." What would that be? Not yet reconciling yourself to the fact that your trans? What If a person has never thought they were trans? Is this just "internalized" something something. This is one of my biggest epistemic problems with the Trans people and the Woke people; they posit to understand everyone's true, latent motivations better than the individuals do. They're saying the can read the 'true' mind inside my mind and, furthermore, that their generalizations in this recursive mind reading are broadly applicable to society. "Everyone has, to some extent, internalized racism. They may not know it, however." Wow. What an assertion.
Second, if "external barriers" like discrimination, limited "access" to gender-affirming care, and (the very non-specific) lack of support cause a person to totally halt their transition, am I allowed to question their commitment in the first place? If I have a strongly head opinion on any issue, I'm probably going to try persevere even in the face of resistance and lack of support. I can understand the healthcare argument where a cancer patient, for instance, fails because they're just too weak. But the whole thing about transitioning is that there are no maladies in the body, just a desire to change it.
If we open the aperture to say that "emotional strength" is required to transition and that the actions of others can damage a person's "emotional strength" and, furthermore, that this is a valid reason for interrupting or quitting a course of action then how in the actual hell is anyone ever responsible for anything?. If "It made me feel bad so I quit" is acknowledged as "valid" then every deadbeat dad is forever absolved, every addict in recovery who relapses is a saint, every smash-and-grab thief is an understandable hardship case.
I do not think it is hyperbolic to say that much of society rests on the idea that everyone will, at multiple points in their lives, feel bad but that good behavior is still required even with the reality of negative emotional states. By medicalizing this "experience" (as the report explicitly does), we're opening pandora's box to the medicalizing of subjective emotional states. As I've written before:
If we ever get to the point as a society where we really deeply subsidize mental health services, we're going to be broke overnight. Think about that - that's creating a free service for when you feel bad. Absolutely uncapped demand.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
Thank you for this. I'll be reading everything you listed. And I'll try to come up with an intentional effort post response.
Side note: You do realize that linking to your paper does self-dox? I assume you do, but just want to double check.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
Here's a prompt (heh):
To what extent is the field if AI Research a new means to do "real world" or applied philosophy? Academic philosophy is notoriously obtuse and inscrutable and, therefore, often of very limited real world / non-academic benefit. You will occasionally see academic philosophers who publish successful mainstream books, but this is the exception rather than the rule. In a different direction, hard analytic philosophy that uses propositional logic gets towards something that looks like a "system" of thought but, to me, seems to get blown out of the water in terms of practical application by the hard math and science people doing applied research (CERN comes to mind as an off hand example).
Does this deck of cards get reshuffled with AI?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
Material assertions can be settled empirically¹
To what extent?
The whole of philosophy of science and epistemology grapples with exactly this. Karl Popper's problem of induction, Bayesian inference, and the entire rationality sphere online (as insufferable as it may often be) are all oriented towards trying to determine the limits of empiricism.
This line of thinking, taken too far, gets towards scientism and "trusting The Science (TM)." It wraps back around the horseshoe and becomes a faith all it's own. "The men in the long white robes (scientists) said it must be so!" Even though the entire idea of the scientific method is that everything is held as, at best, the current state of research and theory and, almost never, and iron law of the universe.
In terms of policy and legislation (to speak to your Bob and Alice example. Thank you for using the canonical names, BTW) policy is even more fraught because of capital-C Complexity and second, third, fourth, nth order effects. Our ability to predict these things is approximately zero. The Yellowstone Wolves example is legendary in this regard.
I am hyper suspicious of anyone who makes some version of the statement "this legislation is good because X will happen after it passes." Perhaps X will absolutely happen, but the entire system of laws will necessarily adapt because of it as well.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
If this is how one thinks of the Christian ban on euthanasia, then it makes sense to say "sure, as a Christian, your faith forbids you from performing euthanasia; but surely your conscience still allows you to see that had God not forbidden it euthanasia would be a good thing?".
"canst neither deceive nor be deceived"
In the one, true, Catholic faith, God's laws are not arbitrary. They may be impossible to fully comprehend in our limited mortal brains and may, very frequently, be exceedingly frustrating. They are not, however, arbitrary.
Turning your argument around just a little bit, it would be very refreshing if people of faith could look at atheists and secularists doing atheist and secular things and simply go, "lulz, enjoy hell." But we are called to love all men and to strive to look out for their benefit. Now, don't take this to an extreme and propose that all good Catholics start trying to hand out rosaries at San Francisco BDSM dungeons. But, in terms of voting for legislation, it isn't enough to be a Catholic in San Francisco and go "yeah, okay, they can make fentanyl legal. I just won't do it personally." No, you have to vote your conscience (i.e. against sin) and, to the extent you are compelled, try to organize the best you can even if it is an obvious losing effort. Remember, starting with Roe V. Wade, Catholic America waged about a 50 year campaign to over turn it. It is not as if, during that time, millions of Catholics were aborting babies left and right.
All of this is to say that faith and conscience aren't really separable if you take them both seriously. "Cultural Catholics" (Biden, Pelosi) aren't actually Catholic. Secular pro-lifers might have really ornate and air tight arguments against abortion, but they aren't operating in the realm of metaphysical faith. This does not make their arguments somehow more "valid" in a political context than people of faith. If that were the case, we'd have a weird situation where everyone would be in a rush to prove how atheist they are while also borrowing heavily from moral theology. It's actually kind of comical to think about - "Look at how excellent my purely rational reasoning is. DON'T LOOK AT THE GOD SHAPED HOLE"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
This makes sense to me. Can't say I've been to many protestant services.
I see this, however, as potentially a theological failure mode. Is the service really about God, or is it a highly ritualized potluck? Again, this is a theological argument. Having a good, regular social interaction within the context of a moral values system is something I am highly in favor of.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
They always seem to want to tell me about their awful exes, in detail.
This is a massive red flag in one or both directions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
Great post.
so much of what they do would have been explicitly Christian.
I don't follow. Perhaps this was a typo?
It’s really in its social form that religion successfully improves people; today it is essentially antisocial.
One of the non-theological differences I've noticed in Traditional circles vs "beige Catholicism" circles is how much the former genuinely enjoy hanging out with one another. When we have a social after Mass on Sundays, people will hang out for hours. At the Novus Ordo parish I grew up at, the "social" felt like a non-required extension to the Mass. You go and get a coffee and a donut, shake hands with Father Friendly, awkwardly make small talk with some randos for a few minutes, then give up and flee back home before NFL kickoff.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
On Catholic Integralism
Integralism won't happen in a meaningful way in the USA. Even if it could, that's a tricky path because, as @georgioz and @Treitak pointed out, it would open up a pretty epic failure mode; those with purely temporal and political goals would infiltrate whatever clerical or secular organizations (in the Catholic sense, like secular priests) they need to in order to grasp political power. We saw this with multiple Popes during the Borgias in Italy. More recently, we see this all over the South with various state and even federal level politicians holding some sort of "deacon" or "reverend" title. I mean, let's not even get started on the MLK line of succession (Sharpton, Jackson). So that you can see I am Fair and Blanced, Here's Josh Hawley doing a great Youth Pastor / Creed frontman impression.
The sneakier failure mode is something like the Orthodox Church in Russia. Orthodox priests and bishops aren't getting elected to the Duma, but they're part of the palace Kremlin intrigue to an extent. In order to preserve themselves, however, they mostly function as an elevated nationalistic cultural force. If you want to be really Russian, you hang a picture of the Patriarch next to your picture of Putin. Is there a supranational theology? Sort of, maybe. For Roman Catholics, this is a non-starter. If you really want to be Catholic but also totally embedded in a national or ethnic culture, you can try one of the Eastern Churches (Maronites etc.). Fully in communion with the Holy See, but autocephalus. Could there be an "American Catholic Church" probably not because that's goofy and because most of the Traditional Catholic groups explicitly trace their history to non-American origins and "liberal" Catholics don't care.
On Separation of Church and State
James Buckley (Wiliam's brother) has the best take on this. The "Separation of Church and State" was intended to prevent church authorities from dual-wielding power as elected officials. Furthermore, national laws couldn't be contravened by a religious leader. If you look back at the anti-catholic propaganda against Kennedy, this is what it focused on; not that Kennedy's catholic faith would lead him to make bad decisions, but that he would have to "change the laws" based on a decree from the Pope. Serving two masters and all of that.
You can vote your faith. Most actual theologies are also complete moral prescriptions. Would it be unfair to say that a secular humanist can't vote their morality?
The tricky part here is the 14th amendment. If a locality, say in Dearborn, MI or St. Marys, KS, wants to have public worship, ban LGBTQ books, and close all businesses one day a week, and that resolution passes overwhelmingly in the local municipality, is it illegal? There are a lot of legal groups not based in these areas that think it is and will create the necessary Rube Goldberg machine to get it in front of a Federal Judge. In fact, this was perhaps the central point of Willmoore Kendall's arguments against de-segregation. If the people of Alabama vote for it, why do the people of D.C. get to say no?
But then, the constitutional conservative in me does remember the Tyranny of the Majority. FLDS communities, Kiyras Joel in NYC are notorious for creating extremely hostile environments to their own people who then have no real recourse to secular authorities. As much as I LARP hard as a TradCath, I get worried that St. Marys, KS could turn into Waco 2.
On Which Option to Take
I've stated my position before; my idea is that anyone who wants to Trad/Orthodox/Snake Handel should just ... do it. Don't worry about the loss of cultural salience. There are dozens of biblical verses that all say versions of, "Don't seek the approval of those you hate." The revitalization of TLM Catholics over the past dozen years has been pretty specifically in response to the failures of modern liberalism, not rabid evangelization efforts. Ideas, like Dreher's, that Christianity is going to be outlawed are hyperbolic and logically unsatisfactory. If you watch his interview on the Pints With Aquinas podcast, it becomes obvious that this guy had a lot of personal trauma that he then transformed into a big part of his world view. At various times he was all of a zealous evangelical from Louisiana, a devout TLM Catholic, and, now, Orthodox. When I see someone dip into all three - but assure me that this time, I mean it! - I'm not going to put a lot of stock into their "well researched ideas."
On Where I Could Be Wrong
Again, a hat top to @WhiningCoil. I'm not worried about the Gub'ment coming after me for my beliefs alone, but I am worried about them going after the kids. When they no longer let you help children because you didn't sign the WrongThink waiver it gets spooky in a hurry. I've heard some shady rumours about TradCath households receiving visits from CPS because their neighbors were worried about six or seven kids running around. Because, like, who would have six or seven kids besides crazy cultists? Again, disclaimer, this is internet rumors, but I can see the path that leads there.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
This is all painfully and utterly correct.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
Do it!
My offer for an effort post of your choosing stands.
@PokerPirate. You're an AI researcher and you're just going to pretend like that's no big deal. I'll offer the same effortpost deal to you or, if I can middle man a little bit, what if you and @anti_dan swap effortposts and I take credit for both? hashtag finance, bro.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
I believe I agree with you. Can you say more about why 1952 was the pivotal year?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
I'm willing to make a deal - You do an effortpost on your general observations in patents and patent law. I'll do an effortpost on any topic of your choosing. If it isn't something I'm familiar with, I'll pledge 5 hours of research time.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
I’d be curious to know how much innovation is spontaneous in comparison with how much was planned.
It's quite close to 0% planned and 100% spontaneous.
Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is probably still the best framework for how human knowledge (science and so, downstream, technology) develops. The long and short of it is that lots of happy accidents often build upon each other. Planning innovation is almost an oxymoron.
The problem then becomes, how do we 'cultivate the garden', so to speak, to make happy accidents more commonplace? Or to shorten the distance between related but unknown nodes that are working on the same problems? The University System and the various Bell Labs / PARC / DARPA orgs of the mid 20th century seem to have done this well. Both had different failure modes which roughly follow red and blue tribe cleavages.
The University System lost to ideological capture but also, more generally, a total remove from practical problems. Instead of a bunch of really smart professors working with Corporations, the Navy, or whomever or an actual problem, "pure" research began to win out. You'd get esoteric improvements in something like photonics that was utterly untenable in a production setting because the supply chain for the super rare materials didn't exist or the apparatus involved couldn't function outside of a clean lab.
The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me. The better answer, though still not "a-ha!" level in my mind is that actually novel and meaningful research is getting harder and taking longer. So, while a corporation may not need its R&D department to come up with something new every quarter, it's harder to not want to cut their budget after 10 or 20 years of nothing new. Furthermore, there's a pretty good argument to be made that corporations shouldn't be trying to shoot-the-moon with totally novel ideas but, rather, really be solving the "last mile" problem of new technology - how to sustain it, scale it, and then make it by degrees cheaper and cheaper. The middle ground that's evolving is something like Focus Research Organizations.
The final players - DARPA and other FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Development) kind of kept the spirit alive longer. DARPA has a very specific operating model that nowhere else in government replicates. But they fell victim to GWOT funding strategy - let's make everything about terrorists instead of focusing on, I don't know, time travel and teleportation. The FFRDCs became some of the most egregious leeches of Federal R&D welfare dollars. MITRE is quite literally make work jobs for PhDs. If you can endure living in a Kafka novel every day, you can make $200k per year and enjoy Tysons Corner traffic for your commute.
The real "oh, we fucking suck" moment was GPT-2 in late 2022. Almost every other major American technology development since WW2 could be traced back to some sort of federal, academic, or corporate R&D lab. That the Attention Is All You Need paper came out from a some ML engineers at google fucking around was, in my mind, kind of the tombstone on the "trad" R&D ecosystem.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
Diversity is our Strength. Us being whites
At the top of Marginal Revolution today: "How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation"
I'm a tech development and "innovation" nerd. There's a small, but growing, especially in recent years, online commmunity of people who read organizational histories of places like Bell Labs and the original Lockheed Skunkwords to try and figure out the best ways to do real tech development. Not academic science projects and not VC backed bullshit which is mostly business model innovation (that even more often fails).
You don't have to read the whole study. The abstract itself is either a hilarious self-own or and even more hilarious playing-dumb post.
We show that innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940 was propelled by shifts in the local social structure, as captured using the diversity of surnames. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties’ surnames—stemming from the interplay between historical fluctuations in immigration and local factors that attract immigrants—we find that more diverse social structures increased both the quantity and quality of patents, likely because they spurred interactions among individuals with different skills and perspectives. The results suggest that the free flow of information between diverse minds drives innovation and contributed to the emergence of the U.S. as a global innovation hub.
1850 to 1940. Bruh.
This paper shows that having big time diversity - you know, mixing all those crazy Poles, Irish, French, Germans, English, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Greek, hell even a few Italians and Spanish in there - was a massive reason the USA was such a technologically innovative place!
The HBDers are going to love this one.
Side note on the hard tech angle: patent issuance used to be a decent enough and standardized enough measure for "innovation." Since the rise of legalism post WW2, however, it's so much more noisy now that it's questionable if it remains a valid "fungible currency" for studying innovation and tech development.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?
No, but this has more to do with feeding and supplying an army than anything else. The modal soldier in pre-modern warfare might spent 2 - 3 years more or less walking in a giant, slow circle, almost starving to death every day. And then actually starving to death.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
Forgive me for the "akshually" style comment, but this isn't entirely true.
No one has come up with a VERY CHEAP effective countermeasure yet. The ones that do work are 1) expensive and 2) Horded by the US/ISR/China and (maybe) a few other countries because nobody wants to show off their cool-new-shit in Ukraine. We want to save it for when it - yikes - actually matters.
Much like the human element of the Ukraine war, the drone element is mostly one of attrition and competing supply lines. At one point, 10,000 drones were falling out of the skies over Ukraine per month because of effective and cheap countermeasures. The tactical wheel turns, however, and both sides elevated their drone-counterdrone game.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
In a word, The Holodomor.
Now, don't worry, I'm not some Ukraine agent apologist here. I'm just trying to directly answer the question of "What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?" You can absolutely boil Ukraine v Russia down to Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. The Ukrainians aren't thinking about the future, they're constantly enraged by the past. The "Politics of Resentment" isn't an invention of 21st American politics - it's the de facto arrangement of most human conflict. To many in Ukraine, allowing a Russian takeover is the equivalent of letting all of the people who killed all of your family members move in to your house. It's pretty easy to get fatalist and irrational to prevent that. "I would rather die than ...." Yeah, well.
Good recommendations for an Einstein biography?
I realized, over Thanksgiving, that all I know about Einstein is second order stuff and, even that, vaguely. General vs special relativity. The atom bomb. He has bad at math in grade school (allegedly).
So, Mottizens, can you point me in the direction of a biography that does a good job and not a hagiography of "the smartest dude who ever smarted?"
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