Do you think employers and employees have any moral obligations to each other beyond those dictated by law and contract?
I was raised to believe that employers should be loyal to, and supportive of, their staff. It seems to me that this leads to a better world than a world where employers can be as fickle and unreasonable as they like as long as they pay enough, and happily fire their staff for failing to anticipate their whims.
Corvos
8hr ago
If the victim did not object to such things, they would not have hired staff to prevent it and said staff would not be in danger of getting faired for failing to prevent it. If they wanted local notables, they would have invited some.
How does the good-fun principle generalise? People have fun jumping turnstiles and prank-calling and shoplifting and getting drunk & disorderly in a public park in the middle of the day. Not to mention all sorts of antisocial but not actually illegal stuff.
It seems to me that you can oppress the worst behaviour of the bottom 10% without too many complaints, but beyond that you either have to allow ‘good-fun’ exemptions for 90% of the population, resulting is an adversarial and low-trust society, or else say that the rules are different for gentlemen, which I regard as being immoral and long-term corrosive to society, or else be clear that ‘local notables’ are required to model good behaviour for everyone else.
Corvos
8hr ago
The ambassador to Washington at the time covered it in his (rather good) autobiography. One of the single biggest causes of the IRA’s defeat was convincing influential Irish-Americans that donating to the IRA was hurting the Irish rather than supporting them.
This is a fun story, and I apologise for the coming less-fun response. From where I'm standing, this is the story of how you and your friends lied and abused the trust of others in order to get things you knew you weren't entitled to. Like, this is the glitzy high-class counterpart to stories of underclass black guys vaulting the ticket barriers in BART stations.
I'm not saying this just to be a miserable scold (though I probably am that) but because when people talk about rebuilding virtue in society and upholding social trust, this is what they mean. I know that you're an upstanding citizen in many ways and that you work for various nonprofits etc. as well but why are people of a lesser standing going to do the hard, thankless work of keeping up their end when they know that this kind of thing is going on behind their back? Hearing stories like this just makes people feel like suckers for holding to the rules and trying not to trouble others.
I am reminded of a quote from SSC:
On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.
But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
You're not that, most of the time, but it seems to me that this is a little bit of that. Especially when you’re intentionally putting staff in a difficult spot, where they may well be in for professional consequences, so that you can get what you want:
The fact that six random bozos were even able to get this close and that she briefly considered letting them in [...] meant that someone had loose lips and various heads would surely be rolling down the fairway the following morning.
Corvos
1d ago
Humans naturally imitate those of higher status, which means that de facto aristocrats (/celebs/billionaires/influencers/sportsmen) will continue to lead by example whether they want to or not. What we abandoned was requiring them to put some thought into it.
Corvos
1d ago
For identifying landmark cases: Number of times that the data has been looked up? Number of contributions on relevant Wikipedia page?
Corvos
2d ago
Re: private schools, would I be right in saying that most of them are grandfathered in? Particularly thinking of the Catholic schools.
Corvos
2d ago
I would say Pratchett did so well because his books are almost unique in his genre for clearly not being slop. Agree with him or disagree, but he has a very particular perspective that he’s coming from and you’re going to end up grappling with his philosophy one way or another.
Corvos
2d ago
All bugman references aside, I think the point is that Asian societies are more conformist, so everyone sends their children to the same (public) schools and then quietly to cram school out of sight.
Weird tech nerds are more likely to brag about sending their children to an experimental school, whereas in Japan this is kind of like saying ‘I’m an enemy of society and I don’t want my children to be brought up in the normal way’. There are special schools for diplomats’ children etc. but not enough to matter at scale.
Corvos
2d ago
Some specifics would be nice. At the moment it sounds like every other complaint made by parents when their children don’t have much ability.
Corvos
2d ago
Teaching involves a lot of grunt work that teachers don’t necessarily enjoy doing - testing vocabulary etc. It also means being able to identify when a concept in the child’s head is subtly twisted and swooping in to correct it. I imagine flashcard software does the former and the ‘guides’ the latter.
Corvos
4d ago
I like that way of looking at it. And your pitch at the end isn’t bad either :P
Corvos
5d ago
We use Greek for diseases a lot. 'Homophobic' is used because it connotes a diseased mind, as did 'homosexual', which is why nobody willingly uses those terms to describe themselves. Gay people don't call themselves 'homophiliacs'.
Corvos
5d ago
Fortune-telling is stupid-coded. Side effect of the millennial emphasis on science and downstream emphasis on atheism.
For a long time, even if you said ‘I tell fortunes but I don’t take it seriously’ people would assume that you are just trying to hide your embarrassing beliefs. Same with conspiracy theories - ‘I’m just asking questions’ often codes as ‘let me rant at you for hours, and don’t criticise my theories because they’re (not) only for fun’.
Corvos
5d ago
I’m not familiar with tarot but I’d like to be. I had a set somewhere - always wanted to learn how to do readings.
Corvos
8d ago
I liked Xi'an. The terracotta army is genuinely worth seeing, and the centre of the city is surrounded by a medieval fortress wall about 15m high and 15m across - it's pretty unique and impressive. About 5 hours from Beijing by train.
I finally did my first proper continuous run of 30min (4km).
Admittedly this is the opposite of a humble-brag: it's being excessively excited about a mediocre achievement. But before this I'd only been able to do intervals of 1/2/3 mins before running out of puff, so I'm pleased with it.
I hadn't run at all really for about 10 years beyond catching buses and things, so I had to taper up from 1m:2m run:walk to 2:2 to 3:1 over a few weeks, with my HR spiking to 160/170bpm during the running phases.
The main thing that helped this time was the advice to keep my mouth clamped firmly shut. It meant that I regulated my running to my breathing/HR rather than the alternative. Was still up to 166bpm at the end though.
Going to try alternating between this and my usual intervals for the next few weeks and see what happens.
Corvos
13d ago
Only that I seem to be in the same position re: stress readouts on multiple devices, but objectively without that many commitments during the day. I'm not sure if this is a personality thing (I don't think of myself as naturally high strung, but it's possible), a health thing (some long term condition I take for granted), lack of good sleep, or something else. I'm trying to do lots of running and get my <90% cardio fitness somewhere appropriate.
Corvos
13d ago
I mostly think of the Economist as 'that magazine which is read by my friends who think that running a country would be easy if you could make everyone take an economics course'. It's Oxford's PPE degree between glossy covers - that particular arrogance engendered by a very wide purview and not-quite-deep-enough subject knowledge.
Corvos
13d ago
Scholar's Stage though he mostly focuses on running a professional China centre these days.
NS Lyon? Apparently now discontinued.
Corvos
14d ago
That seems sensible. I know a fat, short dude who's fun but not good looking by anyone's standards (think fat Gimli) but he has a happy marriage with a lovely girl who he essentially seduced away from a much handsomer and richer dude; he's as forward as that sounds.
I think that it's partly that dating is heavily subject to virtuous cycles - even if you're dating on tinder, if you've got photos of yourself with affectionate women, if you're obviously comfortable with women, if you know how dating works and how to take the lead and make people feel comfortable, that makes up for a lot. Which is encouraging in that it suggests that datability can be improved, it's just that from a certain starting point it's hard to see how in an easily actionable way. @kky had the right of it when he talked about tractability. Also mixed friendship groups probably help a lot.
Corvos
14d ago
Essentially along the lines described below by other posters. I would expect priests to be disproportionately virgins or bad at dating for the obvious reasons, and they are also often older and regarded as pillars of the community. Finally, Christianity has certain ideas about what women and dating are like and how they should work (as do feminism, PUA, etc.) and priests are sort of expected to uphold those values.
As such, it's not that priests are incentivised to lie to you exactly, but I think to some extent they are motivated to lie to themselves and also they will not necessarily tell you all their own private thoughts. Some very self-aware exception will exist, as with any other creed, but I don't think institutional authority figures in general are very helpful in this sphere.
People can defect in various ways to each other all the time; I think we can regard these as fungible to a reasonable degree. It seems weird to say that I am free to punch other people (who don’t want to be punched) any time I like since they can always get their own back by slugging me in return.
You seem to be gesturing at a system of tacit acknowledgement where it’s okay for me to sometimes take apples from your garden because I let you sometimes take peaches from mine, but such an understanding requires prolonged contact in a stable society and also agreement on both sides, which seems to be lacking here.
If what goes around comes around as you suggest, shouldn’t we make sure that what is going around is largely respect and cooperation, rather than deceit and defection?
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