raakaa
18d ago
Whenever I read this quote, what always comes to mind are those countless scenes in anime where characters will drool and salivate over their dinner, and I remember that the fictional country that Lewis describes exists and is called Japan.
raakaa
21d ago
A 14 year old girl is not going to rally a nation to war
raakaa
26d ago
FWIW, I didn’t bring those numbers up to make some point like “my side could beat your side in a civil war”, like a schoolboy going “my dad could beat up your dad”. I was trying to say that targeting 50% of the population creates conditions of total war far more than targeting 1% of the population.
There’s already a war going on, one that the universities have been waging since long before the funding cuts. The difference here is whether that war should be a limited war or a total one. Even putting aside the fractions of people implicated—conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)—there’s a difference in the purpose of cutting funding to progressive universities versus cutting funding to conservative Americans.
Even if I want funding to these universities to be cut, I still don’t want some PhD student, writing their thesis on the inescapable legacy of white male oppression or whatever, to be unable to find a job, or to be unable to be treated for disease. I just don’t want to pay money for the purpose of letting people who hate me spread that hate. They can do that on their own time, with their own money, and even if taxpayer-funded infrastructure helps them do that on their own time better because money is fungible, so be it; it still is qualitatively different from me directly funding their Hate Whitey theses.
[EDIT: I realize that this might seem like a bit of a motte-and-bailey, since there are lots of people whose funding is getting cut whose research is not the maximally-inflammatory Hate Whitey thesis. Here we’d have to get into specifics about whether we’re talking about funding cuts for specific projects or funding cuts for the entire university. The former seem entirely defensible to me. The latter does seem a bit more morally fraught, since there’s more “collateral damage”, but only a bit, in part because there is far less collateral damage than targeting literally all American conservatives, and in part because the collateral damage is not the whole point (whereas it is in the case of targeting literally all American conservatives).]
Can’t you see how that’s qualitatively different from me saying “I don’t want these people to be happy, work, or live at all”?
(P.S. This whole discussion is assuming that we should be funding things federally at all. If you want to argue that we should end all federal taxes, then that’s a whole other story.)
cut funding for all conservatives
Are you referring to conservative academics? Then sure, let them cut federal funding for the approximately n=0 research universities that are as institutionally aligned to conservatism as the current targets are to progressivism.
If you’re referring to cutting federal funding to conservatives in other domains, though, then that’s a more complex story. Let’s say that the U.S. military is just as conservative as academia is progressive (even though I do not believe that this is actually the case): should Dems cut all federal funding to the military then as retaliation? Clearly not, since by protecting global trade alone, the U.S. military already earns its keep (and I say this as someone opposed to all its interventionist adventures). You may disagree, but I think that the effect of cutting all federal funding to any universities was cut tomorrow would be far less ruinous than doing the same to the military.
Now, since I can’t think of any other institutions that receive federal funding that are as conservative as universities are progressive, the only remaining targets would be governments of red states (which, as we are often reminded by progressives, take in more federal dollars than they give). So do we cut infrastructure funding to these states? Do we cut Medicare and Medicaid? This does seem crueler to me than cutting funding to universities. This is because the telos of federal funding to state governments is (or at least, seems to me, to a first approximation) to be to improve the quality of life of their citizens. If a Dem government would cut funding to red states, that seems tantamount to saying “We want to make the lives of all conservatives significantly worse off.” It’s essentially a declaration of total culture war, an action against “civilians”. In contrast, the telos of universities (or at least, what they say to justify their receipt of my taxpayer money) is something more like “we produce knowledge that benefits the country and the world”. If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.
To make the point even clearer: even if funding is cut to all universities, there’s still a story that can be told that goes like “Universities currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to these institutions.” The equivalent story when cutting funding to all red states would be “Conservative states currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to them.” It’s hard for me to see how that isn’t an implicit declaration that conservatives aren’t American, and thus, as a prelude to civil war!
raakaa
30d ago
Sailing returns as a low-value bulk cargo shipping mechanism.
There are already a number of corporations working on adding wingsails to cargo ships for fuel savings, some of which have seen actual use. This article, for instance, gives figures like the following:
On one of its latest transatlantic voyages, Canopée recorded even higher fuel savings of 2.2 tons per day per wingsail. This corresponds to about 510 kW of equivalent engine power saved per wingsail, or 2 megawatt (MW) in total engine power equivalent. The ship even clocked a speed of 13.7 knots under sail power alone, a figure that underscores just how far wind propulsion technology has come.
Now, I haven’t looked into this enough to know whether this translates into actual cost savings or if it’s just an elaborate scheme to collect subsidies for being green. But I see it as evidence for the prediction coming true, and relatively soon at that.
raakaa
1mo ago
If your primary issue is that the algorithm is probabilistic, then good news: there’s also a polynomial-time deterministic algorithm for testing primality. (Just don’t pay attention to the constant factors.)
raakaa
1mo ago
Huh? Both names (along with a bunch of other cognates, like Ludwig and Luigi) come from the same Germanic source, which roughly means “famous [in] battle”.
raakaa
1mo ago
Here’s how I understand this tic to have originated (but do take this with a grain of salt). In elementary school grammar classes, students are admonished for saying things like “Me and Tim played baseball yesterday”. (The error in that sentence is that “me” is one of the subjects of the sentence, so it should be “I” instead.) The problem is, when the teachers correct their students, they do so by saying “it’s not ‘me and Tim’, but ‘Tim and I.’” Of course, most kindergarten teachers don’t know what a noun case is, so they sure as hell aren’t going to be able to explain to their students the precise nature of the error. Thus, many native English speakers grow up with this strong sense that “[person] and I” is correct and anything else is wrong. I know that at least for me, even a perfectly grammatical sentence like “I and Tim went to play baseball” feels wrong somehow, presumably due to this childhood conditioning. So if this theory is true, then bizarre locutions like “Elon and I’s” are examples born from hypercorrection based on this conditioning. (And hey, it turns out that the very first English example provided on that Wikipedia page is precisely this one; I actually didn’t know that when I was writing this.)
raakaa
1mo ago
Glad to hear you appreciated my ramblings (although now I feel responsible if you end up not liking the series…)
I don't know about my travails, but I do know I intend to travel in a big-ass robot this weekend. It's called a plane haha.
Heh, nice one.
Funnily enough, I entertain both positions.
I think that this is a pretty natural feeling. Even on LessWrong where the biggest doomers congregate, I’ll often see those very same doomers idly musing about whether X architectural improvement or Y change to the training procedure of language models might remove Z limitation. (If you want specific examples of this, I’m afraid I can’t provide, but I do remember seeing this.) This can, of course, be justified as “world modeling”: it’s important to think about things so that we’re better able to estimate timelines and prepare for the future.
But if I may be permitted to engage in some bulverism: I think that deep down, it’s just fun to do this. It’s fun to see a problem and try to solve it. It’s fun to push past some limitation that you were previously chafing at. Humans are natural hill-climbers: we’ll follow the local gradient upwards, even if the hill we’re climbing is actually Mt. Doom. (Now I’m tempted to start going on about again about how “humans just want to evolve and go further than they were the day before” is another core theme of the series—but I’ll stop myself here.)
Of course, I do recognize that your techno-optimism is grounded in more practical, utilitarian, moral reasoning than merely Werner Von Braun-style “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down” thinking. But at the very least, I personally feel its pull quite a bit (even though my primary disposition is more to fear an immanent eschaton, be it utopia or Doom).
raakaa
1mo ago
I feel compelled to defend TTGL: it was one of the first anime series that I ever watched, so there’s no doubt that that colors my perception of it, particularly since it’s been years since I last rewatched it. But the show that I remember has quite a bit more going on than you’ve seen in the first few episodes.
I think that a big part of the problem is the attitude that one has when going in and watching the series; I’ve met big anime fans in real life who bounced off of it for this reason too, expecting well-choreographed tactical fights with a deeply-thought-out power system like many modern battle shounen series instead of GIGA DRILL BREAKER ad infinitum. But to me, that’s like watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet and asking “Why didn’t Shakespeare go into more detail about the political chaos of Renaissance Italy instead of this stupid love story?” TTGL operates on vibes rather than carefully engineered magic systems, and that’s the level that the show is best appreciated at.
More specifically, the way I think of TTGL is this. If you (I) watch it when you’re young, you love it because of the epic fights and the horniness and the increasing power levels and “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down”. If you watch it a few years later, further into your teenage years, and that awkward time isn’t treating you particularly well, then watching a show about “believing in the you who believes in yourself” and “doing the impossible” might be exactly what you need, even if your own travails involve precisely zero giant robots. But then if you watch it yet again as an adult, you realize: hey, maybe kid me was on to something, and the “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down” plotline has a lot more real-world relevance than teenager me, who figured that it was just a metaphor for depression or something, thought.
This fundamental thematic conflict in the series, which becomes particularly apparent in the second half (and particularly towards the end at that), could be boiled down to “growth vs. degrowth”: at what point does technological and economic progress need to be stopped entirely, lest humanity collectively shoot ourselves in the face? How much of our own humanity and dignity should we sacrifice in order to prevent this? [1] I’d say that these are questions that’ve gained particular relevance (in public discourse) in recent years, both with climate change and now (more recently) with AI. Without getting into spoiler territory here, one thing that I found TTGL to do extremely well was to “aestheticize” these questions and translate them from an abstract debate about policy into something that “feels” important on a direct, gut level. The show take a rather refreshingly techno-optimist stance on these questions (which made me reconsider some of my own personal aesthetic attitudes towards them—more on that later), but still provides an appropriately healthy level of nuance (which is most strongly made clear in the series’s controversial ending that large numbers of its Internet fanbase refuse to understand).
Now, as I write this, I realize that “being made to feel certain questions strongly” does not make an anime series high art. What I wrote here unfortunately reminds me of some image collage I’d seen created by a One Piece fan, which insisted something like “One Piece is not a childish anime! It deals with themes like poverty and racism!” It’s clear that whoever made that image had a horrifically stunted aesthetic sense, one that hadn’t developed past the 7th-grade English class stage of “good art = deals with ‘themes’ that can be summed up in one word”. And yet here I am, going and saying “TTGL is a good series because it deals with ‘themes’ like ‘growth vs. degrowth’”—alright, that’s great, but why should I care if a show “deals with themes”? And if I tried to rebut by saying “well, maybe it changed my opinion towards those themes”, then that would only reflect badly on me: I don’t particularly consider myself a Rationalist, but I know well enough Not to Generalize From Fictional Evidence.
But if there is a nugget of value to be salvaged from the assertion that “TTGL is a good series because it addresses the question of ‘growth vs. degrowth’”, it would be this: TTGL presents an aesthetic of (responsible) techno-optimism which is compelling, in the sense that it helps me to understand why it would feel good to live in a techno-optimist world. Even though techno-optimism can be considered, like many isms, as a set of policy prescriptions or economic attitudes, man cannot live by policy prescriptions alone; there has to be some sort of narrative that structures how he will relate to the society formed by that set of policy prescriptions.
For example, you could take two different people living in the same society in the same (or similar) material circumstances, who nevertheless have polar opposite instinctual emotional attitudes towards that society. One guy sees that OpenAI and DeepMind have created AIs that placed 1st on the International Math Olympiad and thinks “Holy shit! We’re living in the future and the future is so cool! I can’t wait to see what humans—and soon, robots—are gonna invent next!” The other guy thinks “Holy shit we’re all going to either be replaced or killed, it’s so over.” Now, if you’re in a position where you can affect policy (be it at the political level or at the market level), there is an asymmetry between these positions: executing the policies associated with the wrong one (whichever it may be) could spell mass disaster. But if you’re just some guy—then these are just different ways of relating to the world, on an emotional level that most directly shapes your own life.
So if a piece of art (or a TV anime series) gets you to relate to the world in a different way at the personal level, even if only provisionally, then I’d say that that’s a point in its favor: it was able to enrich your collection of mental attitudes towards the world [2]. And since TTGL did that for me, to some extent, I have to say that I found it to be a good series.
Now here’s the part where I apologize for this massive rambling text dump. Forgive me; I ended up getting way too carried away. Anyway, I’ve never watched Gundam or Macross, but from what I understand, there’s quite the convoluted viewing order for those franchises, so be aware of that before you jump in.
[1] Only writing this now do I realize that this too is an expression of the lingering trauma from the atomic bombs in the Japanese psyche. It’s not quite as obvious as in e.g. “Giant Robo”, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
[2] Of course, there are some “attitudes towards the world” that are just harmful and not suitable for most humans who want to live a good life. E.g. regularly watching cartel snuff videos probably doesn’t foster attitudes conducive to eudaemonia. But I don’t think that TTGL belongs in that category.
This was addressed in one of the holy texts:
More important, unarmed black people are killed by police or other security officers about twice a week according to official statistics, and probably much more often than that. You’re saying none of these shootings, hundreds each year, made as good a flagship case as Michael Brown? In all this gigantic pile of bodies, you couldn’t find one of them who hadn’t just robbed a convenience store? Not a single one who didn’t have ten eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence all saying he started it? [emphasis mine—and note that this was written in 2014!]
I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.
TL;DR: controversial topics go more viral than benign ones.
Edit: also, to address the specific case of George Floyd, at the time, the video footage that went viral was very chilling to watch. (Or so I’ve been told by friends, conservative ones, who had watched the video; as a rule, I try to avoid viewing such things.) When one sees a man being choked to death slowly over the course of eight minutes while protesting “I can’t breathe!” then it’s hard not to viscerally feel that an injustice has been committed. (And if I remember correctly, the video went viral long before the man’s extensive prior criminal history or fentanyl usage became common knowledge.)
raakaa
1mo ago
Are you confusing the real economy and market with the dating market?
I don't think this engaged with Prima's question about why women would settle for poor […] boyfriends
Evidently there is a link between the real market and the dating market.
(And if the descriptor “stupid boyfriends” means “un(der)educated boyfriends”, then “women taking out massive loans for fake degrees that don't pay” is an example of another “market distortion” identified in the original comment that affects the dating market. Now, there’s nothing inherently gendered about this strategy, so a man who is willing to sacrifice earning potential in order to meet the criterion of not being a “stupid boyfriend” can do so. But then he gives up his ability to not be a “poor boyfriend”, so he fails that criterion too.
None of this addresses the “not being a ‘smelly boyfriend’” criterion, of course.)
raakaa
2mo ago
I’ve heard good things about A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian. Full disclosure though, I’ve never read it, nor any of the original books themselves.
raakaa
7mo ago
High intelligence makes self-deception difficult.
This is false. The smartest people are often able to construct the most elaborate rationalizations and justifications.
raakaa
7mo ago
Yeah, that makes two of us. But I find it repulsive because I’m enmeshed within the culture wars surrounding its use. But what does, say, some random Chilean think if he sees some Anglophone Twitter user memeing like
Normalize wearing sweatpants all day, because I’m too lazy to dress nice
or something? (Note: I am clearly incompetent at writing Twitter memes, but certainly you’re familiar with the genre that I’m pointing at.) Would the Chilean think “huh, isn’t it weird how this person is using that word?”
raakaa
7mo ago
I would guess that the name is in earnest. My own interpretation is that it essentially is implying that the app is like a vade mecum. Just as everyone used to carry around the Little Red Book that carried all sorts of wonderful wisdom, so too will everyone now carry around our app.
I get what you’re saying, though. I had a similar moment when I was watching some Chinese YouTuber who was doing a travel video about a museum founded at the site of the border between the Chu and the Han. When he was discussing why the Qin fell, he was sure to explain that it was due to the “contradictions within Qin society”. I didn’t know if he intentionally put it in there as a signaling mechanism or if concepts like this have just become standard tools of thought for Chinese people. It makes you wonder how non-Westerners react when they see how positively peppered our own discussions are with words like “marginalization” and “normalization”.
My own guess is that you have some number of small true believers who are very much intentionally lacing their speech with these words, and a much larger proportion who just get a vague good feeling when they use these words, something like “look, I’m saying something smart/morally correct/timely”.
Addressing your second point, as someone who knows next to nothing about economics [^1]: your question seems to be answered by the parable of the broken window.
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage [to a broken window], and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child [who broke the window]. All this is that which is seen.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
Applying this to your question about the security guard: any society in which stores (and in particularly bad cases, individual families) must spend on hiring security guards is a society where this money is not being spent on research and development, or on education, or on infrastructure, or on other investments that generally raise the GDP of that society (and often make life better in that society too). We should thus expect to see this opportunity cost of hiring security guards to be reflected in GDP figures, as societies that hire them are more likely to be beset with lower GDP. This is borne out in reality: there are many developing countries where elites live behind expensive walled compounds staffed by large security details, but no one particularly thinks that they’re major players in the world economy.
[^1] That is to say, don’t put too much stock in what I’ve written here.
raakaa
9mo ago
As a tangent, I disagree with his assertion that oppressive architecture is not intentional. There is explicit evidence of architects explaining that they intentionally design buildings to be psychologically destabilizing. For an example, refer to the debate between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman, which has previously been discussed on The Motte.
raakaa
9mo ago
Wittgenstein calls this “family resemblance”.
From the Wikipedia intro:
[The idea of family resemblance] argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things.
raakaa
10mo ago
This discussion reminds me of another culture-war-adjacent meme referencing TF2 autobalancing (which I personally find a lot funnier)
raakaa
10mo ago
Yeah, telling the bleating sheep what they want to hear would probably work out better for them than telling the bleating sheep that they hate them and look forward to them being replaced by wolves.
raakaa
11mo ago
Speaking solely to your question regarding pick-me hate (I’ll let your original interlocutor handle the rest), my theory has always been that pick-mes are the equivalent of scabs in the sexual marketplace. Let’s assume that most women don’t want to act male-brained: they don’t want to have to play video games or watch anime to land a good boyfriend. In the absence of pick-mes, they don’t have to: if all women categorically refuse to engage in male-brained behavior, then any man who wants a girlfriend will have to accept that. But now, if we introduce the existence of pick-mes, the equilibrium changes: it is possible for men (including presumably high-status men) to get a girlfriend that aligns more with their interests, meaning that ceteris paribus, a man would choose a pick-me over the equivalent “normal girl”. This means that in order for a normal girl to maintain her same level of attractiveness, she has to engage in a bit of pick-meing herself to stay afloat (and as we’ve previously assumed, most women don’t want to do that). Shaming pick-mes is therefore a method of preventing this from happening, in the same way that anti-scab tactics are methods of preventing wages from being lowered. I also hypothesize that the male equivalent of this is “simp-shaming”.
Note that the one time I shared this theory in real life to a woman, she wholly denied it, saying that the reason for pick-me shaming is that it is simply fundamentally embarrassing to see a woman debasing herself for a man. But even if that’s how this behavior is psychologized or rationalized, it still serves the broader game-theoretic purpose discussed above. (The same goes for simp-shaming.)
From what I understand, that explanation isn’t accurate. The more accurate one is that most men reproduced—but occasionally, one tribe would fully exterminate another tribe’s males, meaning that the loser tribe’s men from previous generations would have no contribution to present-day Y-chromosomal DNA. Despite this, those men did reproduce; it’s just that wars of extermination prevented their genes from making it all the way down to the present day.
But I’m not a hundred percent sure on this, so do let me know if I’m forgetting something myself.
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