Corvos
2d ago
OP said
It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.
Those seem to me classic examples of OP’s first case. Modern Germany defines itself (negatively) in relation to the Nazis, while Australia and Canada are constantly weeping performative tears (and arson campaigns, cancellations, affirmative action etc.) on behalf of the ‘genocided’ peoples.
Corvos
2d ago
For sure. I’m just saying that I don’t think the first approach is actually viable and I can’t remember seeing any examples, except when the genocide is centuries old and long forgotten except by revisionist historians. Can you think of any examples?
But in practice the first is much harder than the second. Telling someone, “Yes, my ancestors killed millions of people not very long ago, but I choose not to let it define me,” is very difficult, especially if your conversational partner is related to the people they murdered.
It’s much easier to say, “nah, that stuff’s all exaggerated,” or as e.g. the SNP do, “no, you don’t understand, all that British Empire stuff was the evil hateful ENGLISH really, they oppressed us too, please don’t look at any of the Mac names on the memorials…”
Corvos
4d ago
That’s hugely excessive. A slightly clunky conversation struck up at the wrong moment is not the same as harassment.
Corvos
4d ago
€8000 seems like quite a lot of money for 1/3 of your classmates to toss away, though. I’m surprised.
Corvos
4d ago
My understanding is that in Europe university is free and therefore much more ad-hoc than in UK and US where it’s a massive investment.
I’ve always thought it sounded like a good system but haven’t had a chance to try it.
Corvos
4d ago
Is that what the Chinese say? I’d be interested to read a translated article or whatever if you happen to have one.
Corvos
5d ago
Oh, yes. I meant the propensity for idle chat / relationship-forming, and the baseline emotional response to customers.
Corvos
5d ago
One thing to note is that in WW2 people were ultimately forbidden to volunteer (in the British Army, anyway). Relying on patriotism creates big bulges of recruits that are hard to process at the start of the war, after important event etc.
Conscription works much better for any serious war because it allows you to stagger your intake, make sure the impact of losses is spread through the country, and get a wider variety of applicants.
Corvos
5d ago
For sure it sounds like she could have dealt with it more gracefully. I doubt that Starbucks is getting the best and brightest.
I also think it's the case for whatever reason that Americans seem to be much accepting about paring all relationships back to pure economics. I'm not sure why. Possibly because it's worked well so far. But I'm reminded of the way that in Japan falling below a certain level of politeness is just totally unacceptable no matter what, as is stuff like raising prices beyond the socially accepted level.
Corvos
5d ago
But you are not their neighbor. That implies they know you already. You are a stranger. A potential customer. This is their place of work, not a place to make friends. As an ex customer service worker myself I really want to stress this. People suck to deal with. The workers generally don't want to make friends with you. They want you to engage in the transaction that they are being paid for, so they can earn their money and go home.
To be fair, this is not the case at all times and in all places. It generally corresponds with scale and culture, and is much more the case in a big-chain shop than it is the case in, say, a little tea shop in a small town.
Corvos
5d ago
But it's also understandable that employers don't want to be undermined by having any one of their employees act as impromptu spokesman for any cause, anytime, anywhere. Even the striking employees as a whole don't necessarily want that - remember how antiwork was basically destroyed by one bad interview?
I think it helps to consider people as having rights and responsibilities linked to the roles they play. When you are wearing a uniform and you are dealing with a customer, you are (like it or not) visibly representing the company and you are expected to do and not-do certain things. After work, it's different.
Corvos
5d ago
I should note that Japan too has recently discovered the joys of ActuallyIndians. If you go to any convenience store or quite a lot of chain restaurants, all the staff are Indian now and have been for several years. Maybe since Covid?
It’s less so outside Tokyo but I imagine that’s a matter of time.
I think the problem is that:
- We (often) bring them in to fill specific shortages, enduring the larger problems that arise (loss of cultural integrity, lowered trust, often high long-term welfare costs) because we need those shortages fixed no matter what.
- There is no incentive for them to continue fixing those shortages after they get a long-term visa.
- The shortages then remain unfilled, so we bring in more immigrants. Meanwhile the long-term consequences are getting more and more severe.
Corvos
5d ago
An appreciable number of women (at minimum) go for guys who observably aren’t reliable and don’t have their shit together.
Precisely. At a certain ratio of machine:human ability, NOT committing genocide starts being harder than doing it.
Corvos
5d ago
I really don’t follow your thought process. To me, there is no risk and no need for conspiracy. All humans not in charge of the robots might as well be air - they have no ability to affect anything at all except to spoil the view.
There would be no need to ‘plot’ under such circumstances. Committing worldwide genocide would be as easy as setting the air conditioner to ‘cool’, or indeed as easy as setting the ‘feed the populace’ machine to ‘off’.
In practice it might be difficult for people to get to this level of dominance, and we should keep it that way of course.
Corvos
5d ago
It’s saying that, with sufficient mental and physical automation, they don’t need other human beings in order to pursue their rivalry.
Corvos
5d ago
I like your frame partly because it suggests useful ways of addressing the problem. (I don't intend this as a gotcha).
-
People are wiping butts instead of cleaning -> more robot vacuums / mops.
-
People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> more of those robots that carry food from the kitchen to the table + normalize selecting & paying for food using a ticket machine at the entrance as in Japan.
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People are wiping butts instead of manning tills -> put more serious work into unmanned checkouts.
Most of these are not insoluble problems, they are problems that nobody was incentivized to solve.
My only worry would be that so much of our economy is purely financialised at this point that such an approach would neglect serious aspects of reality that matter. No idea if this is true.
Corvos
5d ago
PPE at Oxford and Natural Sciences at Cambridge aren’t far off, though.
Of course PPE is widely pilloried for leading to a superficial understanding. I don’t know if that means the curriculum is too broad or the testing too lenient.
Corvos
6d ago
IMO there are two serious barriers to widespread 3d printer adoption:
- Most people don’t need to make small custom objects regularly
- 3D printers produce striated plastic objects in primary colours and people don’t want those in their homes.
The latter could be considered a technological problem. Wood mills are much nicer but too loud and too messy, but there might be paths forward.
Corvos
6d ago
What good is an essay?
When you wanted to explain an idea you had to people you don't know, you sat down and wrote this essay. Maybe that's the joke, but in all seriousness, this is the good of an essay. It's a way of conveying your thoughts in a timeless and self-contained fashion.
They are also a way of helping yourself think. Have you read Paul Graham on essays? https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
Unless you are defining essays very strictly as 'five part theses of twenty pages as written by humanities students'. I am quite prepared to believe that essay writing is taught badly.
Corvos
6d ago
Can confirm, did this myself. There is nothing worse than spending HOURS trying to figure out if a student has a great point that you’re missing because they’re brighter than you and they write floridly, or if they’re bullshitting.
But I don’t hear about Aella from reactionary Twitter, I hear about her from the people who post about her, who are Rationalists and the Rationalist adjacent. In other words, people who are disproportionately not normal Christians and who are weighted towards Silicon Valley.
Also, let’s be honest, your post was very clearly accusing people of being hypocritical perverts who denounce Aella in public whilst having wet dreams about her private. I have many hypocrisies but that is not one of them, and I am telling you plainly that I think your model is wrong.
‘Fun is bad and you’ll pay,’ ignores the very real dissatisfactions and disillusionments that have spread through society in the wake of Free Love. Some people have turned to reactionary and/or Christian sexual ethics in response, others who already held those ethics are pointing out that they said sex was not purely harmless fun and behold, it turns out not to be purely harmless fun.
I think these feelings arise because we eliminated these external causes of suffering and so we are left with the internal ones. It's the difference between a house battered by winds and one with rotting foundations. When you eliminate all external causes for your unhappiness, you are left with the fact that there is simply not much capacity for happiness within you. The starving can hope for food, the plague-ridden can hope for healing, but what do you do when you have everything you could realistically want and you don't enjoy it?
Part of it also is that huge chunks of our lives no longer have tangible, close-time reward. We train for fifteen years before we can hope to get any value of that training for ourselves. It's only natural to long for respite, and the gap between longing for respite and longing for death is not so large.
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