Corvos
2mo ago
Learning a second language seems to help. A lot of the brainwashing / cringe reflex is associated with particular turns of phrase, and I've found that expressing the same sentiment in a language you learned as an adult doesn't trip the same wires.
Corvos
2mo ago
I wasn’t arguing, more trying to figure out what I would do in that situation and where the vulnerabilities would be.
Corvos
2mo ago
Sometimes I think Koreans didn't really get the idea with names, they're not very useful to distinguish.
They wouldn’t be. For a long time you bought a specific surname to gain entry into the clan. The more people with the same name, the more power.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/09/08/why-so-many-koreans-are-called-kim
Note that the Japanese colonisers issued a degree ordering everyone to take a Japanese surname so Seeing Like A State still works.
How far have the founders of Signal lost control of the code? If it’s an open-source project, presumably there are owners and admins of the main fork, and if those aren’t the makers then I imagine a code of conduct will appear in due course. Likewise if there’s no company hiring and paying employees, sooner or lately one of the volunteers will turn out to be law enforcement. It’s legitimately tricky I think.
Corvos
2mo ago
Maybe even the guy who produced the fraudulent research can say "I was relying on inexperienced lab assistants/undergraduates who produced faulty data!" I don't know.
He does say that. In general, who 'produces' a given piece of research is very difficult to nail down, because the head of the lab (the guy in the article) hasn't done labwork for twenty / thirty years and the work will have been done by many PhD students who come and go within four years. The recipients of Nobel prizes have often done none of the physical work that produced the result, or the analysis, or the write-up. Sometimes they didn't even come up with the theory.
Sorry, I think I'm spamming this thread, but it's a topic close to my heart.
Corvos
2mo ago
Having never met your parents, please forgive me for stereotyping them.
I think a lot of people just want to feel good, in both senses of the word. Your parents are happy because they've been given an opportunity to vote and not feel bad about it, and they don't want to hear about policy because that would spoil it all. It's been talked about before but people want to love Big Brother because it makes life easier. They want to be persuaded. All they need is an excuse.
Corvos
2mo ago
What are the alternatives? If you can't control your creation, it falls under the sway of the swarm. If you retain control, you can be coerced.
I don't think it's difficult to make a system where two people who want to talk to each other in private can. The difficult part is linking two people who don't know each other but would like to.
Corvos
2mo ago
Loads of fraudsters have intrinsic moral motivation and identity. There are people who fake for money and fame, yes, but lots who fake because they believe they're RIGHT and they think they're the chosen one who will finally solve X. The fact that the data doesn't support X is just a temporary setback - the next experiment will surely prove they were right all along, but right now they need to bolster it a bit.
As some background for people, scientific labs usually have a three-level structure:
- The graduates are in a situation similar (though less severe) to the one that @Throwaway05 describes here where they have invested huge amounts of time and effort into their studies and are often abused as a result; changing labs is very difficult and will almost certainly cost you your shot at a good career.
- The postdocs are in an essentially similar situation but have invested even more time and money into getting where they are; their stakes are higher and their deadlines shorter. Nominally they often have oversight over the graduate student but really they're too squeezed to do their own work, let alone other people's.
- The Principle Investigator (PI) runs the lab, but in bigger labs will often be uninvolved in any of the actual research - graduate students may not speak to their PI for months at a time. They resemble CEOs, and mostly do management, lobbying, and fundraising. Some PI's are helpless slaves to the funding institutes, others are vengeful gods who bestride their field like a colossus. Having succeeded under hugely stressful conditions and survived constant backstabbing, they have the skin of a rhinoceros and the conviction of a fanatic. When the graduate students' work doesn't match their theory, they will usually blame the students not the theory.
Looking over the academic investigation, it seems like a classic fudge: the PI says the data was compiled by a graduate student who never formalised it and took the original creation methodology with them when they left (entirely possible). The writer (a graduate student) is in hiding and refused to talk to the committee but gave various unconvincing reasons in writing why the false database can't be theirs (e.g. their database was a different file format). A bunch of graduate students were involved with the project, and their papers also seem to be dodgy in various ways.
Quoting the investigation committee:
In so far as PhD candidates may have been involved in academic misconduct in any form, the Committee takes into account that they were in a dependent, and therefore vulnerable, position in relation to the principal investigator. While the Committee considers that PhD candidates do bear responsibility with regard to the academic integrity of their own research, it has the general impression that the candidates in question had too little overview and opportunity to question the principal investigator’s working methods.
Most likely explanation is that it's some combination of graduate students signing up to work with a prestigious PI, being put under huge pressure to produce results, and taking the low road rather than destroying their career. By the sounds of it, the data was passed around enough times that nobody was sure where it came from, and so didn't consider themselves to be doing anything more fraudulent then trusting their colleagues. It's entirely possible that the PI didn't know - or didn't want to know - that this was happening. His name is on most of the papers but that's standard for a PI and doesn't prove he did anything except fund the work.
Should the PI be punished, in the absence of positive evidence they did something wrong? Possibly. Probably, even. I can certainly see the argument for it and it might help. But at some point you have to do something to make academia less soul-destroying, otherwise it's like beating a horse and then killing it when it kicks.
You can of course control all of this to some extent by regulating how work is done and how data is handled, and in the last twenty years we mostly do. A big part of what the PI is getting dinged for in the original report is not following the appropriate guidelines. But academic labs aren't big pharmaceutical companies with lots of money to spend on compliance, so research output takes a big hit when this regulation becomes strict.
Corvos
2mo ago
But it's also the case that the left wield power in a way that fits their critique, right? If you have a movement that complains a lot about minority representation, it's going to put a lot of work into choosing what kinds of people get what roles, ending up discriminating against majority representation. Likewise the stuff about hostile environments - having identified the existence of microaggressions that cause trauma to minorities, they instituted strict speech codes that makes things comfortable for their clients whilst making things uncomfortable for their enemies.
If the US had been unexpectedly invaded by time-travelling Stalin from 1949, we wouldn't be talking about this stuff and we'd be talking about the genocide of kulaks and how the Five Year Plans discriminate against our class and sector. The rhetoric from Faction A is going to be related on some level to the actions of Faction B.
It's also mentally easier for rebels to adopt (and be trapped within) the framings of the propagandistically-superior foes. That's why you had Satanists and Pagans in the 90s/2000s and now you have White advocacy influencers.
Corvos
2mo ago
Buy a tin of canned chilli con carne, and a can of black beans (in water). Mix half of each can, and you've got a full and cheapish meal with extra legumes.
Corvos
2mo ago
Oh, sure, but AFAIK it’s not being done to troll the pacifists, it’s because nationalistic military nerds like it when their country conquers the world.
And that is what is slightly annoying me, because as a Star Wars fan, I would like to see more stories about that. Where the Jedi are not simply perfect do gooders.
Politics aside, genre fiction exists to scratch a certain sort of itch. Why Batman Can’t Kill People is a very, very good essay that I recommend, and I'll shamelessly steal bits:
The problem with Batman is that his world is based on a bent premise. Note that I didn’t say BROKEN. This isn’t like Fallout 3, where the world fell apart because nobody could be bothered to make the pieces fit together. Batman is bent, because to accomplish the goals of the story you have to be willing to bend the world into a shape where it no longer fits with the real world. And no, I’m not talking about accepting his hyper-competence or his super-gadgets. These problems go deeper. These problems inevitably bend everyone in the world a little bit, not just the main characters.
Batman is a very particular kind of Escapist fantasy designed to scratch a very particular itch ... [the desire to see a hyper-competent vigilante hero deliver justice against powerful and frightening criminals].
The Bad Guys need to kill people in order to seem like a credible threat and justify the extreme measures Batman is taking to stop them. We can’t kill them off without turning this into a Punisher-style “Mob Boss of the week snuff film”. The bad guys have to keep escaping so Batman has crime to stop. The bad guys have to be too much for the police to handle to show why this problem needs a vigilante. The bad guys have to kill some people to affirm that they’re a genuine threat and Batman isn’t just beating up harmless delusional nutjobs. You need all of these things for a Batman story to work, but once you have these things you have a world where Batman stupidly allows mass murderers to kill again because [insert current in-world justification for not killing or maiming supervillains].
Why doesn’t Batman kill these guys? How do they keep escaping? Since the Gotham Police Department apparently has a survival rate worse than D-Day on the beaches of Normandy, why would normal men and women continue to work there? And given the attrition they experience, why don’t any of the police haul off and kill Joker once he’s captured? Given the sheer frequency and severity of terroristic attacks on the populace, why would anyone live in Gotham? Shouldn’t this entire city have collapsed by now? Why doesn’t Bruce Wayne use his billions to fight the poverty, lack of education, corruption, or whatever else we might assume is at the root of this prolonged, intense, and far-reaching crime spree?
These are all valid questions, but they can’t be answered because they stem from our inherently bent world: We need a hero to punch famously dangerous and unrepentant criminals in the face, and we need him to do it basically forever.
In short, you can't keep asking questions like 'can the Light side of the force be immoral under some belief systems?' or, 'isn't an organised, militarised group of warrior monk cultists going to end up with some pretty dubious practices?' without ruining the thing that makes original Star Wars fans enjoy it. It can work occasionally in one-offs or side material, but if you do it too much in the main shows you're going to lose the fans even if your storytelling is impeccable, because you're not telling the stories people want to hear.
The above is a lesson I think about a lot because I had to wean myself out of the 'but it would be so interesting if you took X aspect of the genre seriously' writing mindset and realise that even if there were potential there, it would remove the aspect of the genre that made me want to write stories in the first place. It's especially a problem for the professional authors / scriptwriters / directors / critics, who spend far more time in their chosen medium than their average audience member, and therefore find their tastes diverging. The professionals demand originality, complexity and subversion because they're sick of the same old thing. And at some point somebody has to remind them that they're being self-indulgent and neglecting the interests of the people they're supposed to be working for (employers/audience).
Getting back to politics, KOTOR II did morally-nuanced discussions of the Force and nobody was particularly upset. Even the first game shows a variety of Jedi with some not-especially-admirable traits. Those games, and the prequels, were interesting precisely because up until then the Jedi has been pretty clear-cut good guys. People get upset now because:
- The deconstructions of Star Wars and the Jedi have become far more numerous than the original depictions.
- These works are being made by people who give the strong impression that they loathe original Star Wars and the white, male people / culture that spawned it. Luke Skywalker was a stand-in for the 70s white male nerd audience and the Jedi were by implication a stand-in for the heroes that the audience wanted to be, and I absolutely think that the desire to take the Jedi down a few pegs is motivated by political resentment on behalf of the showrunners. KOTOR was 'friendly discussion' whereas the new Disney stuff is 'enemy action'. Context does matter.
It never really comes up, though. At least as far as I've seen (I don't have a huge social circle) there's no Japanese equivalent to the wokescold who takes smug pleasure or moral gratification in bringing up controversial topics. If something is controversial people just don't talk about it.
Corvos
2mo ago
Out of curiosity, have you discussed your opinion of Japanese dramas with local friends? I can't stand ドラマ either, and I don't know if it's because I have Westernised tastes that dramas offend (but anime doesn't somehow) or because Japanese drama is legitimately that bad. I lean towards the latter.
Corvos
3mo ago
Yes. He got on the bus, refused to buy a ticket (or couldn’t) and the driver told him that if he didn’t have a ticket then he would have to get off the bus. He didn’t get off, and so we had to wait at the stop with everyone staring at him helplessly for 20 minutes until he finally gave up.
I remember being suddenly struck by the fact that certain problems become unsolvable if physical force is taboo.
Corvos
3mo ago
The UK (and the rest of Europe to a lesser extent), which is far more advanced in this process than the US is happily locking people up for shitposting, as they let out rapists and murderers.
I think that’s proof they are worried about the citizens. They’re not scared of rapists or murderers, really, any more than they’re scared of sharks. They’re worried about allowing dissent to foster among the working class, so they stamp on it.
Corvos
3mo ago
Given the West for anyone in the middle class and above is much less violent than decades ago, most people are going to have much less experience with violence. They freeze, they plead, they try to de-escalate. They don't in my experience think a lot about the law.
My observation is that many people without that, simply on some level do not believe that violence will be the outcome. This is a place where I think Hlynkacg was correct. They have internalized a world view where this is a rules based existence, because to them it has been.
In other words my feeling is you may be underestimating the aversion and unfamiliarity with violence by the average middle class Western person who may never have thrown a punch in anger in their life, let alone had a knife wielding maniac at their door. I think it is highly unlikely they are being concilitory and non confrontational because of the law, but simply because that is how the modern world has taught them to deal with violence. You don't punch your bully, you avoid them and tell the teacher.
I agree with all of this, from personal experience. I've seen an entire bus full of people stare helplessly at one guy who wants to ride without a ticket because he's physically refusing to step off and nobody is prepared to go and shove the guy one step backwards. It's not a legal problem, it's a helplessness problem.
Likewise, of the few times I've been close to a confrontation (ignoring schoolyard scuffles and things), my instinct has been to run and/or call the police. I'm not entirely happy about that, but it is what it is.
Worked for selecting British Army officers for a surprisingly long time.
Going for maximum brevity: you are allowed a gun for shooting objects or animals, but never ever ever for shooting at a human being no matter what.
(i.e. generally the law tries to say yes to sport and hunting, but no to lethal self-defence or rebellion. In days when people had more faith in government, this was pretty well understood and supported as being the government retaining its necessary monopoly on violence. Now, of course, two-tier anarcho-tyranny beckons.)
Corvos
3mo ago
In my not-entirely unrelated experience, the first thing to do with fighting parents is to be very clear what is, and is not, in your control. You cannot have a strong effect on your parents' relationship; you can't make them stop fighting or make them start liking each other. What you can do is behave honourably towards them both and give them both at least one loving family relationship. Focus on making it clear to both that you love them both, and that because you love them you will not be taking sides, betraying confidences, or nodding along while one belittles the other to you.
Secondly, at the risk of being callous and mistaken...
I also seem to have a high sex drive, which (coupled with the disability and the selfloathing) is a big problem. Disability in particular is a huge epistemic distortion-it's always there, like an invisible monster, questioning if people are expressing what exactly they feel about you, questioning if the positive feedback you get is authentic ... in general, I simply do not have anything I dream for. It feels like some sort of learned helplessness: my wanting-machinery has internalized something which I don't know how to put into words, and that has made me just not want any thing at all with particular intensity overall. I have enough skills/intelligence/opportunity to be able to earn well and prosper; but to what end? I don't know.
This is pretty much life in your 20s for lots of people. Certainly it describes my early 20s pretty well, and I wasn't disabled at all, just shy and with few good friends. The majority of people don't have huge life goals, they just muddle along doing whatever seems vaguely amusing at the time until they die. Not saying this is a good thing, just that you shouldn't beat yourself up for not being a Steve Jobsian ubermensch and I think that you should think about your disability less. Being human is hard, but that's normal. You're not cursed to misery forever because you're disabled.
I can probably take steps to try fixing these problems. Sleep, food, exercise, talk to a psychologist, find futures which feel reasonable given my circumstances, all of that. But as I put it to a friend earlier-all of that needs some sort of underlying source of will, which I feel like I have run dry of. I don't know how to fix that. I don't know if I can, or if I want to.
I feel the same way, often. I'm still trying to figure it out, but I think that this is more a disease of the body than the mind. Light exercise (the kind that really doesn't take a lot of will, just a walk for an hour outside with an audiobook or equivalent) seems to help a lot. Counterintuitively, I think the flow is exercise -> energy -> will rather than the other way around. Expecting a little bit more from your body will make it squeeze a little bit more out, and that's a positive feedback loop.
I think an alliance more-or-less entails long-term mutual support, which in practice usually requires some distance. Britain and Portugal have been allies for 900 years, Britain and Japan have usually got on pretty well. Likewise Britain and Australia. It is fundamentally different from vassalage (support from a superior power in exchange for obedience from a lesser one) and mutual cooperation (countries who pursue their own competing interests but cooperate on occasion).
Almost no countries in the EU are allies, except of convenience, and I find the constant desire to pretend otherwise tiresome. Britain's politicians fawn over every foreign connection they can find, our newspaper write stirring paeans to the bravery of Ukranian troops who we basically treat as meat-shields and who would in turn butcher us all if they thought it would help against Russia, and we just tank knife after knife in the back with a smile on our face.
Just strolling, for me. Go at a reasonable pace, get 10-15k steps a day. You can read while you walk.
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