Corvos
5hr ago
I think there’s a lot of friction that arises from doctors of all nations attempting to minister to patients of all nations.
Supposedly there are stringent language tests and of course we have examples on this board that show some foreign doctors pass these tests with flying colours, but I’ve also heard lots of stories from close family of doctors just being completely unable to speak or comprehend basic English. And of course now half the patients don’t speak English, so all paper has to be massively duplicated in every language and then presumably translated for the docs. Likewise stories of doctors just repeatedly not turning up for appointments that they themselves booked with the patient.
Would an all English population of doctors be better? I don’t know but I’m pretty sure that replacing say the bottom 50% would help.
Corvos
5hr ago
You asked, and I answered. In the world as it is, it is not possible for everyone to have everything that one might ideally wish them to have. In another age technology may change the specifics of cancer funding but that fundamental truth will remain the same.
Corvos
14hr ago
Being hard-hearted, the ethical path is to accept as members of their community that little children with cancer cannot and should not be the recipient of vast amounts of community support. People of my grandmother’s generation could and did accept that.
The existence of organisations like NICE in the UK also tacitly accepts this fact. One might say, “I’m not going to accept socialist government telling me what care I can obtain for my child,” but one might also say that telling parents that if they raise 500,000 dollars it will increase their child’s survival rate slightly is both futile and cruel, and preventing them from doing so is a mercy.
Now, God knows I understand why the parents don’t bite the bullet, but it’s basically the case.
Corvos
17hr ago
Right, but it’s noted that those lessons are basically illegal and permitted only on Dumbledore’s say-so. They’re also noted to be pretty unethical and leave Neville and Harry semi-traumatised. They don’t teach any of those curses either, just how to resist them. And finally of course
Corvos
1d ago
Lots of them are using generative AI themselves.
A 3D artist I knew had absolutely no compunctions about using GPT to produce video game code even as he denounced nerds as being thieves who stole from artists because they lacked talent themselves.
There is an interesting moment in HP 7 where they are preparing to smuggle Harry and the Dursleys to safety. Vernon Dursley asks why he has to trust his family’s safety to randos and suggests talking to the Ministry of Magic.
“Harry laughed; he could not stop himself. It was so typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the Establishment, even in this world that he despised and distrusted.”
Corvos
1d ago
Idk what you mean by misreading. It's certainly not JK Rowling's position. I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.
We have guns, we use guns, but for sport and hunting and as objects of beauty. I don't think the narrative you mention would even occur to most people - it's not that the anti-gun side has beaten down the pro-gun side, it's that for all intents and purposes the battle doesn't even exist in people's heads. Nobody would describe themselves as anti-gun either.
Corvos
2d ago
Research (and upstream activities of future research, like teaching and mentoring) are strong-link problems. Your end results only really depend on the very best that do it, the "not stellar" don't effect overall outcomes much. The problem is - as in most strong-link problems - that you don't know who the very best will be in advance. So having a lot of "not stellar" people have academic freedom (and have little to show for it 30 years later) is just the price of doing business.
Except that there is no reliable system in place to inform people of which the strong links are outside the hard scientists. So the weak links go on TV or write blogs as "Professor of History" and spread whatever idiocy they feel like. And they outnumber the strong links so the strong links knuckle under.
Corvos
2d ago
Depending on how you define "true conservative", it's surely relevant that human attention responds very powerfully to novelty. RETVRN can do well because it is or was novel, but it's very hard to actually live that way in modern society because there are so many non-RETVRN options available and the social forces that prevented people from failing to live up to expectations are now absent.
Thus RETVRN is full of grifters and the less-novel conservatives are absent.
Corvos
2d ago
I don’t think it’s a superstitious taboo, I think it’s a case of ‘If we can kill this now by making it socially unacceptable to use, it’ll never compete with us.’ Alongside a healthy dose of blind, seething hatred - I saw a lot of fedposting from artist acquaintances last year.
Corvos
2d ago
Since perfume does often contain ambergris or other fecal compounds, you’re more right than you know.
Corvos
2d ago
“Everyone’s speculating about who it’s going to be. But there’s one guy you never considered…”
Corvos
3d ago
I don’t think so? They’re all related to each other and AFAIK regard ‘the English’ with suspicion. Or is that a myth?
Corvos
5d ago
This is a hallmark of human beings in general. It’s no different to jibes about Margaret Thatcher stealing milk.
Corvos
6d ago
I‘ll also note that the harsh moderation pushed him away
The Motte is a debate site and he wasn’t remotely interested in debate. At best, he was interested in, “accept all of my assertions and let’s discuss the implications” but prefaced that with insults and demands. He was quite clear in his last message that he regards talking to 99% of people as a waste of time and his usual MO was to turn up, start an argument, and listen for anything interesting in the shouting.
Oddly, the poster he reminds me most of is Hlynka. Hlynka employed the same refrain of ‘oh, I can’t tell you, you can only choose to see it for yourselves’ and by his own admission thought of himself as a shepherd nobly taking it upon themselves to lead us poor lost sheep to the true way.
Corvos
7d ago
Faux-gangsta was a hot trend amongst upper-class children when I was growing up.
Corvos
7d ago
why is Japan not innovating in a Japanese way? Why are they stagnating in a boring stagnant way?
One thing is perfectionism. Standards are very very high, especially for anything consumer facing.
Another thing is the steady loss of expertise. Japanese success was heavily based on little family factories and on one room ‘factories’ that were essentially sweatshops. The latter especially aren’t really legal now and the former are dying off. The big zaibatsu corps may acquire them but they aren’t able to hold onto a lot of the ‘tactile experience’ the smaller guys had.
Plus the big companies are clunky and slow moving; they try for Western style agility but it doesn’t come naturally so they hire lots of foreigners and spaff money everywhere without much to show for it. Look at SoftBank investments (Mr. Soft) or the absolute shitshow that is Toyota’s ‘Woven’ startups.
But Japan is certainly trying! Look at the new Kawasaki robot horse, for example.
Corvos
7d ago
That’s a possibility. The US is larger, of course, so you have more diversity of factions to draw from, but still potentially viable.
He is persona non grata in polite society and in every household that does not contain a Reform voter. He was publicly debanked for having opinions that bank staff disagreed with. He will never be able to get a job outside the right wing grift circuit ever again. News outlets regularly hold a Daily Hate for him, as does my genteel and very conservative maiden aunt.
This is precisely my point! The social sanctions levied on people publicly representing populist and anti-immigration sentiment ensure that the only people who will represent those voters are people who will put up with social disrepute for the money, the power or the fame. If you don't like grifters getting elected, you have to prevent nice guys from being put off i.e. stop levying social sanctions.
Corvos
7d ago
Also note the election of Jeremy Corbyn as head of the Labour Party in the UK. A very old, very socialist man who was thrown in as a sop to the far-leftists on the basis that he couldn't possibly win; the organisers had forgotten the reforms they'd made to try and grow grassroots support and boy, did Corbyn have grassroots support. Then he gets elected to the head of the Opposition party and he promptly starts talking about how he would never fire nuclear weapons to defend Britain, how he would prevent people taking their money abroad to prevent them avoiding the swingeing new taxes he was going to create, and videos started coming out where he referred to 'our friends from Hamas' etc. Not popular.
I enjoyed your Boris post and have no issue with having a character-based filter for high public office, in isolation. Where that breaks down is when one combines it with the ongoing effort to ruin anyone of good character (empathetic, intelligent) who tries to represent the populist anti-woke anti-immigration Right.
At the moment:
- A good chunk of the population (let's say at least 20%) is anti-immigration / wokeness to at least a Farage level and willing to vote accordingly.
- Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life. You will be debanked, nice people will desert events if you are invited, friends will not return your calls, and intelligent people on anonymous forums will call you Nazi collaborators who should have been discredited long ago. This means that anyone willing to represent the widespread serious anti-immigration sentiment in public must be either too impulsive to toe the line or too anti-social to care.
The voting support (1) is sticky for as long as immigration keeps up. The social response (2) is not.
If you aren't comfortable with politicians getting elected who don't meet your character bar (a sentiment I understand), the only viable thing to do is to rehabilitate anti-immigrationist, populist sentiment as an acceptable position for a gentleman of high character.
To be fair, it’s generally acknowledged that NICE is the part of the system that actually works, and it genuinely does a pretty good job of deciding what forms of treatment are sane and worth the money and what forms are just utility monsters.
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