dovetailing
No bio...
User ID: 2225
dovetailing
3mo ago
I'm guessing that this is hyperbole but I'm pretty sure that at least in European societies marriage that young was never very common outside royalty/upper nobility (and usually wasn't consummated until later even in those cases).
Marriage at 16-18, on the other hand, is historically pretty common (though not universal).
dovetailing
3mo ago
I feel like there's conflation in these discussions between four rather different things.
- People who insist on "rules" for "good English" that were never rules of English grammar in the first place. Examples include things like "don't split infinitives" and "don't end sentences with prepositions", or even typographical bits like the use or non-use of the Oxford comma and where to place punctuation relative to quotation marks.
- People who insist that a meaning of a word is wrong because it is not etymologically "correct" or because it was not the "original" meaning, even though it's had the one they object to for centuries.
- People who complain about dialectal differences in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, because these don't match usage in their preferred dialect.
- People who object to trends in speakers of a specific dialect (usually, let's face it, a prestige dialect; nobody cares about other ones) using words or phrases incorrectly per the current or recent standards of that dialect.
People in category 1 or 2 are just silly (or maybe I should say nice rather than silly)? They are often the butt of discussions of prescriptivism and I think that this is what was originally meant by the term.
People in category 3 are either trying to enforce their preferred dialect as the "best" form of the language, or just don't understand that different dialects are not simply inferior or erroneous forms of the prestige dialect. In the latter case they are just wrong; in the former, they simply have a goal that a lot of people disagree with, and therefore those people find it useful to imply that they are just wrong.
Category 4, on the other hand, includes almost everyone at one point or another, and trying to tar them with the same brush as 1-3 is always and only a rhetorical move to try to establish the change that the category-4-person opposes as a fait accompli.
Objections to double negatives might be category 3 or category 4. Objections to "literally" as an intensifier, "could care less" for "couldn't care less", "bemused" meaning "amused" (surely a generation ago this one would have counted as a malapropism?), "irregardless", and the like are pretty much squarely in category 4. Argue about each at the the object level if you want, but these objections are not the result of a misunderstanding of linguistics or a chauvinistic desire to devalue another dialect, but out of a desire to preserve something that the objector finds valuable about the language.
(I'm not sure whether arguments about "enormity" and "peruse" are more category 4 or category 2, but I'm afraid that we're likely stuck with at least a double meaning if not outright replacement by this point.)
PS: If you want a masterclass in analyzing what confusions can result from the same word being used in different senses across time and space, I highly recommend C.S. Lewis's Studies in Words.
dovetailing
3mo ago
hillbilly rather than redneck
I always understood that "redneck" was a general term referring to poor(er) rural, white, mostly southern Americans, including Appalachians south of Pennsylvania, which would generally (though not totally) encompass "hillbilly" -- a person living in rural Appalachia or the Ozarks -- rather than excluding it. ("Hillbilly" is also generally more derogatory -- or at least some people seem to think so; I definitely recall people trying to make a distinction between "rednecks" (themselves) who were, well, definitely Appalachian rednecks and probably hillbillies by most people's estimation, and the "hillbillies" who lived way out in the boonies.)
Is it common to interpret the terms as mutually exclusive, or am I misreading your sense here?
dovetailing
3mo ago
Obnoxious pedantry: In fact "axe" can be used as a verb in another context, when it is used figuratively to mean "to eliminate, remove, or cancel" something (or someone).
Obviously this affects your point not at all.
'redneck English'
I was about to ask you a question under the impression that you meant the dialect(s) spoken in Appalachia, and then remembered that you live in Texas, not in my neck of the woods. Rednecks are everywhere!
Anyway I mostly agree with you. Dialectal variation in American English is shockingly small, certainly compared to e.g. the variation in Great Britain. Aside from maybe AA(V)E, which does seem to have some unusual grammatical constructions, pretty much all varieties of American English are easily mutually intelligible if you are willing to try. (For what it's worth, though I grew up in Appalachian Virginia, my parents are highly educated transplants. My brain seems to produce exclusively SAE even though I have no trouble understanding the Appalachian dialect/accent.)
dovetailing
4mo ago
Can someone explain why this paper is not hot garbage?
It looks like their methodology was the following:
- Give people a set with some words and some nonwords
- Ask them, for each, to say if they know it or not
- Give them a "score" as feedback based on ("known" words) - (falsely "known" nonwords)
- ...Otherwise throw out any calibration information from people claiming to "know" nonwords, and just assume that they actually know every word they say they know?
Behold my shocked Pikachu face that they found an absurdly unrealistically high number of people who "know" really obscure words. (Just look at that histogram!) No, I do not believe for one second that 55% of men know the word "aileron" or even that 58% know what "azimuth" means. This is not measuring how many people know a word -- neither in the sense that they could give a definition, nor even in the sense that they could vaguely gesture at the correct meaning. It is, at most, a measure of how likely people are to guess that something might be a word, which is a totally different thing!
Well, unless I am completely misreading the paper, anyway. Anyone want to point out where my assessment above is wrong?
dovetailing
4mo ago
The problem is not the HP setting is too fairy-tale-like and unsystematic (as you say, this is very much a valid choice), but that (in the later books) it tries to have it both ways. The magic in HP is actually much more well-delineated and "systematic" than in Tolkien. The problem is that (a) rules for how things work + (b) ignoring the rules when they don't suit + (c) taking things seriously, adds up to something that just doesn't work well. You can have perfectly good stories with any one or two of these, but all three together, not so much. In HP, (a) and (b) were kind of baked in by the style of story (and naturally increased over time as more material piled up), so quality decreased as (c) increased.
Tolkien is kind of interesting as a comparison point. His world and its history are incredibly detailed (though it's not really correct to say that he had a huge fixed canon that didn't change as he wrote -- it's really only the published materials that stayed consistent with each other, and even then he retconned The Hobbit), and he's good about making things like troop movements and strategy and so on check out. But the magic is not well-defined at all. The Wizards and the wielders of the rings of power (and many of the more powerful Elves) clearly have magical, uh, powers, but what exactly those are is never made clear. What's more, it's actually important for the tone of the story that this is the case! If Gandalf's or Saruman's or Sauron's (or Galadriel's or Elrond's) powers worked according to some Brandon Sanderson-like magic system, or for that matter like Rowling's (even setting aside the inconsistencies), The Lord of the Rings would be very different, and much worse, for the change.
dovetailing
4mo ago
Hot take: Philosopher's Stone is the best Harry Potter book. As the books go on, the worldbuilding and plotting stand up less and less well to the more serious subject matter (this becomes very clear by the end of Goblet of Fire), and the tone shift is dertimental to the series overall. (Yes, I get the idea of "books and audience grow up with the character", but it just doesn't work all that well.) Philosopher's Stone is an excellent children's book; the later books are still probably better than average for YA (not that I could be sure; most YA is of the sort that I've never been interested in reading), but are only as beloved as they are because people liked the first book(s).
(My wife agrees with me that Philosopher's Stone is the best, but has a higher opinion of the end of the series than I do.)
dovetailing
4mo ago
I have not read most of the books on that list, but from the ones I have it does not bode well. The Great Gatsby is fine, but massively overrated. The same goes for Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Others are mediocre at best with a lot of flaws (Lord of the Flies) or simply execrable (On The Road, a book whose only redeeming quality is that it did an excellent job of making me detest the narrator). And the authors of the list seem to take pleasure in selecting books which had, at one point or another, been banned for obscenity, which certainly sheds some light on their criteria for greatness.
On the other hand, the books they chose not to include are also telling. How can you make a list of the best 100 twentieth-century novels and not include The Lord of the Rings (a contender for #1, and it's not in their list of 100!)? They also seem to think that anything that could be construed as "children's literature" is beneath them, though for my money this includes some of the best literature. Notably omitted is Anne of Green Gables as well as, as far as I can tell, every single Newbery winner (I'd single out A Wrinkle in Time, as well as it's more-mature sequel A Swiftly Tilting Planet (not a Newbery winner), as being particularly good).
All of which is to say, this list surely embodies somebody's idea of a good book, but it's somebody to whose recommendations I'd give negative weight.
dovetailing
4mo ago
You are probably right about that. The dynamics in the modal cases do seem different.
dovetailing
4mo ago
Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.
And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.
This. I think most Mottizens' model of the situation would be much improved my thinking of trans as primarily an unusual set of desires/preferences rather than as delusion or attention-seeking (or even, directly, an attempt to get one's rocks off). The thing that most transitioners (and a whole lot of others who don't go down that path) have in common is that they want, very badly, to be the opposite sex. The delusion, if it's there, is probably a consequence of that desire. Is that desire is born of a fetish or fetish-like sexual thing (AGP), or some emotional thing, or some complicated combination of these, or even of some external source like trauma? Probably each of these for different people (my money's on the complicated combination for most, though). But I strongly suspect that things almost never start with delusion.
Somewhat of a side note, but I find it relevant that quite a few philosophies and religions teach that mastering or overcoming your desires is a key to living well. Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity don't have too much in common philosophically, but they are all in agreement on that point. (Even then there are major differences -- Christianity teaches that some desires must be expunged and the others rightly ordered, while my understanding is that Buddhism thinks that they all have to go. But the common point is that if you can't rule your desires, they will rule you, to your detriment.)
dovetailing
4mo ago
Pascha was maximally different (5 weeks) this year; thus, so was Pentecost. Next year it will coincide with the western calendar, though.
While all Orthodox use the old calculation for Pascha (ok, ok, not the Finns for complicated historical reasons), somewhat confusingly, different Orthodox jurisdictions differ in whether they use the Julian or Revised Julian (identical to Gregorian for most of the next millennium) calendar for all the fixed dates.
The Russian church (and a few others) continues to use the Julian calendar for everything; thus the feast of Sts Peter and Paul, being June 29, is then July 12 in the Gregorian calendar.
dovetailing
5mo ago
In all seriousness: find a private tutor that works with gifted kids. It won't be cheap -- you can expect to spend somewhere in the $50-$200 per lesson range -- but it will be cheaper than an actually good private school, and while he won't have the peer group, at least he'll have someone who is capable of working with his educational needs. (Though it sounds like you personally may have this covered with homeschooling -- and that's awesome if you do.)
My wife actually does some of this (she also works with struggling kids too, since there's a lot more demand for that kind of tutoring), and for a while had a student in almost exactly your situation (down to the region of the country) -- a second (?) grader doing roughly sixth grade level math (though of course they were not using a normal curriculum). Unfortunately the student had to quit because something happened and the family could no longer afford it, I think.
The main reason that most schools are not willing to do anything for gifted kids is that there's so little real demand for it that they can just not bother. Even most parents of gifted kids are not willing to really invest, and are satisfied with the kid getting As and being in a million activities. Or they are more concerned with their kids maxing out the metrics in the system they are in -- grades, test scores, impressive sounding extracurriculars -- than with actually getting them the best education. Either way, accommodating the real needs of gifted kids is not on the schools' radar because it's not the parents' priority.
PS: If anyone reading this has an elementary or middle school age kid who is gifted in math, can meet before 7 PM eastern time, and is able to handle doing tutoring lessons over Zoom, DM me -- my wife might be interested. (Yes, Zoom is not as good as in person, but she's had a lot of experience with it at this point and can make it work surprisingly well.)
PPS: If you are homeschooling an elementary aged kid who is gifted in math and are not using Beast Academy, do yourself a favor and look into it. My wife swears by it as a gifted curriculum, and you can either (a) just buy the books and use them for homeschooling, (b) enroll in an online class through Art of Problem Solving, or (c) find a private tutor (like my wife) who is familiar with it to work with your kid.
dovetailing
6mo ago
Roti Prata is delicious. Go to a hawker center get some.
dovetailing
6mo ago
My theory is that the "right side of history" narrative (and its close cousins, casting being progressive as just being a "decent human being" and denigrating opposition as "retrograde" or "reactionary") is so ubiquitous because the progressive left is deeply confused about whether it believes in moral realism, and so adopts an inconsistent (but very effective) posture on moral questions.
On these big social questions, there are, at root, three reasons for acting:
- You are a moral realist and believe that X is right/wrong as a fundamental fact about reality. (How do you know? Maybe you believe God -- who knows such things -- said so; maybe you believe you have a direct apprehension of the truth; maybe it is a logical consequence of other things that are in the first two categories.) You act because you think it is right, period.
- You have a preference that you want to fulfill, and think that you and those who share it have the power -- or can obtain the power -- to enforce it. You act out of pure preference and power.
- You just want to go along to get along. You don't have an independent reason to act, so you don't act independently -- maybe you stay out of it, or maybe you join a cause you think will imminently win (or is most of your social circle) so that people will like you.
"The right side of history" tries to have it all three ways while not committing enough to any of them to expose weakness there.
Straightforward moral realism is a problem for the progressive left (at least in its modern incarnation; past movements vary) for two reasons. First, because most of its thought leaders are not moral realists, and many of the rest would reject moral realism if the question were put to them (though they may implicitly act as if they believed in it). Second, because the natural response to "It is a moral law of the universe that [insert progressive cause here] is good" is to say: "And how do you know? I'm pretty sure I've always heard that God said the opposite, my intuitions disagree, and anyway you just got done telling me that you don't believe in hearing from God, so why should I believe you?"
Straightforward appeals to power or preference are not persuasive -- at least not unless you already have the power and just want to compel, not "win hearts and minds".
And finally, appealing to people's "go along to get along" instincts is tough unless you can offer social proof that either your cause already dominates, or soon will. (It works wonders when you can, though -- see what happened to gay marriage.)
Enter "the right side of history". It appeals to moral realist intuitions and persuasive force, while not actually committing anyone to staking out an actual claim about ground truth morality. It can be a threat based on present or claimed future power without being explicit about it. It appeals to "go along to get along" without having to actually produce the goods in terms of current social influence.
Time will tell (ha) about whether the rhetorical strategy will continue to be effective, but I expect that, absent major ideological realignment, it will continue to be used in one form or another.
dovetailing
6mo ago
Who the hell wants to ban porn?
Quite a few people, actually. Even on the ACX survey (not a demographic known for its social conservatism) over a quarter of respondents said that they would wave a magic wand to end pornography permanently if offered the choice. Now making something magically disappear is not quite the same as banning it for a number of reasons, but the sentiment is much the same.
You might be confused because of all those statistics indicating that 90%+ of men have used porn. Past, or even current, porn use is not inconsistent with wanting it to not exist. People don't have perfect self-control, after all, and it is Well Known that people have diminished judgement and self-control under... relevant circumstances. Many people are quite capable of disapproving even of their own vices, and think that it's bad to have widely available temptations for them and others to succumb to them.
I am almost certain that banning internet porn is part of the intention of laws like these, not an accidental consequence. For the state of Texas (and for other states with similar laws) this is the system Working As Intended.
dovetailing
7mo ago
This seems to come up as an explanation a lot, but I don't think it really holds water. We don't have a huge number of people who are experts in pushdown automata or computational complexity or type theory, but can't code. For the most part, the people who didn't learn to code in school also didn't learn any of the theory either.
dovetailing
7mo ago
I don't think this is disagreement with my above post? (I mean, I do disagree on a value-level with the transhumanism, but that's another kettle of fish and not relevant here.)
Maybe I wasn't totally clear -- I was saying that your confusion about apparently normal men saying "it could have been me" mostly boils down to the fact that you can't empathize with those people on the subject because most of them have AGP. Despite the stereotype, most such people are normal men in almost all other respects except having, or at one point having had, a recurring desire to be female, and a lot of them are horrified that someone just like them could be ushered down what they see as a self-destructive path.
dovetailing
7mo ago
I think I mostly agree with you, but I do want to emphasize that
some of these men will choose to undergo transition
is not the only difference in outcome between the "pro-trans" and "trans naive" environments being discussed.
Having the ready-made answers, social encouragement, etc. on offer can not just affect what sorts of actionable options they have available, but also the trajectory of the desires themselves.
As an example let's take the POV of a teenage boy with autogynephilia. Our protagonist finds that he has a recurring desire to be female. Sometimes (maybe most of the time, maybe not) this desire and fantasy is associated with sexual arousal. This is confusing and weird, what is he to make of this?
In an environment without the "trans" meme and social encouragement thereof, this remains a private quirk and fantasy. He knows that he can no more become female than he can become a bird or acquire superpowers (random side note: was Animorphs especially appealing to boys with autogynephilia? I strongly suspect so...). Maybe it wanes naturally over the course of years, or maybe his desire is an inner demon that he struggles with from time to time, or maybe it's just a recurring fantasy his whole life which he occasionally indulges in -- depending on the strength of his desire and his attitude toward it. A lot of things are possible, but probably he lives life as a normal man and most things are fine. (Of course there is the chance that he develops some delusions based on his desires and fantasies -- especially if they are unusually strong or he indulges them unusually much -- but this is not a very likely outcome.)
In an environment where the "trans" meme is present and positively reinforced, he is encouraged to interpret his desires as evidence (or even proof) of identity as a "trans girl". A ready-made, positive-valence identity that fits his experience, at a time when he's naturally (like most teens) going to be confused about his identity and place in the world? It's like catnip. He starts thinking of himself as trans. He talks about it on the internet. Maybe he tells his best friends and they affirm it, or maybe his new best friends are the people who affirm it. He indulges his fantasy, because it's just part of who he is. Maybe he even encourages it, as its presence is proof of his new identity. His ways of thinking of himself get solidified: "I am a trans girl": now each of his desires and every trait that is not stereotypically male is proof of that. He develops a female persona and acts it out; maybe he really believes the propaganda that, deep down, he is a girl, not just wants to be one. Now his identity is all bound up in this: he becomes more and more unsatisfied with the stubborn truth that he is not, in fact, a girl; that his body is stubbornly male. As an adult, maybe he does try to force his fantasy to become reality with hormones and surgery (of course this doesn't actually work, but maybe if he is lucky he can convince himself it does) -- or maybe he just ends up with a weird self-identification and way more unhappy with his life than if he'd never gone down that path.
Regardless of whether our protagonist ultimately undergoes medical transition, his whole life can be dramatically impacted by this difference in his environment.
dovetailing
7mo ago
I wouldn't expect you to be able to empathize with it, any more than... well... with people who want to have sex with men.
I can't be certain, but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of men saying this have at least a touch of autogynephilia. The sense of "it could have been me" is less "I, as a perfectly ordinary man, could have become socially hypnotized into wanting to be a women" and more "What if that part of me that already -- at least somewhat -- wanted to be a woman had been socially encouraged, been amplified, been given a (positive-valence) identity category; what if I'd been encouraged to indulge in this, been offered "specialness" and affirmation and a ready-made memeplex, all when I was young and socially and emotionally vulnerable? Then I could see myself having gone down that path."
It's so common because some degree of autogynephilia is probably about as common as homosexuality among men. (I remember -- I think it was in Men Trapped in Men's Bodies? -- seeing a reported study estimate of 1-3% of men for erotic cross-dressing alone, and that's almost certainly a substantial underestimate of the fraction of men with any amount of AGP.)
dovetailing
7mo ago
The explanation you are looking for is "great circles". Your flight probably took close to the shortest route.
dovetailing
8mo ago
This was a great recommendation -- I'm enjoying it very much. It's like the game show version of a puzzle hunt.
Why aren't any American game shows even close to this good?
dovetailing
8mo ago
FWIW I agree with both @hydroacetylene and you here, and I expect that he'd agree with you too. What I would mean, and what I expect he means, by "trans isn't real" is that none of the people being classified as "trans" are "born into the wrong body" or "assigned" the wrong gender, nor are they "really" (in some sense) the opposite sex -- that it's not just a matter of overdiagnosis and a classification of some people as "trans" who aren't, while there is still some smaller subset who are "really trans" and where that the most appropriate treatment is the constellation of "gender-affirming" (what a euphemism!) treatments of hormones/surgery/social transition/etc.
I do agree that there is a separate mental illness (probably more than one) which correspond to "trans" -- that it's not just depression or anxiety or whatever that causes boys/men to want to be girls/women (or vice-versa), or to be unhappy because they aren't, or to (at times) convince themselves that they "really are" what they want to be. And I get that there are some people who don't believe that and think that the entirety of "trans" is just some current-day-cultural nonsense. But I do think that there is a meaningful and important sense in which "trans isn't real" is true, and I think that's what he's getting at.
dovetailing
8mo ago
Thank you for the kind words and the mention (I wouldn't have seen this otherwise). I'm sorry you are going through such a tough time. Feel free to PM me again if you ever want to talk.
Do elucidate, because it seems like at least one of the following is true:
I'd previously assumed that it was just a matter of (1), but from Scott's post and some of the commentary on it I suspect that the others are at play here.
More options
Context Copy link