marinuso
15d ago
Part of it is just the election system. The first-past-the-post election system leads to a two-party system, because having more than two candidates favors the most dissimilar candidate. Consider e.g. the 1992 American presidential election. Bill Clinton got 43% of the vote, Bush got 38% and Ross Perot got 19%. The majority of the population voted for a right-winger, but a left-winger was elected, because the right-wing vote was split between two candidates. To prevent that, people with somewhat similar political stances all have to get together to back one candidate, if they want someone they can live with. Thus you end up with only two parties.
If the population were to shift, the parties would just shift along. For example, if the American populace became much more left-wing as a whole, at first the Democrats would win. But the radicals in the Democratic Party would be empowered, pulling the party further left; meanwhile the relatively more conservative people in the Democrats would get pushed out and join the Republicans, pulling that party to the left as well. Soon enough a new equilibrium would be reached. Even if an entire party does collapse, a new one will take its place.
In European parliamentary systems you get a different dynamic, because the parties are assigned seats proportionally to their national votes, and they have to form a working majority only afterwards once the election is over. So you can vote for a small radical party if you feel like it without wasting your vote. They'll get a few seats anyway, and depending on how the rest of the election went, they may pull the resulting coalition into the direction you want. The result of that is that you get a lot of different parties instead of just two.
marinuso
16d ago
We have written sources from the Classical world on down where people express grief over losing children.
Any written sources from the Classical world that have come down to us, concern only the top ~10% of society, if that. Your average illiterate peasant wouldn't have left a gravestone with an inscription for us to find; he couldn't have if he wanted to. (And not just because he was illiterate and couldn't write a message, that could be - and sometimes was - fixed with a standardized template; mainly he couldn't have afforded the stone or the services of a mason.)
Do note: we have an epitaph or two for dogs from Roman times. This doesn't tell us anything about the common Roman experience. All it tells us is that there were at least a few people in the entire Roman empire, during its entire existence, who could afford a stela for their dog. (It may well have been conspicuous consumption rather than any actual feelings; or perhaps it was both.)
We have stones for dogs today, too. Even in rich Western countries it's not common, but it does exist; maybe in another two thousand years, when our civilization has fallen and another has arisen, someone will dig one up and write a treatise on it. It will say absolutely nothing about our society today.
I think we tend to flatter ourselves by comparison with the past; we're a culture that has legitimised abortion as a human right
Before they had abortion, they had infanticide. It was common and normal in the Roman Empire. The Christians tried to ban it, they banned it over and over and over again for a thousand years, which tells us people didn't listen to the ban and kept doing it.
There's places where it still happens today, despite the availability (though perhaps not accessibility) of medical abortions. Every once in a while, a third-world immigrant still tries to expose their baby even in the West, and then everyone's shocked.
On a discussion forum in particular, you care that there's an actual person behind the post, who actually holds whichever view they communicated, and who can respond to follow-up questions. That's what discussion fundamentally is. Ideally, of course, it shouldn't matter how that person edits his posts, but it does matter that the posts are his in a real sense.
Even before AI, we cared when this wasn't the case. People would pretend to hold views they didn't, or be people they weren't, in order to rile people up, and we'd call them trolls and they'd get banned. Note that even in that case there is a gray area. If someone's not too bad of a troll, and his posts are good enough discussion fodder, he might be tolerated for a while, even though people know he's a troll.
But being a troll by hand takes effort, and that limits the amount of trolling. Meanwhile, LLMs have caused a flood of "content". Marketeers, advertisers, Onlyfans girls, influencers and the like often euphemistically(?) refer to their output as "content" and to the thing they do at their jobs as "creating content". The problem with LLMs is that it's become much too easy to create "content" in this sense.
If you want to be a troll nowadays, you just turn on your LLM and let it flood the place.
If you have a working LLM detector, or even something close enough to it, I can understand a rule that says "whatever it flags, is banned". Yes, it's possible to use LLMs with good intentions and/or with good results. And you may even apply leniency in such cases even when it's obvious someone's using an LLM. But its main effect is to drastically simplify the job of a bad actor.
marinuso
1mo ago
if small groups had the ability to make deadly, highly infectious pathogens.
They don't and they won't. Things like that, just like making nuclear weapons, require a bunch of physical infrastructure that costs a lot of money and takes a lot of effort to build, and you certainly can't just build it unnoticed. Even if you can ask ChatGPT for the recipe and it just spits it out, there's nothing you can actually do with it. What we're really relying on is that random small groups don't have the resources to do these kinds of things.
that does not mean that there aren't a few Xs that the overlords really do need to prevent us from doing.
They can't actually stop us from doing things.
They can arrest us after the fact. Normal people behave because they care about their reputation and about the consequences of their actions (even if just the "I'll be arrested" part of the consequences). But that does not really work on crazies or fanatics. They don't care.
If we really do, somehow, get to the point where random small groups can easily produce deadly pathogens, we're in trouble anyway. For example, look at what Aum Shinrikyo managed to do. The cult was disbanded and the leader executed afterwards, but that's afterwards. If they had managed to make something really deadly, they wouldn't have been stopped in time.
Yes, except that it's not the pop culture. That's just a bonus. The need is much more basal than that.
In the Netherlands for example, you will need English for any kind of higher education, even when the classes themselves aren't in English, the textbooks and articles will certainly be. You will need English for any office job. Advertisements, shop signs and other public texts are written in English more often than not. Computer software is usually in English. The Internet is, obviously, mostly in English.
There are two languages in common use, and you need to know them both; not knowing English is almost as bad as being illiterate. That means everyone is constantly getting a lot of practice, also outside of school. It means the benefits of having good English are very obvious, and the friction of not having it is bad enough that it'll motivate you to practice more if you need to.
In fact this may be a good way to describe it to an English speaker. It is quite like literacy. You don't acquire it naturally at home, you need to be taught it. But then, society presents you with a lot of text, even if you do not seek it out. Society expects you to be able to read information in that format, if you are to participate to any degree. You are always reading and often writing. Perhaps not capital-B Books all the time, like the literature teachers who complain that "kids don't read anymore" would like you to, but Internet forums, manuals, street signs, official forms, labels in the supermarket, text messages, someone's blog, your co-worker's E-mails, and so on. You get all that practice in, and as a result most people end up fairly decent readers.
Imagine if you had no use for reading, and you never actually used that skill outside of a specific "reading" class in school a couple of times a week. You would never get anywhere near decent at it, and you would forget it as soon as you're out of school. I have an actual real-world example of this exact thing happening, the Laotian literacy campaign of the 1980s.
An intensive adult literacy campaign was initiated in 1983-84, which mobilized educated persons living in villages and urban neighborhoods to bring basic reading and writing skills to over 750,000 adults. Largely as a result of this campaign, those able to read and write had increased to an estimated 44 percent. According to the United Nations (UN), by 1985 those able to read and write were estimated at 92 percent of men and 76 percent of women of the fifteen to forty-five age-group. Because few reading materials are available, especially in the rural areas, many newly literate adults lose much of their proficiency after a few years.
You can, obviously, go into what is essentially a pre-modern village and teach the peasants to read, certainly to the point where the guy from the UN will be willing to count them as literate. But they're still pre-modern peasants whose lives haven't otherwise changed. They've never needed to read anything, they still don't, and they have no access to reading materials, save perhaps a few government pamphlets about literacy. They have no real reason to seek out any more reading material, nor any real way to do so. How could they even know what exists? So they just forget it again and when you go back to the village after a couple of years, they'll all be illiterate again. (I bet nowadays, all those villagers have cellphones and thus retain their literacy.)
And so it goes with language instruction at school. It's not that school does nothing at all: English is not my native language, I did have to be taught the basics. I remember not understanding the cartoons on the TV. You don't get there by osmosis unless it really is your native language. But once you do have that basis, it becomes self-reinforcing given all the societal exposure.
At one point I knew enough French to say 'where is the bathroom?', and I could recite the conjugation tables. There may well be French books worth reading, but I never got to that point. I could struggle my way through a newspaper article at one point. But why would I want to read a French newspaper that badly? I needed the high school diploma, not the French. My French is now just as nonexistent as the literacy of one of those Laotian villagers.
marinuso
1mo ago
The real conquest was that of the Tough Barbarians by the Empire. They tried to emulate the society they had conquered, they set up as emperors themselves, not tribal chieftains. They were quite happy to inherit baths and togas (as they understood them) rather than pulling down the marble halls to live in mud huts like their forebears.
Not really, and when they did try, they failed hard. They certainly did not take up the toga (that kind of thing happened centuries earlier when the Roman Empire was still strong). They didn't immediately take up the title of emperor. The first person to try that was Charlemagne. Odoacer was quite explicit about not doing so, he called himself king and had coins struck with an image of him with a (barbarian) mustache and hat.
The marble halls and the baths fell apart on their own, and mud huts did certainly come back in style. That might not have been ideological, but it happened all the same, because the economic and social collapse was total. Long-distance trade ceased, cities were nearly or wholly abandoned, and in quite large swathes of the fallen Roman Empire, money itself fell back out of use for a time.
The Roman Empire had had a fairly complex economy. It had plantations that grew cash crops, it had brickyards and pottery factories and so on. We shouldn't forget that these were worked mostly by slaves, but still, per capita production was really quite high for a pre-industrial society. The barbarians might not have meant to do it, and the Romans in later years certainly did much damage too, but they kicked the whole thing over. The population about halved as food production fell. Barbarian kings were ceremonially buried with crude pottery that a Roman peasant 200 years earlier would've spat on. Even royal complexes, outside maybe Italy itself, were wood and mud and thatch, not bricks and tiles, let alone concrete, which was famously lost entirely.
If they wanted the baths and the marble halls, well, they didn't get them.
Of course, all else being equal, a richer, more powerful society is going to defeat a poorer, less powerful society.
But there's more to decadence than just individual softness. Take the Roman Empire. In a way you can say that the root cause of its demise was infighting. By the year 200, they were so used to being top dog that they no longer took external threats seriously. After all, they hadn't needed to for a long time.
Civilization was not in immediate danger if generals started jockeying for power individually, at the cost of the empire as a whole, so they did. And they got away with it. That is a real position of strength for a society to be in, the 'good times' if there are any. It didn't end civilization all at once, but things got worse. Then they started bringing barbarians in as mercenaries. First as individuals serving in Roman auxiliary troops, but then also as whole tribes, keeping the tribal structure intact and creating competing political/ethnic power centers (foederati). And that too did not immediately end civilization, but things got worse.
By the time the Roman elite as a whole kind of woke up to the situation, due to the Gothic invasion, it was the late 300s and things had gotten quite bad. Only then did they try to do something, but it was far too late. The point of no return had passed.
We say the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, when Odoacer ousted the emperor and formally took power. But Rome had already been sacked in 410 and 455 by Germanic tribes. The empire had been steadily shrinking and getting poorer for centuries by then; by 476 it was basically just Italy - and even that was questionable - and Odoacer's new kingdom held on to that territory. Before his coup, Odoacer already was leader of the foederati in Italy, who by that point basically were what was left of the military. He was already in charge in all but name. And the Roman Senate, which was still around, recognized him. Who, living in 476, would have really noticed much? For most of the people living inside what had been the Roman Empire at its height, by 476 the Romans had been long gone, perhaps for generations.
This didn't happen because individual Romans were taking too many hot baths while the Germans were washing themselves in the Danube in winter like real tough men. But it did happen because individual Romans thought they had (because for a while they did in fact have) the luxury of ignoring external threats while jockeying amongst themselves, and that is also decadence.
I caught my garage in a lie the other day.
They tried to claim my windshield wipers were worn out even though I had replaced them just a few weeks before. They were embarrassed when I said so and at least did not try to push it further. But they did try to cheat me, and they tried to cheat me for about 50 bucks to boot. They have recently been bought out by a different owner, who I'm sure told them to try this, as before they didn't try such tricks.
My brake pads were also worn out. Or so they said. I chose to believe them about the brake pads despite their lie about the windshield wipers, as the brake pads had been on there for about 100k miles and the previous set didn't make it that far. Despite that, I had to restrain myself from telling them to go fuck themselves.
I'm sure that someone who is a bit more hot-headed, and/or with a bit less of an idea of how long brake pads last, would've given them the middle finger they did surely deserve for that stunt right then and there, and gone on to drive another 100k miles with worn-out brake pads. "Oh, sure, the brake pads are worn out. That's what the last guy said, and I know for damn sure he was a cheater and a liar." That would be the wrong thing to do, but I would completely get it if someone did react in that way.
I'm going to go find a different garage. But I can't just go find a different medical establishment.
And while I may have some idea of how long brake pads last, because that's the kind of knowledge you gain just by living your life and paying a little attention, I did not study medicine. I only know about my own field. You can't expect people to have in-depth knowledge about fields other than their own. But you can certainly expect people who've been lied to, to react badly.
marinuso
2mo ago
The Holocaust was just plain old ethnic hatred, not eugenics. It was never presented as eugenics. The Jews were not dumb, or inferior, they were the enemy. Secretly controlling the banks and puppeteering the Allies against the Germans. They had to be removed from society in order to safeguard the German people. That was the story the Nazis told. (For a long while they were even pretending to be resettling them, rather than admitting they were killing them.)
Aktion T4 was the eugenics program, it focused on killing the disabled.
Sterilization programs went on after the war, in places like Sweden and Switzerland, until the 1970s.
I think there is also an element of tolerance - I lived alone for many years prior to our marriage, whereas she never lived alone, so I am quite used to soldiering on when I'm sick as I had no alternative; when she is sick, she is instead used to going into full rest mode to recover.
This may explain the whole phenomenon.
Back when people lived on homesteads, it was expected that men worked outdoors (that is to say farm, hunt, repair the buildings etc), women did the household, and no one lived alone, there was no room for being ill. You pushed on as best you could or suffer a real shortage later.
A little later, when factory and office jobs came about and allowed you to call in sick sometimes, the men started doing so. But someone still needs to do the household tasks; there are tasks that can be delayed, but if no one cooks there's nothing to eat, and that is a pretty immediate concern.
And if the man has no experience cooking at all (which wasn't that weird - many people never lived alone and this was a "woman's task"), you can't expect him to instinctively know how to do it. You'd have to teach him and show him, all the while being ill. At that point it's probably still easier to do it yourself.
Nowadays it is expected that a man knows how to do the basic household tasks, at least in a pinch, just as women are expected to have "real" jobs. But two generations ago it really wasn't. So the ill woman still had to push on, while the ill man takes a day off work.
marinuso
3mo ago
An elite British university in 1800 was more about the cultivation of social skills than learning; lectures were nonexistent, learning was one-to-one with a tutor, and tests were fewer
The big problem with this is that it doesn't scale. It's fine to educate a small elite this way, but you can't teach the masses like this. (Though you could keep doing it for your small elite and educate the masses in a more assembly-line-like manner, which kind of is what ended up happening anyway.)
During the course of the 19th century, the British Empire quite consciously copied elements of the Chinese imperial examination system in order to find talent and staff their civil service.
It's not even necessarily about meritocracy, though it does help. If you need a large civil service to run a somewhat centralized empire, there aren't enough nobles, you will need to recruit commoners and you will need to be able to figure out which commoners to recruit. You will also need to educate said commoners. Something like the Chinese system is the natural result. The British just didn't have or need a large civil service before.
So this:
Unfortunately, the West has decided to structure its educational culture on the oriental mode of study, rather than leaning into its generic and cultural strengths.
is simply a necessity for a large, centralized society, which China had and European countries did not really start developing until the rise of absolutism, at which point they ran into the same problems China had had and solved them similarly.
marinuso
3mo ago
This is in fact the older meaning, an advantage given to someone in a sport or game in order to level the playing field when the players are not of equal skill. The sense of 'disability' came out of that.
marinuso
3mo ago
I don't know, it feels like something changed with respect to speech between 2010 and 2020. Like, people would look down on you for saying non-PC things loudly in public, but you didn't get arrested for it.
The laws themselves aren't new, the enforcement has changed.
Before everyone was on the Internet, enforcement was hardly necessary. The media oligopoly was on board with it and self-censored. Any would-be politicians would need the de facto consent of the media to run a campaign. They didn't bother listening in on pub conversations to find people to arrest. Commoners had no reach anyway, so there's no real point going full Stasi. That left a handful of enforcement actions against a small-time publisher here, a politician who goes off script there, but that was it.
Nowadays people can find each other via the Internet, and there's a lot of discontented people who know there are more and can organize. It has removed the media's role as approval committee, and upended politics. So now in some places they suddenly find it worthwhile to arrest people at their house over tweets.
The early 2010s were a transition period, where the media lost their grip but the enforcement had not yet been stepped up.
marinuso
4mo ago
In the case of Papiamento at least, it seems perfectly reasonable to me. It is the mother tongue of pretty much everyone in Aruba and Curacao. It's also not readily mutually intelligible with any other language. Aruba and Curacao have devolved governments - which other language should they pick? It's not as if they don't learn other languages in school.
You can't really compare it to 'Ebonics', which is mutually intelligible with standard English and which is only spoken by a minority, and an already politically fraught one at that.
Though it probably helps that it is a Portuguese-based creole spoken in Dutch territory. Not being a Portuguese colony or ex-colony, they have no specific attachment to standard Portuguese, and it not being a Dutch-based creole means that nobody can pretend it's merely broken Dutch.
marinuso
4mo ago
It speaks of shocking profligacy to have your system components be written in an interpreted language or use anything but the native UI library. The Start menu is basically an Electron app, for crying out loud. There's a time and a place for JavaScript and system components are not it.
I cite Ademonera's comment in this same thread:
It’s also janky as hell. Windows flash and resize when you click edit mode in Excel, a Microsoft first party app.
You get that kind of jankiness (and I'm sure it's not just the start menu either!) when this is your approach to software development.
marinuso
4mo ago
The Windows 11 Start menu is written in JavaScript and uses the React framework.
Yes, really.
marinuso
4mo ago
I know someone whose ESTA application was denied because she had told them, by accidentally checking the wrong box on a form, that she was a terrorist. This happened 15 years ago at this point.
They ask you, "Are you a terrorist?" You can check "Yes", and if you do so, you will be denied. Makes sense, wouldn't want to let a terrorist in after all.
By that standard, I'd say it is ridiculous to pretend that someone who said "Yes, I use illegal drugs" was rejected for any other reason.
marinuso
4mo ago
Cities are always more innovative than the countryside. Cities have lots of people. Institutions are in cities, education is to be found in cities. People who want education will come to the city to get it, they then stay there, jobs that require education are in cities. So the educated people are in cities, where they are in contact with the other educated people. Wealth concentrates in cities, so the capital you need is also in the city, probably generated by the previous innovators.
And all of this used to be even more so when travel and communication were a lot harder than they are nowadays. Nowadays you can learn from the Internet. A hundred years ago people in the countryside wouldn't have had access to libraries. You'd have to move to a city first.
Not all immigrants went to the cities. The Germans mostly settled the Midwest to become farmers, and didn't invent much of anything, except the ones who did go to the cities.
marinuso
5mo ago
a lot of Federal spending is financed through debt rather than current revenues, so it's mathematically possible for no-one to be a net taxpayer.
In terms of dollars, yes, but in terms of goods and services (which are ultimately the point), surely not. It's possible to print money or hand out IOUs, but any goods and services must actually be real. Someone convinced to provide goods or services in return for inflated money or IOUs has, in effect, just been taxed more than otherwise.
marinuso
5mo ago
It makes at least a bit of sense to stop supporting a commercial business if they do things you don't like.
marinuso
6mo ago
When the left was at it, it got to the point where tradesmen were having their lives ruined for making the OK symbol.
This is not that, yet, but it does carry the seed of it.
marinuso
6mo ago
When you merely piss off your enemies, and on top of that in doing so make them look sympathetic to previously neutral parties, you don't actually win.
marinuso
6mo ago
Cancel culture doesn't even really work. All it ended up doing for the left in the 2010s was make martyrs and help invigorate the right. If the right goes down the same path it'll end just as badly. People don't change their opinions in your favor if you repress them. All that happens is they find somewhere else to organize out of your sight.
It's a bad idea, even if you can get away with it.
They got a fair bit towards getting cryonics to work on hamsters in the 1950s.
More options
Context Copy link