roche
18d ago
Party. It's a gross phenomenon when parties tailor their every little motion to match the flow of the crowd (or really a clumsy, out-of-touch notion of the people), and even uneducated Americans can probably sense they have no other real motive. Like parents who spoil their children and bend their will to match the kid, the whole process feels backwards. Presidents are leaders, but these apparatuses don't select for actual leaders because a tough guy maverick will refuse to play by the rules. I get the ick looking at parties; How's a bunch of followers going to produce a leader? It's backwards.
roche
18d ago
Right, but if the main road to political domination is military genius, the selection pressure falls on tactical brilliance.
roche
18d ago
Charisma is undeniable, but it's a holistic product of concrete things. Trump's charisma is not his background or his manner of speech or suit, but they all play a part in forming his charisma. So what's the nature of that charisma? Why does it work when Trump does the funny hand motions and says "I've got a deal with China, it's the greatest deal, you're gonna love it", when if any other candidate did this it would be suicide? Answer: It appeals to that old old American mentality I mentioned. That sort of enterprising, ungarnished, take-no shit ambition which historically defines this nation's existence. It's because Trump actually embodies these values that it works for him, and for that reason republicans can't produce a replica, because these are not their values. Which is really a failure of democracy: Like every system of morality known to man, when you optimize for trait X as seen from outside, you don't end up with a society full of trait Xers, you get a dog-and-pony show great at convincing swathes of the population someone has trait X even if they don't, and only that; Not actually getting trait X. But for this reason, red tribe could totally produce new Trumps if they recalibrate. The big obstacle is they're so divorced from the common man, they too can't quite fathom his appeal.
Calling it charisma is circular reasoning. People like him because he's charismatic. He's charismatic because of... his voice? His hair? His smile? What about him can't be replicated, exactly? Undeniably what he's giving us is rare, but it revealed to us something undeniable, this type of mass appeal we haven't seen before. He's like a businessman without the bullshit, like an old old American, so old that a huge subset of Americans can't even really fathom his appeal or why it works. And I think that in all honestly is the origin of TDS -- it's because they don't get his main appeal that they assume he's popular because of x/y/z -ism. Not even reds understand it, but crack the code and we'll be seeing more Trumps some day. Not soon, but it's coming. This isn't a stars-aligned moment, but rather a 'we've accidentally stumbled into something huge, and almost a decade later we're still working out what it means' type thing. This is clearly not a fluke.
roche
18d ago
Hi all! I'm cooking up a new history of science blog with a side of book reviews, a pinch of games, deep dives into obscurities, and cultural observations. I've put a healthy amount of time into branding, and then let the first batch of ideas simmer until they're fairly strong. As I have (close to) zero audience coming in, I'm optimizing for quality on this first run (1-2 months), shilling it in some relevant spaces, and then basically praying. If you have any tips or suggestions, I'd appreciate it!
roche
18d ago
Why do you disagree that they selected for it? The link is undeniable. Especially because consular appointments are annual, and it's very hard to judge the wider decisions or impact of a consul on that time scale, and conquest is one of the lone things that's obviously an immense positive, just like rhetoric, except proconsular appointments shatter that dynamic and form an even greater imbalance of power. If we're not selecting for great orators or great generals, then what are we selecting for?
roche
18d ago
I mean that on paper, the Roman system was designed to select for any number of positive attributes, but what it really ended up selecting for is military genius, to a point where they became the real heart of the Roman world, and the republican institutions were like some awkward growth inessential to its subsistence in later years. And to the extent the senate tries to justify its continued existence in the face of obsolescence by staking claims on the military, it faces immense pressure not only from the generals, but from the populares who feel the senate's authority is far out of proportion to their real importance.
roche
18d ago
This may be naive, but screw it -- do you think Trump style populism is here to stay? Our political system is evidently a failure in regards to incubating genuine talent, and the biggest figures now emerging from the private sector seems to say a lot. Like, just as the Roman system acted as an insane pressure cooker for military talent until they could outcompete the elites, perhaps the same will just happen here along a different vector and real politics won't even occur along the old lines anymore.
roche
20d ago
There's also the shit pacing. Look, I understand that BG3 is an early access, multi-year-spanning project, but hot damn does the story have such an awkward and spasmodic flow to it. Act 1 is good, act 2 starts off barren and then builds up into this bizarre crescendo that (vibes-wise) could pass as the end of the game, and then spits you out into act 3 which is completely anticlimactic because it feels like you were just at Mordor but now you're back at Tom Bombadil's.
roche
1mo ago
I'm not the only one who loathes old English poetry, right? Chaucer is great, Shakespeare is great... and then it's about two and a half centuries until you reach something enjoyable again. Awkwardly mythology references, cloying saccharine language, each stanza flowing out like a nursery rhyme and resolving itself in that lame self-satisfied way, with an aftertaste like stale bread. It is a wonder that they who read the King James Bible produced it.
roche
1mo ago
Working memory is a passive process, it's not what we use to consciously model things. Not sure what we'd call the modeling area of the brain, I've heard sensorium used.
It may be that the ability to hold slightly large/more concepts in your mind is responsible for the spontaneous causal associations you describe.
It's a bit of a mystery really. All we know for sure is, working memory/modeling ability/intelligence are strongly correlated. When you and I say modeling ability we're probably thinking about shape rotation or figures and so on, but I believe each form of intelligence has its own type of modeling ability, which is accompanied by a strong working memory (at least in that field). So I suppose there's no knowing which is the 'essential' component, the two always occur simultaneously.
roche
1mo ago
I would be careful associating working memory with the brain's ability to actively model complex problems. The latter is a conscious process, while the former is unconscious. An 80 IQ person can, with pen and paper, rotate any shape or model any system given enough time, or calculate out a 6-move chess sequence that Magnus Carlsen could perform in seconds mentally, but he could never have the spontaneous causal associations in his mind that naturally occur to more intelligent people. The lack of this faculty, and exclusively this, is what precludes low IQ people from complex things. This is why the computer analogy is weak. And why low IQ civilizations just can't get it together. If it were only a matter of processing power, nothing would stop them from busting out the compasses and graph paper. But intelligence is really a phenomenon of the subconscious, of the brain noticing a pattern and showing this to the conscious mind. For that reason it can never be taught or compensated for.
roche
1mo ago
Rather than just trying to remember rotely, deeply engage with the knowledge by connecting it to other knowledge. You've now added multiple recall points to your brain for the single fact, and as long as any of them are intact, you can get the fact.
You remind me of this article
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2007/03/25/how-to-ace-your-finals-without-studying/
Back in high school, I was on the "academic bowl" team (it's academic jeopardy) and our team captain was some dude with glasses from Myanmar. His skill at the game was truly astonishing, and when I asked him how he learned, he said he spent hours reading wikipedia each night. Unsurprisingly, I tried a few variations on this and none of them bore fruit. But as @self_made_human mentions, there's a degree to which this memory faculty feels sort of natural, like we're each given the capacity we need for our interests. If you find yourself going on Wikipedia binges, making deep connections, reading tons of books and forgetting them shortly after, most probably it's a defect in your natural memory; you should be remembering everything you have interest in. Otherwise it's likely a disease.
So, no, it isn't - it's redundant encoding that gives you more threads by which to remember. In CS terms, I no longer have to linearly loop through my list-o-facts; instead, I map quickly to the needed fact via any of a number of hashes (connections).
This is a good analogy. We don't often talk about how inefficient the written word usually is.
roche
1mo ago
I'd really love to improve my memory, but the popular approach to this sort of baffles me. Memorizers construct large memory palaces and winding trails to recall specific, precise bits of information, like numbers or the words of a speech down to the letter, and this is synonymous with memory improvement. But is this not just trivial recall that could be handled easily by a computer, or a scrap of paper? Consulting my internal memory palace is no different from consulting a library. And it's obviously additional. When we talk about memory, we really mean that natural faculty through which things float into our mind as they appear relevant, the source of all creativity. This faculty of memory can be improved through exercise and health and frequent use, and reduced through idleness and so on.
...But is that it? This memory pretty much determines your intellectual life, it determines whether a book will benefit you or be meaningless. Memory is everything. So where are the great writers and studies showing how to optimize this function? Surely it's not just "eat vegetables, do cardio, sleep well", right?
roche
2mo ago
Do you have any tips on determining which books contain useful wisdom?
Know thyself. Also, know your methodology. If you're deep into statistics and not big on deduction, you're going to be locked out of nearly all intellectual history. That a book covers something you care about is irrelevant if its type of logic is meaningless to you.
The other problem with books is that they often aren't timely/relevant unless you have the ability to connect them to modern knowledge/issues. Social media and other technological advancements have significantly changed the world.
If you care about "underlying causes across time, perspectives, and domains", then timeliness doesn't matter. Time is the vector that allows us to see meaningful change in our world, so if you want to know things like "Why do humans go to war?" or "Why do we have money?" you need to study history. It will not have immediate practical advantage, but it's knowledge in the true sense and helps you build up a grasp of underlying causes. If some knowledge becomes outdated, it is not wisdom. Modern scholars would accuse the classics of being outdated, yet Napoleon studied Alexander and took over Europe.
roche
2mo ago
but what I’m looking for is very ill-defined and non-specific.
Aristotle defined wisdom as the knowledge of general causes and underlying prinicples.
[T]he man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the master-worker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of wisdom than the productive.
If most of the internet is shallow, that's because it floods you with the lowest form of knowledge, perception. Wisdom is knowledge of underlying causes, and that's what SlateStarCodex focused on in its heyday. Rather than honing in on particulars, he attempted to create sweeping principles like Moloch that explain phenomena across all walks of life. It's not a new approach, the late 19th century especially was a golden age for this type of exploration. So I would recommend you do some deep dives there, and abandon your hopes that the internet has any more of it. This is a very rare style of thinking. Most people of any era are dogmatists who cling to failing theories because they lack the ability to make their own. You could show them all the examples that led to Moloch, but they wouldn't generate the theory because they can't do that. It's a real hopeless quest trying to find people who can nowadays. Ditch the 'net, read books.
roche
2mo ago
Wireheading, definitely.
Another perspective that's been knocking around in my head is that for ~150 years, we've been burning through residuals from Christianity, and we're discovering that things we took for granted aren't human universals. Your point about promises is exactly right. The last few years have made me feel exactly like those Great War veterans who complained about the decline in manners, values, and behavior in the youth. It seemed like we'd reached a new equilibrium but something tells me we're about to slide even further.
roche
2mo ago
Do you see an end to pop culture within our lifetimes?
Undeniably, we've reached the bookend to the 80's blockbuster era of mega franchises like Star Wars. But the vibe of recent years is not only "These corporate products suck" but a subtle apathy toward media in general. Songs are going viral on TikTok, hitting #1 for a single week, then disappearing. Obscure songs from the past are going briefly viral and then disappearing. We see and consume more media than ever, yet paradoxically we care about it less than ever too. There are no new phenomena like the Deadheads or 80s goths where media spearheads an alternate lifestyle. There are no new games we continue talking about for years after release. Fanbases are less passionate, less distinct, and shorter lived. Fanfiction is less popular. Being a gen Z fan of the smiths or deftones means having their greatest hits in your playlist while not knowing any of the band members besides Morrissey, Marr and Chino, let alone their history, their gear, their influences, famous gigs, etc. Modern artists get this treatment too. People just don't care anymore.
Do you guys notice that in your hobbies too? I.e. younger "fans" totally lacking the ability to nerd out? Do you sense the general level of passion drying up?
roche
2mo ago
I'd class the suffering of the affluent as a different type of suffering. Because when you're starving, facing the possibility of homelessness, facing disease etc., there is a sense of realness and gravitas and urgency to what has befallen you, it is a genuine pain, whereas the suffering of the affluent is a reverse of this; it's not very painful or urgent but it's also completely meaningless, so it manifests as frustration. Put another way, a society that has largely eliminated the extreme negatives of life has flattened the spectrum of human experience, so that for an affluent person to feel any sense of meaning or depth to his life, he must obtain some extremely positive experience. Otherwise life will feel flat and empty. The vast majority of us though lack the means to get some extremely positive experience, so we're stuck living mundane, flat lives. Our pain is not exactly pain -- it's a vague, dull pang of awareness that life can be much more.
roche
2mo ago
People that are smart, and are interested in writing, will generally not be interested in video game writing. They'll want to be authors, or journos, or work in more prestigious arts like film.
There was a pretty decent amount of art school grads hopping into gamedev back in the 90's. Thing is that real artists demand autonomy, so if you start imposing a ton of top-down rules they'll rapidly jump ship, and your team of would-be auteurs is replaced by a bunch of video-game loving dorks who doodle orcs in their notebook (no offense). Never forget that Team Silent formed from a group of ne'erdowells whom Konami placed zero faith in because they floundered in that corporate structure.
Had a random thought that really kinda depressed me. It was thinking about my father and extended family as a whole, and how I can naturally relate to them a lot, while in the world at large I butt heads against people all the time from the sheer fact we're just so different. I remember Westerners laughing at those little tribes in Africa or Brazil with 99%+ genetic similarity that murder fractions of their populations, and do it again yearly, and the punchline is supposed to be Hey look at these idiots killing each other when they're so similar!, and yet they never stopped to think hey perhaps those tribes lived separately because their ancestors hated one another and split off from the same tribe generations ago, like the valley vs. highland people, and this happens constantly in hunter-gatherer societies when there's conflict, and our society is a spectacular achievement in taming groups that should by all accounts loathe one another, by hiding who we are through politeness and living in Dunbar's number-adjacent circles of moderate genetic similarity.
Knowing the reason we fight is pretty much just genetics is a downer.
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