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thomasThePaineEngine

Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill

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thomasThePaineEngine


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for sharing your pov.




He's very right about ephemeral online activity having very real opportunity costs. Most online happenings are nothingburgers, and they detract from purposeful socialization which disproportionately happens in person or, at least, though legacy, meatspace-centric networks such as one's professional community or political organizations.




I see this too, but I think I also see the mounting cultural counter-reaction to this. When I think back to the late 00's and early '10s, when the Internet was becoming really simple to use (compared to the late 90's/early 00's) and was getting flooded with SaaS apps and the iphone came out and all that, I saw non-tech people around me consume it all as if it were magic. There was joy, as if the possibilities of checking timetables on to go was just a step away from living in the sci-fi future of AI. There was also a lot of naivette, much to the frustration of all the crusty web users. I think the epitome was the Arab Spring also called (if I remember correctly), the Twitter Revolution--people really thought Twitter would usher in a new era of democracy in the middle east!


But today, the growing backlash against big tech has a very personal flavor to it. People around me are ditching their Alexa's and Siris and pushing their kids to have more fun the park. Not all people do it, since software has seeped so deep into our lives, but I guess I sense a broad sense of distrust that translate to people still using apps and online services, but at least, perhaps, trying to use them less often. Or maybe giving meatspace experiences more chances.


In a gist, I think our culture is developing an immune response to the attention-stealing gadgets we've been producing for the past 10-15 years. If my view is correct, where "correct" exists on a spectrum, we should start seeing these cultural artifacts bubble up into explicit things like regulations (eg. age limits on social media use) or customs (parents getting good at parental controls on tech) in the next 5-10 years.


I will admit that I'm completely blind to what people between 10 and 25 are doing with tech. I don't know anyone in this range. Some signals I'm getting are worrying, some are astonishing in a positive sense.




A solo console cowboy who can have a multi-year career running circles around major players of his economy (albeit knee-deep in the muck of the underworld, living on the edge of ruin and poverty) is a blindingly heroic image today, when Hackernews regulars are all employed by big tech, cultivate their CVs and race to affirm woke rhetoric of their HR betters, just like any other disposable blue collar serf – despite their ludicrous compensation packages and apparent prestige.




This is an interesting point. But I think you're contrasting two very different things. Hackernews, despite the name, has little to do with actual hacking. And, being a regular lurker for 10 years now, it feels to me that the spirit of hackernews has turned decidedly away from its start-up'y roots and toward boring everyday tech news. Sure, there are still stories about startups and sometimes interesting announcements (like Nystrom's "Crafting Interpreters"), but more often it's a piece about a new nuclear reactor or something for a bored, 25-45 yo techie to read on their break. Maybe we've all gotten older, started families, and aren't just interested in stories of pizza eating and late night coding.


But, what I'm getting at, is that there is still very much a wild, interesting coding scene. Absent from this scene are these highly paid Google and similar employees because, well, they're the people who opted to go corporate, to get regular, comfy pay for jumping through very tight hoops. I've dipped into this scene a few times, and every time I was astounded by how smart these people are... but also how well-socialized. I would describe their vibe as people who still think they're in school, aiming to get high scores, play within the rules, collect all the medals, etc.


Maybe the reason why we see fewer console cowboys these days is because the whole group of coders has grown, mainly filled by people drawn by the good pay & benefits. Because of this, the people producing wild and cool work are that much harder to make out in the crowd, their signal getting lost in the noise.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Fellow code monkey, why are these things worse than the vices of yesteryear? Is it because they're novel?


It seems to me that we've traded one set of abuses for another. Today, instead of being called out for eccentric behavior and socially shunned, you get doxed or canceled. Today, instead of being invigilated by the local priest (and his fans around town), you're surveilled by all the devices around you. But, like then, you have options to defend yourself, at least to some extent.


In other words, this is just another episode in the eternal fight between the collective and individual. Everything you're saying truly exists. But is it really more awful or is it nostalgia?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I see that too. But I don't see how that's different than the minds of my peers--including friends and family--turning trite and corrupted, say, 30 years ago, under the influence of bad movies, sports programming, alcohol, mid-life depression, etc.


I wonder if these new forms of mind-cracking are adding to the old ones or displacing them. I weakly predict they're displacing them, because submerging yourself in porn/games/online mob hate is cheaper and easier than getting smashed with cheap alcohol. And you can do it with thousands of others like you!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not sure why you think his attitude comes from ignorance of how things work




It's a stab at understanding techno-pessimism. I can't be sure where the author's attitude comes from truly. But the fear/lack-of-agency is my main hypothesis.




I've been helping to build the shit machine for the past 20 years and I can see quite clearly what I've done.




Why is it shit?


Yes, it's kludge on top of kludge. Duct tape and bubble gum. Layers and layers of it, going back decades at this point. Yet, it works. Between everything from router buffer bloat to stupid bugs in JS libraries, thanks to layer and layers of fallbacks, including the fallback of last resort when the user has to refresh the page or reload the app--it works.


Or is your take more about what the machine is being used for? Porn. Funny cats. Surveillance. Social media addiction. True, that's all there, but there are also people doing incredible things. Plus, one does not rule out the other, since a person might spend 6 hours a day browsing stupid stuff on Reddit, then go ahead and make helpful videos on youtube.


That's my view more or less. Why do you think it's a shit machine?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What makes you afraid of the holy wards failing? Genuinely interested.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, totally! What I was getting at is that if this digital world feels foreign or "wrong" to you (or the author of that blog post), you might lock yourself out from all of this.


I'm an optimist. I see all of these amazing things happening. People finding each other, coming together, creating something cool and fun. Sometimes, even useful. I'm glad that many more people today find value in the Web compared to ten or twenty years ago.


So apparently there are many optimists out there, but perhaps we don't hear too much from them because they're busy modding, learning, sharing instead of ranting at how bad everything is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Techno-pessimism as Agency-Depletion


Note: This is an exploration of what techno-pessimism feels like. I don't think there's an argument I'm making here. Perhaps it's more a reflection on how deep my techno-optimism goes that it's so difficult for me to entertain the idea of techno-pessimism. The connection to the culture war is that techno-pessimism seems to be deeply embedded in the political dialogue of both the left and the right.


Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 classic "The End of History", spends a few pages describing techno-pessimism. It's been a while, but I think he put it as a belief that technology doesn't solve man's problems and may, in fact, make them worse. The flavor we're experiencing now has its source in the meat grinder trenches of WW1 when people were confronted by a mechanized, assembly-line conflict that was optimized for turning real live humans into ground meat.


For a long time, I didn't give this idea much thought. It was a useful label for a cluster of ideas I'd come upon time and again; a useful bucket to put people in to better understand them, nothing. But today, I read a piece that triggered all my "angry uninformed person ranting on the Internet" alarms, and instead of closing the tab, I spent some precious work-time to read it.


At the end, I was blown away. Not by any new points or ideas, but by being, for the first time ever, shown what techno-pessimism looks like from the inside. Suddenly, these two words stopped being merely a label, but also a lens through which to view the world. And I'm still shocked by seeing something so completely alien to my own perception.


I write code for a living. I have a general idea of how computers work and how different types of software works: payments processing, flight controls, video games, social media, VR, point-of-sale systems, etc. I also licked a little bit of physics and information theory, so I kind of see how all the machinery around us operates, at least on vague level. In the world, I feel... comfortable. I can fix a change a door lock, fix a leaky faucet, install an outlet, change a car tire, etc. It's all just machines of different sorts.


I hope this doesn't sound like bragging. I'm no genius. I can't fix most things and I'm more than happy to hire an expert when I can. I don't understand how most things work. Just enough to get the big picture, the relationships, the constraints.


Reading this the above linked blog post showed me a world where I know non of this. A world where I have some vague ideas about simple things like a squeaky hinge and the like, but anything above it is black magic. I mean, computers have inserted them into every facet of our lives. They record, update, store, delete, connect, calculate everything about us: our bank accounts, our working hours, our taxes, our retirement funds. The distance to the store, how busy a coffee place is, how to send flowers to your mother on Mother's day. Even if you're relatively disconnected, over half the world's population is plugged in; over 3bn people have Facebook accounts. TikTok has 1bn users; so even if you're disconnected, the majority of the people around you are plugged in, dancing to the rhythms created by man and machine together.


That's a terrifying. I can't imagine the frustration this guy has to feel. He can't troubleshoot his router, apart from pushing a paperclip into the little hole to reset everything. He can't make his own website (that doesn't look like templated shit). He can't figure out the right steps to get the car computer to reboot correctly after the battery ran out of power. Jesus, the sheer alienation must be terrifying--you can't really affect your immediate environment in any meaningful way. You're at the mercy of these beeping, monitoring, distracting machines all around you.


Now I understand that, perhaps, WW1 was the moment when people realized they built a grand machine that they only pretend to control. A machine with tendrils leading into every house, every room, every other person. And while in the first half of the 20th century any clever farm boy was likely able to mess around with a car, this isn't true today. There's a lot of layers of abstraction. So many interconnected systems. (Though I believe that taking a beginners course in programming would dispell like 80% of ignorance about machines).


How much agency is lost because of the aggregate effects of modern technology? Sure, the world of yesteryear wasn't some primitive utopia. But even within the strict confines of tradition and feudalism people had agency in the little things. Now, people like the author of that blog post I read are left without even the little things--their "smart" coffee machine will calls the cops if he tries to insert off-brand coffee pods into it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Maybe I phrased it poorly. My suspicion is triggered because both the left and the right agree on some version of this.


On the surface, that should lead to an "aha! There must be something true to this!". But given how rarely this happens, it has the opposite effect on me.


Perhaps it's because of horseshoe theory? As in "both the left and right agree that free speech should be curtailed" (huge generalization, just for example) -- that triggers alarms in my head, but not because of the issue at stake, but because of the agreement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My greatest fear of liberalism is that it will in practice turn everything into a samey globalist liberal soup. I'd rather have an archipelago of self-assorted communities, than everything integrated everywhere.




I'm not sure if "liberalism turning everything into a samey globalist liberal soup" is actually a thing. I'm suspicious of it because we hear about it from both the left and right; the left phrases it as capitalism destroying indigenous cultures while the right phrases it as destroying traditional values--it feels like both cannot be true at the same time.


So, is liberalism turning everything into samey globalist soup? (I love this label, by the way). I'm not sure.


Yes, it allows people to cross cultural and geographical boundaries to engage in a similar activity, eg. teens from all over the world can play Call of Duty together. But does that mean they grow detached from the culture that immediately surrounds them? There appear to be specific flavors of camaraderie among gamers of different nationalities. In the same way, people are afraid of "cocacolization", but wherever I've traveled around Europe and the US, I've seen a lot of local flavors, even local coke knockoffs.


Stepping away from my own subjective experience, it looks like, if anything, the world is undergoing  fragmentation. Famous SV venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote a little bit about it some years ago. And, if anything, it seems like this process is the fastest and most powerful in the liberal west--people sorting themselves out by beliefs, music, age, interests, lifestyles (eg. monogamy vs polygamy), etc. Which makes sense, because there being no culture-enforcement in the form of a church, a government, or a tradition, people will find values that bind them, creating more diversity instead of less. Actually, thinking about over the last 50-100 years, the period of solidified nationalism, it was the pre-globalist world that looks like samey soup: top down, church/government enforced beliefs and rituals.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I should have added more meat to my post, my bad.


I collected some snippets straight from wikipedia on the subject in this comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/75/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/9901?context=8#context


So it appears that whole-word has no effect whereas phonics has a positive effect. Neither probably affect all kids, but given that phonics has a positive effect on at least some kids whereas whole-word has none, it seems like phonics should be used--at least until we find something more effective.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.




Good point. I'll be more careful about the curse of knowledge in the future.


I don't have access to my notes, but wikipedia does a good job summarizing what I've found myself (source):




The whole-word method received support from Kenneth J. Goodman who wrote an article in 1967 entitled Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.[127] Although not supported by scientific studies, the theory became very influential as the whole language method.[128][129] Since the 1970s some whole language supporters such as Frank Smith, are unyielding in arguing that phonics should be taught little, if at all.[130]






Yet other researchers say instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness are "critically important" and "essential" to develop early reading skills.[131][132][133] In 2000, the US National Reading Panel identified five ingredients of effective reading instruction, of which phonics is one; the other four are phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.[134] Reports from other countries, such as the Australian report on Teaching reading (2005)[135] and the Independent review of the teaching of early reading (Rose Report 2006) from the UK have also supported the use of phonics.






Furthermore, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology compared teaching with phonics vs. teaching whole written words and concluded that phonics is more effective. It states "Our results suggest that early literacy education should focus on the systematicities present in print-to-sound relationships in alphabetic languages, rather than teaching meaning-based strategies, in order to enhance both reading aloud and comprehension of written words".[138]






The National Research Council re-examined the question of how best to teach reading to children (among other questions in education) and in 1998 published the results in the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children.[286] The National Research Council's findings largely matched those of Adams. They concluded that phonics is a very effective way to teach children to read at the word level, more effective than what is known as the "embedded phonics" approach of whole language (where phonics was taught opportunistically in the context of literature).






In 2000 the findings of the National Reading Panel was published. It examined quantitative research studies on many areas of reading instruction, including phonics and whole language. The resulting report Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for Reading Instruction provides a comprehensive review of what is known about best practices in reading instruction in the U.S.[288] The panel reported that several reading skills are critical to becoming good readers: phonemic awareness, phonics for word identification, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. With regard to phonics, their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: teaching phonics (and related phonics skills, such as phonemic awareness) is a more effective way to teach children early reading skills than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for sharing this. This is the first time I've encountered Paolo Freire. I've only skimmed the wiki article on him and on his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I think I need to dig a little more.


Both you and the wikipedia article on him say that he's been hugely influential on the US education system. How is this impact measured? I'm reading the City Journal article on this and it mentions that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is assigned to teachers-in-training very often--but does it actually change how teachers teach?


I can imagine that some more fiery educators will have done the heavy lifting and baked in some of Freire's ideas into curricula. But going off my assumption that most Marxist teachings are very abstract (almost postmodern), then most teachers would highlight a few juicy quotes and later forget about these ideas. My other assumption comes from going through a few grades in the US system and I'm struggling to find anything that would have a noticeable taint of Marxist thought--but then, I only did a few grades, and that was over 20 years ago.


(It's too easy to find low hanging fruit of a few teachers refusing to teach math because it's oppressive. I'm looking for more subtle but broader effects of Freire's thought).




One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.”




I find this interesting because it seems like nothing new. I've met before with the constructivist theory of education, which seems to have begun assembling into a coherent theory somewhere in the early 20th century, though its roots go back to the mid 19th century. It's amazing to me that someone could take this idea, which, in the right hands, could produce so much good, and then cover it in Marxist nonsense.




“Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do.




I think my emotion wasn't around the disconnect between their goals and actions, because it's pretty clear that whatever "good" they say they aim toward is subordinate to their real goals. Rather, it was about how openly they disdain science, reality, and human discourse as a tool for pursuing truth. While writing my post, I had a look at the Calkin's institute page and most of the messaging their is, indeed, about DEI stuff. So yeah, 100% WYSIWYG.


Anyway, I have more reading to do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is addressed a little bit in the New Yorker piece. Researchers agree that literacy teaching is difficult to measure because some kids just seem to pick it up quickly, some take a long time, and yet others learn to fake literacy very well until 3rd or even 4th grade. She also raises the point that the kids that do well in whole language learning programs probably come from well off households that have many books and where the family actually spends time reading.


That said, I believe the main point about phonics is that it is able to bring kids who struggle with reading up to speed faster than other methods. These struggling kids include both those with dyslexia as well as those from poor families. If this is true, then I would expect phonics to have little effect, except maybe annoyance, for the smart or lucky kids, but it would be a huge help for poor/dyslexic kids.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In my own experience, phonics wins here.*


Going into school, you already know how to talk. So being able to turn squiggles into sounds allows you to "talk" with texts.


*I was dropped into the American school system in first grade. I did even speak English. A few months in, I was speaking, read, writing English like all my other classmates.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, that's a point that's made as well.


Which is pretty damning, because it invites teachers to use a suboptimal method just because it feels good.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's a Vibes-based World for Us


The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.


Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.


This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.


But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?


The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.


According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.


The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.


Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.


Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend  this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:


Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.


Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.


It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


they have the old soviet stockpiles that means even as the average equipment regresses decades, they can feed the war machine, whereas the European and even American stockpiles are getting hazardously low.




This seems weakly false to me.


Here's an interesting article about how "soviet stockpile" is a myth because equipment, including dumb ammunition, can expire and needs regular servicing, something that Russia hasn't been doing much of until recently: https://archive.ph/4FYzG Also, a CredibleDefense thread that adds some details, including counterpoints, to these claims: https://old.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/x2uhp1/a_farewell_to_arms_by_year_end_russia_will_be/.


I would also be careful about putting much faith in outdated equipment. The way I think of it is that equipment is configured to fighting certain specific kinds of conflicts. So in aggregate, it gives the tactician certain features like speed, time in field, etc. and it would seem to me that old equipment geared toward a 1970's style all-out war w/ NATO would not do well in what's happening in Ukraine right now. More concretely, I would imagine 70's-era tanks to fair quite poorly against modern man-portable anti-armor weapons and tactics. Even more so when we're talking about modern comms equipment.


There's a small counterpoint to be made here using the example of the Millennium Challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002


In a gist, it was a US military exercise that basically pitted a high-tech player against a low-tech player and the low-tech player won on such a staggering scale that they had to reset the exercise. That said, I'm not sure if Russia is capable of deploy an effective low-tech strategy: to my armchair general knowledge, I can't think of an instance when Russia didn't fight using massive force.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think there's a difference: I'm not very cautious about film reviews. If I don't like a film, I'll happily get on the bandwagon of those bashing it.


But when I'm evaluating ideas about how the world works, then I'm going to use a much higher standard. It's more uncomfortable, both because the issues are more complicated and more important, but it seems the struggle is worth it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Nice work there.


What strikes me about the whole ordeal is how eager people are to consume this type of content, how eager they are to be lied to in just the way the suites them. Also, I'm surprised that we don't see more of this type of content produced. Given the demand, it seems there's a some good money to be made here, especially if you use something like GPT-3 to just generate twitter reports like this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've experienced the same feeling.


I read The Hobbit, LotR, and The Silmarillion when I was a teenager. It was addictive, like being kidnapped into a whole new living world. When I reread LotR about a year ago, the same feelings came back--but this time enriched with an awe of Tolkien's language. I didn't even try watching ROP because I don't think it's possible to capture that magic in the medium of a TV series.


From his newer things, I've read Children of Hurin and loved it. Would you recommend the other "new" works as well?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for sharing. I'll dig a bit into what happened in the early XX century.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				I'm glad you guys exist
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm coming from the same place, OP.


Long time lurker. I enjoy the uncommon level of discourse on this forum. It's an amazing example of what good moderation can look like and I'm praying to Elua that this place won't fizzle out like so many other online communities. Thanks to everyone for making this happen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What do you think about the concept of the Global North and South?


I never payed much attention to this way of looking at global economics. I don't know anyone from South America or Africa and only a handful of folks from Asia. My only economic reference comes from Fukuyama's "The End of History", where he spent a few pages describing dependency theory and then refuting it by showing how poor Asian countries were able to grow while South American countries, despite being in a similar situation, were not.


A few days ago, I had a chance to meet some people from South America. I believe they were from Brazil and Venezuela. Both worked for NGOs. They quickly turned the topic to colonization, blaming it for all the problems in their countries. I know their countries are not doing too well, both in terms of civic freedom and economics, but I was surprised by how strong their views were--they basically said the Europe and the US are to blame for the bad situation their countries are in. Europe, for colonization and "mass rape", and the USA for the Monroe Doctrine (and the associated string of interference) as well as extracting wealth from South America.


I didn't have time to query them for more details. I'm ambivalent on the question of colonization. I haven't studied it much nor thought about it. I can easily imagine that US interventions have had a destabilizing effect on SA, but I can't imagine how big of an effect that would be. I remember reading Noah Smith's piece on Cuba and how its failure is not the fault of the American embargo, but rather of obviously bad economic policy. I can't help but think that this is the case for other South American countries as well.


How much merit do you think there is in accusing US and Europe for inflicting poverty on the global south? What should I search for if I wanted to know more--thinkers, articles, etc.?