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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2394 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 15, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A bunch of people here probably have NVGs or thermal optics of some kind. I was hunting caterpillars the other day and got curious if they're as well-camouflaged outside the visual spectrum.

Can anyone check?

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?

I'm 21, which places me well on the younger tip of my two biggest strictly recreational interests: MLB and menswear, and I would generally say I make a serious attempt at nerding out in those areas. What I think has changed is how atomized the communities are from broader audiences. Being a baseball fan 60 years ago meant arguing over whether Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle was better. Today, it means arguing over whether or not to use defense-adjusted or fielding-independent statistics to measure the value of pitchers, which is a much more interesting question (Mays was clearly the better player), but also far more granular and inaccessible to casual fans and passive bystanders. Similarly, I think a lot of people are surface-level fans of the Smiths than in the past, but I think past Smiths fans are probably pretty comparable to present Bladee fans in terms of depth of knowledge (although Bladee is probably a much bigger leap for a non-fan than the Smiths are). I think it's actually gotten harder than ever to start getting interested in a lot of subjects because most of the in-depth communities are in so deep that there aren't really any clearly visible footholds to start off with.

I agree with you but it’s also a very online thing. In real life an autistic hardcore fan is happy to talk to a casual fan at a party because it’s still better than talking to the 90% of other people who don’t care about [baseball / The Smiths / coffee] very much at all.

Аs an autistic hardcore fan, I definitely agree. Another thing worth noting is that you have to kind of obscure your level of knowledge around people you don't know well. Being a SABR member might embellish my resume among baseball fans, but it's not gonna help me much when I'm talking to a girl at a bar. I suspect we see a lot more hardcore enthusiasts on a daily basis than we realize, but there's a sort of social contract we sign to make casual conversations more bearable.

I have found that I can't stand reading anything written by most fanbases of the things I nerd out over, but I am happy to discuss with those I happen to meet in person. People can really be insufferable assholes online.

This may work both ways, because then there's the Motte. Which makes me wonder how recognizable any of us on the Motte would be to one another in real life, or if we would have anything at all to say to each other. Probably not nearly as much as we type.

What I see is a general culture of superficiality, short-lived interest and discarding yesterday's investments behind seven layers of irony and distraction. Maybe what I'm gesturing at is a general aversion to sincerity and commitment. It's not just media consumption. People shamelessly speak in nothing but crass hyperbole, waste their attention on worthless trash that changes by the day, and cannot be pinned down on any opinion or behavior, are in fact panically anxious to avoid ever needing to stand by anything they might have said or done in the past, are deathly afraid of who they were yesterday. Much better to pretend that today is all there ever was. Everyone else is doing it, too.

When was the last time someone made you a promise and kept it? Speaking for myself, I can't remember. Appointments are made and ignored, assurances given and immediately forgotten, grand statements given with full conviction and their ever having been uttered is denied on the next day. Obvious lies are spoken with the expectation that they will be accepted, and failure to do so is seen as a grave faux-pas. Try to tell someone that you respectfully do not buy their excuse on any given renegation and see what happens - adamant insistence on the validity of the excuse, even in the face of damning evidence, followed by indignation at your hostile behavior.

It's probably always been this way and I'm just being grumpy. But let's assume for a moment that no, something is changing.

So pop culture. We don't need it anymore. We used to need some constancy in culture to rally around it; it took time to do so. A fanbase grows, you join it, make friends, or even share some media among your friends and bond about it. Nowadays you just join a fad online, ride it for a few minutes, enjoy the parasocial relationship, and hop off before anyone can actually associate you with it or it grows stale or you miss out on the next thing. And there is always a next thing. Media consumption isn't social anymore; instead we enjoy a much more direct algorithmically powered producer-to-brain pipeline. Which may soon be an AI-tailored-to-your-predelictions-to-brain pipeline, obviating even the need even for pseudo-social platforms like youtube.

We're wireheading. Shamelessly and effortlessly and increasingly efficiently.

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.

There are many libertarians that oppose A War On Drug, in part, based on that police sometimes abuses it and plants fake evidence on people they don't like. This is understandable. A fair fraction of these also supports ban on child porn. But CP is easier to plant and more difficult to defend. Why they support it?

Because it’s worse.

Drug legalization only requires “your body, your choice.” Under the common understanding of consent, CP legalization requires taking that choice away from someone else.

Evidence planting is a distant second.

Drug legalization only requires “your body, your choice.”

Not always--see second-hand smoke.

Under the common understanding of consent, CP legalization requires taking that choice away from someone else.

Depends on how the CP was created. Drawn CP doesn't for instance.

Under the common understanding of consent, CP legalization requires taking that choice away from someone else.

what about drawn porn and adult people distributing recordings of oneself when they were young? The former is almost universally banned, the latter is universally banned. What about people long dead?

Why even worry about it? Just don't do any of it.

Libertarians are notorious for not supporting the ban on CP. Or the age of consent restriction.

I can't say I've ever met any libertarians who were against age of consent. The entire philosophy is based around respecting what consenting adults do. They're fine with restricting what children do.

The entire philosophy is based around respecting what consenting adults do. They're fine with restricting what children do.

  1. Define all X as not-human with some scientific-sounding justification ("brain not developed till 25", "they're closer to gorillas", etc.)
  2. Claim anyone who disagrees with that definition is in opposition to the Science, and are obviously just in favor of X freedom because they want to have sex with [more generally, exploit] the women in X
  3. Rinse and repeat for Y, Z, etc. until you've reinvented traditional morality wholesale (more popularly known as "intersectionality")

No, I can't imagine why any freedom-minded person would have any problems with that. From a liberal standpoint, the problem with this strategy in an illiberal milieu is that you can't really take it on directly, and liberals being mistake theorists (and their tendency to be sexual mistake theorists doesn't help that) generally fail to understand that.

Thus, they tend to get baited into attacking (2), when the actual answer is to either go after (1) [which isn't scalable and is still vulnerable to "why do you care so much about hoaxes?", where people who can attack (1) can still be somewhat-credibly accused of having the same motivations as the people who just attack (2) do], or seek/implement/maintain social conditions such that yeschad.jpg is a valid response to (2)- this is being able to respond "all of them" to "how many children have to die before people who have (and will do) nothing wrong will give up their freedom to X" criticisms of [insert civil right here].

What would the federal government do if, like a podcast I recently listened to suggested, the Utah state government were to stop supplying water to the NSA's Utah Data Center?

Get into a legal pissing match.

Utah has less leverage than Texas(which is getting away with adjusting its border with Mexico over federal objections), but it does pay its own bills(so it has more than say, Alabama) and it’s unclear how important the Utah data center is for the NSA. So what happens after the legal battles is kind of up in the air.

What belongs on a nuclear-prep shopping list?

NB: I live in country Australia, so there will be some things notably missing from mine that others might want. In particular, Australia is not going to have a long-lasting food shortage due to our immense food production and paucity of viable nuclear targets, and I don't need to worry about being directly injured by nuclear blasts (this is not a coincidence; it's why I didn't move back to Melbourne).

Here's what's already on my list:

  • Bottled water (as in, the cheap huge bottles), in case water supplies get contaminated by fallout (I have 20L)
  • A battery- or hand-powered radio, to pick up emergency broadcasts (don't have this yet)
  • Aluminium foil, to wrap up electronics (including aforementioned radio) to protect from EMP (don't have this yet)
  • Some means of transportation that will work after EMP (I have a bicycle; an ICE car would arguably be better but I can't drive)

What else belongs on such lists? Does something I mentioned not belong on the list?

A reliable and relatively painless method of suicide for yourself and those you care about. A gun (of sufficiently high caliber that if you fire at the wrong angle you won’t spend your final hours in agony) or high dosages of certain medications, such as opioids or insulin. I do not recommend paracetamol or sleeping tablets.

Life for those unlucky few to survive full-on nuclear holocaust (as opposed to a limited exchange, which our current logistical systems would probably survive) and subsequent total societal collapse would be horrific. If it gets bad enough, a quick way out is much better than starving to death, dying of thirst, succumbing to radiation sickness, or most other violent and ignoble ends, which you can’t all prepare for.

Not to mention the psychological toll of watching your world literally go up in flames. Maybe better not to survive it at all than to scrape by an existence in the ashes.

No. I mean to live.

Kant's categorical imperative says that we should do those things that we would have all do. If all shirk in such a time, there will be no more humanity, and all we have accomplished will come to naught: the ultimate tragedy. Bentham said we should act to ensure the greatest happiness for the greatest number - which means we need to maintain that number if ever there is to be happiness again.

For all history, mankind has taken the world with all its faults and worked to make it better for the next generation. I will not abandon that proud tradition. If destiny says I'll live in hard times, I want to endure them, so that there may again be good times for me, for the children I hope to have, and for humanity.

I believe in something greater than myself, greater than some momentary pain. I want a better tomorrow, and I can't help build it if I'm dead. Dying for a cause can be worthwhile, if the death achieves enough. But dying for nothing? No, thank you.

It is a good thing to believe in a purposeful existence, whether through religion or philosophy. It sustains the mind when the body has reached its limit. Even among the burning charnel pits of the apocalypse, hope will die last. Good. Better for the man of the future to believe in and affirm life.

But if you want a realistic “nuclear-prep” shopping list, it would be delusional not to include a (self-?) euthanasia agent, even if it’s not the primary purpose of the item. Keep some fentanyl in your medicine cabinet as an anasthetic, and when a family member is writhing in pain and begging for its end, you can let them pass with some kind of dignity rather than beating their head in with a shovel because you refused to prepare for the scenario. And maybe, who knows, you won’t always hold the same beliefs you do now, and you’ll be glad to have that way out.

Anyway this is all hypothetical. I know it’s fashionable in some parts of the internet to fantasize about society collapsing and having to build it back, being revealed as a Nietzschean superman in the process or whatever. I guess the aesthetic vision doesn’t appeal to me. Personally? I’m not preparing for Armageddon. The bombs won’t fall. And if they do, I’m happy to be amidst the slaughtered.

I know it’s fashionable in some parts of the internet to fantasize about society collapsing and having to build it back, being revealed as a Nietzschean superman in the process or whatever. I guess the aesthetic vision doesn’t appeal to me. [...] The bombs won’t fall.

It's definitely not locked in, which is why I'm not following extreme advice like "manufacture a ghost gun" which would have substantial downside risk. But come on, basic gambler's logic. A 1% chance of avoiding death is worth spending $500 iff my life is worth more than $50,000 to me, which it obviously is since I can't exactly spend my money if I'm dead and I don't have any children yet; a probability of <1% for nuclear war in the next ten years seems pretty risible to me (from base rates: nukes have been used in anger in one conflict in the 79 years they've existed, so 10 years = 1/8 = 12.5%; from Reliable Sources: the Doomsday Clock is set closer to midnight than it's literally ever been; from my own actual Inside View: the West is reeling from the culture war, the PRC shows little interest in playing by the rules, there are intersecting red lines on Taiwan, and the spooks are spooked which has me spooked).

And, um... you do realise how offensive it is to implicitly accuse me of a) adopting beliefs because of fashion and/or hope rather than logic, and b) hoping for a billion people to die, yes? I am not Hitler and I'm not a sheep.

Does China have enough nukes that you need to be worried about "Taiwan goes nuclear" in country Australia? (Wikipedia claims they have 438 usable nukes, but it looks like they only have the ICBMs to hit a low 2-figure number of targets outside the region) The only scenario where I see Australia getting more than one bomb for Sydney and one for Melbourne (and the area downwind of those cities where the fallout is likely to land is water) is if Russia and the US go full MAD.

Prep for the chaos following a US-China nuclear war in which Sydney and Melbourne are glassed is generic SHTF prep, not nuclear prep. Obviously all bets are off if you are using "country Australia" as a euphemism for commuterland.

Military targets are:

  • Sydney (naval base in the harbour, which is perhaps not the best place to put it)
  • Perth (naval base just offshore, which is perhaps not the best place to put it)
  • Darwin (US nuclear bombers in airbase there; not going to object to this one since Darwin's low-population and much of that is for the military base)
  • Pine Gap (major control station for ABM radar, which is fairly relevant in a nuclear exchange)
  • maybe Cairns
  • Canberra (capital)

Obvious civilian targets are, yeah, the five state capitals Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne/Adelaide/Perth, especially Syd/Melb.

And, obviously, it only takes one high-altitude nuke to EMP much of the continent, so why wouldn't you?

Agreed that they might not have the nukes to hit all of those.

Adelaide is usually upwind of me (as is Perth, though it's far enough away to be less of a problem), and frankly Victoria's weather is weird enough that I'm not entirely confident in being upwind of Melbourne (I'm in Bendigo). And, well, EMP is still a thing. But yes, fallout is much less of a danger than in the 'States.

WRT number of ICBMs, remember that they have MIRVs (i.e. in some cases "one ICBM" can drop nukes on 12 different cities as long as they're close enough to each other). Australia is also closer to China than the USA, so some of their missiles that can't hit the USA can hit us.

Stockpile lots of food! Just because there’s theoretically a lot of available land doesn’t mean there’s not going to be mass starvation in the event of a nuclear conflict, for multiple reasons.

  1. Local and international logistical breakdown. International commerce is going to grind to a halt for several years. Maybe even several decades. Maybe even forever. Domestic supply chains will too. Even a limited nuclear conflict will likely involve targeting major rail and logistics terminals. Just because there’s food somewhere in the country doesn’t mean there’s going to be any wherever you are.
  2. There’s likely going to be massive food shortages after a nuclear war for several years, several decades even. The American Midwest and the Russo-Ukrainian steppe feed over two billion people on the planet. Those are going to be fallow for a long, long time. And although there’s a hundred pedants on the Motte that will fight me about this, no one really knows what large scale nuclear a war will do in the long term to the environment. Food is probably going to be tight everywhere for a while. Which leads me to...
  3. Forced requisitioning. What happens when what’s left of NATO starts demanding food subsidies from Australia for continued protection from China? What happens when Chinese troops roll up on the shore and announce that Australia’s food supplies are all being socialized to feed the three hundred million remaining Chinese people? You are after all the only non-irradiated food source on this side of the planet. What happens if your own government starts rationing and sends out commissars to take all the food that isn’t nailed down?

Additionally, you must acquire a leather jacket, a souped-up fast car and a sawed-off shotgun. If the rest of us Mottizens are dead, you have a moral duty to live out all our Mad Max LARP fantasies for us.

What happens if your own government starts rationing and sends out commissars to take all the food that isn’t nailed down?

Then the stockpile is irrelevant because it would be taken by those commissars.

It's tricky to come up with a situation where both I actually need the food and I get to keep it, particularly since I'm regional, not rural (a cult compound in the middle of nowhere can definitely use the food, but I don't live in one).

It's tricky to come up with a situation where both I actually need the food and I get to keep it

Not really. There are plenty of potential scenarios where the rationing doesn't provide enough food but you also don't have such a humongous stockpile that the goverment would bother (or even know to) to go to great lengths to confiscate amounts that can't feed an entire large military unit or something like that.

Solar panels and battery with an islandable inverter that you can physically disconnect from the grid. EMP shielding won't do much if your electrical assets are on the wrong end of 100MV of induced transmission wire.

If you have land, then planting potatoes could be a godsend. Potatoes have almost everything you need foodwise.

It might be a good idea to start planting the potatoes now so you'll be able to scale up production rapidly if the need should arise.

I'm wondering if a hydroponic setup (maybe in a greenhouse?) would be a good way to protect from fallout.

Australia is not going to have a long-lasting food shortage due to our immense food production and paucity of viable nuclear targets

You may still have them once you get a fuel shortage. Growing food is one thing, trucking it to the cities is another. Planting new crops the next year will be hard without fuel for the agricultural equipment. Australia has a lot of coal, but you can't just put it in a truck. Coal can be liquified, but you'd need to have the infrastructure for that in place already, plus you'd need to modify the engines, which, modern eco-conscious computer-controlled engines aren't going to like much. You also need spare parts; this problem is, again, exacerbated by the fact that modern agricultural equipment is often locked down by the manufacturer so they can milk you for repairs, which will be a problem when their HQ in the USA gets nuked.

I think you might be underestimating the sheer scale of Australia's food surplus; we could lose a lot of efficiency without Australians starving (as opposed to Asia starving from our exports stopping), because we've got 2.5 times the arable land/people ratio of even the USA. Transporting it is still an issue, but Australia does have some oil.

Fortunately a lot of Australian food can walk in flocks for quite surprising distances! They wouldn't even have to become nomads

Solar panels, for charging devices(and access to a charger can be a valuable trade good if networks are operating). Potassium iodide. Vodka or whiskey- hard liquor is a reliable trade good and it has a few uses anyways. I’d swap the bicycle for a moped. You’re in Australia and thus don’t have the ability to get ahold of firearms, but alternative/less lethal self defense makes sense.

I’d also get a swamp cooler, batteries, and decent toolkit.

Solar panels, for charging devices(and access to a charger can be a valuable trade good if networks are operating).

Any electronics in them will be toast from a single EMP. Possibly also the panels themselves.

Keep them in a faraday cage until you need them?

If you're storing this stuff purely for use after a nuclear exchange, wouldn't you store it in a DIY Faraday cage?

You'd hope so, but I'm not sure if people realize just how much trouble that is with solar panels which aren't exactly tiny and obviously can't be used while they're in such specialized storage. You can't just wrap them in aluminium foil or similar super lightweight "protection".

Doing a bit of googling, the solar panels would probably be the highest risk since they have the longest dimensions and thus highest field strength difference from end to end.

Doing a bit of googling, the solar panels would probably be the highest risk since they have the longest dimensions and thus highest field strength difference from end to end.

Note that size only matters here if it's the size of a conductor (i.e. metal) attached to a semiconductor, not the size of the semiconductor itself (because the semiconductor's resistance also depends on size and that cancels out).

But that's kind of irrelevant; yes, photovoltaic solar cells are low-voltage semiconductor devices (specifically, they're giant diodes) and are thus likely toast if exposed to EMP. Solar-thermal can be EMP-proof, as there's no specific need for semiconductors and metals don't really care about EMP, but AIUI solar-thermal generators are more a thing for power stations than something remotely portable.

metals don't really care about EMP,

Metals do care about EMP but only by heating from the induced currents. This is why power delivery networks are going to be toast and can have problems even from major geomagnetic storms. For shortish length and reasonably large surface area (ie. most things you're likely to have at home), it of course won't be a problem.

So really two mechanisms: field strength induced overvoltage breakdown in semiconductors and heating from high currents induced to long wires.

I'd argue for proper storage shielded against EMP - a couple metal ammo cans with a grounding wire would be very good, a microwave would be mediocre, don't forget dessicator packets and maybe oxygen absorbers or displacers - and a couple smartphones, loaded with info and entertainment. A local backup of digital docs you care about, could be a thumb drive, probably cloud storage services with maximum replication will survive but be spotty to access. Basic cellular service will be a priority to restore, fast data won't. If you want to splurge on EMP shielding a closet-scale volume, an ebike and the delicate bits of a solar power system. I dunno if solar panels will be impacted by EMP. Consumables for your tech, tires and lubricants for your vehicles. Food. Water filters, rule of thumb is 2L a day, more if you're working hard. Gas for cooking, a compatible stove. Maybe a compatible generator? Multivitamins.

...you know what, just read everything on https://www.ready.gov/ .

Fun fact.

In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. government updated their page on nuclear war. They reminded people that, inside nuclear shelters, they should be mindful to socially distance.

Because of Covid. 🤦

Potassium iodine tablets.

A gun.

Hmm, hadn't put two and two together regarding 131I having a long enough half-life that I'd need to eat before it was all gone and also being somewhat inhalable. Guess that goes on the list; thanks.

Guns are a legal headache here in Oz, and going the illegal route doesn't seem like a great cost-benefit at present. I suppose I could get a compound bow; those are the most effective fully-legal weapon of which I'm aware.

Look into 3D printing a gun. Get a gun by all means necessary.

I recall reading a Substack article or a comment here about how the NYT article on early female coders doesn't represent the whole picture. It asserted that women were mainly doing equivalent of data entry.

Could someone help me find it?

Has anything noteworthy improved in the world in the past 10-15 years?

I've wondered if it's just a natural product of depression or aging, but I was thinking recently about how absolutely everything feels as if it were so much better a few short years ago. Housing/food/necessities more affordable, political discourse less toxic, the internet was both more wild west but also more self-regulating, TV was in its golden age (Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men, etc.), sports felt more like an escape than circus, technology still held promise of a brighter future rather than potential enslavement of humanity, people still talked to one another without being addicted to smartphones, the media was still somewhat believable, medicine was still a respected profession by a wide margin, college was the smart choice for many/most young people... I could go on but you get the idea.

What has actually improved in the time since? Uber? Starlink? That's all I can think of, and I don't use either one.

From a British perspective, things that were not widely available in 2009 but now are include:

  • Smartphones
  • Keyhole surgery
  • Cars with powerful driver-assist features like parking assist and adaptive cruise control
  • Induction hobs
  • Affordable next-day delivery of online shopping
  • Ocado and similar grocery-delivery services

Interestingly, "Uber" is not on the list because London had a healthy ecosystem of minicab apps before Uber came in and crushed them all by pricing below cost.

Also, we had mass unemployment in 2009 (remember Subprime!) and now don't.

Smartphones are much better. Video streaming is much faster. It's much easier to navigate in a car by hooking it up to your phone and using the built-in display. Half decent laptops are much more affordable. Good quality large televisions are much more affordable.

More on the technology point: cheap storage. It feels like every time I go into town the flash drives and SSDs in the tech aisle are twice as large and half as expensive as the last time I went.

Solar and battery technology have rapidly expanded, greatly reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

I live in a bubble and I don't know what other people do, but to me Substack has brought a real renaissance in self-published long-form articles; the discoverability and follow-ability, and ease of doing these things, is greatly improved from anything else I knew of before.

To give kind of a corny answer to your broader question: I more or less agree that most things have gotten worse, including several things which were really important to me. (The landscape of fiction publishing is a big one.) But it's not entirely a bad thing; to some extent it forces us to define what is important to us and actively fight for it, instead of assuming that a gentle and friendly world will keep providing it without our doing anything. For example the smartphone problem: if you respond to this by intentionally selecting for "people who have fought this off and remained unaddicted" as your friend group, you may end up with a cooler and more resilient friend group than you would have if it had never happened.

TL;DR I agree with you, but let's make the best of it.

I'm getting the same impression overall.

A long time ago, normies were sold a lie: "modern capitalism is so great that even average people with modest means will have access to affordable loans". This lie went out the window after 2008. Then they were sold another lie: "globalization will mean that producers will compete in the free market for your money, so goods will become ever more affordable". This lie also went out the window after the catastrophic economic consequences of COVID lockdowns started to have an effect on average people. Now the system is done with lies because they're no longer needed, and it rules through intimidation, threats, blackpilling and gaslighting.

Has anything improved in your life?

There's a bias Steven Pinker talks about in Enlightnement Now. In surveys, respondents will predict that the average person in their country will get poorer in the next few years, while simultaneously predicting that they themselves will get richer.

Do you earn more money now? Live in a bigger house or have more savings? Multiply that by most people on the planet.

I was a student, so I had no income, but make less now that I thought I would make as a starting salary, live in a much much smaller house. I have a little bit more savings, but I'm also considerably closer to retirement.

I thought you were actually going to say something different. Most people's lives just get worse and worse as they get older, but each generation is better off than the last.

Really depends a lot on the person. I loved being a kid, hated being a teen, I liked being a young adult but hated college life and now love being a parent & working ( though I'd prefer a different job at this point). And I'm barely past 30! I don't think I'll become less happy for quite a while. Probably peak happiness is still in the future, since I'm already looking forward to my kids being a bit older so that we can do stuff we currently can't.

I don't think any time of my life after about 5 was happy, but I do enjoy the freedom of adulthood, so I'm probably happier now than I was. But problems just seem to compound throughout life for the most part, and your health and looks get worse over time.

Most people's lives just get worse and worse as they get older...

That's definitely not true. It's more that you exchange one set of pleasures for another as you get older. Whether that is as fulfilling as before is more up to the individual than anything else. For example, I'm just about 40 now. Compared to when I was 20, I:

  • Make almost 5x as much money (not inflation adjusted to be fair but still significant)
  • Own a house
  • Got a girlfriend, married her
  • Have nephews who are an incredible bright spot in my life
  • Finished my degree (note that I don't mean I graduated at 22, I mean I flunked out of college and finished later)
  • Am in worse shape physically
  • Don't have as much free time as I used to (but still have a fair bit cause I don't have kids)
  • No longer can enjoy my friends' company as easily as I could when we were all in school together

There are both good and bad things in my life since then. But I think they balance each other out. My life may not be better than it was 20 years ago, but it isn't worse either.

80 year old East German: “Things were better under Communism.”

“Why’s that?”

“Sex was better then.”

Answering the question as stated, though perhaps not as intended, the vast majority of the people in the world have seen substantial improvements in their material standard of living over the past two decades. In some places that might just mean going from being desperately poor, sick, and starving, to being desperately poor, malnourished, and overworked, but China went from being a source of cheap plastic knockoffs to a maker of electric cars and smartphones on par with anything Western companies can produce, there's now high-speed rail in Indonesia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan, and countries like Malaysia and Poland have more or less converged with the developed economies.

Limiting ourselves to the US, Gwern has a good writeup on the subject, though it's pre-pandemic and so misses things like anti-obesity drugs. Obviously nothing on the scale of first getting access to cars or the internet, but that's a pretty high bar to expect to clear every generation, and even then there's a decent chance AI has you covered in that department. In the end though, whether we're born into a time of progress or decline (or material progress coupled with moral decline, or any combination thereof) is never under our control to begin with, so it's just something we have to learn how to accept and live with, whichever way the dice roll.

As to not duplicate from the other comment:

  • Compact utility vehicles, the turbocharged 2-litre 4 cylinder engine, and plug-in hybrids having more performance than non-V8 muscle cars of 15 years ago
  • All new cars are ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago (performance models now have 600-1000 HP)
  • Small trucks made a [limited] comeback
  • All new construction is ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago
  • Grocery pre-compilation for later pickup is cheaper than the cart rentals; delivery not much more expensive than that
  • Food delivery at very reasonable rates; ride-sharing limits what taxis can charge
  • Board games have gone through a renaissance; RP (D&D, etc.) is much more popular and approachable
  • Credit card skimming was 100% solved via NFC (UX of terminals notwithstanding)
  • Android phones more likely to be supported for the physical lifetime of the device
  • Holosun and Primary Arms drove the price of a good rifle or pistol optic down dramatically
  • Optic sights on handguns now widespread, and the variety and capabilities of compact and subcompact pistols in particular has increased dramatically
  • The collapse in price of good AR-15s, Kel-Tec in general, Palmetto State Armory in general, (US only but has knock-on effects worldwide) NFA being completely trivialized means innovation can continue (shoulder braces mean short rifles mean cartridges designed around short barrels, forced reset triggers mean full-auto is functionally no longer banned, e-Form 1 filing for silencers mean you get them in 2 weeks, not 2 months or 2 years)
  • 3D printing, and the accessibility thereof
  • Anti-piracy law is well and truly a dead letter (people were still worried about BitTorrent lawsuits 10 years ago, VPNs weren't yet a thing, Internet Archive didn't exist [for now])
  • Indie games (Minecraft most importantly), mature online distribution for games and music (Steam, Bandcamp, Spotify to a point) and books, backwards compatibility for consoles, subscription services for games
  • Distributed funding platforms (specifically Kickstarter and Patreon)
  • Effectively unlimited cellular data plans, and cell plans having fallen in price by 50% (especially considering inflation)
  • Dramatically cheaper plane travel (except for the last year or so)
  • People work from home more often
  • Computers are faster and consume 10x less power (netbooks finally reached maturity as tablets and hyper-thin laptops)
  • SSDs made computers dramatically faster (this was later taken away by MS bloat, but was true for the majority of the last 15 years)
  • Functional programming principles make UI development far easier

And that's all I have for now.

Functional programming principles make UI development far easier

Can you explain

Based on what little I know about cars, "muscle cars" as such disappeared after California and other US states enacted all sorts of emission regulations in the name of protecting the environment and so on. I think it's just another example of Western civilization becoming ever more lame-ass, but whatever. Anyway, I find the concept of a "non-V8 muscle car" sort of laughable.

All new construction is ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago

Huh? Like...what?

All new cars are ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago (performance models now have 600-1000 HP)

What does more HP have to do with luxury?

"muscle cars" as such disappeared after California and other US states enacted all sorts of emission regulations in the name of protecting the environment and so on

Muscle cars simply became their own segment; they simply stopped putting V8s in everything.

What does more HP have to do with luxury?

Past about 300-400 you don't actually need any more. Stuff you want and don't need is generally 'luxury', like 500 screens, massaging seats, etc.

Anyway, I find the concept of a "non-V8 muscle car" sort of laughable.

Larger turbo-4s have at this point totally eclipsed the V6 (even in trucks). I think the only company that still offers one is Nissan (and that's because they're reusing an old design- the Z is not a new car). Most cars that have V8s are turbos now too (trucks not so much), so instead of 300-400 HP you're getting 600-700.

Basically anything that can be mass produced at scale has dropped greatly in price over the last 15 years or so. Consumer electronics, vehicle parts, musical instruments, firearms and accessories, some building materials, clothing and shoes etc. Electronics also seems to have reached a sort of plateau of capabilities where you don't need a new phone or pc every 2 years to use current software.

Yep. Say what you will about China replacing essentially all domestic manufacturing, but China is damn good at making cheap stuff.

It's kinda mind-boggling how cheap some stuff is today.

Just for one random example, you can buy a blender today for about the same price as it cost in 1970, and it will be delivered to your door cheaply in less than 48 hours.

I've been playing the drums since about 1988. An entry level drum set in 2024 still costs roughly what it did in 1988 in whole dollars, while the quality has gone up significantly. Cymbals have risen in price a bit as there is still a fair amount of unavoidable manual labor involved, but the actual wooden drums shells, metal hardware, and plastic heads have benefited tremendously from improvements in mass production and automation.

Some of your bullet points reminded me that quality home gym stuff is way easier to get and probably cheaper when adjusted for inflation than it was.

Lots of things are better. Off the top of my head:

  • Cancer is much more treatable

  • Many forms of surgery are better

  • GLP-1 agonists will lower obesity rates and improve life spans by multiple years

  • LLMs have made it much easier to get answers to random questions

  • Twitter has enabled free speech to a greater degree than ever before

  • Credit cards and ATMs just work in other countries now, where they didn't before

  • Most people have good navigation systems on their phone. In 2009, they didn't.

  • Electric cars are available now and have many advantages over gas cars in specific circumstances

  • Electric bikes provide a new form of transportation

I'm sure I'm missing lots. Personally I think the western world has gotten worse due to declining social connections. But 2 steps back, 1 step forward! There are many areas where things are better than ever.

Twitter has enabled free speech to a greater degree than ever before

Is this meant to be some joke?

No. Prior to Elon's takeover of Twitter, you were basically at the mercy of media outlets to filter things for you.

Even pre-Elon Twitter vastly increased the amount of information available to an average person, so long as it wasn't in the relatively small subset of things which were censored.

so long as it wasn't in the relatively small subset of things which were censored

So basically cat videos, baby pictures and other content if approved by the Blue Tribe.

So, what are you reading?

I’m still on The Conquest of Bread and Future Shock.

Picking up Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, a book about the inner universe of a 16th century miller who was executed by the Inquisition. The title is a reference to his belief that the world was created from a chaos “just as cheese is made out of milk” and “worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” The man himself sounds like a decent man, not particularly crazy, concerned with the money-making aspects of the Church and the apparent absurdity of its teachings, preferring a simplified, natural religion of doing good deeds.

Started reading And The Band Played On, about the handling of the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s. Seems interesting so far, and I have at least some expectation of it going against some of the things I believed.

To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex. I am skeptical that any reluctance of authority figures to take it seriously due to the nature of the victims was a bigger factor than either of those. Considering that even now, ~45 years later, we still don't have a great handle on medical treatment, it's hard to see doing more sooner helping much. The only thing they could have semi-realistically done differently was to crack down much harder on those high-risk behaviors, which probably would have been pretty ugly and would have further outraged the affected community. So yeah, AIDS sucks and hindsight is 20/20, but give us a realistic alternative that the people involved could actually have done if you want to really convince me that we screwed it up.

I'm finishing up On The Edge by Nate Silver in print. The River vs Village dichotomy is really getting sweaty now that he's talking about things like NFTs and SBF. I like Silver a lot, but this is starting to feel like a Law Review Note where a student picked a topic at the start of the semester only to realize that there really isn't much to say about it, and tried to grind it out anyway. I'm hoping maybe the last 100 pages are about cheating, which might salvage the whole project if he has a robust theory of cheating.

I'm still on Seeing Like a State on my tablet. I'm sure I have nothing to say that hasn't already been said about it.

On audiobook I just listened to Down and Out in Paradise, a quick bio of Anthony Bourdain my wife got on audible. Holy shit that book was terrible. It combined a preening retroactive wokeness (Can you BELIEVE that Tony referred to people as Puerto Ricans and Swedes?) with a deep misogyny whenever it discussed Tony's partners. The author didn't seem to have gotten more or less any original material, no one close to Bourdain spoke to him much. Another book that really felt like the author got an advance, tried to do some research, didn't find anything, but wrote the book anyway. Most of the pages are just a rehash of Kitchen Confidential with occasional emphasis from another public interview or published material. Then the author drop facts at random, but not really go into them. He points out that Anthony Bourdain was on steroids near the end of his life, but doesn't go into when or why he started doing it. Which is emblematic of my problems with the whole book! I'm probably more pro-steroid than most, but there's something obviously weird about Anthony Bourdain doing steroids, it doesn't fit his core public persona, how did he get into it, how did he justify it to himself? The lack of research makes his attempts at deflating the Bourdain myth fall completely flat. I would highly recommend against this book, read Kitchen Confidential and any post-suicide profile of Bourdain and you'll get the same substance.

Very slowly, I'm reading Phenomenology of Spirit, I've started the Half Hour Hegel series, which goes through the whole book paragraph by paragraph. I am still many many many videos from the end, it feels kind of like the year I spent reading the bible in daily bite size chunks.

If anyone knows one, I'm looking for a good history of the Kennedy family. Joe to JFK/RFK/Ted.

I'm reading Nate's blog currently, and this review of the book does not terribly surprise me. In general, I get the impression that he has a prodigious ability to silence his own biases when the data goes against them - in my experience a very unusual skill - , combined with a serious attitude to competently do the single thing he is doing. But in most other ways he is not actually very exceptional. His polling/election model, which he is focusing pretty much all his attention on, is well done and very reasonable, but it doesn't actually include anything surprising. It's just that the competition tend to blatantly ignore or diminish the biases of their favourite polls or use kind-of insane assumptions, such as current-538 (which isn't affiliated with Nate in any way, under the hood) enforcing a fundamentals-only polling approach that, among other things, led to a better election forecast when DEMs polled badly.

Symbols of Transformation by Carl Jung

If you like to read pages upon pages of "And in this culture they have..." to prove an archetype exists (I don't) then this is the book for you.

Nevertheless I have been trudging through it because interspersed throughout there are tidbits of information essentially about mommy issues (which I would say I and a significant portion of modern men have) so it feels like this weird job of like panning for gold or finding a needle in a haystack or whatever.

Worth it but it's been a slog. Can't wait to be finished.

oooh that sounds like the book for me. send it over once you're done ;)

mommy issues (which I would say I and a significant portion of modern men have)

Ok, this is obviously very personal but you can’t just drop that one and not elaborate. I’m curious about your take.

I'm reading Surface Detail, the 8th culture novel. I'm pretty far in and fairly disappointed so far. I'm comparing it to Matter which I just finished. It's apparently poorly thought of, but I'm comparing the vivid imagery of the eternal, subterranean war in the latter with the simplistic, extended exposition for each new element in Surface Detail.

I'm close to finishing the series at this point, hoping that Hydrogen Sonata isn't a poor sendoff.

yeah I love the Culture series but sadly some of the later ones are pretty lackluster

I'd love to hear your opinions of Hydrogen Sonata when you're done. I didn't like Matter as much as Surface Detail, but I thought both of them were a noticeable step down from The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Excession, or Inversions, and I never got around to reading Hydrogen Sonata at all. Of course, I might have stopped from the get-go after Consider Phlebas if I hadn't previously been assured by a friend that better sequels were to follow.

Do author's works have the same "bathtub curve" for failure probability that engineered products do? Not quite for the same reasons, but for similar ones? Their first book(s) are done without enough practice, so have issues due to lack of experience. Then they hit a personal Golden Age. Then when their stock of good original ideas starts to wear out they either dig into the mediocre original ideas or they get repetitive.

I thought Hydrogen Sonata was an okay novel (by Bank's standards). I read it after exhausting the others and I wished the Culture had a better send-off. If I had to pick favorites it would be either Player of Games or Excession. Perhaps Matter as a third.

On the other hand, if you're done with the Culture, the Algebraist is really good even if it's not set in the main universe.

Can someone steelman humor to me?

I’m beginning to wonder if humor is actually bad for us. Important qualification: in-person humor exchanged between friends is amazing for connection and friendship, and so in this capacity it is instrumental toward a good thing (bonds and brotherhoods). But this is no longer the dominant form of humor. The dominant form of humor is now worthless, distracting, and frankly retarded stuff on social media. This humor serves no instrumental purpose. It’s not the teacher whose sense of humor enhances your comfort and learning. It’s not a friend whose sense of humor bonds guys together. It’s not Scott’s wordplay that makes his ideas memorable. It’s just cheap pleasure. And I think it distracts people from taking life seriously.

Have you ever been in a serious conversation where someone keeps making jokes, and it’s impossible to obtain the same seriousness again? To me that’s the Worst Thing Ever, and I think this mental state is how many people are living because humor has penetrated every social media platform. The way many friends now stay in touch is sharing an instagram reel or a meme. But this is all occurring online, so rather than reinforcing friendship it reinforces (anti)social media consumption.

It kind of sounds like you're saying "I like X when executed well, but hate when it's executed poorly". Which is true of pretty much everything. Whenever someone writes or tells a joke, they have no idea how it will be received: it might land or it might bomb.

Sure there are instrumental functions to humour (easing tension, conveying an idea in a memorable way) but that's not what humour is for. Even if expressing a political sentiment in a humorous or satirical way made me less likely to remember it than expressing it in a dry deracinated fashion - I would still love to laugh. Laughing so hard you can hardly breathe is one of the most delightful experiences life has to offer, right up there with delicious food, beautiful music or orgasm. It needs no justification - it is its own justification.

While I can somewhat appreciate where this post is coming from, it is bordering on a parody of autistic rationalist overthinking. You might as well ask for a steelmanned case for listening to music, or dancing, or looking at a beautiful sunset. Laughter is an inherently positive human experience. It doesn’t require a justification. That’s not to say that humor can’t be employed toward malicious ends, just as music can be used to deliver damaging philosophical/thematic content. It’s just to say that humor and music and love and joy are, in and of themselves, indispensable parts of what makes life worth living.

The distinction you draw between laughter as a social lubricant and laughter as a commodified social media engagement-farming product has the shape of a compelling argument, but fundamentally I think that laughter is basically equally valuable whether it’s my friend making me laugh, or a comedian on the internet making me laugh. In fact the latter is often more valuable, because professional comedians are more skilled at reliably inspiring laughter than most of my friends and loved ones are.

Now, the point about how humor is often used as a crutch or a dodge in order to avoid having to be serious is a fair point. While humor is good, serious discussion and introspection are also good (just like sometimes negative emotions are valuable as a counterbalance to positive ones) and I agree with you that humor can be used as a sort of manipulative “cheat” or “exploit” in discourse. Unsophisticated observers (and often even sophisticated ones) risk coming away from a debate with the erroneous impression that the funnier and more wry/sardonic guy won, even if his arguments are worse.

There’s a case for humor being inappropriate for certain scenarios; I love dancing maybe more than almost anyone else here, but I would consider it wildly inappropriate to dance at a funeral.

@faceh makes the case below that humor is maybe the most important element of charisma. This would be very flattering for me to agree with, since I am personally quite funny. I have performed stand-up comedy, I was a member of an improv comedy team, I’ve performed in dozens of comedic staged productions and made hundreds of people laugh. Outside of my day job, I moonlight as a bar trivia host (I’ve been cagey about giving specifics about this before because of fears of doxxing, but at this point I’ve given so many other details about my life that this additional piece isn’t going to move the needle) and I’m very comfortable working a room.

Yet @Ponder makes what I think is the correct observation that charisma is very dependent on confidence, and on the ability to confidently and smoothly adapt to shifting social/interpersonal scenarios. While I have a strong sense of humor, I can really only consistently deploy that humor if I feel like I’m “in my element”. If I’m nervous or concerned that my attempt at humor will be seen as inappropriate or unwelcome, I usually clam up.

A truly charismatic person, in contrast, makes every scenario his element. He creates the paradigm wherein his humor will be appreciated. (That or he simply has such a keen ability to intuitively assess every interpersonal scenario that he just knows exactly which canned joke or humorous observation will fit any given opening.)

It’s well-known that many very funny people are also profoundly insecure and self-hating. I think part of this is that absurdity is often a major source of comedy; recognizing the contrast between expectation and reality - exploiting cognitive dissonance - is a reliable way to get laughs. However, individuals who are good at spotting absurd, fake, hypocritical, bizarre quirks in the things normal people take for granted - good at de-encrypting the comforting illusions that help normal people function and maintain emotional stability - are usually not very well-adjusted, well-socialized people. In that sense, humor could in some way be self-destructive. Making others laugh while making oneself miserable. Pro-social but personally maladaptive.

Self-deprecating comedy is an especially powerful and dangerous double-edged sword in that sense. I know I’ve resorted to self-deprecation in the past as a way of trying to seize control of the things about me that people make fun of. I can draw attention to the stuff about me that’s superficially funny and keep the conversation focused on that, so that nobody notices the much more hurtful things that they could take shots at if they were brought to light. Chris Farley made a lot of hay out of fat jokes, whereas the things about himself that he actually hated, and which he did not want people to notice or joke about, were ultimately much more destructive to him (physically and emotionally) than his weight ever was. Robin Williams (who, to be honest, was not actually consistently funny, if you ask me) was constantly bombarding his audiences with a chaotic stream of disparate humor-adjacent quips and silly voices, such that the real man at the center of it all became inscrutable.

Personally, I like to stay away from satirical/topical commentary and focus on stuff that’s far more anodyne and ideologically-empty. Either stuff that’s just harmless and uncontroversial (wordplay, physical/visual comedy, whimsical surrealist stuff), confessional storytelling (guys like Mike Birbiglia and some of Louis C.K.’s material) or stuff that’s so over-the-top self-awarely “shocking” that it can’t possibly be mistaken for sincerity (guys like Anthony Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, etc.). Leave the actual serious shit for people to talk about seriously.

You might as well ask for a steelmanned case for listening to music, or dancing, or looking at a beautiful sunset

But I have asked these to myself. I’m still considering the steelman case for music. The overuse of music is problematic because it’s a superstimuli that utilizes aural emotional cues. When you listen to too many sad songs you may become desensitized to the natural aural cues of sadness (in the voices of others, primarily). At the same time, because music is simply a packaged emotional state, we have to be wary of enjoying misleading music, which presents an emotional state that isn’t beneficial or realistic. The consequences of poor music consumption are both the potential dulling of real life emotional sensitivity (listening too much) and in being carried away into a fantastical emotional state (obsessing over the wrong kind of music). There’s adolescents who experience unreasonable despair because they listen to too much music of despair, just like how in 18th century youths were captivated reading the Sorrows of Young Werther (which Dostoevsky mentions in the opening of one of his books). This is a normal line of inquiry in the Socratic and Christian West, by the way. It’s only today that we have the idea that human proclivities and interests shouldn’t be instrumental to a greater good. Dances were organized to increase communal bonding and enhance mate selection, while conveying the physical movements of peacefulness and mirth rather than aggression. Sunsets were enjoyed in a spiritual way which deterred one from pantheistic thinking. Etc.

Laughter is an inherently positive human experience

So is doing opiates. But the reason we don’t do opiates is because the pleasure is transient and “pleasure” is a limited experience, so if we experience pleasure from opiates, we experience less pleasure from real life — which has disastrous consequences. So it is with an inappropriate use of laughter. Laughter is relief, and if you experience too much relief from the comedic superstimuli, you may experience less relief where it matters — real life. This is really the root claim… laughter can be deeply relieving, but it’s a relief that is completely unattached from anything significant.

This is a normal line of inquiry in the Socratic and Christian West, by the way.

Yes, I know, I’ve read Plato as well. I remember rolling my eyes and audibly groaning at the passage where he implores the state to regulate the musical modes people are allowed to listen to, such that music can only be used for “pro-social” ends.

It’s only today that we have the idea that human proclivities and interests shouldn’t be instrumental to a greater good.

Absolutely untrue. We have examples of hedonistic philosophy as far back as the Epic Of Gilgamesh; the alewife Siduri offers the advice: “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night… These alone are the concern of men.” In Ancient Greece, Socrates’ student Aristippus of Cyrene founded a whole philosophical school of explicit hedonism. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were arguing about the particulars of egoist hedonism 200 years ago.

Dances were organized to increase communal bonding and enhance mate selection, while conveying the physical movements of peacefulness and mirth rather than aggression.

Do you genuinely believe that this is the primary reason people have danced throughout history? Not to experience spontaneous joy? I think you have a very blinkered understanding of human psychology. People fifty thousand years ago were quite capable of having fun, and of doing things spontaneously without needing to have all social action coordinated by authorities optimizing toward the “greater good”.

Sunsets were enjoyed in a spiritual way which deterred one from pantheistic thinking. Etc.

Again: When and by whom?

It’s so ironic, because what’s one of the most common conservative critiques of rationalist materialism? “You just want to reduce all human affairs into a systematizable spreadsheet. Your worldview leaves no room for organic human experience. You want every human action and utterance to have a quantifiable rationalistically-legible purpose, such that humans become mere cogs in a machine.” Yet to me, this is precisely what you are doing, and claiming that all the great Christian and/or Western civilizations of old were exactly like this! Where is the room for joy and spontaneity in any of this?

Why didn’t you think about it instead of “rolling your eyes and groaning audibly”? This doesn’t mean anything to me. My dog also rolls her eyes and sometimes groans and her reasoning is mediocre.

You have misinterpreted the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s an epic, which commemorates the deeds of a heroic man who meets a variety of figures and obstacles. The very existence of the Epic is a rebuke against hedonic philosophy. Siduri is a young woman who keeps wine, both symbolic of vanity. Gilgamesh argues against Siduri and moves on. The advice of Siduri is placed in the epic so that it can be rebuked by the writers of the epic. As your first example was way off I have to assume your others are as well.

Do you genuinely believe that this is the primary reason people have danced throughout history? Not to experience spontaneous joy?

Dances were not spontaneous in European history. They were organized, the dance routines themselves were orderly, they were scheduled on a calendar, and there were rules about gender intermingling. The only people I see dancing spontaneously in joy are homeless people, schizophrenics, and characters in Hollywood movies. Even today dancing is not spontaneous. You plan to attend an event in which you dance, and you conform to the dancing tradition of the group — this occurs even if you’re a member of the Crips!

I think you have a very blinkered understanding of human psychology

blinks

People fifty thousand years ago were quite capable of having fun

People 50,000 years ago are irrelevant.

Where is the room for joy and spontaneity in any of this?

“Spontaneity” is a late 20th century meme. But joy is a real thing, and it’s telling that we no longer speak in terms of joy today but fun. Joy is a deeper pleasure than fun. We wouldn’t say that a person who spontaneously binge drinks experiences “joy”, or the person who stands in a crowded bar jumping up and down. People experience joy from deeply satisfying experiences which don’t leave a residue of guilt but which are actually beneficial for them in every dimension (physical, spiritual, etc). There is joy around a campfire after a hike with friends, but there’s no joy in “spontaneous” unreasonable pleasure.

The advice of Siduri is placed in the epic so that it can be rebuked by the writers of the epic. As your first example was way off I have to assume your others are as well.

I never claimed that the author(s)/compiler(s) of the Epic agree with Siduri. I am saying that her existence in the text very clearly demonstrates that there were in fact people at that time who did espouse hedonism. Your claim was that hedonism is “a recent phenomenon”. Yet I have provided you with what I consider very strong evidence that it is not, in fact, recent. (And how convenient for you that you received to even give a cursory look at the other examples I provided.)

People 50,000 years ago are irrelevant.

Again, they are very much not irrelevant if your claim is that fun and hedonism are a recent phenomenon. If in fact people who are the exact opposite of “recent” can be shown to have fun, your argument falls apart.

When I read Tacitus’ account of the Germanic peoples, I see a great deal of spontaneity and unstructured play/fun. You don’t have to think this is a good or admirable way to live - I think there are a lot of very unsavory things about the lifestyle he imputes to them - but to flatly state that it didn’t exist strikes me as a highly tendentious claim.

People experience joy from deeply satisfying experiences which don’t leave a residue of guilt but which are actually beneficial for them in every dimension (physical, spiritual, etc). There is joy around a campfire after a hike with friends, but there’s no joy in “spontaneous” unreasonable pleasure.

Yeah no, this is a textbook example of joyless thinking, and it makes me wonder if you’ve ever actually experienced what normal people would think of as joyful.

Look, I agree with you that people should be temperate in their indulgences! I agree that the life of a heroin addict merits scorn! To be entirely ruled by one’s passions and incapable of distinguishing between the appropriate decorum in different scenarios is indeed beastly and unbecoming. However, everybody needs to be capable of letting loose sometimes. Everybody needs moments that are unstructured, unplanned, and not directed toward rationally-legible ends. I would not wish to live in a purely “Apollonian” civilization shorn of any appreciation for simple pleasures.

I've always had this problem with overbearing scores in film or blatantly manipulative music that dosen't stand up artistically.

Granted that films are supposed to be emotionally manipulative experiences (why else would you ever watch a horror film?) but yeah, I really, REALLY hate when a movie's score is trying to sell me on some moment as though it is a huge deal, be it the action, or romantic elements, or some 'huge' twist, and I NOTICE I'm being manipulated because the music is telling me to feel an emotion that the film simply hasn't earned or induced with its other elements.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is the most obvious example of this experience for me.

Humor is a socially acceptable way to critique controversial topics. Historically, clowns have special permission from their society to parody or criticize defective aspects of their own culture.

In modern society it a way to signal intelligence. If you know something is not true but you also know there are social consequences to directly stating this then you can use humor to avoid the social consequences. Humor also allows you to shift the conversation from the object level (where you could objectively be proven wrong) to a social status game that is basically subjective.

Humor also gives people plausible deniability behind their true intentions. For instance, there is a yard sign that says, “In this house we believe:…science is real…love is love…”. Someone made a parody of this sign that says, “In this house we believe: Simplistic platitudes, trite tautologies, and semantically overloaded aphorisms are poor substitutes for respectful and rational discussions about complex issues”. The parody could have several meanings beyond the literal such as: the person is not a progressive, or the person thinks politics in general are a joke, or the person just thought it was a funny sign. Parody can also sometimes provide a defense that you are just giving homage to the original work.

Humor allows you convey your ideas as emotions/feelings instead of logical statements, which makes them more receptive to some audiences.

Humor (including funny memes) is often a more memorable way to convey an idea. A funny meme is much easier to recall than some long statistical argument about a topic.

Humor shows us a clash of perspectives in our ethical framework. It undermines self-righteous absolutism. It can show us the limits of our understanding, which can lead to self-transcendence. For a further steelman see: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KcvsipxzjXw

Have you ever been in a serious conversation where someone keeps making jokes, and it’s impossible to obtain the same seriousness again

This could be the person using humor as coping mechanism to avoid deeply thinking about their own beliefs, but it isn’t really a problem with humor itself.

It is interesting, I've been trying to inject a little serious conversation into friend gatherings recently, because the normal mode of interaction everyone has is just riffing off cultural touchpoint du jour and relatively low level gossip over local goings on. Which is fine but my brain loses interest fast.

I don't try to force seriousness, but I'll bring up a topic that isn't blatantly humorous, make some initial contributions on it, and encourage debate and exchange, but it'll only be a couple minutes at best before someone spots a joke or humorous segue and that puts the topic back onto the riffing.

And its not like I bring up depressing topics, more just bringing up things that would require a bit more mental effort and maybe a tad bit of vulnerability. I'm not so autistic as to expect people to be comfortable announcing deep personal insights in a group setting. Humor just seems to be the way they maintain the conversation without any real attachment to it.

My rough model is that most people just really want to avoid thinking about the real world while just 'hanging out' and if the topic isn't something they can make brief contributions to without much mental effort (topics they're experts on) they just not contribute on that topic. So hard to generate engaging discussion when a particular gathering isn't intended for such.

Which is also why politics is a popular topic (if everyone shares similar beliefs) since you can just repeat the normal mantras and memes and get along just fine.

Over the past several years, I’ve gotten into the habit of introducing side jokes into serious conversations because I’ve found that it frequently extends the length of time the less-engaged participants are willing to engage in those conversations. Throw in a semi-humorous observation or a lame riff every two minutes, and it keeps things light-hearted enough that the people who don’t particularly like serious conversations will find it tolerable. Yes, it frequently slows down the conversation. Yes, it occasionally derails things entirely. Yes, it’s a bad habit to fall into during serious one-on-one conversations (which I’ve unfortunately done). But it’s saved conversations among my friends on several occasions. (There is one couple who will complain bitterly anytime we have a conversation that is more serious than sports or what people have been up to at work. It’s aggravating, but it’s given me a chance to try different solutions. Humor is the best approach I’ve come up with so far, but I’d love to hear anyone else’s recommendations.)

Humor may be the social phenomena that is hardest to be 'naturally' talented at. Requires a mix of traits that are likely rare across human populations to truly have the knack. That is to say that comedians, especially in the improv space are demonstrating excellence at a really impressive skill. And likewise, autists or others who have a hard time reading a room are handicapped to a large degree if they can't figure out how to make others laugh.

A well-timed joke is what can make any given speech, conversation, debate, or lecture 3x as memorable. A poorly-timed or poorly-delivered joke can crush the mood just as easily.

Indeed, I'd argue that a full on 70% of what we call 'charisma' is just being adept at humor. The other 30% is being good-looking.

Knowing how and when to apply humor is such a tricky thing that I'm not even sure how much you can actually practice it if you don't have the bundle of natural prerequisites to be make it work.

I like what you are saying about the importance and effectiveness of humor, but I did want to expand on some of the other points you made.

Indeed, I'd argue that a fully on 70% of what we call 'charisma' is just being adept at humor. The other 30% is being good-looking.

I think this formula is missing an important component of charisma, which is a sense of confidence and certainty. Charismatic people seem to have a way of being confident before it is earned. They can show up in a new situation, or setting, and not seem uncertain like most people. Since they don't appear uncertain people tend to go along with them because the logic is: If someone didn't know what they were doing they wouldn't be able to appear so confident. Someone that is confident must therefore have skills/expertise to handle a situation.

Charismatic people have a way of being confident in their actions in a socially smooth way. If someone disagrees with them they can skillfully navigate the interaction without coming across as insecure and/or an asshole.

humor is such a tricky thing that I'm not even sure how much you can actually practice it

Something that worked for me was to view humor as a clash of perspectives. There is something of an algorithm to it which is to basically compare different perspectives to find variances between them. Once you notice these differences you can start reflect on past interactions and imaginally practice different points where you could have said something humorous. This imaginal practice gave me to confidence to occasionally add humor to my communication.

They can show up in a new situation, or setting, and not seem uncertain like most people. Since they don't appear uncertain people tend to go along with them because the logic is: If someone didn't know what they were doing they wouldn't be able to appear so confident.

Definitely agree with this addition, the ability to project confidence in unfamiliar situations is a trait I've known certain people to possess which makes it terrifyingly easy to 'get along' with them despite knowing them for a very brief time and learning very little about them.

My only pushback is that humor is still a huge part of that equation since being able to deftly use humor even in situations others would find uncomfortable is very important to appearing confident! Like you suggest, someone who is making jokes and engaging with people where others are nervous gives the strong impressive they know what they're doing.

Funny enough, though, I'm naturally suspicious of these people and it feels like I can 'see through' the facade more often than not.

This is likely because I'm a natural introvert and just autistic enough that I can ignore social cues rather than respond to them uncritically, so somebody I don't know approaching me in a situation already puts me on edge (what are they trying to sell me?) and making airs like they're a good ol' buddy of mine when I don't know them from Adam makes me shut off the normal paths they'd use to get me to like them.

And indeed, a large portion of these people are easy to push 'out of their depth' if you DO know what you're talking about and you don't care about making the interaction socially awkward. They can revert to platitudes and deflections and double down on humor to maintain their image, but it breaks their normal game plan.

Some portion of these folks are actual sociopaths seeking to infiltrate a given space, so I tend not to just let them ingratiate themselves into groups I care about without testing them.

There is something of an algorithm to it which is to basically compare different perspectives to find variances between them. Once you notice these differences you can start reflect on past interactions and imaginally practice different points where you could have said something humorous.

My 'trick' has been to carefully create a particular set of expectations, and then thwart them at an opportune time with little warning.

Imagine the humor inherent when you're talking to a nice, 80 year old woman calmly knitting a scarf for her grandkids and reminiscing about the good old days when she accidentally stabs herself with a needle and lets fly with a tirade of horrifying curses and epithets like a drunken sailor, then composes herself, apologizes, and continues on like nothing happened.

When I interact with almost everybody I default to a largely professional, straightforward, grounded persona (which flows pretty naturally from my job title) and keep most of my commentary very direct and sensible, with dashes of color to show I'm not a complete fuddy-duddy. But then, once people see me as the straightlaced and perhaps unimaginative type, I can whip out some completely absurd, possibly offensive comment when there's an opportunity, with complete deadpan delivery, and people will be caught so off guard that they go silent for several seconds trying to discern if A) they just heard that correctly and B) I'm actually being serious.

Usually that's enough to get a laugh, but if not I relieve the tension by throwing up my hands and going "just kidding!" but with a bit of a wink on top.

Its a reliable method because I can always bring my own personality with me to most interactions, and I can very consciously choose the time and place to pull the card if I gauge it is appropriate with the other person(s).

The 'downside' is that it becomes way harder to surprise people who have known me for a long time with that tactic.

You just described many uses of humor which you appreciate, then described the sort of humor you don't like. What do you need a steelman for?

Non-socialized non-instrumental uses of humor, so most humor consumption — any kind of commercial humor, whether standup or online humor.

Most humor is very much a matter of taste. The annoying guy who makes a joke out of everything and snarky online humor annoys a lot of people, but they aren't an indictment of humor as a genre. If you don't personally like standup comedy or knock-knock jokes, no one is going to be able to steelman why you should, but that doesn't make humor itself deleterious.

I mean, to use an analogy, just because most people these days would rather eat fast food instead of nutritious meals cooked with fresh ingredients, that doesn't mean that food is bad for us in and of itself or that we could do without it.

You seem to have already steel manned humor, just pointed out that sometimes it’s not appropriate and with a dash of how the internet tends to ruin things

This sounds like an argument against cheap social media simulacra, not humor.

I know the kind of conversations you're talking about, and either the other person is immature, or covering up social awkwardness with humor. I have a lot of good friends who don't talk like this.

In the spirit of Buzzfeed and Murray's Coming Apart quiz on how thick your bubble is, what're your best questions for assessing Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe American membership accurately. I've thought of a few, wandering what everyone would add. I'm aiming more for questions that get at the cultural attitudes and feelings that underly tribal membership, rather than political positions questions, which I feel are more vulnerable to lies. So far I've got for examples and formatting, I'm setting Red as Positive and Blue as Negative, the higher your score the Redder you are:

Do you drive a car with a V8 engine?

Yes (+2), No (0), Yes but it's not my daily driver (+4), I don't know (-8), I don't drive (-2)

How often do you go to church?

About as often as I'd like (+1), less often than I'd like (+4), more often than I'd like (-4)

What is the biggest reason you prefer to buy things made in America?

They are higher quality (+4), workers are paid a fair wage (+1), it's important that we make as much as possible at home (+2), I don't prefer things made in America (-2)

How large a raise would you need to be offered to do your job in a foreign country for two years, assuming that your standard of living would remain more or less the same while you were there?

50% or more (+4), 25-50% (+2), 0-25% (-2), I would do it for less than I'm making now (-4)

On a completely unrelated note, it still keeps surprising me how rich Americans are. People just drive around with V8 engines.

It's fairly related, actually.

Rednecks I know with no money still keep a V8 pickup or old project car around. It's the space, when you have a large property in a low-land-value area, to store it.

‘How many goals do you use for a pickup basketball game?’- red tribers play on half a court, blue tribers play on a full one.

‘Your biggest role model is_?’ Red tribers are more likely to name a parent or grandparent, blues a public figure.

‘Should people not their parents treat older teens more as adults or children?’ Red tribers would tend towards the former, blues the latter.

‘What should schools teach, but don’t?’ Red tribe answers might be vocational skills, home ec, or shop, but are more likely to be ‘civics so people don’t let the government oppress them’, blues might answer something culture warsy like sex Ed or the age of the earth(and few schools in America actually have a YEC curriculum), but I would point to STEM as probably a more common answer.

‘Is racism or a bad culture the biggest problem facing the black community?’ Self explanatory(true HBD is a fringe position in the red tribe).

‘Is racism or a bad culture the biggest problem facing the black community?’ Self explanatory(true HBD is a fringe position in the red tribe).

I like this one, but I think in more detail it could go

What is the best way to uplift black communities?

Increase funding for education (-2), Increase funding for police (+2), decrease funding for police (-4), increase attendance at churches (+6)

The black church is not always viewed as positively among cultural conservatives as the evangelical church, or the white Catholic or orthodox churches. Part of that is politics but part of it is quite literally that liberal views on sexual morality are not viewed as being compatible with helping the black community fixing its broken culture, because that broken culture is viewed as being downstream of promiscuity and poor family values.

I remember my mother- red tribe leftist- saying ‘black kids don’t have dads because their churches put women as heads of household’. Liberal views about family, gender, and sexuality are probably more of a mainline Protestant thing, but their existence in the black church takes a lot of the blame for black dysfunction in the broader red tribe.

Interesting! I've never heard that critique, possibly because I'm less into the Protestant infighting.

Still, I'd contend that it's much more likely that a person who says that inner cities need more religion would still say that despite that critique of existing black churches, they would simply say they need more proper churches.

Probably, yes. And there are distinctively black socially conservative religious movements, such as NOI and the black Hebrew Israelites. For some reason these groups are no more popular with the religious right than with anyone else, despite being sociologically pretty similar. On the other hand black KJV-onlyists seem popular with their evangelical counterparts despite predictable voting differences.

I would be very interested in examinations of the outcomes of kids born in these groups.

‘How many goals do you use for a pickup basketball game?’- red tribers play on half a court, blue tribers play on a full one.

Wait what? I would've said you just use whatever you have to hand. Sometimes that's a half court, sometimes full. Why would this have a tribal slant to it?

I don’t know how it originated, but I’ve seen reds play on a half court when a full one was readily available enough to pick up on a pattern.

I mean, obviously basketball is a very blue coded sport- especially by the standards of US team sports- but it seems like a thing.

obviously basketball is a very blue coded sport

So says the Texan. Come to Kentucky or Indiana and say that.

Wait what? I would've said you just use whatever you have to hand. Sometimes that's a half court, sometimes full. Why would this have a tribal slant to it?

Maybe a hoop in a driveway vs a full public court? An obscured way of getting at suburbs vs city?

Just say "Trump" and their reaction should be enough.

Any positive reaction: clearly red tribe.

Uncertainty or confusion: gray tribe.

Any negative reaction: clearly blue tribe.

I think that most of the members of the red tribe will have a positive or neutral reaction to Trump, but that is about all it tells you.

Scott Alexander, as firmly part of the grey tribe as anyone could be, spent thousands of words to persuade republicans not to vote for Trump. Should I suspect that he is crypto-woke?

I consider myself part of the grey tribe and my reaction to Trump is mostly negative.

There are prominent republicans opposing Trump, does that make them blue tribe?

There is tribe and then there is political party, and I think Trump is closer to tribal divide than party divide.

And the way I'd ask the question is to get their initial reaction to Trump, not their thought out and considered reaction. If someone randomly brought up Trump to you would your reaction be something like "why are they bringing him up?" Or "what about Trump?" That would be the "confusion" reaction. Meaning you don't really respond to him emotionally too much. Strong blue and red tribers will skip past the conversational confusion and straight to a reaction about the man, because he has a strong emotional salience to them.

Scott Alexander, as firmly part of the grey tribe as anyone could be, spent thousands of words to persuade republicans not to vote for Trump. Should I suspect that he is crypto-woke?

He also wrote "you are still crying wolf" about Trump being racist. Which had some strong blue tribers almost foaming at the mouth mad at Scott. Your reaction and Scott's reaction to me seem grey tribe leaning blue, because you are forming opinions about Trump because of policies or things he does. If you were strongly red or blue tribe the facts would literally not matter.

I do not consider Scott ultimate grey tribe. I think that he thinks he is very grey tribe because he likes living in super heavy blue tribe areas and he knows he doesn't fit in among them. But there is the rub: he likes living in super heavy blue tribe areas.

Do you feel more comfortable among blue tribe or red tribe?

I think I'm grey tribe leaning red. I'd be confused if someone randomly brought him up. But his antics sort of use me, and I generally dislike his policy prescriptions. I'm not strongly emotionally attached either way to him.

he likes living in super heavy blue tribe areas

Well, he lives in Silicon Valley, which probably has the highest relative density of grey tribe (10%, perhaps?).

SV is also heavily urbanized and thus is overall very blue. But a high population density is kinda required if you want to meet people of your minority. Even if the fraction of people belonging to the grey tribe in rural Texas was equally high, meetups would involve much longer drives.

I agree that from what I know about his cultural upbringing, Scott is likely closer to the blue tribe than the red one. If he spent his youth fixing his car on his farm, he talks very little about it.

Of course, one could also discuss how much Trump himself fits into the red tribe. From my understanding, he was born elite and spent an awful lot of time in NYC. I don't think he ever shot his dog because it was going after the neighbors chickens. Definitely not a redneck/borderer type. On the other hand, he passes (imo) successfully as a working class man who comes to own a big fortune (even though he is nothing of that sort). Where other elites are into refinement, and perhaps subtly understate their wealth, Trump is the opposite, going for straightforward opulence.

Understatement: Jeff Bezos could have named his company Bezos. He did not. Trump likes to put his name on anything he is involved with. While I don't know the truth about that rumor, of all the people who might be able to afford a toilet bowl made out of gold, Trump feels like the person who would be most likely to signal his wealth that way.

Refinement: Other elites might marry sophisticated people with an advanced degree in fine arts. Trump goes straight for hot models. Where other elites would dine on food with fancy French names unknown to ordinary Americans, Trump likes his fast food.

Meaning you don't really respond to him emotionally too much.

I concede that. My reaction is more like 'urgh, please let us not have four more years of that clown', not 'he is a fascist and he will destroy democracy in America (this time!)'.

There are prominent republicans opposing Trump, does that make them blue tribe?

Indubitably yes! Remember that the red/blue split was not supposed to cleave on party affiliation or even ideology, but cultural affiliation. A republican from, say, the northeast, who comes from money and lives on an estate is going to be blue tribe almost without fail.

On the other hand, Cheney and Romney.

Cheney and Romney are the prototypical examples of Blue Tribe Republicans.

Cheney shot someone. Does that make him more or less red tribe?

More: He used his shotgun to shoot something on a hunting trip.

Less: He (hopefully) missed his real target. (ETA: And shot someone without killing him.)

Less. Bird bunting is a common wealthy blue tribe activity. More if he had been deer hunting.

There’s an idea, rarely expressed explicitly, that seems to underpin some of our commenters’ idea of the world- and considerably more popular among DR twitterati- wherein recent economic growth in the west is not representative of an increase in the quality and quantity of stuff, it’s reflecting accounting tricks and rising real estate prices. Seemingly a right wing corollary to the socialist/socdem idea that western economies are like South Africa where everything goes to the top 1/5/10%.

I’m not really looking for a steelman, so much as a when do these people think ‘real’ GDP started to decline. Hourly compensation became uncoupled from productivity in the 70’s but we’re much richer now than we were then.

wherein recent economic growth in the west is not representative of an increase in the quality and quantity of stuff, it’s reflecting accounting tricks and rising real estate prices.

I've recently encountered a somewhat similar narrative, pointing to a similar stagnation and decline, but, rather than being purely "accounting tricks and rising real estate prices," it's, to put it succinctly, software isn't stuff.

The example given was to consider if you took every modern electronic screen out of your house. Get rid of your flatscreen TV, and maybe replace it with an old CRT set. Toss out the laptops, the tablets, the smartphones, the GPS and other "screen" electronics in your car, etc.

Now, how does your stuff, your surroundings, your life differ from someone of similar class, job, etc. back in the 70s or 80s? What has gotten better in terms of material stuff, rather than telecommunications, internet, and software, software, software? It's the whole "flying cars vs. cyberpunk dystopia" thing, the building of the virtual "layer" atop a stagnating, even declining material one.

(I'm reminded here again of the likes of Tyler Cowen's Average is Over and the future he projects, where ~80% of the population lives in third-world style favelas, concentrated in the narrow latitude/climate band that minimizes annual heating+AC costs, eating beans, making pennies on Amazon Turk; but most people will be fine with that because VR will have become so good they won't care about their conditions in the material world (and for those who don't, there will be better psych drugs and cops with omnipresent surveillance drones).)

Now, how does your stuff, your surroundings, your life differ from someone of similar class, job, etc. back in the 70s or 80s? What has gotten better in terms of material stuff, rather than telecommunications, internet, and software, software, software?

My car is much nicer. My house is probably not that different, but it’s definitely not worse. My diet is probably mildly better; my parents remember eating liver, franks and beans, etc, and I certainly don’t have to do that. I have more options for vacationing within my price range even if I prefer to spend my money on things other than flights(and tradesmen in the 70’s or even 80’s did not get to fly places). Most of my minor chattels are mildly better or about the same.

And, for two new technologies- cell phones and the microwave are a massive improvement in the quality of life for ‘white van men’- the cell phone, because I’m no longer confined to my house when I’m on call, and microwaves because I can now eat a hot lunch at any gas station without having to either a) eat a 7/11 hot dog or b) go to McDonald’s. It seems fair to also note that the internet and Amazon are large improvements in QoL in middle class suburbs, even lower middle class ones.

Oh, and I get all that working fewer hours.

Software is stuff, very much so. Or at least something worth caring about.

The boardgames I used to play as a kid? Replaced by videogames. Mail chess? Chess.com. TV? Streaming. Notebooks for planning, notes, recipes? An app. Physical maps? An app. The Encyclopedia? Replaced by Wikipedia, plus I can for the most part freely access scientific papers as they're published on pubmed, arxiv, etc.

How do I learn things like cooking, sewing, gardening, woodworking, chemistry, or look up information? Used to be a trip to a library, asking around, searching for experts in the phonebook, etc. Now I can google stuff, youtube is full of how tos and instructional videos, and LLMs can spit out semi accurate answers to common problems that are hard to find on google.

People complain how newer appliances are crappier, but the price to income ratio nosedived.

All that said, I agree that we lost things, and that some things got worse. Replacing physical buttons with touch controls in cars springs to mind. Architecture is another common example.

Architecture is another common example.

Architecture has certainly got worse in the last 100 years, but in the last 15, I'd say we've probably seen an improvement. New Traditional Architecture is picking up steam as a movement. Governments and developers are realising that building nice-looking buildings isn't an esoteric mystery lost to the sands of time. I predict in another century people will looking back on C20th architecture with embarrassment.

Okay, that first article calls out Beijing’s CCTV building, which is…actually really cool? Or insane, or futurist in a way that makes people think “we can do that?”

Something similar goes for the Guangzhou opera house. It’s not as physically impressive, but it does make me think of Halo: Reach’s vision of the future. Maybe the builders want to send a transhumanist or utopian message. Maybe nice cornices just aren’t the right tool for that.

I’m not offering a blanket defense of modernist slabs. The London National Theatre sucks, and there are plenty more where that came from. And when we consider the mass-produced architecture which trickles down to our houses and shops and parks, I expect the traditionalist language scales much better than exotic futurism. More ways to screw up a design which doesn’t fall back on the familiar. More ways to crawl up one’s own chimney.

I'm less sympathetic to modernism than most, but I can agree that I'd be basically fine with it if it was limited to a handful of high profile buildings in city centres. There's always the small chance that such a building becomes iconic, like the Sydney Opera House or the Eiffel Tower.

But building this when we could just as cheaply and easily build this is an affront to God.

One imo true part is inflation stats. Basically, we used to use a simple bucket-of-goods based approach, which would compare the same goods in the past to the same goods in the future and calculate inflation based on that. This was deemed not good enough, on the understandable logic that we will want different goods in the future, so over time this fixed bucket will reflect consumer realities less and less.

So we now use a different approach, the CPI, which has a flexible bucket based on the actual goods we buy instead. Sounds good? Well, the problem is twofold. First, it means we aren't comparing like-for-like anymore, so any historic inflation comparison is kind of nonsensical. Second, and imo even worse, it naturally biases inflation estimates downward. For example, back under Corona bell pepper prices shot up 300% or so at my local super market for a while, and we pretty much instantly stopped buying them. Which means that over this time frame, looking at the CPI, the rather extreme inflation of bell pepper would have minimal to no impact on the inflation stats calculated solely on our household, despite being one of my favorite vegetables that I like to eat near-daily if I can. This can easily be generalized to most consumers - if there is a good that was consumed a lot in the past but not anymore, a solid % of that will be an increase in price, and vice-versa any good that was rarely consumed in the past but is now consumed a lot, chances are it got cheaper.

See here for a graph

So if we fully buy into this framing, some time in the 80's official eco stats substantially uncoupled from the real economy. Obviously that doesn't prove that we actually got poorer, though.

Interesting.

I’m used to thinking of inflation as a demand-side phenomenon. The Econ 101 explanation was something about money supply. More dollars in circulation, more thrown at any particular good.

It makes sense that a supply shock across a slice of the market would count as inflation, because people are substituting some kind of produce. What about an isolated shock? If it had somehow just been bell peppers, should it have counted as inflation?

I guess I’m saying the CPI isn’t necessarily wrong to bias downwards. A metric which didn’t account for substitutions would be a bit silly in its own ways.

Ok so when did standard of living decline.

I think looking for the starting point of real GDP decline is missing the point. We can see the Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Top 1% (99th to 100th Wealth Percentiles): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134. It goes from approximately 23% in 1989 to approximately 30% in 2024. Statistics like that could be calculated for longer periods and/or for different wealth percentiles.

The point is that even if real GDP is growing it disproportionately benefiting the people that were already wealthy instead of being more evenly distributed. You also have other data like how women used to be able to afford to stay at home. It leads to a feeling that the middle class is constantly shrinking as the wealthy figure out how to keep more of the GDP to themselves.

Many people see that their lives are getting economically worse. They can no longer achieve the same results as their parents with the same amount of effort. Manufacturing got outsourced to foreign countries, which eliminated a high-school to middle class path for many people. Then the question becomes why am I worse off economically than my parents even though I have the same or higher education? One explanation could be real GDP declining. A more causative factor seems to be the American system is designed to funnel more and more wealth to the wealthy as time progresses.

I think the point of the economic growth discussion is something more like: If real GDP is growing then something in the system is broken if it isn't making life better off for the majority of Americans.

I think it’s a poor measurement of the general health of the country. It’s useful as a general overview, but it misses the question of whether the economic benefits of the activity measured is beneficial to the country as a whole or if it’s only one segment of the economy. I think much the same of CPI because it doesn’t tell you which items are going higher or whether they’re necessary goods or luxuries.

The idea that GDP is fake is mostly cope (and I say that as an European), but there is a nugget of truth in it as a lot of things rich societies spend money on really is 'fake' in a way:

  • Positional goods. Things that only/mostly benefit you if you have better stuff than everybody else. This includes luxuries like fashion, but also much of higher education, and all ways people price out poor people to e.g. not having to live next to them.

  • Waste. The government spending a gazillion dollars on a 4-year environmental pre-study for some infrastructure project without any tangible result absolutely counts as GDP but doesn't really benefit society much.

  • Paying for results that other people get for free. If you live in a high-crime area and have to spend a bunch of money on replacing stolen goods, security, insurance, fixing vandalism etc. you are contributing to GDP even though somebody living in a low-crime place get that automatically.

This has probably always happened in all societies to some degree or other, but it's just more prevalent in the richer ones that can afford the slack.

I'd like to add one more point:

  • Companies pumping money back and forth that actually does very little besides making lines go up and filling slides in shareholder presentations. If you have advanced financial markets or advanced insurance markets, this is easy to "grow" organically. But all large/"modern" companies like to partake in schemes like that: complex compliance infrastructure, management consulting contracts, software as a service, ect.

Is the They Eats Cats in Ohio the best meme so far in the election? The memes from the right are chuckle worthy which hasn't been in a long time and the left is in the (un)usual for them defensive mode since Kamala nomination to debunk.

The best I have seen so far: https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED489/66e3727adde1f.jpeg (alf with a cat sandwich) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXcp_JCWQAA8gO8?format=jpg&name=medium (woman and cat arguing)

Lots of alf memes on the topic anyway. Also a lot of ai generated memes in which trump saves cats. I have seen a parody of the chick-fil-a ads, cats in combat fatigues getting deployed to ohio, tiktok trend with shocked dogs when trump says they eat pets in there.

All in all surprising memetic hit.

And it resulted in an absolute banger of a techno song, although good luck finding it on Google.

Trump's speaking has a strange rhythmic quality that makes it pretty easy to set to music.

Nice song, but I hate how Twitter stops playing the video as soon as I scroll away from it to read the replies. It's just as terrible as autoplaying videos, but in reverse.

I hate how Twitter stops playing the video as soon as I scroll away from it to read the replies

There is a public video-enabled Nitter instance at https://elon.cucked.me/Bigfoot_USA/status/1834305378621730851 ; it doesn't have infinite-scrolling replies, but it does allow you to keep the video playing in the background when you open subsequent pages of replies in a new tab.

I couldn't stop laughing at this video clip from the hallowed halls of Congress earlier this week. It has the exact same tone as schoolchildren bullying an overwhelmed substitute teacher. I think that's a good metaphor for the id of the two parties.

Why is it surprising? It seemed obvious as soon as a candidate repeated an accusation that's at once all of outre, disgusting, racist, ultimately unprovable as either true or false, hate-inducing, and goofy; that was going to be a viral moment. People love hating the out-group, it feels great. This is true regardless of the truth value of the accusations. The race was on the moment he said it between right wing research efforts to turn up something close enough to true to say it was true, and left wing efforts to turn up a hate crime against the Haitian community. So far the right has turned up a couple rumors that almost kinda sound like it, and a bunch of pictures of people two towns over roasting what are obviously chickens or lamb on closer inspection; the left is in overdrive reporting "threats" but hasn't turned up anything concrete yet. The NY post meanwhile is reporting on car crashes in Ohio in which no one is injured as major news stories.

That said, I think the best meme of the election so far has been the Fight Fight Fight photo of Trump. Fifty years from now, when the 2020s retro look is back in, and it's all aesthetic and no politics, it'll be around. When my grandkids want to decorate their 2020s vintage basement in style, they'll put that picture on the wall, maybe in the form of a framed boardwalk T shirt from the Jersey Shore, as iconic of the time, without really knowing whether they agree with DJT's politics or not; in the same way that I have a velvet painting of JFK hanging in my '62 vintage basement.

My favorite has been, "If Kamala wins, you get free healthcare," as if free healthcare for all would be a travesty of the common man.

It would be - the common man is pretty happy with their insurance-provided health care, as opposed to VA or Medicare.

I'm mildly surprised this hasn't been discussed in the main thread. But I guess I can predict how it will go.

I'm a fan of the autotunes and dance remixes personally. There are several good ones, including one I'm partial to where the guy autotunes a howling dog as a backup singer. Would really enjoy going to a good dance party and hitting a few strides to "They're eating the cats, they're eating the cats" between Chappell Roan or something.

Edit: As an addendum, the second-best meme of the cycle is the series of coconut tree dance remixes from Kamala's announcement PR team meme blitz, for the same reason.

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