site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2808 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Has anyone written about the demographics of elite college clubs? This is noteworthy as they are the top-most selection filter for business and finance. A lot of these organizations appear to have a worse under-representation of white students than the schools themselves. The Harvard Undergraduate Consulting Group, for instance, is the most elite of club for Ivy students, and is only 7% white. The students are admitted by other students, and these students grew up in a culture saturated with anti-white propaganda about privilege.

These clubs aren’t the clubs that provide any elite status, they’re shitholes for first-gen elite college student overachievers to try (and fail) to game status in things that kids with real connections don’t even need to think about.

Makes sense I guess. So as an example, Goldman and McKinsey don’t care about this as much as the students think they do?

If Goldman and McKinsey care whether you’re a member of the student consulting or investment banking club, I’ll eat my hat.

I've tried to get my head around the Repugnant Conclusion a bunch of times, but I still don't really grasp it, and definitely don't feel that I could explain to a third party what it entails, in simple language. Anyone care to do an explainer?

The Repugnant Conclusion is a counterexample or argument against utilitarianism as an ethical philosophy. To illustrate the Repugnant Conclusion, it might be a bit helpful to phrase it in politically-charged words, even though the general principle is broader.

Let’s say that you live in a country where everyone is very happy. Because we’re operating under utilitarian ethics, this amount of happiness can be quantified by summing up the amount of happiness of each person in the society. Now, let’s say that your country imports a bunch of foreigners who aren’t nearly as happy. If the foreigners don’t make your country’s original inhabitants any less happy, then under utilitarianism, this is a clear win: the total amount of happiness in your country has increased. But crucially, even if the foreigners decrease the amount of happiness of the natives, then as long as this decrease is outweighed by the increased total happiness you get from adding new people to the country, this is still a net win under utilitarianism.

So let’s keep iterating this: naive utilitarianism would argue that it is good to keep importing unhappy foreigners, even if they make everyone else worse off, so long as these foreigners still have positive happiness (that is, are not suicidal) and so long as there are enough of them to offset the decrease in happiness in everyone else. The end result: a country of a billion people, all of whom are barely happy at all, which utilitarianism says is still superior to the original smaller country of very happy people. That is the Repugnant Conclusion.

Note that despite my framing, the Repugnant Conclusion doesn’t quite directly apply to the question of immigration in this way; I haven’t addressed the salient real-world question of whether immigrants do decrease happiness rather than increase it, etc. The more general Repugnant Conclusion applies to not a single country deciding whether to import immigrants, but to the question of whether one possible universe is better than another possible universe. The most crucial way in which my framing differs from the real world is that it assumes that the only country that matters in the world is the country being discussed, which utilitarianism rejects. But framing it in these terms hopefully makes it more understandable than saying “say that N unhappy people are born into a possible universe…”

When did headline writers start putting the adverb "quietly" in every headline?

I swear to God, I feel like I haven't seen a headline about Netflix just adding a movie to their library for months if not years. They're always doing it "quietly".

Netflix Just Quietly Added the Best Cannibal Thriller of the Decade

Netflix quietly adds award-winning BBC series

Netflix has just quietly added one of 2023’s very best movies

From three different sources. What on earth is this supposed to convey to the reader?

From three different sources. What on earth is this supposed to convey to the reader?

"No one knows about this, and you're going to be so cool when you tell your friends"

"The company did this on the sly, and we found out about it."

I find myself needing to write a "Statement of Past and/or Planned Future Contributions to Advancing Diversity and Inclusive Excellence" (a.k.a. a DEI statement) in order to apply for a university teaching job.

My understanding is that this is a kind of ideological litmus test, designed to make sure that applicants at least know and are willing to state the approved beliefs. I'm fairly conservative, so I'm not sure I actually know the correct lingo to use and what the minimum viable essay would look like.

If you have been in my position, how did you approach writing it? Does anyone know of any current examples of acceptable submissions I can study for wording and content? Ideally I would be able to deliver my actual beliefs (or a subset of them) in a way that passes scrutiny from the people reviewing it, but I'm not above just parroting the approved lines (I need the work).

Oof. I only tried to thread that needle one, many many moons ago, and I've mostly avoided engaging with bullshit people who demand such bullshit things ever since. It's real icky, and you will respect yourself a little less and hate them a little more for a long time. So, my first line advice would be that if you can think of literally any other options that allow you to avoid it, do those things instead and never look back.

(FYI: I didn't get the one thing I did try for; one interpretation could be that I'm just a hater for not getting it, though TBH, in hindsight, if I had gotten it, it would have been quite minor in terms of meaningful change to my life; but I am at least avoiding the alternate interpretation that could happen if I had gotten it, where someone could accuse me of asking others to make sacrifices that I didn't or whatever; there's never going to be any winning if people want to shit on you. Anyway.)

I don't think I didn't get it because of the DEI thing; I think their biggest negative was on something unrelated (which was annoying in itself, but that's a story for another day). But even so, I didn't personally think that my approach was remotely convincing, anyway. But I think that, in practice, my thing was actually just assessed by a bunch of profs from a bunch of different universities, with a much higher chance that they were really just assessing science stuff and totally ignoring the DEI stuff. I know from experience with the inside of quite a few different academic selection processes that in many cases, it just gets completely ignored. But of course, it's always a difficult challenge to figure out whether this university will mostly ignore it or pay close attention. I don't know of any strategies here other than having made friends with someone who has served on a faculty search committee there and had some sense about how seriously they thought the 'higher ups' took it. Of course, any particular department can also be more/less committed to the cause, but that's even harder to get good info on.

Up to this point, it's all reasons to run or to not care, which isn't super satisfying to you. My last suggestion will be the least satisfying. If you really want to still apply, and you really think you need to have something that is somewhat conforming, just use ChatGPT or pay someone to write it. They'll probably get the job done as good or better than you could do, and you'll feel slightly less icky, not having had to literally squeeze the words out of your own mind. At a minor cost of increased involvement, but to get slightly increased personalization, prompt it with anything about yourself that might be relevant or look for any area-specific DEI-sounding orgs on campus. It's cheap and easy to say you're going to engage with "[DEI Group] In [Academic Discipline]" or whatever that already exists on campus, and they're probably not going to follow-up to make sure you've actually done so. That said, I probably need to check in with some of my folks who either just went through their tenure review or are about to in order to see how much they seem to care about this BS stuff at that point. It's really hard to know if you're signing up to an organization that is going to make you constantly grovel to the golden calf or just pay a little lip service from time to time.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I'm managing to struggle through the writing of it. Maybe I'll regret it in the future.

Did anyone watch Megalopolis? What is it, what are the CW elements?

I did see Megalopolis! Its a self-produced, self financed movie by Francis Ford Coppola! There are some superficial culture war elements that are mapped onto this neo-Roman America (death of democracy through appeal to a mob, vestal virginity, question of striving for future utopia vs present concerns?) but they were removed enough from the main storyline and really not presented 'believably' enough (there is no hammered home moralizing of the 'correct' position, and really no demonizing of the 'incorrect' position) that I don't consider the film 'waging' the culture war.

The final dedication at the end of the film, and I think cinema-insiders fears of the future of movie production are why this movie was made now.

So, uh, was it good?

I liked it, but it does have some significant problems. It succeeds as spectacle but not as a narrative. I want more film-makers to take chances like this, but also this wasn't a masterpiece.

anyone else annoyed by posts that start with some unrelated story like "i was cooking dinner when blah blah", its like reading cooking recipes online

i feel like our esteem for effort posting is why people pad their posts so much, to try to fit in when they dont actually have that much to say

I've always thought that a lot of rat adjacent people cannot really differentiate between actually good posts and posts that are just overly long, Scott being a notable example of that group.

I agree but brute length is an effective low pass filter. But once you’ve applied that filter, it’s not good.

Scott’s length issues are worse than just superfluous. He’s clearly reached a point of epistemic growth where instead of exploring ideas in his long posts, he’s laundering conclusions

If by effective low pass filter you mean a filter that makes me ctrl-w almost immediately, you're right. Such posts are the ratsphere textual equivalent of youtube videos where you have to watch half an hour of video to get two minutes of actual information.

No I mean effective as in it filters out the very worst of your Reddit low value poster. That doesn’t mean I think it’s good. Just that it is effective in at least that.

Not especially. I appreciate when our forum members provide these humanizing elements; especially since we have a core of users that has been stable for a long time, it makes me feel like I know them a little bit as people, instead of just as collections of culture war viewpoints.

The recipe thing is a unique meme related to SEO, but for some reason it’s apparently impossible for search engines to solve without creating an exploit so everyone has to play the game.

There needs to be a Wikipedia for recipes.

We’re so close yet so far.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. Due to the almighty youtube algorithm I have watched somewhat more astronomy videos than usual.

Tabby's Star - 1,470 light years from the sun, dimming from time to time. Have some decent explanations involving exomoons and some indecent involving alien dyson sphere.

Przybylski's Star - 356 light years away from us, very unusual composition. It is full of short half life elements - so either something produces them or something put insane quantities of them there. Or it is aliens dumping ground.

Methuselah star - 200 light years away from us, at a time thought to be older than the universe, but now is revised down, still one of the oldest stars found. Probably not that noteworthy because due to the exponential change in main sequence life with linear change of the mass.

The sun - 8 light minutes aways from us. Notable with being the only place we know that has life (my opinion whether the life is intelligent or not depends if I have visited twitter yet or not any given day). And Venus - I think it is the most interesting place in the solar system right now after earth.

So do you think that our neighborhood is somewhat unusual, or there are huge gaps in our knowledge?

Any other interesting thing in the space close to us?

I think we're in something of a golden age for astronomy right now, thanks to better telescopes and better computing power to analyze their data. Plus youtube channels to communicate that stuff to us laymen. So maybe not a surprise that we're just now finding all these weird quirky stars that until recently would have been too small to identify. And of course it's easier to see those things if their nearby, compared to a distant galaxy where the best you could see is a huge quasar.

One thing unusual about our neighborhood is that it sits in the local bubble of unusually deep vacuum, which makes astronomy easier. And on a larger scale there's the local void where there's unusually few galaxies nearby.

One thing unusual about our neighborhood is that it sits in the local bubble of unusually deep vacuum, which makes astronomy easier. And on a larger scale there's the local void where there's unusually few galaxies nearby.

On the other hand, we're blocked from what'd be probably the most fascinating view by interstellar dust clouds between us and the galactic core. We win some, we lose some.

I just wish some astronomy apps had a simulation of "This is what we'd see if there weren't those damned clouds in between".

What's so interesting about Venus vs e.g. Enceladus?

What exactly is "our neighborhood" and what of stars that are beyond our neighborhood? This just looks like they picked 3 random peculiar stars.

Algol, the Demon Star. 94 LY away. Actually a 3+ star system; fades in and out over a three-day period as one eclipses another. Multiple Suns worth of mass and radius trading places every couple days.

Is there any pro-Hezbollah content in English that I can read? I’m not talking about standard anti-colonial junk from “leftist religious-studies activist #17354”, I mean legit Shia Islamist propaganda, the kind of stuff they feed their own people.

I'd expect most of the organic ones being in Arabic, and if there's something in English it's probably run by some Iranian IRGC officer.

Isn't Britain a big source of jihadis? There must be some English literature.

British jihadis are Sunni. Hezbollah is Shia. They hate each other more than they hate the west, but not as much as they hate Israel.

I'd assume the ones in Britain are predominantly relatively recent arrivals, so they still communicate in their native tongues.

You're mistaken, many jihadis are native born citizens.

I couldn't find any official stats, but here's a laundry list: https://www.aei.org/articles/what-to-do-about-second-generation-terrorists/

There's also native born women who join isis as jihadist's wives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethnal_Green_trio

The second part are solitary cases, which do exist, but if we're talking about wide communities, these are probably not typical. Nutcases like that can be found around pretty much every anti-civilization cause, from ecoterrorism to jihad. But I don't think they are the core of Hezbollah's support.

The typical situation is that immigrants come to the west because they want to be (on the margin) in a more western society. Obviously they don't fully assimilate, but they make some effort. Their kids face an identity crisis and become even more doctrinaire than their parents as a means of constructing a personality. Then they go off to Syria.

Probably on telegram, similar to the Z channels

Another question for the medics among you. Shortly after I started in my previous job ~two years ago, my employer booked me in to undergo a full physical exam in a clinic. I underwent the exam and they gave me a clean bill of health. It's recently come to my attention that I may have a mild medical condition (nothing to be concerned about, before you ask), so I wanted to ask the clinic for the detailed results of my medical exam, to find out if the condition was present two years ago. They gave me a form to fill out, asking for my personal details and what information I want access to.

The form included this clause:

In certain cases, some data will be withheld by [clinic]; if it is the medical professional’s opinion that it is not safe to the data subject (yourself) to do so, or if [clinic] are not legally allowed to do so. Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners (Amended) 2019, states that “Patients have a right to get copies of their medical records except where this is likely to cause serious harm to their physical or mental health.”

Pardon my French, but what the fuck? How grandiose and paternalistic can you get? Under what circumstances could it possibly be acceptable that a medic can arrogate themselves the responsibility to decline to inform an adult of sound mind that they have a serious medical condition? What is this, fucking Love Story?* "You have cancer, but I thought that finding out that you have cancer might make you sad, so I decided not to tell you that you have cancer."

*A movie in which a doctor tells a man that his wife is terminally ill without telling the wife herself.

You mentioned this isn't the U.S. so I can't help you toooooo much it's probably mostly boilerplate language that isn't intended to actually be used.

Exceptions may be something like withholding test results until they can call you or tell you to come in. You are supposed to find out you have cancer in the office with the doctor so they can calm you down, tell you the plan, and help you make decisions. Not because some automated portal suddenly interuptYOUAREGOING TO DIE DIE DIEDIEDIE.

It's jarring and not good for patient mental health.

The other example that sometimes comes up in the U.S. with our equivalent legislation is blocking mental health adjacent notes. You have patients who you will documented "patient threatened to murder this writer, and then said 'if you write that down I'll kill you.'" You'd document this and then block the note so the patient can't see it, to protect you, and to protect the patient from doing something to you and harming themselves in the process.

Some theoretical discussion exists about things like blocking notes that call patients obese because they don't like it, but it isn't really legal.

In the American context, the search terms you're looking for are the "information blocking rule" (which prohibits some restrictions and disincentives to accessing records) and its "preventing harms exception"; afaict, a lot of the discussion mirrors EU and UK matters.

The steelman is that there are a number of records that are messy:

  • Initial test records can be noisy or prone to false positives. A first-trial blood test with a high false positive rate, followed by confirming the analysis using a more precise second-level test is common problem, and delaying the announcement until the confirmation is a common practice.
  • Some patients with certain mental health disorders will fixate on subclinical details, often falling to unhealthy or dangerous practices to solve problems that weren't really problems to start with, or react with accurate diagnosis with denials and refusal to work with a doctor. Where a patient has already been diagnosed under such conditions, reducing specificity when presenting information to such patients is a rare but accepted practice.
  • There's a lot of controversy about genetic testing for certain conditions that have no cure or preventative treatment, and where the risk for a specific patient developing the disease is elevated but not certain, and what extent it is necessary to provide counseling before releasing that information. There have been documented cases of people committing suicide over a prospective neurodegenerative disorder.
  • The US version of the rule also allows some protections for second parties, generally under pretty outlier circumstances like a domestic violence abuser finding out that 'their' kid doesn't share their genes. I don't think the EU or UK variants have such an explicit exception, though.

But the potential problems and abuses are vast, and even these steelman cases are paternalistic.

While discussions of the rule and its exceptions in each context revolve around delays to accessing data, the strict text of the rule is not so limited: it allows doctors to fully withhold data, and when pressed about sufficiently iffy edge cases, there are outspoken doctors defending permanent withholding. To be fair, ethics groups like the AMA have pushed back against this view in recent years.

Under what circumstances could it possibly be acceptable that a medic can arrogate themselves the responsibility to decline to inform an adult of sound mind that they have a serious medical condition?

DNA testing reveals that the person is a child of incest.

If I was a child of incest, I'd want to know about it.

It's actually probably important to know, in that repeated incest is what drives genetic problems, so if I were a child of incest and more likely to carry recessive mutations I'd have been certain to marry one of the African or Chinese foreign exchange students to get as far away as possible.

This isn't how genetics works. Even if you are highly inbred, you can marry any member of your race who is not your relative and have as healthy babies as if you were not inbred. (Except if you're a woman and inbred phenotype affects pregnancy, but then outbreeding won't fix it either).

Maybe you know, maybe not, but incest doesn't increase number of recessive mutations at all, it increases chance of them to get in homozygote and make visible effect.

You can make argument that outbreeding is beneficial, but it won't actually depend on fixing recent inbreeding. With Africans, you'll be bringing some low IQ alleles and alleles for tropical environment that make no sense in temperate climate.

Since today it's possible to look at actual genes and being foreign student doesn't rule out they don't have recent ancestor with you, there is no reason for such far outbreeding.

This was mostly a joke about how easy it is for a white man to marry a Chinese or Nigerian foreign exchange student at any selective American college. Most likely outcome if I hadn't met my wife first, tbqh.

...being foreign student doesn't rule out they don't have recent ancestor with you.

My most recent possible common ancestor with a Chinese girl would be before the Magyars left the steppe, and my most recent possible common ancestor with a Nigerian girl might be the Great Rift Valley.

This is a US thing? I'm pretty sure that in the UK, this wouldn't fly at all. We're obliged to disclose all relevant information to our patients, though if memory serves there are criteria like mental incapacity where that's not strictly necessary.*

*My gut instinct was wrong. From GMC guidance:

You should not withhold information a patient needs to make a decision for any other reason, including if someone close to the patient asks you to. In very exceptional circumstances you may feel that sharing information with a patient would cause them serious harm and, if so, it may be appropriate to withhold it. In this context ‘serious harm’ means more than that the patient might become upset, decide to refuse treatment, or choose an alternative. This is a limited exception and you should seek legal advice if you are considering withholding information from a patient.

I certainly find this perplexing, I can't under any circumstances endorse people not being given medical records that they paid for (or were paid for on their behalf). I suppose this a clause more likely to be invoked in psychiatry than elsewhere, but it's not one I particularly want to use.

I live in Ireland.

Goddamn… I knew that jurisdictions were outsourcing medical policy to doctors’ associations, but I didn’t know it was this bad.

Yesterday, I stopped by a CVS to use the ATM there.

I ended up stuck behind a man who used the ATM as follows: he inserted a card he had, entered the PIN, and pressed the "Credit" option and withdrew 100 dollars. He then repeated this same process probably 10 or 11 times: using the same card, he did that and withdrew 100 more dollars, over and over again.

Is this is a legitimate thing to do? I can't think of why someone would do that. I got a feeling like it was some kind of fraudulent behavior, but I just don't really know. I guess maybe he didn't know how to use the ATM properly, but that doesn't feel likely to me. He was a younger man in apparent possession of all his mental faculties.

As a secondary question: if you see someone who is definitely using some kind of stolen card, or tampering with an ATM in some way... what do you even do then? Who would you tell? (Assuming you didn't want to just ignore it, which is what I would probably do by default.)

I don't know why a person would do this, but if he used his credit card to pull cash, that would be considered a "cash advance" which comes with its own set of fees and high interest rates. Only a truly desperate (or stupid) person would choose this option.

Or a money mule who is exploiting somebody else's card for a small fee.

I only use an ATM when a business owner offers a 10% discount for paying in cash, so it’s entirely possible he just lacked the specific knowledge of how to use it.

Does the ATM in question give different bills for amounts over vs under $100? I've done something similar when I wanted to get a bunch of twenties from an ATM that chooses the bills it gives you based on the amount withdrawn.

I'm not sure about that, honestly. From that specific ATM, I have never withdrawn more than like 80 dollars at a time; though I know it can do more.

I was more weirded out by the way he kept picking the "credit" option. My understanding is that this incurs big fees for people that use a credit card to get cash advances. It made me think that he was using a stolen card. But - I don't know that much about the ins and outs of that, so I might be mistaken.

I am reminded of the posters I used to see in airports and on public transit, that said, "If you see something, say something!" I suppose they were looking out for bomb threats, etc.; but how do I know if the "something" I've seen is pertinent to anything?

Foreign debit cards need to pick the "credit" option to get cash out of US ATMs.

How old was he? Despite spending all their lives on their phones, a lot of zoomers are staggeringly technologically incompetent and don't know how to carry out basic computer tasks like sending emails or creating Word docs. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this man literally didn't know you could request a custom amount of money, particularly given that zoomers use cash far less frequently than any previous generation.

He was in his 20s.

I didn't look at it from your perspective, but now I'm really starting to see it that way, actually.

I guess maybe he didn't know how to use the ATM properly, but that doesn't feel likely to me. He was a younger man in apparent possession of all his mental faculties.

I hear the whippersnappers nowadays prefer newfangled contraptions like CashApp and Venmo over physical bills, so it isn't that unlikely that they would be unfamiliar with ATMs.

I hear the whippersnappers nowadays prefer newfangled contraptions like CashApp and Venmo over physical bills newfangled contraptions like CashApp and Venmo

Those apps are very convenient. The cashless problem is also prevalent among millennials, gen X, and boomers.

Does the ATM offer more than 100 at a time?

It does. I don't know if he knew that, though.

Where can I view media and read actual descriptions and see comparative breakdowns of Helene’s damage?

NOAA's National Hurricane Center will publish a comprehensive report around six months from now.

When was the last time the last Scottish people wore kilts unselfconsciously or unironically?

Scotsmen wear kilts now, unselfconsciously and unironically. There are three main cases where they are worn:

  1. As formal dress, usually with black tie accompaniments like bow ties. Think weddings, graduations, proms, formal birthday parties.
  2. For things related to Scottish heritage, i.e. Burns Night, Hogmanay (New Year's), ceilidhs (group folk dancing)
  3. For sport, usually with thick football/rugby socks and boots, plus team jerseys

Now of course, that doesn't mean that Scotsmen wear them every day. The only guys who do that are really into their Scottish nationalism, and usually members of the underclass or hippies. I suppose because they lack status in regular society, they attach themselves to their national identity more strongly. Typically they wear something like this.

In the lowlands, kilts were never everyday dress. They were highland dress that was only adopted by lowlanders after the military threat from the highland was vanquished and the kilt was safe to become an expression of Scottish identity more broadly.

See to me all those cases, dress codes and nationalists, are self consciously wearing it, in direct opposition to the normal clothes they typically wear or understand as normal clothing. It seems to me like it's been a while since a scotsman put on a kilt without thinking about the English he was unlike by doing so.

See to me all those cases, dress codes and nationalists, are self consciously wearing it, in direct opposition to the normal clothes they typically wear or understand as normal clothing.

I don’t know much about Scotland but I think you’re underestimating how normal nationalist and other identity based clothing can be. When someone puts on a Celtic or Rangers top in a city where you can get beaten up for walking down the wrong street in the wrong colours he’s making a statement, but football jerseys are still everyday clothing and he might put that top on once or twice a week without thinking much about it (given that it’s also normal for him not to walk down the wrong streets).

That seems a weird way of framing it. Where you live, it's understood that if you're attending a wedding or a funeral, you're meant to dress formally. Does that mean that when you put on your tie and cufflinks, you're doing so "self-consciously"? I wouldn't think so. Scotland is the same, it's just that their conception of formal dress is different from yours.

Does that mean that when you put on your tie and cufflinks, you're doing so "self-consciously"?

Yes, in a sense. I'm very self conscious when putting on a tie, these days, that I'm dressing like a different person, and putting on that persona as part of the act.

I mean, you can frame national dress and national identity that way, sure. But it seems awfully uncharitable.

Is every Bavarian wearing lederhosen or a dirndl thinking about how unlike the Berliners they are? When the Japanese wear kimonos to weddings and festivals, are they mainly thinking about they're not like China or Korea?

Or is it only Scottish national dress that gets defined in this way?

Scots wear the national dress the same way every country's national dress gets worn. I can't think of a single country where the national dress is worn as everyday clothing. We all wear blue jeans and business suits as part of global culture.

I can't think of a single country where the national dress is worn as everyday clothing. We all wear blue jeans and business suits as part of global culture.

Well, right there is one: the United States. Jeans and a t shirt are, in a very real sense, my national costume. Of course, if I put on cowboy boots and a stetson with the jeans, that would be a change again towards a national costume, and I'd be conscious that I'm dressing differently from the default of "clothing." Or, moreso for me, if I put on a pastel polo shirt and pop the collar, with Nantucket red chinos, pull on a navy blazer and a pair of sperries, I'm at some level putting on the ritz to dress most like myself, and I'm conscious when doing so of being different from other people in the street.

Which is where my question is coming from. I wake up in the morning and I put on pants and a shirt and a jacket. I'm self conscious of variety of pants-shirt-jacket I'm putting on, when I put on chinos and a polo I'm aware that I'm dressing differently than when I wear joggers and a wifebeater and differently again than a suit and a dress shirt. But the core paradigm of pants-shirt-jacket remains the same. Stepping outside of that paradigm is stepping outside of default "clothing" and into a national costume.

The kilt is the most obvious step completely outside of that paradigm of men's dressing. And I'm wondering when the last scotsmen lived who just woke up in the morning and put on a kilt because that's "clothing" to him, rather than putting on a kilt as a national costume. Maybe, as @2rafa points out, that never really happened. But the Japanese example fits in there as well: at some point in the 20th century putting on a kimono became a differently understood act when the default of "clothing" became pants-shirt-jacket in the western paradigm. When was the last Japaner born who woke up and put on a kimono without any intent of being traditional?

I'm tempted to say 'never'. Clothing has always been an expression of identity, whether the identifying characteristic is ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, wealth, profession, religion or any others you can think of. A muslim woman who wears a headscarf does so as her everyday dress, but it is also explicitly religious/ethnic dress.

The Scottish highlanders wore kilts for hundreds of years because they were practical, but they were also aware the entire time that the lowlanders didn't wear kilts. The identity around the kilt was no doubt strengthened during the Jacobite rebellion and during its aftermath (when it was banned by the government in order to suppress highland identity). So if you want a a particular date for when the kilt became more symbolic than day-to-day, I'd say then.

The history of the modern style of kilt is arguably one long LARP, although after 400 years I think we might respectfully consider it a ‘legitimate’ cultural symbol since, even as a LARP, it is older than the US.

What’s more interesting is that a substantial part of the rest of modern Scottish identity stems from the 1995 movie Braveheart, and the more distantly from Victorian English romanticization of the highlands.

What’s more interesting is that a substantial part of the rest of modern Scottish identity stems from the 1995 movie Braveheart, and the more distantly from Victorian English romanticization of the highlands.

Mel Gibson was on such a fuckin' tear before he got into the Jews.

The actual Scotland-resident Scots in my social circle have about as much time for Braveheart as the English do - it is a piece of ahistorical American silliness. I can't comment on how formative it is of Scottish-American identity, but it has nothing to do with the land between the Tweed and John O'Groats.

As @Crowstep points out, the modern kilt worn as formalwear by Lowlanders as well as Highlanders is indeed modern by European standards - it dates back to the early Victorian era. So it isn't older than the US, but it is older than black tie or lounge suits. I can confirm that a Scotsman wearing a formal kilt is as unselfconscious and unironic as an Englishman wearing a dinner suit, and probably less so than an American given the falling sartorial standards bemoaned by @dieworkwear.

Do First World Countries outsource some of CCTV security jobs to foreign residents?

If the person is qualified then I would presume they can apply for those jobs just like any other.

im interested in extent of how this exists. Outsourced call centers in India and Philipines are also a meme because it's widespread

So i've been learning about guns and I have a question,

If I slammed a bullet on the table would it trigger an accident? Like as far as I can tell from the NRA website a bullet fires by being struck by a hammer which lights an ignition source (called a primer) which then lights the main explosive (the propellant) and which pushes the bullet.

No, although you could probably do it with a hammer and a nail, at least given several attempts. Likewise modern ammunition can be thrown into a fire safely.

Older or specialized ammo is often different, but modern off-the-shelf munitions generally cannot be detonated outside of either a) a gun or b) deliberate effort.

My Californian cousins came to visit a few years ago and expressed nervousness about driving down a gravel road with ammunition. My first thought was "These fucking people think they're qualified to have an opinion about who should own guns?"

Please believe me when I say I'm not trying to be rude, but even without understanding the mechanisms deeply of how guns or cartridges work, start with "Common Sense". If cartridges fired when dropped on a table (or transported in a truck), could war be possible in any meaningful sense?

You can set a round off with a nail and a hammer, but cartridges are designed to require significant, focused force. In fact, the most common failure I see in firearms (by like an order of magnitude or two) is what's called a light primer strike, when the firing pin does not hit the primer with enough force to trigger an ignition.

If you'll forgive one more point of pedantic education: The bullet is the projectile itself. The Cartridge is a combination of the (generally brass) case, primer, propellant, and bullet together, which is what you load into a weapon. So slamming a bullet into a table would also do nothing, since it's just a lump of lead/copper/whatever.

In any case I mean this seriously: Thank you for learning about guns. I think they're fascinating. Are you doing so just for the heck of it, or as required for something else?

If you'll forgive one more point of pedantic education: The bullet is the projectile itself. The Cartridge is a combination of the (generally brass) case, primer, propellant, and bullet together, which is what you load into a weapon. So slamming a bullet into a table would also do nothing, since it's just a lump of lead/copper/whatever.

Yeah I was just being sloppy there, I know bullet is the projectile but I should have said "A bullet fires by the cartridge being struck by ...."

start with "Common Sense". If cartridges fired when dropped on a table (or transported in a truck), could war be possible in any meaningful sense?

I figured it would be like a freak accident thing where everything would have to line up correctly, not that it would be reliable at all. I could easily see say a Truck dropping the cargo causing a few misfires on the road and then cleaning up afterward.

So no common sense did not stop me from concluding that such a thing might be possible in a freak accident.

In any case I mean this seriously: Thank you for learning about guns. I think they're fascinating. Are you doing so just for the heck of it, or as required for something else?

I was writing Fanfiction and wanted to make sure my knowledge of guns wasn't so bad that people would laugh at me.

My experience with 12 gauge shotgun shells - probably not, but don't do experiments on the topic, unless it is remotely operated and you are behind bullet proof glass.

Munitions are generally designed to be able to withstand some rough handling and you have to have some stars aligned to explode - hitting it hard enough, having irregularities in the surface to damage the primer, but stars do align and people win the lottery.

Keep in mind that exploding shell in your palm means 3 fingers torn off or maimed (depends what fraction of the gun power decides to explode vs burn, smokeless gunpowder is quite slow) one of them the opposing thumb. So unless you are big game of thrones and really really want the Littlefinger nickname or Darwin Award - don't.

My experience with 12 gauge shotgun shells - probably not, but don't do experiments on the topic, unless it is remotely operated and you are behind bullet proof glass.

Munitions are generally designed to be able to withstand some rough handling and you have to have some stars aligned to explode - hitting it hard enough, having irregularities in the surface to damage the primer, but stars do align and people win the lottery.

This. It shouldn't happen, but I'd be really mad if I watched someone whack the back of a shell in front of me.

AFAIK generally no, because the hammer or striker contains a firing pin that strikes the primer only; it's not a flat surface impacting on the entire rear of the cartridge. One caveat: If you slam it onto a table rear first and hit a nail directly on the point with the primer, then I suppose that should do it? The bullet probably won't gain a lot of velocity without a barrel to contain the pressure, though.

Disclaimer: Nogunz.

The bullet probably won't gain a lot of velocity without a barrel to contain the pressure, though.

Generally, the primer blows out the back instead. The case probably won't shatter, but I wouldn't bet my fingers on that.

a firing pin that strikes the primer only

As far as I'm aware, most higher-power cartridges are center-fire (there's a clear ring on the back that's the primer). There are also rimfire cartridges like 22LR that you might be able to set off by hitting the corner.

The bullet probably won't gain a lot of velocity without a barrel to contain the pressure, though.

Please don't do this while holding the cartridge. Or without significant thought given to protecting yourself (remotely, while behind cover). It probably won't send the bullet terribly fast, but the expanding gas alone can be quite dangerous (blanks have killed people), and the brass will likely do something interesting like shatter when not supported by a barrel.

Did we ever have any threads discussing Alex Garland’s film Civil War? If not I think it’s worth a post in the main culture war thread.

I absolutely loved it. IMO, the main culture war angle was that left-leaning critics desperately wanted it to be anti-Trump but the narrative is stubbornly a-political (or rather, the narrative and the characters treat politics as a meaningless game they indulge in for the sake of adrenaline rushes).

I think it’s pretty ironic that both MovieBob and Critical Drinker gave it pretty much the same negative review which boiled down to “this film doesn’t specifically support my politics!”

Please make one. There's some kind of meta point in there about capitalist exploitation of the culture war and enshittification, how we get the crap fakakta version before the raw version, and the decline of cinema as a form generally.

Found it via the search function

I haven't seen it. I have seen a bunch of clips from it. I have thoughts, and I'm curious how accurate they are.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Future Shock, The Cheese and the Worms and Scaramouche.

Lethal Injection by Jim Nesbit. After the monster tome that was The Goldfinch I wanted something accessible and short, and hardboiled/noir fiction is my preferred wheelhouse for that sort of thing. One of the blurbs was from James Ellroy (<3) and another said it was like "Kafka meets Jim Thompson", which sold me.

I'm a few chapters in. It's from the perspective of doctor supervising a Texas execution by (you guessed it) lethal injection. The execution is complete, but the doctor is starting to worry that the condemned might have been innocent. Comparisons with Jim Thompson are apt, Nesbit is eloquent and it's darkly humorous: "Royce had prescribed Mencken enough Valium to tranquilize ten out-of-work actresses."

Adding a second reply here, because I had an interesting CW-ish experience over the weekend.

One of my church's book clubs read Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman this month, and yesterday we had the discussion at the church. As you can probably imagine, apart from me - a 35-year-old man - the book clubs consists exclusively of women aged 50 to 90.

Anyway, I enjoyed that book immensely. It is the autobiography of a white woman called Mary Hamilton, who lived in the Mississippi Delta around the turn of the 20th century; she married a timber man named Frank, and worked ridiculously hard her whole life to keep her family alive and fed, surviving natural disasters and the early deaths of four children. They lived on the very edge of civilization, mostly in wild country, far even from any neighbors. I absolutely couldn't put the book down. Every page brought either a new threat to life, or the practice of a cultural custom that has now just about faded out of memory. I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the real business of how the American continent was settled, or in how ordinary people lived outside of cities, just over 100 years ago.

Now, Mary Hamilton does relate a number of encounters with black people. The descendants of slaves, freed some 50 years prior to the story, were building up their own lives in Mississippi and Arkansas, where Mary spends much of the book. She honestly describes black criminals and black nurses, neighbors and scoundrels, men, women and children, young and elderly; she relates good ones and evil ones, she talks about racial conflicts that occasionally would spring up, and she transcibes their patterns of speech as she heard them. She does use the N-word and many variants thereof, but in an entirely natural way that reflects how they were referred to at that time, in that place As far as I could see, Mary Hamilton had no special racial prejudice, but neither was she a particular supporter of black improvement or uplifting. She was simply focused on keeping her family alive.

In the book club, we were asked to give a 1-10 rating of the book. I gave it an honest 10 - too generous perhaps, I admit it's not an utter classic of all-time, but that's how much I enjoyed reading it, definitely. But the woman next to me would go no higher than 6. She said, "Every time [Hamilton] started talking about black people, I cringed. There was an incident where there was a black convict who escaped from the prison, and the police chased him down and beat on him, and I just couldn't stand that. I don't like to think about that. I loved the hard-working pioneer spirit stuff, but I kept cringing and cringing when she would use the N-word, or write the way they talked where they sound all ignorant."

I said, "I wouldn't say that I found that completely enjoyable, but I felt like reading it enhanced my understanding of life in those days. I wouldn't want those parts to be cut out." She responded that she wouldn't want to recommend the book to black people she knew because of those passages; and that furthermore, she didn't watch the news because she didn't want to know about bad things that are happening.

A lively discussion ensued on this topic generally, and to my surprise I think more of the women had my view, than that of my interlocutor. But still, I had never heard someone express that so directly before: that if it's bad, they don't want to be aware of it; and if it portrays black people badly, they don't want to read it. I have a little bit of sympathy for the first point - the world can produce negativity longer than you can remain sane if you have unlimited empathy, and maybe it's healthier not to dwell on that stuff. For the second, though, I got the sense that she felt it was "punching down" to portray poor blacks as they really lived around 1900; and I just find that nuts. I believe there is a strain in our culture that want to see all minorities as wise and saintly people we should look up to, instead of being complex people, some of whom are smart, some stupid, some evil, some virtuous. It results in a highly inaccurate understanding of the world.

There was an incident where there was a black convict who escaped from the prison, and the police chased him down and beat on him, and I just couldn't stand that.

I'm not a sociologist but I'm sure it's almost a small miracle that police were even available then and there to chase him town, instead of an armed group of vigilante citizens who'd have hanged him on the first tree after one or two rounds of torture, which I'm also sure was a completely normal course of events. I wonder how many suburban middle-class normies are even aware that poor and remote communities had little to no police force throughout history.

It's interesting to me that even here, we self censor around the use mention distinction.

On this forum, I'm less concerned about giving offense, and more concerned that spelling out the N-word will make readers think I'm trying to be "edgy" on purpose; which reduces the odds of their being willing to have a serious discussion with me.

For better or worse, I can't write anything without imagining what it will make the reader think.

Yes, you're right, but I find that depressing, that we aren't beyond the use-mention distinction, or that we (collectively) have not done enough to convince you that we are.

It's amazing to me the way that being offended by words, by profanity, was understood broadly as a sign of small-mindedness when I was growing up among the right-thinking progressives, who have no turned around and imposed a new sense of closed mindedness on us, a confusing and race-caste based system to close thought.

So, what are you reading?

Finished The Diamond Age: some interesting thoughts on child rearing, nanotechnology, and AI. A bit ironic to be reading it on a Kindle, although not one equipped with an LLM to tell me a custom story — give it a few years. The neo-Victorian aesthetic was an interesting touch (modern culture comparisons to Victorianism are a bit en vogue these days). I see how that was supposed to contrast with the orgies of the Drummers, even though, to me, the latter felt pretty out of place in the novel otherwise.

Started A Fire Upon the Deep. Not far enough to have an opinion.

I did finish Surface Detail, which I mentioned a bit ago.

The book picked up a bit in the middle for me. I still considered it enjoyable. Maybe a 3/5?

One thing that really hit me after the completion is one thing that attracts me to this series overall though and I think will get me through Hydrogen Sonata, is that there's a comfort in knowing that The Culture will always win. Always. Yes a main character (or two, or three...) will die at the end, but the Minds and the Ships will triumph in the end. A story has a catch-22 where the consequences have to seem real and significant, but if the book ends with the bad guy getting off scott free then I'm left unfulfilled, or at least a little twinge in my adolescent morality tummy.

Even with that attitude, I found the end of the novel cloying and the characters more obviously good and evil than before. It was published in 10, so of course, it was tainted by the CW. The main antagonist is a super rich asshole who, despite having access to unlimited top tier sex with polymorphic hookers also happens to be a rapist. A ship also tortures and rapes a man continuously, but then is given a clean bill of moral health by wiping his memory. Another primary antagonist is literally a conservative elephant who wants to maintain virtual hell.

Then, to top it all off, the book ends in a way I would supposedly enjoy, but is too much even for me. The Culture decides, after the antagonist decides to end the eternal suffering of trillions in Hell, that they still should go ahead and let the woman he had enslaved kill him. A commenter mentioned previously how bad each of the epilogues are in these books, but wow this one was even more of a doozy than usual.

In any case, I probably have another 6 hours of reading to at least knock out the complete series. I think that's worth the investment before I pivot back to the Goodreads list full of great suggestions from here and a stint of "good for me" nonfiction.

I pivot back to the Goodreads list full of great suggestions from here

Do you have a link to the list? Somehow I've never come across it.

Sorry - this is my personal list of what I've curated from random threads about books over the years. A suggested reading list would be interesting, but I can't help but think it would be sprawling.

I'm still reading And The Band Played On. Probably want to hold more extended commentary until after I finish it, but I am pleasantly surprised so far that it's not at all a dunk against Reaganist budget thriftiness specifically. Nobody looks particularly good in this story, and it seems that the gay community itself and the Federal administrators behaved far more irresponsibly. It's definitely interesting to compare the reaction to the rabid panic associated with Covid-19.

Reading it recently I was struck by the extent to which the reaction to COVID (lockdown places where it might be transmitted over the objections of libertarians until money shoveled towards vaccination pays off) were what should have been done during AIDS but wasn't.

Or more recently, monkeypox. Temporarily shut down gay bars and clubs to stop the spread of an infectious disease which disproportionately impacts gay men? No way, not a chance. Temporarily shut all bars and clubs (including gay cars bars) to stop the spread of an infectious disease? A-OK.

Edit: it was an autocorrect, but dogging is a thing guys!

gay cars

I dunno about that one; EVs and Priuses were still relatively common on the road coincident with the uncommon cold.

Currently reading Germinal by Emile Zola.

I love it. I love the subject matter - any story about miners, factory workers, farmers etc. gets me going. And Zola has a great, engaging writing style, full of rich images and sharp emotion.

I watched the movie version of this in high school, and have a scene burned in my brain where a baker (?) Falls off a roof and has his genitals cut off and stuffed in his mouth. Is that in the book?

Ahahaha I'm not there yet if it is. Can't wait lmao.

Oh uh....spoilers, I'm sorry

How interested would you be in an effortpost about the (horrendous) state of public mental health care in one of the worst states in the USA as told from the perspective of someone with 25+ years of employment experience in the field? I love it whenever Scott (PBUH) posts on these things and I find that it just whets my appetite to talk about it more but maybe that's just my inner geek coming out and that wouldn't be as interesting to most Mottizens. Regardless, it seems like a promising thing to post about and if there's significant interest then I'd be happy to do it but fair warning: it wouldn't be pretty and there would be lots of references to Moloch and not being able to have Nice Things.

Please, do this!

Adding to the eager cacophony. I am especially interested in longitudinal controlled comparatives on a definitional level, since my own private biases are that treatment has advanced incrementally, but diagnostic precision has degraded. Every time a lefty youtuber fellates BetterHelp as a therapy tool I cannot help but suspect a combination of pathologizing and subconscious repetition of therapyspeak is contributing to the 'mental health crisis' more than any incidence of mentally traumatizing events.

Would love to know more from those in the trenches, even if my biases are proven wrong.

Yes please!

Thanks for the feedback, everyone, you've convinced me to write the post. October is a busy month for me so it may not be ready anytime in the next week but still, coming soon!

@AvocadoPanic, when I used the word horrendous I was thinking in terms of money spent versus the quality of the outcomes, not necessarily any other state or country.

I suspect it's horrendous in an absolute sense and average, maybe low average in a peer group sense.

Adding to the pile - please do, it would be awesome.

I think it would go down well and I'm always keen to read first hand accounts of peoples day jobs.

Though I'd ask horrendous compared to what, horrendous compared to someplace that actually exists in current year?

The Motte loves long form posts about niche interests, I'm sure it would go down very well.

I'll commit to reading it in full unless the writing is terrible with a high likelihood of at least upvoting, a decent chance of engaging further, and a non-trivial chance of sharing anecdotes with friends in conversation if it's compelling.

I work in healthcare and would love this!

I think this sounds like the sort of thing that would do very well here. I’d certainly be interested in it.

https://fortune.com/2024/09/26/bird-flu-us-health-officials-h5n1-cdc-information/

This is concerning IMO. Avian flu slowly but surely gets closer to becoming a human pandemic. The CDC and other officals drag their heels and drip-feed information each Friday afternoon. Farmers are reluctant to test their animals. The authorities lack authority to enforce testing.

There has been a human hospital patient with bird flu in Missouri. Why is that interesting? Because he had not been in direct contact with likely animal sources. A household contact of the patient became sick but was not tested. Several of the healthcare workers who cared for the patient have become sick too. It's too soon to declare human to human transmission however. It may be the case that the healthcare workers got covid or something.

The problem as a whole is not taken nearly seriously enough. My only hope is that the vaccines for both animal and human use are developed quickly enough to prevent a pandemic, or to or mitigate it before it starts. It's a race against the clock and the officials don't seem motivated to run.

My only hope is that the vaccines for both animal and human use are developed quickly

What am I missing? The FDA has already approved a vaccine for h5n1, and they've already started manufacturing a 40 million dose stockpile of the adjuvant via $121 million BARDA award.

It's not ready to be put in anyone's arms yet. And 40 million doses won't be enough for the world. The virus itself might be ready already. We don't know if it's jumping from human to human at this point.

It was approved a few years ago it actually is ready to be in people's arms

Source? Afaik there is no usable vaccine already mass produced and available for the various strains, not for humans and not for animals, otherwise it'd be in use already.

The EU has already started receiving its 650,000 dose order of Audenz and has reserved 40 million more when production increases. ASPR has had a reserve of Audenz for 2 years. I don't know how many vials they've purchased. They've just reserved 40 million doses of only the adjuvant, which they think will help them update to newer strains if they need to. Nobody is vaccinating yet because they don't know if there's going to be a pandemic.

What is your source for these claims?

You can look through CSL Seqirus' press releases for other info on which countries are receiving the vaccine if that information has been publicly disclosed.

Pre-Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Stockpile:

https://www.idsociety.org/science-speaks-blog/2024/u.s.-orders-4.8-million-doses-of-a-cell-based-adjuvanted-h5-vaccine-for-avian-flu-preparedness#/+/0/publishedDate_na_dt/desc/

40 million doses of adjuvant:

https://www.cslseqirus.us/news/csl-seqirus-announces-fifth-barda-award-in-response-to-avian-influenza

EU's 650,000 dose order of Audenz:

https://www.ft.com/content/467af193-a7f1-4957-9dfd-8e544fc8a05e

Finland offering Audenz vaccine to labworkers and farmworkers in July 2024 from the EU vaccine order:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/finland-offer-bird-flu-vaccines-people-world-first-rcna158907

You downvoted me for asking for sources...?

More comments

I’m not 100 percent sure of how bad this could be, no idea. But one thing to point out is that just because we’re about 4 years past a major pandemic, I suspect that things like this happen all the time, but don’t really turn into anything major. And so while I think watching this might be warranted, I think it’s much much too early to decide that this is the Next Big Thing.

The last major pandemic was in 1970s or so. The one before that was in 1918. And most other Viruses didn’t really turn into major world pandemics. We’ve had several iterations of this. A couple of versions of swine flu, a couple versions of bird flu, monkeypox, Ebola a few times. Running the health department as though every novel virus that shows a potential for human to human transmission as if it’s going to require global lockdowns is ridiculous.

I’ll also point out that our common flu viruses of the HxNx varieties are descended from bird flus so even if this bird flu starts spreading in humans, there’s likely to be at least some immunity simply because almost everyone has at some point been exposed to a related virus or gotten a flu shot (probably both). If you’re really worried, get the standard flu shot and you’ll likely have at least some protection.

I will commit right now to insistently not giving one single solitary fuck unless there is actually a noticeable number of otherwise healthy young people dying. No, I will not be strapping underwear to my face or staying out of the parks. I will absolutely maximize civil disobedience against anything the public health retards experts cook up.

You may not have the choice. I mean, would you be willing to go to jail (where they would forcefully strap underwear to your face, and beat you up if you resist - probably likely beat you up anyway just in case) just to be able to briefly walk in a park? Would you be willing to lose your job and cease all in-person contact with 99.999% of human population, give up all your hobbies, your social life, your cultural life, everything? What if you need to use actual medical services or help your loved one to use them, and wearing underwear on your face is the only way to do it? It's really hard to stay sane when everybody around you is crazy.

No, I will not be strapping underwear to my face or staying out of the parks.

You have your style of Saturday nights.

I have mine.

If the real fatality rate is sub-5% among young and healthy people, this kind of virus panic should be laughable.

To put a 5% CFR into perspective, the US military's plans for responding to a bioattack give the CFR for bubonic plague "with prompt, effective therapy" as 5%. A quick google suggests this is based on third world countries where plague is endemic, and "prompt, effective therapy" means cheap antibiotics and not much more. And of course it is a whole-population CFR.

So a disease with 5% CFR specifically among young healthy people with access to 1st-world medicine is significantly worse than the plague. I don't think we would be laughing off a plague pandemic, let alone the hypothetical @2rafa pandemic.

There is a reason why I give "Computer, what is the DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Yersina pestis?" as an easy example of an existential AI risk when talking to normies.

It’s worth noting that the Black Death spreads by fleas on rats- mass spread in the first world is rather unlikely, and there are periodic outbreaks these days but mostly among the homeless.

Y. pestis is really good at undergoing selection for respiratory spread during the course of a plague and is much better at being a viable respiratory pathogen than most bacteria...It still won't ever be an existential scale risk for 1st world governments no matter how extensively modified someone makes it

There is a reason why I give "Computer, what is the DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Yersina pestis?" as an easy example of an existential AI risk when talking to normies.

Normies don't need an AI to find that information. That information is available on google and in a trivially digestible way. What isn't trivial is that manufacturing your designer AI risk level bioweapon at the scale required to get it out into the environment and start snowballing requires $10 million in specialized facilities, equipment and reagents. At the moment surveillance for this type of attack is ok. AI, ironically probably makes this scenario less likely because the surveillance infrastructure is going to exponentially outpace AI assisted attempts to establish a new bioweapons lab. So many different pieces need to come together and just a handful of them need to be flagged to stop it completely.

5% is an enormous fatality rate. There's 140 million people under 25 in the country. If we assume they ~all get infected (as they did with covid) that's seven million dead. The real number would be way worse because of obesity.

Smallpox fatality rate was 3% and it was so bad that we literally drove it extinct in the wild.

We drove it extinct because there weren't any animal reservoirs of the disease.

There's plenty of diseases without animal reservoirs. We drove it extinct rather than another because of its deadliness.

I actually don't think that's true. Almost all of the infectious diseases we've driven (near) extinct were much milder than smallpox, but we still eliminated them because they had 0 significant animal reservoirs and so it was easy to do.

In high-trust societies with usual first-world levels of state capacity, any disease with a safe and effective vaccine will be eliminated. The return of measles in the US and UK is visible evidence of falling social trust in exactly the same way that locked cabinets in stores are.

The thing that is unusual about smallpox (and, hopefully, polio) is that we committed the required resources to vaccinate everyone even in hard-to-reach parts of the third world.

You're looking at it the wrong way. The question is not "do eliminated diseases have animal reservoirs", it's "are diseases with animal reservoirs eliminated". And there are plenty that are not. It took decades or even centuries depending on when you start counting to eliminate smallpox.

The rough blueprint to eradicate birdflu would be to find every live or dead, bird and mammal on earth(and at sea) and vaccinate or cremate them. What I'm trying to communicate is that any serious virus with an animal reservoir is impossible to globally eradicate without several orders of magnitude more political will or state capacity than has ever existed. Smallpox was so easy to eradicate with a vaccine and quarantines that the U.S. and USSR accidentally realized they were right next to the finish line when they set out on an initiative to globally eradicate it.

any serious virus with an animal reservoir is impossible to globally eradicate without several orders of magnitude more political will or state capacity than has ever existed

Yes, obviously. This has nothing to do with my point, which is that the only virus considered serious enough and feasible enough to fully eradicate had a fatality rate under 5%.

More comments

I don’t know what to say, but that’s the threshold at which I might be willing to sacrifice another year+ of basic freedom in the communal interest. Anything less and, to paraphrase Boris Johnson, ‘let it rip’. Most people have 25-30 good years of adult life if they’re lucky (before the body starts noticeably deteriorating / ageing catches up to you). 4% of that is a lot.

At this point, the medical establishment and government don’t (or at least, I really, really hope they don’t) have enough credibility left to enforce anti-pandemic measures. Even if avian flu does become a human pandemic and is widely acknowledged as such, it’s probably just going to have to rip through the population like any other transmittable disease. Those who get sick, get sick; those who die, die; and those who survive eventually reach herd immunity.

It's nice to meet an optimist. Unfortunately, I can not concur. I am still seeing a lot of people wearing masks in public, and I am sure the establishment and the press are capable of creating a panic that would easily provide democratic supermajority for virtually any measure short of mass executions, if they want to. My only solace is that the elections are in 2 months and they don't have enough time already to use it (and also probably don't need it really as they already have passed all the laws they needed the last time) so there's no real incentive to do it again right now.

At this point, the medical establishment and government don’t (or at least, I really, really hope they don’t) have enough credibility left to enforce anti-pandemic measures.

I'd like to note that it isn't just the medical establishment or the government (in the USA) that has lost credibility: the public has as well. Going into Covid lockdowns in March 2020, I might have thought that everyone would play along, now I know that there is no chance everyone will play along.

Even if you assume Lockdownism is ultimately correct on the facts, it is a classic prisoner's dilemma: my sacrifice of locking down and not going out is only worth anything if everyone else does as well. If I know in advance that everyone else is not going to lockdown, there is no societal value in my locking down.

And there is no way that anyone will convince me that the American public is gonna do shit-all about it.

I'd like to note that it isn't just the medical establishment or the government (in the USA) that has lost credibility: the public has as well. Going into Covid lockdowns in March 2020, I might have thought that everyone would play along, now I know that there is no chance everyone will play along.

It's fascinating and banging-my-head-to-the-wall inducing to read peoples comments here regarding lockdown and particularly those who assume that the Western response was universaly the same, or at least very similar, as the American response.

Finland never had a lockdown. Not a single one. When the pandemic hit in mid March, the only things forcibly closed were bars and restaurants (after massive public pressure). Yet everything shut down because 1) people voluntarily stopped going out, 2) many facilities owners didn't want the risk of spreading the infection (of which a lot was uncertain back then) and 3) many of the rest didn't want the bad PR. I personally skipped town for two months because I preferred having views like this instead of being stuck in the city with absolutely nothing happening. Apparently nature parks have never been as popular as during that time (and no, nobody even suggested restrictions to that - there's shitloads of open space in Finland, might as well let people enjoy it when it's especially useful).

So, in some places people do play along. It just seems that US is not one of those.

Playing along with "don't go to crowded pubs" and playing along with "you are going to be arrested if you go alone to an empty beach, but please please go to a massive protest where people around you scream in your face for hours" is playing two entirely different games.

It's fascinating and banging-my-head-to-the-wall inducing to read peoples comments here regarding lockdown and particularly those who assume that the Western response was universaly the same, or at least very similar, as the American response.

So, in some places people do play along. It just seems that US is not one of those.

Seems like you're making the same mistake as he is? All he said was "there is no chance everyone will play along", and Finland is not "everyone" any more than the US is. Europe made plenty of insane COVID-era decisions, and I think he's right that even pro-covid-measures people lost appetite to redo them for anything short of an airborne ebola-cancer-aids outbreak.

People in Medicine are really nervous, you are right that public health entities burned through basically all the credibility they had last time, but at current expectations this Avian flu would be be worse than COVID and U.S. healthcare (and likely everywhere else) has basically burned through every ounce of slack it had including things like people's willingness to work and mental health. A lot of COVID-denier types were able to miss just how close we were to total collapse because everyone was locked up at home but this could be really, really bad.

Is the anxiety about the 1st few months? How much do the existing antivirals and the approved vaccine temper their perception of things? Sequiris has been groomed for a few years by ASPR to be in a position to rapidly scale up their manufacturing, and they already have (a very small) global distribution of it. BARDA is probably going to announce and grant them a treasure trove if there's actually a pandemic.

As demonstrated elsewhere in this thread, support for lockdowns/masks/precautions is very low, and even traditional supporters are going to be banging the economic drum.

This will likely kill much more young people before whatever crazy new technology we have gets approved and rolled out. At least thats the feeling.

I think it may be a bit doomer but the worse than COVID and COVID exhaustion bits are very real.

Ok, I understand where you're coming from now. I think if there's a pandemic it will be hellish for anyone working in healthcare. On the other hand Audenz was already approved by FDA and updating the formulation with antigens for new strains doesn't require new clinical trials to be reviewed by the agency before the supplemental formulation is approved. The rollout preparedness is (relatively) good already. They've just spun up manufacturing a 40 million dose stockpile of only the adjuvant from a $121 million BARDA grant, but that's mostly just to get Sequiris' manufacturing flywheel started. Probably 6 months until vulnerable populations start getting administered a vaccine from whenever a pandemic is declared, with a 1 month margin of error. So if the vaccine actually works that writes off the most apocalyptic outcomes.

I think if there's a pandemic it will be hellish for anyone working in healthcare.

I'm not concerned about the apocalypse, even without any further technology changes but I am concerned about stuff like people dying at their homes of heart attacks because ambulances are overstretched and we don't have the resources in the ED or hospital to handle otherwise treatable problems.

Like with COVD damage to the complex systems involved will take a long time to clear, if ever.

Not to mention medical professionals getting sick at a (much) higher rate than the general population, further decreasing the capacity. That already had an effect here in Finland during Covid.

This still isn’t the Black Death 2.0. Literal worst case scenarios are still nowhere near what the virus was sold as.

Society didn't end and wasn't going to, but we did almost lose access to healthcare which is quite a bad outcome.

More comments

A lot of COVID-denier types were able to miss just how close we were to total collapse because everyone was locked up at home but this could be really, really bad.

I don’t think the Covid-deniers did miss that; it’s everyone else who failed to see the issue. Opposition to lockdowns was the single thing that united all the various types of skeptics.

I think you misunderstand, even with the reduction in cases because of lockdowns our hospital infrastructure almost collapsed (and would have without them, at least initially).

Denier/skeptic types don't realize how bad it was in the beginning. I've seen plenty of people here doubt the seriousness of COVID, call complaints of full hospitals etc as fake news, and so on.

Just from my own perspective, I don’t think the problem was the initial reaction. The problem was that there was no real thought into what was going to be the sustainable solution to the need to slow spread while still giving people freedom and not destroying the economy. There were no end dates or mitigation mechanisms, no advice on what kinds of activities were high or low spread, or what types of environments were conducive to spread. So they just locked everything up indefinitely just to be sure and lied about the dangers so that the people were too scared of Covid to make rational decisions.

And to me that damned the whole thing. Nobody will trust a system that cannot be honest or upfront about dangers and trade offs and how the economy could actually function when nobody can leave the house without government permission. It further gave no criteria or end dates to the emergency. 2 weeks to flatten the curve became 2 months, than nearly 6 months. Because of all of this, the government simply lost all credibility, not just in health (and being Frank, no matter how bad the next pandemic gets, lockdowns are off the table, and good luck with vaccines) but in almost everything else. If the government lied about this in a power grab, what else are they lying about. (I personally think at least some of the popularity of Qanon and later election denial is down to the loss of trust that came out of the lockdown experience. People felt abused and lied to by their own government, and as such, conspiracy theories telling them the government was lying about other things and using its power to manipulate them into things that benefit them). That trust is unlikely to come back for at least a generation and maybe longer than that.

When I argue with my coworkers and other pro-Lockdown types its all about how it was poorly defined, blew our load on an important public health intervention, failure of implementation and buy in etc etc.

When it's the anti-Lockdown types its almost always "bruh, you know COVID was real right?"

I mean sure a lot of people ended up believing it was fake, but to take their perspective, the government was pretty much lying about everything all the time. They said as a slogan that it was “2 weeks to flatten the curve.” After 3-4 months with no end in sight, the people saw that as a lie. The messaging on masks did two complete separate 180s. Masks don’t work until they do, except ooops they were wrong and it actually doesn’t work. The vaccines will prevent you from getting Covid, until it was obvious they didn’t, at which point they protected other people, until it was obvious that this wasn’t happening either. Then the vaccines were supposed to be based on a place that didn’t mutate much. Except that that section does mutate a lot and now you need a booster every year for the new variant. And so after the fourth or fifth obvious falsehood, it’s not really that surprising to me that people who lost their freedom because they obeyed a government that lied to them a lot might start questioning the virus that’s at the bottom of this whole thing. They’re under arbitrary rules that are quite often not only making them miserable, but costing them money and opportunities, with no end in sight, with moving goalposts and lots of guilt tripping over any questioning or noncompliance.

If the government wants the trust of the people, it must be trustworthy.

When you say collapse, what exactly do you have in mind? Are we talking about a triage situation or something more long-term damaging? If it’s the former, I would consider the situation deeply unfortunate, but it’s also something that would resolve itself in relatively short order.

Take the issue of ventilator shortages, which I recall being a real problem in some areas in early to mid-2020. It’s horrifying if you’re a Covid patient who needs a ventilator but who can’t get one, but I wouldn’t consider the deaths that resulted from such shortages to constitute collapse of the hospital infrastructure.

Also, on the topic of lockdowns, it seems to me that we went about it in exactly the wrong way. Assuming we were going to do some kind of lockdown regardless, it seems to me that we should have forced the at-risk portions of the population to isolate, directed the fountain of free federal money to “reward” those who stayed on the job, let the disease rip through the healthy population, then rescinded all lockdown measures once the number of cases was low enough that there was little risk of overwhelming the hospital systems. You’re still running rough-shod over some people’s freedoms, but that seemed to be inevitable by March of 2020, and at least this plan seems like it would have been less destructive and more effective.

The purpose of the original management of masks and the overall lockdown approach was to buy time for hospitals and other aspects of healthcare to adjust and to do things like "smooth out the curve." This was mostly a success. Messaging around this was terrible, and public health and governmental identities (and the media) couldn't stop themselves from lying and misunderstanding.

These policies overstaying their welcome has nothing to do with the early need. You of course also have other nonsense like trying to prevent people from staying outside away from each other in a park. The damage from overzealous, unscientific, and downright retarded policy decisions is immense.

But the lockdown was still a good idea.

Hospitals had to shut down elective procedures. They had ophthalmologists and dermatologists managing critical care patients. Routine medical activity and screening shut down in a way that will increase mortality and morbidity for decades. Medical education, which is expensive, complicated, and slow was paused or had quality go down for years. Many doctors and other staff died, retired, moved out of clinical practice, or dramatically reduced their hours, and the shortages and other problems caused by this are only growing worse and have a tremendous lagging effect. It's taking time and a multifactorial problem but hospitals are shutting down all over the U.S. and it's becoming increasingly impossible to get certain types of care in some states or regions.

Multiple things can be true at the same time.

Lockdowns were a violation of freedoms. They were absolutely a necessary violation of freedom for a time. They were not a necessary violation later, but persisted anyway.

Most lockdown deniers types seem to realize they were right about lockdowns being misused and then leverage that into thinking that COVID was just as bad as a regular flu, that everything was fine or a hysteria, or that because we didn't load up some random ship with COVID patients that everything was fine, or that running out ventilators will cause some people to die but cause absolutely no other problems.

It's a massive Dunning-Kruger issue that seems tremendously over represented in the population of rat-adjacent people.

Hospitals had to shut down elective procedures. They had ophthalmologists and dermatologists managing critical care patients. Routine medical activity and screening shut down in a way that will increase mortality and morbidity for decades. Medical education, which is expensive, complicated, and slow was paused or had quality go down for years.

Every single one of these consequences were because of the massively extended lockdowns and the medical/governmental apparatus refusing to lose any face. No shit the industry wasn't doing as much routine medical activity when going to urgent care required multiple tests, staying in your car, poorly-developed ass-covering questionnaires, etc. etc. etc.

hospitals are shutting down all over the U.S. and it's becoming increasingly impossible to get certain types of care

And this is explained by some mythical massive death toll in the medical industry, instead of giant healthcare conglomerates and regulatory capture? Come on man. This is just the Obamacare nightmare 14 years in. Buckle up, it's not going to get any better.

I can't take this seriously after seeing the rock-hard erections in the pants of every petty tyrant nurse, doctor, or administrator that lasted 2 years instead of 4 hours. The sanctimonious slow the spread shit that got jettisoned the moment some race riots needed to be sanctioned by the entire industry. Miss me with this gaslighting.

Every single one of these consequences were because of the massively extended lockdowns and the medical/governmental apparatus refusing to lose any face. No shit the industry wasn't doing as much routine medical activity when going to urgent care required multiple tests, staying in your car, poorly-developed ass-covering questionnaires, etc. etc. etc.

No?

You think Ophthalmologists were being pulled to do critical care because of COVID tests requirements at outpatient offices?

It frustrates me how lockdown/COVID skeptics can be more or less directionally correct and still worse than the supporters at the same time. Stop and think about your claims for a second.

More comments

People in Medicine are really nervous,

Can you say more about this? Do you know anything more than what has been in the MSM so far?

The good news: it's pure "oh shit this could kick of." So far. I don't have any particular special information at this time but haven't seen anything more than all the other times it almost happens and then doesn't.

The bad news: all the revision, hysteria, and poor decisions about COVID has resulted in most people forgetting just how bad COVID was, and this will likely be worse. Our healthcare infrastructure may not survive another hit of that magnitude.

I can’t speak to most people, but I remember how bad it was. It was so bad that New York City had to bring in emergency 1,000-bed hospital ships in order to handle the overflow of cases. Of course, those ships sat virtually empty and unused, and their large crew of medical workers basically got to enjoy a free holiday, but still, they had to bring in ships! It was so bad, Covid-positive patients had to be rehoused away from the hospitals and into empty schools nursing homes, for some reason. It was so bad that nurses were so exhausted, they barely had the time and energy to make TikTok videos to help keep people’s spirits up as they were imprisoned in their homes. It was bad.

You are forgetting the lockdown sex parties. That was the worst of it. People were so scared top health officials had to secretly rent the hotel rooms “just be naked with friends”. Can you imagine?

I mean, it doesn’t sound great. More Joseph Heller than George Orwell, though.

Well, I guess thank you for appearing on command and making my point for me.

And what is your point? COVID was over-sold. Wildly over-sold, and that's the enduring legacy of the pandemic.

It was never that bad, because it was over-sold so completely that nothing short of civilization-ending pandemic could have been that bad.

It was never that bad, because it was over-sold so completely that nothing short of civilization-ending pandemic could have been that bad.

It was oversold, it was also worse than the people complaining about it being oversold think it was.

More comments

This seems like an easy thing for a relatively young and healthy person (I assume) to say.

This seems more like a shallow dunk than an attempt to acknowledge the terrible job pretty much every Westernized government did at responsibly balancing the right of ordinary people to go about their lives versus the actual increased risk to the actually significantly more vulnerable population, rather than pandering to overblown fears stoked by social media culture and letting a bunch of low-information healthcare officials with no accountability to the actual population play tin-pot dictator.

I'd also like to know - many people have stoked fears about supposed healthcare "collapse", but did any healthcare systems anywhere actually do anything that could be described as collapse during the entire Covid era? Exactly what does a "collapse" look like, what are the real consequences of it? I mean things that actually happened, not somebody speculating about what could happen. I think this is a "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" thing - if no healthcare system anywhere actually "collapses", then we're being too restrictive and over-cautious, and we should ease up until there are a few.

I'd also like to know - many people have stoked fears about supposed healthcare "collapse", but did any healthcare systems anywhere actually do anything that could be described as collapse during the entire Covid era?

In the west, probably Bergamo and nowhere else. At least in the UK, the politics of the decision to lock down were driven by media coverage of events in Bergamo.

Honestly, I kind of wonder whether the last century of health care have been like the 20th century fire prevention/suppression effort and humanity would be much healthier overall if pandemics were a more regular selection factor in reporduction.

I’m not even sure it’s entirely a reproductive issue instead of a general fitness one. It seemed like every time I heard about some perfectly normal, healthy young person dying of Covid, it turned out he or she weighed 300 lbs.

While I won’t deny that, I’d rather put it that it’s an easy thing for anyone who saw the competency with which almost all Western governments handled Covid to say. After living through 2020–2022, do you really trust the CDC, the WHO, the federal and most state governments, the major medical journals, or any other group to get this one right?

No, but I suspect that the costs of not even trying would be higher than the costs of ham handed attempts at containing it or delaying it. It's not just about the virus itself, but about healthcare system collapse. If you get appendicitis at that point, good luck surviving.

If you get a novel virus for which no good medical treatment exists you’re left to live or die as fate demands, if you come in with acute appendicitis you’re operated on and live. I have just solved this supposedly impossible conundrum.

It probably won't work out as nicely and cleanly as that. There will be several treatments of dubious efficacy that will be given/experimented with on the many virus patients, while all sorts of other types of doctors get drafted in to deal with them.

Refusal to follow triage best practices in order to try to make people care says more about the medical system than it does about anyone victimized by that choice.

Good. The US just a week or so ago started unwinding monetary policy that was necessary to avoid having the response to Covid destroy the US dollar. That’s nearly five years after the first case was discovered!

And it was all to try to save mom-and-pop businesses who all went out of business anyway just a few years later, under the weight of their nearly-free government loans.

Just get the fuckin flu, man.

And it was all to try to save mom-and-pop businesses

Or, you know, to steal half a trillion dollars. At least. Probably more.

What changed a week or so ago? Are you talking about the interest rate drop?


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats