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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1843 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024

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

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

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

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Hope everyone is doing well.

Currently, I am working as a software engineer with limited experience. My boss recently came up with an idea for a new product that requires mTLS to connect with a server. However, I’ve never worked with something like this before.

Does anyone have any good resources where I can learn more about this topic?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I've decided to tackle the Platonic dialogues between now and the new year. Anyone have a good YouTube college lecture series on them?

As in, all of the dialogues? My copy of the Complete Works clocks in at 1800+ pages, including notes and introductions but still. I know you're not asking for a list of what to read but here is one I followed (based on this video) and would probably make for a decent couple months worth of reading. Caveat being that the Republic is a beast and might take as much time as the rest of the below list combined.

Ion, Meno (Epistemology)

Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo (trial and death sequence)

Gorgias, Protagoras, Cratylus (Language and rhetoric)

The Republic

Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus (Friendship and love)

As for youtube resources, Sadler who I linked above has a playlist for Plato: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB0AE9449D5B07340&si=i-m3AmIt2q72X_4b And Michael Sugrue will probably be a top hit for the Republic specifically: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8rf3uqDj00A?si=JQPS5S6p1KTMnrmT

And some supplementary websites: https://www.plato-dialogues.org/tetralog.htm https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/

What is the point of politics if it no longer tracks with civility?

I've touched on this before, but it makes no logical sense for people to accept uncivil words and behavior from politicians when we expect civil words and behavior in most other areas of society. And why should anyone participate in politics unless and until we establish a baseline?

And why should anyone participate in politics unless and until we establish a baseline?

You may be not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. If you ignore the politicians completely, you still will very much have to deal with consequences of their actions, and these consequences, with our currently insanely regulated and government-infested world, would still define huge part of your life. If you don't participate at all, they'd just be freer to do whatever they want, without even the microscopic hypocritical lip service to your interests they have to pay now.

I think a lot about this and to me a huge, unspoken aspect of the vitriol is how much of daily life is now political. It’s a power game, and increasingly it’s a power game that has no outside. The church I attend is political, the car I drive, my sports teams, my beer, the stores I shop at and the brands I buy. Further, politics is invading issues that used to be private business or family matters, or simply left too personal choice. And because politics is so total, it has a lot of power. And with so much power, getting a seat at the table is worth alienating other people. It’s worth walking out on thanksgiving dinner over politics if it means that someone watching might agree. It’s worth the inconvenience of having to check the boycotts to make sure you don’t accidentally fund someone who believes wrong-think.

If government either weren’t so powerful of didn’t require us to vote I think we’d have a lot less vitriol. A government too weak to do anything isn’t a prize to capture and loot. And as far as not having elections, if we weren’t required to give our legitimacy to the things our government wants to do to us, they’d have no reason to manufacture consent.

People have rightfully lost the trust in the polite insiders, so they turn to the impolite outsiders. It's that simple, and I can't blame them.

On a related note, the left has been weaponizing civility to effectively disallow even basic disagreements, which is why being deliberately uncivil is an important precommitment signal in the current environment.

Note that this weaponization works only in one direction. The oppressed masses get a complete pass to be violent (up to and including mass murder) and it's of for the left to be completely uncivil towards the deplorables. But if you dare to disagree with somebody who is higher than you on the oppression ladder, you are the worst criminal possible. It has nothing to do with civility, it's enforced power structure where the left usurps the right to designate who is going to be in power, and who is allowed to discuss questions of power. They just use the pretense of civility in an attempt to hide this blatant power grab.

It's more civil than war.

I'm serious, that's the baseline. That's the floor to which things can fall. The default method of conflict resolution is where team A and team B kill each other until one of them wins and then that side imposes its will and/or enslaves and/or genocides the other. Politics allows us to decide who gets their way without doing that. Modern politics is nowhere near as civil as it ought to be, and contains a lot more violence and death than it ought to, but it's not literally war. We're heading in that direction, but very slowly, and we're far enough away that there is time to course correct before we get there. Hopefully.

The takeaway from History so many people fail to learn is that things could be so much worse, and how easy it is to get there. We should participate in politics to avoid getting there any faster than we have to.

American politics is still more civil than a lot of places. There are plenty of countries that aren’t currently at civil war where it’s still commonplace for all major parties to have officially organized armed wings.

There's a lot of ground to cover between being unwilling to put up with incivility and being willing to resort to force of arms to secede, a fact which is exploited in modern politics; if I can get the other side to leave in anger or disgust, but not angry enough to come back with guns, then they're pretty much just ceding the ground to me.

If politics feel horrible and fill me with dread, it's not an accident, it's what my political opponents deliberately wish me to feel so that I have to disengage from it to protect my mental health, that makes me less likely to vote, less likely to be informed past the headlines, etc...

Of course, there's great peril in this strategy in that all sides ratcheting this up doesn't really push further away the point at which people resort to violence; maybe slightly at best as it changes the perception of a normal baseline, but not as much as it reduces the gap between participation in politics and violence.

The so-called sex recession has been discussed both here and on the two old subreddits extensively, and a consensus seems to have formed for a good reason (I think) that it's not actually a sex recession per se but instead a socialization/community recession, a recession of social interaction. That is, it's not only sexual activity that is declining but also every form of socializing and all traditional social circles (churches, clubs, associations etc.), and the sex recession is just one consequence of that.

There are three related phenomena that I remember being occasionally addressed on the subreddits, namely:

  1. The decline of shopping malls.
  2. The decline of arcades.

(These two started to take place largely around the turn of the millennium and were exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis, and can be explained by a combination of social and technological trends but that's not the point here.)

  1. The long-term effects of the federal enforcement of 21 as the drinking age, as a phenomenon peculiar to the USA. This meant that people over 21 and under 21 have no venues or social circles left where they can interact, and teenagers who graduate from high school and subsequently lose that place as a venue for socializing basically find no replacement for that, because every conceivable venue that could fill that role caters to people over 21.

  2. The proportion of 18-year-olds with driver's licenses has apparently also declined massively, which appears to be a phenomenon tied to the ones above; anyway, I don't remember it ever being discussed here in detail.

All in all, the obvious combined effect of all of this is the massive loss of what sociologists call third places for teenagers in particular. And all this happened before the proliferation and normalization of smartphone/tablet use, which had its own great consequences, of course.

So, to get to my question: have there been studies about this particular phenomenon and its effect on the sex recession or the social lives of teenagers / 20-somethings? Because there must have been one. Was it ever even discussed in mainstream media?

One could certainly compare to other developed countries, as this issue seems largely a US-specific phenomenon. As far as I can tell, third spaces are alive and well in much of Europe and East Asia, where the denser urbanization with proper public transit, among other factors, don't keep kids completely dependent on their parents to get anywhere at all. I remember watching anime as a young teenager. The thing that always stood out as most alien to me, more than the monsters or magic or whatever, was the way that kids in Japan could apparently just go out, alone, and see friends without needing parents to give them a ride every time. As a 14 year old who only ever knew life in my typical American suburb, walking distance from almost nowhere (the nearest non-residential building was a single gas station a 40 minute walk through rows of copy-pasted single family houses belonging to complete strangers), I couldn't help but feel envious. As an adult, I get the appeal of suburbs, and there aren't many great choices for walkable cities in the US (maybe someone from NYC or Chicago, etc. can chime in on if their experiences differed), but I don't know if I would ever want to force that kind of isolation on kids of my own.

The most frustrating part about this is that it's still possible to have walkable suburbs. We have them in the Europe. The problem is that US zoning laws usually make it illegal to build anything except houses in suburban areas. In the UK, suburbs have shops, parks, schools and pubs and it is possible to walk to all of them.

Suburbs have all those things, the problem is that you can't build any of that stuff amidst houses (except parks and maybe schools).

'Amidst the houses' is the suburb. If there's a zone for housing and a zone for commercial, then the housing bit is the suburb, from the perspective of the residents.

By contrast, in the UK there are pubs and shops nestled in between houses. To take a random example, the suburb Jesmond, in Newcastle. Look at it on Google Maps. It includes two metro stations, bus stops, pubs, restaurants, playing fields, hotels, parks, churches, allotments, schools, cafes and small businesses. You can easily walk from any part of the suburb to any other part, and you can get public transport to the rest of the city.

When I look at (also randomly chosen) Rio Rancho in Albuquerque, I see vast tracts of houses, many located in cul de sacs (so you can walk to the end of your road and that's it) and all of the shops and restaurants are limited to the big road that surrounds the suburb.

'Amidst the houses' is the suburb. If there's a zone for housing and a zone for commercial, then the housing bit is the suburb, from the perspective of the residents.

Are you American? This isn't really how Americans conceive of suburbs. The typical American suburb is a small town that's predominantly residential, but it still has a shopping mall or main street. A town that's predominantly a bedroom community with people commuting to work in the big city is a suburb, not just the residential zone of that town.

How are 18 year olds getting around without drivers licences given that so many of them live in suburbs now?

They don't. It's not seen as an issue because if you're a suburban teenager you're expected to go off to college somewhere at 18.

Being driven around, obviously.

This tethers them to their parents more tightly.

federal enforcement of 21 as the drinking age

When I was young, I wondered if I'd stop caring about this one once I was well beyond the age that it was directly relevant to me, but no, the further I get from it, the dumber it seems. The arguments are so cliche that we've already all heard them a million times - these people are old enough to vote, old enough to fight in the military, but not old enough for a beer? Self-evidently ridiculous! We can even easily visit other countries with lower drinking ages and observe that nothing much happens differently without these dopey laws. Worse still, the effect isn't just on the underage, it's in pointless enforcement up and down the age spectrum. Nearing 40, I still need an ID to buy beer at a grocery store. Everyone involved has to pretend as though this is a completely retarded ritual, we all agree that there's really nothing to be done about it, the federal government decided that you need to card everyone and the company dutifully implemented a system where it's not even possible to sell a beverage without doing so. A small thing, really, but a constant reminder of how much I despise the petty, authoritarian weasels of the American federal government.

The vast majority of my excessive drinking was before 21. 21 was actually around the age I decided I should prioritize my health and not drink too much. I was much more mature than I was just a few years earlier. Also, if 18 year olds can get access to alcohol, it makes it a lot easier for 16 year olds to get access to it. My friends and I drank way too much in high school and we mostly got our alcohol from older siblings.

I totally agree that it's ridiculous that people over 30 are getting carded. This is not a thing in Quebec, but in the rest of Canda, they're way too strict about it. There's no law requiring them to do it though.

I suppose the social milieu was such that adults got spooked by the horrific specter of 18-20-year-old boys getting into car accidents, fistfights, having unprotected sex etc. and this measure was seen as a good idea. People generally don't consider long-term consequences in such situations.

that adults got spooked by the horrific specter of 18-20-year-old boys getting into car accidents, fistfights, having unprotected sex etc.

In other words, "teenage boys" [and to a lesser extent, men in general- the young men just get it worse as a consequence of how men accumulate sociofinancial value] became the new "niggers" (started in the early 1900s, and would become progressively truer each decade, with a quick pause around 1960 for the economic golden age where they became economically useful again). The prohibitions that were imposed for the latter group would transfer to the former; they'd be charged as adults for crimes committed before that time (for things that wouldn't be crimes if they were adults, even), be prevented from working, intentionally segregated, consistently demonized in the media because melanin hormones, get the phrenology treatment ('lack of brain development') for a justification for making the paper-bag test analogue stricter, etc.

I failed to stop Noticing this one once I was well beyond the age for whom a change in that cultural attitude would have been wholly selfish. Perhaps that's a side-effect of not actually having particularly identifiable "stupid kids" in class but "this is net-negative for at least 50% of the population" is a pretty damning condemnation ignoring that. We are already willing to accept 12/52-type consequences that result by giving rights to every other group and the fact we don't extend that downwards in the age range is... interesting, to say the least. I think it's socioeconomic in origin, for the same reasons other groups gain or lose the right to be considered human over time in industrialized societies (unindustrialized societies consider adulthood to be around 13-14, which strongly suggests that's when it actually happens, but it's not like they have any other choice in the matter; not that Western societies that delay it are being explicitly malicious when they do that, but if we accept that we also accept a lack of malice about race/sex discrimination more generally [assuming and to the extent that our scientific ageism is false], so...).

People generally don't consider long-term consequences in such situations.

I agree; I think forcing them out of any cultural milieu or circumstance that they'd grow up in (growing up is an inherently dangerous activity) may not have been the best of ideas. This is part of why the Amish have rumspringa- you're leaving as a child, and if you choose to come back, you're doing so as an adult.

unindustrialized societies consider adulthood to be around 13-14, which strongly suggests that's when it actually happens, but it's not like they have any other choice in the matter

This isn't true. Teenaged boys in agrarian societies might be expected to do adult levels of work, but they don't get adult levels of say in society(and of course they don't have freedom, because in undeveloped poor agrarian societies no one does) and coming of age rites in agrarian societies for male full adulthood are usually higher than the 18-21 common in the industrialized world.

Now teenaged girls in agrarian societies are commonly married off to much older men and subsequently treated as adult women, but that's not what you're talking about.

because in undeveloped poor agrarian societies no one does

My level of reference is "what was it possible for a 14 year old to do in 1900" compared to "what are they allowed to do today"?

Off the top of my head I can think of "get any entry-level factory job that doesn't require advanced education, support or start a family, get laid, move across the country, buy a weapon, have a beer after work" in 1900. At 15-16, provided you could had reached full adult height and weren't cursed with babyface, you could join the military. Even in the 1930s 14 year olds doing menial tasks like waiting tables was normal enough; evidenced by the youngest Hindenburg staff member that survived that incident being that age.

Today they're... allowed to play on the computer, I guess.

In 1900 the US and Western Europe were industrialized societies with on paper modern laws about the ages you could do things, with the exception of child labor. Sloppy record keeping meant there were lots of high school aged boys in the military, sure, but they lied about their age and got away with it because public records were spotty. And the idea that any appreciable group of people had more sexual freedom at any point prior to 1960 is risible, although I suppose the frequency of prostitution might count as a point in favor of our 14 year old in 1900.

Actually agrarian societies tended to be rather harshly restrictive of teenaged boys and marry the girls off. And that’s still how subsistence farmers behave today.

The thing that blows my mind the most as I look back is how many of my college friends did the worst of their drinking before 21 and calmed down after.

Yeah, I neglected to mention that part, that these laws unambiguously do not work. The idea of a bunch of teenagers just deciding that they have to be sober because it's illegal to drink is comical. No one is actually being saved from binge drinking by a 20-year-old not being allowed to have a glass of wine with a steak. But hey, on the bright, every now and then my wife neglects to bring an ID with her and it saves her from having a dangerous intoxicant with dinner.

To play Devil's advocate for a second (I too think 21 is unnecessarily high), maybe the point of 21 is that it makes 18 easier to enforce. Here the drinking age is 18, and alcohol was a normal part of my life from around the time I was 16. Normal as in my parents wouldn't have any problem if I drank alongside them for meals of social gatherings, I would go out to bars with friends and order alcohol without anyone bothering me, and whenever there was a party my friends and I would always manage to have beer case one way or another (family/siblings buying for us, one of us having a fake ID, etc...). I don't think I could have gotten into bars pretending to be 21 at 16. Maybe people were more lax with it back then too though, it felt to me like the rule was that as long as the ambiguously aged late-teen young adult seems the discreet type they wouldn't bother checking ID.

You're right, in that much of purpose was to split away from High School friend groups. Everyone in high school has friends age 18, few have close friends age 21+. When I was in high school, from 15 onward I could have gotten an 18 year old to buy me cigarettes, it wasn't until after I graduated that I could reliably acquire alcohol.

The results of all this are kind of uneven and mixed. As a kid it was easier for my peers, or me though I didn't at the time, to smoke weed than to drink alcohol, weed was already illegal so the dealers didn't card, and it's easier to transport than alcohol. Good kids, like me, basically didn't drink in high school, the bad kids who did want to drink found ways to, and it meant interacting with real shitbirds of adults who would help them get it. I'm sure there's a lot of bad people who make a habit of preying on minors looking for booze.

I'd love to see it set at the municipal rather than the state level, using the same techniques. No state government can turn down government highway funding just to let 18 year olds drink. But a city? Say, a beach town like Asbury Park, which would benefit from attracting 19 year olds to party? Or a college town like Ithaca, which would be able to better regulate student drinking if so much of it wasn't technically illegal?

Does anyone here know anything about "flip" cell phones, or any advice or meta-advice for shopping for one in the US? I've been thinking for a while that it'd be nice to be able to turn off my smartphone for "offline" time without being cut off from anyone who might need to reach me.

The problem is you'll have to physically swap over your SIM card every time. Actually, now that eSIMs are a thing I wonder if it's even possible to bounce between handsets in the way you're looking to.

If all you want is offline time then it's a lot easier to just switch off internet connectivity. You can probably get an IfThisThenThat app that could automate regular online/offline times. A quick search suggests it can be done natively in iOS.

Would separate SIM cards not work? The idea I had was to have an occasionally-on smartphone for regular things and an always-on flip phone for critical things. Sort of the same use case as a house phone.

I currently have an Android phone. It has a toggle for Wi-Fi and one for 4G connectivity, but I'm not aware of one specifically for "Internet" that still allows calls through. Not sure how that would differ substantially from just closing and reopening the Web browser. I guess it could be an easier way to toggle email notifications, but I can't see it meaningfully reducing the "onlineness" that I'm trying to get away from. Am I misunderstanding something?

Unless there's some way of cloning it your phone number is effectively locked to a single SIM card, so if you want either handset to receive phone calls to your number it needs to have that SIM inserted.

Hmm, just looked it up and apparently there are ways of cloning a SIM. You could look into that, I stopped at the search results page. SIM cloning is usually done for illicit purposes though so I'd expect it to present additional unexpected difficulties even beyond the incompatability you found trying to use a T-Mobile SIM in your Nokia. It almost certainly won't be supported* by the networks and their vendors though so unlike the T-Mobile/Nokia you can't just take it into a shop and ask them if you can try before you buy.

Wifi and 4G are the phone's means of connecting to the internet. Turn them off and you'll still have cell tower service for plain phone calls and SMS texts. You'd have no email, no browser, no doomscroll apps, no internet dependent notifications, but your "offline" apps will still work (things like the camera, timers, alarms, step counters... maybe maps? GPS will still work but it depends if you have the map saved locally for offline use).

I don't know what your skill set is like, and I've never done this, but I think an IfThisThenThat app should be able to do what you want with some simple rules that add up to "If it's between 5PM and 5AM then switch off wifi and 4G", or "if GPS is not [at the office] then switch off wifi and 4G".

*By "not supported" I imagine it could likely raise a flag of suspicious activity if two devices show up using the same SIM card simultaneously. One at a time would okay, but then that defeats most of the purpose of not having to swap the SIM between them.

Do you mean a flip-phone as in something resembling a pre-iPhone cell phone? They still exist: some are clearly marketed to seniors, but I suppose there are others that like them for 2003 nostalgia. In terms of actual hardware, it looks like they can be found pretty cheaply new and unlocked (<$100 US). I wouldn't try to use an old one because the mobile standards have moved on and 2G seems to have been phased out.

In terms of actual use, I'd say be prepared to get good at T9 typing. It used to be a fairly common skill.

Never mind 2G. The Nokia 2720 Flip that I bought a while back advertises 4G and Wi-Fi, but when I tried a T-Mobile SIM in it recently, I got a message saying that "this phone is only partially compatible with our advanced network"; and I wasn't able to make a call or send a message when I tried.

I'm unconvinced about the benefits of T9. Multi-press typing always made more sense to me; this sequence of presses produces this character, predictably and reliably, with no guesswork needed in either side. I guess time will tell.

Never mind 2G. The Nokia 2720 Flip that I bought a while back advertises 4G and Wi-Fi, but when I tried a T-Mobile SIM in it recently, I got a message saying that "this phone is only partially compatible with our advanced network"; and I wasn't able to make a call or send a message when I tried.

Band compatibility issue. It looks like they only made an EU version and a MENA/Asia version, and the band support on both models has close to zero overlap with the frequencies used in the US. This is a little surprising, because these days (afaik) it's pretty cheap and easy from a hardware standpoint to include as many bands as you want on a phone (at least for 4G/LTE; 5G is a bit of a different story). I guess they didn't anticipate any US sales.

Bands 5 and 41, the latter only present on the MENA/Asia model, are the only supported ones used in the US. T-Mobile US does not have any band 5 licenses as far as I know. You could get away with using it on AT&T or Verizon, but you'd have to determine which one of them owns the band 5 licenses in your area (confusingly this can be both AT&T and Verizon, one of the two, or neither of them) and it would not work nationwide. T-Mobile does have band 41 licenses (almost) nationwide, but they're in the process of repurposing that spectrum for 5G (and it was never meant to be used for full-coverage voice even when originally deployed as LTE).

If your only concern is voice and text, the bands you want for USA 4G/LTE compatibility are 2, 4, 5, 12, 13 (Verizon-only), and 71 (T-Mobile-only).

You can buy so called ‘wise phones’ which work like a smart phone with no internet access. Usually they’re marketed as kid phones.

Sounds far in the opposite direction of what I'm looking for in compactness and convenience/ease of use; but will keep it in mind as an option.

I'm not the only one who loathes old English poetry, right? Chaucer is great, Shakespeare is great... and then it's about two and a half centuries until you reach something enjoyable again. Awkwardly mythology references, cloying saccharine language, each stanza flowing out like a nursery rhyme and resolving itself in that lame self-satisfied way, with an aftertaste like stale bread. It is a wonder that they who read the King James Bible produced it.

Did you read the contest review for The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book? It was my favorite of the entries.

You might start by looking up some examples of poetry from each century, going back until you can’t easily understand the English anymore, and find in the 16th century such poems as John Skelton’s “Speke, Parott” [sic]:

My name is Parrot, a byrd of Paradyse,
By Nature devised of a wonderowus kynde,
Deyntely dyeted with dyvers dylycate spyce,
Tyl Euphrates, that flode, dryveth me into Inde;
Where men of that countrey by fortune me fynde,
And send me to greate ladyes of estate;
Then Parot must have an almon or a date.

Moving forward into the 17th century in search of poems that spell their subject matter consistently, you might come across John Donne’s “A Hymn to God the Father”:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done; I fear no more.

Moving forward with a bit more confidence, now that English has had a bit more time to settle on its modern form, you find in the 18th century Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”;

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

By now, the patterns to this ‘poetry’ thing are becoming pretty clear, but a little stale; there’s only so many one- and two-syllable rhymes available, and only so many times you can hear the word ‘yearn’ rhymed with ‘burn’ before you’re wishing for something a little more exciting…

Poetry makes it into the Western canon through some combination of novelty and technical prowess. We study things for the latter, but we read them for the former. Worse, the more technically impressive something gets, the easier it is to copy and to inform newer, more capable successors. I suspect the works you find most cloying are ones which were considered technical successes at the time.

I dislike a lot of English poetry. I find Keats the worst of the worst, with his constant poetic contractions, tangled meter (what did you need there's "o'er"s and "rous'd"s for, Johnny, if your verse doesn't flow anyway?) and, like you've written, superfluous mythology references.

Chaucer is Middle English. Old English is Beowulf. Gawain and the Green Knight isn't bad, neither is Piers Plowman.

I said old, not Old.

Out of curiosity, what do you find interesting after having slogged through those two and a half centuries?

Which time period are you talking about (I don't think you actually mean Old English)? After Shakespeare you've got Donne, Milton, Pope, Burns, and then the Romantics (who I think need no defense). I don't think there's really a time period without a great poet.

Meet Bob. He's in his late twenties, and has not done any math since high school, where he was a B- student in STEM-related subjects and moderately disliked most of them. Bob is of above average intelligence, but not exceptionally bright (think +1 SD, midwit extraordinaire territory). One day Bob decides to renounce his wordcel ways and try to learn enough math in his spare time to leave his fake e-mail job and join a rigorous quantitative PoliSci program.

How many hours of intensive study do you estimate it would take Bob to get to the level of mathematical prowess of an average incoming first-year grad student in such a program?

Claude seems to ballpark that number at 600-800 hours (200-300 to relearn math up to Calculus, and 400-500 hours for undergrad math). To me this feels like a real lowball (there are like half a dozen videogames where I have twice as many hours, surely learning an extremely valuable skill must take a lot more time and effort – otherwise everyone would do it, right?), but maybe math is that easy, and Bob, like many people, just never really tried.

Mental fatigue is a real thing. If you only count hours spent actually running then training for a marathon doesn't seem that impressive.

Spending 2 hours a night and 6 hours a day on weekends learning math is going to be exhausting. But it's pretty easy to do that with video games.

Meet TollBooth - graduate of a quantitative PoliSci undergrand program at an Ivy.

Math is important, but you're going to have to be more specific with your end goal. If you want to be a professional academic then you'll need to have a transcript with math courses on it. Community colleges are fine up to multivariable calculus, then you probably need to pay for your local state school's courses (a lot of these programs are online). But then you'll also need to show a reasonable polisci ability as well. That's actually harder. Not because of the courser material (lol) but because those programs run on prestige and credentialism. An online PoliSci degree from some no name school is worse less than zero because they'll charge you tuition. And Top-50 PoliSci undergrads aren't usually in the habit of bringing in curious almost 30 year olds (although so might be if you show you hustled on your math, idk). There are some Continuing Education programs that are actually legit, but you have to be a careful. Harvard Extension school is pretty much Coursera.

But do you want to be a professional academic? That seems lame as hell. If you want to do quant geopolitics for a living - build a GitHub portfolio where you apply your mathematical ability to real world data using code. You're showing off a full-stack of skills there; hard math, PoliSci concepts, and moderate software engineering capability. You can probably get a job with one of the research firms (think Cambridge Associates). From there you can build a professional network and work your way to a think tank or one of the smaller (and less known) research firms who do risk analysis for bank etc. I mean, this is a 10+ year progression, but its doable.

But again, what's the goal? A quantitative polisci masters is kind of weird degree to get unless you're already in that industry (risk analysis, geopolitical analysis, military-industrial capacity analysis (probably filed under Operations Research a lot)).

What insanely complex math do you use in ‘quantitative political science’ on a regular basis? Even most reputatable geopolitical think tanks are running what is essentially babby’s first ML / journeyman python data science and combining it with undergrad lukewarm political science level commentary. At the best places it’s combined with academic prof tier commentary churned out with low motivation and contributed to by ex military and state department people retiring where the easy money is.

What insanely complex math do you use in ‘quantitative political science’ on a regular basis?

Zero, for 95%+ of the industry. Please don't confuse me for OP, however. I wasn't trying to imply you need high level math to be a geopolitical/risk practitioner. That's why I said "lol just spin up github" in my response.

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you do with your degree?

I know one guy who studied PoliSci, presumably because he grew up in a State Department household on the other side of the planet. We met because he was switching to engineering. As far as I know he’s at a major defense contractor now.

I don't use my degree at all.

First few years after graduating, I did startup land stuff. Back then, it was like being paid to be a YouTube podcast bro. I hated it. So I started consulting because it was prestigious and good old fashioned work. I hated it. Went to a F500. Way better, but I realized success there was 20+ years of politicking. Hooked back up with some solid engineers I knew from wayback. We built a thingy (won't get into details because it's too specific and I'd risk a doxx) and made a bunch of money.

Now, I still don't use my degree at all.

Can Bob afford a tutor? The instructional and executive functioning value there is huge (with a good tutor).

In particular, I think they could really help you know what is worth studying. E.g. probably you can skip trig identities, and you can certainly skip Kramer's rule.

Even better, find someone in the polisci program and ask them what you actually need to know. There is probably a big difference in what you need to know to get the job, and what you need to know to do the job. I'd focus on the former.

surely learning an extremely valuable skill must take a lot more time and effort – otherwise everyone would do it, right?)

Absolutely not. People procrastine and are lazy as hell. There are many skills that are relatively easy to learn but the learning is unpleasant enough most people just don't do it

Are you Bob?

It’s impossible to give a universal estimate, people learn math at such wildly different rates that there’s no point in speculating. If Bob has all the prereqs met for whatever the program is then Bob should be good. Bob can just learn things as Bob goes. Perhaps Bob should just read the sorts of journal articles that quantitative political scientists tend to read, and if Bob encounters a mathematical concept that Bob is unfamiliar with, then Bob can go look it up and do a deep dive on that particular concept. That would give Bob a series of concrete, relevant goals to focus on.

Ok, so college algebra at my local community college is 5 hours a week for a sixteen week semester, and let’s approximately double that time for homework/out of class study/whatever. That’s 160 hours to get through high school minimum math, minus geometry. Precalculus is a four hour/week class, so that’s 96 hours. So for everything up to but not including calculus that’s 256 hours, towards the high side of Claude’s estimate. If we assume that calculus is approximately the same amount as getting ready for it, we’ve blown Claude’s estimate out of the water. But, Claude’s estimate seems reasonably accurate for solely class time, so that’s probably what it counted.

I find your estimate fair, if you take into account that Bob is not at the level of a skilled mathematician or programmer, for whom advanced math is bread and butter. A STEM graduate working in the profession can spend about 3-6 hours a day on math before getting tired, but for Bob two hours a day would probably be his limit. Time estimate is not as important as ability to use this time efficiently and meaningfully.

About 95% of programmers never use math beyond basic arithmetics. Exception is when you have to deal with physics and such (games, simulations, etc.) and crypto (but regular programmer would never ever roll their own crypto, they'd use a pre-made library), or maybe financial calculations. Of course, if you consider algorithms, computation theory and things like graph theory "advanced math", it's different but it's not the same kind of math as calculus or linear algebra are, I think.

Yes, graph theory is math, or at least the math department that gave me a doctorate for a dissertation in graph theory seems to think so :)

So, what are you reading?

Still on Future Shock and Committing Journalism. Starting Galactic Patrol, in the Lensman series.

All Cormac McCarthy.

Finished my re-read of The Road, and alright, I have no complaints. It's a book alright. Very good.

Also finished The Passenger. I still maintain that it went over my head, but I found it beautiful nonwithstanding. So much so that I immediately bought the sequel, Stella Maris, on finishing it. Currently reading that one.

I'm not sure why I like McCarthy that much. I suspect it's just some kind of autistic imprinting rather than the actual quality of the literature; after all I'm not even an Anglo and I have no business caring about Anglo literature as much as I do. And my interest is probably a lot more shallow than I think. What do I really know?

Still, if there were something like a Complete McCarthy Collection in good shape and boxing, I'd buy it in a heartbeat and happily starve for a month.

Discovered a good source of audiobooks so suddenly my book consumption skyrocketed. Listening to Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth at the moment. It’s a hell of a book.

Also slowly progressing through a physical copy of God Emperor of Dune. Things became pretty weird at the end of the last book and has no sign of slowing down.

Is the source of audiobooks... paid? pirated?

I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo and enjoying it a lot. It feels very much like a sort of shlocky Hollywood action movie dressed up as literature, but like in a good way. A man is wronged by his friends, imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, escapes, becomes rich and plots his elaborate revenge on his enemies? I can just imagine Dumas whispering "hell yeah" to himself constantly while writing this.

If he was writing today, he’d probably be publishing on RoyalRoad.

I read it last year, there is a good rendition of it on librivox, silly Italian accent is a huge value add. Very enjoyable, though somewhat lenghty.

I've been enjoying some Verner Vinge (RIP to a real one who predicted the Singularity but died potentially just a few years short of seeing it). A Fire Upon The Deep and a Deepness in The Sky were pretty good. It's a damn shame it's just a trilogy, I was hoping for more to chew through.

Also happily enjoying Collen McCullough's Masters of Rome series, ah, she's a very good writer, and it's time to truly grapple with Caesar's adventures.

Verner Vinge is my main man. You should also try some of the audio books made from his works. Works great when you want to have your gaze spaced out looking at the horizon.

I think average productivity in the US will take a dive over the next month. For the 2.5 weeks before Nov 5, much of the public will be psychologically consumed by election uncertainties that distract them from doing quality work, and then for another week or two afterward, the losing side will mope while the winning side get drunk. I don't think the impact will be limited to "bullshit" knowledge jobs that don't produce much tangible outcome anyways, but extend to all sectors. For instance, I predict restaurant meals will taste worse, surgeons will make more mistakes, etc.

Thoughts? Do you anticipate any election impact on your own productivity over the next 30 days?

Instinct: no way! Most people don’t care about the election any more than they care about the Super Bowl. Internet political forums are a hell of a selection bias.

On second thought: I need to get back to work instead of moderating said forums.

But how could this be measured? Stock market? Number of malpractice lawsuits? Firings? Place your bets.

The only impacts I recall in 2020 were a few local businesses whose owners were arrested on Jan 6th. Other than that I didn't notice any disruptions.

A lot of people will have some stuff occupying their mind and causing their work productivitity to suffer anyhow. If it's not politics then it's personal life stuff, hobbyist drama, sports, celebrity shit, UFOs or whatever.

For politically obsessive terminally online weirdos, our habits will remain the same. For normies, they will be annoyed by political ad but otherwise remain unchanged. There is only a small, niche group of people that actually care, but aren't already enmeshed in this nonsense constantly.

Time to short the market then bud.

I probably would spend less time reading the news than usual, until the election. I don't believe anything short of super-dramatic things is going to happen to change anything - there's probably no dirt on Trump left that could be discovered (if it were possible, they'd do it in the last 8 years), no dirt on Harris, even if discovered (which is unlikely), will be published anyway widely enough to make any effect, and if something like somebody dying happens, I'd hear about it somehow. So, reading any news from now till the election is completely pointless.

I kinda doubt it. I think it’s a hobby of the too-online crowd, but I’m not convinced that the median American is all that interested in the election. I’m not hearing much discussion of the election in the real world, I’m not hearing ordinary Americans discussing things like Project 2025, trans people, immigrants or their culinary habits, etc. I’m also seeing a lot fewer signs around my neighborhood, bumper stickers, roadside homemade signs, hats, shirts, etc. honestly I’m not sure anyone else is interested. The only real conversation I’ve had offline about the candidates was right after the first assassination attempt, and that was mostly a short conversation of “OMG, did you hear someone shot at Trump.” “Yeah, that’s really weird.” That’s it.

Given this level of interest, I think you’re not going to see a lot of people consumed with election uncertainty to the point of a measurable impact on productivity. It’s not really something I’m seeing a lot of people thinking about or talking about or anything like that. I see more sports talk around me than election talk.

I was unfavorably compared to Kamala Harris on a customer call. (I was typing and talking at the same time and started to say word-salad.) I think people mostly avoid talking about politics when out in groups, but it is on people's minds.

I may be wrong of course but the reason most don't discuss these issues is because they want (if only unconsciously) keep the fragile illusion that all of their surrounding peers hold the same views as they themselves hold, regardless of how tenuous. Broaching such topics in the current climate has the potential to create a bloodthirsty ideological combatant or lifelong enemy, where before there was just Rusty, the guy at the Hardee's on Tuesdays.

If not gone, certainly dormant are the days when healthy political discussion was a way to pass the time. I was at a group gathering recently where when someone brought up the election I said offhandedly that I would really prefer a Trump to Harris (though I was clear I did not in any way like Trump) and it was as if I had said I believed the moon was made of cheese. All eyes turned toward me with what seemed a sudden constriction of pupils and sphincters. It was a beer garden however and Bacchus hates a serious tone, so the boat eventually righted itself and we carried on (on far different topics.)

I mean it’s certainly possible, but then again we didn’t seem to have that problem with other elections. Even with it being contentious in 2016 and 2020, people still talked about current events to some degree, and people did put out yard signs, at least around me. There are now more sports flags flying than Trump or Harris combined. There’s not really much tension that I’ve seen, just that it’s not something people are interested in. They’re also not really following news. It’s just not something in the air, or anything that people seem dialed in on. It might make a difference where you are, I’m in Missouri which is pretty conservative.

No doubt--I'm in Japan, so there's that. I don't have a feel for what it's like on the ground in the US.

I think it won't matter because most people are already indulging their digital addiction to the max anyway. (Looks at self). Lately I've begun to notice how many people are looking at their phones while driving. It's pretty crazy.

Boring election coverage can't compete with Tiktok.

We are doomed.

Who's "we"?

The car in front of you as you posted this.

I was thinking you and me specifically, but others are welcome to join.

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