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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34280 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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I think honestly it’s one of the things I like about the modern era that’s most bizarre about the current crop of elite. Not only do these guys speak an odd dialect of lawyer, but they’re fantastically uneducated about how anything is actually done or made. And it is off putting to average people because they don’t hide behind statistics and spreadsheets. They do things, make things, and watch or play games.

It’s like if I had a bookie describe the last game of the World Series, and then a plumber from Brooklyn. They’d both be describing the same events but only one guy would have described a baseball game. The other guy is describing a graph describing the baseball game. And I think that’s actually why the elites running the systems cannot fix things. The old deep knowledge of the processes their graphs and lawyered language describe is gone. They’ve never done any of that kind of work, nor, increasingly do they even know anyone who does that work. Without knowing how the game of baseball actually is played, without knowing what is going on on the field, moneyball simply doesn’t work.

And I think this is what people are reacting to. Trump at least comes across as the guy who actually understands baseball instead of baseball statistics. They have plenty of real life experience of working with idiots who only see the world through screens. Those people might be educated, as in having attended a lot of very expensive colleges and having a couple of $100K sheepskins on the wall. But talk to anyone in the trenches of any operation and it’s pretty universal that the spreadsheet jockeys often make arbitrary decisions that make their job harder to impossible. The general problem for a lot of ground level managers is to make it look like they’re following the new, stupid procedures dictated by a spreadsheet jockey, while still getting productive work actually done. They’re used to idiots who talk like Harris, and they know her practical knowledge of the stuff she has policies for is precisely as bad as the local regional manager o& their corporate masters— she looks at graphs and knows the graphs go up if you do a thing.

I’m not sure that it’s a communication problem at all. The problem for the elites is that the culturally coded language they use bespeaks of their ignorance. Nobody takes them seriously because not only do they mistake their maps as territory, but it’s often the case that the6 have no idea there’s a real territory out there being impacted. We can just make fossil fuels a thing of the past, without using nuclear. Just look at my graph.

I think this has also enshittened movies. When I watch movies made before 20 years ago, they seem like they were made by people who had life experience outside of filmmaking and celebrity scenes. Which is maybe strange, because Hollywood has been very nepotistic since the moment it came into being. But for whatever reason, Hollywood used to pull in more talent who had experience with life outside movies. There were soldiers, blue collar people, hippies, wild politically unorthodox guys like John Milius, and all sorts of other kinds of people who got into the film industry. When I watch modern film, on the other hand, I often feel like I am watching something made by people whose life experience consists of watching other movies and going to parties in New York and Los Angeles.

I could be biased, maybe my political opinions are filtering into my perception of movies. But this is how it feels to me.

I think it's part of the optimization of everything. Increasingly, if you're about X, you need to have been about X for as long as possible. People who are constantly going from one line of work or lifestyle to another are slipping through the cracks and becoming sort of invisible, on the outside of success looking in. It's associated with being kind of a loser, relative to decades past. Indeed it's kind of a Boomerism, to have worked in e.g. a department store and then one day a guy comes in who makes movies, you hit it off, and a few years later you're firmly ensconced in the movie industry with some success.

While I have mixed feelings about Oliver Stone, I have to concede that at least his confrontational "war is hell" movies about Vietnam actually drew on his personal experiences of serving there. Which leads me to an interesting question - have there been any films about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan written or directed by people who took part in said invasions?

Closest I've seen is Generation Kill, a miniseries, which was written by an embedded journalist, had a dozen of the guys from the unit on as instructors and producers, and one or two even played themselves (Rudy Reyes).

The Hurt Locker was written by someone who was in Iraq, though as an embedded journalist. Jarhead is based on a memoir written by the titular Marine.

I read The Hurt Locker, it was pretty good. Although I was really talking about movies etc. rather than books - did anyone involved in making the adaptation actually go to Iraq?

The Hurt Locker movie wasn't an adaptation.

Sorry, I just realised I'm mixing it up with Generation Kill.

I often feel like I am watching something made by people whose life experience consists of watching other movies

I have this thought every time I watch a movie directed by John Carney. It's as if he's an alien who's never met a human being face to face and only learned how they talk and behave from watching movies. Oppenheimer gave me the same feeling.

I keep coming back to this article by a guy talking about the National Book Awards, and how they've become increasingly insular and self-referential over time. He talks about how previous generations of award-winning books were written by people who had actual practical "lived experience" of the things they were writing about (e.g. Hemingway actually fought in a war), often without having ever attended college. Increasingly, the people winning or being nominated for these awards are people who hold MFAs in creative writing and have never lived outside of the academy for any significant period of time. They're books written by people who learned everything they know about life from reading other books, rather than from the primary sources of actually doing and experiencing things firsthand.

Pointedly, he notes that previous generations of award-winning books often had mass populist appeal and were just as widely read by ordinary people and educated people. Increasingly, National Book Award-winning novels are novels you've never heard of: they're written by and for MFA graduates.

He talks about how previous generations of award-winning books were written by people who had actual practical "lived experience" of the things they were writing about (e.g. Hemingway actually fought in a war), often without having ever attended college.

I think the valorization of "lived experience" for writers and artists (which, in practice, typically means the valorization of a specific kind of experience, to the exclusion of others - traveling to distant places, exposing oneself to physical danger, etc) is misguided.

Consider this post, which linked to this graph, where people were asked how many unarmed black men they thought were killed by police in a single year. About one in five "very liberal" respondents said that the number was 10,000 or more - but the actual number is nowhere near that high. Now imagine that someone has the "lived experience" of watching their unarmed black male friend get shot by a police officer. Perhaps he hears one or two anecdotes from friends that they also knew people who had similar experiences. We can imagine that this experience might affect him greatly; we can imagine that he might start to think that this experience is more common than it really is, and he might go on to write an award-winning book about it, and this book might produce more people like those 1-in-5 Very Liberal respondents who think that police shootings of unarmed black men are much more common than they actually are. In this case, we would want his lived experience to at least be tempered by some "book learnin'". Otherwise, he might go on to write a book that was quite politically deleterious. There are some truths that can never be arrived at even with a lifetime of "lived experience" - there's no getting around the need for data, abstract reasoning, the need for knowledge of other people's experiences so you can find the common patterns.

Or consider all the things that are in principle impossible for anyone to have direct experience of. If you want to, say, write a book that deals with the historical connections between contemporary wokeism and Stalinism, or maybe the French Revolution - you're going to need to read other books for that. Eventually, historical events become so distant that no one alive could have experienced them.

That’s not the value of lived experience in narratives. The value of having fought in a war (Hemingway for example) is that he understands the way war is in the real world and can thus create characters who feel like they’re fighting a war instead of characters that think and act like people who make movies think people in wars behave. Or if you want to write about life in a black ghetto, it’s going to feel more real if written by someone with at least some idea, even second hand, of what that life is actually like. There’s a phrase in philosophy that I think captures the idea. It is like something to be a person in any situation you come up with. It’s like something to be poor, or Palestinian, or a cop, or a soldier. And stories become much better is the author at least has some idea of what those things are actually like, rather than going off TV/movie tropes, or stereotypical ideas, or other sources with no real connection to the thing being described. It’s a fidelity issue. A copy of a copy of a copy eventually looks nothing like the original.

You all may be interested in this Critical Drinker video: Why Modern Movies Suck: They're Written by Children

My point is not that having lived experience will lead you to have a more accurate picture of how the world works. I'm saying that if you have lived experience of X, if you're writing a book about X, then all things being equal it will probably sound more convincing than a book about X written by someone who has never experienced X firsthand.

Could a novel written by an underprivileged black youth about his experiences growing up in the hood contribute to a progressive's erroneous impression that unprovoked police shootings of unarmed black men are widespread? Sure. But all things being equal, I would expect such a novel to be a lot more affecting and convincing than a novel on the same topic written by a creative writing MFA from a wealthy family who's never even set foot in the hood.

If you want to, say, write a book that deals with the historical connections between contemporary wokeism and Stalinism, or maybe the French Revolution - you're going to need to read other books for that.

Sure, but even having broadly comparable lived experience might be more beneficial to the creative process than just pure research. The experience of fighting a battle in Baghdad in 2003 is unlike the experience of fighting a battle in the Somme in 1916, but I would expect that the two experiences have far more in common with each other than they have with the experience of sitting in a warm cottage with a pot of tea reading a book about the battle of the Somme.

I'm saying that if you have lived experience of X, if you're writing a book about X, then all things being equal it will probably sound more convincing than a book about X written by someone who has never experienced X firsthand.

This depends on the readers. If both the writer and readers have experience in X, then the readers can recognize things from their own experience in the written work, and thus think it is realistic. But it could also happen that the writer has experience in X and the readers have none, and the reality of X is so far removed from the readers' own experience that they find a realistic depiction of X unbelievable.

FWIW I've had a very similar thought/possible post about TV sitting on the back burner. While there are the rare few gems a lot of the recent streaming fair has left me wondering where all the adults went. Not just on screen but in the production department so many choices that left me feeling like "this should've been an easy win, how did you fumble it this badly?"

Yeah, I agree. Especially watching shows from the 50s and 60s, where a lot of the creators were WWII vets (Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, etc.), is a huge contrast to today where most of the PMC wouldn't be caught dead in uniform.

No, because I noticed the same. The people making films today all come from the PMC for the most part and know no other lifestyle. It’s also just that in the 1950s society was much more economically integrated in the sense that the emerging PMC was very likely to grow up in neighborhoods and attend schools with the working class. Most of the generation that marched off to college after the war (or sent their kids to college) grew up working factory, sales, or skilled labor jobs or at least knew people who did. Modern elites are much less likely to have any significant contact with blue collar types, less likely to have served in the military, etc. so what they know about war, blue collar work, small towns, religion, and so on, come through narrative fiction.

And I think that’s actually why the elites running the systems cannot fix things.

Fix what? Elites developed the policy that solved the 2008 mortgage crisis as the rest of the world struggled. The zero-interest rate policy and QE has since been copied by other central banks. It was not elites who were buying those mc mansions with 0-money down. Same for Covid vaccines.

Elon Musk is technically is an elite and has contributed greatly to society. Society is not going to solve difficult problems like space travel using only ordinary people. Difficult coordination problems require elites. Sometimes the public isn't always owed an explanation or it would be against the interests of national security, like the Manhattan Project.

Elon Musk is technically is an elite and has contributed greatly to society. Society is not going to solve difficult problems like space travel using only ordinary people. Difficult coordination problems require elites. Sometimes the public isn't always owed an explanation or it would be against the interests of national security, like the Manhattan Project.

Dollars to donuts Elon had a summer job shovelling shit or picking apples at some point -- Kamala seems to be kind of an early adopter on this sort of thing being Just Not Done for aspiring white-collar climbers, to the point where not only does she need to make up a story about working at McDonalds, McDonalds is the shittiest job she can even think of to lie about.

Trump probably never had to literally lay bricks or whatever, but based on how much he seems to enjoy hanging around with garbagemen and workers at his hotels, it's a good bet that he's done quite a bit of shit-shooting with the pointy end of his construction crews as well.

Maybe he does a better job pretending to fit in with those jobs or appears more convincing.

I dunno when McDonald's become the epitome of the bad job. I can think of many jobs that are way worse ... even many people's ideas of 'fun' (e.g. running a marathon ) seem way less pleasant than a shit at McDonald's .

a shit at McDonald's

Say working at McDonald’s isn’t that bad all you want; your subconscious just gave you away.

According to his biography:

Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs

He may claim to be self-made, but parent's name is blue on wikipedia.

In 1979, [Maye Musk] divorced Errol Musk. Two years later, Elon, who was about 10 at the time, decided to live with his father, as he had the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a computer, things which Maye could not afford to give the children as a single parent.

In 1979, [Maye Musk] divorced Errol Musk. Two years later, Elon, who was about 10 at the time, decided to live with his father, as he had the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a computer, things which Maye could not afford to give the children as a single parent.

I thought the right could meme?

The right's memes will not be used against the right's house.

Maye Musk, like Quentin Tarantino's father, has a blue name because of her kid, not the other way around.

I’m still not convinced that she lied about working at McDonald’s. I think it more likely that she lied on her resume about not working at McDonald’s. Of course, that shows not just ignorance, but shame at being associated with the working classes.

Not listing a job on your resume is not “lying”. It’s totally normal and acceptable to omit meanial labor jobs when applying for professional jobs.

It's trivially easy to prove, you can see all of your work history on ssa.gov.

So either she doesn't want to engage, no one on her staff has realized this paper trail exists, or she really didn't work there. Or she worked under the table.

I had two jobs in the 90s that I got W-2s for and paid taxes on that don’t show up on my SSA work history. I’m currently in the process of trying to prove I worked these jobs for the SS benefits when all the paperwork has long since been shredded. Totally plausible to me that she worked there and can’t prove it.

Small businesses? Totally possible that they pocketed the deducted payroll tax and never reported to SSA. Many such cases.

Yep. This is possible.

There's a theory that she did it in Montreal, right? Doubt you'd find that on ssa.gov (or want to publicize it).

She specifically claimed that it was a particular McDonalds in the Bay area, didn't she?

Yes but at the same time if she did work at a McDonalds in Montreal shifting the local to the states seems like a natural "bending of the truth" given how her campaign has been trying hard to downplay her family's ties to Trudeau and the wider Canadian left.

yes, you're right.

Elon Musk is technically is an elite and has contributed greatly to society.

Which is the more central example of our Elites as a class: Musk, or the management of Boeing? Would you say that Boeing has demonstrated a solid track record of solving difficult problems?

The planes fly, don't they?

Except when they don't

The rockets don't, though.

Well, speaking from personal experience, the management at Boeing spans quite a wide social demographic. And yes, they do have a history of solving difficult problems, but the current management is a different set of people than those problem solvers, being made up mostly of SoCal Defense industry or Jack Welch era GE castoffs who's primary competancy is spreadsheet optimization. The hard charging problem solvers were mostly made up of people like Musk or tech industry types- move fast and break things used to be a very valid approach to aerospace, as long as your breakage was confined to flight test only.

Like everything, it's hit or miss. Elites being necessary doesn't imply all elites are good or competent.

OK, now that we know some elites are bad and incompetent, who gets to decide when the public is owed an explanation? The elites themselves? The ones you just said are "hit or miss"? The Dalai Lama? Some Guru? The Bishop of Rome? Greta Thunberg?

The decision that was reached in the enlightenment is that the public does; the actions of elites who serve the public are accountable to the public. And I'm all ears for criticisms of the enlightenment, but you're coming right up against the very reasons people even wanted democratic rule in the first place.

All i am saying is that elite are necessary. People overreading into my comment to mean they are better, and heaven forbid some bad people are promoted, as this this doesn't happen for non-elite roles too or anything else in life.

Alright, let's back up a step.

Fix what?

There's a problem where our current system of elites take a thing, fuck it up beyond all belief, and suffer zero consequences. I've mentioned the Boeing space program as an example, but we could use education or the economy or the criminal justice system or the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan. This problem has gotten pretty bad, to the point that it is at least arguably jeopardizing the stability of our nation. That's the fix I and I think other people here are claiming is needed.

Sure, we need elites. There's always going to be a need for talented leadership. But I think there's a pretty strong argument that our current leadership is not in fact talented. And it seems to me that the problem isn't just that they're "hit or miss". The problem is that they've demonstrated that they can consistently miss for multiple decades running with zero consequences for them and disastrous consequences for us.

All i am saying is that elite are necessary.

Are they though? Our rather are the bulk of our current crop neccesary? How much real value is there in spreadsheet optimization? If 1 in 10 Boeing executives were Thanos-snapped out of existence would the Airline industry be changed in any meaningful way? What about a quarter or even half of them?

How to fix the Ivy Leagues: require every student to have held a non-intern job earning no more than 2x minimum wage for their locale for no less than six months.

The generation of elites currently in charge and screwing up (Boomers and early Xs, except in Silicon Valley where success comes younger) were teenagers in the 1980s when it was expected that young PMC members worked menial jobs. (I am younger than that I didn't because I wrangled an engineering summer job - and even that involved shop-floor work - but the majority of my contemporaries at one of the top private schools in the UK did). This is still the generation where more CEOs have worked for McDonalds than any other company.

The Silicon Valley elites who being touted as more competent than other elites were more likely to have been hacking on their startups (or ideas that didn't pan out before they started their startup) at the age when the parents would have been waiting tables. So I don't think "elites didn't wait tables in university any more" is the problem.

The thing that has changed is that elite careers are increasingly unlikely to involve leading non-elites. My grandfather was an officer in WW2, and his father had been an officer in WW1. (Even my working-class maternal grandfather had been an NCO in India). My father's first graduate job was as a shift manager in a factory. The only people I have had to manage are younger versions of myself, and when I was on the graduate job market there was a major ugh filed attached to jobs like manufacturing industry or commercial banking where you would have to be a hands on manager of line workers (with the military seen as an exception, but almost nobody from Cambridge went into the military). You can go through 6-9 months on the burger line (split across three summer jobs) while only developing a superficial relationship with co-workers who are unlike you and you both know it. You can't command a platoon and only develop a superficial relationship with your troops.

My parents in the Soviet Union were made to spend the summers of their university years helping out with the potato harvest somewhere down south, for a similar purpose. Funny how the valence of these ideas evolves.

Just accept the top student from every school in the country. There's about 20k high schools and the same number of admissions each year.

Failure modes:

  • tiger moms running a private school for their child. Solution: restrict the offer to schools with at least as many graduates as the smallest public school in the state
  • tiger moms transferring their kid to a public school for the last semester. This is not a problem, as there isn't enough public schools for all of them next to major cities. If the parents are willing to move to Podunk even for a year, I say let their kid in.

The biggest failure mode is that any legible policy like "one student from each school" makes it harder to cook the books to admit affirmative action students.

The silver spoon people from what I have observed are sometimes more humble or nicer than the pulled-myself-up people. People have it reversed for some reason, maybe due to pop culture. The silver spoon people know they are already at a big advantage starting out in life, so they understand that luck plays a huge role. A McDonald's stint will not change this. The pulled-myself-up people already had stints in bad jobs. It's quite common for people who start at the lower rungs and then move to the top to become detached, not those who start at the top.

I agree about old money being nicer, but, well, a big chunk of it is just selection on people hard enough to succeed.

Also, as a tradesman, I can say that very wealthy people are generally pretty nice(they don't get where they are by making people hate them, after all), often quite generous, and usually understanding and intelligent. Their professional servants are... not. Butlers, high end restaurant managers, country club highers up, high end chefs and hotel managers, etc are typically awful. Whether this reflects the very wealthy behaving differently in private and shit rolls downhill or the personality type that goes into this stuff I don't know.

I would guess that those jobs (butler, housekeeper etc.) need a lot of strictness and attention to detail, to produce the appearance that everything just sorts itself out. Like putting on makeup very carefully to look like you aren’t wearing makeup. It would make sense for them to be sticklers.

I think there are also social dynamics involved. If you’re working those kind of jobs, you can’t socialise with your employers because that’s not how it works, and your underlings don’t want to socialise with you because you’re their boss and a stickler. So it can be very isolating.

I agree with the observation, but not the reason. I'd say it's more like: it's easy to be nice when life is nice and easy. That, and while the hypothetical job pays few dollars, it comes with a chance at Harvard per six months worked - an excellent hourly rate.

A better way to fix the Ivies would be to ban legacy admissions.

But really, that would just eliminate the Ivies, as the whole point of them is for the children of uber-elites to network with other children of uber-elites (and a few token minorities so the brochures don’t look too white) in the company of experts who can connect them to major industries. They’re not looking for smart people, specifically, they’re looking for high-IQ go-getters who are so type A that their type A-ness is literally more pronounced than their IQ. They’re not looking for nerds, they’re looking for chads. That’s why they cling insistently to “holistic admissions”, because it’s important to them that their admits aren’t just smart, but gifted in many other ways.

I would much rather we separate the finishing schools for elite children from our institutions of knowledge, but things are they way they are for the simple reason that knowledge isn’t power; power is knowledge. Everything is kayfabe and the humanities are word games, which is why the only fields who have major institutions that are looking for nerds lay in STEM, where “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

as the whole point of them is for the children of uber-elites to network with other children of uber-elites

I've heard this phrased as something like "merit laundering". Harvard et al. reserve part of the class for their primary clientele (uber-elites) and part of the class for the actual best students (IMO medalists, etc.) to maintain their legitimacy. They grade inflate and then everyone's resume line looks roughly the same coming out.

In this context, their aversion to non-holistic admissions makes sense. The intelligent, motivated, but not particularly exceptional kid with perfect SAT/GPA and a list of strategically selected, exaggerated extracurriculars who goes to Harvard only to eventually settle down as a private practice dermatologist in the suburbs contributes minimally to their true goal.

or even better, companies should stop requiring degrees for everything unless the job necessitates it , like being a doctor

Wealthy parents will gladly have their kid work at McDonald’s for 6 months to go to Harvard, that wouldn’t stop anyone.

McDonald's would build a restaurant near Harvard in a wealthy area and the manager (probably an elite who would usually not actually be present at the restaurant -- some middle class schlub would be hired as assistant manager to actually run things) would in practice only require well-connected prospective Harvard student employees to show up on a single day in their 6 month shift and excuse all other absences. It would just become another node in the elite influence and favor trading network. You would need a powerful sovereign of some sort to actually impose this on the rich and well-connected.

I don’t think the idea is to stop anyone, but rather have them do non abstract work like flipping burgers and learn the culture and average intelligence of the public and fast food coworkers rather than remain in their high IQ bubble

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