Slate Star Scratchpad

shlevy:

slatestarscratchpad:

shlevy:

@slatestarscratchpad:

Yes, I know my opinions are weird, but do you have any point besides “Ha ha, look, someone believes a weird thing, let’s all make fun of him?”

So I do think the thing you were responding to was completely unconstructive and, at most generous, relied on an implicit “well everyone knows” kind of argument, but I’m not sure why you jumped to “the implicit argument is obviously that this is weird and we should make fun of it”.

I’ve seen this assumption jump up more and more lately, and it rarely seems like a fair reading of the criticisms being discussed. Yes, there absolutely are people who make fun of weird ideas solely on account of their weirdness without any consideration of their possible validity, but that doesn’t mean any criticism of a weird idea, or even any bad criticism of a weird idea (which, to be clear, the critique you’re responding to is) is criticism of the ideas weirdness as such.

I think what you’re calling “relies on an implicit everyone knows argument” is what I’m calling attacking it just because it’s weird. If everyone believes X, but I believe not X, and he makes fun of me for that - ie specifically because I believe something nobody else believes - it seems like by definition he’s making fun of me because my belief is weird. How else do you interpret it?

I think you’re maybe using “weird” confusingly here. It sounds like you’re pushing back against people arguing against ideas solely because they’re unusual and strange when you say “making fun of me because my belief is weird”, which is very different from arguing against ideas that they assume everyone knows are wrong/ridiculous

Again, I’m not sure what the distinction is. A belief which everyone knows is wrong/ridiculous will be weird almost by definition.

Maybe there’s some sort of cosmic weirdness as defined in number of bits it takes to specify or something, but in human terms, weirdness is defined by social ostracization.

shlevy:

@slatestarscratchpad:

Yes, I know my opinions are weird, but do you have any point besides “Ha ha, look, someone believes a weird thing, let’s all make fun of him?”

So I do think the thing you were responding to was completely unconstructive and, at most generous, relied on an implicit “well everyone knows” kind of argument, but I’m not sure why you jumped to “the implicit argument is obviously that this is weird and we should make fun of it”.

I’ve seen this assumption jump up more and more lately, and it rarely seems like a fair reading of the criticisms being discussed. Yes, there absolutely are people who make fun of weird ideas solely on account of their weirdness without any consideration of their possible validity, but that doesn’t mean any criticism of a weird idea, or even any bad criticism of a weird idea (which, to be clear, the critique you’re responding to is) is criticism of the ideas weirdness as such.

I think what you’re calling “relies on an implicit everyone knows argument” is what I’m calling attacking it just because it’s weird. If everyone believes X, but I believe not X, and he makes fun of me for that - ie specifically because I believe something nobody else believes - it seems like by definition he’s making fun of me because my belief is weird. How else do you interpret it?

jeysiec:

slatestarscratchpad:

jeysiec:

I guess I just find it gross that a psychologist like @slatestarscratchpad is effectively engaging in societal victim-blaming.

You’re a psychologist, man! Do you really have to sit there and wonder why abuse victims, bullying victims, and other victims of societal mistreatment don’t want to play fucking pattycake with their abusers?

A gigantic chunk of why I have chronic depression, low self-esteem, and a host of other issues, is spending my time either getting the same punishment that people who abused me got, or being told I have to “be the better person” and be nice to someone abusing me while they in turn get a slap on the wrist or often nothing at all for abusing me.

My family situation is basically “my mother emotionally abuses me, I run around trying to nicely ask her to stop doing it and appease her, she just continues emotionally abusing me because she goes ‘don’t like it there’s the door’ in response to asking nicely and always thinks up excuses to not be happy with anything I do to appease her”.

My school situation was getting physically assaulted by other classmates, given detention/suspension/other punishments right along with the people who assaulted me, and being told I was a “whiny crybaby who deserved what I got” whenever I asked the teachers to intervene before a smackdown started.

My work situation is a long list of doing my best to appease my bosses by being a hardworking and perfect worker, and getting terrible pay and working conditions in return.

My home situation was spending time dealing with a landlord who refused to do maintenance around the house to the point of things being so broken they were endangering mine and my mother’s health and then threatening me with eviction (just me, not my mother) whenever I asked him to fix anything.

My social situation is watching all of those general categories of things happen to other people over and over again same as they happened to me.

My political situation is watching conservatives do much the same to large numbers of oppressed and low status people same as they happened to me.

Give me something other than victim-blaming people being mistreated for being tired of trying to appease their abusers. Do you tell your patients who deal with abuse or bullying “Oh well, maybe if you just talked to them nicely and tried to understand where they’re coming from, they might beat/abuse/bully you less?” I seriously hope not!

Your life sounds terrible and I’m sorry. I’m very confused since you didn’t seem to claim any of the terrible things in your life have anything to do with racism. I’m not even sure if you’re a racial minority or not, but you don’t seem to relate the problems to race in any case, and I assume your mother is the same race as you? So I’m not sure why you think my post is justifying all the terrible things in your life.

All I can think of is that maybe you’re interpreting it as something like “nobody’s really evil, they’re all just misunderstood nice people”. I don’t think this is true at all, and I never said anything like it.

For example, one of the examples I gave was Eric, the greedy restaurant owner who will do anything to make a profit. I gave the example of Eric keeping minorities out of his restaurant, but if Eric were to overwork and abuse his employees, or cut hygiene to the point where people got food poisoning, or spread fake rumors about his competitors, all of those would be well within the sort of thing I would expect a greedy restaurant owner to do.

My point isn’t that Eric might be a great guy deep down, my point is “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference”. Eric doesn’t poison his customers because he has a goal of poisoning them, he poisons them because he has a goal of getting money and doesn’t care if they’re poisoned one way or the other. He’s not an other-suffering-maximizer, he’s a self-money-maximizer who doesn’t care at all about other people’s suffering. This isn’t saying he’s not evil, it’s saying this is what evil *means*.

Likewise, if Eric discriminates against black people, my first guess is that he wants money or something, discriminating helps him make money, and he just doesn’t care about black people enough to not discriminate against them. “Not caring about other people and being willing to hurt them whenever it’s convenient” seems like a pretty good definition of evil.

None of this means Eric’s customers shouldn’t be angry at him. He’s an evil person, he’s deliberately poisoned them in order to make a buck, if anger is ever justified it’s probably justified here. But if someone’s trying to prevent this from happening again, they might want to know that if they can make poisoning people less profitable, Eric will stop doing it. And if they just keep trying to convince him of how nice and likeable the restaurant customers are, this will be totally useless.

I don’t know anything about your life. Maybe all of the people being abusive to you are doing it because they hate you in particular, even if they get nothing out of it. But in most of my experience with abusers, it’s because they do get something out of it, at least psychologically if nothing else. Part of my job as a psychiatrist is to try to figure out what’s causing abusers to abuse, and then see if that cause can be stopped. For example, if an abuser’s abusing somebody because they feel powerless and abusing people makes them feel powerful, it’s to get to the root of what makes them feel powerless and see if there are ways to address that feeling.

This is the job of psychiatrists, and not of victims. Victims have no job except to deal as best they can. If it’s helpful for you to hate your abusers, go for it.

Just don’t take it out on unrelated people, ie me.

I’m not even sure if you’re a racial minority or not, but you don’t seem to relate the problems to race in any case, and I assume your mother is the same race as you? So I’m not sure why you think my post is justifying all the terrible things in your life.

Because abuse/bullying has similar causes and effects. Racism is a particular manifestation but it doesn’t change things so much that I can’t empathize or realize we all have similar suffering.

Is it really so different if I get abused/bullied because I’m poor, another person gets mistreated because they’re black, still another gets mistreated because they’re socially awkward?

In school I had kids of different races and sexes in my group of “kids who were bullied” because we were all bullied similarly despite perhaps the specific reasons being invoked for the bullying.

In my jobs I noticed that all of my coworkers had similar tales of woe caused by their low wages despite all of us being a variety of different sexes, ethnicities, religions, and so on.

When listening to kids dealing with parental abuse we all had similar tales of what we dealt with, differing in severity rather than based on what demographic we were.

I live in public housing devoted to elderly and disabled people. I see and listen to their struggles which again don’t really differ hugely based on demographics outside of “elderly and disabled”.

I empathize with BLM because I’m a white person who’s been mistreated by police and seen other white people mistreated by police.

Etc.

But if someone’s trying to prevent this from happening again, they might want to know that if they can make poisoning people less profitable, Eric will stop doing it.

And I appreciate that as a tactic.

But you’re still sitting there and shaming people if they feel like they’re being asked to care about the wallet of someone poisoning them while that person is getting no obligation to, y’know, not poison others.

Or people being poisoned asked to wait and wait and wait and wait for the person to finally maybe stop poisoning them all while, you know, still putting up passively with being poisoned.

I also can’t help but wonder “What happens if it turns out you can’t make poisoning people less profitable? Do we just have to shut up and go away and put up with being poisoned?”

For example, if an abuser’s abusing somebody because they feel powerless and abusing people makes them feel powerful, it’s to get to the root of what makes them feel powerless and see if there are ways to address that feeling.

But why doesn’t anyone ever address “how does the person being abused feel”?

Nobody seems to care how black people feel about being called thugs or shot by police. Nobody seems to care about how poor people feel about being called lazy or having their ability to survive taken away. Nobody seems to care about how Muslims feel about being called terrorists. Or how transpeople feel about being called predators and having their ability to do something as simple as use a bathroom taken away. Etc.

Or well, that’s not true. The people being hurt and the liberals you’re lecturing to be nicer and more understanding care.

But the people hurting them don’t care. Because nothing is ever done to make them care. Since any time liberals do anything that might force the people doing the hurting to care, folks like you admonish us to be nicer and more understanding. Even though the people doing the hurting have no obligation to be nicer and more understanding to us.

This whole “be nice and understand” is an incredibly one-way street. Why is that? Why shouldn’t I be mad that it’s a one-way street?

Just don’t take it out on unrelated people, ie me.

You sat there and wrote an article saying how abused people have to learn how to make nice and be more understanding to the people who abused them, even though those abusers are never once obligated to be nice and more understanding to the people they’re abusing. The fact that you’re speaking on a societal scale doesn’t change the fact that that’s what you’re doing. How are you unrelated to the topic?

Further, you sicced your white knight army on me which means I’ve been having large number of notes from multiple people showing up to respond to without the privileged benefit of having my own army or anybody at all to help or support my end of things. I don’t think you get to complain if I spend a tiny few notes your way calling you out on things.

I agree everything has similar causes. That is the whole point of my post. There is no point in talking about “racism” as distinct from all the other things that cause people to abuse people of the same race. People are just generally horrible, and sometimes it happens to people because of their race. This is the whole point of my post.

>>But you’re still sitting there and shaming people if they feel like they’re being asked to care about the wallet of someone poisoning them while that person is getting no obligation to, y’know, not poison others.

I’m not shaming anyone. The people I am *criticizing*, which I think is different, are pundits and Twitterati and everyone else who tries to interpret broad social trends and decide to exclude things from national discourse. I specifically say the sentence “I’m not saying that minorities should never be able to complain about racism”, because of long experience that anyone saying anything at all will be rounded off to that. I don’t know how to be clearer.

>> I also can’t help but wonder “What happens if it turns out you can’t make poisoning people less profitable? Do we just have to shut up and go away and put up with being poisoned?”

To quote the post, “If such people existed and made up a substantial portion of the population, liberalism becomes impossible, and we should go back to just using violence to enforce our will on the people who disagree with us.” I’m trying to argue that in some cases, there are options that are worth considering before killing the bastards.

>> Nobody seems to care how black people feel about being called thugs or shot by police.

…this is an incredibly weird definition of “nobody”. My whole point is that since *everyone* cares about this, we should try to do things that actually help this problem, instead of not helping it. To stick to your example, we know that racism isn’t responsible for this - blacks get shot at the same per-encounter rate as everyone else, and are more likely to be shot by black cops than white cops. Solutions like giving cops implicit bias tests and training them in diversity awareness have been proven not to work. What works is lowering the number of encounters, especially of black people, so that a constant per-encounter killing rate results in fewer deaths. We can do this by eg lowering the number of traffic stops. I think this is pretty consistent with what I’m saying.

>> But the people hurting them don’t care. Because nothing is ever done to make them care. Since any time liberals do anything that might force the people doing the hurting to care, folks like you admonish us to be nicer and more understanding. Even though the people doing the hurting have no obligation to be nicer and more understanding to us.

The problem with “victims can do whatever they want in order to destroy bullies” is that everyone thinks they’re a victim, especially bullies. I can’t tell you how many domestic abusers say this sort of thing: “You’re telling me I should just sit back and put up with it when she talks to me like that!?”

There’s this unfortunate tension between the Inside View and the Outside View. On the Inside View, I know I’m right and that my enemies really are bad people who need to be dealt with violently. On the Outside View, read any Klan pamphlet, and you see them saying “The black people are trying to destroy our civilization; we have to defend ourselves”, and then you get kind of uncomfortable with all this “Well, if they’re oppressing you, of course you have to kill them, it’s rude to ask you to think about it a little first.” I agree that dealing with the Klansmen involve also putting unfortunate demands on innocent victims, but I’m not sure how to prevent that except sayind “Do this, unless you’re one of the actually good people”, in which case no one will do it.

I think this is much less true in individual personal relationships, because people have society as a sanity check and so they usually have communal ideas like “abuse” to work with. I think it’s dangerous on a society-wide level precisely because society doesn’t have anything else to check its work with.

>> This whole “be nice and understand” is an incredibly one-way street. Why is that? Why shouldn’t I be mad that it’s a one-way street?

I don’t think it is. During this (short) conversation, you’ve accused me of “being gross”, “bitching and whining”, “telling innocents to passively roll over and accept being treated like dirt”, wanting bullying victims to “play fucking pattycake with their abuser”, of “sitting there and shaming people”, “siccing a white knight army on you” (by responding to a post in which you @d me), being incompetent and evil in my profession, et cetera. I don’t think I’ve ever said an unkind word to you. All I did was write a blog post saying people should try to understand other people better. The reason I’m still talking to you at all is that I assume underneath all the nastiness and abuse, you have a point. But it sure as heck seems to be a one-way street in your favor right now.

I’m not just saying this to be mean. I would describe this conversation as “you bullying me”, though obviously in a minimal way in the grand scale of things and compared to other forms of bullying. It’s possible I’m wrong, but if so, the fact that I’m wrong underscores my point that from the inside it’s hard for people to tell who’s bullying whom. I am sure you think that you’re just being a perfectly reasonable person, but the whole point of my post is that almost all meanness is done by people who think they’re being perfectly reasonable people and who think they’re just trying to protect themselves and maybe show a little well-deserved righteous anger.

>> I don’t think you get to complain if I spend a tiny few notes your way calling you out on things.

I feel like you’re saying you can be as mean to me as you want and I am not allowed to object or defend myself. I decline to continue the conversation on those terms. I think this is consistent with what I’ve been saying about accepting there’s a reason for people being hurtful, but still trying to prevent it / get away from it when it happens. I’ll read your replies so that it doesn’t look like I’m claiming the last word. If you want to talk about this in private, my address is scott@shireroth.org

jeysiec:

I guess I just find it gross that a psychologist like @slatestarscratchpad is effectively engaging in societal victim-blaming.

You’re a psychologist, man! Do you really have to sit there and wonder why abuse victims, bullying victims, and other victims of societal mistreatment don’t want to play fucking pattycake with their abusers?

A gigantic chunk of why I have chronic depression, low self-esteem, and a host of other issues, is spending my time either getting the same punishment that people who abused me got, or being told I have to “be the better person” and be nice to someone abusing me while they in turn get a slap on the wrist or often nothing at all for abusing me.

My family situation is basically “my mother emotionally abuses me, I run around trying to nicely ask her to stop doing it and appease her, she just continues emotionally abusing me because she goes ‘don’t like it there’s the door’ in response to asking nicely and always thinks up excuses to not be happy with anything I do to appease her”.

My school situation was getting physically assaulted by other classmates, given detention/suspension/other punishments right along with the people who assaulted me, and being told I was a “whiny crybaby who deserved what I got” whenever I asked the teachers to intervene before a smackdown started.

My work situation is a long list of doing my best to appease my bosses by being a hardworking and perfect worker, and getting terrible pay and working conditions in return.

My home situation was spending time dealing with a landlord who refused to do maintenance around the house to the point of things being so broken they were endangering mine and my mother’s health and then threatening me with eviction (just me, not my mother) whenever I asked him to fix anything.

My social situation is watching all of those general categories of things happen to other people over and over again same as they happened to me.

My political situation is watching conservatives do much the same to large numbers of oppressed and low status people same as they happened to me.

Give me something other than victim-blaming people being mistreated for being tired of trying to appease their abusers. Do you tell your patients who deal with abuse or bullying “Oh well, maybe if you just talked to them nicely and tried to understand where they’re coming from, they might beat/abuse/bully you less?” I seriously hope not!

Your life sounds terrible and I’m sorry. I’m very confused since you didn’t seem to claim any of the terrible things in your life have anything to do with racism. I’m not even sure if you’re a racial minority or not, but you don’t seem to relate the problems to race in any case, and I assume your mother is the same race as you? So I’m not sure why you think my post is justifying all the terrible things in your life.

All I can think of is that maybe you’re interpreting it as something like “nobody’s really evil, they’re all just misunderstood nice people”. I don’t think this is true at all, and I never said anything like it.

For example, one of the examples I gave was Eric, the greedy restaurant owner who will do anything to make a profit. I gave the example of Eric keeping minorities out of his restaurant, but if Eric were to overwork and abuse his employees, or cut hygiene to the point where people got food poisoning, or spread fake rumors about his competitors, all of those would be well within the sort of thing I would expect a greedy restaurant owner to do.

My point isn’t that Eric might be a great guy deep down, my point is “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference”. Eric doesn’t poison his customers because he has a goal of poisoning them, he poisons them because he has a goal of getting money and doesn’t care if they’re poisoned one way or the other. He’s not an other-suffering-maximizer, he’s a self-money-maximizer who doesn’t care at all about other people’s suffering. This isn’t saying he’s not evil, it’s saying this is what evil *means*.

Likewise, if Eric discriminates against black people, my first guess is that he wants money or something, discriminating helps him make money, and he just doesn’t care about black people enough to not discriminate against them. “Not caring about other people and being willing to hurt them whenever it’s convenient” seems like a pretty good definition of evil.

None of this means Eric’s customers shouldn’t be angry at him. He’s an evil person, he’s deliberately poisoned them in order to make a buck, if anger is ever justified it’s probably justified here. But if someone’s trying to prevent this from happening again, they might want to know that if they can make poisoning people less profitable, Eric will stop doing it. And if they just keep trying to convince him of how nice and likeable the restaurant customers are, this will be totally useless.

I don’t know anything about your life. Maybe all of the people being abusive to you are doing it because they hate you in particular, even if they get nothing out of it. But in most of my experience with abusers, it’s because they do get something out of it, at least psychologically if nothing else. Part of my job as a psychiatrist is to try to figure out what’s causing abusers to abuse, and then see if that cause can be stopped. For example, if an abuser’s abusing somebody because they feel powerless and abusing people makes them feel powerful, it’s to get to the root of what makes them feel powerless and see if there are ways to address that feeling.

This is the job of psychiatrists, and not of victims. Victims have no job except to deal as best they can. If it’s helpful for you to hate your abusers, go for it.

Just don’t take it out on unrelated people, ie me.

jeysiec:

Increasingly my question to the people who bitch and whine about white supremacists or classists or so on being punched or censored or whatever is: What are we supposed to do about the situation that will actually work?

Because here’s the thing: If debating bigots actually worked to stop people from being bigots, there would be no bigots. We spent a whole massive ton of time trying to be all cute and nice and playing ball with the bigots and in return we have a society that’s even more bigoted than it started out as. What gains we’ve achieved have needed to be done via courts over the heads of the bigots, and that approach is increasingly harder and harder to accomplish.

So, now what? If the hand-wringers don’t want a civil war, the solution is not to tell liberals and innocents to passively roll over and accept being treated like dirt to appease and asspat the bigots. The solution is to give us a way to successfully win our rights that won’t require a civil war. So far you have yet to do that.

slatestarscratchpad:

(at a lecture on the Oedipus complex)

Lecturer: Oedipus was a character from Greek mythology. He was the son of Laius and…uh…um…

Me: Jocasta?

Lecturer: No, that was his wi…wait, I’m an idiot.

Also from the same lecture:

Lecturer: Also, there are many alternative sexualities today. Some people believe that they’re not their biological sex. These people are called transgender. Other people believe that they’re not even human, and identify as types of animals. These people are called transhuman.

maybesimon:

low quality photos, but:

Ana and Erica

Sohu and Uriel, ft random lady I drew before

worldlypositions:

This is a travel blog and I have OCD, so I wanted to start it at the start of the travel, but I am sufficiently confused about how many layers of travel I am undergoing that I just went for my birth. But I also don’t like to skip huge pieces of time, especially whole layers of traveling. So to give you an idea and get to recent times quickly, a non-exhaustive selection of things that happened in the intervening time.

After being born half way through a world trip, I took half of a world trip with my parents, to Tasmania. I am told some minor royalty tried to buy me in Europe, but failed. 

(A very hazy mural of me with my brother on the front of a Chinese restaurant in Tasmania from Google Maps. I’m not totally sure why, though the building was an ice cream shop belonging to my family at the time it was muraled.)

My mother bought a restaurant in a ghost town. I lived in a movie prop ‘house’, there were bats in my bunk bed, I missed so much school that I thought for years that ‘roll call’ was a thing from fiction or in America (I now think it actually happened every morning in my classroom). I abruptly ceased coping with life for several years after being read a horrifying book at school. I was so scared of e.g. the deadly snakes that I would use something like Bayes Theorem to work out e.g. how likely I was to die if there was blood on my leg. A snake killed my dog, and my other dog chased a babysitter with a live snake in its mouth, so the inside view on snake safety genuinely looked bad.

(My childhood home apparently featured in this movie. I have not got around to watching it. I am not sure if it is the one in the picture.)

(Tiger snake in Tasmania)

We moved to town and I looked after my three younger brothers in a house that was about as tidy as you would expect if it were inhabited by three boys in a state of constant war brought up and accompanied by their older sister who also had little actual upbringing to speak of, and a rapidly developing appreciation for ‘tragedy of the commons’. I decided I should give all of my money to the very poor overseas forever, minus anything really necessary to live. I insisted on cycling or walking everywhere, and was very confused about why everyone else in the world continued driving, given that they seemed to fairly universally agree that it was bad. 

A memorial to my grandfather on the waterfront in Devonport, for providing the world with a lot of opiates. Picture from here. 

At school I accidentally joined a wannabe-wiccan-cult, intentionally joined anti-forestry activism, was surprisingly good at academic contests once I went to school enough to know that e.g. decimal points are a common convention, and not a code that you are meant to logically deduce the meaning of from context as part of the problem. I can’t remember whether or not I used to dress in a Viking helmet and flowery blue cape on days that were not assigned for that. I moved to a tent in my family’s (fenced) front garden, and then left home.

(Tasmania is pretty, and relatively safe from global catastrophic risks, but it is not my favorite place to live. Photo by JJ Harrison.)

(A six foot man on one of the biggest trees to be felled in the Styx Valley. I used to know a lot of arguments and statistics about why this shouldn’t happen.) 

I went to university at ANU in Canberra. I figured I would henceforth know an entirely new set of people, so I changed my name to Katja and cut off my hair and decided to make a go of being gregarious. I hadn’t really tried talking to people at school before, so it was not super smooth, but to my delight I relatively quickly mastered causing other people to hang out in my room.

(At university I definitely wore a viking helmet when it wasn’t required—here with my friend Victoria—but that sort of thing is basically required at university. I also wore nothing but shoes and rode my bike up and down the center of campus, which was probably not required at all, especially since I was sober and alone. It felt required though, because on the one hand it seemed like the kind of thing you just can’t do, yet on the other hand I couldn’t see any good causal reason that it would be that bad, so I thought I should really do it and find out what happens if you do things that you just can’t do. What happens is that you do them, like usual things.)

I went to America on holiday, then on a really long holiday, then as a student in Pittsburgh, then as a temporary worker. While studying in Pittsburgh, I went to Berkeley on holiday and then on more holidays and more holidays and took leave from my PhD program and haven’t been back or talked to my advisor about whether I will in a while, so it seems safe to say that I moved to Berkeley at some point. Then while living in Berkeley I visited S near Detroit for a week, and then a longer week, and then stopped buying return tickets, and got around to going home less and less often.. until now I think I just went on a holiday to Berkeley. And I am probably about to move there. Moving to Berkeley was amazing the first time, so I hope if I move there twice without moving away my life will be really very good.

(According to Wikipedia, the city of Westland where I am was so named in order to avoid a nearby city annexing this shopping mall, which is called Westland for some reason. Photo by PeRshGo.)

It seems kabbalistically appropriate that your grandfather is memorialized by the Poppy Memorial.

worldlypositions:

(Part 1)

Ok, this is a further effort to remember what S told me happened in history, before the fun is ruined by the various spoilers in popular culture, S enthusiastically trying to educate me, and the powerful combination of those two (S enthusiastically encouraging me to watch 300 with him and play Greek-history-based Civ IV scenarios). The rest of this post is history as I vaguely recall it from some conversations in recent weeks, now with added Civ IV and 300 so probably wrong.

I.

We left off sometime early in Greece’s history (let’s say 450BC), when the Persians were a large and successful military force to the East who had never lost a war. At this time Greece was pretty interesting. The people in Athens and around were a group called something like Iberians, and they had many especially clever people who did things like philosophy and political innovation, of a calibre that gets them remembered today. Greece was a democracy, which I think was unique. 

Sparta (near Athens, to the West) was populated by Spartans, who were terrifying warriors whose main interest in life was being terrifying warriors. Sparta was a very small city relative to others around—it had maybe a few thousand people while other big cities were hundreds of thousands. But everyone was scared of them because each Spartan was such a devastating military asset.

Persia decided to take over Greece, so they sent in a small army, figuring that would be plenty. The Athenians were worried about this, and went to ask the Spartans for help. 

The Spartans agreed that Persia coming to conquer everyone was troubling, and at any other time they would have helped, but they were having an important festival for like a month, so they couldn’t right now. In their defense, work-life balance is hard.

So the other Greeks went and fought off the Persian army themselves. And they won! I think because they had an excellent general or something. But this was pretty surprising to the never-before-defeated Persians. The battle was at Marathon, and when they won, a guy ran as fast as he could back to Athens to give them the good news. He dropped dead from exhaustion upon arrival, because he ran really fast, and Athens was however many miles away a modern marathon is long (26 maybe? —one of those numbers that is vastly bigger than it seems to be possible to run, empirically). For some reason this made people at the time think running that far was a good idea, and so they commemorated his feat by starting the athletic event, the marathon. 

The Persians were not permanently discouraged, and returned with a larger military force. Again it seems the Spartans were busy with the same festival, which was unfortunate since they really liked being great warriors so much, and totally would have thrashed the Persians in a moment if they weren’t already fully booked with all these festivities. 

This time 300 Spartans decided to fight though, and went up North to head off the Persian army, joined by another small army of ‘Thespians’ from a place called Thespius or something. This stand was sort of ridiculous seeming, because the Persian army was really, really big. Probably like tens of thousands of troops. However, as depicted in the movie 300, the Spartans were very manly, and very well trained warriors, and they had very cutting edge military technology—for instance the idea of standing close together with your shields so that your shield defends the people next to you. The Thespians (as a society) were very good actors, and inspiration for the modern word ‘thespian’. As far as I know they were not inspiration for fear in the hearts of their enemies, so while there were more of them than Spartans, they do not seem to have been a main factor in this military action. (Though note that Spartans and Thespians alike are now represented to us by actors, presumably because actors are more convincingly warrior-like than actual warriors, so maybe the Thespians were pretty scary, but everyone just assumed they were especially Spartan-seeming Spartans).

A key fact in the Greek side’s favor was that they were defending a narrow gap. So as long as they didn’t get too tired, it would always be however many people fit face to face in the gap, meeting face to face. Plus however many arrows or whatnot could be hurled over the top of the frontline. The Persians said that the number of arrows would be enough to blot out the sun, to which some Spartan, probably the king, who might have been called Peleponides II or something, famously responded that they would then fight in the shade. 

So, the Spartans did astonishingly well, and killed heaps of Persian soldiers, and were eventually defeated not by being worn down by the massive Persian army, but because a Greek traitor showed the Persians a route around that didn’t involve dealing with Spartans.

The Athenians meanwhile had emptied Athens onto a small nearby island, figuring that they couldn’t beat the Persian army, but they might be able to defeat the Persian navy, given that they had a pretty good navy themselves. So they were going to let the Persians take the mainland, but defend this island, and then maybe work their way back again from there. The Persian army did come down into Athens, though weakened by the 300 Spartans, and then by the whole Spartan military when it was done with the festival. But the Athenian navy won the seas, leaving the Persians in Athens without the water-based supply lines that they relied on, back to most of Persia. So having come so far, Persia had to retreat home, and Athens went back to Athens, and all was more or less ok modulo lots of deaths, and Greece remembered ‘that time we beat the Persians’ with fondness for a long time. 

II.

Greece was happy and successful for about a hundred years, roughly between 450-350BC. 

There were lots of famous philosophers, including what we would now think of as scientists. For instance, Democritus invented atoms. Someone, maybe also Democritus, came up with the notion that at a tiny scale something must be random, which also seems impressive (unless its just that someone believed every random thing possible in the ancient past, and we primarily remember the winners). 

One guy (probably called Herodotus) discovered recording history, and he spent a lot of time carefully talking to various people about what had happened in the past and writing it down. Apparently the distinction between true statements and made up statements implicit in this agenda was novel, and some of his interviewees do not seem to have grasped it well. Some of these histories are very interesting, especially if interpreted as non-fiction.

He wrote about Xerxes trying to cross a narrow sea way up North where it was necessary to let the Persian army across. First Xerxes made a bridge out of boats, and everyone was happily jumping boat to boat, but then the wind moved the boats and out of bridge-alignment, so Xerxes whipped the sea into submission and then they continued. 

He wrote about Darius’ ascent to leader via horse neighing contest, described previously.

He wrote about some other things I forget. Oh, one was probably the fate of King Croesus. This story took place earlier, before Persia attacked Greece. Croesus was extremely rich. I think he was the son of King Midas, who at much personal cost had discovered how to turn all kinds of things into gold. Or possibly Croesus had a good economy for some other reason. Anyway, he was worried about the Persians, who were getting to be a big empire to his East, and he had a bunch of money, so like a good rationalist he set out to determine whether any of the oracles around were really oracular. To do this, he did the weirdest thing he could think of —some series of wrapping disgusting things in other things and boiling them in things and eating it. Let’s say he took the heart of a lamb and wrapped it in pig skin and then boiled it and sliced it and wrapped the slices in leaves and then ate the pieces. And then he went to the oracles in turn, and gave them some money, and said “guess what I just did?” Most of them got it wrong, but the Oracle of Delphi was like “you took the heart of a lamb, and wrapped it in pig skin…”, so he gave her money and asked what would happen if he went to war with the Persians. She said that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. He hadn’t heard about cryptic prophesies with double meanings yet, because he was in possibly the first story about them, so he went to war, and this destroyed his great empire. The end.

Socrates was another still-famous philosopher from that time in Greece. His fame was more for his style of clarifying questions than any particular discovery, so he was more like a modern philosopher than a scientist. His student Plato famously wrote a lot about Socrates, making him very much like a modern philosopher. He also wrote about what an ideal republic would be like, in a book that is still well known, though I think mostly famous for being a very early work of political philosophy, rather than for not embodying terrible ideas for how to run a country. His student Aristotle was famous for all sorts of philosophy and science. 

Toward the end of Greece’s golden age, Macedonia (to the North of Athens and Sparta) controlled a lot of Greece, under the reign of Philip. Philip hired Aristotle to teach his son, Alexander. When Alexander became leader, he decided to take over Persia in revenge for the earlier attacks. Persia was still doing well enough that this was an insane plan. But in an astonishing turn of events ascribed sometimes to Alexander’s training in science and philosophy and reason, and sometimes to his biological father being a major god who his extremely creepy mother had an affair with one time, he succeeded in conquering everything as far as India in about a decade. India was probably unappealing because it had elephants and such in it, and he had had about enough anyway. He went back to somewhere near Egypt, and had some other plans (maybe to have a thriving society of reason and peace?) but died of malaria within a decade.

There were some endearing stories about Alexander the Great, during his life. One time a philosopher studying astronomy told him that there were other worlds out in the stars, and he sat down and cried. When asked why, he said that there were so many worlds out there and he hadn’t even conquered one.

He met another philosopher called Diogenes the cynic, who was an early thinker on social status, and had decided to live without any. Appreciating the breadth of status’ infiltration into life, Diogenes forwent all sorts of things that are marks of status, such as sobriety and hygiene. Alexander approached him in the gutter one day with great respect, said he really liked his work, and if he wasn’t busy with being Alexander the Great, he would like to do what Diogenes was doing. Diogenes said no he wouldn’t, or he would do it now. Alexander was like ‘yeah, good point’. 

(Incidentally, to the modern eye this looks like Diogenes had discovered countersignaling. Our best understanding probably agrees with Diogenes: not being a drunkard covered in your own urine is often for status. However, if a person is sufficiently high status that they are unlikely to be considered low status even when pissed on and pissed—for instance because they are also a renowned philosopher—then they can actually mark themselves as higher status by conspicuously setting out to look low status and failing. 

After Alexander the Great died, his empire was divided between four generals, but none of them were especially great, so they didn’t prosper that much. One of them was called Ptolmy, and he was a forebear of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt later. 

III.

That was around 350 BC. Around that time, before about 200BC, the Roman Empire was getting to be a big thing, centered around Rome in Italy. There is a myth about how Rome was founded that involve Romulus and Remus setting out to start a new great city, then having a fight about what to call it, and then Romulus killing Remus, and that is why we have Rome rather than Reme. This was before humanity had discovered ‘picking your battles’. 

Rome was a democracy early on. I’m not sure how this related to Athens being a democracy. There were a bunch of wars, probably just with everyone around the edges. At some point young general Julius Caesar and another more experienced general who had made his money from the first fire department, and another rich guy teamed up to do some military conquest, going off in different directions with a bunch of Roman military. Caesar took Gaul—roughly the region of modern France—which proved him more impressive than expected. He also took lots of other things, like the British Isles, which belonged to the Angles and the Saxons. The rich guy died. I can’t remember what the other general did, except after a while worried that Julius Caesar might take over Rome. Generals weren’t allowed to bring their armies into Rome for this reason. Caesar did, and took it over. 

The other Roman Senators promptly murdered Caesar, including his friend Brutus (depending on how you want to assign blame for stabbing people who are already thoroughly stabbed). This prompted Caesar to say ‘et tu Brutus?’, which is for some reason really famous.

In spite of Caesar’s murder, the democracy was over for a bit, because it was unclear whether it should go back to the democracy or to the next in line after Caesar, and the latter won. There were some other Caesars, such as Augustus Caesar. There some other Emperors, such as Nero (who was bad and somehow caused Rome to burn) and Caligula (who went crazy and married a horse) and Claudius (who was a nerd and one of the few people in this part of the story not intent on killing everyone around).

At some point Rome had some war with the Carthaginians, who lived across the sea in much of Northern Africa. The Carthaginians were descended from the Phoenicians, who had lived somewhere near Lebanon a thousand years or so earlier, and invented the first alphabet. Usually the war happened across the sea, but a Carthaginian general called Hannibal took a whole lot of Elephants all the way around through Spain and Europe to attack from the North. I remember that this caused surprise, but I forget whether it had further geopolitical implications.

In around 400AD, the climate was cooler and many smaller groups of people living in the Northern parts of Europe tried to move South-Westish to improve their situation. These people spoke strange languages, so their speech was summarized as ‘bar bar’, which was the Roman equivalent of ‘bla bla bla’. So they were called ‘barbarians’. If we had been there, we might have called them ‘blablarians’. 

Gotland is a lovely island in Sweden, that was the original home of the Goths, one successful group of barbarians. They moved to the South and took a chunk of central Europe—roughly Germany. They separated into the Ostrogoths (East Goths) and the Vizigoths (West Goths) and took more things in their respective directions. 

Some other barbarians were the Vandals, who modern vandalism is named after. There were also the Gauls, and the Angles and the Saxons, though I’m not sure how they fared after Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and Britain. And possibly the Celts were considered barbarians. 

The Western part of the Roman Empire including Rome was taken over by barbarians in the 400s and 500s. Constantine was was the last Rome-based Roman emperor. He moved the capital to the Eastern city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. Constantinople stood at the point where two land masses nearly touch, dividing two seas (The Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea). So every journey by land or water was funneled through this one point. It was a naturally powerful city. The Empire came to be known as the Byzantine Empire, or as the Eastern Roman Empire, and lasted for another thousand years or so, centered in Constantinople. 

“The people in Athens and around were a group called something like Iberians”.

Actually Ionians, famous for inventing charged particles.

“Some Spartan, probably the king, who might have been called Peleponides II”

We watched that whole movie and you didn’t remember Leonidas’ name?!

“Someone, maybe also Democritus, came up with the notion that at a tiny scale something must be random.”

This was Epicurus. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus . You’ll like him.

“And sometimes to his biological father being a major god who his extremely creepy mother had an affair with one time”

I told you I’d try to remember what made Olympias so creepy and then get back to you, so here it is. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympias , “She was a devout member of the orgiastic snake-worshiping cult of Dionysus, and it is suggested by the 1st century AD biographer, Plutarch, that she may have slept with snakes”. It also says that she died when “the families of her many victims stoned her to death”, which I guess is one way to go.

“Rome was a democracy early on”

Republic.

“He also took lots of other things, like the British Isles, which belonged to the Angles and the Saxons.”

The Angles and Saxons didn’t come to Britain until about 500 AD, long after Caesar’s death. During his lifetime it belonged mostly to the Celts.

“Caligula (who went crazy and married a horse)”

…what? You seriously think a Roman Emperor married a horse? I didn’t tell you that, and I can’t believe you would think something so ridiculous. Seriously, what kind of distorted view of history do you have to have to think this is even a possibility? Emperor Caligula didn’t marry a horse…he just made one a Senator.

(he married a perfectly normal woman, then had sex with his sister instead)

transgirlkyloren:

siderea has a post on her blog conceptualizing some forms of social phobia as essentially feeling entitled to everyone thinking well of you

this resonates with my experience

I don’t want to dismiss a psychological theory just because it sounds kind of mean. But I wonder if this makes any predictions different from a framing of “…essentially feeling terrified of anyone not thinking well of you,” ie the standard framing of social phobia that fits patients’ internal experience.

Actually, I find Siderea’s whole argument (link here) kind of hard to follow. She starts with the very reasonable theory that maybe people who were abused as kids have social phobia because they internalize social situations as the sorts of things that sometimes lead to being abused. But then she dismisses that because she doesn’t think it makes sense that kids who were abused by their parents should generalize this to the rest of the world.

But the mind isn’t logical. Why do Vietnam veterans with PTSD freak out when they hear sudden loud noises in America? Apparently they generalized their bad experience in Vietnam to inappropriate situations. So why can’t kids, who are much younger and less good at reasoning, do the same?

And if we were to frame PTSD as “the Vietnam veteran feels entitled to an atmosphere of perfect security where nobody ever disturbs them”, it would be obvious that we’re just reframing their problem in a way that seems less true to their internal experience, more condemnatory and stigmatizing, and makes it easier for other people to dismiss their pain. What’s the difference here?

slatestarscratchpad:

drethelin:

slatestarscratchpad:

On third thought, everyone else is right and I am wrong. The Dragon Army group house is a very bad idea, enough so that it’s okay to be forceful in encouraging Duncan to modify it or other people not to join it. This is true even if the required modifications are so hard that they end up torpedoing the project.

I’m not sure what my point was except that it’s wrong to make fun of people who are trying to help, and that if despite all the light social pressure we can muster people still want to join it they should be legally allowed to do so. I still think these are true, though more weakly.

Can you say why?

1. On closer look, a lot of the nastiness and bullying I was responding to in terms of comments were coming from one person. Most people disagreeing had good points and important criticism. That meant my original point of “stop being jerks” was irrelevant, since most people weren’t.

2. I think that also changed the pragmatics of the situation? Like, I was previously taking a God’s-eye view of “should Duncan be allowed to set this up?” But since none of us can stop him, that’s not really relevant. I think everyone else was answering the correct question, “Is this, as designed, probably a really bad idea, such that Duncan should seriously consider changing his proposal in specific ways, and other people should consider not joining until he does?” I think the answer is yes, on the grounds that the “forced to commit to live in a house doing this stuff and no clear means of exit” plan is dangerous for the reasons people say.  There are probably intermediate ways to do this that capture most of the value but lose most of the risk. It seemed like most of the critics were okay with these and trying to propose them constructively, but Duncan wasn’t really considering them.

Again, I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to do this if they want to. I’m saying that I would recommend to people that they not do it, and recommend to Duncan that he strongly consider finding ways around this, and that if he can’t then the project is likely to be net negative and he might want to consider not pursuing it.

Since this was all that most of the critics were saying anyway, I decided the critics were right.

On fourth thought, I talked to Duncan via email, and he sounded very concerned about this, and mentioned some concrete steps he was taking. He says:

One thing that is getting extremely under-emphasized in outside criticism is the degree to which updates and clarifications are occurring in the comments in real time (and the degree to which getting object-level criticism was the point of posting), and the it-was-always-stated-to-be-a-draft nature of the charter.  Some things which might reduce your unease (which was probably appropriate given your knowledge/assumptions at the time):

1. Lease is being signed with home owner, not funneled through me, meaning that exit procedures are fairly boilerplate/normal, à la people who default have it show up on their credit score, but little else.

2. There’s a pretty clear house-approved exit plan forming, and it includes ejector-seat options for people who have gotten critically low on either emotional or financial resources.  Things like “you have to find two viable replacements” were more intended to limit the sense of obligation of the leaver (i.e. it’s not your fault if you made a good faith effort to replace yourself and we rejected your interested parties; you’re not on the hook forever) than to obligate them, and they’re waived in cases of emergency (and “whether it’s an emergency” is not determined by me or by consensus but by the individual and the individual’s trusted advisors/proxies).

3. We’ve committed to having every house member check in with a fully outside friend or advisor at least once a week.

4. We’re leaning strongly toward “abandon house” vacations where everyone leaves to go home or go camping or go couch surf with friends, just to not be stuck in the same frame.

5. None of these norms or structures are being imposed by me without consensus; literally the only lines I’m drawing at the beginning are “there will be structure” and “we need to spend ~20hrs/week in one another’s company.”  Much of the stuff outlined in the post (like exercise and group projects) is more of the form “if you all can’t decide where to go to dinner, we’re getting pizza,” i.e. there’s a block of time where we’re definitely collaborating, but the group decides what gets done with that collaboration.

He also says that he and potential housemates have already shared an AirBNB house for a while so they could test the idea and make sure they all got along with each other.

I’m encouraged by this both because they seem like good ideas and because they sound like he’s thought this through more fully than I originally thought.

worldlypositions:

The other night I attempted to stop S from leaving to his room by lying on top of him, intending for this to delay him for about five minutes. Somewhere in the ensuing discussion he realized that I didn’t know anything about the Californian Missions, or actually almost anything else in world history. And he thought I might like history, since it helps organize and make sense of many things about the world (contrary to my impression that it is a whole bunch of unorganized statements about names killing other names and random anecdotes and dates attached to names, which sounded bad for knowledge compression). So he told me about it. It only took about six hours. Here is what I remember of the story (after a few more shorter discussions, but before looking anything up now, so probably false in many ways—I want to see what I remember):

History (of civilizations) can arguably be divided into three eras (or maybe this is just Western civilizations? Definitely something happened in China in all this time, but we didn’t discuss it, so I’m not sure if it coincides era-wise). 

The first era stretched from about 4000BC to 1200BC and is fairly hazily understood. It started around when agriculture did. It is hard to know exactly when agriculture started, but we can actually pinpoint where very well, because genetics tells us that many modern agricultural species come from the same tiny part of the world. There are also the ruins of an extremely old city there. 

The writing around these ruins is in a strange pointy looking alphabet that is also used briefly on the front page of EconLog, and was apparently big in this first Era, and it’s sort of surprising that I haven’t come across it. Its letters somewhat correspond to ours and recognizably resemble them, and similarly for some other important alphabets. Wikipedia shows a table of these, and also the words from which the letters were derived. The original letters represent simplified pictures of the words. For instance R is a head. I am pretty sure that I have drawn the letter R as a head on shoulders before, when it needed decoration, which somehow makes me feel closer to my very distant ancestors—that we independently make the same mental connections reminds me that they were people with very specific familiar internal experiences.

There were a bunch of smallish empires (or whatever you call units of political control at that scale) in the general vicinity of Greece and the Middle East. They all sort of fell apart in around 1200 though it’s not entirely clear why. There was a massive volcano eruption which might have caused it. There is also some lasting reference to sea-men appearing, but nobody is sure what that is about. There were also some other things. Anyway, everything sort of fell apart for a bit, and there weren’t large units of political organization.

Incidentally, the mega-volcano is quite beautiful now. It is the one in the photo you often see of white buildings with domed blue roofs overlooking the sea. Actually there is a massive cliff leading down to the sea, and the sea is actually in the middle of the volcano, which is a terrifying circle big enough to nearly meet the horizon. If we ever want to go to a really pretty place, maybe we will visit.

When things regathered themselves at the start of the second era, some of the new empires roughly corresponded to ones that had been in similar places in the past. For instance, I think Greece did. At any rate, many of their stories came from that earlier time.

Sometime pretty early on in Greece’s history, Persia was a large and militarily successful empire to their East, which had never lost a war. It was run by Cyrus, then Darius, then Xerxes, but I’m not sure which one we were up to when they decided to attack Greece. 

(Darius was not the son of Cyrus, but upon Cyrus’ death apparently he suggested they decide who should be in charge by having a horse race, where the rider of the first horse to neigh got to be ruler, and then he fairly predictably set out to teach his horse to neigh on command, and got leadership. I get the impression that many of these early stories are pretty much made up, though this one at least sounds physically possible.)

Actually, history is long, that’s enough for now. Maybe there’ll be Part II another time, if everyone can hold out on telling me how much I have embarrassed myself so far.

Good except:

1. The idea of dividing western history into three Ages might be my own idiosyncratic thing (even though it’s obviously right)

2. Gobekli Tepe is a temple, not a city.

3. Cuneiform wasn’t at Gobekli Tepe, that was afterwards.

4. Cuneiform and the Phoenician alphabet are different. One was the first writing system, the other was the first alphabet.

5. Term “Sea Peoples” is preferred over “sea-men”, but good job keeping to the “unintentional sexual innuendo” theme of your blog.

6. Some other things happened between Cyrus’ death and Darius doing the weird horse thing, and it was more complicated than that, but a weird horse thing was definitely involved (at least as per Herodotus).

worldlypositions:

I was looking for anything surprising about Yeovil.

“Folly” is an architectural term which means much the same as the usual term, except constrained to a specific kind of architectural foolishness, instead of the whole range. A ‘folly’ is the thing you have if you make your structure not just mostly functionless and ornamental, but ornamental to a point considered too pointlessly ornamental for even best practice ornamentation. 

Yeovil seems to like follies. Exactly how many of their buildings are overly ornamental is a matter of opinion (complicated by the issue of whether they get credit for all the ones that are underly ornamental) but there are at least four publicly agreed follies nearby. I like this one:

(Rose Tower, Yeovil)

I’m not sure that my investigation into from whence I came yielded much in the way of useful insight. Everyone’s youth has follies. I suppose if you want to recover from those follies, it is helpful to know that some of them are about poor architectural judgment. 

Though I actually pretty much guessed that I needed better architectural judgment when in playing Minecraft recently I nearly finished this tall domed pink tower, with silver streaks circling down it and a wide rounded base—climbing as I built—then stepped away to look at it (see far below). I am not sure what the architectural jargon name is for this kind of foolishness, but there is apparently a world class instance of it very near where I am currently staying:

“Ypsilanti Water Tower in Ypsilanti, Michigan, winner of the “Most Phallic Building contest” (by Dwight Burdette - Own work, CC BY 3.0)

A monument to my own romantic obliviousness perhaps, for which a 25m high stone penis outside my door is arguably apt. 

I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO TAKE YOU TO THE YPSILANTI PHALLIC TOWER.

Sorry, I have failed to provide you with the full Michigan experience :(

slatestarscratchpad:

K: Wait, I thought Charlemagne was the Pope.

Me: Huh, no, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope was the Pope.

K: Yeah, but I heard they were in cahoots, which I figured doesn’t really happen in this world unless you’re the same person.

K: I’m fine with you mocking my understanding of history…

Me: I’m not mocking your understanding of history, I’m mocking your understanding of cahoots!

K: I understand you can be in cahoots now, it’s just historical cahoots.