samueldays

[samueldays]

Back from vacation, have there been any good posts recently?

Vacation pic taken in the Arctic, rly.

[samueldays]

Yes and it has a story. Briefly:

A long time ago on a glacier far far away, "Norway" was a geographic expression sort of like "Iberia", divided into small chiefdoms. There was then a horny Viking chieftain named Harald who saw a hot chick named Gyda, and he paid court to her. She was an ambitious lady who saw Harald was no slouch himself, and she said : "I will marry no one less than the king of all Norway." He did the quest and got the girl, with his last big battle in the unification wars being in Hafrs-fjord.

A thousand years later, give or take a century, Norway put up this monument at the fjord. The three swords represent the three kings who fought there, and their embedding in the rock represents Norwegians being at peace and not drawing swords against each other. (Asterisks apply.)

Sverd i fjell, Norway

[samueldays]

How impractical might it be to get one abroad?

It's here

It came

[samueldays]

If I were Native American, I might also feel disrespected by the way some of these Internet People a) talk about the wendigo as if it's a super special native tradition that's incomparable to anything people believe elsewhere and uniquely encodes native understanding of the world, but also b) talk about the wendigo in a way that's seemingly based on recently popular fantasy literature, probably written by white people.

Because a Native American view of the wendigo (I say "a" because it varies by tribe quite a bit) before the Harry Potter Era is that the wendigo is not so special, it's something recognizably close to a European vampire or Arab ghoul: here is an evil creature that was once a man and now feasts on men.

In some versions of these stories, the cursed condition results directly from a man committing the taboo act of cannibalism, and the moral of the story is something like Don't Eat People, That Makes You A Monster.

In other versions, the cursed condition results from a man bargaining with dark powers for immortality, and the dark powers deliver with a catch: you have to eat people to sustain it. The moral of the story is something like Don't Deal With The Devil or If The Deal Looks Too Good To Be True, It Probably Is.

Maybe I'm off-base here, but, if I were Native American, the way Internet People talk about wendigos and skinwalkers like they are very obviously real and will Getcha if you enter the Sacred Forest engage in cultural appropriation would not make me feel respected and included. It would make me feel like an eight-year-old in a room full of grownups that think I still believe in Santa. But that's just me.

More broadly, the line between "stupid regressive superstitions and dogma that we should actively destroy, for a Better World", and "Spiritual, literally-true (haha jk. unless?) folkways that preserve the soul of a people and that even us moderns could learn from, for a Better World" is just, so fucking stupidly arbitrary and so obviously downstream of electoral politics and culture-war shit that I don't know how any serious person thinks there is a line. "The Bible is a complete crock of shit, but wendigos and the fae and youkai are all real" is not a natural, evidence-based conclusion to come to, in either direction! It is someone who wants to fit in socially knowing what gets cheers and what gets boos. In your aunt's church facebook group, it's the opposite.

More more broadly, the idea that a world of nothing but atoms and electricity and chemicals and gravity, a world where there is simply no room for 'the supernatural' as we conceive of it* to exist...I think that's both most likely true and an incredibly soul-crushing, depressing thing** to internalize, that, ethically, I can't really blame anyone for convincing themselves otherwise, and if it's expressed through the language of ethno-cultural chauvinism well, what isn't, these days?

*-I'm aware that the barrier between the natural and the supernatural is something that changes with scientific development. And yet, you know what I mean, don't you?

**-I really do try to find wonder and awe in science the way many of you do. It just doesn't usually work.

[samueldays]

I think many people's intuition of "water use" is the thing academically referred to as blue water use, which is water taken from wells, rivers, etc. to water the crops. Blue water use for potatoes is 33 litres per kg according to the cited study.

The 290 litres per kg shown above is adding green water use, which counts water from rain. It is arguably true that this much water in some sense passes through the potato plant. I find it deceptive to tie this to climate change and say that potatoes are "using" this water. If a potato farm was removed and the land left wild, rain would still be falling on the soil and passing through other plants there.

(also grey but that's a small tangent)

somehow i don’t think these sentences are true

[samueldays]

I’ve made this post like six times but it still fucks me up the China’s mountains just look like that. Like I spent decades thinking it was stylistic but no, they just have different mountains over there.

[samueldays]

Cognates of the day: "Brachiosaurus" and "pretzel"

brachiosaurus(n.) 1903, Modern Latin, from Greek brakhion "an arm" (see brachio-) + -saurus. The forelegs are notably longer than the hind legs.

.

pretzel(n.) 1836, "small, crisp biscuit in the form of a knot, salted on the outside," from German Prezel, also Brezel, from Middle High German brezel, prezel, from Old High German brezitella, brecedela, from Medieval Latin *brachitella, presumably a kind of biscuit baked in the shape of folded arms (source also of Italian bracciatella, Old Provençal brassadel), diminutive of Latin bracchiatus "with branches, with arms," from bracchium "an arm, a forearm," from Greek brakhion "an arm" (see brachio-).

[samueldays]

every time i see a picture of a coyote i am immediately like "omg my friend Cable Ties!"

[samueldays]

*Mutual reblogs something you posted*

Me: They still like me. Thank God.

[samueldays]

[samueldays]

It is in fact easy to move as in transport oneself to another country, I don't need a reason or anything, I went to Switzerland this summer and showed up at the border and was like "I'm here to visit a friend" and they let me in. Two years ago I went to Poland in the same manner.

It is much more difficult to move as in acquire political power and entitlements in another country, which is difficult for good reason, I don't see what's fucked up about that.

Rectify your names.

its so fucked up how difficult it is to move to another country you shouldn’t need a reason or anything you should be able to show up at the border and be like “the vibes were off back home” and they should let you in

[samueldays]

That also works, but it may need an intermediate step of creating a new layer to draw your circle on so you won't delete what was in the middle of the circle. :)

top 5 free and open source software?

linux

gcc

libffmpeg

the C++ programming language

(doxxes myself)

[samueldays]

It has not improved much. The joke about how to draw a circle in gimp still applies as of 201X: "Step 1, choose the elliptic selector tool..."

Then select a circle-shaped area. From menu or context menu choose Select -> Border, and indicate how many pixels wide you want your circle to be. (NB: a value of "1" here gives you a 1-pixel width but a higher value of N gives you 2N pixels in width. There is no way to get a circle that is 2 or 3 pixels thick with this path.) Then choose the Bucket Fill Tool, and make sure its Affected Area option is set to "Fill whole selection". Choose the appropriate color or background, and bucket-fill the selection of your circle.

top 5 free and open source software?

linux

gcc

libffmpeg

the C++ programming language

(doxxes myself)

[samueldays]

Aspen estimates that about 10% or 13 million US households have negative net worth.

If one estimates that the next 10% up are roughly symmetrical around zero, that suggests the "total" "wealth" of the poorest 20% of households or about sixty million Americans is in some sense zero.

This isn't an exact figure, there's uncertainty and rounding, but the scale of tens of millions of people still applies. Lose a factor of two for household size, and it would still be thirty million people.

Now I know some people will read the above and think of nasty remarks against America in particular, and those people should learn that the similar figure of negativ nettoformue in Norway is approximately 15%, SSB table 4.

Adding up the "wealth" of the poorest people when some of those people have negative "wealth" leads to the conclusion that Zero Dollars Georg has "more" "wealth" than the poorest billion people in the world added together. Your methodology is bad and you should feel bad. Your comparisons are meaningless and your stats are excuses for bloodthirst.

‘capitalism works’ factoid actually untrue. the 62 people who own half the world’s wealth are outliers and should be eaten.

[samueldays]

[soft awoo]

[samueldays]

I want to emphasise the "counterintelligence" bit. Formal pre-registered studies with replication plans are very bad for finding vampires who can read the pre-registration and simply not be in the area that the researchers are planning to check.

Most studies are made with an implicit assumption that there won't be malicious opposition. Samples to be tested won't run away when the researcher is coming, and test subjects won't tell lies for fun and profit.

I heard a story of such lies a while back, a study which claimed to have found that homosexual women are twice as likely to experience teen pregnancy as heterosexual women. This led to questionable comments and dubious attempts at explaining the finding, from "slutty bisexuals are calling themselves lesbian for better PR" to "there's a conspiracy to rape and impregnate lesbian teens".

Emphasis on claimed because the study was based on self-reports, not medical records of teen pregnancy, and a cynical explanation of the real finding is "Bored teenagers filling out the survey were more likely to falsely report both being homosexual and experiencing teen pregnancy".

I don't have the study to hand and this story might be an urban legend, but I think it is still evocative of the data collection problems one can run into when intelligent test subjects are being uncooperative. It would be much worse with outright malice and supernatural powers involved, like vampires who can bat-fly unseen into a researcher's home and replace the so far collected data with computer viruses.

some other force (like a government conspiracy) actively suppressing information of their existence

Technically I suppose it is a "conspiracy" in a literal sense for vampires to sabotage investigation like this, but it's not what comes to mind when I hear "force like a government conspiracy".

Another possible approach to counterintelligence is deliberately feeding knowledge of vampires to the least credible people around, like the National Enquirer.

If it's established well enough that vampires are tabloid nonsense, any serious source attempting to report on vampires will get lumped with the National Enquirer and become discredited as a result.

@zzedar2

(Separate reblog to avoid hijacking @apilgrimpassingby OP)

The problem I always have with this sort of Weirdness Censor sort of thing is: how did the worldview of our world get established as the normal one at all? Unless these vampires and so forth are a recent addition to the world, I would think they would just be seen as a normal part of the workings of the world, unless there's some other force (like a government conspiracy) actively suppressing information of their existence.

Regarding the idea of a hidden magical world with demons and demon hunter conspiracies and the like, and the idea that people in scientific-modernist cultures have a "weirdness censor":

Variously:

Stuff that is rare, or at least uncommon, and not readily produced on demand or can do basic counterintelligence.

Stuff that's rare may be discussed in terms of folklore that's not even necessarily correct. There are plenty of things that few people will have happen multiple times in their lives and almost nobody will have happen enough times that they're prepared for it.

The common feature of this sort of thing is generally that the world is usually mundane.

People who aren't in the know may not be able to coordinate knowledge.

Stuff that is really, world-historically rare.

The big miracles of the Bible, for example, are all unique and happen in clusters separated by centuries.

Culture, religion, and politics.

It's undeniable that science works, and it has lead to the engineering that has revolutionized the world.

I think there's a movement, which you could call political, religious, or cultural, to say that science works for everything, and to discount things that don't pass through a certain kind of demonstrable-on-demand scientific analysis, that will discount folklore or anecdote pretty hard

[samueldays]

Lebanon is very interesting! I figure you're asking about views on the system rather than specific laws when you say "politics" here: it's unusual, I like it, it seems to be performing above replacement, it's creaking because of demographic change.

I think you are broadly correct about the basic concern.

The nuance is that Lebanon designed their particularist policies for staving off sectarian unrest; whereas American left-wing particularist policies are partly "un-designed", and partly designed for other goals they don't know how to achieve such as closing the race gap.

You might have seen this flag:

The drift in the pride flag is a visual case of "un-design". I don't have a precise word for this, I think the illustration is striking, I shall try to explain in words.

The original six color stripes were meant to represent and include all kinds of people. Some people felt that that they weren't represented enough, they wanted extra representation and got more stripes added. Some people proposed other additions like a red sex worker sign. That one didn't catch on, but the intersex circle did. I don't know why, I can't see who's calling the shots here, it seems to be a deeply informal and opaque process.

That can work well for internal matters of cultural tradition, but for external matters of policy and social order and negotiating with outsiders, it's a bad approach. Outsiders would really like some clarity in what their obligations are and who they take complaints to.

Gay symbolism aside, let's talk about a specific particularist policy. Recently there was a fuss about the fact that Zohran Kwame Mamdani, mayoral candidate in New York, had falsely ticked the "Black or African-American" race box when applying to Columbia university, and this box gives racial preference in admissions.

Columbia's explanation of what this box means and who should check it describes a racial-ethnic group, which Mamdani does not belong to because he's of (dot) Indian blood.

Stock leftist explanations of why there ought to be such a box and preference talk about compensation to the descendants of slaves for the legacy of slavery (and segregation and so on) in America, but Mamdani was born abroad and only came to America in 1998.

On both counts, he was wrong to check the box. Yet I see leftists confidently defending him by saying he was born in Africa, that makes him African-American, and this is a non-story. (I doubt these people would say the same for Elon Musk, who is also a lightskin born in Africa.)

Outgroup homogeneity bias is at work in my telling of this story, I figure, but even granting different types of leftists, their parties/factions are being informal and opaque in working out how this is supposed to go. This is "un-design", and it's bad for staving off sectarian unrest when the sects can't settle on who is owed what, or even what the rule is by which judges should be determining who is owed what.

NRx has a view of formalism, which extra doesn't like this. I shall paraphrase Moldbug very briefly here in summarizing formalism: much human conflict derives from the double uncertainty of who owns a thing, and whether I could become the owner by taking the thing. To minimize conflict, figure out who owns what, formalize that in an open and honest way, and pin down and enforce the rules by which ownership can legally change.

This makes NRx broadly supportive of Lebanon, which established "ownership" of such things as the Prime Ministership (belongs to the Sunni Muslims) which are frequently fought over in other countries. But they whiffed a bit on the changing ownership part, so now Lebanon is having trouble with demographic change undermining what used to be the basis of their old agreement. Formalists would also wish for universities to be open and honest about just what it is black applicants "own" in affirmative action admits, also figure out who exactly owns and administers that.

(I've heard criticism that formalism is close to trivial, "be clear about what the law is", and I think owning a Prime Ministership and affirmative action admissions are examples of nontriviality. Moldbug also says to avoid arguments about who should own what in favor of observing who does own what and formalizing that.)

Lebanese confessionalism was primarily a pact between Muslims and Christians there, with colorful footnotes about groups like the Druze and interruptions by the PLO. The major sects, and I generalize broadly here, both have a traditional basis on which to respect the agreement handed down to them from their fathers even if they're not personally in favor of it; whereas the American Left has more "why the fuck should I obey some dead white male?" objections.

While the Left has more of this than the Right in America, America also has more of this problem in general than Lebanon. Americans love to think of themselves as a nation of freethinking individuals, and call their enemies "bootlickers", mocking each other for "spouting the party line". But the opposite POV on this is that Americans are disloyal and rebellious at scale; it is very difficult for an American party leader to make binding agreements on behalf of his followers if they won't repeat the party line. America has the problem I called "un-design" at the top, because Americans won't commit to a design and won't stick to a sect to anywhere near the same extent as Lebanese.

Back to the university application story for a moment, another problem was that everyone was competing for the same admissions slots, which means one cheat becomes everyone's problem. Lebanon has had much stronger religious-legal separation where two Christians fighting wouldn't get the Muslims involved, and two Orthodox Christians fighting wouldn't even get the Catholics involved. Religious communities in Lebanon have a degree of autonomy vaguely similar to American states, with their own courts. One's "rights" in Lebanon are partly determined by which religious group one belongs to. I don't like the word "segregation" because a lot of people have a kneejerk reaction to the word and think of stereotypes not applicable to Lebanon, but the allocations by religious group (sometimes verging on ethno-religious) are in some ways similar. The Shia Muslims in Lebanon are competing only with other Shia Muslims for some of the goods in Lebanon, which changes the nature of the competition, especially when their judge is also going to be a Shia Muslim. In other ways it's like a microcosm of the Westphalian system, but that's another tangent.

Lebanon's National Pact had headline distribution of positions like this:

The President of the Republic and the Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces must be Maronite Catholic. The Prime Minister of the Republic must be a Sunni Muslim. The Speaker of the Parliament must be a Shia Muslim. The Deputy Speaker of the Parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister must be Greek Orthodox Christian. The Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces must be a Druze.

Personally, I love it for the novelty.

Politically, the ways in which this helps stave off sectarian unrest seem to me immediate and obvious. Each major sect is guaranteed a high position, and also guaranteed that their worst enemy can't nab a majority of them. The distribution forms a Schelling point after existing for a while; any one sect agitating for more invites everyone else to form a coalition and tell that sect "be happy with what you have". The explicit distribution makes it simple to check whether parties are abiding by the agreement. The obligations are relatively simple to abide by. There's similar quotas on parliamentary seats, too.

America does not do this. Not nationally, not partisanly, not at state level. Sometimes a judge will order the gerrymandering creation of a black-majority congressional district to ensure black representation, which is a little similar but not much and results in gerrymandering problems and other side-effects. Americans dislike tokenism, and Lebanon has tokenism as a basis for government.

Left-wing particularist policy in America, I think, is structurally unable to do this because of asymmetrical markedness.

Lebanon has no majority denomination; the Sunni+Shia+Druze add up to a small majority of "Muslims" but the first two don't cooperate and the third barely counts as Muslim. Every sect in Lebanon's confessional political system is aware that it's a sect, and dealing with other sects, and the system needs to be somewhat symmetrical about sects. Every sect is a minority. The biggest sect, Maronite Catholics, is allocated 34 of 128 seats in Lebanon's parliament.

By contrast, American leftism is more focused on the 13% blacks, the 3% gays, the <1% trans, and other minorities contrasted against a majority. Minorities such as blacks are marked while whites are unmarked (this may change if whites cease being a majority), so to leftists black preference in admissions and hiring feel like a very different thing from white preference. This background shapes policy and policy design. Asymmetric design is hard to balance.

In closing, Lebanon has fascinating politics with a lot to learn from, but I think a lot of its lessons are either inapplicable to America (unmarked and "nondenominational" church issues), or so close to segregation as to be coup-complete.

Question for some of the NRx(-adj) guys on here, e.g. @mitigatedchaos and @arcticdementor:

What are your views on Lebanese politics?

The common refrain I hear in your circles is, in broad strokes, concern that left-wing particularist policies vis-à-vis minority groups will lead to social chaos of some kind. There are many different instantiations of this general prototype but I think it's safe to say (correct me if I'm wrong) that this is the basic, recurrent concern. Lebanon is one of many examples of a place where particularist policies towards different social groups were implemented principally to stave off sectarian unrest. And Lebanon is a particularly extreme case in which this represents the core of the political system itself.

I don't have any particularly strong views here; I think Lebanon's strategy is one among many for handling the potential conflicts that come with a pluralistic society, and I suppose the most I can say is I hope it works out for them.

But if your primary set of concerns are as the NRx(-adj) ones seem to be, it seems to me that you probably want to be thinking hard about Lebanon.