2,870 karma · joined April 16, 2018
Ever since the (IMO ludicrous) XKCD comic[0], too many have gotten the wires crossed and think free speech is exclusively legalistic rather than the bedrock of an open society.
This is nearly the textbook definition of censorship: sanctions for failing to uphold the "public morals." Somehow that's not the most bizarre claim.
> If I had my druthers we'd take away the licenses of virtually all the commercial TV stations and hand them over to community groups, unions and nonprofits. They couldn't possibly do any worse.
Is this meant to as a joke?
Doesn't mean there isn't abhorrent harassment toward many women on social media, just that it isn't common for most women and will not "drive women away."
I see this sort of statement sometimes, and I really haven't figured out what it means. I can point to exactly zero consequences in my life for either believing in evolution or not at any given point. The time scales evolution requires are simply too long to matter to even the next thousand generations of my family, and evolution is simply too flexible to exclude other worldviews (e.g. theism).
Are you suggesting a status thing, i.e. belief in scientific theories is high status and skepticism/alternative worldviews are low status?
This is an analogy or what I mean by "political correctness" (or related concepts like "wokeness" and "social justice warrior"). Great art communicates truth about the human condition in a beautiful way. This is, of course, open to interpretation, yet somehow many people agree that, for example, The Godfather is a great film. Why? I believe the film shows us some truth about the human condition (particularly our ability to descend into evil) through a gripping story with excellent characters, visuals, dialogue, plotting, etc.
When we substitute an arbitrary checklist of criteria a film must meet that have nothing to do with communicating truth about the human condition in a beautiful way, we are engaging in "political correctness," and we have ceased to value art but instead propaganda. For instance, if we were to use the new Academy standards for Oscar-nominated movies, the Godfather would fail – the cast is almost all white, has no LGBT and IIRC includes the n-word. Amadeus, another excellent film (one of the most praised in Oscar history) would certainly fail, since the cast is all white and almost entirely male, as we would expect from a film set in 18th century Vienna. This does not mean great art cannot have diverse casts, LGBT characters or a lack of "problematic" content. For a recent example, the excellent show Andor ticks almost all of the DEI checkboxes – LGBT character(s), diverse cast –, but it also has smart writing, interesting characters, sensible plots, beautiful visuals and a compelling story. As long as the former are subordinated to the latter, a work remains art and not "politically correct" propaganda. At the same time, Oppenheimer ticks almost none of the DEI checkboxes and yet is arguably one of the best films of this century.
> So instead of using a meaningless euphemism, OP should articulate what exact themes, stories, or characters they think lead to a good critic score?
I think this comment betrays exactly what I'm critiquing. Great art can't be shoved in a box like this. Mediocre art has identifiable flaws - maybe it's visually bland or maybe the dialogue is poor or the characters act in inexplicable ways. These all detract from the beauty and truth of the work.
This is a single datapoint, but my hypothesis is that political correctness does indeed account for a measurable (beyond noise) portion of a RT score. Marketing spend probably matters more, and genuinely excellent non-PC films (say, Oppenheimer) can succeed without PC, but PC does contribute.
[0]https://fandomwire.com/theyve-been-barely-advertising-it-unt...
[0]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-probably-not-possib...
The analogy checks out.
A lot of time in public schools is either wasted or simply a consequence of classes having ~30 students each. I also find that homeschool kids can be taught the discipline to work on their own after a lesson. I check the work in the evenings or before school starts in the morning.
I can understand why many people might not want to homeschool, but I find it's been a blessing for my kids & our family.
About a year after starting treatment, I noticed that during the final week of that eight-week cycle and continuing for a few days after treatment, my time on Twitter was much higher than during the other 6.5-ish weeks. I figured it was something psychological, and was able to get my doctor to increase the frequency of doses, which curbed my Twitter visits even more.
Recently, I had a bout where due to insurance nonsense, I was delayed in getting my injection. I was heavily on Twitter, not as a result of conscious choice, but just because I felt like it. I took my shot a couple weeks ago, and have barely logged into Twitter over the last week and a half.
Correlation does not imply causation, but using my own anecdata, I can't rule out this study and in fact have some personal evidence to confirm it. I find it interesting that someone attempted to test a hypothesis that I had informally stated a few years ago.
I tried to edit the page with a more accurate description: namely, that McCloskey attempted to have Bailey fired from Northwestern for violating "research ethics" and tried to have his license to practice psychology revoked in Illinois. Those facts seemed relevant to me, especially about someone who claims to be libertarian or "Classical Liberal." Wikipedia editors did not think so. The change was reverted almost immediately, even despite my citation of a high-quality source - much higher quality than the journalism garbage backing up many of the claims made on Wikipedia, yada yada. I eventually gave up after realizing one of the editors was on a moral crusade to suppress this piece of information, and none of the other editors were going to question her bias.
I imagine the same thing happens on thousands of other politically sensitive pages.
I made another comment conceding the point about the the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, which were fraudulent albeit separated by several decades.
Nevertheless, the thought of the US Government unilaterally dropping bombs or executing a raid on sovereign foreign countries like we have done in Iraq or Pakistan would have been seen as outrageous before the DoD days, notwithstanding that the United States is the preeminent economic and military power today. But I think that fits in with OP's point: the incompetence is a feature of giant, hegemonic power, not a bug.
The Spanish-American War was likewise begun under suspicious circumstances, but it was the first fueled mainly by the press.
The US also engaged in pointless wars like WWI and unjust wars like the Indian Wars following the Civil War.
"War is a racket" sounds interesting, so I'd be curious to read the arguments. Maybe my interpretation is wrong or incomplete! I do think there was a significant shift from wars being perpetrated by elected officials seeking political ends to wars being largely planned and executed by the MID (and the press), with the elected leaders dragged along like the tail wagging a dog.
To your latter point, the US became significantly more bellicose after the War Department became the Defense Department (merged with the Navy Department). This coincided with escalating dishonesty about the wars the US was making. The Korean War was at the time a "police action." The casus belli for full commitment in the Vietnam War was the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident. And then, of course, who could forget the the invisible WMDs in Iraq?
Has there ever been a time when the suits weren't ignoramuses? And if they're optimizing everything to deliver a profit, why aren't they profitable?
The suits are to blame in terms of accountability, because the buck stops with them. But the product as far as I can tell has never been more expensive. The new Indiana Jones movie had a production budget of approximately $300M, plus marketing costs (between $50M & $150M). If we assume Disney will pocket 50% of the gross box office, they'd need to make $700M-900M just to break even. So far, more than two weeks after release, the film has made just over $300M worldwide.[0] That movie alone is very likely to lose hundreds of millions. Movies losing money is the norm, but not to the tune of hundreds of millions.
What's gone wrong? 1) The writing has deteriorated. Stories have become boring & tendentious, filled with unlikeable characters, hackneyed plots and preachy dialogue. 2) The studios have become completely risk-averse. I can kind of understand why they'd want to be risk averse with budgets of $300M, but audiences tire of remakes, reboots and distant sequels. (I think the creative types have gotten wise, which is why "explorable" IP with large worlds like Star Wars or Middle-Earth have been cannibalized to tell stories that are tonally and thematically quite different than the source material, because the suits have zero clue. Sometimes it even works, like with Andor. Though even Andor has struggled to find its audience amongst all of the noise.) 3) The costs have gotten too high. I'm not sure if the streaming wars or golden age of TV or even just low interest rates are responsible, but the costs of production are staggering. This is in a day and age where technology should have made it cheaper to produce films & TV. When I look at Oppenheimer's budget of $100M, I can almost understand why it is so expensive. I can't explain the Indy 5 budget.
When I was younger, I could almost always find a movie I wanted to watch on a Friday night. Those days are long gone. At some point, Hollywood stopped producing anything worth seeing, and now they're paying the price.
[0]https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2776598017/?ref_=bo_...
Has conservatism "moved?" And if it has, has it moved to the right? If we were to time travel three generations ago, would the mainstream liberal culture then be more similar to the present day conservative culture or the present day liberal culture on the issues mentioned?
I submit that a present-day conservative would likely be a staunch liberal in those days. The Left has simply moved much further to the left.
This would be a bit like a headline including the phrase "serial killer trained at Harvard" to refer to Ted Kaczynski. I loathe Harvard, but I couldn't honestly claim that the nexus of Harvard and Kaczynski had any relevance to his terror campaign.
So, yeah, GP had a solid basis for objecting to the headline. Certainly one beyond the cynical, borderline clairvoyant explanation given.
To put it in a different context, consider when Uber was playing with autonomous driving. Their miles-driven-per-incident rate was orders of magnitude lower than any commercial fleet of human drivers or even the general population of human drivers.
Engineers have an ethical duty to try to quantify these risks and present them as accurately as possible to those who make decisions. Anything less than that is performance art.
He also, by all accounts, has developed genuine expertise in deep sea diving by having the same attention to detail. This isn't to say he's doing the design all by himself. Rather, he worked with engineers and designers to build subs, and is meticulous on every detail with them, the same process he uses on his films.
His expertise speaks for itself: his sub has dived into the Challenger Deep successfully, because it was solidly & competently engineered.
Works quite well, and is configured w/ Lua
My take from reading the article (not a physicist) is the physics of the nucleus (i.e. the protons and neutrons and strong nuclear force) are treated as emergent phenomena from the quantum theories about fundamental particles (e.g. quarks, leptons & gluons).
Per the article, such leading theory of the nucleus is "chiral effective theory," which seems to be quite inaccurate at making predictions for the experiment in question.
I'm not sure how much more accurate the headline could be, unless chiral effective theory is not in fact the ex ante leading theory of the nucleus.
I'm not talking about car (or chariot?) accidents here, I'm talking about literally thousands of people being executed on the grounds of a temple dedicated to Rome's chief god. Certainly people died in the Circus Maximus, and that is just sporting accident. I wouldn't even call gladiatorial combat human sacrifice, since it was mostly an entertainment spectacle in a more brutal time.
We're talking about Romans taking prisoners captured in war, marching them to one of the most significant religious locations within the sacred boundaries of the city, and executing them.
My issue with just trusting the ancients is that they sometimes aren't trustworthy. It's very possible that Rome didn't admit this was human sacrifice because Roman culture condemned human sacrifice, and kind of turned a blind eye to the ethics of this ritual.
It's not the killings of prisoners themselves - those were common throughout the ancient world, alongside slavery. It's the fact that they killed them at the temple to the chief god.
On the whole, the Romans were quite enlightened compared to the other brutal civilizations of the ancient world, being governed more by law than superstition, but they still had these quirks that wouldn't be eradicated till Christianity replaced the state religion.