lambdaphagy:

loki-zen:

ursaeinsilviscacant:

wolffyluna:

ursaeinsilviscacant:

Like, I can see why e.g. saying the rosary would be a good anxiolytic and/or virtue increaser for humans who aren’t me. Or how having a religious community is comforting and helpful. I just don’t get how the afterlife stuff doesn’t massively offset it. 

But I genuinely don’t get how anyone’s mental health is improved by a religion with a Hell in it. Everything else, sure, I see how that helps. But “eternal torture exists and you deserve it” is like… this isn’t Taking Ideas Seriously or Competing Access Needs. Any person is not going to deal well with the risk of eternal extreme misery. It is horrible by definition.

I know it’s bad to psychologise your opponents, but I can’t see how Christians believe in Hell if they’re mentally healthy. Maybe the sola fide ones are okay with other people being tortured and secure in their own salvation, but “they are okay with other people being tortured” is a horribly mean thing to say. And yet the alternative “they are lying about their religion” is also horribly mean.
What is going on here? What am I not getting? What is there that’s missing? “I am crazy” is 500x more plausible than “everyone else is crazy” but NOTHING. ABOUT. THIS. BEHAVIOUR. MAKES. ANY. SENSE. AT. ALL.

Explain it to me. My inability to understand is maddening. Maybe there’s some piece I’m missing and if I see it Jesus is real and the eternal torture is somehow okay. But fuck I hope that’s not true.

In my (limited) experience, people seem to completely forget about the concept of Hell, or believe it could never happen to them/those that they love*.

But plain old forgetting/forgetting the implications seems most common.

*Esp in some Protestant systems (not sure if correct word), where it is relatively easy to ‘qualify’ for heaven. Though it varies wildly depending on who you ask.

*nods* Yeah, this is similar to David’s point.

I just don’t see how you can forget about something which is literally the worst thing possible.

Lots of happy-seeming religious Christians, and also every Muslim I’ve asked, have told me that they don’t view Hell as a place of eternal torture.

The Christians pointed to something Jesus said about ‘cleansing’ and say that ‘eternal’ is hyperbole; what they believe is that bad people go to a place that is pretty unpleasant until they have learned their lesson.

The Muslims told me either that Hell is a process of cleansing those who are not yet fit for paradise, or that before you go to Hell you get undeniable proof that the Islamic God exists (he’s basically sat there in front of you being all God and such) and only go to Hell if you still refuse to become a Muslim. And that at any point after you go to Hell you can change your mind and he’ll forgive you.

so idk, data points?

Lewis’s theology of Hell is pretty interesting.  Just as Heaven may be “an acquired taste”, the damned in Hell may not even wish to leave: 

“The damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; the doors of hell are locked on the inside.  I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of Hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man ‘wishes’ to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.

The Problem of Pain

In any case, our choices will echo at least until heat death whether we like it or not. Given that inevitability, should we adopt a metaphysics that rubs it in our faces or one that allows us to push the thought to the back of our minds?  Are we playing for keeps or not?  And if not, why not? 

(Cut for length – and sorry for writing so many words in response to so few)

Keep reading

(via lambdaphagy)

OK, if you were wondering where this dystopian thing was from, here’s the deal.

I was thinking about IQ testing stuff earlier today (see my last few posts), and at one point I went back to my own test results from 2014 to check something.  And I noticed something odd there, which was that I had “widely discrepant” (tester’s phrasing) scores on the two tests of “Verbal Comprehension” I was given.  Specifically, I scored three standard deviations higher on “Vocabulary” than I did on “Similarities.”  Wild!

So, of course, what I did immediately afterwards was poke around Google trying to figure out what the “Similarities” subtest was and why it might be a crock of shit.  Motivated reasoning at its finest!

(Note: my university library doesn’t have the full WAIS-IV materials, and they don’t seem to be freely available online, so I’ve had to infer stuff about the Similarities subtest from the materials I do have full or partial access to, such as the guidebooks  Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment and Assessment with the WAIS-IV, as well as this page which lists 10 of the 14 subtest items on a particular version of the WAIS.  (I guess you may not want to look at that if you want to take an IQ test at some point and don’t want to be unnaturally “prepped” for it.))

So what is the Similarities subtest?  Wikipedia says that it’s supposed to measure “Abstract verbal reasoning” and “semantic knowledge.”  (The Handbook of Psychological Assessment says it “requires verbal concept formation and abstract reasoning abilities.”)  So, something about abstract reasoning, concepts, and words.

How does it measure this?  Well, the tester presents you with a pair of nouns and asks how they are “alike.”  For instance, for “banana” and “orange” you might say “they’re both fruit.”

Upon being asked such a question, you might start to wonder exactly how you are supposed to be showing off your intelligence here.  Is it better to think of similarities that are as general as possible?  But it seems unlikely that answers like “objects” or “entities that may or may not exist” would be considered good answers.  Maybe you are supposed to show off specialized knowledge – say, a biologist might mention some special gene that bananas and oranges happen to share?

You are given clues about such matters in the following way.  First, you’re given a “sample item” – that image I posted earlier was the sample item from one adaptation of the WAIS-IV Similarities subtest.  If you get this “wrong,” the tester tells you a “right” answer, and then you move on.

After the sample item, the first two questions you are asked (”items 4 and 5″) are “teaching items.”  Answers are scored on a 0-2 scale, and if you don’t get a 2 on both of these teaching items, the tester will give an example of what a 2-point answer would have been, then will go through a set of “easier” teaching items (”items 1 to 3″) until you score two consecutive 2s.

You are not given any information about the scoring criteria except what emerges from this script.  For instance, if you just happen to get 2s on items 4 and 5, you are never given any information about what a wrong answer might have looked like.

OK, let’s stop being coy and talk about what the Similarities subtest is actually about.  Here is how the guidebook Assessment with the WAIS-IV sums up the scoring criteria:

Oh, OK.  So it’s about abstraction.  More abstract and conceptual is good.  (But you also have to choose abstractions that somehow single out the pair in particular, unlike, say, “objects.”  Hence answers that are “too general” get 0s.)

Assessment with the WAIS-IV is quite direct about what one can learn from Similarities subtest answers:

Now here is the interesting thing here.  The subject is not told: “this is a test of your abstract thinking.  You are meant to think of abstract categories that both things belong to.”  After all, since “abstract category” is itself an abstract category, and this is a test of your ability to think in abstract categories, we can’t just assume at the outset that you will understand such an instruction!

Instead, you are at most given a few clues that the test is about abstraction.  (You may be given no clues at all.)  So the test is, for the most part, judging your ability to think abstractly by looking at your tendency to provide abstract answers when asked merely for answers of any sort.

If you are, say, an agronomist who thinks you will wow the tester with your knowledge about the agricultural properties of apples and bananas – or an historian who knows apples and bananas had similar roles in some past society – well, you might think you’re showing off your “intelligence” relative to those who merely know they’re both fruits, but nope!  Those are merely functional answers.  Or what if you’re a neurotic sort (like me) who thinks it’s very important to provide true answers, even at the risk of suppressing fancier answers you’re less certain of?  Maybe you’ll retreat to the safe world of sense-data, which remain even as theories rise and fall?  Even worse!  (The guidebooks don’t focus much on whether the answers are true or not; my impression is that if the tester isn’t sure themselves, the question gets tossed out.)

(If you want more, uh, concreteness, that document I got the “numbers” thing from has some helpful examples of 2-, 1- and 0-point answers.)

Essentials of WAIS-IV Assessment quotes the W-Man himself on the glories of the Similarities subtest:

Ah, yes – we’re all aware that those who respond to weird unmotivated questions with abstractions are just on a higher plane than those who respond to the same weird unmotivated questions with concrete or sense-level info.  We all know those wretched “both have a skin” types, and their unsuitability for any “high grade of intellectual work”!

In seriousness, I do kinda see what Wechsler is going for here.  He’s saying that high-level intellectual work requires the ability to see abstraction connections.  Or maybe that’s what he means.  What he says is that there’s a difference between “the individual who says [my emphasis] that … and the individual who says that … “  But that’s clearly nonsense.  What it is right to say about an apple and a banana depends entirely on the nature of the conversation.

But you can’t argue with results, I guess.  The subtest “has a high g loading” and apparently it’s reliable enough to keep around in a commonly used IQ test.

Anyway, I did three standard deviations worse on this thing than on the Vocabulary test in 2014.  (On the other hand, way back when I was 14 years old, I took a Similarities subtest on the WISC and, back then, got a score two-and-two-thirds SD higher than my 2014 score.  How far my abstract verbal reasoning skills have fallen!  Once a fruit-sayer, now a mere skin-sayer!  The pathos of it all!)

NAB notes: Moldbug and counter-revolution

(This is really long, and I apologize if people dislike these dash-stretching posts.  I prefer not to use cuts for this kind of thing because that way people skimming the dash may notice a particular bit of interest.)

One of the central themes of Neoreaction A Basilisk is that philosophies can have implications – “monsters” – that horrify their creators, or which go against their creators’ most cherished values.  So there are a number of sections where Sandifer looks for these sorts of contradictions in the output of the trio.  (See the discussion of “pwnage” in @psybersecurity‘s review)

Let’s look at one such contradiction Sandifer identifies in Moldbug.  There’s a lot of stuff going on in the passage about this – Johnson’s quip that “the first Whig was the Devil,” Satan as a character in Paradise Lost, Sandifer’s distinction between “Satanic negations” and “Antichristal negations,” etc.

But the basic idea is that Moldbug rhetorically identifies “the devil” or “Satan” with chaos, which he hates, order being (ostensibly) his highest value.  Yet (Sandifer says) Moldbug himself imitates the Satan of Paradise Lost in several ways, both because he relies constantly on a “yes, but” rhetorical strategy and, more simply, because Moldbug is (or wants to be) a chaotic, edgy, rebellious figure, handing out Red Pills to people who just want the vertiginous thrill of seeing their old ordered reality for the bullshit it is(, man).

Certainly this tension is there in Moldbug.  He’s a raving firebrand for the cause of order and stability, and despite valuing those things he keeps turning on the reader with a wink, saying “yes, but no” and pulling away the solid ground you thought you were on.   His says that reading his writing is like taking a psychedelic drug, and psychedelic trips are not noted for their stability or for their tendency to induce faith in firm hierarchies.

But how weird is this, really?  Should we be surprised?  Sandifer thinks it’s weird, that Moldbug is in fact the kind of chaotic force he loathes most.  But I think that in saying so, he’s missing what a reactionary actually is.

I’m relying here on Corey Robin’s interesting essay collection The Reactionary Mind, particularly the first two essays, which handily enough are both available in full online – one on the nature of conservatism and one on Hobbes.  I recommend reading both, which may even make my words here superfluous, since I’m mostly just going to regurgitate Robin.  (Of course, you might think Robin is full of shit, although to me he’s pretty convincing.)

Robin’s basic theme is of modern conservatism descends less from the complacent voices of any given “old order” than from the voices of reaction – that is, the firey new voices that rise up in defense of the old order when it is challenged, who often see things quite differently than the old order did before the challenge arose.

Robin’s second theme is that these reactionary voices tend to concede that things really are different after the challenge – that we can’t just pretend the revolution never happened – and in fact adopt (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) the tactics of the revolutionary forces, even making a pitch for the old order in the same terms used by its overthrowers.  (”Aristocracy is the real revolution, man.”  Or: “you want to really blow your mind?  Read Moldbug.”)

The reactionary isn’t the muddy-headed aristocrat who wants nothing more than to hunt game on his spacious estate – he’s restless and roiling, a political animal, a firebrand, just one who happens to argue for the aristocratic system.

Robin writes:

Ever since Edmund Burke invented conservatism as an idea, the conservative has styled himself a man of prudence and moderation, his cause a sober—and sobering—recognition of limits. “To be conservative,” writes Michael Oakeshott, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown … the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant.” Yet the political efforts that have roused the conservative to his most profound reflections – the reactions against the French and Bolshevik revolutions, the defense of slavery and Jim Crow, the attack on social democracy and the welfare state, the serial backlashes against the New Deal, the Great Society, civil rights, feminism, and gay rights – have been anything but that. Whether in Europe or the United States, in this century or previous ones, conservatism has been a forward movement of restless and relentless change, partial to risk taking and ideological adventurism, militant in its posture and populist in its bearings.

In other words: being a whirlwind force of chaos in the name of the old order isn’t an aberration, it’s the norm.

Robin finds this tendency in a number of places.  The one that’s most interesting in re: Moldbug is the case of Joseph de Maistre, one of the classic reactionaries, a vigorous defender of monarchism in the wake of the French Revolution.  But Maistre said a lot of things that may surprise you.  Robin again:

[Burke and Maistre share] an antipathy, bordering on contempt, for the old regime they claim as their cause. The opening chapters of Maistre’s Considerations on France are an unrelenting assault on the three pillars of the ancien régime: the aristocracy, the church, and the monarchy. Maistre divides the nobility into two categories: the treasonous and the clueless. The clergy is corrupt, weakened by its wealth and lax morals. The monarchy is soft and lacks the will to punish. […]

The second element we find in these early voices of reaction is a surprising admiration for the very revolution they are writing against. Maistre’s most rapturous comments are reserved for the Jacobins, whose brutal will and penchant for violence – their “black magic” – he plainly envies. The revolutionaries have faith, in their cause and themselves, which transforms a movement of mediocrities into the most implacable force Europe has ever seen. Thanks to their efforts, France has been purified and restored to its rightful pride of place among the family of nations. “The revolutionary government,” Maistre concludes, “hardened the soul of France by tempering it in blood.” […]

Archmonarchist that he was, Maistre understood that the king could never return to power if he did not have a touch of the plebeian about him. So when Maistre imagines the triumph of the counterrevolution, he takes care to emphasize the populist credentials of the returning monarch. The people should identify with this new king, says Maistre, because like them he has attended the “terrible school of misfortune” and suffered in the “hard school of adversity.” He is “human,” with humanness here connoting an almost pedestrian, and reassuring, capacity for error. He will be like them. Unlike his predecessors, he will know it, which “is a great deal.

My point isn’t that Maistre is especially like Moldbug, but that he clearly thinks a little chaos and bloodshed can sometimes really hit the spot, that Satan (in Sandifer’s sense) is not the enemy.  And that he’s willing to adapt his case to revolutionary times, much as Moldbug does.  And this from a guy who’s basically the prototypical reactionary!

Robin’s essay on Hobbes, who he (while aware of the obvious objections) calls “the first counterrevolutionary,” is more in the same vein.  But it’s worth reading too because Hobbes, in Robin’s portrait, just sounds so much like the kind of guy who’d call his ideas “the Red Pill”:

It’s no accident that Hobbes fled his enemies and then his friends, for he was fashioning a political theory that shredded longstanding alliances. Rather than reject the revolutionary argument, he absorbed and transformed it. From its deepest categories and idioms he derived an uncompromising defense of the most hidebound form of rule. He sensed the centrifugal pulses of early modern Europe – the priesthood of all believers, the democratic armies massing under the banner of ancient republican ideals, science and skepticis – and sought to convert them into a single centripetal force: a sovereign so terrible and benign as to make any challenge to such authority seem not only immoral but also irrational. Not unlike the Italian Futurists, Hobbes put dissolution in the service of resolution. He was the first and, along with Nietzsche, the greatest philosopher of counterrevolution, a blender avant la lettre of cultural modernism and political reaction who understood that to defeat a revolution you first must become the revolution.

As a certain movie protagonist once said: “whoa.”

OK, I’ve more than made my point there.  And I’ve only claimed that Moldbug shares these tensions with his most famous antecedents, not that the tensions are (therefore?) not a problem.  Maybe this is just a problem for all these guys, for Hobbes and Maistre et. al. as well as for Moldbug.

But in that case, it’s just a problem with reaction, not with Moldbug.  (Robin would say it’s a problem with the entirety of conservatism.)  Sandifer’s frame is about mad philosophers and horror protagonists delving too deep into the dark; for this to work, Moldbug has to be struggling with something newly and idiosyncratically awful and self-opposing.  If Moldbug’s descent into the dark happens just because he’s a reactionary, then it’s pretty commonplace and well-established, as encounters with horror go.  The basilisk there isn’t neoreaction, it’s just reaction, and Moldbug’s venturing into anything but the unknown.

Is there a better way to play Sandifer’s game with Moldbug?  I think so.

I’m admittedly much less sure of myself with Moldbug than I am with Yudkowsky.  I’ve read some Moldbug posts here and there, but Sandifer seems to have read a lot more Moldbug than I have.  Anyway, let’s see how well I do.

Sandifer more-or-less identifies Moldbug’s core value as “order,” as opposed to “chaos,” hence the Satan thing:

Over and over again, Moldbug insists that order, law, and the concept of goodness are interchangeable synonyms, whereas chaos is inherently a force for evil and indeed the very definition of evil.

He specifically quotes at one point from Part 3 of Moldbug’s Open Letter series, which defines reaction as favoring order.  Here’s another quote from that post:

A reactionary - ie, a right-winger - is someone who believes in order, stability, and security. All of which he treats as synonyms.

This sounds like Sandifer’s line about synonyms.  But the triad, at least in this particular line, isn’t the same one.  In particular, “order” is arguably the least progressive-friendly term here.  “I value order” calls up, for me, a lot of scary, dystopian scenarios.  But “stability” and “security”?  Hey, I like those too.  I may want to attend a wild party now and then, but I also want to be able to walk home safely.

“Being able to walk home safely,” I think, is really the more fundamental concept for Moldbug here, which is getting referred to as “order” a lot because, hey, synonyms.  My sense is that what motivates Moldbug is not “order” as a pure abstract concept – which would a pretty weird and alien preference even before he even starts devising governments to ensure it – but a revulsion towards violence.

He puts things this way in his very first post, “A Formalist Manifesto”:

The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence.

Especially organized violence. Next to organized human-on-human violence, a good formalist believes, all other problems - Poverty, Global Warming, Moral Decay, etc, etc, etc - are basically insignificant. Perhaps once we get rid of violence we can worry a little about Moral Decay, but given that organized violence killed a couple of hundred million people in the last century, whereas Moral Decay gave us “American Idol,” I think the priorities are pretty clear.

Compared to Protect Order At All Costs, Chaos Is The Tool Of Satan, this is pretty friendly and recognizable stuff.  He states it pretty starkly, but I do think reducing violence is pretty good as basic goals go, if you have to choose just one.  (See also his fears that someone will physically harm his daughter.  EDIT 5/14/16: if you’re interested, I wrote about the racism in that post here)

A bit later he replaces the word “violence” with “friction,” which is broader.  It covers any sort of uncertainty over the result of a conflict that might cause both sides to judge the conflict worth a go.  (This is what animal dominance hierarches are trying to avoid – they figure out who can beat up whom and trust the results, so no one actually has to fight.)  Avoiding this is, again, pretty good as basic goals go.

So how do Moldbug’s ideas come back to horrify him?  Simple.  Scott Alexander covered it long ago in great and delicious detail.  The problem for Moldbug is that the political systems he thinks might be nice and nonviolent and frictionless are in fact the exact opposite.

Monarchy is frictionless?  What the fuck?  Practically every famous story about kings is about friction, and there are a lot of these stories, and they happen in quite compressed sequence.  Rebellions against the monarch happen constantly.  Monarchs tend to lose their position by getting killed by people who then take their place, and this recycling occurs at quite a fast clip.  The Hundred Years’ War involved a dizzying network of larger and smaller friction that honestly – speaking as a pampered democratic modern – makes my head spin, with a dispute over succession to the throne of France interlocking with various smaller succession disputes.  It’s not that everyone knew who was sovereign over what; it feels more like no one knew who was sovereign over anything.  Popes, who were absolute rulers of their own domains, excommunicated each other, squabbled over succession, and sometimes decided they had sovereignty over the stuff kings were supposed to have sovereignty over.  It was Moldbug’s nightmare.  And with all this friction came, yes, a massive amount of pointless violence, moving in vast and unpredictable waves.

Moldbug must know all this.  I mean, it’s there in the record.  Trying to write it off as one big Cathedral lie would be impossible.  But still he persists in his bizarre vision of stability under monarchy.

What is Moldbug’s basilisk?  “Here, the House of Stuart is back.  Really.  You are the subject of a king, now.  Enjoy your order, stability and security.  It’s what you wanted.”

voximperatoris:

nostalgebraist:

pluspluspangolin:

nostalgebraist:

pluspluspangolin:

nostalgebraist:

I’m usually sort of anti-anti-elitist, in that I think there’s often a good reason to prefer the “finer” versions of any given art form or craft, and while people do often use these preferences for signaling, I don’t think anyone should be quick to assume that it’s “just signaling” in any given case

but

I just cannot understand alcohol snobbery

I think it’s a combination of “I don’t understand what interesting variation is there, beyond ‘the cheap kinds tend to taste bad’ – the non-cheap kinds are just a bunch of slightly different flavored drinks" and “I dislike the personal qualities that alcohol snobbery signals.”  (TBH, without the latter I probably wouldn’t worry much over the former)

is it the preference for higher quality versions of X over lower quality versions of X or the preference for obscure drinks over less obscure drinks that confuses you?

I wasn’t clear on this in the OP, but it’s mostly the attitude that alcohol is continually interesting beyond just finding a drink or category of drinks you like and mostly sticking to it, with some variations.  And the attitude that this is part of an acculturation process, that by (say) trying many many different beers you are learning to “appreciate beer” and that this is a valuable thing.

isn’t that just the general art/cultural appreciation attitude mapped onto drinks?

ie, ‘to properly appreciate things in this space you should familiarize yourself with a variety of things from the space, so as to get a sense of its parameters and conventions and ranges of expression and thereby enhance you understanding and enjoyment of things in the space’

the ultimate (self-)justification of this is of course a mess, but isn’t that true of all such projects?

(on the continuity of interest, I could see it being rather interesting to see what people can brew up with a relatively limited palette of ingredients/within a relatively constrained form)

It’s precisely that, but not all such projects make as much intuitive sense to me as others.  It depends on how much variability, or how many “new kinds of novelty,” are present in a space.

Being a “connoisseur” of literature, say, makes a lot of sense to me, because the space there is extremely variable, almost as much as life itself: it’s “everything creative people can do with language.”  Music and visual art are also really varied.  Food is a little less so, I think, and pings as kind of weird to my brain, but I can see that cooking is a very, very complex craft and there’s a lot to appreciate there.  In my brain, alcohol and mixology feel analogous to some very tiny subset of food/cooking, and thus the variability starts to get low enough that it feels really weird to me.

I mean, in the low-variability limit, this eventually has to stop working, right?  We laugh at the last frame of the “Joe Biden eating a sandwich” xkcd comic because we realize it’s ridiculous.  Set aside the fact that the comic presents it as an analogy for wine appreciation (my point here, about the properties of extreme cases, works even wine isn’t such an extreme case).  The comic, on the surface, encourages us to think of all sorts of connoisseurship as being no less (or more) absurd than the Joe Biden thing, but it’s obvious that there’s more to it than that; exploring the entire wide world of human literary or musical creativity is just more interesting than exploring the world of Biden sandwich frames.

We realize that the Biden thing doesn’t have the qualities we value about connoisseurship, and at most just has some of the incidental trappings of it, like people connecting their tastes to their broader identity.  And this seems to be a result of how little variability there is in the Biden sandwich frames: there really is not (in the words of the comic) “a whole world there.”  So if you dial down the variability of a space too low, you get Biden sandwich frames, and at that point it’s clearly not the same thing anymore.

(If you wanted to mathematicize this “variability” concept, I think it’s kind of like “the dimensionality of a vector space,” as opposed to say “the variance of a distribution.”  I mentioned “how many new kinds of novelty there are,” which is a dimensionality concept – “here’s a new direction I’ve never moved in!”, as opposed to “I’ve moved in this direction, but I could go further!”)

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You mentioned mixology, as did @voximperatoris in this post (which I am only not reblogging because I don’t want to spawn several separate threads).  I think mixology is cool, although I don’t know much about it myself, and there’s definitely a lot more there than in pure flavors-of-alcohols alone.  But as a space for connoisseurship, it still feels cramped to me.

It feels like a very small subset of “cooking” involving relatively little preparation beyond the selection of individual ingredients – kind of like making salads, say.  There are a lot of things that can go into a salad, each of which can be relatively low- or high-quality in any given case, and it’s impressive when someone makes a tasty salad with limited ingredients.  But it’s still a really limited domain, and it would seem really weird to be as passionate about “exploring the world of salads” as some people are about exploring the world of mixed drinks.  That’s not to say that those people’s passion is illegitimate, just to say I don’t get it, and elaborate as to why.

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@voximperatoris also spoke of the many varieties of alcohol that are out there and their subtle differences.  I think I may just not have the taste buds for this kind of thing?  I can recognize these differences, but to me they’re like the differences between, say, potential salad ingredients (”even just in the realm of squash alone, you’ve got butternut squash, but also acorn squash, delicata squash … “).  Like, the differences are there, but there are differences in everything, and once they get sufficiently trivial (or low-dimensional, or whatever) they stop being interesting.  (In the extreme case, you get Biden sandwich frames.)

Being a “connoisseur” of literature, say, makes a lot of sense to me, because the space there is extremely variable, almost as much as life itself: it’s “everything creative people can do with language.”  Music and visual art are also really varied.  Food is a little less so, I think, and pings as kind of weird to my brain, but I can see that cooking is a very, very complex craft and there’s a lot to appreciate there.  In my brain, alcohol and mixology feel analogous to some very tiny subset of food/cooking, and thus the variability starts to get low enough that it feels really weird to me.

In what way, exactly, is literature more variable than cooking? “Everything creative people can do with language”; what can they do with it? Write words on a page? I went into a bookstore and I was shocked at the lack of variety: in nearly every single book, black text on a white page. Sometimes a few illustrations. Where’s the soundtrack? Where’s the scented ink? Why can’t I taste the food they’re eating in ASOIAF?

There’s no variability in the experience, either. You just sit down in a quiet room and stare at the pages silently and passively. I never got to engage with the characters. I tried to tell Ned Stark to watch out, but he didn’t.

Okay, okay, I’m being facetious: there’s obviously a huge amount of variety in literature, and I’m willing to say it engages with higher parts of the brain than cuisine does. But if you looked at it in a simplistic enough way, you could obscure the variety. And some people just plain don’t like reading, given that there are other forms of entertainment that appeal more to them—which I also think is fine. (Needless to say, the snobbery over that one is huge.)

***

I agree that at a certain point, you get to “Biden sandwich frames”. But the point isn’t that “Biden sandwich frames” are intrinsically uninteresting is some kind of cosmic way; there may be a possible mind that finds them endlessly fascinating. The point is that they just don’t have much appeal to human psychology and interests.

And everyone is inclined to think that what he personally doesn’t find interesting or appealing is an example of “Biden sandwich frames”. For instance, with me it’s sports and especially baseball. There is no sport more boring than baseball, with the possible exception of cricket. I understand on some conceptual level that people like this stuff. But for me, it’s “They hit the ball. They run around the bases. How many hours of this crap can you watch before it gets old?”

Or even something like chess. I like chess. It’s a fun game, and I play it every once in a while. But goddamn, how could anyone dedicate his whole life to becoming a chess master? I’d get sick of it after a month. Sure, there’s all this complex strategy and everything. But at the end of the day, you’re playing chess. Same few pieces, same board.

Then people come in and apply the typical-mind fallacy. “I would find a life dedicated to chess mind-numbingly boring. Therefore, everyone else would, too. Since no one really enjoys it; they must be doing it to signal intelligence, or for the money, or for all the chess groupies you get.”

***

I’m not denying the signalling factor entirely. I have a great suspicion that there are many people out there who don’t really like expensive champagne but just buy it to show their wealth and supposed sophistication. But I also think that there really is a difference between the cheap stuff and the expensive stuff, that there are people genuinely dedicated to the craft of making it, and that it’s possible for someone to appreciate it.

As I said, I don’t like most wine, especially not dry wine. I think it ranges from “bad” to “tolerable”. So I don’t try to force myself to “appreciate” the nuances of it. But many people genuinely seem to like it.

This is not so shocking when you look at things like salmiak liquorice, which is a favorite of people in the Netherlands and Scandinavia, but which most Americans absolutely hate. (If you dislike regular black liquorice, you will definitely hate this stuff.) People just have different tastes.

***

Are there some areas of alcohol “appreciation” that I think genuinely are “Biden sandwich frames”? Yes.

For instance, you have “gourmet” vodka that people waste their money on. Vodka is nothing more than pure ethanol cut with water. It is supposed to be tasteless. The only variation is in the filtering, i.e. whether it’s really pure ethanol or not. But once you go above the really cheap stuff, it’s all the same. So I think “appreciation” of the “nuances” here is a bit silly. There may be some variation from brand to brand but…not much.

But contrast that with tasting Kentucky bourbon versus a really peaty Islay Scotch. The difference is not subtle. At all. They truly have just totally different flavor profiles. Neither one is “objectively better”, and there are premium varieties of both, but there is a large difference.

***

I think it’s kind of funny that you talk about being “really into salads” as funny when there are many restaurants, including a large national chain, totally dedicated to making salads. And I’m sure there are people out there, e.g. hobbyist vegetable gardeners, who appreciate the different varieties of squash.

Your point about the limited variability and ingredients is true, but it also cuts the other way. I have neither the time, the money, nor the skill to make the kinds of things a world-class chef can make. Have you read the book Modernist Cuisine? I think “rationalists” would find that book fascinating, since it’s all about applying science and reason to cooking. But nobody has the equipment to make a lot of the stuff mentioned in there.

But the nice thing about cocktail recipes is that they are:

• Totally exact and easy to measure.
  
• Require no skill and very little time to prepare.
• Made from ingredients that have almost no variation (different bottles of the same brand of liquor).

The craft is more in the experimentation and the new ideas people come up with than in actually making it. And once it’s made, anyone can follow along at home, which is a large part of the appeal.

It’s rather like being a good DJ: they don’t actually make music, they just rearrange what other people do. But they follow the tastes of the crowd and know how to put things together that will keep people dancing or otherwise appeal to them. They experiment and promote unfamiliar things, while taking back what doesn’t catch on.

***

This has gone on forever, but the last point is the obvious one of diminishing returns. It applies to everything, alcohol no less than anything else.

But to change it up a little, consider fountain pens, which are another thing I’m “into”. (Not something—and neither is alcohol appreciation—I’ve dedicated all my free time to.)

Let’s say a Bic ballpoint pen is 100 times better on the Absolute Scale of Writing Quality than writing with your own blood. And let’s (generously) say that writing with a basic-level fountain pen is twice as good as the ballpoint. Is a $400 fountain pen ten or twenty times better than that? Certainly not.

Does that mean premium fountain pens are all just a scam, that there’s really no difference in the writing experience? Well, to some extent the improvement is merely in the aesthetics and the fittings. There’s a reason why super-premium brands are most often sold in jewelry stores. But you really can pay several hundred dollars to an expert who will custom-grind you a solid 14kt gold (gold is used because it’s a flexible and corrosion-resistant material) nib in any shape or size you like, and it will be exceptionally smooth and pleasant to write with. The pen body will be made of light and comfortable but very durable (and aesthetically pleasing) materials, and it will be much more reliable than a $20 pen, let alone a disposable ballpoint.

But still, should you pay $400 for a pen if you’re not “into pens”? No. Even though it’s better quality, it’s just not worth it.

And anyway, to tie this back in, alcohol is just the same or even more so, because so much of the price of super-expensive liquors is merely rarity. There’s only so many bottles of 100-year-old whiskey. They don’t really taste better than contemporary whiskey, just different (or maybe not even different). But some people to whom “price is no object” are willing to try them for the novelty, making them incredibly expensive because they bid against each other.

I wrote a whole lot of words so I’m putting them under a cut

Keep reading

(via voxette-vk)

the future of humanity institute seems very confused re: the future of humanity

Esther mentioned to me that a bunch of people on Facebook were sharing this article, some of whom were (understandably) freaked out by it.  It makes a startling claim:

Across the span of their lives, the average American is more than five times likelier to die during a human-extinction event than in a car crash.

Wait, what?  According to whom?  How in the world could they possibly know?

The source is described as “a new report from the U.K.-based Global Challenges Foundation.”  (The Global Challenges Foundation is, in fact, based in Sweden.)  It was actually written by a group of five people from the Future of Humanity Institute (Nick Bostrom’s group) and the Center for Effective Altruism.  So, some familiar names around here.

What does the report actually say?  There is a section (section 2.1) about “catastrophic climate change,” but it says nothing about actual human extinction due to climate change.  (The worst climate change it discusses, warming of 6°C or more, is “likely to render most of the tropics substantially less habitable than at present,” which is very much not the same thing.)

But the “five times likelier” figure does, in fact, appear in the report!  It’s even stated in giant type that makes two sentences fill a whole page.  This appears not in the section on climate change, but in section 1.2, “Why global catastrophic risks matter,” as a way of making a point about … basic math.  The report says:

It is easy to be misled by the apparently low probabilities of catastrophic events. The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change suggested a 0.1% chance of human extinction each year, similar to some rough estimates of accidental nuclear warfare. At first glance, this may seem like an acceptable level of risk.

Moreover [sic], small annual probabilities compound significantly over the long term. The annual chance of dying in a car accident in the United States is 1 in 9,395. However, this translates into an uncomfortably high lifetime risk of 1 in 120. Using the annual 0.1% figure from the Stern Review would imply a 9.5% chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.

I mean, yeah, point made about compounding risks.  But anyone reading this paragraph is going to be more startled by the “0.1% figure from the Stern Review” than about the math lesson.  As if to highlight this, the facing page says, in gigantic letters:

The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change suggested a 0.1% chance of human extinction each year. If this estimate is correct, a typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash.

Which is where the Atlantic writer got the figure.

Something seriously weird is going on here.  A report on climate change “suggested” this serious risk of human extinction, they make a big deal about this, and then they just forget about it only several pages later, in their section about climate change?

We’d better check out the Stern Review.  (Which came out in 2006, by the way, so this is not exactly news.)

In the Stern Review, a word search for “extinction” reveals that the concept of human extinction only comes up non-trivially in a single context: discussion of time discounting.  The Review wants to compare/combine utilities at different times.  Within a single lifetime, it makes (some) sense to discount future utilities relative to present ones, because individual people have nonzero time preference.  But once you’re considering multiple generations of future people, it’s harder to justify applying this: why would my great-grandchildren matter less than I do?  The Review says (p. 45):

In Chapter 2 we argued, following distinguished economists from Frank Ramsey in the 1920s to Amartya Sen and Robert Solow more recently, the only sound ethical basis for placing less value on the utility (as opposed to consumption) of future generations was the uncertainty over whether or not the world will exist, or whether those generations will all be present. Thus we should interpret the factor e^(-δt)  in (3) as the probability that the world exists at that time. In fact this is exactly the probability of survival that would apply if the destruction of the world was the first event in a Poisson process with parameter δ (i.e. the probability of an event occurring in a small time interval ∆t is δ∆t).

In other words, you can discount your great-grandchildren if you are not 100% sure they will exist.  More generally, you can discount the utility of everyone in the world at some future date if you are not 100% sure humans will exist at that date.  As the Review notes, this means that any postulated discounting rate can be interpreted as a postulated rate of human extinction.  This definitely makes it tough to choose a discounting rate!  The Review goes on (pp. 46-7):

But what then would be appropriate levels for δ? That is not an easy question, but the consequences for the probability for existence of different δs can illuminate – see Table 2A.1.

For δ=0.1 per cent, there is an almost 10% chance of extinction by the end of a century. That itself seems high – indeed if this were true, and had been true in the past, it would be remarkable that the human race had lasted this long. Nevertheless, that is the case we shall focus on later in the Review, arguing that there is a weak case for still higher levels.

That 0.1% rate is precisely what got quoted in gigantic letters in the FHI/CEA report, and then reproduced in the Atlantic.  The Review itself says that this “seems high.”  But it’s the number they’ll use.  And they’ll argue that “there is a weak case for still higher levels.”  What exactly do they mean by that?

As far as I can tell, the only further discussion of the discounting rate occurs near the end in a section called “Technical Annex to Postscript.”  In this section, they explicitly say that the 0.1% rate was made as an assumption, and confusingly describe it as a “low” choice where earlier they had said it seemed “high”:

We argued that the primary justification for a positive rate of pure time preference in assessing the impacts of climate change is the possibility that the human race may be extinguished. As the possibility of this happening appears to be low, we assume a low rate of pure time preference of 0.1%, which corresponds with a 90% probability of humanity surviving a 100-year period, if the ‘probability of existence’ view of pure time discounting is invoked.

So now the case for alarmism on the basis of this figure seems doubly wrong: the figure is just an assumption some people made, and it was an assumption meant to be low!

The Review notes that choosing a discount rate for comparing multiple generations means engaging with tough ethical issues.  The Review then nicely side-steps this philosophical issue by doing a sensitivity analysis, in which they look at how their conclusions would vary if they used different discounting rates.  They find that their conclusions don’t change much unless the rate is really high (corresponding to a very high probability of human extinction in the near term):

As is intuitively clear, raising the pure time discount rate lowers loss estimates because the future is seen as less important. Nevertheless for all cases, even with the very high δ of 1.5% the loss estimates still exceed 1%, the estimated cost of strong mitigation. However, we would argue that even a pure time discount rate of 0.5% should be regarded as too high in this context, from an ethical or probability of extinction perspective[.]

[…]

However, we have seen that provided δ is not extremely high (above 1%) the basic case from this approach for strong mitigation remains convincing, particularly when one takes account of higher damage exponents. […]

Many commentators have pointed to the importance of the pure time discount rate. So did the Review, clearly and strongly, and it marshalled the arguments for the level chosen. On the other hand it is quite wrong, as some have suggested, to argue that high losses from unabated climate change, relative to the costs of abatement, rest solely on this assumption. The sensitivity analysis demonstrates this clearly.

To summarize: the “0.1%” number was entirely an assumption made at the outset, with no empirical backing.  But the Stern Review justified it (sensibly) by noting that their conclusions are similar unless the number is made much higher.

That is, the “chance of human extinction” here interacts with climate change in the opposite of the way you might intuitively imagine.  The only effect of this (postulated, non-empirical) number is to count future generations as more or less important.  If you assume a very low chance of human extinction then climate change becomes more worrisome, because there’s a greater probability that people will be around to experience its later effects.  The Stern Report’s warnings about climate change only go away if you think human extinction in the near term (by whatever cause) is so likely that it doesn’t matter what climate change does later on, because we’ll all be gone anyway.  Since no one believes this, the Stern Report happily picks the arbitrary rate of 0.1%, which is low enough that it doesn’t hit this barrier.

The final question to ask is: how did this idea get distorted in transmission, resulting in a scary Atlantic article?  Who is at fault for the distortions?

The FHI/CEA report already contains the misleading description that was copied almost verbatim by the Atlantic.  The only difference was that the FHI/CEA report said 

[The] Stern Review … suggested a 0.1% chance of human extinction each year

which, in the Atlantic, became

The Stern Review …  estimated a 0.1 percent risk of human extinction every year

“Estimated” is different from “suggested,” and “suggested” is technically closer to the truth, but the FHI/CEA report was still very misleading.  (When we read “suggested” in that context, it’s natural to infer “estimated.”)

Do the FHI/CEA actually know what the Stern Review said?  Interestingly, when they make their claim, they don’t cite the Stern Review directly, but instead cite another FHI publication: “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority” by Nick Bostrom.

OK, does Bostrom actually know what the Stern Review said?  The statements that appear in his paper are at least closer to what the Stern Review really said, although Bostrom still appears to fundamentally misunderstand why the Stern Review used the 0.1% rate.

Bostrom mentions the 0.1% rate in the course of an argument about expert opinion on the likelihood of global catastrophic risks:

Although it is often difficult to assess the probability of existential risks, there are many reasons to suppose that the total such risk confronting humanity over the next few centuries is significant. Estimates of 10–20 per cent total existential risk in this century are fairly typical among those who have examined the issue, though inevitably such estimates rely heavily on subjective judgment [1].

Endnote [1] reads:

One informal poll among mainly academic experts on various global catastrophic risks gave a median estimate of 19 per cent probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of this century (Sandberg and Bostrom, 2008). These respondents’ views are not necessarily representative of the wider expert community. The UK’s influential Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (2006) used an extinction probability of 0.1 per cent per year in calculating an effective discount rate. This is equivalent to assuming a 9.5 per cent risk of human extinction within the next hundred years (UK Treasury 2006, Chapter 2, Technical Appendix, p. 47).

The statement about the Stern Review here is technically accurate, but it is being used as a kind of evidence it cannot function as.  It is true that the Stern Report “used” this probability.  But this was not based on any notion that this was the true probability.  Rather, the Stern Report used this number simply because it was low enough that it did not invalidate their conclusions.  The Stern Report could have just as well used any lower rate – their only concern was that the number not be too high.  Hence Bostrom is wrong to imply that the 0.1% rate is somehow the Stern Report’s “estimate.”

But here, at least, Bostrom seems to know what he is getting away with: he has chosen his statement about the Stern Review (not “estimated” or “suggested” but “used”) so that it is, in itself, perfectly true.

In the FHI/CEA report, written in part by people from Bostrom’s institute, “used” becomes “suggested,” and the 0.1% rate is given its own page, as though it is a striking result that should be one of the take-aways for anyone skimming the report.  The claim is equally misleading, but used in a way much more likely to make an impact on the reader.

Finally, the hapless Atlantic writer assumes that the FHI/CEA report is not egregiously misleading, and reads into its statement what any charitable reader would see there, resulting in a scary article.

To be honest, the moment I heard that FHI was involved here, I became instantly more skeptical, knowing that Bostrom was responsible for shaky futurism elsewhere (in his book Superintelligence, for instance).  So I admit that I came in with a bias.  But the facts of the matter – which I think I have accurately understood – are worse than I imagined.  Not only has Bostrom made a bad argument, he’s allowed his institute to publish a document which amplifies one of his misleading claims so that it looks like a major, scary result, with predictable consequences in the mainstream press.  It’s easy to speculate about how FHI prefers to spin the facts in favor of alarmism in order to obtain more prestige and funding, but no matter why they’re doing this, it’s not good.

Unless I am wrong, I think you should not trust FHI to tell you about the future of humanity, at least not without skeptically checking their arguments yourself.

afloweroutofstone:

mousethephoenix:

conquerorwurm:

metalgirlysolid:

shrimppunk:

tombstonettromboners:

jewishzevran:

backstageleft:

Okay so @q2qcomics and I are currently apartment hunting for the fall and I just stumbled upon the weirdest apartment ever. 

Like at first, wow this looks nice:

How can it be only $650/mo?? Something’s gotta be wrong with it.

… And then you find the floorplan:

Like… WTF is this place? And you realize it’s on bottom of three “apartment units” (Clearly this was meant to be one big place). 

This is your enterance:

Have fun living in the maintenance hallway under the rich folks. 

It comes with such stunning features as:

Creepy ass long murder hallways.

A room with many doors (all closets).

A bathroom that’s clearly just meant for storage.

And whatever this thing is in your kitchen.

I hope you like wine, A LOT.

this. this is a video game apartment. be wary of lurking assassins. any stray chests probably contain loose gold or weapons

honestly I’d totally live in this amateur counter strike mapper’s first map

I don’t give a shit that the bathroom is in another timezone its cheaper than anything around here

This is literally the first level of Hitman 2

What the fuck

what does it all mean

WHAT

(via transgenderer)

waystatus:

nostalgebraist:

nostalgebraist:

A thing I really need to get myself to do less is “treating people’s stances on controversial fiction or other art as reflective of deep psychological or even ‘spiritual’ traits which make them deeply similar to me or deeply different from me”

I don’t actually believe that the world works this way, but it’s so easy for me to slip into thinking like this without realizing that I’m doing this

(It’s probably obvious that I was thinking about this because of the particular case “people who like Homestuck but dislike Act 6 are My People,” but there are various other examples, many of them even less well-founded than that.  For instance, despite not having watched enough Doctor Who to judge, I’ve picked up “people who like Moffat’s run on Doctor Who despite its flaws are My People” simply because of Esther and Andrew Rilstone)

Another example, which has some basis in fact, is James Joyce vs. Virginia Woolf

James Joyce was (on a material level) a regular bloke who struggled with money and drank too much and got into fights, and worked for several stretches as a clerk (the literary intelligentsia at the time looked down their noses at clerks), and he wrote about regular blokes who did these things, and scandalized a lot of people by making his characters talk like the regular blokes they were, crude dirty jokes and all.  His sympathetic everyman character in Ulysses was Jewish in a time when that was a big deal.   OTOH he was pretty awful at writing women and the main female character in Ulysses is like this ~eternal feminine~ ur-woman who only thinks Woman Thoughts (with no punctuation, naturally, because they just flow, you see).

Virginia Woolf grew up in a rich snooty literary family where people like Henry James would just come over for tea sometimes, her dad was a notable historian and literary critic, her mom was a model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and their house had a giant library from which she learned the classics.  She wrote about similarly high-society characters.  But she was a feminist, who wrote a now-classic book (A Room of One’s Own) about the material factors that suppress women’s writing and how well women could write if they were freed from these factors, and how women in literature are so often idealized muses or ~eternal feminine~ archetypes rather than 3D POV characters, etc.  Nonetheless, some women saw Woolf as out of touch with the condition of women outside of the high-society bubble she lived in.  Woolf was put off by Ulysses, because it seemed like “the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.”

I feel so much more positively about Joyce, who injected a giant fuck-you dose of “how regular blokes live and talk” into literary a tradition about rich people with servants, than about Woolf, who was a feminist within her tiny coterie world cloistered apart from the vast, vast majority of women.

---

But that’s all a slanted, superficial, fairly ignorant history as recounted by my brain which is convinced, largely on personal experience unrelated to any of the above, that Joyce>Woolf people are My People and Woolf>Joyce people are Not My People

And I need to remind myself that all class-and-gender whatever aside, these are very different authors (on the page, in their work) and that preferring one to the other does not usually mean anything of any significance.  You read a page of Joyce and then a page of Woolf and you don’t see any of the above; you just see that they were very different writers.

FWIW, the trait I associate with Joyce the most is less working-classness and more being incomprehensible. (I associate him more with Finnegan’s Wake than with Ulysses, though I admit this is at least as unfair as your characterization of him.) But the idea to me that Joyce was introducing a dose of “how regular blokes live and talk” into literature seems absurd to me when he wrote a book that has thousand-letter-long onomatopoeia and sentences that that mean things in English but also different things in some other language.

I was unclear there.  It’s true that Ulysses (and FW even more) are very difficult to read and include many elements comprehensible only if (and not iff!) you have various kinds of obscure knowledge.  (This has led to a common, and probably fair, charge of hypocrisy against Joyce, that he wrote a book about everymen than no ordinary person could read.)

But this wasn’t that only thing that struck people about Joyce’s work at the time.  Note that the Woolf quote I linked didn’t criticize Ulysses for being opaque, although it was remarkably opaque, but for seeming low-class.  It was also the subject of two obscenity trials because of its explicit sexual content.  The first concluded a specific part of the book was obscene, and precluded the book from being published in the U.S. for a number of years.

The second ruled that the full book was not obscene.  To come to this determination, the judge read the book, thought over it, and in his decision, wrote that the “obscene” elements were necessary to portray the thoughts of Joyce’s “regular bloke” characters in the honest detail which he was committed to:

In writing “Ulysses”, Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the City bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

Joyce has attempted — it seems to me, with astonishing success — to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.

[…]

To convey by words an effect which obviously lends itself more appropriately to a graphic technique, accounts, it seems to me, for much of the obscurity which meets a reader of “Ulysses”. And it also explains another aspect of the book, which I have further to consider, namely, Joyce’s sincerity and his honest effort to show exactly how the minds of his characters operate.

If Joyce did not attempt to be honest in developing the technique which he has adopted in “Ulysses” the result would be psychologically misleading and thus unfaithful to his chosen technique. Such an attitude would be artistically inexcusable.

It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented. For his attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty words and has led at times to what many think is a too poignant preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters.

The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe.

[…]

As I have stated, “Ulysses” is not an easy book to read. It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns. In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains, as I have mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake. Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers.

If one does not wish to associate with such folk as Joyce describes, that is one’s own choice. In order to avoid indirect contact with them one may not wish to read “Ulysses”; that is quite understandable. But when such a real artist in words, as Joyce undoubtedly is, seeks to draw a true picture of the lower middle class in a European city, ought it to be impossible for the American public legally to see that picture?

In Judge Woolsey’s opinion, the book’s incomprehensibility and its dedication to “how regular blokes live and talk” were connected rather than opposed: Joyce wanted to depict every thought and impressions of his characters honestly, and this involved using explicit sexual content, dirty words, etc.

I personally think this is overly simplistic – much of the difficulty (in the latter half of the book) comes from literary parodies and imitations which the characters themselves would not recognize, for instance.  But I hope I am building some sort of case that the depiction of “how regular blokes live and talk” was part of what struck people, at the time, as remarkable about Ulysses.

(via waystatus)

Alice Dreger, autogynephilia, and the misrepresentation of trans sexualities (Book review: Galileo’s Middle Finger) →

Electric Bouguereau

voximperatoris:

Reflecting on the recent debate over Bouguereau, I realize that there are two very different attitudes toward the role of art in relation to the poor.

With the exception of the ones drawn from Classical mythology, most of Bouguereau’s paintings are of lower-class, rural women. They’re painted doing work like spinning, drawing water, or tending flocks.

For someone like Fred Ross, this shows respect for the dignity of the poor:

In much of his work he uses peasants and gypsies for his subject matter. How fitting to choose society’s lowest to exalt all mankind to the highest, for if we could appreciate the value of the peasants and gypsies, then certainly we all must be worth while.

[…]

It was the artist’s goal to show humanity as beautifully real and ideal as possible, encouraging all to strive for such ideals. The message is: Mankind is good and life is good. Implicit is the moral imperative that all people are worthy of love and respect and it is society’s duty as well at the duty of each individual to nurture our children and to care for the poor and down-trodden, asserting that each individual was unique and valuable.

But for @nostalgebraist, it comes off as unrealistic and false, holding people to an ideal that they will never be able to achieve and making real people seem worse in comparison:

In my case there’s also the fact that my aesthetic sense actually likes imperfection, because I recoil from a lot of attempts to achieve “perfection” in the actual world.  A world full of Bouguereau people would be a world where everyone spend a lot of effort making themselves look like Bouguereau people (via cosmetics and diets and being very careful to never get dirty or go outside when they look sub-optimal due or illness etc. etc.), even if this was very time-consuming or stressful or unhealthy.  This would optimize one thing at the cost of various others, and my preferences are convex.

I am, of course, more sympathetic to Ross’s view. Bouguereau seems to say: the human ideal is not just for the rich or those at the top of society; everyone can pursue it; everyone reflects it in some way. The peasant woman is painted in such a way that she is more beautiful than a queen. Ayn Rand had similar comments about Victor Hugo and the way he portrayed the poor and downtrodden in an idealized way, as noble in spirit. Works like Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo have similar elements throughout.

In contrast, you have the idea of “gritty naturalism” that should portray life among the poor without sanitizing it or leaving anything out. The idea, I think, is that people should appreciate the poor as they really are, rather than setting up some kind of romantic concept that allows the actual poor to be dismissed or disvalued for not living up to it.

The problem, as I see it, is that when you focus on all this crime, dirt, and ugliness, you lose the ability to convey in an artistic medium what makes their lives valuable after all. I get this feeling very strongly when watching The Wire: what goodness, beauty, and dignity is in any of these people’s lives?  What would be lost of the whole if the whole city were demolished?

A Bouguereau painting seems to distill down all the little things admirable in people who are usually looked down upon, into a concrete reminder of their humanity:

On the one hand, I follow your reasoning.  On the other, I think we really do have very different aesthetics, which are probably tied to very different values.  So, for instance, I disagree somewhat with your opinion about gritty realism, but I don’t expect to be able to convince you by pointing out any particular “flaw” in it; instead I just have very different basic premises, quite far back up the chain that leads to these sorts of conclusions.

I don’t want to sound like I’m saying your aesthetics are wrong, here, but I figure I should describe how they look from where I stand, being me and not you.

First, I have this basic sense – an explicit belief, but also something deeply ingrained and unconscious, which affects my immediate responses to things like paintings – that trying to ground “human dignity” in someone’s capacity to look good or dignified, in an “ungritty” way, is a bad idea.

For this topic, the relevant sense of “look good or dignified” is literal – static visual appearance, along with its various connotations – but I also mean it in a more general sense: making a certain immediate sensory impression, as opposed to making an impression in light of all relevant context.  The difference, say, between meeting someone new and getting this immediate sense that they’re a “passionate” person, and knowing from experience that someone is a passionate person and then judging any given interaction with them in light of that.

It seems to me that the cases in which we need concepts like “human dignity” most are the ones where, in a static contextless snapshot, people seem the least dignified.  Crying people, for instance, often just don’t look pretty (except in movies).  In fact, crying is, from a detached standpoint, an inherently undignified-seeming state: an unappealingly reddish face, often gushing snot, producing halting speech which may come directly from the id (or similar) and may lack the sense of proportion, concern for others, etc. that we might think of as proper and adult.  But it’s exactly in states like these that we need to remember that this too is a human being, perhaps one we respect and care deeply about, that they have not been replaced with some substitute whom we do not feel that way towards.

More broadly, suffering tends not to seem pretty or dignified or “worthy of respect” in a contextless sense.  It is good, say, if one’s lover often makes this immediate impression, but it is very important that when they stop making that impression on account of suffering, we retain the feelings toward them on the whole.

One might object here that if we’re talking about paintings, we can’t have this sort of pre-existing context, so all we can use are immediate impressions.  Just so.  But what I’m saying is that the connection between my immediate impressions and my actual feelings have been shaped by the values expressed in the previous few paragraphs.

So – here is the key part – I actually expect a certain amount of “grit” in situations where I am being called upon to appreciate someone’s human dignity.  After all, the capacity to “appreciate human dignity” is useful precisely in those cases where some amount of “grit” needs to be, as it were, overcome.  One effect of this is if someone appears sufficiently good or noble or dignified (etc.), my responses will shut off somewhat, since they aren’t as needed.  Seeing a person who appears noble and serious and appreciating their nobility and seriousness is easy, almost automatic, to the point that it’s not really an interesting experience – my response is more like “yes, this does happen sometimes, what of it?”  It’s much more emotionally engaging when there is some tension, where my appreciation has some sort of barrier to overcome.

That is, after all, what most of the day-to-day business of being good is about.  It’s fine to say “I react very positively to my lover when she’s at her best” – of course I do – but the morally salient aspect of my behavior is how I react when she isn’t.  It’s nice to not have acne, but what separates the mean judgmental clique in school from other people is how they treat those who do have acne (and the like).

This is not to say that people must learn to love things that repel them, but that most things in life present themselves as a mixture of appealing and unappealing – blemished, but not pure blemish itself – and it matters how we respond to these mixtures, which sorts we can enjoy and which we can’t.

(And if we value people for their capacity to have moments without blemish, everyone will strive to have as many of those moments as possible, and in turn we will learn even more to demand them, and what will we all do when it breaks down, as it sometimes must?)

OK, I will stop trying to sound like some high-minded Victorian essayist now.  Sorry.  Here’s a quite different angle:

In the earlier Bouguereau conversation, you said a number of times that you didn’t like certain paintings because they were “ugly.”  By contrast, Bouguereau’s paintings are pretty, not ugly (I will grant this).

I tend to like some ugliness with my prettiness, partly for the moral reasons given above.  But also for purely aesthetic reasons, I think.

It’s like food: some flavors are, individually, more pleasant than others – pleasant in a simple “as an organism, I find this stimulus rewarding” sort of way.  The prototypical example is sugar: sweetness feels kind of inherently good in a way other tastes don’t.  Typically, children care most directly about this particular axis.  (Many) children love sweetness and will cheerfully prioritize it over all other factors.  And we can sort of “see where they’re coming from”: sweet things give you a clear “this is good!” signal, relative to other tastes.  In a certain sense, candy really is just “better” than broccoli.

Yet at the same time, adults tend to like a variety of flavors.  Some of this is just for pure variety – if your parents don’t restrict how much candy you eat, you quickly realize that you can only eat so much at once before it gets monotonous.  But some of it is that … well, those other flavors are good too, above and beyond their variety potential.  I really do like broccoli, in a way that isn’t simply a lesser shadow of the way I like sugar.

I remember once talking to a friend who didn’t like hot (as in spicy) food.  “It burns your mouth!” he explained.  And what could I say?  He was right.  If I had never tasted spicy food and someone told me I could have food that feels hot even if it it’s cold and kind of burns and kind of hurts, I wouldn’t have thought that sounded good!  Yet I happily order my food “hot” when there’s a choice and I have a special love for good Szechuan restaurants.

I feel the same way when you say a painting is ugly.  It feels like you’re sort of right, in the same way my friend who didn’t like hot food was sort of right.  And yet I feel like to avoid that sort of “unpleasant stimulation” would be to deprive myself, and that looking at Bouguereau is a lot like eating candy, which is to say, it’s nice but it gets old fast and it’s not, for good reason, the kind of thing that gets a restaurant rave reviews.  If a child told me that the candy store was way better than my stupid Szechuan restaurant, because candy was sweet and the Szechuan food hurt your mouth and was covered in gross oil and had yucky peppers in it, I would indeed see what they meant.  But I would still go the Szechuan place and not to the candy shop.

bouguereau

baroquespiral:

wirehead-wannabe:

voximperatoris:

nostalgebraist:

psybersecurity:

nostalgebraist:

(Note: this got longer and more serious than I intended.  I am not actually an art critic and don’t actually know what the hell I’m talking about)

William Bouguereau is an interesting case.

He’s one of those creative figures who was very popular in parts of the 19th century and is now almost entirely forgotten.  (Like Marie Corelli, who I just learned about the other day – look her up, the plot summaries of her books are #amazing)

Bouguereau was apparently the epitome of something called “academic” painting, which is what the Impressionists were reacting against.  Bouguereau was conventional in subject matter, realistic in style, sentimental in tone, often erotic but in a softcore, “safe to hang in your home and show to your stuffy parents” way.  He seems to almost always aim at being pleasant, either through cuteness, sentimentality, sexiness, or some combination of the three.

You could see him as the ultimate anti-”modern” artist.  But then, we’re actually making huge amounts of this kind of stuff in 2016 – it’s just on tumblr or DeviantArt rather than in galleries.

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There’s a website called the Art Renewal Center, which is a classic “someone on the internet made a project out of their personal axe to grind” sort of place.  The site’s creator, Fred Ross, thinks modern art sucks because it doesn’t value technical skill and actively avoids realism.  This is a common complaint.  But Ross’ version of it champions Bougureau as the single best example of everything he values in art.  For Ross, seeing a Bougureau for the first time was something like a spiritual experience:

Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine; I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast. It was so alive, so beautiful and so compelling. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of soaking up wave after wave of artistic and spiritual ecstasy, I started to take back control of my consciousness…..my mind started racing with unanswered questions. My first thought was “I haven’t felt this way about a work of art since I stood before Michelangelo’s David. Then I thought, “This must be one of the greatest old master paintings every produced. But no name or country or time would come to mind. Italian High Renaissance, 17th Century Dutch, Carravaggio,Fragonard, Ingres, Prud'hon … back further perhaps … Raphael,Botticelli, Leonardo, no! No! NO! Not one of those names or times felt anything like what I was looking at.

The painting he saw is this one.  Which is … like, it’s good, I guess?  I don’t know much about painting but it sure looks like there is a lot of technical skill going on there.  Nicely varied (if oddly artificial-looking) lighting.  Poses look real.  Faces look real … almost too real, making the whole look like a posed photograph.  The weird lighting only adds to that effect (the rightmost nymph is really bright even though the ground doesn’t get brighter beneath her?  the satyr’s skin is no brighter right against her arm than it is near the other, dimmer nymphs?  it looks like an effect that could only be produced with artificial lighting, if at all).  The figures have apparently been moving around a lot and yet there are no tracks in the dirt whatsoever, making them look pasted-on.  There’s not much going on emotionally.  I don’t get what Ross is on about.  But it’s not a bad painting.

Things get worse when you look at some of the other stuff Bougureau painted (and the Art Renewal Center has a big online gallery).  The thing is, it’s … all like that.  They all have the bright, not-quite-right lighting; the exposed flesh in the same skin tones as illuminated by the same lighting; the uniformly pretty-faced young women, who all seem to be based on one of about 2 or 3 facial templates; the emotional content that amounts to “well, that’s nice.”  Usually it’s either cute children (optional: devoted mothers) or nubile young women, who look like grown versions of the cute children who will grow further to become the devoted moms.  It’s all kitschy, and maybe kitsch isn’t bad – but what is clearly bad is having such a tiny range.  (It reminds me a lot of those artists who just draw similar-looking anime girls over and over again.)

Bougureau does occasionally stray from his home turf to tackle more “serious” subjects, and the results are, IMO, just plain bad.  The facial expressions are so realistic that Bougureau can’t convey emotion stylistically the way most painters would.  The result, given the artificial lighting and Bougureau’s preference for youth, looks like a photo of an awkward high school theater production.  (“Abduction of Psyche” is the height of this effect, for me.)

His “Flagellation of Jesus” is decent but if I look at any of the faces I start to see actors or models wondering when they’ll get to leave for lunch.  (Except for that creepy child in the background, who is probably sending a psychic message to the Mothership.)  His “Dante and Virgil in Hell” shows off his facility with dynamic nude bodies (just like the nymphs), but is otherwise a pretty half-assed vision of hell, with the ridiculous grinning demon who looks less “evil” and more “thinks he’s a lot funnier than he really is and gets on everyone’s nerves,” and the flat, tepidly glowing background (”yep, this is hell, it’s like red and stuff”).

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OK, so the interesting part of all this to me is the question – was Bougureau actually technically skilled?

This is a key part of the Art Renewal Center view – Bougureau not only chose the right subject matter, he also had mad skillz.  And it’s certainly true that he could paint people who really looked like people (if often like the same people over and over again).  His paintings are more photorealistic than those of any great master I’ve seen.  That took craft.

But technical skill isn’t just pure craft.  It’s also the capacity to do something with your medium.  There’s pure craft – being able to paint a nose that looks like a nose, or whatever – and then there’s another sort of craft that involves channeling that craft for the purpose of playing the audience’s mind like an instrument.  Bougureau could paint really nose-looking noses, but he could only achieve one or two effects.

Compare him to, say, Rubens.  Rubens is a lot less photorealistic than Bougureau, and his paintings look rougher, with less of the “noses look exactly like noses” kind of craft.  But Rubens could do this (Bougureau country) and he could also do this.  Isn’t that preferable to hundreds of near-identical teenagers with impeccably rendered eyebrows?

Of course there’s no accounting for taste and I’m not saying that Fred Ross shouldn’t have reacted so strongly to that Bougureau painting.  It’s good that he did; good for his own life and good for the variety of the world.  I just personally don’t get it at all.

I think I can take a guess as to why someone might be absolutely blown away by Bougureau. 

To me, the appeal of the high-technical-skill figurative art that dominated from the renaissance to the invention of impressionism is not that it’s “realistic”, because in important ways it’s not. A painting like, idk, this is realistic in the sense that the artist clearly spent a great deal of time observing and copying things he saw in nature, but you would also never see this scene just walking around out of your eyes - it’s idealized, aestheticized, “posed”, etc. Some people consider this a bad thing but I don’t. A painting like this is like a glimpse into the Platonic realm, a hallucination of a world realer than our own. Maybe if GlassWave succeeded of arranging all the rhododendron leaves and rid the world of definite wrongness, it would look something like this. Paintings like this have a very sublime effect on me in a way that a merely “realistic” painting or a merely “aesthetic” painting would not.

Of the painters who are providing glimpses of this aestheticized Platonic realm, Bougureau is probably the one who is most able to make it “come alive”. A painting like this looks so much like a real person you feel like you could reach into the frame and kiss her, but also could clearly never be a photograph. Therefore I could see a painting like this providing a maximally sublime experience to a certain person. Though personally I prefer more energetic, complex, religious examples of this style over the pretty girl in a countryside subgenre. 

As for whether or not he was technically skilled, the answer is obvious. Yes, similar looking female heads occupy the focal points of most of his paintings. But if you look in the details and backgrounds, you see a wide array of things - birds, furniture, geometric patterns, violins, all impeccably rendered. The dude could probably paint absolutely anything he wanted, he just chose to paint pretty girls in the countryside. Maybe he lacked creativity, or maybe for some reason this is all he wanted to paint. (It’s not hard to imagine why, to be honest.)

Also, to be honest I’m kind of surprised to hear you take the anti-pure-technical-skill stance given that the only art I see you post is lavish, conventionally “beautiful”, and kitschy. I don’t mean this as an insult, but I would have expected you to be a Bougereau fan.   

I was hoping you would respond to this, thanks.  This mostly makes sense to me, and “realistic style vs. realistic scene” is an important distinction to make.  (A long time ago I remember telling a friend that my preferred aesthetic, in a lot of different media, was “a painstakingly modeled and animated CGI dragon” – i.e. something clearly unreal, but made so that it seems exactly like what that thing “would be like” if it existed.)

I see your point about the first painting you mentioned, where there are a huge number of individual elements that contribute to the overall effect, which would be unlikely to “come together” in a single photograph.  I still am not really able to see this intuitively with Bougureau – that painting you say “clearly never be a photograph” just looks to me like a pin-up photo.  I guess it is idealized in the sense that the pose, lighting, etc. have clearly been optimized for effect, but again, that’s that pin-up photos and the like strive for.

What I’m most confused by is how Bougureau manages to have an effect like this on someone like Fred Ross, who lives in an age when posed, (digitally or traditionally) post-processed photos are ubiquitous.  Photography is probably not capable of producing the density of juxtaposed ideal elements in things like the first painting you linked, but it and the market have utterly perfected the genre of Sexy Girl in Ideal Sexy Pose illuminated by Ideal Soft Pretty Lighting etc.

Re: variety and skill, IIRC Bougereau explicitly stated that he painted what the market wanted out of him.  “The dude could probably paint absolutely anything he wanted, he just chose to paint pretty girls in the countryside” seems right.

Re: my taste, I think it’s largely a function of the small set of art blogs I’ve arbitrarily chosen to follow.  Also, even if I like kitsch, I value … what I want to call “emotion” although I’m sure there is a more precise term for it.  I like beautiful and realistic art that captures a strong mood, or something that could be part of an interesting story.   Bougureau usually doesn’t do this, or when he tries it doesn’t work for me (see above on the “more serious” paintings)

I think the “better than reality” thing @psybersecurity points out is what Bouguereau has going for him.

Like, here’s a random picture from my dashboard. It’s a fine photo.

Do Bouguereau’s paintings look like that? No, they look better. They don’t literally look exactly like photos. They look like idealized people who are superior to reality.

I’m not much for the “Madonna and Child” genre, but this one by Bouguereau is the best I’ve ever seen. It’s not literally photorealistic. The background, in particular, is very flat. But the figures look really good.

Also, as for my view, that painting of St. Sebastian is really ugly. Everything in it looks weird and “uncanny valley”, as @wirehead-wannabe points out. It’s grotesque.

Not that I think all the Bouguereau ones are equally good. This one, “why can’t I hold all these lemons?” is more impressionistic and it looks a bit silly. And the Dante one. And I just personally don’t like the nude ones.

The Virgin of the Lillies doesn’t actually look “better than reality” to me at all, and I’m sort of surprised that someone would have that reaction to it. It seems really easy for a fairly attractive mother and baby to recreate in real life, minus the halos of course.

>baby in fanciful/symbolic pose, seems to have adult’s degree of motor control and composure
>not sure the way she’s holding him would even be that secure physically, but sure is posed nice
>muted colour effects deliberately reminiscent of older painting forms e.g. fresco, you’d need an Instagram filter for that shit at least
>the halos mediate between the depth of the wallpaper and the space in a way I bet you couldn’t if you had any natural shadow or anything going on, like there is no visible spacial disjuncture between the wallpaper, the halo, and then by extension the heads, which sort of sink into 2D at the same time as the wallpaper rises into 3D and it’s really cool

anyway, I’m surprised by how many people in here seem genuinely defensive re: Bouguereau.  The “Platonic realm” argument is about right but seemed implicit in the OP from the get-go - not to mention in the entire history of Western art from the Renaissance to modernism; Bouguereau’s not doing anything new or unique by aiming at that effect (most art historians reading that formulation would think of, say, Michelangelo (no homo)) and I read robnost’s critique as just saying he’s not very successful at it.  the question kind of comes down to, what is the Platonic realm?  which of course there’s tons of legitimate readings of that (which is why I might sound like I absolutely love or hate Plato from post to post) but most would agree that it’s radically different from our own realm as we experience it.  it’s not just all the best versions of our categories reapplied to the same base totality: our world is shadows on a cave wall compared to the Forms.  what even is a Form?  might it not have as much in common with what robnost calls “emotion” as with the supposed object of such?  the whole premise of making the Platonic realm “come alive”, as we understand “alive”, then, is a lot more paradoxical and fraught than Bouguereau seems to know how to grapple with, is how I read the starting point of this whole discussion.  but you could also read Bouguereau as presenting an alternative, materialist utopia, less akin to Michelangelo’s Christian heaven than to iyashikei slice of life anime or socialist realism.  which (as a communist weeb) I’d be totally down for, actually, but then the question arises of what are all these Christian Platonist conventions from the classicist tradition doing here and do they get in the way?

I respond to Bouguereau’s take on classicist aesthetics the same way I respond to KyoAni’s take on moe aesthetics.  but then not only do lots of people love KyoAni, but it’s considered more highbrow than some of the stuff I like.

Yes, this is also how I feel about the “Platonic realm” and Bouguereau.  In my mind, transcendence and estrangement are linked; something “more real than reality” is going to seem different from reality, probably in jarring ways.  An analogy here might be trying to understand some deep piece of mathematics or physics – the thing itself may be quite “beautiful” by the appropriate standards, but it still stretches your mind and requires you to step into a realm of things (abstractions) that don’t at all feel like the objects of everyday life.

In my case there’s also the fact that my aesthetic sense actually likes imperfection, because I recoil from a lot of attempts to achieve “perfection” in the actual world.  A world full of Bouguereau people would be a world where everyone spend a lot of effort making themselves look like Bouguereau people (via cosmetics and diets and being very careful to never get dirty or go outside when they look sub-optimal due or illness etc. etc.), even if this was very time-consuming or stressful or unhealthy.  This would optimize one thing at the cost of various others, and my preferences are convex.

These two factors don’t get me all the way to the point of seeing nothing as prettier or uglier than any other thing, but they do make my judgments vary in a kind of complicated way.

(via baroquespiral)