tom bombadil

my ideal version of the iliad would start in dark age greece with a bard beginning the poem, then cut to what that dark age greek would have been imagining as the bard told this story about a bronze age war

something i've been playing with is the idea of "dimensionality" in how something is characterized. if i say "apples are good," you only need to hold one dimension in your head (good/bad). if i say "apples are healthy and tasty" you need two dimensions (healthy/unhealthy, appetizing/unappetizing). if you want to be more nuanced in how you understand something, you increase the dimensionality, adding dimensions. if you want to be less nuanced, you decrease the dimensionality, discarding or combining dimensions. high-dimensional things are probably harder to reason about. you have to keep track of more stuff and reconcile contradictions. so there's probably a sweet spot for how nuanced you want to be in how you think of something. one thing you see is people will collapse everything to the good/bad dimension and reason that way, applying simple rules like "bad things make other things bad when they touch." this sort of moralistic reasoning is probably really energy efficient.

it could also be that's just what i crave and i'm projecting

what i think audiences tend to crave though is enough information to engage in counterfactual reasoning within the secondary universe of the fiction

i think the difference is that the trailer offers an explanation for the wicker husband (made by a guy who knows how to do that sort of thing). it doesn't directly explain how his dick works. you can probably infer that the guy making the wicker husband put some thought into the dick though

@SYNESTHEIZURE i found henrich and cultural evolution theory to be helpful because they are able to mechanically describe and model how social construction actually happens (in a somewhat abstract way, but good enough to bootstrap my intuition for what's going on)

I get a little frustrated nearly every time I see social constructs mentioned. I can't help it, everyone loves to be wrong. Any time the words are spoken, people start rolling around in the mud and screaming about what is and isn't real. The issue is that they, whoever they happen to be in that instance, do not understand what the words mean on a literal level. They have heard them. They know what they mean independently. But put together they form a critical mass and violently explode into mind-numbingly frustrating discourse. Many people, especially lay people, misunderstand the nature of social construction. The words "social construct" are often used as a woker euphemism for "fake and gay" online and in real life. All social phenomena are socially constructed in the same way that all material phenomena are materially constructed; neither is faker for it. While I do in theory espouse a sort of mereological nihilism I also understand it is not a useful framework to discuss almost anything. Yes, only subatomic particles are truly real and all other categories are contingent. That being said, we both know what I mean when I say I want an orange. Additionally, this term is often used to implicitly or explicitly contrast the thing the user is maligning with some "real" or "good". A "social construct" is invariably understood by people on both sides of a given argument as being an insult. It isn't. It is just a description. The reason for this confusion is not because lay people are just dumb. It is because many in academia use a motte-and-bailey strategy of acknowledging the rigorous understanding of social construction when pressed but still using it as a way of marking something illegitimate anyway. Calling something a social construct nearly always comes with three additional claims snuck onto the end: a. that anything socially constructed is arbitrary; b. that anything socially constructed is inauthentic; and c. that both of these make social constructs worthless or worse, actively harmful by nature. The first claim is trivially false. Every law and regulation is socially constructed; they are words, formed through consensus and authority, that govern behavior. That does not mean that they are inherently arbitrary. Many, ideally all, are crafted with later-order effects in mind and are based on empirical information about the world. Even where the exact borders of a social construct are arbitrary, like the difference between a hill and a mountain, the actual underlying phenomenon of things differing in size and this having implications for how you interact with them is real. That the exact forms are contingent does not make them random. We could pronounce any word in any given way, but the context and history surrounding each word allows us to weave persistent nets of meaning from them. The idea that they are all inauthentic is frustrating and dismissive of the people and societies who constructed them. While you can be forced to act out a role inauthentically, and while many traditions are larpy, authenticity is not a trait inherently held or lacked by any of these constructions. Personal authenticity is about one individual's alignment with the construct, not the construct itself. The larp is often the point with ritual. Getting mad about it is akin to screaming that George Clooney is a liar because he isn't actually the Fantastic Mr Fox. Many of these constructs are also (as previously covered) reflective of other phenomena and authentically reflect that social community's relationship with the thing they are responding to. Often people will appeal to antiquity to call something inauthentic, but something being older does not make it more real. Babies are not liars for just having been born. A ritual is not false for not predating the written word. Other times the fact that something is old is taken as proof that it is outdated, when in reality plenty of ancient practices are relevant to this day. One of the best ways to process grief is a funeral. It always has been. In some cases frustration with the phenomenon itself is used as a casus belli against the social constructs that surround it. Poverty is bad. People blame that on the concept of money. People's relationship to the concepts of resources and work is genuinely best abstracted as money; the fact that currency is an abstraction does not mean it is unfaithful to the underlying value and it certainly doesn't mean doing away with it would solve impoverishment. It doesn't need to reflect some platonic ideal of value to authentically represent our intersubjective understanding of value. The inference that they are harmful because they are inauthentic or arbitrary requires either of those claims to be true to begin with. However, even without examining those claims we can see that the conclusion is false by looking at the outcomes in question. Language, and this is inarguably true, is socially constructed. It is also the single most characteristic and useful behavior humanity exhibits. The same goes for written standards to transcribe language: even if the correspondence between semantics and symbol is not intrinsic, it is nonetheless useful, and written language has substantially improved the lives of billions of people. The same goes for value, kinship systems, rituals, traditions, and identity. While these constructs do not uniformly have good outcomes for every single person, the fact that they are preserved and are seemingly impossible to dislodge entirely is evidence that these categories themselves are adaptive. We seem to be constitutionally incapable of not carving out a peg to fit each hole. Every society works with the same meta-ontology that requires these categories. They oftentimes respond to these requirements with deeply broken and harmful solutions. The institution of foot binding is an obvious example of a malformed fashion tradition, just as slavery is a corrupt answer to the question of identity. Every society has some variation on these themes and people tend to recreate them from scratch when new communities form. They are functionally universal. These harms are disorders of vital organs more than they are parasites. Fashion and identity convey a huge amount of information and are extremely powerful coordination tools, so much so that we cannot seem to exist stably without them. Treating some social phenomena as constructed while implying others are not is dishonest and academics who do this (and they frequently do) literally should know better. That they can use these arguments in such a sophisticated way to craft rhetorically effective but untrue conclusions is evidence that they understand the concept of social construction well enough to not make these mistakes. It is a tempting error to make, to sit back and call everything "fake and gay." It is also quite effective for the right audience. It is harmful, though, because it promotes a false understanding among those who align with your views and among those who do not; at once you are miseducating those who trust you and eroding the trust of those who do not agree with you. This is how you end up with a sizable chunk of lay people who reject social constructions entirely, despite them obviously existing and being impossible to escape from. If you actually want to make an argument that something is harmful, you should look at its effects, not make borderline tautological arguments about how it is constructed. This kind of argument appears in discussions about group identity a lot, especially ethnicity and gender. There is an odd implicit standard that, if not entirely intrinsic, these things do not matter and are not real. This is used to argue that any number of historical and contemporary ethnic groups are not real, almost always to the detriment of fact and often to the individuals in question directly. It is also increasingly used in discussions about sexuality and gender in harmful ways. By attacking both as fake, you alienate people closer to the societal norm and needlessly disrupt the lives of those further from that norm. Treating them as fundamentally unimportant, fake, annoying, or useless is demeaning to people who do care. This applies to both normative people and queer ones. It is fundamentally an issue of imposing your own preferences (often motivated by an implausible utopian platform) onto others by assuming you are normative and that your experience or desired experience is inherently better. This, of course, may sound familiar. It is the same behavior those near the normative center often perform. The reality is that we do not get to actual social freedom by enforcing the "abolition" of gender any more than we would be free of hikes by abolishing the socially constructed category of a mountain. There is an underlying phenomenon being referred to by this construction. All abolition would achieve is to render people inarticulate and frustrated. You might argue that abolition leaves the door open to new constructions, but in truth reform is a different word with a different meaning and there is not a good-faith argument for consistently aligning your views with true abolitionists under the pretext that you mean something different. Gender is a legitimate cultural universal and any meaningful abolition would require active effort to prune it. People are their genders, even if gender is constructed. It not only gives people a way to understand their role and body but also allows them to conceive of better alternatives. In literature a shared cultural context gives authors and readers the ability to communicate by allusion and metaphor. Gender allows people to do the same with their phenotype, sex, and feelings about both. Even if you think there are better systems, having a system is good. It is desirable. Social constructs can and often should be modified. Really, they behave cybernetically: by interacting with them, you shape them and you are shaped by them. Attempts at abolition produce a short-lived vacuum. Any move you make collapses it and a new construct begins to cohere around your behavior. Complete separation from social interaction isn't a solution; you were made by social forces and your absence is a form of interaction. Monasticism and isolation have repeatedly had large impacts on people's understanding of religion and the self. Unless your entire existence was total isolation, you have been molded by social constructs (and if you're reading this at all, language at the very least got to you). This doesn't mean you should be hopelessly bound to them; cybernetics is the study of feedback loops, not one-sided impositions. Still, those constructions are there. Always. Involuntarily and without anyone needing to try. People ought to have a greater degree of freedom with how they relate to them and in many cases they should be allowed to opt out as meaningfully as they can. This does not mean these constructs are bad. They are, on the whole, good. It is good we have society. It is great we have language. It is fantastic we have tools to understand kinship and value and responsibility. You don't have to read if you don't like the genre, but you shouldn't burn books for finding them distasteful. This was inspired by the argument that the Goths are, in some way, not a valid ethnic grouping historically. This argument takes multiple different shapes but nearly always relies on constructivist critiques of ethnogenesis that frame performance and function as false, usually in contrast to other ethnic and social identities in the context of the Roman Empire. Sometimes this is done by pointing out that they likely included a number of groups, some not Germanic in origin, and organized themselves into a new ethnic category as a response to interacting with the borders of Roman society. This argument is not wrong in how it describes their origin per se, but this is how nearly all ethnogenesis functions. Additionally, this would preclude groups like the English and the Romans themselves from being ethnic categories. The honest version of this argument is an attack on the idea of ethnic identity at all, which is a more coherent position but a less popular one due to the overwhelming importance of ethnic identity throughout history. Others work from more constrained claims, like Amory does in "People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy." There he claims that the word Goth came to mean a professional military class by the end of the fifth century in Italy rather than an ethnic marker, marking Goth as a fluid identity. All identities are fluid (they are constructed by the people who use them and those people die), and this argument draws a false dichotomy between ethnic identity and profession. Worse still, it is cited as evidence against the Goths being a coherent ethnicity even though it can only support that argument for a very specific place and time in history. It has no bearing on the centuries of them being understood as and behaving as an ethnic group. Mamluks and Janissaries were also professional military classes that in practice often functioned like ethnic groups, due both to the extraction of their members and their position in society. The Cossacks took the opposite path. They experienced ethnogenesis starting from being a military and professional category. These sorts of arguments assume entire worldviews in order to refute them. The professional argument presupposes mutual exclusivity with ethnicity. The composite background approach presupposes genetic purity as a requirement. With the Goths, they function as ways of rebutting a different false claim (that the Germanic peoples are one superior united folk) for political reasons. While I agree with those politics (that ideology is corrosive, to say the least), bad scholarship is not the way to beat bad ideas. This approach implicitly cedes the frame that defines what a valid or desirable ethnic grouping is, arguing only that these racialists are factually mistaken about their ancestors without discrediting the logic of ethnic supremacy. Likewise, trying to discredit hierarchies by pointing out that they are not natural cedes the frame to naive naturalists. In both cases, these malformed viewpoints should be challenged at the level of their premises and effects. Credit to Hacking for asking "The Social Construction of What?" in 1999 and Searle for answering four years before that with "The Construction of Social Reality" in 1995. These both heavily influenced my understanding of this issue and helped give me the vocabulary to discuss it.

i think it's helpful when thinking about these things to understand that political movements are made of people, not ideas. socialism is a tag for a group of people who can take up and discard various ideas. there is never an ideological core to a movement, there is always instead a social core. the ideology of a movement is less stable than its constituency.

i think we're starting to see a shift in the economy where prestige is sort of fungible for cash. it used to be that prestige and pay went hand-in-hand, but this is less and less the case. now it's more like moving along a pareto frontier

it seems to me like internet-based political movements don't really want to be led by someone with their own ideas, they want a leader who can act as a sort of pure vessel for whatever memes float to the top

one thing to keep in mind when irresponsibly pondering evopsych explanations for human behavior is that if one gender benefits from something and the other gender is neutral, evolution will have an easier time pulling both genders in that direction than doing complicated sexual dimorphism

this is also why some people have a negative visceral reaction to property taxes. if the government can charge you money to live in your own house, then the psychological stability they want is impossible to achieve.

i think any economic understanding of homeownership is missing the point. people have a psychological need for stability. part of that for many people is knowing that nobody can kick you out of your home. as long as you're renting, you're at the mercy of a landlord.

@MattKnightLewis i don't think most people think precisely enough to distinguish the difference between the motte and the bailey. they certainly don't understand it as two separate things, they just see the motte as a good argument for the bailey

@Authw8 People work out their arguments "live" all the time, though its annoying and suggests they're not a good interlocutor in the first place. With charity you could say It's only a motte-and-bailey then if the person keeps going back to the bailey because it sounds good as a slogan.

i think i'm coming to understand how motte-and-bailey doctrines form. people start with the bailey as a sort of poorly-defined vibe in their head. from there, they fish around for a good argument for the thing they intuitively know to be true. i think this is just what cognition is. we unconsciously come to certain conclusions that we then need to try to unpack and understand consciously. all reasoning is motivated reasoning. we always start with intuitive vibes and try to formalize them. what happens next though is that the weaker arguments get demolished. what's left are the strong arguments, aka the motte. these arguments stick around and spread because they're difficult to refute. a motte-and-bailey doctrine doesn't rely on bad faith or conspiracy because it's a natural attractor basin in a competitive environment.

European history from the perspective of the papacy: 330 - 476 AD: It sort of blows that the Emperor moved the main capitol to Constantinople but at least I get to be Pontifex Maximus 476 AD - 535 AD: It sort of blows that the Goths are running Italy and are Arian but I can still threaten them (vaguely) with the Emperor if they get too uppity 535 AD - 554 AD: Fuck fuck fuck fuck everything is on fire fuck fuck fuck 554 AD - 773 AD: Well the Lombards control the shitty parts of the peninsula and the Byzantines sort of control the cities so I can work with this 773 - 800 AD: Uh-oh the Lombards are getting too strong, time to ask the Franks to kick them around a bit 800 AD: What if I crowned my own emperor (of the Franks, lol) 800 AD - 924 AD: Yeah this Frankish emperor business seems to be working out, they are so far away it's great 924 AD - 951 AD: Uhhhh the last of the Franks died out, the locals are getting a bit uppity 951 - 961 AD: What if I invite a German down to be Emperor 961 AD - 1046 AD: These German emperors keep trying to interfere with my corrupt practices, pretty annoying TBH 1046 AD - 1073 AD: Just kidding, corruption sux, reform papacy time 1073 - 1077 AD: What if the reform papacy gave me so much moral authority that the pope is above the emperor? Really makes u think 1077 - 1268 AD: So it turns out the emperors are not being cool about the whole me being above them thing, so I'm going to have to excommunicate them. Also fight a nearly never-ending war mostly through proxies 1268 AD - 1309 AD: I won, this rules, just a few loose ends to tie up 1309 AD - 1376 AD: Those loose ends are more conveniently tied up if I'm in Avignon, for reasons, shut up 1378 AD - 1417 AD: I, the real pope am located in [scribble], please go murder the fake pope located in [scribble] for me 1417 AD - 1449 AD: I, the real pope, am definitely and indisputably in Rome again. Why are these cardinals claiming they get to decide things 1449 AD - 1494 AD: Cardinals don't get to decide shit, the papal states are a real country, everything rocks. Except, uh, I am a bit worried about the Ottomans. 1494 AD - 1517 AD: NEVERMIND I AM MORE WORRIED ABOUT THE FRENCH 1517 AD - 1527 AD: Martin who? 1527 AD: Hapsburg mercenaries sacked MY CITY 1527 AD - 1559 AD: THE HABSBURGS ARE MY BEST FRIENDS 1559 AD - 1648 AD: The Habsburgs are still my best friends, but I have other priorities now. These northern heretics are really annoying 1648 AD: YOU SIGNED WHAT WITHOUT MY CONSENT???

@eclairJoss i usually bought a 12-pack of bic ballpoints at wal-mart and just sort of haphazardly dumped them into my backpack to be fished out later as needed

I just watched a video of an American reacting to a German highschool and he was very confused that every student had a pencil case (didn't know what it was for at first)??? Where do Americans put all their pens for school????

@chrislakin it works better than you might think!

@Authw8 lol

I used to believe "It's always good to be nice to people who are rude to you", but turns out some people interpret this as "I'm not being rude enough" and get more rude to reach equilibrium. Still deciding on what I believe now

@etirabys it may not be the same for you, but for me i think it's not just having the destination that's helpful, it's having a little ritual to engage in when i get there. that makes me feel better about spending money on it

I don't particularly want the coffee or pastry. But it's so suffery to groggily leave the house with no destination that my mind seizes on any palliation. When I've tried to go on a walk without a destination, I've found myself circling the block and coming right back home.

@kuthnull yes, i think it's a similar process. intelligence has to emerge as an illusion of selection effects plus crude generative heuristics

@Authw8 It's notable that this kind of describes evolution. Learning, or updating the heuristics / mental material you construct solutions out of, is also part of it.

i think intelligence is mostly about the ability to quickly generate and evaluate solutions to problems. generation needs to be fast and use good heuristics so the solutions are worth evaluating. evaluation needs to be fast and accurate so we can evaluate many options and reliably end up with the best (or at least a good enough) option. a highly intelligent person is someone who, when they consider a problem, they intuitively generate a large number of possible solutions, and then accurately evaluate those solutions for likelihood of success and potential side-effects. i think most of this happens unconsciously - your intuitive mind is generating and discarding thousands of options that are never surfaced to consciousness. but the best options do get surfaced for further, conscious evaluation.

when someone challenged me to a fight in high school i told them i was a pacifist, but i'm not a little bitch, so i would be cool standing there peacefully while they kick my ass. they didn't take me up on the offer