periphrasis

I said you would not have to leave your chair, as in you are treating this like a game, as in you are not taking this seriously, as in you are prioritizing your personal emotional satisfaction over any sort of analysis of strategic interest. What do you believe is at stake here that would justify dramatically increasing the probability of a strategic nuclear exchange? I agree that a strategic nuclear exchange is p<.5 in the event of a NATO-Russia war, but how high a probability should we tolerate before the risk-benefit analysis of nato intervention collapses? The end of civilization is an almost unbounded price to pay, and even at a very low probability of occurrence we would still be taking on an extraordinarily expensive risk. So what are we buying for that risk? That Russia loses this war? To the extent that their political objective was to turn Ukraine back into a satellite client state, they’ve already lost. Destruction of the Russian armed forces for a generation? The Ukrainians are already doing yeomans work there. A chance for regime change in Russia? If so we’d be increasing the probability of a strategic nuclear exchange well above .5 then. A chance to punish the cretins who bound and shot, and raped, and tortured civilians to include children? Laudable but many of the immediate perpetrators are likely already dead, and to be frank it’s generally not a good time to risk nuclear war when you are feeling personally outraged. So what then? A chance to feel like you fought the good fight? As others have noted you have every opportunity to personally go fight that fight without NATO involvement, particularly, but not necessarily, if you have infantry or medical training.

I know I’m being an antagonistic asshole, but I would genuinely be curious to know what precise benefit you think nato intervention would achieve and why you value that benefit so highly as to incur near incalculable risk. I’m assuming you haven’t done that analysis, but then I’m an asshole who may be selling you short.

Photographs corroborated by satellite and drone imagery, which is consistent with the public arguments being made by [Russian state media](https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with...) (yes I’m aware the translator has a horse in this race and no I do not read Russian myself but obviously she is not the only one who has reported on the content of what Russian state media is saying needs to be done) calling for ethnic cleansing/genocide. But I’m sure my inability to think critically has caused me to irrationally preclude the possibility that these civilians simply killed themselves.

Congrats on your contrarianism. Forgive me if my simplicity and inability to think critically causes me to think less of you.

The question would be a lot easier to resolve if the major MAGA thought leaders would stop making excuses for genocide. Anecdotally, my dad is MAGA-leaning right, and while he opposes the invasion and is happy to see the Russian army destroyed, his immediate response when I brought up the mass graves was “how much of that is propaganda though?”. Skepticism about what we are told about a war is always warranted, but right wing Americans are being actively persuaded right now to deny or doubt Russian war crimes despite overwhelming evidence.

Yet most unaffiliated voters “lean”, often very strongly, towards one party or the other. Most estimates put true independent/swing voters at only 3-4% of the electorate.

The irony of course being that the American political demographic, MAGA, with the biggest grievances regarding tech “censorship” also appear to be most willing to make excuses for or deny Russian war crimes.

You are advocating conflict escalation and expansion that will drastically shorten the decision tree that ends in the permanent end of human civilization in its present form. Given that the Ukrainians -- with Western material, financial and intelligence support -- appear to be capable of destroying the combat power of the Russian Army in the field without a direct NATO intervention, what you're in effect asking for is to take on the literally largest conceivable risks for minimal added benefit beyond feeling tougher and stronger and like you're doing something, all without personally having to leave your chair. Forgive me if I don't think that's a good trade off.

And as an aside, my personal view is peak nuclear escalation risk is in another 3 or 4 weeks when Russian forces in the east and south hit a similar point of exhaustion/forced withdrawal that we just witnessed in the north. I don't think Putin is going to react well once the news finally penetrates that his miscalculation has destroyed his army and revealed him and the Russian state to be laughingstocks.

New Vegas wasn’t a Bethesda game?

The problems of higher education not withstanding, I will always be grateful I stumbled into a superb liberal arts education as an undergraduate and I will always feel a little sorry for men like Altman who aren’t even aware that they missed out on anything.

A few subjective observations that may be totally wrong when applied to others despite their normative tone:

* VR makes me sweaty… because it induces minor vertigo.

* Anything which requires intense, complete focus to do right is never boring. Exercise, both strength and cardio, requires this level of focus.

* Exercise is essential to physical and mental well-being, especially as you age. The difference between having plenty of energy throughout the day and fighting through deep fatigue is profound. With exercise you are sharpening the tool that is your body, for both physical and intellectual output, and time spent keeping your tools sharp is never wasted.

* Exercise is a skill that supports measurable progressive mastery. If gamification helps your motivation, then the advent of smart watches and fitness trackers makes it extremely easy to watch your “stats” go up.

* Exercise and sports provides a venue to meet new people, which as you get older only gets harder and harder. You may think you are an introvert and dislike being around others, but that likely points to unresolved social anxiety. You’re a human: you evolved to be a social animal. You may indeed need less socialization time and fewer friends than more gregarious humans, but you do need it. The extent to which you are introverted only emphasizes the importance of finding opportunities to make new acquaintances and friends because introversion has probably left you with fewer than you need. Exercise and sports is a great such opportunity.

* Exercise is fun. It taps into a very animal sense of conquest, and the joy of pure physical sensation. I’ve been doing a lot of road cycling lately following a running injury that I’m still recovering from, and the exhilaration of speed, of instinctively responding to possibly dangerous surprises, and of pushing your legs and your lungs to go ever faster is joyful. Even overcoming the misery of winter cycling weather becomes it’s own source of accomplishment: “I pushed through sub freezing temperatures and a brutal headwind today. I am strong and resilient.”

A cup of coffee and a book.

Today OP “taught” me that if a book requires careful effort to fully understand, then the book is badly written. Likewise, if a book is hard, the reader shouldn’t ever be expected to push through that difficulty and should instead seek an easier and simpler take on the same topic.

If these are the OP’s habits of mind, then hard pass on anything else he thinks.

Agreed on the latter point. But on the former, would it though? Prior to the internet, isolating yourself from the world involved making a very deliberate and drastic life choice that completely changed your environment, like joining a monastery. Now though, a compelling and addictive alternate world awaits us in our pocket at all times. Indeed, I doubt either of us really cares much about this “conversation” or each other yet here we are wasting part of our morning shouting into the void. On that note I think I’m done with unintentional internet use for the day.

Sure conveyances existed prior to 1945. What did not exist prior to 1945 was cities and towns designed such that the only effective means to get around was a car. Yes, I grant that the car is a useful invention for the rural farmer. It is not a useful invention for someone living in a town or city because it does not scale to a population the size of a town or city; the only reason a car may appear useful is that post war towns and cities are so badly designed that a car is the least worst option. The beauty of a well designed town or city is that everything you need for daily life is within a five minute walk of your home, a walk in which you often bump into friends and neighbors; work is a couple mass transit stops away at most, and a traffic filled commute is not eating hours of each day. A car cannot improve upon this mode of life; it can improve the life of a farmer, but it only detracts from the life of a town or city dweller. Unfortunately, people can’t imagine an alternative to the “convenience” and “freedom” of being stuck in traffic, fighting for parking, and paying for gas.

Idk man, how do you think people survived prior to 1945? We do not have to go far back into human history to see the alternative to car centric development. Were pre war cities and towns gentrified and devoid of commerce? Did everyone have no time for anything but walking? It’s always striking to me the extent to which people will take a 75 year old radical experiment (car centric suburban development) as the normal and the natural mode of civilization, and consider any deviation from that mode completely impractical. I guess people were entirely impractical for 8000 years or so?

We’ve also absorbed the Protestant Reformation, the Counterreformation, the Thirty Years War, and the English Civil War into the background of our culture: see the implicit suspicion of the Pope and global organizations in any right wing YouTube video. One can be completely ignorant of the world historical events of early modern Europe and still have absorbed their cultural impact. But that doesn’t make you any less ignorant of the sequence of historical events, new ideas, and great works that form the rational account of why our present culture and experience is the way it is. Sure, one can be ignorant and still function in human life, being carried along by the undercurrents of the time and culture in which accident assigned your life span. The question is why a thinking person would consider it acceptable to leave it at that.

I think this common argument underrates the extent to which core factual mastery informs your ability to perform analysis and to synthesize arguments. For example, if given the exam question “Discuss the role of demagoguery in Athenian democratic politics in the Peloponnesian War.” and you need to look up whether the Sicilian Expedition happened before or after the death of Pericles, then you probably don’t really understand the role of Athenian political dysfunction during the war either.

I’m not sure the recency bias of a contemporary average person is a good proxy for the artistic achievement of a time now three generations past. If we were to enumerate the list of major, artistically significant films released in the 30s and 40s, we would produce dozens of titles that even the average person has heard of, if perhaps not seen themselves. In the same vein, the average person would struggle to identify Plato or Cicero, let alone have read any of their work, but the names would at least ring a bell.

Video games are in a weird place because they arguably reached maturity of design with 1985’s Super Mario Bros. But as wonderful as SMB is, it doesn’t mean anything or have anything to say: it is just the first game to truly nail 2d platformer mechanics to a transcendent degree. Indeed, as the OP mentioned, the best video games seem to be able to do as of yet with respect to depth of meaning is the equivalent of a mid-grade zombie film (The Last of Us), and the industry is such a grind that the writers burn out before really developing their craft. Maybe video games will eventually bring a depth of meaning and insight equivalent to their refinement of play mechanics, but they’re not there yet.

I haven’t played either game but any sort of visual medium is capable of story telling without dialogue or exposition: visuals can tell a story at least as effectively, if not more so, than words can. For a somewhat recent, very well regarded example, see the opening prologue of Up.

Video games have existed for over 50 years now. Video games have had as much time to mature as film had had by the early 1940s. And by the early 1940s film had produced numerous mature works of art displaying mastery of the medium that are still avidly watched and viewed as masterpieces today. The excuse that video games are a young medium may have held 20 years ago in the PS2 era, but it does not hold any longer.

I’m saying that anyone that thinks that progress is a given and that we are inherently better off for having the social web may not be giving sufficient considerations to the trade offs we have incurred. On the other hand I’m typing in anger, so I might just be an asshole.

Indeed. What are the trade offs of technology? Is it actually making our lives better? Are our lives richer for having brought Mark Zuckerberg into them? Perhaps if we had thought to ask those questions ahead of time we wouldn’t be living through a fourth corona virus wave fueled by antivax misinformation, and perhaps people wouldn’t be feeling deep personal injury at being unable to talk to someone for six hours.

No I do not. And I’m sorry that the incumbent monopolist in third world countries is such a shit show that anyone has to suffer for their incompetence. Doesn’t change the reality that Facebook is the only game in town in the developing world because they worked very hard to make it that way.

Tell you what: I’ll be more empathetic to victims of the great Facebook outage of 2021 if you can be more empathetic to the mother I lost to covid after refusing to get vaccinated on account of memes she saw on Facebook. Deal?

Some number less than their active user count?

Ask a leading question; get a flippant answer.

I’d find the cries for empathy to the poor affected users more compelling if it weren’t for the fact that anyone of working age can remember a time when these technologies didn’t exist. If it’s a tragedy that you didn’t have access to a novel technology for six hours, then I’d question the health of your relationship to it, and the wisdom of any economic choices you’ve made which depend upon it.

I particularly had in mind “why would I want to consume this particular form of sensory input in preference to others?” and “why is this good and useful to an individual and a society as opposed to just a platform for selling noise?” and “what are the social, ethical, and economic trade offs of devoting our time, privacy, and money to platforms like this?” As you note, these are questions that don’t necessarily have answers; I’m just trying to clarify for myself whether I should view 1B MAUs with dread, indifference, or appreciation.

Very interesting distinction. I remain deeply skeptical that this is a good or useful technology, but you’ve effectively summed up why it’s compelling to users in comparison to other social media. Thanks!

I agree that precious little occurred in terms of technological advancement. However, I think it’s a more tendentious claim with respect to cultural achievement. For example, all the great epic poems of the Western tradition predate the Enlightenment (although there have been notable failed/incomplete epics since then). In terms of Humanism, it’s unclear to me that we’re doing better than our far less technologically sophisticated ancestors.

That aside, my broader concern is with our civilizational stability. We are still too close to and to involved in the events of the past two years to achieve any kind of objectivity, but I am increasingly concerned that, at least in the American context, things are not going to work out. Between worsening climate change, an incipient and solidifying neo-Fascist mass movement, the disinformational chaos of social media, the mass death of a pandemic, and an increasingly sclerotic US hegemony, our civilization is experiencing profound pressures of the sort which historically presaged extended periods of violence and chaos.

I hope that I am completely wrong, but it’s difficult to read the stories (and for that matter the crueler comments) of r/HermanCainAward and not come away with the conclusion that social media has broken our society to the tune of 2000 unvaccinated dead per day and counting.

Sounds like a gigantic attention suck designed to stimulate addiction. Moreover, it’s unclear to me why opening the floodgates to more human expression without any concern for the quality of that expression is desirable. The virtue of social media seemed self evident in 2006 when we had little experience of what it would mean in practice; in 2021 however, I think the premise that megaphoning unfettered expression is inherently good requires justification, particularly given the instability it has introduced at the societal scale and the addictive behavior, poor mental health, and loss of concentration it has often imposed at the individual level.

Individual humans got along just fine for millennia without being able to broadcast the minutia of their thoughts for likes and subscribes: what are we really gaining by suddenly being able to do so in the course of two decades, and is it really worth the trade offs?

Why would I want to watch short form video content? Genuinely curious here.

Yeah, I was about to make the exact same comment albeit mentioning Sophocles and his roughly 120 plays.

If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing. I read Cicero’s De Re Publica recently, of which only about 35-ish% survived. What’s there is so interesting, both for what it says about the structure of the Roman republic as it existed, and what an educated traditional Roman of the senatorial class thought about how best to structure society and government. The concluding Dream of Scipio is enough to make you cry, not just for its extreme beauty and elegiac tone, but also for the fact that the dialogue it concludes only came down to us in a mutilated state.

While much of what was lost was surely dross, we also lost some of the great achievements of human culture too.