Election Priorities

1. No wars
2. No “open borders;” decrease low-IQ immigration in favor of high-IQ immigration
3. Decrease paperwork/bureaucracy/over-legalization/unnecessary government (or civil) intrusions into people’s lives

1 & 3 have been priorities for approximately forever; on point 2, I’ve changed over the past decade from favoring the libertarian position of fully open borders to favoring the “Hive Mind” hypothesis that the nation’s well-being depends on our % of smart people.

Number 3 may require explanation–there is just a tremendous amount of overhead gumming up everything. I think small business owners get this–every new regulation ends up being yet another hour they devote to paperwork instead of business. The net result is that regulations are, effectively, a form of taxation–a tax on time and ability to act.

I don’t think the general impression that it is nigh-impossible to get stuff done these days is just an illusion.

Imagine, for a moment, running a small business in the late 1800s. There were no payroll taxes, no insurance requirements, no pensions to keep track of, no deductions, no environmental impact surveys, no chance of getting sued over the ethnic/gender composition of your workforce, far fewer licensing requirements, etc.

Not that I want to die in a fire or from drinking polluted, feces-laden water, but there is a cost-benefit tradeoff to every regulation.

The Empire State Building, for example, was built in little more than a year, between January 22, 1930 and April 11, 1931. Wikipedia does not tell how much time–if any–was spent getting building permits prior to construction, but does note that the architectural plans were drawn up in two weeks.

By contrast, after the 9-11 attacks, folks began drawing up architectural plans for the new WTC building in 2002 and finally finished their plans, 3 years later, in 2005. Construction began a year later, in 2006, and finished in 2013. Tenants were finally allowed to move in yet another year later, in 2014–a mere 12 years after the project began.

The WTC cost an estimated 3.9 billion, or about $1,500 per square foot (in 2007). The Empire State Building cost $637,172,100 in 2016 dollars, or $283 per square foot. (Assuming square footage is calculated the same way for both buildings.)

On the plus side, it looks like no one died in the construction of the new WTC, whereas 5 people died building the ESB (though it looks like two people almost died and had to be rescued by the fire department.)

In a more mundane example, we frequent a local park with a new playground and a lovely, unoccupied restaurant building. It has stood unoccupied for several years, ever since the park opened. Every day hundreds of children and their parents play here; all summer thirsty children and their parents would love to buy lemonade and hot dogs and snow cones, but no one sells them.

Finally an enterprising Mexican appeared with a cart, selling corn on the cob and lemonade. Why corn? I don’t know, but it was good corn. Did he have a license? Was he legally allowed to have his cart there? Probably not; he disappeared after a couple of months.

Now there is no one selling lemonade; the restaurant is still empty.

The legal/judicial system is horribly inefficient. Consider the time, expense, and stress endured by a person falsely accused of wrongdoing in attempting to establish their innocence. False accusations should not destroy innocent people’s lives, but they do.

A female acquaintance of mine was accused of domestic violence and arrested by the police. The whole matter was bogus and the police dropped the case without even going to trial, but in the meanwhile she lost her job, was evicted from her apartment, lost numerous friends, had to spend a tremendous amount of money (and time) dealing with the case, and faced the possibility of actually going to prison. Basically, it ruined her life.

A friend who had started a small tech company was sued by a much larger company for patent infringement. The friend won the case, because none of the tech they used had anything to do with the patents in question, but the expense (and time they had to spend on it,) nearly destroyed the company.

The average person has neither the skills nor the expertise to defend themselves in a patent case; they must hire a lawyer, and lawyers aren’t cheap. Larger corporations can afford to throw bogus IP infringement cases at smaller companies until the cows come home or the smaller companies are driven out of business–obviously not how we want free-market economic competition to work.

As for #1: I don’t want to die in Syria. I don’t want my friends or relatives to die in Syria. I don’t want other Americans to die in Syria.

I also don’t want to die fighting Russia.

Soviet atomic bomb, 1951

I suspect the chance of war is, from lowest to highest:

Sanders < Clinton < Trump < other Republicans

Trump has a belligerent personality, which makes me worry that he’d start or get involved in a war, but from what I’ve seen so far of the debates, he is ironically less inclined to get into a war than the other Republican candidates.

My impression of Open Borders sentiment:

Trump < other Republicans < Sanders < Clinton

Trump’s plan to build a wall seems a bit 30 years too late if you’re worried about Mexican immigration, (and enforcement might cost more than the migrants, anyway,) but Clinton and Sanders seem likely to greatly expand low-IQ immigration.

Nobody campaigns on an anti-paperwork platform, but Trump seems like the kind of guy who’d hate regulations on businesses.

How TVA flattens a flood

The Democrats have the good luck to have two candidates they can feel truly enthusiastic about–Hillary as the first serious female presidential candidate; Sanders as the first Socialist. After all, when’s the last time you heard someone say, “I’m a Democrat, but I don’t believe in female empowerment/expanding social programs to help the poor”?

Republicans, by contrast, are amusingly divided over Trump. Sure, he’s the front-runner (as of when I wrote this,) with a fairly sizeable lead over the other candidates. And Trump’s supporters tend to be very enthusiastic, which is a good thing for getting your votes to actually make it to the polls come election day.

But the Republican leadership appears to be losing its shit over the matter.

It’s Time for an Anti-Trump Manhattan Project:

If the Trump contingent should succeed in this endeavor, the party would not emerge refreshed or improved; it would be summarily returned to where it was languishing back in early 2009. And if that should happen? Well, suffice it to say that it would be an unmitigated, unalloyed, potentially unsalvageable disaster. For the first time in years, the Right’s defenses would be completely destroyed, perhaps never to be rebuilt. …

Now is the time to throw everything at Trump, and to stop this disaster in its tracks. Will our children wonder why we were so reluctant?

Incidentally, when I say “everything,” I really do mean everything. Tomorrow night, as they stand on either side of Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz must find their resolve and all-but-machine-gun the man to the floor.

I feel like the author needs a reassuring pat on the head. Don’t worry, your children really won’t care who you voted for in the primaries when they were five.

Donors Ask Independent Consulting Firm to Research 3rd-Party Bid:

A group of Republicans is moving quickly to research ballot-access requirements for independent candidates in case Trump wraps up the GOP nomination next month.

Sure, Trump is loud and rude and disreputable, but more importantly, he came out of nowhere to upset the Republican front-runners simply by loudly opposing illegal immigration from Mexico.

Speaking naively, the odd thing is not that Trump opposes illegal immigration, (which is, after all, illegal because people oppose it,) but that no one else was making it a prominent part of their platforms. But in retrospect, in a field where the establishment darlings were Cruz, Rubio, and Jeb–two Hispanics and one guy married to an Hispanic–it seems clear that the Republican elites had decided on a strategy of courting Hispanics.

After all, if Dems have black voters, why shouldn’t Repubs have Hispanics? Hispanics are 17% of the population (compared to Blacks at 12 or 13%)–nothing to sneeze at, demographically.

The problem with this strategy is that while liberal whites may get excited about the prospect of voting for a suitable black or female president, conservative whites aren’t excited about the prospect of voting for the nation’s first Hispanic. The Hispanic Vote might “save” the Republican party by helping it to victory in future elections, but conservative whites care more about their own self-interest than the continued existence of a particular political organization. Let it go the way of the Whigs; life will go on regardless.

The Republican field before Trump entered the race was almost shockingly dull and uninteresting–not good for winning. While I have nothing against (or for) Jeb as a person, who in their right mind would consider him for president? Is the party so lacking in leadership and foresight that the best they can come up with is literally the little brother of the previous Republican president and son of the Repub. before that? No, a good leader should go to waste just because other members of his family were also talented, but there are a great many positions besides president in which a truly talented person can serve his country–Secretary of State, Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice, governor, etc.

That people find the Trump’s success at all surprising is, well, strange. What, Republican voters aren’t keen on illegal immigration? I am shocked, absolutely shocked! It is like discovering that Democrats think that Black Lives Matter. What else shall we learn, that Libertarians favor individual freedom?

The Republican leadership is in direct opposition to its own base. The leaders want to promote their pro-Hispanic strategy; the base is anti-immigration. Hypothetically, Hispanic voters who are legally in the country might resent people who break the law to do what they jumped through hoops and worked to do legally, but as a practical matter:

1. People who oppose illegal immigration often oppose legal immigration;
2. People who oppose illegal immigration are often opposed to Hispanic migrants in general;
3. Hispanics immigrants may simply desire more Hispanic immigration, without caring about the legal details.

All of which makes the Trump campaign potentially problematic for the Republican elites.

Presidential Poison

The Founding Fathers never intended for the President to be all that big a deal–each state was supposed to basically do its own thing and mind its own affairs, Congress was supposed to take care of the matters that required interstate coordination, and the President was just supposed to be there for those times when we really needed a single guy to do something, like present a coherent foreign policy to foreign sovereigns.

Since then, of course, the Presidency has increased both in power/scope and in the amount of attention people pay to it. People who can’t be bothered to vote for the mayor or city council that runs their cities somehow find time to watch endless news coverage of presidential debates, buy t-shirts and tote bags promoting their favorite candidates, and broadcast their presidential preferences all over every social media platform they have available to them.

I was reading this morning about cuts to the services disabled people receive in Oklahoma, and (as you might expect) more generally about economic malaise throughout Appalachia.

Whether Obama or the Democrats can do anything about joblessness in Greater Appalachia is a matter of some debate; whether they should is another. But people have gotten so fixated on their hatred of the President and the Democrats more broadly that they are willing to vote blindly for the Republicans, whether the Republicans actually accomplish their goals or not.

The inverse is also true in liberal areas, where people vote Democratic because they hate Republicans.

This fixation on hating the president instead of paying attention to and trying to improve one’s own community is a kind of poison. At best, it’s a worthless distraction; at worst, you give up your own self interest in order to symbolically defy someone living in another part of the country.

Just to give an example of such politics in action:

7% of Americans like Obamacare, but dislike the Affordable Care Act.

9% of Americans dislike Obamacare, but are fine with the Affordable Care Act.

And according to Reuters,

Reuters/Ipsos polling reveals a remarkably high level of approval for nearly all the provisions of the act, often in the 80 percent range, even though respondents oppose the legislation, commonly known as “Obamacare,” by 55 to 45.

Chances are, the average person has no idea what is actually in the bill; support or disapproval is based entirely on political identity–if you think abortion is bad, then you think “Obamacare” is also bad; if you think abortion is good, then you probably think Obamacare is also good.

Of course, this is an idiotic way to determine health care policy.

You know best your own business; second best, your friends’ and loved-ones’ businesses; worst, strangers’. We do the most good by serving our local communities–caring for our families, helping our friends, cleaning up our own streets and being decent to others. But instead we spend our energy watching TV and complaining about health care plans we don’t understand. We want to “fix” schools we’ve never set foot in, without the slightest idea what’s wrong with them. We invade other countries and expect them to thank us for the favor.

And who wins?

You? Me?

Probably not.

How many years of Republican voting have resulted in a preservation of anything Republicans hold dear? Job, society, religion?

Oh, yes, we got tax cuts for the rich.

 

Does advertising’s desire for young consumers drive ignorance?

The “rural purge” in American TV was the cancellation, between 1969 and 1972, of “everything with a tree in it.” Wikipedia lists 26 shows that were purged, everything from Lassie to Gunsmoke to Red Skelton. Some of these shows were probably declining anyway and would have been cancelled sooner or later, but most, like Hee Haw (#16 in the ratings), or Red Skelton (#7) were doing quite well.

According to Wikipedia, CBS’s original plans called for Gunsmoke–a TV and radio success since 1952–to be canceled at the end of the 1970-71 season, but Gunsmoke kept defying them by doing things like coming in #5 and #4 in the Nielsen Ratings; it didn’t get canceled until the end of the 1974/5 season, when it came in #28.

The entire cast was stunned by the cancellation, as they were unaware that CBS was considering it. According to Arness, “We didn’t do a final, wrap-up show. We finished the 20th year, we all expected to go on for another season, or two or three. The (network) never told anybody they were thinking of canceling.” The cast and crew read the news in the trade papers.^[26]

Gunsmoke was replaced with Rhoda and Phyllis. Rhoda did well for two seasons; then it cratered. By season 5, it had sunk to #43 and was cancelled. Phyllis made it for an impressive two whole seasons, ending at #40.

If ratings didn’t drive the purge, then what did?

Advertisers.

Advertisers wanted TV shows that appealed to young people with money to spend and tastes to shape, not old people whose tastes and incomes were already fixed. (The same dynamic that lead tobacco companies to try to market cigarettes to children.) Everything that appealed to the wrong demographics–old people, rural people, poor people–got the axe. They were replaced with “relevant”show like All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the Brady Bunch Comedy Hour, which everyone agreed was awful.

Amusingly, Congress–which tends to be full of old people–was upset about all of its favorite shows getting cancelled and replaced with programs aimed at 20-something single women and hippies. According to Wik:

The backlash from the purge prompted CBS to commission, perhaps somewhat facetiously, a rural family drama for its Fall 1972 schedule, but the network scheduled it in what it thought would be a death slot against popular series The Flip Wilson Show and The Mod Squad, allegedly hoping the show would underperform and head to a quick cancellation. Instead, The Waltons went on to run for nine seasons, reaching as high as second in the Nielsens and finishing in the top 30 for seven of its nine years on air.

Dude lives in a trash can.

Mary Tyler Moore only lasted for 7 seasons.

I suspect something similar happened in the late 80s/early 90s as the grittiness of our degraded cities, reflected in shows like Taxi, Sesame Street, and Welcome Back Kotter, began to distress watchers instead of inspire them, and networks began focusing on suburban comedies like The Cosby Show and Full House, but I have yet to find any articles on the subject. (This trend may have reversed again once Giulliani cleaned up NYC, resulting in shows like Seinfeld and Friends.)

 

“If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brains.” — Variously misattributed

While I wouldn’t describe younger me as a total idiot, there are certainly a great many things that I know now that I didn’t know back when Joe Camel ads were a thing or when I attended candle lit vigils for Darfur. That’s part of growing up and getting older: hopefully you learn something.

What happens when most TV programming for 40 or 50 years is intended to appeal primarily to people who don’t yet know much about the world?

It took quite a bit of rumination to come up with something better than “obviously they have trouble telling when the wool is being pulled over their eyes,” and “small children tend not to notice the pattern of kids’ TV shows making the black character the smartest one.” (I’d make a list except I don’t care that much, but I’ll note that even LazyTown, an Icelandic TV show, does it.)

So the non-obvious effect: People massively over-estimate the percent of the country that agrees with liberal values, and then are shocked by reality.

Basically, TV–a few cable stations excepted–functions like a great big liberal bubble.

For example:

42% of Americans are young-Earth creationists

27% of Americans–20% of Democrats and 44% of Republicans–favor deporting illegal immigrants. 39% of Americans favor amending the Constitution to end birthright citizenship; 41% believe immigrants are, on net, a burden.

17% believe the Bundy-led militia takeover of a building in Oregon was just.

40% of Americans oppose gay marriage.

60% of Republican primary voters think the US should should ban Muslims from entering the US; 45% of Democrats agree, so long as you don’t mention that it was Trump’s idea.

7/10 Republican presidential candidates favor getting into WWIII with Russia.

44% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 don’t know which country America gained its independence from. (Also, while 85% of men know the answer, only 69% of women managed the same feat.)

57% of Americans see the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride, rather than racism; 43% oppose removing the Confederate flag from government buildings.

31% of Americans believe it is immoral to be transgender; 59% believe trans people should use the bathroom that corresponds to their birth gender.

If your perception of “normal” is based on the sitcoms you see on TV, chances are good that virtually all of these stats are surprising, because they don’t feature many young Earth creationists who fly the Confederate flag and want to start WWIII with Russia.

But given the structure of our electoral system–Republicans pick a candidate; Democrats pick a candidate; everyone gets together and we vote for the Republican or the Democrat–there’s a very good chance that about half the time, the president will actually agree with a variety of the positions listed above (except he’s pretty much guaranteed to know who we fought in the Revolution.) If you think that’s an absolutely horrible outcome, I recommend either advocating for massively changing the structure of the electoral system, or investigating some form of Neocameralism.

One of the more amusing experiences of the past few months has been watching people–both Democrats and Republicans–express outrage, shock, and confusion at Donald Trump’s success. Who could have predicted that “kick out illegal immigrants” might attract more voters than “Let’s all die in a war with Russia”? (Clearly not anyone paid to understand which issues appeal to voters.)

“It’s time we punched the Russians in the nose.”–Presidential candidate Gov. John Kasich

“Not only would I be prepared to do it, I would do it,” blurted Christie: … Yes, we would shoot down the planes of Russian pilots if in fact they were stupid enough to think that this president was the same feckless weakling … we have in the Oval Office … right now.”

Carly Fiorina would impose a no-fly zone and not even talk to Putin until we’ve conducted “military exercises in the Baltic States”

Lindsey Graham, …opined that he “would shoot [Putin’s] planes down, I would literally shoot his planes down”.

Ben Carson said of his call for a no-fly zone and Russian planes: “You shoot them down, absolutely” then added “Whatever happens next, we deal with it”.

There are a lot of people who would describe Trump as “literally Hitler” (which seems a little unfair to a guy whose daughter is Orthodox Jewish,) for wanting to deport illegal immigrants, temporarily halt Muslim immigration, and create some kind of Muslim registry, at least until we have fewer incidents like the San Bernardino Christmas Party shooting.

But on the scale of human suffering, I guarantee that a war with Russia would be far, far worse, and yet no one is protesting against that possibility, screaming that those candidates are going to start WWIII, nor even mildly concerned that the “mainstream” Republican candidates are so completely off their rockers, they make Trump look like a pacifist. (Here the Rand Paul supporters would like to point out that their candidate is also sane.)

Perhaps political commentators have become accustomed to Republicans starting wars and the threat of nuclear armageddon. Killing foreigners is a normal part of the Republican agenda–but trying to keep them out of the country? That’s completely novel. (Or at least, we haven’t done it since the 20s.)

Or perhaps people are mad because Trump is vocally anti-liberal and garners much of his support from people who hate liberals, and liberals had not realized just how many people really hate them.

Liberals must not get out very much.

I didn’t actually intend this to turn into a Trump post, but the subject is popular thee days. Had I written this in 2004, I’d have discussed the two young women I had just spoken with who swore up and down that George Bush couldn’t win reelection because “no one likes him.”

(As always, this blog makes no official political endorsements.)

RIP Programming, America

The first time I read Mencius Moldbug’s Unqualified Reservations, the style was so familiar, I thought Moldbug was just a friend writing under a pseudonym.

He’s not; I’ve never met him.

Some people dislike Moldbug’s style. They call it “smug, long-winded, and elitist.” I reflexively identify Moldbug as “one of my tribe” based on it and find it far more readable than, say, Das Kapital, which I had to read twice at university.

I have not read all of Moldbug, no more than I have read all of Tolstoy. There are, in fact, a great many unfinished books in my stack, Anna Karenina among them. I don’t claim to endorse or support everything Moldbug’s said; rather, I found his posts an entertaining and thought-provoking way of looking at the world, a means of shifting the political discourse outside the normal boundaries of Democratic and Republican bickering that, to be honest, I find repulsive.

Here was a space for thinking about societal organization from evolutionary, game theoretic, and entropic perspectives. [Note: Moldbug is far from the only person involved in creating this space, and I actually owe much to other writers, like Jayman, who have nothing to do with Neocameralism.] I wanted to move beyond a system where one’s politics were simply an artifact of whatever issues happened to be cool while one was in college. I did not want to become one of those old guys who is still concerned about defeating the USSR, or worse, still bitter about Pearl Harbor. I did not want to become an old woman who is in favor of the radical feminism of the 70s, but in the face of radical politics of the 90s, starts talking about traditionalism and religion.

I do not want to be a crystal, solid, never changing. I want to find the metapolitics that transcend generations and create long-term civilization.

Mainstream American Conservatives have been, to be frank, intellectually bankrupt. This does not mean they are wrong, necessarily–it just means that they have been very bad at articulating themselves. They are especially bad at articulating themselves in ways that will make sense to young people. Take the most common argument against homosexuality: “God says it is a sin.” Young people are fairly atheist, believe in separation of church and state, and think a god who doesn’t like gay people is a jerk. This argument doesn’t just fail at convincing young people that gay marriage is bad; it also convinces them that God is bad.

By contrast, a simple graph showing STD rates among gay people makes a pretty persuasive argument that the “gay lifestyle” isn’t terribly healthy.

Conservatives have made lots of other bad arguments, like opposing clean water regulations (what, do you want to be known as the guy in favor of mercury in the drinking water?) promoting tax cuts for the rich (like indebted students care about them), bombing Iraq (because destabilizing the Middle East is always better!) and blathering endlessly about Supreme Court decisions from a couple generations before today’s students were born.

All of which created an intellectual void which liberals were only too happy to fill. And with no one to respond to them, they dissolved into holiness spirals and madness, trying to cast each other as the “other” they were fighting against, like a bird that has mistaken its reflection for an enemy, trying to peck a mirror to death.

Holiness spirals and litmus tests are not my thing. I hope they die in a fire.

There was a time when programming (and science, more generally) existed as an independent zone well outside of both the intellectual vapidity of the right and the holiness spirals of the left. People who were too busy building and creating and discovering to waste their time on holiness spirals, who seemed to delight, in fact, in sticking it to the norm in shocking but fairly harmless ways. We were mostly “liberals,” of course, in the sense that we weren’t Republicans, but beyond that, we dreamed of colorless green libertarian utopias, free information and anti-trusts.

You could be a furry or a Nazi, a ESP-wielding psychic or a polyamorist sadomasochist who ate poop and no one really cared so long as you wrote good code or did good science. We were unafraid.

And this attitude, as I saw it, came straight out of America. I mean America in the metaphysical sense, the America of Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Association, Freedom of Freedom. The America of yeoman farmers and mountain men, in stark contrast to the bullshit of “parental advisory warnings” on music Tipper Gore didn’t like.

You have your mythic fantasies; I have mine.

So it was with great sadness that I watched Curtis Yarvin get un-invited from Strange Loop last year, not because his code was bad or because he made someone feel uncomfortable in an elevator or because he advocated for the murders of millions of people, (which, of course, many Strange Loop attendees do,) but because Yarvin wrote Unqualified Reservations, which does not bow to the litmus tests and holiness spirals of leftism but exists outside of them.

Oh, Yarvin can play the games if he wants, but he is also still clearly playing a game, not surrendering.

Yes, there are lots of people who dislike Moldbug. There are far more who’ve never heard of Moldbug and wouldn’t have cared at all without the 14 minutes of Twitter Hate to tell them they ought to be outraged about some guy named Moldbug.

There are also lots of people who like Moldbug; lots of people who would actually like to hear Moldbug speak or who are interested in Urbit.

Now we get to LambdaConf. LambdaConf accidentally accepted a programming talk by Yarvin based on its merits, in a blind application process, without first applying a political filter to all of their applications and tossing out anyone who believes anything offensive to anyone. Then they found out what they’d accidentally done, were horrified, and went into a long, hand-wringing process of trying to figure out whether they should start screening programmers for Wrong Think or if they should try to just have a programming conference.

They eventually came to a sensible conclusion, but the fact that it took them that long to figure out something considered obvious back in the day and were that afraid of the political backlash is saddening.

Rest in Peace, programming.

(Also, I dislike the current habit of calling people like Moldbug “autistic” when people actually mean, “He doesn’t prioritize MY feelings! WAH!”)

Does the Growth of Cities Contribute to Revolutions?

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are ostensibly “working class” candidates (and draw their support overwhelmingly from white voters,) and yet, Trump and Sanders voters don’t see themselves as allied or their candidates as advocating for the same people.

As usual, I’ve actually been reading about the French Revolution, rather than modern American electoral politics.

To summarize quickly, just in case it’s been a while since you read anything on the subject, much of the revolution was driven by hoards of hungry peasants roaming around the streets of Paris, marching on Versailles, breaking into the democratic assemblies, etc. These hungry, mostly urban peasants are generally credited with helping start the revolution and driving it to the left.

Their most frequent and vocal demand, quite sensibly, was bread. France had some very bad winters/harvests around that time, and liberalization of trade policy with Britain put a lot of textile workers out of business. The result was high grain prices and unemployed people, which leads, of course, to starvation, and if you’re going to die, you might as well do it trying to get food from the king than just succumbing in an alleyway.

The trend in the countryside tended to be the opposite of that in the cities–rural peasants felt the pinch of taxes and bad harvests, but at least they had their own farms to depend on, and rarely had the population density to march on anything, anyway. The peasant revolts in the French countryside during the revolutionary years, like that in the Vendee, tended to be counter-revolutionary and intended to push the country in a more conservative direction.

The counter-revolution in the Vendee was ruthlessly suppressed, unlike uprisings in the city.

Peasants in the city got listened to, at least early in the revolution–perhaps simply because they were in the city; they could both put pressure directly on the government, which happened to be located in the cities, and they had more opportunities to converse with and gain the ears of government officials.

Revolutionary changes that made life better for peasants in the city often made life worse for peasants in the country (whence the counter-revolutions in the countryside.) City peasants chiefly desire lower grain prices; country peasants chiefly desire higher grain prices.

In both the French and Russian Revolutions, the urban poor became convinced that high grain prices were some sort of rural conspiracy–perhaps an anti-revolution urban conspiracy–with rural peasants supposedly hording grain instead of selling it in order to drive up the price and, perhaps, destroy the revolution.

In both cases, the revolutionary governments responded by forcibly confiscating grain from the peasants (in Russia, this led to mass starvation in the countryside, as the peasants truly had not been hoarding grain!) and introduced price controls.

Communism (or more mildly, socialism,) is supposed to be about all of the poor, but in practice it often pits the needs of one group of peasants against those of another group. The growth of cities themselves may contribute to the tendency toward instability by creating a new group of people who do not have their own farms to fall back on when food prices rise and whose income is dependent on economic cycles/factors outside their own control, leading to hungry times in the city whenever a factory has to lay off workers due to a slowdown in production.

 

Bernie Sanders’s supporters basically see themselves as supporters of the urban poor; Donald Trump’s supporters basically see themselves as supporters of the rural poor.

On a related note, from the NY Times, 2/13/16 (h/t Steve Sailer)

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” Mrs. Clinton asked the audience of black, white and Hispanic union members, “would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the L.G.B.T. community?,” she said, using an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. “Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”

At each question, the crowd called back with a resounding no.

America: State or Thede?

Liberal reactions to the Oregon militia standoff have been more interesting than the standoff itself. My only reaction to the standoff was, “Oh, ranchers in dispute with the Feds? Eh.” After all, Rural Americans’ distrust of and conflicts with the “gummint” and “revenuers” are well-documented and frequent subjects of humor:

(The Beverly Hillbillies probably did this gag a hundred times.)

So you may imagine my confusion when I encountered liberal acquaintances (and pundits) calling the militia “terrorists” and “traitors” and demanding that the FBI go in, guns blazing, to put down the uprising.

These are the same folks who’re just fine with the Black Lives Matter folks shutting down streets and bridges in the middle of major cities in their protest against the police (who are, I note, as much government employees as the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management folks the Oregon Militia guys are opposed to.)

The whole affair highlights a crucial difference in the ways liberals and conservatives conceptualize “America.”

Liberals see “America” as a state, a formal, legal, structural governing institution (created, of course, via some form of “social contract,”) possessing a specific geographic area. The American people, therefore, can be anyone at all, so long as they have met the legal requirements.

Conservatives see “America” as a thede, (their thede), that happens to have a government.  Many conservatives see this government as having been imposed from the outside (in the South, this is actually true,) and as being run by people not from their thede (like Obama.)

Conservatives are loyal to their thede; liberals are loyal to the state. One can join a thede (generally by marrying in, converting to the religion, and adopting the local lifestyle,) but the formal process of acquiring US citizenship does not make one a member of the thede. Thus many legal Americans are not thedic Americans by conservative standards.

Liberals see the Black Lives Matter activists as blacks opposed to whites, which they are fine with. But they see the Oregon Militia as whites opposed to the state, which they see as treason.

To conservatives, the Black Lives Matter movement is acting against the interest of their thede, while the Oregon Militia, even if they disagree with it, (note: the vast majority of them disagree with it) is merely opposing the state.

This difference also manifests itself the two sides’ different attitudes toward the Constitution/Bill of Rights. To Conservatives, the Constitution is like the Bible: the founding document of their thede. Its role is mythic, not legalistic. (Without this understanding, Conservative statements about “activist” judges and the Obama administration running roughshod over the Constitution make no sense at all.) And they do have one vaguely valid point: the Constitution doesn’t actually say anything about issues like abortion or gay marriage, and the idea that there can exist no recognized right to gay marriage in the Constitution for over 200 years, and then suddenly one appears, involve highly questionable logic.

From a legalistic standpoint, re-interpreting the Constitution is one of the Supreme Court’s prerogatives (and from a practical standpoint, a necessity, given that new technologies and situations arise over time.) From a mythical standpoint, it’s like saying you’ve found a verse in the book of Mark where Jesus says he’s cool with gays.

Unfortunately, people are often really bad at articulating their points. So you get a lot of nonsense that has to be carefully picked apart before you can figure out where people are really coming from.

My liberal acquaintances seem curiously unaware of the general culture of Rural Americans. Perhaps this is just because I have relatives who live in rural America, and so I am vaguely acquainted with their culture and attitudes toward the government. I know that ranching and farming can be difficult, (especially in the areas that have been hit by droughts,) and yes, conflicts happen over grazing rights or land management, (though of course the vast, vast majority of ranchers pay their fees and obey the laws and generally act with loyalty to both the state and their thede.)

I also find it curious that the same people who recognize that the Black Lives Matter movement involves ethnic conflict do not recognize the ethnic conflict between different groups of whites.

Curious, not unexpected.

Intra-ethnic violence is crime; Inter-ethnic violence is war

Proclamation issued in 1816 by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, Tasmania.

Peace is a government that can prevent both, but people will settle for preventing war.

I was thinking today that people are far more concerned with the harm done to them by others than the harm done by themselves. 1 in 5 of you–about 700,000 people per year–will be killed by your own over-indulgence in food, and you are three times as likely to kill yourself with your own gun as a stranger is to shoot you with theirs. And don’t get me started on cars. By contrast, the past 15 years have seen a few thousand Americans murdered by Islamic terrorists and domestic mass-shooters. These events might be terrifying, but America’s enemies could kill a lot more people by providing us with free soda, cookies, and cigarettes than by flying planes into buildings.

America has spent approximately 5 trillion dollars pursuing Bin Laden and his associates, and yet no one (sane) has proposed shooting everyone involved in the production and sale of Coca-Cola.

One of the central tenets of this blog is that people are not merely random in their irrationality; if millions of people do or think something, then there is likely to be some sort of cause.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way:

Coca-Cola isn’t trying to kill anyone, so we tend not to think they deserve to be killed.

Humans are bad at estimating risks because we are not adapted to TV. 100 years ago, if you saw a bunch of people being horribly murdered, there was a war going on and you were either killing them yourself or about to get killed. Today, you’re probably just watching a movie.

As a practical matter, this means that people do, in fact, get completely worked up and devote absurd amounts of money to fighting trivial problems. The “Satanic Daycare Scare” of the 1980s is one such case.

For those of you who don’t remember the 80s very well, or have blocked the Satanic Daycare Scare from your memory due to sheer stupidity, here’s a rundown:

A bunch of mentally ill people–that is, people actually receiving treatment for mental illness at the time or who were later discovered to be schizophrenic–began coming up with stories that their parents or their kids’ daycare workers were part of a vast, underground Satanic conspiracy, ritually murdering and torturing children, ritually sacrificing giraffes and drinking their blood, flying on broomsticks, etc.

The Wikipedia page lists 19 major cases involving over 100 defendants; as of 2006, the McMartin preschool trial, for example, was “the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the history of the United States.^[1]” Over 1,000 smaller cases were brought on similar evidence of “Satanic ritual abuse,” (SRA) and even Geraldo Rivera claimed on TV that:

“Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in [the United States and they are] linked in a highly organized, secretive network.” (source)

Eventually the FBI got involved and figured out that it was all nonsense:

Kenneth Lanning, an FBI expert in the investigation of child sexual abuse,^[151] has stated that pseudo-satanism may exist but there is “little or no evidence for … large-scale baby breeding, human sacrifice, and organized satanic conspiracies”.^[46] …

Lanning produced a monograph in 1994 on SRA aimed at child protection authorities, which contained his opinion that despite hundreds of investigations no corroboration of SRA had been found.

The Satanic Daycare Scare is a fascinating subject in its own right, but beyond our current scope; for now, the important thing is that even intelligent, trained folks like lawyers, doctors, judges, and Geraldo Rivera can believe obviously false things if you just put it on TV or in a book. We are really bad at dealing with modern mass media, and probably even worse at math.

But the instinct to protect one’s children from people who would hurt them are perfectly sound, reasonable instincts. You should protect your children; you just have to protect them from actual dangers, not made up ones.The Satanic Daycare Panic of our day is the conviction that the police are brutally slaughtering black bodies in the streets. Statistically, of course, they aren’t; not only is a black person far more likely to be murdered by a fellow black person than by a police officer (of any race,) but the police don’t even disproportionately kill blacks: 

Graph originally from Mother Jones magazine (and if Mother Jones can’t find evidence for disproportionate police shooting of blacks, who can?) but helpfully cited by Slate Star Codex’s extensively researched article, Race and Justice: much more than you wanted to know. I strongly recommend that article; I also wrote a rather long piece about crime statistics back in Bully Part 2: Race, Crime, and the Police.

The short version is that blacks get into a lot of conflicts with the police because blacks commit a lot of crime, much of which is aimed at their fellow black people. We know this from crime victimization surveys, which ask people who have been victims of crimes to describe their attackers.

Thousands of black-on-black murders barely make a blip on the airwaves, while one white-on-black murder can dominate the news, streets, and college campuses for months.

By contrast, when a shootout in Waco, Texas, left 9 people dead, 20 injured, 239 detained, and 177 arrested, allegations that police snipers had actually murdered the 9 victims resulted in exactly zero campus protests.

White on white violence? Snoozefest. Black on black? *Zzzzzzz* Black on white? Hate Twitter notices. White on black? College campuses explode.

People notice inter-ethnic violence in a way that they don’t notice violence committed by their own ethnic group.

————————

Every group has its own, internal way of dealing with their own malefactors, from compelling murderers to pay a fine to the victim’s family to ostracization to stoning. This is, in short, what police are for. But sans an extradition treaty, it’s almost impossible to deal with malefactors from some other group. If a neighboring group of tribespeople starts killing your tribespeople, the only way to stop them is to kill them back until they stop.

From an evolutionary standpoint, your own criminals simply aren’t as big a deal as another tribe coming in and killing you. If my brother kills me, horrible though that may be, my genes will still live on in his children. Furthermore, my brother is highly unlikely to kill me, my children, and my parents, then burn down my village and carry off my wife and cattle. But if some guy from the next tribe over kills me, the chance of any of my genes making it into the next generation goes down significantly. Historically speaking, inter-ethnic violence has probably been a bigger deal than intra-ethnic violence.

Modern countries are, with a few Polynesian exceptions, much bigger than individual tribes. As a result, their priority becomes not just protecting their people from outside attack, but also protecting their people from each other.

In a world of limited resources (and no obvious technical advantages), a group that cooperates with itself and defects on others will out-compete a group that cooperates with itself and others. But the government of a large, multi-ethnic state has little to gain from everyone falling into default-defect scenarios; the government wants everyone to cooperate in order to maximize economic growth (and thus tax revenues.)

The Pax Romana comes immediately to mind as a famous historical example of a government conquering a whole munch of little tribes that formerly warred against each other, and using its military might to put an end to such conflicts.

The Mongol Empire, after destroying everything in its path from the Sea of Japan to the gates of Vienna (a conquest halted only by the Khan’s death,) brought about the similarly named Pax Mongolica:

[Pax Mongolica] describes the stabilizing effects of the conquests of the Mongol Empire on the social, cultural, and economic life of the inhabitants of the vast Eurasian territory that the Mongols conquered in the 13th and 14th centuries. The term is used to describe the eased communication and commerce the unified administration helped to create, and the period of relative peace that followed the Mongols’ vast conquests.

The conquests of Genghis Khan (r. 1206–1227) and his successors, spanning from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, effectively connected the Eastern world with the Western world. The Silk Road, connecting trade centers across Asia and Europe, came under the sole rule of the Mongol Empire. It was commonly said that “a maiden bearing a nugget of gold on her head could wander safely throughout the realm.”^[2][3] Despite the political fragmentation of the Mongol Empire into four khanates (Yuan dynasty, Golden Horde, Chagatai Khanate and Ilkhanate), nearly a century of conquest and civil war was followed by relative stability in the early 14th century. The end of the Pax Mongolica was marked by the disintegration of the khanates and the outbreak of the Black Death in Asia which spread along trade routes to much of the world in the mid-14th century.

I know less about Yugoslavia than about the Mongol Empire, but Yugoslavia’s various states were clearly at peace with each other under the dictatorship of Josip Tito, and fell into civil war after Tito died, democracy came to the country, and everyone began voting along ethnic lines.

I recall–but cannot locate at the moment–an interview in which Lee Kuan Yew, erstwhile autocrat of Singapore, expounded on one of the reasons why he didn’t support western-style democracy for his own country. Given a country with three major ethnic groups, he asserted, democracy would quickly break down into each group attempting to vote for its own interests, against the interests of the others. Singapore may be a small country, but it is also a successful one.

A national government does not need to do anything about crime if sufficient local institutions exist to handle local conflicts. If the Amish want to handle Amish criminals and the Zuni want to handle Zuni criminals, that is no skin off anyone else’s nose. However, inter-group conflicts are better handled and adjudicated by an outside third party that can A. enforce its rulings against both groups, and B. does a good job of convincing everyone that it is being fair and effective–that is, a higher level of government.

This seems like the most effective and expedient way to avoid mutual defection in large, multi-ethnic societies. (The other option, I suppose, is to not have large, multi-ethnic societies.)

Short thoughts on French and Russian Revolutions

The French Revolution was caused, primarily, by a confluence of three factors:

1. Bad harvests=> to starving peasants. Starving peasants will risk death for food.
2. The gov’t went deep into debt to fund expensive wars and could extract no more taxes from the starving peasants.
3. The legal system was crusty and inefficient, due to old age.

The Russian Revolution was primarily caused by WWI:

1. It was far more expensive than Russia could afford,
2. Unarmed peasants ordered to fling themselves in front of German machine guns react a lot like starving peasants told to go eat cake
3. Probably a lot of starving peasants.

I don’t know if the Russian legal system was as crusty as the French one, but the whole thing was run by Nicholas, which is not a good sign.

In both cases, the immediate priority for the revolutionary gov’t ought to be halting the deaths of the peasants. Things like standardizing weights and measures or executing the monarch, whether you like those ideas or not, far fall, fall below “getting people bread” and “getting rid of the machine guns.”

Unfortunately, at least in the Russian case, instead of replacing their old, peasant-starving gov’t with a gov’t sensitive to the caloric needs of its people, they replaced it with a gov’t that was massively better at not getting overthrown by starving peasants.

Leading promptly to the starvation of millions of people.

The Big Bang Theory is not “My People” (pt. 2)

Warning: I am not entirely satisfied with this post.

Errrg.

I had to spend today with dumbs.

At one point, someone claimed ISIS consists of militant atheists.

By the end I was about ready to chew my arm off to escape.

You know, if The Big Bang Theory were at all realistic, one of the rules in Sheldon’s roommate agreement would be that Penny isn’t allowed in his apartment. He wouldn’t be able to stand her.

“Tribe” can be a difficult concept to articulate, especially if you don’t live in an explicitly tribal society. To be an outlier (in any way) is a recipe for isolation–there’s simply no one else around like yourself. You make do, if you can. But when you finally find someone–or a whole group of someones–like yourself, it’s a wonderful moment.

These days, spending most of my time in the company of others like myself leads to a certain complacency,  but it takes only a few hours in the presence of outsiders to remind me of just how awful it is to be in a place where no one thinks like you do.

I’m not one for “who is a true X?” fights. I’m not going to debate who is and isn’t a poser. But I reserve the right to have personal opinions about whether or not we get along and how people affect group dynamics.

I think it is emotionally healthy–perhaps even necessary–to have a group of people you fit in with and whose company you enjoy.

To have such a group requires at least some awareness of the existence of your group and a willingness to define some people as inside of it and some as outside of it. This does not require hating outsiders–if anything, most people seem capable of identifying with some group or another (a local sports team, their state, people who use ham radios, etc.,) without particularly hating everyone outside of it. (For that matter, most people are quite innocently self-concerned–too busy with their own lives to really take much notice of things outside of it–and so do not really notice or know much about people outside of their own groups.)

But nerds have a habit, in my experience, of being explicitly anti-tribal. I think this is a side effect of growing up on the outside of everyone else’s tribes. When everyone else has a group of friends and you don’t, it’s pretty easy to decide that being exclusionary is wrong and immoral.

Realistically speaking, of course, there aren’t a lot of people trying to sneak into nerd spaces for inappropriate reasons–how many people are physics posers? (I am pretty sure I have been snuck to an exclusive physics lecture by someone trying to date me. Does that count as inappropriate?) But even so, group membership is not worthless. When my husband and I met and he asked me out, I was willing to give him a chance because I was vaguely familiar with him as a member of my social group. People in my group, at least, were somewhat known quantities–if he were a bad person, I likely would have heard about it or could find out quickly from a mutual acquaintance.

(A note for the unwary: sometimes your mutual acquaintances value different things in a partner than you do; sometimes people are outright liars. Tread cautiously when dealing with the opinions of others.)

Even now, I find that, “Do you look like people I have previously gotten along with?” is a pretty good metric for picking people to talk to.

Serious question, folks: Have you ever observed a correlation between “I find this person attractive” and “I enjoy talking to this person”? Not in an “I find it unpleasant to talk to ugly people because they hurt my eyes,” nor in an “I am going to be extra sympathetic to things you say because I want to have sex with you,” kind of way. More in a “Wow, how did I get so lucky that I am actually attracted to the small subset of people I can stand talking to?” My own taste in men hasn’t changed since 4th grade, which was really well before I had any idea what sorts of personality traits or political opinions or lifestyles I’d be interested in as a grown-up, and yet it has consistently served me well.

Anyway, back to politics. A few decades ago, it seems like there was more of a place for nerds in mainstream politics. Republicans liked funding projects that employ nerds, like atomic bombs, and Democrats claimed to believe in things like evolution. Even then, of course, there was a third political position that attracted a fair number of nerds: Libertarianism aka Objectivism. Heck, even the name sounds appropriate for people who are inclined toward a scientific view of the world.

Since then, both mainstream sides have turned against us. Republicans have been anti-science since at least Bush II–who ran on an explicitly anti-smart people campaign–and have been trying to prevent people from learning about the basic theories underlying modern science since approximately forever. This drove a lot of us into the “liberal” or “Libertarian” camps back in the ’90s and ’00s. Since then, though, liberalism underwent a shift, from extolling Libertarian-like meta-politics of respecting peoples’ individual rights on matters like free speech, entertainment, or religion, to the collectivist advocacy of particular group interests–groups that are, to be explicit, not nerds.

Demographically speaking, most nerds are English, German, Jewish, and East Asian men. (Most of them are also heterosexual, cisgendered, etc. etc.) Of course nerds come from all sorts of backgrounds–black, Russian, maybe even borderlands Scot. We are just talking overall numbers. But the SJW orthodoxy has been hammering, pretty explicitly, against the main nerd demographics.

To give an example: most of the nerdy and/or high IQ people I know were, circa 2000, sympathetic to feminist arguments. For that matter, when it comes to violence against women, nerds are probably among the groups least likely to commit any. Per capita, blacks, Hispanics, and lower-class whites commit much more violence. And yet, as a practical matter, people like Scott Alexander–who’s asexual, non-violent, and simply asked for advice on how to find love–or Scott Aaronsen, who confessed to feeling so terrified of the possibility of accidentally harassing someone that he became suicidal–are more likely to get attacked by feminists than folks who actually actually raped over a thousand children.

As a female nerd, I confess I find this a double insult: first you attack my people for something they aren’t guilty of, and then you refuse to defend women against the people actually raping them.

So nerds have split. Some of the old Libertarians have decided that, essentially, we can’t use a meta-ethic of treating everyone equally if some people are starting from unequal positions–that everyone has to be brought to equal positions first, and then treated equally. Others–especially those now styling themselves “Rationalists,” have stuck with the original Libertarian values but attempted to improve their ability to to deal with complex, real-world situations. And a third group–Neoreactionaries–has turned explicitly away from equality.

The Big Bang Theory is not “My People”: aspies, tribalism, and the development of nerd politics

As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t watch much TV, other than the odd documentary and some children’s programs. So while I’ve heard of The Big Bang Theory, I’ve only actually seen a couple of episodes. An acquaintance recently expressed surprise at this fact, asserting that TBBT depicts “[my] people.”

Curiosity got the better of me, so I attempted to watch some episodes on YouTube. Unfortunately, I could only find highlight reels; curse the zealous and effective enforcement of copyright laws. Regardless, I have watched a couple hours of highlights and read the relevant Wikipedia pages.

And these are not “my people.”

To be fair, I laughed. I’m not going to go on a rant claiming that a popular, successful show that lots of people enjoy is actually bad for reasons particular to my own taste in TV. Neither is this going to be an in-depth deconstruction of the good or bad points of a show I’ve barely seen. I’m content to say that it’s funny and I see what other people like in it.

I just don’t see myself in it.

“My people” is a bit of a fuzzy concept. Certainly plenty of “my people” like video games or comic books or have OCD or autism. But this is not what defines us; this is not what separates us from the rest of you.

If anything, video games, Star Trek, comic books, etc., are the things that connect us to normal people. Video games are immensely popular–Farmville2 had, as of 2013, 40 million regular players, which is about the same as the total number of copies of Super Mario Bros. (1985) sold. Then there’s The Sims, which sold over 125 million copies between 2000 and 2010 and has probably kept on selling.

“The success of The Sims resulted in Guinness World Records awarding the series five world records in the Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2008. These records include “World’s Biggest-Selling Simulation Series” and “Best Selling PC Game of All Time” for the original The Sims game, which sold 16 million units…” (Wikipedia)

There’s nothing wrong with videogames. I like them; lots of people like them. The same goes for the rest of the list. Are nerds more into Star Wars or Star Trek than the average Joe? I think so, but the vast quantities of Star Wars merchandise available at Target certainly isn’t being driven by my tiny demographic; I own more things (books) on P. A. M. Dirac’s contributions to quantum physics than Star Wars and Star Trek-related things combined.

Maybe TBBT is what “my people” look like from the outside, but it’s not what we look like from the inside.

Let’s start with the clothes:

This show is set in southern California. It is hot there all the time. They have no winter. WHY ARE THEY WEARING JACKETS AND SWEATERS?

While nerds do occasionally dress nicely–especially for SCA events–most of the time, we wear clothes to cover our fleshy meat sacks. We do not (generally) have colorful, curated wardrobes.  Most of us don’t really think about clothing. I have seen nerds walking in the snow wearing less clothing than these guys are wearing for the simple reason that they were thinking about something else and had not thought to put on clothes.

If Sheldon were really an autistic (or OCD,) quantum physicist with an IQ around 178 or whatever, he’d look more like the guy on the left:

From left to right: Dirac, youngest Nobel prize winner in physics; Nobel laureate Robert A. Millikan; and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Caltech, Calif., May 28, 1935.

(Say what you will, Dirac clearly did not notice that he put on a vest that’s too small for himself this morning.)

Or maybe this guy:

Blatantly cramming Niels Bohr into post

Of course, the modern style of Caltech Physicists is a little less formal–they appear to have ditched the jackets–but still a far cry from curated colors.

But clothes are a triviality. They are not my real objection; they’re just the easiest to express objection.

According to the Wikipedia’s summary of TBBT, the show revolves around the characters’ pop-culture obsessions and failures at dating:

One of the recurring plot lines is the relationship between Leonard and Penny. Leonard becomes attracted to Penny in the pilot episode and his need to do favors for her is a frequent point of humor in the first season. Their first long term relationship begins when Leonard returns from a three-month expedition to the North Pole in the season 3 premiere. However, when Leonard tells Penny that he loves her, she realizes she cannot say it back. Both Leonard and Penny go on to date other people; most notably with Leonard dating Raj’s sister Priya for much of season 4. This relationship is jeopardized when Leonard comes to falsely believe that Raj has slept with Penny, and ultimately ends when Priya sleeps with a former boyfriend in “The Good Guy Fluctuation“.

Penny, who admits to missing Leonard in “The Roommate Transmogrification”, accepts his request to renew their relationship in “The Beta Test Initiation”. After Penny suggests having sex in “The Launch Acceleration”, Leonard breaks the mood by proposing to her. Penny says “no” but does not break up with him. She stops a proposal a second time in “The Tangible Affection Proof”. In the sixth season episode, “The 43 Peculiarity”, Penny finally tells Leonard that she loves him. Although they both feel jealousy when the other receives significant attention from the opposite sex, Penny is secure enough in their relationship to send him off on an exciting four-month expedition without worrying in “The Bon Voyage Reaction”. After Leonard returns, their relationship blossoms over the seventh season. In the penultimate episode “The Gorilla Dissolution”, Penny admits that they should marry and when Leonard realizes that she is serious, he proposes with a ring that he had been saving for years.

Jeez. Who goes through that much crap for a relationship? Here’s what a normal relationship looks like:

Day 1: meet; ask other person out. Yes => date. No => meet someone else and ask them out.

Within a month or two: if you’re in love, keep dating. If not, break up.

Within a few years: get married or break up.

I feel like I am harping on something trivially mundane and totally obvious, except that a lot of people watch TBBT, and I honestly think that plotlines like this (which serve to draw back viewers for subsequent episodes with their constant “will they or won’t they finally get together?” rather than depict reality,) actually give some people (mostly beta males) the wrong impression about how to go about their relationships. Anime is also guilty of this. DO NOT SPEND YEARS OF YOUR LIFE WAITING FOR THE GIRL YOU LIKE TO FINALLY NOTICE YOU. If you don’t ask her out, she will not date you. If she says no, she’s probably not interested and you should go ask someone else out. Doing the “nice guy” beta-male best friend thing for years in the hope that someday she will notice you does not work and tends to work out badly for everyone involved.

Here’s what my life revolves around: personal relationships (kids, husband, friends, relatives, job, etc.,) and my ideas.

I have a lot of ideas, hence this blog and a few other projects I’ve got going.

The ideas permeate everything. Picking the kids up from school? Thinking about the evolution of social structures. Conversing with mom-friend on the playground while watching the kids? Calculating estimated total fertility rate for the neighborhood. Trying to fall asleep? Narrating the French Revolution in my head.

Sometimes the ideas are so intense, it’s agony to do anything else. I can’t sleep, can’t converse, can’t be still until I write them down.

It’s ideas, all the way down.

I wouldn’t care a whit about the colorful t-shirts and weird relationships if the show just focused on Sheldon’s ideas! Admittedly, each episode would be Sheldon wrangling his friends into the apartment and then 2o minutes of enthusiastic physics lecture, which might not go over so well with the intended audience. But real life tends not to be all that TV-worthy.

I am now going to break an unstated rule of this blog and talk about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

No, I don’t watch MLP. I have kids; my kids watch MLP. (But I admit that MLP is one of the kids’ shows that doesn’t make me want to light the TV on fire and defenestrate it.)

Anyway, if I were a pony, I’d be Maud Pie:

She likes rocks. (I like rocks.)

Unlike Sheldon, Maud was not written for the audience to connect with. Maud is the pony the other ponies cannot connect with; the one they cannot be friends with. (This is aside from her sister, Pinkie Pie, who loves her unconditionally because she’s family.) The point of Maud’s episode is that there are some people in this world who, though they are not bad or evil people, are simply interested in things you aren’t, and you don’t have any connection to them.

Maud is interested in rocks, rocks, and nothing but rocks. She writes poetry about rocks. She has a pet rock. Her special magic abilities have to do with rocks. Her cutie mark is probably a rock. She doesn’t really have interests outside of rocks.

The audience, like the main cast, is supposed to find Maud boring. You are supposed to connect with their total lack of anything in common with someone like Maud.

Of course, since I like rocks, I spent the episode going, “Why don’t they just learn to love rocks like Maud does? Why don’t they try connecting with her by finding out what she finds so fascinating about rocks?”

But the idea that one might try to connect with someone by being willing to discuss their passion did not occur to the show’s creators. This is why physics and ideas can never be the focus of TBBT–the viewers have no real interest in what makes Sheldon passionate about physics.

While researching this post, I happened into a conversation on whether or not Maud has Asperger’s. All but one of the folks in the thread who actually have Asperger’s agreed that Maud comes across as Aspie. All but one of the folks saying that Maud was not Aspie were neurotypicals.

Their arguments tended to go like this: “Maud is not Aspie. There is nothing wrong with her, and Aspies have something wrong with them because Asperger’s is a disorder. She is just very passionate about rocks.”

Yes, well, fuck you.

Let’s get something straight. We can call Maud “Aspie” without saying that there is anything “wrong” with her.

I don’t think the show’s creators intended to create an Aspie pony. I think they wanted to create a pony none of the other ponies could connect with because she was boring, uninterested in the other ponies, and only talked about one boring thing.

Which is basically the colloquial definition of “Aspie.”

Here I need to pause and clarify the difference between a formal diagnosis of Autism or Asperger’s with the colloquial usage of “Aspie.”

Autism and Asperger’s were never all that well defined to begin with, with a tremendous overlap between there. Asperger’s is thought of as the less severe of the two diagnoses, but there are “low functioning aspies” who are much worse off than many “high functioning autistics.” My suspicion is that the distinction drawn between the two (language delay and IQ,) wasn’t really the correct distinction, and the whole business should have been determined via degree of impairment in the first place.

Which I suppose is what they are trying to do, now that they’ve formally removed Asperger’s from the DSM.

A formal diagnosis of autism means that there probably is, in fact, something “wrong” with you. As Slate Star Codex notes, formally diagnosed, institutionalized autistics do a lot of things that are definitely problematic, like try to chew off their hands.

I do not have a formal diagnosis of autism, Asperger’s, or anything of the like.

According to the Wikipedia, “Asperger syndrome is characterized by impairment in social interaction accompanied by restricted and repetitive interests and behavior; it differs from the other ASDs by having no general delay in language or cognitive development.” Autism, “is distinguished not by a single symptom, but by a characteristic triad of symptoms: impairments in social interaction; impairments in communication; and restricted interests and repetitive behavior.”

Unlike the stereotype of autistics as “idiot savants,” most of them are intellectually impaired across the board, cannot work, and will be dependent on others for their entire lives. Many of them cannot talk, put on their own clothes, use the toilet unassisted, or communicate their needs to others.

A recent study of people with actual, diagnosed Autism found a bunch of de novo mutations. These kids can’t talk because there is actually something genetically wrong with them:

By comparing affected to unaffected siblings, we show that 13% of de novo missense mutations and 43% of de novo likely gene-disrupting (LGD) mutations contribute to 12% and 9% of diagnoses, respectively. Including copy number variants, coding de novo mutations contribute to about 30% of all simplex and 45% of female diagnoses.

The colloquial definition of “Aspie” is someone who’s interested in stuff you’re not interested in and who has trouble interacting with normal people. This definition has nothing to do with functionality; it’s really just a matter of whether or not you “fit in” with dumbs. So, a teenage girl who talks endlessly about boys and makeup is considered “normal” by most people, but a teenage girl who talks passionately about quantum physics is “aspie” because other teenage girls don’t want to hear about quantum physics. A man who is obsessed with motorcycles is “normal” because only an idiot risks getting punched in the face, but a man who is passionate about trains is “aspie.”

“Aspie” is the new “faggot,” now that you’re not supposed to make fun of gay people. (Is it mere coincidence that the actor picked to play Sheldon is, in fact, flamingly gay?)

There’s a major problem here that anyone who is exceptionally intelligent is probably going to have ideas floating around in their head that normal people can’t understand and is going to learn far more about any subject they’re interested in than the average person. If I am trying to express the idea that different environments favor mitochondrial or viral memes, and you’re trying to express the idea that a popular actor is very attractive, we are not going to socialize terribly well together.

But I have no difficulty socializing with other people like myself.

A recent study of “autism-spectrum-quotient” traits found that men do, indeed, rate higher than women on autism surveys, and people in STEM professions score higher than folks in non-STEM professions, true to stereotypes:

We examine correlations between the AQ and age, sex, occupation, and UK geographic region in 450,394 individuals. We predicted that age and geography would not be correlated with AQ, whilst sex and occupation would have a correlation. Mean AQ for the total sample score was m = 19.83 (SD = 8.71), slightly higher than a previous systematic review of 6,900 individuals in a non-clinical sample (mean of means = 16.94) This likely reflects that this big-data sample includes individuals with autism who in the systematic review score much higher (mean of means = 35.19). As predicted, sex and occupation differences were observed: on average, males (m = 21.55, SD = 8.82) scored higher than females (m = 18.95; SD = 8.52), and individuals working in a STEM career (m = 21.92, SD = 8.92) scored higher than individuals non-STEM careers (m = 18.92, SD = 8.48). Also as predicted, age and geographic region were not meaningfully correlated with AQ.

Hold on a second and look at that last sentence again: age was not meaningfully correlated with AQ. The number of autism diagnoses has been skyrocketing over the past couple of days, accompanied by a great deal of debate on why. Here we have evidence–from nearly half a million people–that the overall “AQ” of the British population has not increased (or decreased) significantly over the years. Either the increase in “autism” diagnoses is entirely an artifact of some other process–like kids who would previously have been diagnosed as just “retarded” getting diagnosed as “autisitic”–or the distribution of “Aspie” traits in the general population has nothing to do with autistics.

At any rate, I see no reason to assume that people in STEM fields are retarded; their aspieness strikes me as far more of the colloquial, “normal people just aren’t into this,” variety. Whereby “normal” I mean “people who talk about their emotions all the damn time.”

Stupid emotions.

Now, I have no idea whether or not Sheldon is really autistic. At this point, I’m not even comfortable with the colloquial use of “Aspie.” And I’m not saying that nerds never act like the guys on TBBT. I’m just saying that this isn’t really “my people,” at least as I see them.

A show about people like me would have one programmer guy who starts out libertarian in season one and then starts reading Moldbug in season two. The main character would be a prominent rationalist blogger/physicist, whose ex-girlfriend is in a bi-poly open relationship with an SJW Asian bio-major, who gets in frequent fights with the programmer. Their room would be full of computers, disassembled computers, computer parts, and robots. (TBBT has one Jewish and one Indian character, which I would obviously retain.)

It’s getting late, so I’m going to continue this tomorrow.