BC SOCIETY
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

Both this thread and the outraged response threads are... something.

 This is why I never wanted kids. Way too much responsibility for another human’s development. Depending on the child, this might either be the day they discovered who they were or the day that traumatized them into a lifelong fuckup. Either way I don’t want to direct the show.
As far as the can opener goes, it wouldn’t even occur to me to try and turn it into a teachable moment. That sounds vaguely quixotic. I’d just show them how immediately. I think my default is to try and instruct clearly but not demonstrate unless the person is truly disoriented.
I think there’s basically a right answer here: show the kid. If the kid has the aptitude they’ll enjoy the mechanism so much they’ll develop the figure-it-out skill with other devices. If not, it’s a training data point that will build remedial levels of intuition more slowly.
I think perseverance is both misframed and over-rated as a virtue. Misframed as in: everybody has potential for it in some areas and lacks it in others. Aptitude is those areas where perseverance comes easily to you. Meta-skill of knowing where/why you persist is more important.
I think of myself as a quitter overall. Across strong/weak areas I’m just not as persevering as the average person. I’ve just discovered a couple of high-value areas where I’m able to stay on a thing like a Terminator, and few other people can. One Weird Trick.
My wife is the opposite. She’s much more persevering than average across many domains. She’ll get mad but won’t quit till things get pyrrhic. The general part of perseverance is emotional self-regulation, including the ability to get mad and unreasonably invested.
Where I’ll go “this is not worth the trouble” she’ll go “I don’t care that this is not worth it, now it’s about winning” and keep at it.

Unpleasant regulatory emotions will make me quit but she’ll just vent a bit and keep at it.
Where I’ll recognize a skill barrier and decide learning it is beyond me or not worth it, she is likely to look for a skilled person to hire and drive *them* nuts until she gets it done. This is a superpower when it comes to dealing with high-skill third parties like doctors.
I think it comes down to raw energy. High-energy people tend to persevere across many domains, low-energy people (like me) tend to strategically identify a few areas where our skill/aptitude makes up for low perseverance energy and low tolerance for emotional regulation stress.
Also cultivating the ability to care about and want many things, which is a skill too. There’s almost nothing I care about enough to not quit at the first sign of trouble/challenges. I’ve improved a bit over the years, and am now dogged and caring in pursuit of more things.
There’s a resourcefulness component too. In the OP the child wanted to simply use a hammer at one point rather than figure it out. People who want the outcome don’t care about the means as much. They’re willing to try many ways and are not attached to prowess in one way.
I’m more resourceful than I am energetic or caring, but sometimes that feels wrong to persevering types. Resourcefulness can go too far and change the goal. For eg. proving you’re right and winning over another person. If you hack the thing too weirdly, you may quit that goal.
Still overall, I think perseverance is over-rated as a virtue. We don’t quit enough or focus our perseverance narrowly enough as a species. We’ve built ourselves a frustrating world that feels like that 6-hours-to-open can must have to that little girl. This feels... unnecessary.
Ie we’ve designed the world to be way more frustrating than it needs to be. It can be much less frustrating if we choose instead to be less deterministic in outlook (go left when going right is too hard etc). Healthy quitterism is really comfort with many ways things could be.
While there is a risk to becoming low-energy/path of least resistance, I think the industrial world trained humans too far in the direction of thinking quitting is a vice, and perseverance a virtue. Because industrial logic is deterministic.
In a way perseverance as a virtue is the flip side of bureaucracy as the primary machine of civilization. The pre-moderns had the fatalist-faith/religion as their primary virtue/mechanism pair, while ours has flexibility/computation as the primary pair.
The thing about bureaucracies is that they are just smart enough to be the preferred problem-solving mechanism where available, by covering a few default cases well, but not smart enough to run the world without human intelligence working relentlessly as a backstop.
Here I mean bureaucracy generally, as in open-loop, formulaic, procedural decision-making and problem-solving that is basically primitive algorithms running on bad computers with humans-as-robots parts. Covers both public and private, market and planned institutions.
Even the dad in the OP clearly has a bureaucratic conception of the intelligence required to “learn” a can opener that he’s trying to inculcate. He’s not wrong. The skill in question is essentially internalizing the logic of a bureaucratic machine (clamp-puncture-rotate-cut). https://t.co/QFW6Hq2dEm
It’s not a bad or worthless way of looking at the world. Nature is full of machines (DNA transcription is clearly related to TPS report filing). But it’s not the *only* way.
“Perseverance” is basically “getting this dumb machine to do what I want done is frustrating but the least-bad option.” As a mode of being civilized perseverance+bureaucracy (Ie a Kafkaesque unopened-can world of Trials) only looks good relative to outrunning lions in the wild.
This is why “software eating the world” is such a powerful thing. Imagine a can opener that is just slightly smarter. A Young Lady’s Can-Opening Primer. Enough silicon to make it smart-tinkerable.
It’s easy to make fun of internet-of-crap things, but when making something smart works, it *really* works. I make both pourover coffee and use a Nespresso vertuo machine. They have different frustration profiles, but both make good coffee.
Pourover is pre-modern, Vertuo is postmodern. In between you have bureaucratic coffee machines that just make bad coffee.

Pourover has the natural frustrations: percolation physics, temperature, wetting, diffusion.

The Vertuo has digital frustrations: googling for instructions.

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Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr
I’m guessing these responses really reflect people’s weighted averages (age*current average effort fraction) though I kept it simple and asked for just averages.


I suspect a healthy weighted average should be ~ (age-20)/2. So a 30 year old should be at 5, a 40 year old at 10, a 50 year old at 15 etc.

Standard deviation should be ~average/3 maybe, so distribution spreads as you age and accumulate projects and get better at them.

Other things being equal, people get good at starting in their 20s, at follow through in 30s, at finishing in 40s.

No point learning food follow through until you’ve found a few good starts to bet on. No point getting good at finishing until a few projects have aged gracefully.

I’m in the 7+ range myself. Probably 8-9. Slightly less than healthy for my age.

I suspect most self-judgments on being good starters/follow-through-ers/finishers are really flawed because of the non-ergodicity of project management skill learning. You can’t learn good practices for the 3 phases in an arbitrary order. On,y one order actually works.
FOR LATER READ
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr
stacks are eating the world

business used to be easiest to comprehend via a) market-based logic of horizontal vs. vertical STRUCTURE, b) professionalization/specialization based FUNCTION c) core competencies based BEHAVIORS

this has pretty much collapsed in the last decade

Structure = sclerosis
Functional specialization = bureaucracy
competencies = inertial habits

"Stack" thinking instead lets technology structure (rather than market structure) drive business org logic

Companies seem to do well when they identify an entire stack of technologies they are good at (not just point bits) and organize to conform to its logic. There is a "full-stack" dimension of technical specialization that is the spine of the org

It feels buzzwordy, but it really is getting to be that way. AI stack, decarbonization stack, mobility stack, electrification stack... some end-to-end pathway of turning physics into economics via layers of tech artistically baked together like a cake
CRYPTO , FOR LATER READ
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Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr
following a discussion at @yak_collective this morning, I came up with this chart to capture a hypothesis I have that the difficulty of creating communities scales exponentially with the the "depth" of what you're trying to do


thanks @grigorimilov for leading the discussion that sparked this.

The way to read the graph is: each line is a time history of difficulty. It starts dotted, goes through a criticality inflection point, and then crests in difficulty before coming down to a stable plateau.

The inflection points have different names depending on context, but are all topologically similar. They are the make or break moment when a network-effect either kicks in, or fails to. "Product-market fit" in the case of market is the best known such point.

Level 1 is a basic social community, such as a FB group, meetup etc. There are millions of successful ones, and 100s of millions of failures. The "fit point" is what I call a meme-mind fit, when some social object catalyzes a sustainable long-term conversation of growing richness

Almost everything I've helped instigate is Level 1. My contributions to the social-object soup have been things like the vocabulary around sociopaths/clueless/losers, legibility, 2x2s etc.
FOR LATER READ
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr
social media use really calls for something closer to a driver's license than terms of service... most apparent bad behavior here is more incompetence than malice, like not knowing how to change lanes or take turns at a 4-way stop..

trump's history on twitter is something closer to a crazy car chase on LA streets than bad driving (with the cops MIA, but media helicopters in pursuit), but almost all unpleasantness around here is just poor driving skills

not that I'm advocating for a licensing regime... that would be a terrible thing. Do not need a social media DMV. But the underlying principles (as tested for eg. in the written and road tests) are pretty good.

Written test would test things like "safe following distance" (reply-guying = tailgating?)

Road test would actually expose you to routine provocations. Like, "make a left turn" = "deal with this concern troll"

As in the driving test, where an awkward, unnatural, and unintuitive bit, the parallel parking test, is the toughest bit, there would be some such awkward maneuver you'd have to learn (hmmm... what's the parallel parking equivalent on twitter?)
SOCIAL MEDIA
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr
Heh, one thing the nyt piece managed was to do a Cunningham's law nerdsnipe-wmd at newspaper scale... now a bunch of people are energetically trying to post the right answer.


IMO trying to correct whatever the NYT writer thought he knew/understood is futile. "Willing to be misunderstood by the NYT" should be the default stance unless you want to waste a lot of time correcting an obsolete 2013 map for people who don't care.

The thing is, the NYT still has enough normative cultural power, even as it has fallen from newspaper-of-record, that it takes a particular sort of heretical self-confidence to sort of ignore whatever they happen to be wrong about on any given week, whether or not it concerns you

A subtle shift has occurred in the workings of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It used to be an individual private amnesia re: media ("I'll believe myself when I am certain they got it wrong because I'm an expert, but still believe them when I am not"). Now it's a collective effect

A sort of common-knowledge threshold has been crossed lately. "Everybody knows that everybody knows the NYT is wrong on X across largish subcultures." It's no longer mutual beliefs being validated occasionally 1:1.
SOCIOLOGY

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XVIII Airborne Corps🐉...
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1 of 16: WE ARE ALL JEWS HERE: THE STORY OF RODDIE EDMONDS

One of the most moving and relevant stories of the Battle of the Bulge, or any American Soldier in any war, is that of Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, a Knoxville, Tennessee native, who served with the 106th Infantry.


2 of 16:

Roddie was captured early on in the Battle of the Bulge, on December 19th, when Panzer forces plowed through his unit.

He, along with almost his entire regiment, was forced to surrender.


3 of 16:

The men were transported to the Stalag IX-A POW camp in Ziegenhain, Germany.

Roddie was the senior enlisted American Soldier at the site. As such, he was the conduit between all American Soldiers and their German captors.


4 of 16:

In late January, the camp’s commandant, Major Siegmann [pictured here], ordered Roddie, a Christian, to identify all Jewish Soldiers and order them to stand in formation by themselves the next day.

[Jewish Soldiers were a minority within American units]


5 of 16:

Throughout WWII, captured Jewish Soldiers were often tortured and then killed by their German captors.

In fact, Jewish Soldiers had been told to bury their dog tags before capture. The dog tag identified Jews with the letter “H” for Hebrew.
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Kate Julian
Kate Julian
@katejulian
1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi


2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.


4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.
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Respectable Lawyer
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
There's been a lot of talk about the missionary killed by the natives of North Sentinel Island. They're probably so aggressive because of this weirdo, Maurice Vidal Portman. So here's a big thread about this creep and some facts from my decade-long obsession with the island.


The Sentinelese are often described as “uncontacted,” but this not strictly true. They had a very significant contact in 1880 with Commander Portman.

Portman, the black sheep third son of some minor noble, was assigned by the English Royal Navy to administer and pacify the Andaman Islands, a job he pursued from 1880-1900 with the full measure of his own perversity.


Portman was erotically obsessed with the Andamanese, and he indulged his passion for photography by kidnapping members of various tribes and posing them in mock-Greek homoerotic compositions.


During his 20 years in a sexualized heart of darkness, Portman measured and cataloged every inch of his prisoner’s bodies, with an obsessive focus on genitals.
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NOT A DISCO DANCER || \u09b0\u09be\u099c \u09b6\u09c7\u0996\u09b0
NOT A DISCO DANCER || ...
@DiscourseDancer
Patriotism is an interesting concept in that it’s excepted to mean something positive to all of us and certainly seen as a morally marketable trait that can fit into any definition you want for it.+


Tolstoy, found it both stupid and immoral. It is stupid because every patriot holds his own country to be the best, which obviously negates all other countries.+

It is immoral because it enjoins us to promote our country’s interests at the expense of all other countries, employing any means, including war. It is thus at odds with the most basic rule of morality, which tells us not to do to others what we would not want them to do to us+

My sincere belief is that patriotism of a personal nature, which does not impede on personal and physical liberties of any other, is not only welcome but perhaps somewhat needed.

But isn’t adherence to a more humane code of life much better than nationalistic patriotism?+

Göring said, “people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”+
SOCIETY
Scott Coley
Scott Coley
@scott_m_coley
The reason that so many conservative evangelicals these days appear to be moral relativists is that they *are* moral relativists.

They would deny this, of course. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Here's why.

They’ve bought into the premise that all statements are either fact or opinion: facts are objective and verifiable; and everything else is opinion—subjective and unverifiable. In other words, they've bought into full-fledged modernism.

From there, the secular path to moral relativism places all moral statements in the “opinion” category. On this view, morality is subjective—dependent on cultural context, historical background and the like.

Conservative evangelicals recoil from this approach, as they should.

So instead, they place morality in the “fact” category, claiming that moral truth is objective and empirically verifiable.

And how is moral truth empirically verified? The Bible, of course. Problem solved.

This is tempting, for two reasons. First, Scripture is entirely true; and much of that truth pertains to morality.

Second, apart from special revelation, it’s difficult to imagine where we might go to find empirical verification of moral truth—you can't *see* moral properties.
SOCIETY

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Rani Bhabani was the Queen of Natore, Bengal or 'Natorer Rani' as she was famously called. She made great contributions in Tarapith & renovated Benaras.

In Varanasi, Durga Kund Mandir was constructed by Rani Bhabani in the 18th century.


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A woman as a zamindar was extremely rare in those days, but Rani Bhabani managed the vast Rajshahi zamindari most efficiently and effectively for over four decades.
Maharani Bhavani was very pious in her personal life. She passed her life in a strict disciplined way.


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Rani Gaidinliu joined the freedom struggle at 13 &was sentenced to life imprisonment at 16."We r free people—the White should not rule over us.”Thus calling out to her Zeliangrong tribesmen was the voice of 13yr-old Rani Gaidinliu.


She joined the freedom struggle in the present-day Northeast India. Today, her struggle is lost in history as most of her countrymen wouldn’t even have heard her name. B'coz our history textbooks tell us that only Mahatma Gandhi &Pandit Nehru got India its Independence.


At 16 yrs of age, this valiant girl was sentenced to life imprisonment for leading a movement to drive out the colonial rulers from Manipur and Nagaland. Nevertheless, she was released in 1947 after India’s independence and was given the title ,"Rani of Nagas".


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dan spaceman
dan spaceman
@ohlaika
I'm gonna do my other star wars thread tomorrow, which will primarily be me yelling at a @RowanKaiser-shaped strawman for calling the First Order and The Resistance "cosplayers who the rest of the galaxy has to deal with"

the deal w/the New Republic, the First Order, and the Resistance is very weird and complex and I actually take issue with how Story Group frames the actual conflict.

pre-TFA stuff is presented as a "cold war" between the New Republic and the remnants of the Empire that form the First Order, which 100% makes sense.

But they frame the First Order's attack on the Hosnian system and the subsequent battle that takes place across TFA and TLJ as a full on war when it's very clearly a coup. A war implies at least equal standing, but the First Order completely wrecks shop and takes over the galaxy.

ok never mind I'm fucking doing this now.

The First Order fleet we see in TLJ is *not* the entire fleet of the First Order (I don't even think Starkiller Base was their main base of operations honestly, it couldn't have been considering they were operating out of Wild Space)
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RadioChinar
RadioChinar
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A recent video of Shoaid Akhter surfaced in social media creating a lot of controversy where the #Pakistani Cricketer can be seen suggesting invasion of India by using the term Ghazwa-e-Hind.
Radicalization of sportsmen seen off late
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Some radical Islamic preachers believes that Ghazwa-e-Hind means a “Holy War against India”. As per this irrational & profane concept, there will be a fierce battle to secure victory over #India.
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Some machiavellian people claim it is a prophecy that Muslim warriors will wage war against the #India.
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Corey Lynn \U0001f64f\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
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