Why You Shouldn't Tell Someone That Everyone's a Little Autistic

It's not true, and it's extremely annoying to be told this as an autistic person. I wrote about one aspect of how being autistic is a qualitatively different way of experiencing things in this post: https://stripey7.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-new-window-on-myself.html

The video by Amanda (IAmMindBlind) pictured above: https://fstube.net/w/dTcSBWKS45J2k6kHFfMy2t 

Not Swallowing Matt Christman's Black Pill

In a recent conversation with Ben Burgis, Matt Christman argues that third-party presidential efforts are a waste of time. I commented:

This discussion reflects a very narrow and mechanical conception of how political change takes place. Over the long run people's attitudes and behaviors in all areas, including politics, are shaped and reshaped by a variety of kinds of social influence, many of them quite subtle.

If I'm in a polity -- Philadelphia, for instance -- that overwhelmingly supports one of the two capitalist parties, then it's profoundly un-pragmatic to vote for either of them, precisely because there's no chance that it will make a difference to who's elected in this cycle. But if I understand social psychology, then I can appreciate that voting for a third party creates social proof (one of the six "weapons of social influence" identified by Robert Cialdini in his signal work Influence) for supporting a different kind of politics. At any given time under normal historical conditions, most people won't be carefully studying the election results, but those who do will notice an increase in the vote for a third party and will start taking it more seriously. It may lead them to investigate its platform and get involved in some of its issues. Even if they don't get into the weeds of the election returns, the same things might result simply from noticing how many people are wearing a third candidate's campaign buttons. And again, particularly in an election that isn't close, this may result in their also wearing that button and voting for that candidate, which in turn broadcasts social proof to others, etc. You have to be willing to think long-term.

I should add that the non-existence of any (major) vehicle for effecting change outside the red/blue dichotomy doesn't mean you can't work on building them, and there are currently several such projects. One of the most interesting is Vote Pact, a concept that involves finding someone with opposite ideological leanings but a similar frustration with the pressure to vote lesser-evil, and jointly declaring that neither of you will vote for either major party in any election for which you're both eligible. This withdraws two votes from the big capitalist parties without changing the balance between them, but also has the virtue of motivating people to seek out and develop understanding and trust with people who have a different perspective.

See the interview here: https://fstube.net/w/5NG9yC3etQLLgBAweuv7DA 

Quotable from Adam Smith

From The Wealth of Nations:

Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which a man's own labour can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labour of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase. The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.

Penn Administrators Uphold the Value of Free Speech While Recycling Zionist Smears

In response to criticism of the upcoming Palestine Writes Literature Festival on the University of Pennsylvania campus, administrators have issued a statement endorsing the false equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

I hadn't been too sure I'd make time to attend a general literature event, but in response to these smears against Palestinians I feel obligated to show up in support.

PW's correspondence with Penn: https://palestinewrites.org/2023/09/15/letter-to-the-university-of-pennsylvania/

My sign at the Global Climate Strike today. A fellow marcher made it easier for me to carry by letting me hang a couple of my bags from her handlebars.

A Video of My First Filk Song Is Posted

My first song parody, "Trinity," is based on the Lois McMaster Bujold fantasy novel The Curse of Chalion and set to the tune of "Yesterday." I composed it in 2004 and got a tape recording made a few years later at Philcon, which I subsequently got converted to a sound file. Today I sang it again for a video recording, whose visual part is simply the book standing up on a table.

The lyrics focus on the uncomfortable condition of the protagonist, Cazaril, for much of the story. At the opening he's barely staying alive, wandering the countryside of a feudal society in search of a position. On his last legs, he realizes he's arrived at the estate of a noblewoman he served in his distant youth as a page. Hoping against hope that she might remember him and let him serve as a page again, he drags his weary self to the gate. Once he gets the guard to inquire within, he finds that the noblewoman not only remembers him, but wants him for a significantly more exalted position as secretary and tutor to a young princess in the royal line of succession named Iselle, who is currently under the noblewoman's protection, and her lady in waiting. Over the next weeks they become fast friends, only to receive a mysterious summons to the royal court. Shortly after they arrive, they learn the reason: under the influence of intriguing courtiers, the King has betrothed Iselle to a lout named Dondo. Feeling he owes his life to her, Cazaril resolves to do whatever he can to save Iselle from this fate. He obtains an audience with the King in hopes of changing his mind, but is unable to sway him. Next, he attempts to assassinate Dondo by various means, but they all fail. His last resort is to death magic.

In the universe of this book there are five gods: the Lord of Winter, patron of old men; the Lord of Autumn, patron of young men; the Lady of Summer, patron of mature women; the Lady of Spring, patron of maidens such as Iselle; and finally the Bastard God, patron of all things out of season. Death magic is a ritual whereby one prays to the Bastard God to end someone's life. Two troublesome things about death magic: if it fails because the Bastard God didn't answer your prayer, the attempt is considered to have been blasphemy. On the other hand, if it succeeds you lose your own life in the process, because the death demon that the god sends in answer to your prayer takes the soul of the person for whose death you prayed and then takes your soul too.

For the first reason, Cazaril has to make his attempt in secret. He finds a section of the royal castle that's no longer in use, and since no  one else knows about what he's doing he has to conduct the entire elaborate ritual by himself. When he's finally completed it he collapses in exhaustion, hoping not to wake up since if his prayer is answered he'll be dead soon.

But he does wake up, still alive if oddly bloated. At first he thinks he must have failed, but soon learns that Dondo did in fact die mysteriously at table. He asks around and learns of an old retired wizard who's working in the King's private menagerie, whom he goes to see in hopes he might have an idea why Dondo has died yet Cazaril hasn't. The wizard gets the story from Cazaril, also noting his strangely bloated condition, and figures it out: the Bastard God answered his prayer and the death demon he sent took Dondo's soul, but before it could also take Cazaril's, one of the other gods intervened by encapsulating the demon along with Dondo's soul in Cazaril's gut. Hence the bloating. This implies that whichever god did this has some use for Cazaril, making him by definition a saint. It doesn't take him too long to figure out that the god in question is the Lady of Spring, but most of the remaining book to work out exactly what her purpose for him is. Cazaril's awkward condition is the focus of my song.

Here is a link to the video I made: https://fstube.net/w/hJRNXPjjzuXNsm8ME9Fm7t

A Little Bit Culty?

 

A few years ago I saw an article about groups for explorers of urban spaces and looked into joining one. I noticed that one Meetup group's web page asked that people not rate the Meetups unless they were going to give five stars, on the grounds that the Organizer was going to the effort to make them happen and lead them and people who didn't like them just shouldn't come back. This sounded to me like the request of an insecure narcissist so I decided not to get involved with that group.

"Is your online community a little bit culty? These are the signs"

https://www.cultnews101.com/2023/08/is-your-online-community-little-bit.html

Sabine, Markets =/= Capitalism

 

Quantum physicist Sabine Hossenfelder wades out of her depth in a video titled "Capitalism Is Good." I posted the following comment:

There are two fundamental errors here. One is assuming the consequent: she argues for the benefits of a market in the context of private ownership of the means of production, but that's precisely the condition for the capitalist system's operation, which she doesn't question.

The second error is confusing a free market with capitalism. As Sabine acknowledges, capitalism is a recent historical development, yet markets have existed since ancient times. What distinguishes capitalism as a system is the commodification of labor-power. The existence of labor markets and capital markets, which is unique to the current capitalist era, results in an increasingly uneven distribution of personal income, so that there's growing expenditure on luxuries for a few while the basic needs of many others go unmet. This in turn causes capital to be increasingly invested in producing luxuries and comparatively disinvested from the production of necessities. Obviously this is sub-optimal for the species biologically.

It also misses the point to dismiss the problem of anticipating externalities like the social cost of carbon emissions as "another problem." The problem is precisely that the capitalist setup, in which the means of production are privately owned by wealthy people who can afford to insulate themselves from the social costs of their investment decisions, guarantees that such considerations will by default be an afterthought, and by the time even a robustly democratic government has begun to catch up with them, much damage has been and there's a vested interest with the resources to obstruct any attempt at regulation. Capitalist democracies are constantly closing the barn doors after the horse is gone.

None of this is to deny that a great deal of material progress has been made possible by capitalism, but further progress is increasingly obstructed by the imbalances it creates, and it's been absolutely destructive in the way it forces most people into a much more alienated relation to their work than was typical in premodern times. Instead of one-sidedly pronouncing it "good" as if it represented the end of history, it's necessary to see it as a phase of social evolution that it's time to move beyond. Capitalism has created machine industry and in the process it's also created a working class for whom cooperative labor is second nature. It's time for this class to recognize that it can lead society in replacing the allocation of productive resources by unconscious market mechanisms with the conscious democratic self-direction of society, and to act on this understanding by substituting its own political rule for the present de facto dictatorship of capital.

To deepen your understanding of capitalism not as synonymous with liberalism but as a contradiction immanent within bourgeois society and pointing beyond it through proletarian revolution, I suggest you enroll in The Platypus Affiliated Society's primary Marxist reading group.

Echo Chambers Happen in Science Too: The Case of Obesity Research

 

These days there are many people who tell us we should just "trust the science." They insist anyone who suggests there could be systematic bias on a question within the scientific community is just a paranoid conspiracy theorist, and that conventions like peer review and the desirability of making one's mark with an original insight ensure against excessive conformism. But the reality is that collective delusions can occur in spite of their collective non-functionality among scientists just as easily as in any other group.

A good example is obesity research. As demonstrated in the article I'm linking to below, for half a century or more this field has been totally dominated by an "energy balance" explanation for what causes obesity and what can be done about it. This is in spite of the fact that it's been repeatedly observed in various species that some individuals reliably become obese even when they're starving. Saying weight gain equals energy in minus energy out is much like saying the average price is that at which supply equals demand: it's a mere tautology that doesn't actually predict anything. Yet it's been treated as dogma within this community and obstructed the advancement of knowledge that could actually reverse the trend of ever more overweight people.

"How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity"

https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/13/how-a-fatally-tragically-flawed-paradigm-has-derailed-the-science-of-obesity/