the idea that the state is purely a construct of laws enforced by threat of violence is closer to legalism and not something xunzi favors. he sees law and punishment as a last resort for eliminating the minority of people who can't be handled any other way, but trying to rule principally on the basis of coercion is doomed to failure. one of his essays is an extended lecture on why the qin state (to become the qin dynasty) will be overthrown unless they stop trying to govern this way
for xunzi the main tool to run the state is that nebulous word "ritual." roughly this means the government should behave virtuously to inspire civic duty and pride, encourage people to cultivate themselves and behave properly in the context of their personal relationships, and use the tools of civic religion (in his time sacrifical rites, sumptuary laws, military ceremonies) to impress people with majesty rather than instill fear. on the mundane end it should make punishments light, lower taxes, handle natural disasters, and maintain a military that mostly fights defensive or just wars. through this he believes people will mostly act virtuously through a felt sense of obligation to and appreciation for each other, ie social trust and social responsibility
there are legitimate points of criticism though, I think the main ones from a western individualist democratic perspective would be that he considers a hierarchical (albeit strictly meritocratic) social structure to be absolutely essential, and that the confucian social network style behavior regulation may depend inherently on social shame, which tends to be smothering
xunzi's dim view of human nature is superficially similar to hobbes (and both came from similar times of brutal civil war) but while hobbes says "and the people have to agree to give absolute power to a dictator" xunzi says "and the people need a model for how to be better"
any confucian system is necessarily grounded in virtue, so you still have the classic problem of "what if the ruler isn't virtuous." I do think this is fundamentally unsolvable though. at the end of the day no clever government structure can work around the fact that whoever holds the final say is ultimately sovereign. checks and balances evaporate in times of crisis and we've just been lucky most of the presidents so far who got that supreme authority (lincoln and fdr being the most notable) were relatively virtuous
I actually have been going to church lately. I think the orthodox take on holy tradition comes very close to what xunzi means by ritual, but xunzi applies it to running a state as well
for me, the value of the xunzi isn't that it's old or that it's eastern, but that it's a sophisticated text which describes a system of morality, statecraft, and international relations which I largely (but don't entirely) agree with
the period he came from was extremely intellectually fertile, and you can find advocates for everything from rational totalitarianism to postmodern anarchism, ethical egoism, hippie utilitarianism, and jeffersonian pastoralism. I think an "east vs west" lens doesn't really capture it well, because the codification of what we would consider "eastern" took place long after this period, over the course of many centuries
there are things xunzi gets wrong, and after I finish writing commentaries on the essays by him I think are most important, I'll probably write a critique on that. I think of him more as a starting point than an ending point
I don't think this is a good comparison because there's so much about language that's subjective or dependent on context. if you could translate something with perfect denotation, you still need a human touch for connotation. the nuances of word choice and sentence structure that give something a flavor of emotionality, or cool logic, or confidence, or aloofness, etc. to say nothing of localization, how to handle meter, all the various tradeoffs a translator has to make because translation is inherently lossy. games don't have any of these problems, you either win or you don't
I think ai will prove "good enough" for most applications in the near future, but this won't eliminate human translation (or journalism, or copywriting, or whatever you might want to apply similar technology/techniques to). but it may well eliminate the bottom 80%
same reason it's hard to steer an ocean liner. death rates dominated the way people thought and talked about this for months. now it's clearer death rates are obviously not so bad, but permanent damage and months-long recoveries and unclear immunity profile are massive unknowns, but the inertia of the previous narrative still overwhelms the minority trying to course correct. "we're all going to die" "no we're going to be fine" is much easier to latch onto than "it's more complicated than that and we don't really know." especially since most people got sick of lockdown and many are in grave economic danger because of it. people are doing a mental calculus of "well I'll probably be fine so I think we should open back up" and change their arguments to suit the conclusion they've decided on
yea my gyms here (texas) have been really good about this, either mandatory masks or open air, mandatory distancing, wipe everything down (my muay thai gym got like a metal exterminators tank for disinfectant they just spray everything with), etc etc. the article makes the point well, that if you close everything down, people will just do it anyway, so it's better to just have it in the open and under control and punish bad actors when they crop up
local gyms (as opposed to chain/bigbox) tend to be extremely tight-knit communities, which means people want to keep each other safe and will go out of their way to do it, within reason. most people don't care about everyone in their city in abstract, but they do care about members of groups they derive camaraderie from. hell of a lot safer than reopening restaurants, imo
people who act like joggers are the real threat mostly don't exercise, just as people who say things like "I don't understand why people need to get together" mostly are introverts, people who think the anti-lockdown protestors are lunatics generally don't own brick and mortor businesses, etc. people are scared and want someone to blame, ideally someone who isn't like them. and it's naturally much easier to see the things you do as essential, but the things you don't do as nonessential
the commonly accepted estimate for intersex conditions is 1.7% of lives births, via https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11534012/ from this basis it's not much of a stretch to imagine the reality is that there's a greater spectrum of sex difference that is illegible because it hasn't been medicalized. certainly seems like a more plausible explanation than "ok ok, so there's people who don't fit into our perfect platonic ideal categories, but other than the 1.7% of weirdos the categories are still perfect"
it's god of the gaps thinking, people are addicted to drawing clean lines around discrete categories as a vestige of modernism. taxonomy brain. we don't have good ways to say "there are two major clustering points, which most people are roughly close enough to one or the other to call them that, but there's enough overlap and so many dimensions that it makes drawing clean boundaries impossible"
I suspect as gene sequencing gets commoditized and personalized medicine actually becomes practical, we'll find a lot more cases where it makes sense to analyze people on the basis of their individual traits rather than what broad groups we can class them under
this has been a contentious argument for at least half a decade that I've seen, and I won't rehash it here, but the magic words to google if you want to read more are "truscum" and "theyfab"
previous poster's claim is a common piece of folk wisdom that ultimately stems from this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16298429/ 2005, n=187. the authors are blanchardites so the language they use is needlessly confusing, but they find 107.3 mean iq among the male-attracted trans women, 121.7 among the female-attracted
when it comes to this topic, "sex" "gender" "male" "female" "man" "woman" etc etc are overloaded with contradictory meanings by people trying to make sneaky ontological arguments. unless I'm specifically talking about the signifier itself, I don't really care about these kinds of games, so I just try to say unambiguous things
anyway aside from language legerdemain, the word "sex" is also used to refer to what sex you're legally designated as, which is only loosely coupled to biology by now
I presume this is a consequence of the datasets they had to work off but it is really frustrating that they have one catchall "transgender and gender-diverse" category, segmenting by birth sex or particular gender identified with would be interesting/valuable
oh interesting. I've had a pet theory for awhile now re: trans/autism comorbidity that they're better thought of as symptoms (among others! op's link notes higher incidence of every surveyed mental disorder) of some underlying brain abnormality, rather than being tangled up in some causal relationship with each other. had not heard of gender incoherence theory before
definitely worth doing. would be a massive undertaking. I'm not webdev enough to comment intelligently on _how_ to do it, but I think the general _what_ to do is something like... a system that is simple and internally coherent, designed specifically to a) court devs to build on it instead, and b) enable all the optimizations that have eluded browser vendors so far because the existing standards are so absurdly complicated. "parallel layout engine" and "a tab doesn't use multiple gigs of ram" are good for starters
then you make a browser that is much faster for sites written in the new thing and build in blink for fallback. also make something in the same niche as electron, but only using the new thing. win devs over and try to cultivate another "this site best viewed in" phenomenon. gradually demote the existing paradigm to second-class status
the important thing is you probably need a well-heeled patron but you don't need to win over the existing browser vendors. (tbh I'm surprised facebook hasn't tried this yet, they'd benefit immensely from it even aside from being able to stick it to google)
make something better and people will gradually switch. reaching non-technical types isn't as hard as it's made out to be, there was a point where every early adopter geek type was going out of their way to install chrome (and firefox before that!) on their parents' and friends' computers for them. and if people switch, other browsers will have to follow
of course it's also likely that all the problems that necessitate a switch will come back even worse after. google made a js engine that was 1000x faster so people made sites that were 10000x slower. google sandboxed tabs so a bad site wouldn't crash the whole browser, and now complicated sites crash constantly because there's less consequences to it. but hey you have to imagine sisyphus happy after all
I don't mean asking technical questions, which I agree is often easier to do over text, not least because you can cite line numbers and include code snippets etc. I mean getting favors, demanding concessions, strategizing, comparing notes, etc. especially if you're running a project (as I was) and need buy-in and deliverables from people in different reporting lines (I was eng with an asterisk, depending heavily on people in qa and ops), the ability to walk up to their desk and convince them is priceless
there were more than a few times when the schedule slipped by months because someone outside the project delayed something by weeks. those kinds of issues I never had when I was in the office because I could get what we needed through force of personality. but outside, you have to go through process, and process is inefficient
seasoned remote workers might counter the org was dysfunctional (a charge I will not deny, hence why I left) but they don't have solutions other than more process. because remote depersonalizes work interactions, they have to layer on policies and documents. it's fundamentally a bureaucratizing force
a lot of stuff in the twitter thread is eyerolling english undergrad turning everything into a literal symbol for essay points, sort of thing. but it is kinda true that the plot of movie is a morose depressed practically catatonic hacker guy feels trapped and cut off from authentic experience until a symbolic rebirth frees him to grow into the entity he was always meant to be
>The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person.
it depends what their goals are. having worked in-office and remote for the same company, it's way easier to get shit done in the office. at least if you're reasonably extroverted/persuasive/bold. there are so many times I was able to walk up to someone's desk and spend ten minutes to save multiple weeks of protocol and runaround. partly because it's easier to apply pressure, but also partly because communicating face-to-face is so much higher bandwidth. but if you're remote you're easier to ignore, and a lot of office workers are very good at ignoring people who want to create more work for them
but the flip side is it's way easier for remote workers to fade into the background and hardly do anything. a skilled developer can emulate a mediocre developer while working a fraction of the hours. a skilled manipulator can "work" a fraction of the hours managing expectations and barely produce much of anything. plenty of people will figure out how to automate their jobs and just never tell anyone
there's this idea that remote will benefit introvert/aspie types because it's so word-focused. you have few face-to-face conversations but you write tons and tons. but really, apsie types will produce reams of literal-minded descriptive and often very helpful documentation and discussion, while people-people types will manipulate their image to appear very legibly valuable and come out ahead more often than not
my honest opinion for awhile is that remote is going to a massive efficieny drain on big tech companies and startups doing stuff that's easy to phone in like webdev/saas/whatever, such that if you founded a small committed colo team you could probably outcompete them in whatever domain you want even without any special edge
for xunzi the main tool to run the state is that nebulous word "ritual." roughly this means the government should behave virtuously to inspire civic duty and pride, encourage people to cultivate themselves and behave properly in the context of their personal relationships, and use the tools of civic religion (in his time sacrifical rites, sumptuary laws, military ceremonies) to impress people with majesty rather than instill fear. on the mundane end it should make punishments light, lower taxes, handle natural disasters, and maintain a military that mostly fights defensive or just wars. through this he believes people will mostly act virtuously through a felt sense of obligation to and appreciation for each other, ie social trust and social responsibility
there are legitimate points of criticism though, I think the main ones from a western individualist democratic perspective would be that he considers a hierarchical (albeit strictly meritocratic) social structure to be absolutely essential, and that the confucian social network style behavior regulation may depend inherently on social shame, which tends to be smothering
xunzi's dim view of human nature is superficially similar to hobbes (and both came from similar times of brutal civil war) but while hobbes says "and the people have to agree to give absolute power to a dictator" xunzi says "and the people need a model for how to be better"
any confucian system is necessarily grounded in virtue, so you still have the classic problem of "what if the ruler isn't virtuous." I do think this is fundamentally unsolvable though. at the end of the day no clever government structure can work around the fact that whoever holds the final say is ultimately sovereign. checks and balances evaporate in times of crisis and we've just been lucky most of the presidents so far who got that supreme authority (lincoln and fdr being the most notable) were relatively virtuous