> 1: a CDC meta-review said that 26% of surveyed US trans students attempted suicide this year, N=20,103 surveyed, ~660 of which were trans. https://archive.ph/0H81G
This paper also finds that 5% of cisgender male and 11% of cisgender female students (out of ~8k surveyed for each) attempted suicide in the past year. It's kind of strange, because the age <=18 suicide rate (of "completed" attempts) is much smaller, approximately 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000 [1].
Interpreted as a literal propositional statement, it's saying "if you have a good attitude, then you will have success". Therefore if you do not have success, it must be because you did not have a good attitude, which is your fault. It's the contrapositive, right?
If you take "determines" to mean "is the sole determining factor ... at a given instant" then yes. But with a more conventional reading, unless you define a time-frame, deny randomness or otherwise specify an outcome - no.
"Will have" is a stronger rephrasing, but even with this wording it wouldn't necessarily blame your attitude as long as you're alive (and if one believes in afterlife the promise may as well never expire).
> Aspects of society that conventional wisdom holds to be outside or above the influence of tech and media, things like government, we suddenly realize are downstream from a single, monolithic technological communications machine that spans every screen and has its own biases.
> Covid-19 revealed that the Media/Tech Complex is capable of acting as a single unified entity if necessary. That makes them more powerful than the Roman empire ever was.
This article is long on ominous assertions about the incredible power of the "Media/Tech Complex" and short on actual evidence of that power. The main piece of evidence seems to be: look how they all said similar things at the beginning of the pandemic! But this seems like a weak example -- you may as well say getting a tornado warning on your phone and on the local TV news is evidence of the same thing.
The claim that Media/Tech is "monolithic" is also pretty weird to me. There are popular articles from big media companies tut-tutting "Big Tech" every week. They don't seem to be good friends.
> we're not much different from a 3rd world failed state like Venezuela
In 2016, Venezuela's murder rate was well over 50 per 100,000, and the USA's murder rate was slightly over 5 per 100,000 [1]. This gap is pretty consistent.
Another amusing event from the life of the balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard mentioned in the article: in 1793, Blanchard arranged the first American balloon flight, starting in Philadelphia. George Washington was interested enough to attend and write Blanchard a passport saying, roughly, "look, this guy is French and traveling in this unpredictable way, if you find him then know that I, George Washington, think he's cool, and you should help him get back to Philadelphia", which apparently worked [1].
A few years ago I read a book called Maximum City. The premise is "let's look at the lives of several people [including a powerful police officer, a dancer, low-level criminals, high-level criminals, very poor people just getting by and, remarkably, a young Hrithik Roshan] in circa-2000 Mumbai". I also happened at the same time to be within hearing distance of a few discussions that touched on crypto-anarchism.
The thought I remember having is that crypto-anarchism seemed to require being embedded in a well-functioning state, but that this assumption was kind of just waved away. I had this thought because so many of the people in Maximum City are just at the mercy of the slightly more powerful people around them -- paying protection money, not getting paid for work, paying bribes -- and there's not a well-functioning government that can help them. It seemed like said people would love a lot less anonymity ("hey! look! this guy is threatening to beat me up if I don't pay him every month! that's illegal!"), and would be well-served by tech infrastructure that makes them more visible.
> The thought I remember having is that crypto-anarchism seemed to require being embedded in a well-functioning state, but that this assumption was kind of just waved away.
Not sure about anyone else, but speaking from my own philosophising, you're subtly wrong/missing the point: it requires not having any of your critical physical substrate/infrastructure embedded in poorly-functioning state. The distinction is that, in a lot of (over-)simplified models, there is no physical substrate, so what kind of state it's embedded in is a vacuous question. Compare, eg, any (over-)simplified model of computation that doesn't consider physical problems like cosmic ray bitflips or hard drives dying in fires/wearing out (ie, most of them).
More visible to whom? To the well-functioning state? I don't follow. The whole premise of anarchism is that a truly free society is one without a state. The presumed benefit of the kind of visibility you're talking about also rests on the assumption that the state is aligned with the interests of the wider population, whereas anarchism proposes that the state is fundamentally misaligned with collective and personal freedom.
Maybe your point is that because crypto-anarchism appears to rest on this state-friendly assumption, it isn't "real" anarchism. I don't know too much about crypto-anarchism and haven't formed an opinion either way, but if it's as cozy with anarcho-capitalism as the quotes at the end make it out to be, I'd probably agree with you.
Detour: This thread has a lot of downvoted comments, but not a lot of replies. Further, a lot of the downvoted comments, like the above, are well argued. I, for one, would love to see more involved engagement.
Anyway. Anarchism is actually a broader concept than believing that state is fundamentally misaligned with the collective. That's a branch of anarchism if anything. A better definition of anarchism is the belief that every institution or authority has to be able to justify its presence and should be dismantled if it can't (quoting Noam Chomsky). Following that defintion, I'd say that crypto-anarchism is anarachism where redistribution of power is done via technological means, with an emphasis on technological solutions to privacy and trust.
You make a critical point, actually in light of the OP topic. The building of crypto-anarchist tools might lead to the insight that certain forms of state have little coercive power (because the tools restrict or redirect the actions the state can take), and so anarchists are okay with the state.
The only anarchistic definition of The State I've ever heard is some kind of body with a legal monopoly on violence. If you're going off that definition, you'd have a hard time justifying it to anyone, as it's pretty much fundamentally counter to self-determination. It's true that the state (and capitalism in general) are fundamentally technological, so successful anti-state victories (say, making it harder for the state to manufacture consent and bypassing the propaganda filter) would be significant. But that's only "certain forms," as you put it. At the end of the day, the state will at some point resort to its go-to tactic of violence. If crypto tools restrict or redirect state action, that doesn't mean the state is suddenly okay, it just means anarchists are winning.
You're right. I wasn't really trying to give a broad definition - I was making a narrower argument - and I agree that Chomsky's is a better definition. I guess my "whole premise" phrasing was a bit overly broad.
I like the idea of "synoptic" reading to learn about a concrete topic. It makes sense when different works offer different versions of what happens and why.
But it seems weird to do it with fiction. If I'm reading fiction, I want to get into the world created by the author. I think repeatedly stepping in and out to compare it to other works, or analyze its construction, or think about a GoodReads review, all of that is going to impede that process. So I usually just get into the book's world, finish it, and then step back for 30 minutes a day or two later and write a few paragraphs of my thoughts.
This little essay often includes connections to other books, and articulating thoughts on a book right after reading it contributes a ton to my appreciation and understanding. It makes it a lot easier to pitch the book to somebody else, for example (easier than saying "it's...it's just so good, just read it"). And for me this process works best if I refrain from doing it too consciously during the reading process. The experience of immersing your unconscious in something is pretty unique.
That said, I don't finish every book I start, and I don't write comments unless I feel like there's something to work out. But there's usually something to work out!
Unrelated pedantic comment: TFA attributes this quote to Edgar Allan Poe
> Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.
But it doesn't sound like him, and the internet suggests it's actually a quote from this other Adler guy also referenced in TFA?
I'm rereading "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren right now. It's worth picking up if you're interested in getting more out of your reading.
I interpreted the four levels of reading to be a subsection of "Category 3: Reading to Understand". So as I understand it, reading fiction in the way you describe would be reading to entertain, but if you are reading to study fiction of a certain kind as a topic, synoptic reading would apply?
Also, to your other point, the author seems to be fast and loose with his facts - clickbait titles and unverifiable Einstein quote too!
It seems like this elides the difference between the goals of humanities education and the actual practice and outcomes of humanities education. I honestly don't know if humanities education confers the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information" at a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one.
Just as some naive first cut at answering this, I looked up GRE scores by intended graduate major [1]. "Physical sciences" (including math) majors average a 151 Verbal and "Humanities and Arts" average a...156, which seems pretty close, and even closer if you squint to try and account for the fact that the physical sciences skews English-as-a-second-language more than the humanities?
Of course, the GRE isn't a perfect proxy for the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information", but...graduate schools seem ok with it?
> a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one.
Likewise, your argument doesn't support diverting funds in favor of STEM programs. From my own personal experience of having both a liberal arts BA and a huge portion of a CS degree, the liberal arts program has improved my ability to think and read deeper and more completely than the CS coursework ever could. It has also proven to have prepared me to face the "real world" better than any of my STEM major peers have been able to.
More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.
The STEM world has no soul and will fail all of us because of it.
In the other direction, my personal experience is that a pure math undergraduate helped me to structure assumptions, evidence, and conclusions in a way that I thought was sorely missing in most of my humanities classes. But I doubt either one of our personal anecdotes is all that convincing to a third party.
> More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.
If you're going to jump to this uncharitable a view of my argument, it probably makes sense for us to just stop here.
> 1: a CDC meta-review said that 26% of surveyed US trans students attempted suicide this year, N=20,103 surveyed, ~660 of which were trans. https://archive.ph/0H81G
This paper also finds that 5% of cisgender male and 11% of cisgender female students (out of ~8k surveyed for each) attempted suicide in the past year. It's kind of strange, because the age <=18 suicide rate (of "completed" attempts) is much smaller, approximately 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000 [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr024.pdf, Figure 3
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