Maybe in a crude, Fight Club-y you-are-not-your-job sense. But for the counter argument, consider peter_hurford’s hypothetical: the label “artist” is a useful communication tool whether or not its user is permitting it to restrict her thinking.
fezziwig
(Also, how dangerous, how unsafe is the phrase, “it turns out”! I forget who first pointed this out to me, but oh, what horrible things can it conceal...!)
Could it have been this?
Fair cop on ‘counterpoint’; Merriam-Webster suggests you’re losing that particular definitional battle, but I get annoyed when people refer to crackers as “hackers”, so I definitely sympathize. Edited.
To the broader point, if peter_hurford’s argument-by-dialogue doesn’t click for you, you might try grouchymusicologist’s more detailed explanation.
Would you be willing to expand? Every meaning I’ve been able to extract from that paragraph is either trivial (“identifying with a label does not imbue you with the qualities associated with that label”) or untrue (“people who identify with labels lose the ability to behave non-stereotypically”).
I’ve had no better luck with the article as a whole. The most charitable interpretation I’ve come up with for the whole piece is “if you identify yourself to us with a label of any sort, you have identity issues and must fix them before you can help us”, which...isn’t very charitable at all, actually. But how else can one explain, say, the first paragraph? Or the one that starts “If you’re looking for a cause...”? The article isn’t just dismissive of our hypothetical volunteer, it’s abusive toward him, and from very little evidence. I think that by itself explains a lot of the backlash.
One suspects that there’s a lot of missing context, that these prototypical volunteers are saying a bunch of other things that make the conclusions in the article less egregious (e.g. “I think they sort-of do [believe these stupid straw-man beliefs]”). One fix would be to rewrite the piece in positive terms, disposing very briefly of the bad framing in “how can an artist help?” and suggesting a replacement. The last paragraph is a fairly good prototype for the sort of piece I’m imagining.
I remember being tempted, but ultimately it felt nosy. I wouldn’t request that SIAI make all its strategic thinking public, and there’s nothing special about this particular bit of it, from my perspective.
Thanks for that link; I wound up reading the whole comment thread, and it changed my mind.
So, people of SIAI: What were the discussions about? What conclusions did you reach? Or are you not finished yet? If not, how’s it going?
All the Christian apologetics stuff I’ve read since deconverting...is very obviously not actually targeted at actual atheists.
That isn’t necessarily true. I have personal experience with some people who write these sorts of materials, and mostly they just have a really terrible time modeling non-Christians. Some don’t even believe that non-Christians exist, really—they seem to think that non-Christians are just people who are resisting what they subconsciously know to be true, out of twisted pride or hopeless despair. I think it’s either too optimistic or too pessimistic—I can’t decide which—to conclude that the people writing these arguments must know at some level that they wouldn’t be persuasive to non-Christians. I don’t think they understand non-Christians well enough to make that leap.
I am reminded in particular of one gentleman, otherwise ordinary in intelligence, who honestly could not understand why 2nd Timothy 3:16 (“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”) would not persuade an atheist of the inerrancy of the Bible. He understood the concept of circular arguments, but could not apply his knowledge to our discussion.
I had a lot of fun reading this post.
‘Deligitor prodi’ was my favorite. Not sure what you didn’t like about it, but the longword-shortword construction gives it a nice imperative feel, and I mildly prefer ‘prodi’ to ‘prode’.
Fun! I’ll post a serious answer when I’ve more time; for now, some off-the-top observations:
1 AD is in the middle of Augustus’ reign; the empire is in decent shape financially and is pretty religiously and culturally diverse.
So the hardest part of the God gambit is in getting people to pay attention.
Roman politics included assassination, at all levels; extended engagement with Roman political life requires some safety measures, no matter how valuable you’ve made yourself.
The German barbarians hadn’t yet recovered from their losses in the previous century; provoking another great migration would be very hard.
And their religious practices were never well-documented, so boosting off of their existing structures is probably a no-go.
Egypt might be more fruitful, I’ll have to check.
Upvoted for detail and thoroughness, but I think you’re depending too much on the naivete of the natives. Step 3b is especially problematic; even if your guards are too loyal to sell you out (why?), you can’t conceal that you’re doing something in secret with a pack of metalsmiths. Just the fact that it’s a secret will be enough to get the provincial governor’s attention. That’s probably not the end: he may well be an incompetent ditherer, or venal enough to take bribes. But as soon as you start training your infantry, the clock starts: the emperor sends an envoy ordering you to turn over your new weapons, you refuse, you’re ordered to appear before a Roman court, you refuse, you’re declared to be in rebellion, and it’s on.
I think your one-year gamble is probably the better strategy for becoming emperor—maybe the best one, or close to it. Certainly the fastest. Surviving the next year would be tricky, though.
I think that in general, the thread is underestimating the importance of tribal politics. In particular, you’re not going to be appointed emperor unless you can make a compelling case that you’re a Roman citizen (a bastard, presumably, since there aren’t any records). If you’re too black or too blonde or too female to pull that off, you’re going to have to win by conquest (see below) or play power-behind-the-throne.
Assuming you have the right looks, I think you want to slow-play it: build up a fortune in business, get adopted by one of the elite families (not the Julians!), marry into another of the elite families (still not the Julians), and transition into a career of able public service. A generalship would be ideal, if you can swing it. At that point I see two options:
You can set yourself up as Tiberius’ successor, aiming to fill the void left by Sejanus’ fall. Getting Tiberius’ favor will be tricky, but at this point you should have immense personal wealth and 30 years of accomplishments to draw on. This is why you don’t marry one of the Julias—they mostly died in the purge.
Hold out even longer, and help restore the republic in the aftermath of the whole Caligula thing. The hard part here is surviving six years of Caligula; he was perpetually broke and will definitely try to steal your money.
“Holy shit, Fezziwig, you’re saying it’ll take thirty years minimum?” Sadly, yes. It’s tempting to try to sidestep Tiberius entirely and become Augustus’ successor, but I don’t buy it. Augustus and the senate won’t accept you unless you’re over 50 (or so) and have a proven record in governing stuff, and there’s just not time to get that together before Gaius dies in 4AD and Tiberius gets officially tapped as successor.
So if you’re impatient (or black, female, &c), you have to conquer Rome. That sounds harder than it is; all you need is (1) a group of people who’ll let you lead them against Rome, and (2) a military advantage that’s better than the tactics and discipline of the Roman legions. I had a strategy for generating (2), but Logos01 describes a better one, so let’s go with that.
(1) is tricky. You need to be allowed to amass a military power base, so thoroughly Romanized provinces are out. You need access to a functioning economy to get your raw materials, so semi-nomadic herders like the Germans are out. You need a vaguely reasonable logistical chain, so Mexico and China are out. You need a state that actually wants a fight with Rome, so the Persians and the British are out.
If you have a solid ethnic in with the Egyptians or Jews, they’re good choices: nominally Roman, but with a proud history of self-rule that should help you through the early delicate period where one informer ends the whole game. Failing that, I think your best option is a slave revolt: amass wealth, buy into one of the slave colonies, and recruit from there. You’ll have to do the metallurgy yourself, at least at first, but at least your forces are hard to bribe.
Even with a military power-base, you probably want to wait until late Tiberius or middle Caligula, just so that the empire doesn’t turn on you or fragment the instant you seize power. I guess you technically win if a rump session of the Senate coronates you while Rome burns outside, but it feels like we should award points for a smooth transition of power.
A very cogent point, and one I took too lightly. I do see two causes for hope:
You have Mad Oratory Skills, and so have some scope to set fashions of behavior.
News travels slowly, so you can field-test your approach in small communities before the big show.
It might be smart to start in another country, so that none of your eventual targets see you make your newbie mistakes. It’s not as good as being born in Egypt/Judea/wherever, but as you point out that’s really hard to fake.
Yeah, ok; you have more scope for camouflage than I appreciated at first. It will eventually become obvious that you’re training an army (you’ll have to train them to fight in formation, and volley, and things like that), but when the provincial governor shows up wanting to know what you plan to do with it, you might well be able to get away with saying “I’m planning to conquer Rome and install myself as emperor, and if you go along with it I’ll find you a nice fat province in the East to be governor of”. And if that doesn’t work, well, you probably can win a long campaign, it’s just really messy.
The Romans as a culture placed a lot of stock in the notion that victory in combat represented worthiness as a person.
Indeed, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stop fighting you. Consider Cannae: most states would have sued for peace after so brutal an upset. Same deal after Arausio; the Romans were as proud and stiff-necked a people as have ever existed, China and America by no means excepted.
I signed up for their yearly plan. I’m about three months in. I’ve enjoyed it, but haven’t seen any signs of general improvement yet. My scores improved quickly early on, as I learned the games, but have been essentially flat for the last two months, even in the categories in which I really suck (40th percentile Speed, hell yeah).
For the fights to continue, Lily must have remained unaware that Snape was not writing in her potions book. And for Lily to remain unaware, Snape could not find out the reason for the fights
...which implies that, in the course of all these fights, Lilly never mentioned it to him. It’s not enough for her to disbelieve his denials, she must never have given him an opportunity to make them. That being so, what were they arguing about? What sort of dialogue would you write for those scenes? What states of mind do you imagine for her?
In other words: I notice that I am confused.
That is how people fight over [...trivia...] when what they are really hurt by is loss of autonomy, or financial insecurity, or fading intensity of intimacy, or some other big deal.
Are you really comfortable putting “hurtful and/or stupid things written in a Potions textbook” in the same category as financial insecurity? Or are you saying that Dumbledore used the textbook to induce a profound fear like that? And did it such that Lilly never e.g. tried to respond to one of the Potions remarks face-to-face?
I dunno. I’m trying to imagine how this played out concretely, and I just can’t manage it. Try this exercise: pick two of your high-school friends, and try to produce the effect you’re describing, without either party realizing that anyone else is involved. Give yourself all of Dumbledore’s powers. I don’t believe I could have done it without mind-manipulation magic—and if I were going to use that, why bother with the Potions textbook at all?
My apologies, I wasn’t clear. I meant, pick two of your high-school friends when they were in high school. Or if you prefer, pick any two of “your kids”, whatever that means to you, at an age when they’d been friends for at least five years. Not two kids who “aren’t inclined” to get along, two kids who are.
What, concretely, do you write to start them fighting? I see several straightforward ways to worsen an existing argument, but creating a new one, without either participant noticing the asymmetry, is much harder.
I guess what I’m saying is that you are either limited in information on teenagers or in imagination.
No need to apologise; you don’t know me. Without wanting to get too distracted by an argument over credentials: my involvement with teenagers in unending, God help me, but perhaps I do lack imagination. I’d observe in turn that you seem to have identified very closely with Snape’s suffering, and have paid relatively little attention to Lilly’s thoughts and feelings in this affair. That’s when I noticed my confusion: I tried to model Lilly’s half of this, and failed.
The process you describe seems feasible, but I don’t know how much I’m affected by the fact that I really, really want it to work.
Maybe just run a pilot?
Luckily these folks would not yet have been immunized to Nazi-style propaganda campaigns or other forms of indoctrination.
As GLaDOS points out, nobody’s really immune, as such, but it wasn’t a new tactic. ‘Demagogue’ is a Greek word, and the techniques involved had been known for centuries before 1AD. Take the brothers Grachii as your bar; if you can manipulate public opinion more smoothly than they did, you might have a shot.
I don’t realize it either; I’m not sure that it’s true. Forgive me if I’m missing something obvious, but:
gRR wants to include the preferences of the people getting dust-specked in his utility function.
But as you point out, he can’t; the hypothetical doesn’t allow it.
So instead, he includes his extrapolation of what their preferences would be if they were informed, and attempts to act on their behalf.
You can argue that that’s a silly way to construct a utility function (you seem to be heading that way in your third paragraph), but that’s a different objection.