[part 2]
There are two possibilities: either Harvard significantly boosts the life outcomes of its students/graduates or it doesn’t.
If it doesn’t, its justification for existence disappears, and, to say the least, it will have to find a new one.
If it does—there are only so many students it can take, and aristocrats and favored ethnic groups have a much easier time getting in than others. Harvard takes in about two thousand students each year, of which about twenty percent are noncitizens. Of the 1600 remaining students, many of them will be aristocrats or members of favored ethnic groups. Let’s say half are. And of the rest…
…Well, there are about three hundred million people in the USA, and there were about about five million people in medieval Britain. If medieval Britain had selected fourteen people from the peasantry every year and made them barons, would it then not have been an aristocracy?
Since impossible thought experiments that include unbelievably advanced aliens and pick at bizarre edge cases are acceptable in the relevant branch of philosophy…
You are a young parent. You have no siblings, and you and your spouse were both rendered infertile by a rare but otherwise asymptomatic disease right after the birth of your first child. An unbelievably advanced alien named Angarag appears in your bedroom and makes you an offer.
Angarag reads your mind and computes the coherent extrapolation of your favored version of utilitarianism, then models human psychology at such a high resolution that he can identify the smallest possible increase in aggregate utility—the Planck utilon—and then he proves this all to you. You have no reason to doubt Angarag. You do not doubt Angarag.
Angarag then makes you an offer. He has computed the loss of aggregate utility that would result from him brutally murdering your only child; if you let him do it, he will act in such a way as to set aggregate utility to one Planck utilon above where it would be in the counterfactual world where he doesn’t brutally murder your only child. By, if your preferred version of utilitarianism is into this sort of thing, wireheading lots and lots of chickens.
Whether or not you accept the offer, he will, after either killing your only child and wireheading some chickens or whatever, used his advanced alien technology to teleport away from Earth and never interact with it again.
Remember: if Angarag doesn’t kill your child, aggregate utility after he stops interacting with Earth will be N; but if he does, aggregate utility after he stops interacting with Earth will be N plus one Planck utilon.
You have no reason to doubt Angarag. You do not doubt Angarag. What do you do?
If you’re a utilitarian, you have to let Angarag kill your child. I hope it can go without saying that this is wrong.
…and imagine a country that didn’t know this. Imagine if Alaskans and Hawaiians could vote on whether Maryland should allow gambling to raise money for its school system. Imagine if Idaho and Wisconsin could vote on marijuana laws in Colorado. Imagine if New York and California could vote on the governance of public utilities in Wyoming. A New Yorker knows nothing about Wyoming; she can’t form an educated opinion on its public utilies; and what happens in Wyoming won’t affect her at all—so she shouldn’t be able to vote on it, she has no grounds to say anything about it, and it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. Everyone knows this.
But if someone in Rutland, which is whiter than Japan is Japanese, wants to vote on immigration…
I don’t know. Neither does anyone else. There are innumerable proposals. All are contradictory, and some are the exact reverse of others: Pulleyblank (1962) and Zhengzhang (1987) both attributed the A/B contrast to vowel length, but Pulleyblank thought type-B vowels were long, and Zhengzhang thought type-A vowels were.
…But I analyzed the 4967 (at least, I hope that’s what the count is!) Old Chinese items from the recent Baxter-Sagart reconstruction, to find out how often each vowel occurred in each type of syllable.
| Vowel | A | B | B – A |
|---|---|---|---|
| *a | 810 | 789 | -21 |
| *e | 345 | 340 | -5 |
| *i | 155 | 305 | 150 |
| *o | 319 | 344 | 25 |
| *u | 229 | 358 | 129 |
| *ə | 301 | 607 | 306 |
| *A | 0 | 65 | 65 |
I don’t know what *A is. I also don’t know what this distribution suggests. High vowels, especially *ə, seem to prefer type-B syllables, but low vowels don’t care one way or the other.
Amritas‘s old proposal that the A/B distinction could have come from low/high presyllabic vowels reminded me to check presyllables:
| Presyllable type | A | B |
|---|---|---|
| None | 1687 | 2073 |
| Tightly-bound | 239 | 351 |
| Loosely-bound | 230 | 380 |
| Both | 3 | 4 |
In the corpus, there are 2159 type-A syllables and 2808 type-B syllables; that is, 56.53% of syllables are type-B. There are 1200 words with one presyllable; if there’s no correlation, we’d expect about 678 of them to be of type B. In fact, there are 731. This is probably not significant. The same for words with no presyllable: we’d expect 2125, and there are 2073. Unless Proto-Sinitic had an Austronesian-like CVCVC word structure and lost most initial consonants—that is, unless it was Arrernte* or something—the presyllabic vowel hypothesis is probably out.
I wonder what the statistical distribution of pharyngealization (or similar) looks like in the Qiangic languages that have it. Incidentally, where did that come from? I think Guillaume Jacques once said in a paper that it’s unknown. Could it have been preserved from Proto-Sino-Tibetan?
* Arrernte underwent the historical change of unconditionally dropping all word-initial consonants.
Malinovich: In a debate with Raymond Aron in the New Statesman, somewhere around 1971, you said that a radical transformation of values is taking place before your eyes. And you were speaking about an overcoming of aggressive, repressive values. Would you still take that strong a position?
Marcuse: Yes, more than ever before. I insist that a better society, or socialist society, would be qualitatively different from all preceding and present social systems.
Malinovich: But would you agree with the idea that in the late sixties and early seventies the students had really attained a kind of new consciousness?
Marcuse: Yes, and not only the students. Also women and racial and national minorities, also part of the intelligentsia as a whole.
Malinovich: My feeling was that you were not just speaking of a political consciousness but that you were speaking of a change in the psychological—
Marcuse: A change in the entire mental structure. If you want, you can go back and quote it in Freudian terms—an ascent of Eros in the struggle with aggressiveness and destructiveness.
Malinovich: Do you still feel now that that change was a deep one, that it was more than a superficial change?
Marcuse: Yes, I do. It was on a very deep level, but did not come to adequate realization as a political movement.
Malinovich: If that’s still your feeling, then how do you explain that the student movement has kind of fizzled out? Recent Gallup polls indicate that students are much more conservative.
Marcuse: I would consider this a temporary relapse. The situation may very well change with a worsening of economic conditions.
Malinovich: How would you explain the fact that it came to an end?
Marcuse: There are many reasons. First, the end of the war in Vietnam, and the end of the draft. Secondly, the stabilization of the capitalist system.
Malinovich: What do you mean by that?
Marcuse: Economically as well as politically a turn to the right, and with that an intensification of repression.
Malinovich: Do you have some specific thing in mind when you speak of intensification of repression? Something like Kent State?
Marcuse: In this country still in a constitutional and democratic way we have no such thing as a Berufsverbot. However, I think it is an understatement to say that a Marxist scholar will find it very difficult to get a job or even a promotion.
Malinovich: Could you say something about what your hopes were for the student movement back in the sixties? At that time what seemed to you to be the possibilities for the movement? For example, in a lecture in Germany you said: “I see the possibilitiy of an effective revolutionary force only in the combination of what is going on in the Third World with the explosive forces in the centers of the highly developed world.” Did you in the sixties have hope that somehow the student movement in conjunction with the Third World or the ghetto population could conceivably have led to a real revolution?
Marcuse: Not in this country. The situation was different in France. It was not in itself in this country a revolutionary movement, but one of the catalyst groups which for the first time articulated this transformation of needs and values, with such slogans as “the new sensibility”, for example.
Malinovich: When you talk about the new sensibility are you saying that, while the students today are more politically conservative or less politically involved, they are still in some psychological sense on a more advanced level than students before the sixties?
Marcuse? Again, it is not so much a psychological question as the changing needs and aspirations, and a skepticism concerning all the competitive needs and values of the capitalist system, and the insistence on the right of sensibility, a sensuousness—that the emancipation of these from the established alienation is a decisive element in the struggle for a better society. This kind of change is still there. Its political expression is largely repressed, but it is certainly there, and not only among the students.
Malinovich: You talked about the workers.
Marcuse: And strata of the dependent bourgeoisie.
Malinovich: So what you said about France is at least as true about the United States?
Marcuse: Not everything I say there about France would apply to the United States. You cannot say that it was a revolutionary movement here; in France it may well have been, and in Italy too.
Malinovich: So even in the sixties you never believed that the U.S. student movement was a revolutionary movement, but would it be correct to say that you felt it would be a step in the right direction, a consciousness-raising experience?
Marcuse: Even more, I would say the expression of a qualitatively different struggle and qualitatively different aims.
Malinovich: Do you consider that Third World economic and social problems are caused to a very large extent by colonialism or Western imperialism?
Marcuse: Not exclusively, but to a considerable extent, yes. I would not, for example, in any way put what is going on today in Uganda on the account of colonialism. That’s ridiculous.
Malinovich: A political-scientist friend of mine estimates that the contribution of colonialism has been in the area of 25 percent. His analysis is that about 75 percent of the troubles in the Third World would have been there anyway.
Marcuse: I think I agree to that. I don’t know if it’s 25 percent or 35 percent, but essentially I agree.
Certain media, subgenres, subcultures, etc. draw on certain emotions or states of mind. Take the Shakers, a celibate Christian sect that used to exist in the American Northeast: when non-Shakers want to get laid, they go out and get laid, or find a simulation thereof, but when Shakers want to get laid, they sublimate it into (prototypically) crafting a piece of furniture. Some other well-known examples exist within the space of musical subgenres: punk draws on anger, depressive black metal draws on depression, etc.; but an important difference between Shaker crafts and punk music is that Shaker furniture is not, and punk songs are, designed to bring about their own emotional sources in the minds of the viewer/listener. In the former case, a community exists that brings about and incentivizes the sublimation of a certain mental source into a certain type of product, but the product, because it doesn’t bring about its own mental source in the viewer, can’t catalyze a scene around that source; in the latter case, it can.
For an artist, craftsman, etc. to be able to sublimate an emotional source into a product, the source must be present. A punk musician who stops being angry, or a depressive black metal musician who stops being depressed, would likely end up drifting away from the scene, no longer able to relate to its idiom and the products within it, or to produce cultural artifacts in its expected mold.
The internet has made it much easier to form scenes, but it necessarily exerts systemic selection pressure upon them: those who have more time and inclination to use the internet can more easily form or influence a scene. Since time spent online funges against time spent in other pursuits, some of which are important for mental stability, internet scenes tend toward depressive mental sources; that is, the internet tends to generate scenes of depressed people who sublimate their depression into cultural artifacts that push their viewers toward depression. A radical political scene, for example, attracts depressives and produces arguments that the world is in such a state that hopeless, lethargic, fuming despair is the only rational response. Of course, radical political scenes aren’t the only things that do this…
Given this, it seems like it ought to be possible to subvert an idiom, to create artifacts within an idiom that draws on and promulgates a certain source such that the artifacts promulgate a different source while remaining recognizably within that idiom, socially if not stylistically, and thereby break the feedback loop that spreads/intensifies that source and allow its audience/the members of the scene an escape from it.
Imagine a hypothetical poetry student, who is drawn to poetry out of a sense of depression or alienation, and, upon reading more and more poetry, becomes more and more drawn to the vision of himself as a deep, depressive poetic-type, begins writing poetry in that mold, starts or joins a scene of like-minded people who all wrote and read deep, depressive poetry and, in so doing, becomes more and more committed to the concomitant vision—and then reads F. T. Marinetti, whose poetry, being about the glories of war, action, and speed, is aesthetically almost the exact opposite of the relevant mood, while still remaining within the poetic world our student is operating in. Maybe our hypothetical student abandons the depressive, poetic vision and goes out and buys a motorcycle. Or, for that matter, imagine a philosophy student who believes that the Great Questions are deeply important, and that it is therefore necessary for him to live up to the ascetic philosophical ideal of the ‘Life of the Mind’. What could happen when he reads Marinetti? Well, I don’t go in for that Life of the Mind shit anymore.
Two other examples of subversion that come to mind are transcendental black metal, which seems to be aware of, and even intend, its subversive quality, and the scene that coalesced around Mencius Moldbug, which in recent years has thrown off its depressive mindset and started focusing on taking practical steps to cultivate a better life.
In addition to the right-Reddit, there is now a left-Reddit, sponsored by Lena Dunham and advertised by leftist press-release reprinter TechCrunch, previously known for doxing Mencius Moldbug.
Given the Rabid Puppies and so on, it seems likely that fandoms will pillarize. I hear that the interactive fiction world has already split along political lines: choice-based interactive fiction is apparently associated with the left, and parser-based interactive fiction with the right. To round out the pillars, is there a Christian interactive fiction industry? Christians are one of the two groups in America that have completed the process of pillarization—Christian rock, Christian colleges, Christian video games, even a Christian brand of mints (yes, really; they sold them at the Adventist store when I was young, and yes, there are such things as Adventist stores)—so it wouldn’t surprise me. Then again, Rod Dreher doesn’t seem to think there’s such a thing as a Christian pillar.
American cartoons are mostly left-coded, leaving the right with anime and My Little Pony.
And the Ghostbusters reboot—at a time when the studios are seemingly incapable of coming up with new ideas, and relying mostly on, of all things, comic-book superhero films—is being marketed with the same techniques as Hillary Clinton (and, arguably, as 12 Years a Slave): you should consume this product because it is politically obligatory for Right-Thinking People to consume this product. If this strategy works, it will be reused.
Speaking of Hillary Clinton, remember that pillarization in the Netherlands was consciously chosen by political elites:
The Dutch parties, deciding to recruit their followers exclusively from an ideologically clearly defined group, had to anticipate two consequences—a desirable and an undesirable one: By pillarization they could ensure a longlasting, nearly blind loyalty but on the other hand they had to accept a strict limitation of their sphere of influence, because all members of different religious or ideological groups were by definitionem beyond reach. …
They compared the disadvantages of limiting their sphere of influence with the big advantages: if a realistic chance could be expected to gain a majority, pillarization would be the best strategy possible for gaining both: majority and loyal voters.
And remember that Dutch pillarization was functional because of the strong tradition of cooperation among the elites of the different pillars.
No such tradition exists here.
A party defining itself merely as the representative of a certain, clearly distinguishable part of the population, automatically rafrains from addressing itself to potential voters not belonging to this part of the population. It sets drastic limits to its potential voter-reservoir. This self-chosen restraint only seems sensible if there is a likelihood of compensating for this loss of possible voters by an eventually total absorption of the chosen group. To this end the parties not only claimed to be the only representatives of this part of the population. They moreover tried to integrate their followers as totally as possible into their sphere of influence, mainly by creating a system of organizations and associations that corresponded to the various party lines. The result was a fairly complete exclusiveness and absorption of all members of the group in question. The pillars thus created were defined by their belief or ideology and deliberately closed to non-members.
At this stage it becomes clear, that the Socialist pillar is oriented along the same lines as the denominational pillars. The Socialists too had a clearly defined reservoir of followers—the workers. They had a common ideology; they closed their front against dissenting ideologies; they created a broad network of organizations and associations into which they tried to integrate all social activities of their followers. They used the same ideologically based exclusiveness and the same totality of absorbing their followers as the denominational parties did. The only difference was that they could not take over an existing network of church associations—they had to create everything from scratch. So the Dutch parties, deciding to recruit their followers exclusively from an ideologically clearly defined group, had to anticipate two consequences—a desirable and an undesirable one: By pillarization they could ensure a longlasting, nearly blind loyalty but on the other hand they had to accept a strict limitation of their sphere of influence, because all members of different religious or ideological groups were by definitionem beyond reach. …
It appears very much as if the parties decided to choose pillarization after checking the costs and benefits of mobilizing ideologically defined groups. They compared the disadvantages of limiting their sphere of influence with the big advantages: if a realistic chance could be expected to gain a majority, pillarization would be the best strategy possible for gaining both: majority and loyal voters. Indeed, all three parties—the Catholics, orthodox Protestants and Socialists—seem to have reckoned with this possibility. The Catholics expected to gain a majority among the population in a surprisingly short time because of their high fertility rate. They dreamed of the ’Catholic Netherlands’ and of an unchallenged political superiority. The orthodox Protestants clearly wanted to gain as many voters as possible from liberal Protestantism. They at least explicitly strived for the Protestant’s dominance and for a structuring of social life according to their religious beliefs. The Socialists assumed that the workers would help them to gain a majority at the polls, as they likewise hoped in other countries too. All three of the parties could reasonably count on winning the majority because of the considerable overlapping of the categorial groups (for example among the Catholic and Protestant workers). The condition was that they succeeded in mobilizing totally their specific reservoirs. The course of events however showed that the parties considerably overestimated their possibilities of such total mobilization. Only the Catholic were able to win over nearly the whole Catholic part of the population. They profited mostly from the support of the organizationally united Catholic church. The Socialists and especially the Protestants were less successful. So it is no surprise that the ’doorbraak’ — a refrainment from pillarization — was explicitly justified by the disappointment of hopes for a majority.
Pillarization in the Netherlands is linked so closely to the origin and the behaviour of the political parties, that each attempt to explain it without reference to these parties must necessarily lead to contradictions. Pillarization is not the consequence of struggles for emancipation or for protecting the identity of the churches only, it is mainly an effect of the mobilization activities of the Dutch political parties, focussing on religious and ideologically defined groups and arguments, during a time of specific conflicts.
Discussing a number of hypotheses, Lijphart concludes that there are two factors, plus one indirect explanation and one comprehensive explanation. (Politics 1968, ch. 5) The two factors are firstly, the basic sense of nationalism among the members of all four blocs, which is reinforced by a few national symbols, and secondly, the crosscutting of the religious and class cleavages. The first factor promotes unity and the second diminishes sharp divisions. The so-called indirect explanation is the deferential character of the Dutch political culture: Dutch politics is “highly elitist” and the masses accept this elitist leadership. (Politics 1968, 102) The reason for this is to be found in the comprehensive “explanans,” in itself the crux of Dutch political stability, namely, the spirit of accommodation among the political elites. “That is the secret of its success.” (Politics 1968, 103)
nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst 
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