eigenrobot Profile picture
Jun 16, 2023 23 tweets 9 min read Read on X
the need for political groups to denigrate or idealize the past is an interesting phenomenon that isnt discussed with sufficient care i think

this is a really dreadful example of bad behavior but its helpful in highlighting how dumb this can make people and in which ways
for example there were a lot of polio cases in the early 1950s yeah

if i had to guess the spike may have been related to the baby boom

but the most notable thing about polio in the era was that the vaccine was released *into the public domain* in 1955

this was miraculous
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i havent had much success in finding data regarding womens mental health in the 1950s

s*icide figures might be most reliable as an indicator but unlike homicides there are more plausible issues here

a further issue is that these are not age adjusted, which matters

call it even Image
what is interesting is that mens suicide rates were as usual higher, but possibly noticably higher in the 50s

its curious to me that the dumb political cartoon ignores what I somewhat suspect was the most widespread mental health issue in the 50s that no one talks abt, PTSD
I dont have any proof of this but it seems likely reasonable to expect it may have been a problem, arguments about social reception and appreciation of warriors like those discussed in Sebastian Junger's _Tribe_ notwithstanding

I also have an anecdote
my great uncle was a sniper in Europe. reputedly a capable one. later in life he was an exceptional golfer.

when he demobilized he lived in a house down the street from his parents and for years would wake up in the middle of the night to run to his mother, screaming, to be held
so anyway thats probably under-discussed as a source of quiet misery for men in the 50s
no easy data on antigay sentiment

its plausible it was historically high though

arrests by entrapment were routine at least in public venues in major cities (and perhaps it would have been relatively difficult to meet in other circumstances, idk)
archive.is/YlBFK
i dont know what life was actually like for gay men in the 1950s. obviously in a lot of ways "not great" but the closet was sometimes a polite mutual fiction

eg: my extended family was well aware that another of my great uncles was gay. they remained close his whole life
a related matter is that the country was at least in some ways relatively relaxed about transgender people

when Christine Jorgensen's reassignment surgery was announced in 1952 it was billed as a Miracle of Science and the Army said, yeah, ok, we'll change your name, no prob


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the notion that american women "werent allowed" to go to college in the 1950s is risible

my maternal grandmother, born in the _1920s_, was a college-educated medical laboratory technician

this was in no way novel. america has had womens colleges for nearly 200 years
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on the point regarding molestation i frankly have no idea how to obtain data on this matter and i honestly would prefer not to look
my point is not that everything in the 1950s america was good or bad, and i hope ive not tried to covey either absurd extreme

if i had to _guess_ id say it was one of the strangest times in american history
yes we had just conquered half the world and we were suddenly richer than any people in history had ever been

but wed only half made it through two decades of war and poverty and revolution--korea itself was 1950-1953!

there were soviet spies everywhere, and they had the Bomb
images like the one that OP defaced were ads, right. they were kitsch

but you can learn alot from kitsch as ive said before
there are two deadly mistakes you can make looking at images like these

the first is to imagine that they were representative rather than aspirational; that things ever really were so uncomplicated


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the second and in my opinion more corrosive error is to perceive the difference between the idealized images and an often rough reality, then go further to refuse not only the possibility of approaching the ideal; but further still denying its value, were it somehow attained
the denial of the possibility or value of things good and transcendent is a sickness of the spirit

im sorry (not sorry) to be a mystic about this but its the most efficient means of conveying the mentality involved in nihilist aesthetics
this is an intermittent occurrence in culture but it seems to me that its reached a kind of recent zenith

@Vert_Noel and @keyofgeo pointed me at this @SMBCComics strip after id complained in verse about a parallel trend in written english

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i guess the point of this thread is that i am once again asking you to eschew luciferian despair and the ensuing embrace of hell for fear that you might not attain some heaven Image
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More from @eigenrobot

Oct 9
israel is NOT an ally of america. theyre aggressively trying to capture our strategic ashkenazi resources. is that how an ally behaves?
a true America First policy would be ANTIZIONIST

jews dont belong in israel. they belong in new york and its time to come home

the eigenrobot administration is prepared to agree to a population swap of 100 american muslims repatriated to arabia for each israeli returned to us
im also prepared to accept a "Two State' solution wherein palestinians from gaza and the west bank will be resettled in michigan territory redesignated "new palestine" and expelled from the union. in exchange the US will accept all current Israeli territory as a new 50th state
Read 5 tweets
Sep 22
cant believe ive been outed as a postrationalist

but yes im sorry the credibility revolution was a mistake and economics has long since abandoned careful empirical work for atheoretical regression slop that it massively overinterprets to mindlessly support political claims
my advice to you is if you ever want to ruin a party full of applied econometricians talking about the effect of immigration on native employment, bring up the mariel boatlift after everyone is several drinks in

you may find result enlightening and you'll certainly have some fun Image
fun inside story

when seattle implemented a $15/hr minimum wage they asked some ppl at UW to do a study of the employment effects

the big paper dropped in 2017 and found huge disemployment effects

so the city immediately disavowed it and ran to amherst for a rebuttal
Read 6 tweets
Sep 21
we can easily exploit this with secondary markets in H1B workers. all we need to do is buy up 63 H1Bs for a guaranteed successful IPO. vcs are leaving trillion dollar bills on the ground here
its a reasonable microeconomics paper with a plausible identification method and lots of regressions that are highly suggestive if you dont think about them too much

(are patents actually predictive of ipo success? are the h1bs producing these patents themselves? lol who knows) Image
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the literature review provides some complementary evidence, some of which is interesting context and some of which flatly contradicts the claim tabarrok would like to make Image
Read 15 tweets
Sep 18
Set normative considerations aside a moment.

Is there any way that Dems and the left, going forward, could credibly commit to not suppressing speech? I don't see it.

If not, is recent suppression of speech by the administration construable as strategic retaliation?
It's tricky.

This dynamic is _not_ obviously gainfully-modeled as IPD. Instead of acting simultaneously, one agent (here representing something like a D/R coalition) decides to act in each round.

Who acts next round is nondeterministic and may be affected by actions this round.
More things to consider in this model:

1. If party institutions are ahistorically weak, which I think they are now, discounting of future rounds ought to be treated as relatively intense, which makes commitment more difficult
Read 16 tweets
Sep 16
somewhere along the way i think maybe what happened was, eliezer started believing everything he thought

easy pitfall as you age, probably. IME when you spend enough time thinking, certain things crystalize and you get less patient about the process

happens to everyone prolly
the vital urge to say "ok, how is this wrong" starts to fade as you get older, because you've played that game so many times that it gets tiresome and you start to think you know what that room holds

usually you're right, but it's an easy way to get stuck
second issue is the cost of doing this sort of inquiry gets higher as you accumulate more committed beliefs or expectations

once more, you're usually more likely to be "correct" at any given moment, but updating gets very costly as your world model is built out and solidified
Read 5 tweets
Sep 13
its been a long week so tonight please relax as i relate to you the tale of a great episode in american autism Image
our third president, thomas jefferson, was immensely autistic

he spent much of his time inventing questionably useful devices, getting hung up on and beefing over irrelevant abstractions, pursuing unwise relationships w subordinates, and recording data for no particular reason Image
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he combined several of these hobbies in an extended incident in the court of france where he was serving as america's ambassador ("minister plenipotentiary") in the mid 1780s, succeeding a real scientist and charmer, benjamin franklin

big shoes to fill! and he tried. awkwardly Image
Read 23 tweets

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