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TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
@tracewoodgrains
Jan 10 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
that barrier between people who learn languages as children and those who learn it as adults? realistically, it exists in many more fields. we're not culturally equipped to understand what native-level proficiency even looks like on most topics.
these are all research-backed. but we have no systematic understanding of critical and sensitive periods, only glimpses in some of the most obvious fields and observational lessons from intensive training programs. minds do not remain open forever.

two good, simultaneous examples from @KevinF_26 and @aniwacked that cause problems for the idea that adults can match kids given equivalent time

adults put ungodly amounts of time into video game proficiency, and then small kids come along and blow them away Image
it is very, very comfortable to imagine that it is only a matter of time spent and some level of innate capacity, and that adult learners can generally reach the same comfort as childhood learners given enough time and focus.

it is also false.

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More from @tracewoodgrains

TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Nov 21, 2024
thinking I should probably read an Ayn Rand book at some point to figure out what all the fuss is about

will I become (more) insufferable upon doing so
which one should I read?
some people said to read a short one so I get the point faster but I'm like two chapters into Atlas Shrugged and well I think I've figured it out
Read 4 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Nov 16, 2024
I could very easily believe something like this is happening, but this is an atrocious test of it and should be wholly disregarded. You can’t compare politicians to commentators without a ton of confounding factors entering in, and the only difference they found was for views. Image
This is either dishonest or a simple misreading of the paper. The paper found comparable increases in retweets and favorite counts for the Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats are starting from a much lower baseline because, again, they’re not comparing like with like. Image
Even for views, where they say they found a discrepancy, both groups show an increase after the change point. The Democratic accounts just start from a much, much lower baseline, because again, they are not comparing like with like. Atrocious study. Image
Read 4 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Nov 6, 2024
It may be too early for an election retrospective. It's still election night, and technically things haven't been called. It's a good time to speak candidly, though:

There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one.

But—people, and especially leftists, will say—you're a centrist! she ran to the center, did she not? spoke of unity, focused on fundamentals, stayed disciplined? And I confess: she did. But let's consider the nature of that "running to the center": well-oiled, precisely tuned gears of the Machine, turning and calculating that to win the vote, they needed to present as Normal.

Not that they were ever wrong. Not that any of their priorities were mistaken, that they had ever seriously overstepped, that they needed any serious re-examination. Just that they needed to slow-walk things, to be calm, to rely on running against Trump and repeating platitudes to waltz into the presidency.

"What will you do differently from Joe Biden?" A bold answer from Kamala: I'm not him, and I'm not Trump. Great. "What are we to make of your positions during the 2020 primary?" Well, it's not 2019 anymore, is it? "Did you ever, even once, go too far?" A laugh and a charming slice-of-life quip.

The Democrats tried to run an election on vibes alone. Kamala is brat. Kamala is normal. Kamala is all things to all people. Kamala is with the good guys and against the bad guys, with the good things and against the bad things, and shouldn't that be enough?

Look, I've been adamantly against Trump from the day he entered the national scene. I have never wavered on that. But I spend my time and my energy writing, shouting, begging someone to listen that people do not trust the Machine, and they do not trust it for good reason. Young, educated professionals are far to the left of the average American, and they are the ones in control of every institution. Institutions systematically represent their views, treating them as natural and everyone else as aberrant.

I'm on the fringes of that group, right-wing by young, educated professional standards, dead center by the standards of the country. And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.

Kamala Harris never represented me. The Democrats never signaled to me that they heard and understood my voice and voices like mine, only that they wanted to pull the right levers and press the right buttons and twist the right knobs to convince that mystical creature, the Centrist, that they were on their side.

I don't know what will happen under what looks to be four more years of Trump. I don't think it will be as dire as the worst predictions, and hope it won't be, but I remain now as ever wholly convinced that he is temperamentally unfit to be President and the country is a more volatile and uncertain place with him in charge.

But what I hope is this: the Democrats don't take this moment to lament to themselves how everyone fell victim to misinformation and imagined grievances, that they were fine and good and the people were the problem, that their problem is they were simply not pure-Left enough. Now is the time for recognition that they fundamentally, wholly failed to understand and reach the frustrated center. They have four years to get serious about doing so.Image
and yes this essay is an extended form of this but dangit I stayed in the coalition of a candidate I never wanted and never trusted from day one, and now she lost and I actually would like my priorities to be understood, thank you very much

this is how I felt all election season. Kamala did nothing, at any point in the campaign, to change it. Trump did not deserve to win this election but as far as I'm concerned, Kamala absolutely deserved to lose.

Read 6 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Nov 4, 2024
as a reminder, this is what people fought to put and keep on her Wikipedia page, suppressing every hint of accurate info for ideological reasons

I have no stake in women’s boxing and prefer a live-and-let-live approach but I really, really hate being lied to Image
my prior thread on the matter

an increasing number of people in my replies have very strong opinions about my duty to defend the integrity of a sport I have never watched and never liked

look, guys, fight your fights. but I will continue to be clear about precisely where my stake is and why
Read 5 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Oct 29, 2024
I'm getting a lot of understandable pushback on this, including from people I respect, which means it's worth expanding on at length. What was I sloppily gesturing towards with this throwaway line? In short: the fundamentally foreign nature of the "MAGA chud" archetype to me.

I grew up in Utah. Everyone knows Utah is sort of its own thing, but liberals still often clumsily lump its culture in with conservative culture more broadly. It's worth outlining my impression of white Southerners as a suburban Mormon schoolchild:
- These are the people who tell me I'm not a Christian, spread lies about my religion, and picket outside my religius events.
- These are the people whose ancestors drove my ancestors out of Missouri, in part because they worried my people would be anti-slavery.
- These are the people whose ancestors fought against my country in defense of slavery, then fought the government in defense of segregation.
- ...but these are also my allies in a sense against the godless, hedonistic Democrats and Hollywood, who misunderstand, misrepresent, and slander my morality, try to foist gay marriage on me, etc

Of course real history, and real culture, are always more complex than the self-interested stories one absorbs as a child. But the cultural tension points were real and strongly felt. Inasmuch as I recognized my heritage and culture, it was distinctly Northern, emphatically Mormon, and quintessentially American suburban middle class.

None of this has anything to do with Appalachian culture in specific, arguably the one most specifically gestured to in the quoted post. That's because I didn't think or learn about Appalachian culture at all, outside of, say, vaguely positive sentiments about Daniel Boone and frontiersmen.

The book Albion's Seed argues for the presence of four distinct settler groups in America that make this clearer: the northern Puritans (New England) and Quakers (Pennsylvania), the southern Cavaliers (Virginia) and Borderers (Appalachia). Mormons are best seen in that light as a peculiar Puritan offshoot, and the natural narrative for me can be parsed in that light.

Alongside that, I was drawn to the aesthetics and culture of (particularly Victorian) England. Many of the best childhood books I read were British classics. Lewis and Tolkien seemed obviously right about everything important (except their regrettable lack of opportunity to convert to Mormonism). E. Nesbit and Roald Dahl spun charming worlds; Arthur Rackham's illustrations defined how the fae ought to be and set me up to be frustrated with Disney forevermore. I was caught up by and inspired by the beauty and the history of institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, and more broadly the notion that there were plenty of stuffy, learned, Cultured people around who would tell me everything I was doing was wrong for esoteric reasons.

When Trump took over the Republican Party, he ushered in a period of dominance for an aesthetic and a frame that combined my natural enemies of southern culture and the hedonism, sin, and excess I associated with Hollywood and Vegas. Suddenly it really sank in just how many of the people I had vaguely assumed were my co-tribals were fundamentally foreign to me, how little my culture, my experiences, and my hopes seemed to have in common with theirs.

This was compounded by my growing sense of unease with Mormonism - not on moral grounds, as I clung to my faith's doctrine on gay marriage all the way through Obergefell, but on intellectual ones. Suddenly, awkwardly, I found myself increasingly alienated not just from the friendlier-seeming political tribe, but from my own ethnic/religious one. All around the same time, I started realizing the extent to which my imagined vision of an academic culture of stuffy old Tasteful professors in tweed jackets arguing about Matters of Consequence had become a modern-progressive monoculture, with its own off-putting and alienating mores.

I paint in broad strokes here. But I hope you understand the gestures. I was hungry to see a refined moralist conservatism somewhere—one that, even if I rejected it and it me, could credibly claim a certain moral authority in the frame I recognized—and all I saw was what Freia colorfully called "feral hillbilly amerikaners" yelling vulgarities about guns and deportations.

I have complicated feelings about this. Obviously I don't precisely relate with that tribe as a tribe, and I'm conscious at once of not wanting to judge them harshly and Noticing the harsh judgment, and misjudgment, many of them toss at me (particularly now that I'm a Gay Godless Lib and all). I'm wary of those who seek to lionize dysfunction of any sort, and in posts like Freia's I see a certain "noble savage" mythologizing. But I've also been impressed by e.g. Darryl Cooper's dives into Amerikaner culture/history, and have slowly gotten a sense of the side of the picture I was missing, and what all of that feels like from the inside.

All of this to say: I have no particular quarrel with "low-class feral hillbilly amerikaner" culture, except inasmuch as they pick fights with me and mine over things I value. I recognize why two flippant lines are nowhere near enough to convey the sort of sentiment I vaguely aimed to outline. But it is not my culture, it never has been, and it rose to prominence seemingly in place of a culture I had seen here and there, in books and hints of conversations, and hoped to find as part of the world I grew up into.Image
Image
this is an important note from a frank exchange that touches on part of my sentiment. the trope-character Freia references defends Your right against Them. that sounds great until you realize you're Them, and the "defense" includes "no family for you."

I think a big part of why I bother many on the dissident right is that I am both an obvious degen by their standards ("gay furry") while having a coherent and regularly articulated set of positive values that I unapologetically pursue.

And what bothers me about them, in turn, is that they flip between a sort of "aristocratic" notion of a well-ordered society aimed at cultivating a common good and a "folk" notion of defending freedoms against others' notions of the common good, at once outraged when others tread on them and eager to tread on others.

That's why I prefer the unapologetic elitists in some ways. If you want to impose your values on society, own it and don't hide behind a cloak of Freedom.

x.com/moonbeamdreams…
Read 4 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Oct 28, 2024
every once in a while I catch something intelligent from Vance or see Elon do something cool and think “…could I support MAGA?” and then I remember that I like immigrants and hate conspiracists and can’t stand tariffs and want nothing to do with Trump’s inner circle ever
inspired by the below
“why would you use a dark humor comedian as an example?”

bc it reminded me about how many in the Trump coalition salivate at the opportunity to insult immigrants

clean your house
Read 5 tweets

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