Maybe-Mathematical Musings

very high net immigration rates (the per capita ones) simply are not possible for large countries. fun number trivia: to have a net immigration rate as high as luxembourg’s, the US would have to import all of Italy or France every 10 years. to get a net immigration rate as high as Qatar’s, the US would have to import all of the Netherlands every year.

this is a good thing, though! it means big countries can absorb comparatively more migrants with less short-term disruption–the US has tons of small towns and cities people can move to, form immigrant communities in, and start living their lives.

you could turn the question around and ask, ok, but what would the US look like if it suddenly had a huge amount of immigration from poorer countries? wouldn’t it be poorer itself? well yes, on average, it would. because moving to a new country doesn’t instantly give you a salary that’s average for that new country. but the people already living in the US wouldn’t become poorer–they would probably become richer, because immigration is a net benefit to the economy. and the people moving would become richer over time. so the actual amount of wealth available to everyone would increase, even if on paper the US per capita gdp went down. obviously the wealth of new immigrants would go up faster if there was a UBI available to them, and in that respect, a UBI could be an important equalizing tool between old citizens and new citizens, a valuable source of capital to start new small businesses or to invest in education.

So the question (in the context of the original post) is: in an open borders situation, what actually imposes the limit?  Especially in an open borders + UBI situation.

Like, the US is really far away from open borders right now.  We could (and probably should) double or triple immigration while still being really far away from open borders.  And that’s because so goddamn many people want to immigrate.  Gallup says 150 million people would move to the US if they could.  (And that’s without the addition of UBI as hypothesized in the original post!)

And obviously that would be fucking unmanageable over a few years.  So like one response here is to say yes, we’d never allow a hundred million immigrants in a five-year period.  And that is true.  But that’s denying the hypothetical of “open borders”.

So if we did move to an actual open borders situation, how many people would actually move here?  It probably wouldn’t be 150m; talk is cheap.  But would it be 50m?  20m?  Honestly, 20m over five years sounds manageable.  (There are currently about 750k green cards per year, so that would be quintupling the flow.)  But 50m definitely isn’t.  Would the inflow be self-limiting?  What would create the limit?

keep forgetting that we do italics like this and not like *this* here

Markdown editor sucks. (I keep trying to use it, but it sucks. It doesn't even fully implement Markdown!)

(On the Old Post Editor, the markdown editor randomly deletes all your line breaks on posting sometimes.)

But I've always been confused why Markdown allows *this* to be italics. That's obviously bold! _this_ is italics.

(In my Markdown code I use _this_ and **this** so everything is unambiguous.)

I've always known _this_ to be underlined, and /this/ to be italics.

Underlining is just italics for handwriting, right?  That’s a big part of why I’m used to that convention.

keep forgetting that we do italics like this and not like *this* here

Markdown editor sucks. (I keep trying to use it, but it sucks. It doesn't even fully implement Markdown!)

(On the Old Post Editor, the markdown editor randomly deletes all your line breaks on posting sometimes.)

But I've always been confused why Markdown allows *this* to be italics. That's obviously bold! _this_ is italics.

(In my Markdown code I use _this_ and **this** so everything is unambiguous.)

begging people to understand that the territory between the post cold war cross-party neoliberal consensus of the 1990s when the two parties just seemed like minor aesthetic variants on the same basic political formula and a complete rupture of the political order that results in a shooting war between two significantly-sized armed factions is vast, and the midpoint is not “a mob with no plan and no organized elite support breaks into the capitol building and one of them gets shot in the face.”

Yeah I think that like

If you live in a modern liberal democracy, it’s easy to underestimate just how much space there is at the bottom.  A shitty mediocre dysfunctional state today is so much better than, like, 90% of everything that’s happened.  I’m not talking about the US, I’m talking about like Central American countries that have persistent gang violence problems and large areas of the country that can’t be policed; that’s still above the historical average, right?

This is, honestly, the big intellectual reason I am small-c conservative.  Things are not as they could be, and there are ways to improve them, and that’s important.  But they are so much better than the, uh, “baseline”, that we really need to maintain an appreciation for how much we have, and not wreck it in pursuit of perfection.

If you could flip a coin, and heads the US becomes a social democratic utopia that’s richer than Luxembourg and more egalitarian than Sweden, but tails the US becomes a genuine failed state like Somalia, or for that matter a median successful sate as of like 1600, you should not flip that coin.

>no trains

>no healthcare

>no democracy

>fundies everywhere

>staggering levels of violent crime matched only by police brutality and corruption

some "developed" country

sorry, but the rhetorical tic where people treat “developed country” like it’s a value judgement rather than a renaming of the category “first world country” (which definitionally included the US) is dumb. yes, the US is an outlier in a number of respects, yes it has particular problems, but its per capita gdp places it solidly in the “developed” category (ranked 13th), and it is more democratic than the overwhelming majority of most countries on earth (ranked 30th). "the US isn’t a developed country” is a reflexive self-hating sneer popularized by american progressives on twitter, not a reasonable assessment of the category “developed country.”

Sure, but wait, what are the actual criteria of a “developed country,” why is “some rich people there are getting even richer and they’re already very rich” used here as an inherently valid metric that should be accepted without explanation. Like, what’s the argument for having GDP and (someone’s) determination of how democratic it is be the one set of factors to rule them all?

AFAIK “developed country” doesn’t have a strict definition. the terms first, second, and third world were originally purely political descriptors, describing the US/NATO bloc, the Soviet bloc, and unaligned countries during the cold war. the expression “third world” came to denote “poor, often undemocratic, often politically unstable countries” in this time period because a lot of the third world countries were post-colonial states dealing with the common postcolonial issues of, well, poverty, authoritarianism, and political instability

but after the end of the cold war the term “third world” was even more incoherent, so it fell out of use, and people have been groping for a substitute ever since. “global south” is another, but since it includes countries like australia and new zealand south of almost all countries in the “global south,” it’s not quite reached universal appeal. “developing country” contains a certain hope/ideological implication that the countries it’s applied to just don’t have mature markets and industries yet, but they will get there for (whig history|application of neoliberal policies|gradual spread of technology) reasons.

because it’s a functional replacement for “third world,” “developing/developed” isn’t a purely economic dichotomy. some people definitely use it as a drop-in replacement for what third world sometimes meant, which was a straightforward sneer aimed at countries largely populated by ethnic groups they dislike. but its common usage certainly seems to focus mainly on economics; the tops of lists like per capita gdp and the HDI certainly seem to closely correlate with what people usually mean when they say “developed country,” with some small outliers like Brunei and Qatar being notable exceptions (both countries with rich petroleum sectors but a lack of economic diversity)

if we want to use a vibes-based definition, we could easily accuse norway of being a developing country (petrostate), or britain (years of austerity + decimation of the NHS), or italy (run by fascists). but this is why replacing the function of descriptive terminology with vibes-based definitions used to indicate disapproval of current political conditions is a stupid way to conduct political discourse, that fucks up your ability to understand the world. if you’re going to call the US a developing country, you have to explain why it’s the only developing country that’s also a military superpower and the largest economy in the world, and sure, maybe you can construct a definition of developing country that consistently includes both the US and, like, Sierra Leone, but it’s not going to be a useful definition for anybody, except for maybe the Qataris sitting on their pile of oil money looking down at everybody who lives in a country with a lower per capita gdp than them (which is all of them).

I also wanted to call out something that athingbynatureprodical said which I think reflects a common misapprehension.  

Yes, the rich people in America are very rich and getting richer.  And the median person in America is also very rich and getting richer.  According to the OECD, the US has a higher median inceom  than basically anyone except Switzerland, Norway, and Luxembourg; switching to median drops Ireland a ton (as expected), and more surprisingly to me bumps Austria, Canada, and Australia up above Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden (I would not have expected Sweden to do worse on median than on average).  

I’m having way more trouble finding 10th percentile figures.  This link has the US slightly lagging Canada, Germany, Britain, and Australia in 10th percentile incomes, but only barely!  

Playing around with this site, an income of $12000/year puts a family of three at the tenth percentile in the US.  That would put you in the bottom 9% in Germany or France, the bottom 8% of Sweden or Luxembourg, and the bottom 10% of Canada or Australia.   (But I’m not sure how much I trust these numbers.)  The US is so rich that our bottom ten percent are competitive with other countries that are much, much more equal than we are.

(I really want to find numbers that adjust for taxes and transfers but I genuinely have no idea if these do.)

>no trains

>no healthcare

>no democracy

>fundies everywhere

>staggering levels of violent crime matched only by police brutality and corruption

some "developed" country

sorry, but the rhetorical tic where people treat “developed country” like it’s a value judgement rather than a renaming of the category “first world country” (which definitionally included the US) is dumb. yes, the US is an outlier in a number of respects, yes it has particular problems, but its per capita gdp places it solidly in the “developed” category (ranked 13th), and it is more democratic than the overwhelming majority of most countries on earth (ranked 30th). "the US isn’t a developed country” is a reflexive self-hating sneer popularized by american progressives on twitter, not a reasonable assessment of the category “developed country.”

Yeah, "no healthcare" and "no democracy" are wild exaggerations that obscure way more than they reveal. Like, the modern United States is one of the most democratic societies that has ever existed in history; even taking the "ranked 30th" at face value, like, that's in the top 20% of the world today and easily at the top of, say, the world a hundred years ago.

But I also wanted to amplify on the "GDP per capita" thing, because like, saying it's "ranked 13th" wildly undersells how rich the US is. I'm gonna use World Bank data because it's easy for me to get and a bit more comprehensive than the IMF data; the World Bank has the US at 11th in PPP terms and 12th in nominal terms. (I looked at a few lists and couldn't find one that had the US at 13th but I totally believe there is one. This list keeps us relatively low because it's more comprehensive.)

But then let’s look at those countries that outrank the US.  In PPP, the list is: Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Qatar, Bermuda, Norway, Switzerland, UAE, Cayman Islands, Macau.  Now first of all a couple of those GDP numbers are basically fake because they have to do with bank routing, but again let’s take them at face value.  If you add up the populations of all ten of those countries, it’s a little less than  40 million people.  The USA, of course, has 330 million people.  You have to go down another eight places on the list to hit a country that’s even vaguely in the same weight class as the US (Germany, which is 20% poorer per capita but has some real advantages that compensate for this, partly in reduced working hours.)

Like yeah, living in Norway or Switzerland seems like a sweet gig, but those countries are, relatively speaking, tiny.  I think Noah Smith put it that the US is the biggest rich country and the richest big country, and neither of those contests is close. 

Like, I think a lot of people would want to put Spain and Portugal in the “developed country” bucket. Portugal has literally half the GDP per capita that the US does.  Spain is at like 4/7.  Japan, which is probably the second-biggest rich country and arguably the second-richest big country, is at 60% of American GDP per capita.  The US is just wildly off-scale for most reasonable comparisons here.

morbidly curious about who trump might select as his running mate this time. the only people who might be willing to take the job seem like they’d have to be even crazier than he is.

He is allegedly considering Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Kristi Noem.

I have no idea how seriously to take those reports.

Last night I went back to playing KH: Birth By Sleep, and I did the (first) Vanitas fight in Ventus’s storyline.

And god is that fight a collection of every single thing I don’t like in KH fights. He constantly breaks your target lock. He can one-shot you from across the field, which means you can’t back up and get a breather and recharge. He can break out of basically any combo whenever he wants.

He has lots of iframes where your keyblade just goes through him, which always feels unfair to me. And he has them in a stagger animation out of a big attack, which means you can dodge his attack, attack him to punish, your attack just phases through him, and then he hits you. It sucks!

I died like thirty times (with like four different builds), and then decided I wasn’t having fun and stopped. That fight is awful! It feels a lot like the Terra fight from KH2FM. But the Terra fight is the hardest superboss, not a story fight in the first third of the game.

I could grind a bit and it would be easier; it would be nice to have damage above the floor, and also it would help a lot of I get either Leaf Bracer or Second Chance. (Or any of the abilities that speed up my recovery.) But I like to play by no-grinding to make the game an interesting challenge.

Or I complained about this on a stream and someone told me a cheese strat. And I’m really tempted, even though I hate that. I try to play blind, so even knowing that strat works isn’t something I’d want. And I just don’t like doing the cheese, if I didn’t figure it out myself. I’ve only done that for one KH fight so far. Which was, again, Terra.

It turns out this fight is much easier if you’re not wildly underleveled, and do more than chip damage.

I normally play with zero-intentional-grinding, but I decided to break that rule and suddenly the fight was easy. Which is, of course, the problem with grinding.

my total layman's perspective on latin is that meaning seems bizarrely underspecified. its like toki pona. maybe because in the modern age you mostly see like, pithy quotes and mottos which select for shortness? but theres somehting here. like the extremely free word order. maybe itd be more obvious if i knew all the inflections, and the ambiguity is being resolved in there

you could not be more painfully monolingually anglophone if you tried

yeah but like. inflections are stupid. this is known. doing grammar structurally is way better

Gotta side with Summer on this one. The Latin cases resolve some of the ambiguity but are *way* less fine-grained than normal prepositions. Of course you can use normal prepositions if you choose but you have expanded options to be vague and pithy, which helps for quotability.

not to be a morphology simp, but--a lot of the use case for cases is to distinguish different uses of prepositions! ablative vs accusative “in” for instance. that’s two prepositions for the price of one! and don’t tell me English prepositions are more specific, when a preposition like “to” gets used for seventeen different things. the latin dative is only used for like eight

Well again it’s not quite that you can’t use proposition but that you can forgo them. An ablative can mean basically anything you want, if you believe in yourself

in practice cases uses are pretty well defined, though! this page lists nine different uses of the ablative, for instance, which is a lot (the Latin ablative collapses a couple distinct PIE cases), but they’re in four or five broad categories, and some are very specific. and it’s still much less overloaded than the English preposition “to”

I gotta say, I really hate the classification of the ablative like they have in that page, though.  It’s the ablative of ablativity, because that’s an ablative-feeling concept.

Obviously you can’t teach it that way, but if you understand the language, if you actually speak it, that’s how you think about it, right?  And one reason I stopped studying classics in college is that I could translate all the stuff correctly but I lost points on tests for not being able to tell you which Official Dative Classification that noun was in.  It’s the Dative of Giving, you assholes!  

Now, Summer is essentially right that Latin is like uncomfortably compact compared to English.  It wants to pack a ton of meaning into very few words.  (More so than Ancient Greek, even though we compare those languages in a lot of ways and Greek arguably has more available inflections.)  But that compactness doesn’t make it especially ambiguous, because the inflections pack a ton of meaning into those words.

(Also to be fair we’re regularly exposed to Latin that is functionally poetic, and poetry uses ambiguity and elision in a way normal speech doesn’t.)

But the other thing is that, as someone commented on some other branch, that making different distinctions isn’t the same as not making distinctions.  But you look for the distinctions you have in your native language, and not for the obviously weird and artificial ones that only exist in your second language.

yeah i mean sometimes the classifications grammarians make for the uses of a construction feel sort of arbitrary--wiktionary lists the use of English “to” + infinitive as separate from “to” + implied infinitive, and that’s pretty hairsplitty

on the other hand, the Latin ablative really is historically a merger of the Proto-Indo-European ablative, instrumental, and locative cases, and its uses reflect that, and it’s helpful to know that (or I find it helpful to know that) when people wonder why it seems like it has such varied meanings that have nothing to do with one another

If they’d told me that in school it would have been way more helpful!  Like, “instrumental, locative, away-from” is a useful classification and also historically accurate.

But we were taught it’s the “garbage can” case which has like twelve unrelated uses.  But in high school they didn’t make us identify which thing off this list it was in any given sentence, and in college they did, so I stopped taking the classes because that was annoying.

Like, here’s the list for the Dative in Attic Greek, which is the one I actually took in college and the one I’m directly complaining about.  And you can tell that, like, the Greek dative got IE dative, locative, and instrumental (the genitive got true ablative).  But this list is more than that, and I didn’t like tests that asked me to remember that “the Ethical Dative” is a thing and is distinct from the “Dative of Advantage”.

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

@necarion and I were talking earlier today about Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.  He has a society that has extremely rigid gender roles—like to the extent that men and women eat totally different styles of cuisine.  (Eating sweet food as man, or spicy food as a woman, is taboo.)  Men fight and lead but can’t read or write, and women read and write but can’t fight or lead.

But he’s also pretty explicit that this culture has zero issue with gay relationships.  And that honestly makes no sense in-world, right?  Both in the sense that societies with rigid gender roles tend to be, well, rigid about them, and in the sense that “wait, you’re married to a man?  Then who does your reading for you?” is a perfectly reasonable question in that world, in a way that “wait which one of you does the laundry” isn’t in ours.

On the other hand, this is the sort of society where transness seems very plausible.  In fact, even in canon it has an explicitly codified third gender, a sort of priesthood whose members don’t count as male or female.  (So if e.g. you’re a man who wants to learn to read, you have to become a priest.  But that role has its own set of restrictions.)   

But it would actually make sense, and be interesting, if you were allowed to switch to the other gender role, as long as you did it completely.  Even if you were AMAB you can be a woman, but you must wear dresses and hide your left hand in public and eschew leadership roles and stop eating spicy food.  And then you might imagine this society totally allowing two AMABs to marry, but only if one of them is inhabiting the male gender role and the other is inhabiting the female gender role.  (And maybe this society feels totally uncomplicated about agreeing that one is a man and the other is a woman.  She reads and eats strawberries, right?)

And that’s way more interesting in a lot of ways than “oh yeah, don’t worry, all my characters are fine with gay people, so if you’re gay you can feel included.”  But Sanderson is super big on explicit by-the-book inclusivity, in a way that I think sometimes gets really awkward.  And I suspect this is partly from a good-faith belief in the sort of thing you’re talking about.  And it’s partly because, well, he’s a relatively conservative Mormon, and if he wrote a book where his protagonists weren’t comfortable with homosexuality, people might attribute those beliefs to him.  He doesn’t have cover to experiment in that way.

i feel like a society where nobody who is in charge of shit reads has bigger problems

Oh definitely. You’re not supposed to think this is a good setup!

(Although important men do consume books.  They just have to do it as audiobooks, by having a woman read aloud to them.  Which is part of why the “wait, so who does your reading for you?” is such an important question.  In military units it’s very important that one of the men have a wife or a sister so that she can read dispatches and keep the books for the unit.)

But that’s part of my point.  No one is going to read this setup and think “Ah, prolific male author Brandon Sanderson thinks men shouldn’t be allowed to read or write.”  So he can explore that fucked up and frankly kind of stupid system without anyone thinking, or feeling, that he’s advocating for it.

But if he said “also they’re not cool with gay people” then it would be a whole Thing.

this (with the transness inclusion) is actually pretty similar to my headcanon for Qunari from Dragon Age, who are introduced as having such incredibly rigid gender roles that the first Qunari NPC will more readily believe you are a weird looking man than a woman fighter, and then later said to be more accepting of a trans male human character than humans were. you just don’t know what qunari have under their armour bc by this point gender *is* ‘do you want to be a soldier or a teacher?’

anyway i’ve not read this series but having all book learning mediated through women seems like a setup for even more illicit exercise of soft power by powerful mens wives and mothers than real history

it’s so incredibly charming that someone thinks no one is going to read this setup and think “ah, Brandon Sanderson thinks men shouldn’t be allowed to read and write” or “women shouldn’t be allowed to be political leaders” while posting this literally on Tumbr, the website where at least half of the posters are 100% going to announce that this is indeed their reading, and then compete with each other over who can most loudly denounce Brandon Sanderson for sexism.

I think those things are very different! I could very easily see someone accusing Sanderson of thinking women shouldn't be allowed to be leaders. (That would be a dumb criticism given the totality of his work, but I wouldn't be surprised if some people were making it. I'm sure they are!)

But no one (plus or minus epsilon) is going to accuse him of thinking men shouldn't be allowed to read and write, for two reasons. One is that he is in fact a male writer, so like come the fuck on. And the other, probably more important one, is that it doesn't touch on any big culture war topics; there isn’t a body of conservative Mormons who think that men shouldn’t be allowed to read, or anything, so there’s no source for that allegation and no one is going to engage in it.

Now maybe you could get someone to argue that, because people are silly sometimes.  But it’s a rounding error; he’s not going to worry about getting in trouble over that, or about alienating his readership.  Whereas “Sanderson is homophobic” is a fundamentally plausible charge that a bunch of his readers would get very mad about.

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

@necarion and I were talking earlier today about Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.  He has a society that has extremely rigid gender roles—like to the extent that men and women eat totally different styles of cuisine.  (Eating sweet food as man, or spicy food as a woman, is taboo.)  Men fight and lead but can’t read or write, and women read and write but can’t fight or lead.

But he’s also pretty explicit that this culture has zero issue with gay relationships.  And that honestly makes no sense in-world, right?  Both in the sense that societies with rigid gender roles tend to be, well, rigid about them, and in the sense that “wait, you’re married to a man?  Then who does your reading for you?” is a perfectly reasonable question in that world, in a way that “wait which one of you does the laundry” isn’t in ours.

On the other hand, this is the sort of society where transness seems very plausible.  In fact, even in canon it has an explicitly codified third gender, a sort of priesthood whose members don’t count as male or female.  (So if e.g. you’re a man who wants to learn to read, you have to become a priest.  But that role has its own set of restrictions.)   

But it would actually make sense, and be interesting, if you were allowed to switch to the other gender role, as long as you did it completely.  Even if you were AMAB you can be a woman, but you must wear dresses and hide your left hand in public and eschew leadership roles and stop eating spicy food.  And then you might imagine this society totally allowing two AMABs to marry, but only if one of them is inhabiting the male gender role and the other is inhabiting the female gender role.  (And maybe this society feels totally uncomplicated about agreeing that one is a man and the other is a woman.  She reads and eats strawberries, right?)

And that’s way more interesting in a lot of ways than “oh yeah, don’t worry, all my characters are fine with gay people, so if you’re gay you can feel included.”  But Sanderson is super big on explicit by-the-book inclusivity, in a way that I think sometimes gets really awkward.  And I suspect this is partly from a good-faith belief in the sort of thing you’re talking about.  And it’s partly because, well, he’s a relatively conservative Mormon, and if he wrote a book where his protagonists weren’t comfortable with homosexuality, people might attribute those beliefs to him.  He doesn’t have cover to experiment in that way.

seems worth mentioning that as far as I remember the only place in canon where the Vorin (men-can’t-read culture) attitude to homosexuality even comes up it’s to be contrasted with the Azir attitude to homosexuality, which do more or less exactly the thing you describe. amab people can socially reassign themselves to the social role of woman to be allowed relationships with other amab people (while otherwise the Azir being much less strict on gender roles, by comparison)

there’s an argument you could make that these attitudes to homosexuality seem mismatched to the respective cultures and Sanderson let the Vorin be the less homophobic ones just cause most of the main characters are Vorin. but, well, maybe he was just making up cultures. worth saying that whether the vorin are homophobic or not has mattered very little so far, there’s like one minor gay character on-page so far.

Yeah, that’s a big part of my issue, that those attitudes to homosexuality are mismatched.  Like with this exchange:

And like, which one of those characters sounds like he’s from a culture with incredibly strict religious taboos about gender roles?

But yeah, I think the Vorin get to be non-homophobic because they’re the protagonists and we want them to be sympathetic.  Whereas “other cultures” can be more weird and less sympathetic because they’re over there.  And yeah, it hasn’t been relevant and that’s the point.  

There’s one minor gay character, whose role is to exist for the scene I just quoted so that Sanderson can assure the readers that, yes, the Vorin have a bunch of strange and alien gender and religious taboos, but other than that they think just like you, liberal educated reader in 2020s America.  He doesn’t want to let his cultures deviate too much from modern sensibilities even when they really should.  

my total layman's perspective on latin is that meaning seems bizarrely underspecified. its like toki pona. maybe because in the modern age you mostly see like, pithy quotes and mottos which select for shortness? but theres somehting here. like the extremely free word order. maybe itd be more obvious if i knew all the inflections, and the ambiguity is being resolved in there

you could not be more painfully monolingually anglophone if you tried

yeah but like. inflections are stupid. this is known. doing grammar structurally is way better

Gotta side with Summer on this one. The Latin cases resolve some of the ambiguity but are *way* less fine-grained than normal prepositions. Of course you can use normal prepositions if you choose but you have expanded options to be vague and pithy, which helps for quotability.

not to be a morphology simp, but--a lot of the use case for cases is to distinguish different uses of prepositions! ablative vs accusative “in” for instance. that’s two prepositions for the price of one! and don’t tell me English prepositions are more specific, when a preposition like “to” gets used for seventeen different things. the latin dative is only used for like eight

Well again it’s not quite that you can’t use proposition but that you can forgo them. An ablative can mean basically anything you want, if you believe in yourself

in practice cases uses are pretty well defined, though! this page lists nine different uses of the ablative, for instance, which is a lot (the Latin ablative collapses a couple distinct PIE cases), but they’re in four or five broad categories, and some are very specific. and it’s still much less overloaded than the English preposition “to”

I gotta say, I really hate the classification of the ablative like they have in that page, though.  It’s the ablative of ablativity, because that’s an ablative-feeling concept.

Obviously you can’t teach it that way, but if you understand the language, if you actually speak it, that’s how you think about it, right?  And one reason I stopped studying classics in college is that I could translate all the stuff correctly but I lost points on tests for not being able to tell you which Official Dative Classification that noun was in.  It’s the Dative of Giving, you assholes!  

Now, Summer is essentially right that Latin is like uncomfortably compact compared to English.  It wants to pack a ton of meaning into very few words.  (More so than Ancient Greek, even though we compare those languages in a lot of ways and Greek arguably has more available inflections.)  But that compactness doesn’t make it especially ambiguous, because the inflections pack a ton of meaning into those words.

(Also to be fair we’re regularly exposed to Latin that is functionally poetic, and poetry uses ambiguity and elision in a way normal speech doesn’t.)

But the other thing is that, as someone commented on some other branch, that making different distinctions isn’t the same as not making distinctions.  But you look for the distinctions you have in your native language, and not for the obviously weird and artificial ones that only exist in your second language.

i don’t know the correct latin translation for “works” in that context (which is really closer to “functions” or “ordinarily behaves,” but ago covers such a broad semantic range i feel like it almost has to fit

“when” is “cum,” but i have no idea if latin admits using “when” in a conditional sense

and i have no idea if you use the subjunctive for the conditional clause, but i think you only do that if it’s an imagined condition rather than a condition that may or may not obtain?

Pretty sure this post should have “ago” in the subjunctive, because it’s a generic statement; see D.1 here.  (Also it just feels subjunctive to me, and I studied Latin early enough for that to be a decent guide.)  And I’m pretty sure “quomodo” takes the subjunctive in this context.

I see where you’re going with agere but I feel like the passive of facere feels more right here? So I might write 

Omnia conspiratio sunt, si nescias quomodo quicquam fiat 

or even

Omnia conspirationes sunt, si nescias quomodo fiant

because I’m not sure you really need a subject for “facere” there.  

But then I might rewrite the sentence entirely, because that’s just a very English construction.  

Nescientibus quomodo fiant, omnia conspirationes.

“To those not knowing how they are done, all things [are] conspiracies.”  (I’m waffling on which clause should go first.)

(Edit to fix grammar on “nescientibus”)

@eightyonekilograms jadagul’s latin is way better than mine, and i think that last version is quite elegant

Thanks!

Honestly it still feels a little, well, English to me.  It’s not ungrammatical (I’m pretty sure), but Latin doesn’t really use the “how this works” construction the same way English does.  I kinda want to go with just

Nescientibus, omnia conspirationes

or even

Nescientibus, omnia conspirant.

That’s a little more generic but it’s punchier and I think has more Latinity.

i don’t know the correct latin translation for “works” in that context (which is really closer to “functions” or “ordinarily behaves,” but ago covers such a broad semantic range i feel like it almost has to fit

“when” is “cum,” but i have no idea if latin admits using “when” in a conditional sense

and i have no idea if you use the subjunctive for the conditional clause, but i think you only do that if it’s an imagined condition rather than a condition that may or may not obtain?

Pretty sure this post should have “ago” in the subjunctive, because it’s a generic statement; see D.1 here.  (Also it just feels subjunctive to me, and I studied Latin early enough for that to be a decent guide.)  And I’m pretty sure “quomodo” takes the subjunctive in this context.

I see where you’re going with agere but I feel like the passive of facere feels more right here? So I might write 

Omnia conspiratio sunt, si nescias quomodo quicquam fiat 

or even

Omnia conspirationes sunt, si nescias quomodo fiant

because I’m not sure you really need a subject for “facere” there.  

But then I might rewrite the sentence entirely, because that’s just a very English construction.  

Nescientibus quomodo fiant, omnia conspirationes.

“To those not knowing how they are done, all things [are] conspiracies.”  (I’m waffling on which clause should go first.)

(Edit to fix grammar on “nescientibus”)

This is a huge step up from Bartman

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

@necarion and I were talking earlier today about Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.  He has a society that has extremely rigid gender roles—like to the extent that men and women eat totally different styles of cuisine.  (Eating sweet food as man, or spicy food as a woman, is taboo.)  Men fight and lead but can’t read or write, and women read and write but can’t fight or lead.

But he’s also pretty explicit that this culture has zero issue with gay relationships.  And that honestly makes no sense in-world, right?  Both in the sense that societies with rigid gender roles tend to be, well, rigid about them, and in the sense that “wait, you’re married to a man?  Then who does your reading for you?” is a perfectly reasonable question in that world, in a way that “wait which one of you does the laundry” isn’t in ours.

On the other hand, this is the sort of society where transness seems very plausible.  In fact, even in canon it has an explicitly codified third gender, a sort of priesthood whose members don’t count as male or female.  (So if e.g. you’re a man who wants to learn to read, you have to become a priest.  But that role has its own set of restrictions.)   

But it would actually make sense, and be interesting, if you were allowed to switch to the other gender role, as long as you did it completely.  Even if you were AMAB you can be a woman, but you must wear dresses and hide your left hand in public and eschew leadership roles and stop eating spicy food.  And then you might imagine this society totally allowing two AMABs to marry, but only if one of them is inhabiting the male gender role and the other is inhabiting the female gender role.  (And maybe this society feels totally uncomplicated about agreeing that one is a man and the other is a woman.  She reads and eats strawberries, right?)

And that’s way more interesting in a lot of ways than “oh yeah, don’t worry, all my characters are fine with gay people, so if you’re gay you can feel included.”  But Sanderson is super big on explicit by-the-book inclusivity, in a way that I think sometimes gets really awkward.  And I suspect this is partly from a good-faith belief in the sort of thing you’re talking about.  And it’s partly because, well, he’s a relatively conservative Mormon, and if he wrote a book where his protagonists weren’t comfortable with homosexuality, people might attribute those beliefs to him.  He doesn’t have cover to experiment in that way.

i feel like a society where nobody who is in charge of shit reads has bigger problems

Oh definitely. You’re not supposed to think this is a good setup!

(Although important men do consume books.  They just have to do it as audiobooks, by having a woman read aloud to them.  Which is part of why the “wait, so who does your reading for you?” is such an important question.  In military units it’s very important that one of the men have a wife or a sister so that she can read dispatches and keep the books for the unit.)

But that’s part of my point.  No one is going to read this setup and think “Ah, prolific male author Brandon Sanderson thinks men shouldn’t be allowed to read or write.”  So he can explore that fucked up and frankly kind of stupid system without anyone thinking, or feeling, that he’s advocating for it.

But if he said “also they’re not cool with gay people” then it would be a whole Thing.

this (with the transness inclusion) is actually pretty similar to my headcanon for Qunari from Dragon Age, who are introduced as having such incredibly rigid gender roles that the first Qunari NPC will more readily believe you are a weird looking man than a woman fighter, and then later said to be more accepting of a trans male human character than humans were. you just don’t know what qunari have under their armour bc by this point gender *is* ‘do you want to be a soldier or a teacher?’

anyway i’ve not read this series but having all book learning mediated through women seems like a setup for even more illicit exercise of soft power by powerful mens wives and mothers than real history

Yeah, that last thing is explicitly brought up, although not as explored as thoroughly as it could be. (One character has an epigram about "we forbade women to use the sword and we gave women the book, and sometimes I wonder if we really got the better end of that deal.)

The most explicit version of this is "undertext". Basically, most books have a set of footnotes that are never to be read or even mentioned out loud. Which means that women, who can read, will read them, but men, who have to listen to books read by women, will never even know they exist. And it's pretty explicitly a mechanism by which women, who are locked out of most formal exercises of power, can steer the actions and knowledge of the men in their lives.

Minor spoiler: there’s a bit where one particular man, who winds up as a religious renegade, decides to learn to read.  And his girlfriend winds up having to explain this setup to him, and gets pretty embarrassed in a “wait is this manipulative?  It sounds manipulative when I say it out loud” sort of way.  But of course they had good reason to be manipulative, as you point out.