[deleted]
Earnestness
131–140 of 478 posts
Re: Earnestness
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment…
Everyone forgets the Swedish empire. And the man whose name is a synonym for traitor, Vikrund Quisling. Scandinavia has hardly escaped war. If I wanted a glib answer I'd attribute it to a combination of less feudalism and more Lutheranism, plus a bit of Hanseatic trading.
It's Vidkun Quisling.
The lack of feudalism as a contrast to other nations and the excess of Lutheranism were mostly a long time ago as was the Hanseatic league. And while Scandinavia looks homogeneous to outsiders, especially to those from far away, the three countries have distinct characters and distinct histories. Part of how each behaves has to do with the climate and topology of each country as well as the accidents of history in recent centuries. At least one Danish king was famous for picking fights with his neighbours which is one reason why Denmark is so small, Sweden had a French king for a while which left its mark on the language and the structures of society. Norway for a long time was simply far away and difficult to travel in which means that decentralisation worked as there was almost no choice. Towns only 10 km apart on the map might have very distinct dialects because there is a mountain in the way meaning that it is a 100 km trip from one to the other.
The glib answers, as I suspect you were saying, are usually wrong or very partial (in both senses of the word).
Re: Earnestness
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a link from the word "bogus." I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion reaction is on one end of t…
Did you look at the references at the other end of that link? It seems like you are equating rejecting papers like that, with denying white supremacy. Would it be possible for someone to think that particular kind of academic work is of low value, and yet still think white supremacy is real?
The informative question is the converse:
Would your hypothetical someone append the word 'whiteness' to their primary example search illustrating bogus research?
Re: Earnestness
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm with you here buddy. seems like he was doing something shady the way he expressed it. probably lonely and providing alcohol/drugs for minors in order to have company.
> it sounds shady so it probably was c'mon catch people a break. Maybe they were a former alchy giving AA advice to troubled kids, maybe they don't like talking about their religion online
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Re: Earnestness
#135> Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even when used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite. It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be a handicap, but also in office politics and academic politics. I don't think this is always the case. I've found that no matter the size of the business, they are made up of people, and people have bullshit detectors. When yo…
PG seems to have a cynical conception of what "politics" is, since he seems to be saying that practising it is anathema to earnestness. I understand what he means if by "politics" he means self-interest and hoodwinking voters. And that may be his experience of politicians, but it doesn't define the field any more than Mulligans define golf. Champion golfers don't take Mulligans, don't kick their ball closer to the ho…
But I kinda feel like your example proves the point, because I've never seen MLK described as a "politician" or "political figure". Politics as most people understand it is the process of deciding who ought to run the government, and King specifically avoided discussing this (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/sta...) because he felt that doing so would undercut his mission of social change.
Re: Earnestness
#136These essays are getting ridiculous. We get it, you have tons of experience funding companies so it helps you to do a competent job filtering the candidates.But after that it is pretty much a crap-shoot, and all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego.
Re: Earnestness
#137The word "earnest" seems a bit antiquated to me. I've rarely used it since I was a child, except in the phrase "earnest money". https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnest-money.asp
I guess "honest", "dedicated", "non-flaky", "good follow-through", and "good track record" would be terms I would use to communicate it instead.
Edit: oops, I hadn't yet read the second paragraph.
Re: Earnestness
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scandinavian countries are not really countries. More like a family club. (This is starting to change though) When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and Japan. Contrast this with their similarily northern neighbour Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A nation resulting from a melting pot of ethnicitiess, languages, cultur…
Poland is very uniform in term of cultural background and origins (and everyone is white), and yet has very low trust levels.
Poland (and most of Eastern Europe) has been steamrolled repeatedly by neighboring empires which have imposed what amounted to foreign governments. These governments ruled despite, not due to, the local populations. Ergo secret police, network of informants, etc, just to control the population.
It's hard to have very high trust levels when your own government and state are working against you and when your coworkers and neighbors can at any time rat you out for unpatriotic activities.
Re: Earnestness
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant they escaped the world wars and the rest of the turmoils of the 20th century. Largely because they didn't have deep historic conflicts with the rest of the big empires. I mean, sure, not completely, they definitely had some of their population deported by Nazis, but it wasn't such a major impact as elsewhere in Europe.
They definitely did not escape any recent war. The WWII in Scandinavia was particularly bad, including the occupation of Norway and Denmark. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Weserübung They did escape the contemporary ones the same way any other country in Europe did anyway.
Norway and Denmark (as well as France) were treated with kiddie gloves compared to what occupation in Eastern Europe meant.
Re: Earnestness
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you look at the references at the other end of that link? It seems like you are equating rejecting papers like that, with denying white supremacy. Would it be possible for someone to think that particular kind of academic work is of low value, and yet still think white supremacy is real?
The informative question is the converse: Would your hypothetical someone append the word 'whiteness' to their primary example search illustrating bogus research?
If some particular research they thought was bogus was about the concept of whiteness, why wouldn’t they?