I enjoyed the piece but the conclusion is weak and so broad as to be meaningless.
>So, what of the two cultures today?
Well, Snow won of course. Removing Latin and Greek in favor of more science and engineering? Teenagers used to read Thucydides. What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor"? Science and engineering will bring us material comfort? We are living in Snow's world!
>Above all, this style of thought valued analysis and exactness, and it was just this drab preoccupation with exactness that bothered Leavis, for it neglected what he considered should be the true focus of serious thinking: ‘life’. The idea of life haunts Leavis’s thought. It is central to it and yet maddeningly opaque. He believed the mark of great literature – or rather, what it is that makes great literature great – is its ability to manifest life, to summon it and make it exist for the attentive and dedicated reader. Literature is the locus of life. If a piece of writing does not make the close reader somehow sense life, then it can fairly be denied the status of literature. The absence of life is the most common cause of Leavis’s derision, with which he was so generous (even extending once to a rant against Jimi Hendrix, of all people). So: what did he mean by it? What is life?
To me this comes to mind: feeling, intuition, thinking, active, moving, creative, danger, the highs and the lows. Not-Life is the efficient modern world, the commoditized, reactive, standardized, efficient, safe, low-risk, smooth featureless extrusions of a massive system.
>It involves, in the Laurentian manner, life, lived, with intensity, experienced with full consciousness in a real, a very real, organic and intense way.
For anybody who hasn't had the pleasure of this delightful bit of English:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes —gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
English is my second language, with that in mind, I felt it may be interesting or amusing to some the parts which were "hard" for me to understand.
>Michaelmas term lately over
I had no idea that "Michaelmas" was even a thing. Nor do I think I have ever encountered the formulation of "term lately over"
>As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth
This puzzled me, as I'd imagine, if there's no water, there surely would be no mud. Apparently a reference to the great flood which makes it make sense.
>and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus
This one was funny since I properly understood (I think?) that it's meant to give a feeling of the savage, untamed, natural feel of the elements taking over London. But then I thought a reference to a Megalosaurus couldn't possibly be that. And it seems it is?
The rest was way easier, although I had to make sure what "Dogs, undistinguishable in mire" meant.
It's not presently on scihub (also, $25 for access? fuck off...), but the whole study stinks of "dickens scholar checks modern reading comp, vastly overestimates familiarity with victorian england and dickens' prose.".... .... here's the bio of the first author of the paper
> SUSAN CARLSON is a professor of English at Pittsburg State University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature,
Exactly, what exactly is an English major going to do, if YA novels are the pinnacle of reading achievement? I'm baffled, and reading more about it, concerned.
I guess I’m going to go ahead and pat myself on the back for being able to easily read through this aloud. What exactly would people struggle with here?
I knew very little of this. I know about the Inns of Court, but I didn't know this was such an Inn; I know what a chancery court is (Delaware has them!) but similarly not that it applied in this case. I've no idea what Michaelmas is, but like Christmas, I assume it's an event and/or season which occurs periodically.
I could still read the text! And it's useful to read texts and understand 95%, or 80%, or even 50%! IMO "fully understand what you're reading" versus "can't understand what you're reading" is a harmfully discouraging dichotomy. You can often gloss over such things rather than struggle with them.
I just wanted to get across that there's more detail to be wrung out of even the first line. You don't need to get all nuances on first read, but they're there. Dickens was known for his observational detail, and also he'd spent a lot of time in London courts on account of his father so knew all these terms well.
Everyone has their own comfort level with reading, and we do just skim things we think unimportant... I often do that until suddenly the book stops making sense, and I have to go back some pages and re-read things which I'd skipped that were clearly important. Different authors have different densities of load-bearing words.
I think it's forgivable if you gloss over this first line and think it might be set in a hotel during a holiday, with some random high-ranking person, because the next 800 pages will make it pretty clear it's about a court. But I am worried that these students, hoping to get an degree in English, would rather guess what's being said, when they had the opportunity to look things up. An afternoon on Wikipedia would do them a world of good.
No of course not, nor did I need to to read the passage.
It sounds to me like you are you are overestimating the importance of all these trivial details - getting caught up in the minutia is exactly what might make this seem (falsely) inaccessible to people who don't really know how to read properly. You demand to know whether the reader can pick out the individual trees, when in reality they see the forest just fine.
I don't think you need to know any of that to be able to read and understand this passage. What you need to know is: There's a guy who's eating, and then we immediately break away for a lengthy description of the weather and the environment of the city - all of which is easily digestible without dicking about with trivial details of UK law and politics.
If you'd get tripped up by anything, I'd imagine it would be "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus" given that 'wonderful' in this context means the precise opposite of the common usage today - literally, inspiring wonder - as this dinosaur would be an unremarkable sight, not inspiring wonder. There's all sorts of clever little twists and turns in word usage here, if you're worried about 'Michaelmas' or the etymology of the term 'Chancellor' then you've already lost the plot, imo.
LOL no. But I'm sure I would be just unable to read many online forum topics build on its own intimate subculture without as much clarification from insiders.
Court esoterism is just as blatantly bland in its behavior as in any other human group carrying nothing but prestige and a will to mystify outsiders. Elaborate vocabulary to fill the space around a void core. Much ado for nothing.
I've talked to a few high school and young college students in the last few years to get a feeling for what pandemic and LLMs have done to education, but this seems near apocalyptic to me. An inability for a majority of English majors to read 19th century literature, or for their teachers to even bother teaching with books? I think the students I've been talking to have given me a false sense of hope.
I have to say that after reading other commentary about the 2015 paper this was based on, it seems to be far less relevant, even if it comes up very high in tehGoog search rankings.
> What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably?
Yeah about that, that was a tiny study. 85 undergrads from two Kansas universities. Kansas isn't renowned for its universities. And this study was done in 2015 (11 years ago!), only published 2 years ago.
"58%" is 49 undergrads. "5%" is 4 undergrads. I think it's massively unrepresentative of students at large.
It's a very entertaining paper, as it goes into the juicier parts of the subjects' think-alouds, and analyses why the problematic readers were problematic readers. What's especially infuriating is they were told they could look up the internet if they wanted, and many chose to guess wrongly what something meant, rather than look it up. Perhaps they're not only bad at reading but also bad at searching. Today I suspect those people would be heading straight for the AI to tell them what to think.
It's because we have open primaries in the US - registering as a Democrat or Republican is only important as far as voting in primaries. In other countries the selection of candidates is internal to the political parties themselves. There are pros and cons for both systems but the US system is fairly unique globally aside from a few exceptions in South America.
Isn't it kinda internal here too? Parties get to pick their candidates how ever they want. The major ones have primaries, but I still don't know if anything legally requires them to respect the votes there.
Wow. I contributed to Reveal.js years ago… some features, some bug fixes, some broader browser support; nothing too crazy but it took time and energy and effort, and now Opus makes its own, just as a side item in a larger project… That’s a strange feeling.
A counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture - and also a counterexample to “AI will never be smarter than humans.” Even the most dyed-in-the-wool AI hater at this point must acknowledge that it is more intelligent than any human. The other day I found out that Fable could read seal script! The small seal, standardized stuff no prob, but I found it even did OK at the hardest you can get, Warring States regional scripts. That’s something maybe 2,000 academics worldwide can do and nobody’s even talking about it because it’s just one more item in a very long list.
It’s a strange feeling, to be overtaken by our own creation. Top dog for millions of years and then in the blink of an eye we go from “how many Rs in strawberry” to this.
For those saying "disable all cellular radios", I don't recommend that; you would be in violation of European laws. To quote a previous comment of mine about a similar EU-mandated safety system:
The EU-wide "911 eCall" system records your location at all times and has a cellular modem connected to government systems. It is illegal to disable this system. If you still do so, there are fines, and your insurance is no longer considered fully valid in case of an accident.
Regarding specific legislation, for the Netherlands and our "APK" system, the relevant rule is under "Geluidssignaalinrichtingen en eCall", article 5.2.71 of the APK handboek, issued by our Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer.
In the EU, automatic surveillance cameras on the side of the road enforce this APK system, so if you do disable the eCall system, you will fail your APK, and you will automatically receive a fine. Even if you don't leave your driveway, the government is working hard to keep you safe; government camera surveillance cars drive around constantly, scanning your license plates, cross-referencing surveillance images with other government databases to automatically issue fines if you step out of line.
I really don't think there's anything to worry about, though; to quote another comment of mine:
>Thankfully, we're safe. Car software is notoriously high quality and rarely hacked. All governments are fully trustworthy, especially around espionage and privacy, and have a perfect track record of never lying to the public.
>Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked; "hackers cannot take control of it", from ec.europa.eu. They built an unhackable device. I am not sure what you could be worried about. If the government tells you something cannot be hacked, then it cannot be hacked. Furthermore, none of the EU member states have been found using other infrastructure to violate privacy laws.
This, like the linked article by the same author ("America Doesn't Have the Stomach for Growth") raises a few interesting points but doesn't have a strong central thesis. If I could summarize this article, the main thrusts are 1) it's too technically complex, 2) the margins are thin, 3) there are strong regulatory requirements, and 4) opportunity cost vs. AI and chips. Anyone that knows Chinese modern manufacturing knows that is an incredibly weak argument overall.
On technical complexity, China _has_ a more technically complex engine, totally domestic! The WS-15 is a _more_ difficult engine to make. It runs hotter, has an afterburner and variable nozzle... and it is made virtually entirely domestically; yes, including the turbine blades that the author wastes two pages reassuring you only the West can make.
On thin margins... this is laughable. The CCP loves to subsidize strategically industries in six million ways and it is _really_ good at it. Way better than any Western government. Talk about efficient use of gov't money, the CCP will get you high quality engineers, raw materials, a captive market, whatever you need. Negative margins do not bother them one iota.
On strong regulatory requirements... China has a massive domestic market, a physically large country and several strong allies / client states. International requirements are irrelevant to start and once they have proven performance in their markets they can get them anyway.
On opportunity costs... this is the least weak of the arguments. I would argue that 1) China has enough top talent to go around, 2) even in a post-AI world jet engines are useful, and 3) it's clearly a priority of Xi Jinping and thus this whole discussion is irrelevant. That said, there is something to this argument and I would be interested to read a political/strategic analysis on this topic.
Overall, this and Aakash's other articles seem like starting with a conclusion then grasping at random factoids to defend it. If I might give advice to the author: try writing with a strong central thesis.
The WS-15 is impressive, but it’s on a par with the jet engine technology available to the US military in ~2005. No-one doubts that China can make functioning jet engines. The question is how long the West can maintain the technical lead that it still does have.
WS15 matches western on raw power, i.e. comparable thrust to f119/f135 (f22/f35). PRC cores lacks CMC which was last (2000s) western hot section revolution, but that's more about efficiency ~10-20% better range. We don't know WS15 maintenance/metallurgical gap - no one really knows if their service/overhaul hours, but even if heresay assumption 30-50% lifepsan, that's something PRC industrial output can circumvent, i.e. simply building 2-3x more engines and iterate/improve. CMC fuel efficiency huge, but issue 20% doesn't buy F35s enough range/endurance in westpac theatre size without tanking in many scenarios etc. PRC gets around that by just making J20 chonky boi with massive internal fuel, worked around efficiency from systems perspective.
I think we're talking slightly at cross purposes. The f119 is an engine that flew in 1997. So while the WS-15 is evidence that China can make modern, well-performing military jet engines, it doesn't show that China has caught up with the West in that particular area.
For civil applications, fuel efficiency is non-negotiable if China is to sell engines outside its domestic market.
I'm just point out lead in specific area can be made up elsewhere and not indicative of overall lead.
WS15 is basically parity with F135 in terms of trust/kinematics, i.e. PRC is functionally at parity with latest fielded US military engines. US still head in efficiency and (heresy osint) lifespan but those are swap, logistics issues that can be worked around, - 20% fuel efficiency negated by larger airframe to carry more fuel (25% for single engine, 40% for twin) and lifespan by just building a lot of cores. There is something to be said about PRC 4/5 gen are twin/triple engined, i.e. in aggregate, on paper MUCH more trust/perf/power gen than single engine F35 w/F135. And now that PRC MIC aviation is starting to spam airframes, J20 triple digits, J35s about to explode, and we are talking about underlying industrial chain that is on trend to supply 3-4x+ more engines than US per year for airframes (not factoring in spares). Have to view from systems perspective, US engine lead =/= platform lead, and US fundamentally constrain in F35/5th gen fleet as single engine and 6th gen in limited quantities, and tyranny of distance in westpac = 20% efficiency from being 10 years ahead in CMC doesn't give meaningful edge. F35/F135 having 20% more fuel efficiency matters less when J20 bruteforces twin engine by being larger, with ~2x combat radius and ability to carry larger AAs. As long as US not willing to go twin engine with large % of fleet, all the cost/readiness implications, being ahead in particular area of jet engines hard = false sense of security/advantage.
But civil aviation, efficiency at CURRENT high fuel prices is none negotiable. There is cross over point where if fuel prices drop to precedented level lows, PRC can make up TOC of less efficient / lifespan engines on capital side... just having 1/2 cost airframes and maintenance packages can weather efficiency buffer over lifetime. But that is going to be very real struggle.
We don’t really disagree on any substantial point. However, if we’re going by the F135, that’s an engine that first flew in 2006. If China now has an engine that’s comparable to it it some ways, that means it’s about 20 years behind, give or take.
As you say, militarily speaking, engine tech is just one of many factors. Quite possibly, China would beat the US in a real war just in virtue of being able to manufacture more screws.
The quote that the OP recommends as the best response to AI slop is from Good Will Hunting, here is the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo) and here is OP's selected transcript:
If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" doesn't apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.
I have made this comment on HN many times [0] now but: it's the goddamn sunlight.
Sunlight has many pathways in the body, and increased vitamin D levels are just one of those pathways. Swallowing one element of a many-element pathway cannot simulate the human synthesis of vitamin D! This should be obvious! Your car might not run because of bad needle bearings, but the solution is not to add them to the gas tank! First, you must always understand.
Sunlight / vitamin D is an especially aggravating issue because we have increasing amounts of research on how sun exposure improves general health. Sleep quality and regularity, mood, cancer incidence (as the article notes), eyesight, skin conditions, overall mortality, virtually every part of human health is improved by going outside. And when I say "improved" I mean improved to such a degree that it would blow 95% of prescribed drugs out of the water. See, for example, the Melanoma in Southern Sweden study where the highest sun exposure cohort had _half_ the all-cause mortality of the lowest group. Unfortunately the Western medical establishment is thoroughly captured by industry and you can't sell a pill that makes you go outside.
I think science is just too granular to be a reliable input into wellness decision-making. It is too easy for interested parties to enable everyday people to confirmation bias their way into defying common sense.
Of what utility is the truth in decision-making if it is such a narrow truth that it might as well be a falsehood in practice?
Alcoholics talking endlessly about flavonoids, obese people insisting in polyunsaturated fat mayo, sedentary people that don't resistance train drinking soda with protein in it.
Vitamin D is fat soluble, so it would be feasible to build up a supply in summer to last through winter. I've seen it theorized that a cyclical weight gain and loss tied to preindustrial seasonal food availability also plays a role.
Because of industrial food chains making that possible. Before we could refridgerate and ship food all over, most of your calories came from seasonal foods, and summer is usually more bountiful than winter.
I looked up data from a calorie tracking app I used a while ago and I got just enough vitamin D. Main sources were fish, eggs and dairy products. However, I ate a lot and I'm quite sure in winter there will have been periods where I didn't get the recommend intake.
So if you live in a northern country and you don't like fish, I suppose it's quite a good idea to take a supplement.
Though as OP said, even if the sun isn't strong enough, there are plenty of benefits to going outside beside vitamin D.
If you gain weight during summer (so that excess vitamin D is stored in fat cells) and use body's stored fat in the winter (eat at a deficit, so that your stored fat, rich in vitamin D, is used), you need no supplementation. This is what all animals living in the region do.
Which could be one of the reason people near the Mediterranean sea (for example in Italy) and tennis players do tend to live longer than average. Now of course there s probably more than one reason but those sure do enjoy time outside.
Unfortunately, sun exposure (specifically UV exposure) is heavily tied to skin cancers and aging. I haven't researched it myself, but my feeling is that, ultimately, there is a calculation where sun exposure / skin risk needs be balanced on your specific genetic makeup.
We really need to drill down into ethnic and racial boundaries to really make sense of how much sun exposure helps us.
I think the strongest example by far is nuclear power. We could have used it for everything from energy to warfare to transport to space exploration, and instead we limited our use because the societal costs were too high. Unlike the other examples people cited here, there often isn't a better alternative or a technical reason not to use it. In 2026 nukes are still the best way to destroy your enemies or travel at any appreciable fraction of C or power a ship and the reason we don't do those things is purely societal.
The US is a huge country. In general it has excellent water; the US averages better than the EU. The Environmental Performance Index is a report that measures many things, and they have a handy section where they measure DALYs lost from sanitation and drinking water. For this section the US scores 96, within a few points of Switzerland (100), Sweden (97), Austria (96), Denmark (94), Belgium (93) and comfortably above the Netherlands (91), France (88), Poland (80), Czechia (79) and Japan (78.)
There are isolated incidents of poor water quality in each of those countries, and especially in small towns of eight hundred people in rural areas, but generally speaking, clear drinking water that is free of bacteria is standard.
On the other hand the US often relies on relatively crude chlorination to reach those levels, which those 'top' European countries don't. They instead put a strong emphasis on protecting the source water and then treating it via ozone, UV, biofiltration and slow sand filtration.
The taste of chlorinated water generally isn't tolerated.
The US isn't a monolith and neither is Europe. Overall, yes, the US uses more chlorine than Europe, but Spain and France both have _minimum_ water chlorination levels (about 0.2-0.3 mg/L depending on the regional situation) and France has no cap on max chlorine, which is very different from the US, where you can drink completely unchlorinated water in countless places around the country and there is a nationwide cap of 4 mg/L. For example NYC (average 0.5 mg/L and many places with zero.)
Oh, but you were comparing the US to the top-ranking European countries: "For this section the US scores 96, within a few points of Switzerland (100), Sweden (97)"
Also: It's a bit of a culture shock to be served soft drinks made from very obviously chlorinated water in e.g. California (one of the richest regions in the world). Is it a taste that people just learn to live with? I don't understand how this is tolerated.
Where in California? Where I am in the bay area, we have quite good tap water. San Francisco famously built the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite national park in the early 20th century, which delivers excellent water from the granite Sierra Nevadas to supply the city and a substantial fraction of the water supply in other parts of the bay area. Hetch Hetchy water needs minimal treatment.
On the other hand, I remember being shocked as a small child visiting Disneyland by how nasty the water from the water fountains there tasted, and in general the tap water in the dryer southern part of the state isn't as good (LA also has its own famous systems for getting drinking water from parts further east).
>So, what of the two cultures today?
Well, Snow won of course. Removing Latin and Greek in favor of more science and engineering? Teenagers used to read Thucydides. What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor"? Science and engineering will bring us material comfort? We are living in Snow's world!
>Above all, this style of thought valued analysis and exactness, and it was just this drab preoccupation with exactness that bothered Leavis, for it neglected what he considered should be the true focus of serious thinking: ‘life’. The idea of life haunts Leavis’s thought. It is central to it and yet maddeningly opaque. He believed the mark of great literature – or rather, what it is that makes great literature great – is its ability to manifest life, to summon it and make it exist for the attentive and dedicated reader. Literature is the locus of life. If a piece of writing does not make the close reader somehow sense life, then it can fairly be denied the status of literature. The absence of life is the most common cause of Leavis’s derision, with which he was so generous (even extending once to a rant against Jimi Hendrix, of all people). So: what did he mean by it? What is life?
To me this comes to mind: feeling, intuition, thinking, active, moving, creative, danger, the highs and the lows. Not-Life is the efficient modern world, the commoditized, reactive, standardized, efficient, safe, low-risk, smooth featureless extrusions of a massive system.
n.b. Dresser has things mixed up here about Jimi Hendrix. Interesting read which, of course, gets to Life: http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/5/confessions-of-a-lapsed-l...
>It involves, in the Laurentian manner, life, lived, with intensity, experienced with full consciousness in a real, a very real, organic and intense way.
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