YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

Ahhh Jaan Tallinn, the Diet Coke of batfuckery. Jaan “Diet Batfuckery” Tallinn.

The Valley Spirit never dies. / It is called the Mysterious Female.

The entrance to the Mysterious Female / Is called the root of Heaven and Earth

Endless flow / Of inexhaustible energy

(trans. Stephen Aldiss and Stanley Lombardo)

These people really need the Tao Te Ching

Sorry, but the history of technology is one of my things, and I think that there’s a misrepresentation going on here about how technology develops. Not only is it rarely mono-causal, it’s extremely rare that one cause even predominates in the evolution of a technology (such as a railway system). I don’t think it’s the case that 20th century conflicts have remotely a large enough impact on the development of the European railway systems to properly explain why it is that they aren’t more integrated.

I still think that this represents a bias towards a military-geopolitical interpretation of history that’s not wholly sustainable, in spite of its appeal. In the Russian Empire case, I’m quite certain that that’s a popular myth, because I know that it is certainly the case that when the first railway infrastructures were being built, the political powers, administrators, and engineers responsible were as much influenced by technological and physical geographical imperatives as they were by geopolitical. The Russian Empire’s decision to use what would become the Russian gauge was multi-factoral - indeed looking it up, it appears that they were persuaded by Brunel’s own preference for a wide gauge, which was famously thwarted in the early development of the British railways.

That does clarify the point, but I also don’t think that it’s true. It may well be that a major reason proposals for unified European rail never got off the ground before recently was that European countries rejected such proposals on grounds that it would make it easier for them to be invaded. But the rail systems in different European countries nonetheless developed independently, using different technology and standards, mostly (arguably) in the 19th century.

This complex process doesn’t reduce to 20th century FUBAR, even insofar as diplomatic and security considerations were involved in its evolution (and yet of course beginning in the 19th, not the 20th, century).

due to all the 20th century conflicts

I assume he’s referring to the same question I was asking: did you just extrapolate this from the phrase “fucked up, disastrous mess” (referring to the sheer number of different systems in Europe?), because I think the big long reply above seriously undersells the fact that “20th century conflicts” aren’t even mentioned or gestured at in the video. There’s a map showing…different countries…but while 20th century conflicts changed various borders in Europe, they aren’t the origin of the borders between countries in Europe, or the origin of different European countries developing their own independent rail systems without any centralised plan - because they’re different countries, and the various bodies which today unify much of the continent only began to come into existence after the Second World War.

If we were talking about Former Yugoslavia, you’d actually be right! The integrated rail infrastructure of that region was completely devastated by the 1990s. But that’s not the focus here.

Honestly? Whatever. I know I’m not in the wrong here. I shouldn’t have come in hard at the beginning.

Alright.

Well I could be, and I really really want to be, incredibly sarcastic and dismissive, because I genuinely believe that you’ve missed the mark incredibly hard, and your eminently reasonably and good request that people not medicalise assholery in general would, in this case, imply not mentioning the fact that people abuse prescription drugs and act like assholes. Alcoholics act like assholes, so do cokeheads, and so do people who abuse prescription medications which are, at the appropriate dosage, a perfectly good and fine support and indeed lifeline for managing whatever condition they may have. And this is just the truth: one of the central reasons that you have alternatives to Adderall, such as the drug which you personally are prescribed, is that there are risks associated with Adderall even for patients with nothing but good intentions.

But I also know it’s bad and counter-productive for me to both try to explain that I think I’m actually being quite reasonable and be sarcastic and dismissive like that.

So instead, I’d like to ask you, first, for a little charity. I’m going to copy paste my original comment below, and point out that it does not say that Adderall is what “makes the eas racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts” (your words, my emphasis on “makes”). Then I’m going to point out what I think it does say:

they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful

how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?

Adderall

So Jax isn’t here saying “what makes them racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts?” What she’s asking is how are they able to go around in circles amongst themselves talking about this shit, without acknowledging that the ideas they entertain have real world consequences. The joke I’m making focuses narrowly on this point: they’re able to waste all of this time (given that they’re already eas) going round in circles, and denying that words have effects, because they (very very famously!) have a cultural problem with prescription drug abuse. The joke categorically does not attribute their racism or cultishness to Adderall.

Now, the joke does attribute their combined dissociation from real world consequences and their verbosity - specifically, their energy for verbosity - to abuse of Adderall. That’s a stretch, but it’s in the nature of a one-word joke to generalise a little! I need my reader to have a modicum of charity here, in imagining that I am aware that there are other things going on with these people. You, in fact, should be more than aware of this, because I replied to you in another context just the other day with three quite long paragraphs giving an analysis of Yudkowsky and scientific racism in LessWrong which didn’t once mention prescription drugs of any kind.

And the joke is a little inter-textual: the word “abuse” does not appear next to “Adderall”. Again, I need a little charity from my reader to make the joke work, but I think it’s actually a really reasonable amount of charity. I think, personally, that on SneerClub at least, where I am a frequent commenter, people are generally aware that the abuse of prescription ADHD medication (and other, similar, drugs) is a famous problem amongst rationalists/EAs. At least on SneerClub, I think, people can be trusted to know the difference between attributing behaviours to Adderall outright, and attributing behaviours to its abuse. In this context, I think we can in this case safely skirt discourses of medicalisation that I wholeheartedly agree exist in lots of places.

So this is where I think you’re just wrong: I think that you’re misusing the warning label we rightly put on discourses of medicalisation. And I think misusing those warning labels is generally not a good thing. I think that you do a disservice to me personally, and I think you do a disservice to people’s collective ability to communicate and socialise with one another if you call them out on bare associations between the names of drugs, bad behaviours, and discourses of medicalisation.

I’m saying they abuse adderall, an amphetamine, which class of drugs I can tell you from personal experience do turn you into a gibbering asshole if you abuse them, and it has bugger all to do with the appropriate use of ADHD medication

But please, if you want to call me out, have the good grace to use the second-person pronoun, this “can we please not” shit is the single most disingenuous phrase that’s entered the language since “I’m not a racist, but”