HN is full of people with a) probably decently good homes and b) a high level of self-motivation on work and hobbies. I suspect sentiment here doesn't generalize well to the population at large.
I believe the stats are more like mid-30s. So been in a software career for a decade and above-average interest in technology, a majority not even in SV... ya, most HN in US probably own homes.
I don't think the quality of the home factors in, but I think you make an excellent point about HN'ers being highly self-motivated in terms of personal projects.
They're less likely to be spending their time at home just watching endless TV or Instagram scrolling.
So I think you're right, it doesn't generalize to the larger population at all.
As a former philologist (but not a historical linguist) I think for me the primary argument for a shallow (Steppe) as opposed to deep (Anatolian) dating of PIE is vibes-based. I agree with the other counterarguments raised in the article about sound shifts etc., but the main thing for me is that when one reads Homer, the Rig Veda, and the Twelve Tables side by side, one gets the distinct hard-to-articulate impression that these texts were produced by closely related cultures. I could point to discrete things like how patriarchal they were (even by ancient standards), the importance attached to herding and poetry, etc. But the vibe is more than that, and it's really hard to convey unless you've done work in the original languages. So, this comment is probably pretty unhelpful.
> Homer, the Rig Veda, and the Twelve Tables side by side, one gets the distinct hard-to-articulate impression that these texts were produced by closely related cultures.
That, in itself is a very interesting fact, fascinating.-
> I agree with the other counterarguments raised in the article about sound shifts etc.
With more DNA data, we wouldn't necessarily need linguistic characteristics to chart language ancestory, we could also look at the DNA evidence.
> one reads Homer, the Rig Veda, and the Twelve Tables side by side, one gets the distinct hard-to-articulate impression that these texts were produced by closely related cultures.
We know that the romans borrowed heavily from the greeks. That rome and greeks were closely related is well known. Everything from law to literature to religion. Not sure about the Rig Veda.
> I could point to discrete things like how patriarchal they were (even by ancient standards), the importance attached to herding and poetry, etc.
> With more DNA data, we wouldn't necessarily need linguistic characteristics to chart language ancestory, we could also look at the DNA evidence.
DNA evidence tends to favor the Steppe hypothesis.
> We know that the romans borrowed heavily from the greeks. That rome and greeks were closely related is well known. Everything from law to literature to religion. Not sure about the Rig Veda.
There are in fact some instances where Archaic Rome is closer to Vedic India than it is to Greece - the horse sacrifice, regulations around high priests and kings, etc. You can dismiss the similarities between Greece and Rome as due to borrowing, but you can't do the same with Rome and India.
> That describes a lot of cultures.
I specifically said those discrete elements weren't sufficient to convey the "vibe", so yeah.
> DNA evidence tends to favor the Steppe hypothesis.
There you go.
> There are in fact some instances where Archaic Rome is closer to Vedic India than it is to Greece
But you weren't talking about archaic rome. Also cherrypicking 'some' instances doesn't prove anything. There are some instances where the US is closer to China than Britain. So what?
> I specifically said those discrete elements weren't sufficient to convey the "vibe", so yeah.
You didn't convey anything. Not even a vibe. Your current response shows that you were just spewing nonsense with your original comment.
"Muslim empires preserved Greek learning" is a half-truth, because the medieval Latins traded more with the Arabs than they did with Byzantium. Thus when they got Aristotle etc. it tended to be from Arab sources, even though Constantinople had much better copies.
This would be sort of a death blow to much of postmodernism, no? "Reality is structured like a language and the free play of symbols reigns over all"-style thinking was very popular at one time, but this would rule against it.
No. Language stays a framework for modelling. Reality stays available to us only in form of models (pictures, sounds, ideas, measures, texts, videos, this text and what you imagine based in the text). The claim "Reality is structured like a language and the free play of symbols reigns over all" holds regardless of us thinking in symbols, words, pictures, concepts, cliches, emotions or _other models_. We have access only to symbols (not reality they represent) thus we "stuck" with this postmodernism discovery for observable future.
Not completely. The Postmodernists do use language to shape people's thought by redefining words and eliminating wrongthink words. And they have been successful.
But they mainly influence people who are not thinking to begin with. Or, to put it more mildly, do not have time to think about every issue and therefore adopt the current mainstream propaganda.
So in the sense "Can we conjure up a fake reality that many people will believe?" they are right". In the sense that "language is reality or even thought they are of course wrong.
> As a layman who's only familiar with Hilbert's work as it pertains to Godel and CS, I'm curious what makes expressing these proofs using some sort of formal logic so difficult.
For one thing, they'd be much longer, and likely not human-readable.
Question: TASP, a related summer program, has recently gone through some painful convolutions related to race and inequality[1]. How much if at all has Deep Springs been affected by currents like this?
These conversations have been live on campus for some time (80s) and continue. Though we're isolated, most conversations happening elsewhere also happen here, but, because everyone's so weird, the conversations get turned on their head or don't present in the same way in other places. Mostly it just makes the environment less reactionary.
That can be frustrating for some who want change now, but, at the end of the day, the students and community have the power to change most aspects of the program, and year to year different students or community members take on different projects in response to community needs. That agency helps diffuse many convolutions via compromise and practical action. Of course, convolutions still happen. Basically, this isn't a place that avoids conflict or disagreement, it's a container where students (and staff, ha!) learn how to disagree, conflict, resolve/forget, and get shit done.
Does the college remain a pipeline to good schools? In the past, a very significant portion of the student body, some years the majority, transferred to tier-one, four-year universities (Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Cal, Chicago, Stanford). This ensured that it attracted smart and ambitious applicants who knew they were not giving up the chance to attend those schools. What is the current rate of admission to tier-one schools, year by year, and how does it contrast with historical rates? If it is lower, does the college view that as a problem? If the college does not view that as a problem, then what is the vision? Deep Springs' reputation was built on being excellent and anomalous in highly legible ways. It can coast for a while as a two-year associates degree on a farm, but not forever.
The college does remain a pipeline, though the landscape of junior + senior transfers has changed.
Once US News started more heavily weighting 4-year completion rates, schools responded by attempting to select for folks who would complete in 4 years and providing more support for first and second year students. That left fewer spots for transfer into upper-level classes because of fewer dropouts / transfers-out.
Like I commented elsewhere, most students until the 60s went to Cornell to the Telluride house. That relationship was very helpful for generations of students. Deep springers still do follow this path, but much more rarely, i.e. every few years someone will go.
The stories from the modern era about a quarter or more of the class going to Harvard of UChicago are mostly gone now, although every so often an admissions director starts trying to get as many dsers as they can -- looking at you Columbia ;) But basically, top schools seem to accept about one deep springs student a year as part of their upper-level transfer class. For example, this year, harvard accepted just 14 students for upper-level transfer, including one deep springer.
So things seem to be getting harder, but the student experience here is so unique and the student quality so excellent, that they're still able gain admission to top schools despite the changing landscape (most of them get into one or more of these schools before they attend deep springs).
There has been some conversation as this has been taking place about new arrangements or additional support (e.g. 4 year scholarships, a formal relationship with another school, etc.), but at the moment, the need isn't acute enough, though vision for this aspect of the experience will be included in the next strategic plan.
Generally, the quality and curiosity of life on the ground here is what attracts great and weird students to enroll rather than a pipeline effect; applicants attached to that don't tend to make it into final class.
TASP was renamed TASS a couple years ago, and it now offers only two seminars: Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies. The program has been taken over by woke radicals both on its board and in the administration, which is led by Amina Omari, someone with near-zero experience in education prior to her appointment. I receive desperate emails from them asking for volunteers and financial support, which suggest that they have lost some of their base due to their political choices.
Deep Springs is on a different track, but not a totally dissimilar one. That is, the school has been attempting to feminize for decades, a process that culminated in its conversion to co-education in 2018 after a long legal battle. I get the school's newsletters and see occasional land acknowledgements penned by privileged people of color, which tracks with a known trend in US liberal arts colleges.
But the real shift at DS, triggered by co-education, seems to be that it's less hard-core. One person called it "Benningtonization". The boys and girls all hive off into pairs, and the communal life of mind and labor and governance shrinks as it cedes ground to America's default version of life together, the romantic couple.
But the school has gone through many phases. This is no doubt a temporary one.
Seriously, if stoicism is so good for mental health why did so many of them suicide? And why was Marcus Aurelius specifically such a poor father? Seems like a bad track record to me. I'd rather party with the Nietzscheans.
