I remember reading this as a naive 14 yr old, because it was one of “the” classics of American literature apparently. It scarred me for months later. I hated it.
Now looking back, I don’t think this story would scar me as much anymore. But I still don’t see the point it. Is it an allegory for something deeper than what it is. I still don’t like it much anymore!
The point is that you can see this lottery as a cruel horror. You immediately hate it. It's obvious to us as the readers because it's outside our experience. Of course we wouldn't regularly just draw lots to stone someone to death, that's crazy and good people wouldn't put up with it, right?
What are the lotteries you don't see, because you're used to them, and they're just part of how the world works, like this one is to the people in the story?
If you're looking, you can find them. But it's also as uncomfortable to find them in real life as it is to read the story. So, most of us are happy to keep some other ideas between us and these lotteries. Those people just didn't do the right things. They should have been more careful, more prepared, more like the people who didn't get stoned. They should have done it the right way. They should have known their place. And if it's their time, well, what are you gonna do, mondays amirite?
And if that's true, then you can be safe because you will do the right things. And nobody has to go to the bother of persuading a society with any changes at the margins on which it sacrifices random people.
None of your other examples are comparable to the story. They're not deliberate deaths caused by adherence to some tradition. They wouldn't be prevented if people "just stopped doing it". They're accidents and violence, that we've taken reasonable steps to prevent (traffic laws, car safety standards, the criminal justice system, worker safety laws,...), but haven't been 100% successful.
The comment I was responding to asked for examples of “lotteries you don't see, because you're used to them, and they're just part of how the world works, like this one is to the people in the story”. The comment wasn't asking for “deliberate deaths caused by adherence to some tradition”.
Expanding the idea of "lottery" that much makes it meaningless, and useless as social commentary. Sometimes people die of cancer, or lightning, or shark attacks, and eventually of old age. What insight is there in calling them "lotteries you don't see"?
At the time (1948), lynchings of Black people accused of crimes (or just not suitablely "humble") were still practiced in the South and some people seriously defended the practice as part of Southern tradition.
And we treat the 2018 murders you're invoking as crimes. Problems to be solved. Most people do not accept that's just how it should be. Almost everyone believes murder should be illegal, policed, prevented where possible, charged prosecuted and punished where it can't be prevented so that it's discouraged. And done through a court / justice system where the process itself isn't just a lottery (whatever improvements we could make here).
The lynchings? Part of the problem was that enough of the societies where they happened did accept those as part of the social order. And they were undisciplined in a way that allowed them to be esentially lotteries -- no requirement for any kind of hearing, no right to defense or appeal, no right for others to know how well any accusation stands up, no right for anyone to even know who the lynchers are. Supposed offenses could be trivial if not entirely fabricated, to cover nothing more than ugly bullying.
The contrast between the two situations could scarcely be starker.
And that's before we get to the ridiculous racial fearmongering that you're selling. You want to talk about 2018 murders? It doesn't look like you want to do that carefully and honesty. If anything the 2018 data shows white people as the disproportionate threat to white people.
Because of the 3,315 white murder victims where an alleged/established perp has been identified closely enough to talk about their race, it appears that 2,677 were killed by white people.
That's 80% of white murder victims killed by white people. This is above proportion of the population that's white at a level that's beyond noise (about 60% of the US is "non-hispanic white", maybe we move up to 75% if we're lumping in white-alone-identifying hispanics and assume that the criminal justice system also errs on the side of assigning perps "white").
514 murders where the perp is black would mean about 15% of white murder victims were killed by black people. Estimates of the portion of the US that's black run about 12-15%, so this tracks proportion.
2018 statistics make it look like, if anything, whites are in more danger from their fellow white people than from a racially integrated society (and this sure tracks the lived experience of most white guys I know).
And if someone says "well, of course white people are killed by more of their fellow white people because that's where they voluntarily associate" ... that wouldn't change the statistically demonstrated nature of the threat, it would only highlight how limited racial integration actually is (and how much more ridiculous it is to complain it "kills whites").
Perhaps like Jackson, I think it can be useful to prompt people in a way that might nudge them to notice on their own.
Giving examples of specific "lotteries" I see is just as likely to activate those psychological mechanisms I talked about (or a partisan frame) as it is to open anyone's eyes.
If you want hints, though, watch for where you see the psychological mechanisms in yourself or others. "Those people just didn't do the right things. They should have been more careful, more prepared, more like the people who didn't get stoned. They should have done it the right way. They should have known their place. And if it's their time, well, what are you gonna do, mondays amirite?"
If you hear someone saying something like that, if you find yourself saying it... interrogate that. There may sometimes be real truth to it. But ask yourself: is that really all there is to it? Does the world have to be that way? If it were your child who "drew the lot", would you be satisfied?
Some may notice this response is in good company with the other psychological mechanisms we use to avoid confronting "lotteries."
Like "they didn't prepare correctly" or "they didn't do the right things" or "mondays amirite" there may even be cases where it's true, and a robust analysis of lottery situations sometimes reveals local maxima or tradeoffs that are tough to shake.
But they can also be spoken with a post-hoc resignation that discourages the very analysis that might confirm them... because such an analysis might also disaffirm them.
One question to ask is whether a way of addressing a "lottery" encourages you to stop analysis and reflection, or to work your way through analysis and reflection.
That's a great way of announcing that you didn't read my comment, which actually accounts for the principled version of the point you're ideologically abusing.
Net deaths is what matters here. Obviously they aren’t perfect, but no human system is.
The market for effective drugs is global. FDA regulations have a significant but not that burdensome influence on drug discovery. At the other end, the opioid epidemic is a demonstration of just how many deaths can result from insufficient regulation of just a single drug family.
Which is why FDA regulations vs zero regulation have saved vastly more lives than they cost. Conservative estimates put it somewhere in the 2 orders of magnitude range.
> Which is why FDA regulations vs zero regulation have saved vastly more lives than they cost.
The first book I linked to did the research and showed otherwise. The key aspect usually not admitted is the deaths caused by drugs not developed due to costly regulations.
I hope you can understand why a book with a “Publication date : December 31, 1974” might have some gaps here in terms of relevant research and current regulations.
As to the leaded gas issue, that’s a function of less strict regulations allowing unleaded gas. Many countries have banned it without issue.
Peltzman had 10 years of statistical data to make the case. Any subsequent study that does not take into account lives saved by drugs never developed because of regulation costs is not a useful study.
As for leaded gas, the problem was changing the engine designs would require recertification so expensive that people just keep using 1960s engine designs.
Regulations have an effect of stifling new development - in drugs and airplane engines.
As for drugs, there is a way out. Allow legally consenting adults the right to sign a piece of paper stating that they understand that drug X is not approved by the FDA and they take it at their own risk.
> Peltzman had 10 years of statistical data to make the case. Any subsequent study that does not take into account lives saved by drugs never developed because of regulation costs is not a useful study.
You say that as if no such study exists. They do and the costs are known to reasonable levels of accuracy, what’s generally excluded is the benefit of drug regulations. Regulations on opioids alone (granted there’s a lot of opioids) have saved million of American lives since that book was published, but it’s easy to exclude such numbers if you want to make regulations look bad.
> As for leaded gas, the problem was changing the engine designs would require recertification so expensive that people just keep using 1960s engine designs.
Nope, ~80% of existing light aircraft in the US can 100% legally fly on unleaded gasoline. This isn’t a technical problem or the burden of regulations. This is a group of people that didn’t want to spend money because the transition isn’t free.
> Regulations on opioids alone (granted there’s a lot of opioids) have saved million of American lives since that book was published, but it’s easy to exclude such numbers if you want to make regulations look bad.
Opioids were approved by the FDA, and were by prescription only.
How did your studies account for drugs never developed? The rate of new drug development dropped drastically after the 1962 Amendments.
By prescription only is a regulation. Without that Coca-Cola would still have coca leaves.
> drugs never developed
The way you get good data on that is to look at the actual drug discovery process and how decisions are made.
Automated in vitro testing has been used, but the number of potential compounds make that impractical even with essentially zero regulation at that point. Once you get down to some actual evidence for a drug funding is surprisingly plentiful. The often quoted 2 billion per drug includes all the failures, for any given candidate the cost is low at every individual stage until you have something with significant promise. Which makes sense as the average drug is worth vastly more than 2 billion so at every stage further investment looks viable.
>Regulation of drugs has caused deaths due to high cost of compliance with FDA regulations meaning far fewer drugs get developed that may save lives.
What about the lives saved by crappy unsafe drugs coming to an unregulated market, either because they're snake oil / ineffective but marketed as potent, or because they're actively harmful, or non properly tested?
As for the book suggestions: free market economists in favor of deregulation? Color me surprised!
I think there are a few things that make it "worthy" of literary consideration:
1. Read a straight horror story, it's quite a surprising twist at the end
2. A critique on the senselessness of following tradition just for the sake of it -- the way a society can just go along with something without really understanding why
3. The banality of evil, and how it can often look like something totally ordinary, rather than some nefarious demon
I loved it when I first read it -- it truly shocked it in middle school and I still have a visceral feeling when thinking about it many years later
Usually quotes are used to question something another person or other people say so I would think you’d quote “classics” or “classics of American literature” to question this story actually being a classic as many other people might say.
Putting quotes on the word “the” in this context seems to be for emphasis and I’ve seen this numerous times with non-native speakers.
If you are a native speaker I don’t mean to be rude, I’m just curious.
I’m a native English speaker, my quote was trying to question whether it is really one the classics of American literature or not. Might not be appropriate use though. “The classics of American literature” might have been more appropriate.
Quotes are also used to quote something verbatim, which is their more traditional role than "questioning". They're also used to refer to a term in a meta way - like I did with the term questioning just now.
In this case, he uses them for emphasis, like one would write "it's considered one of THE classics".
The point is any society and micro-society works like that in many cases. Doesn't have to be the specific form in the story (don't want to spoilt it for others).
Has bun really shipped using a million line vibecoded PR. I know they merged it, but merging something in a new dir doesn’t mean anything compared to what code is actually running for customers. It’s crazy if the vibecoded rust version is what’s running for customers and not just some experimental hack.
Except it's not vibecoded, it's litteraly the best prompt an LLM can ever get - literal code. If the whole thing ends up as a failure, then it will show that the king is naked.
Frankly I think any QoL measure between a western and a Japanese life are meaningless.
If you’ve ever worked for a Japanese corp under a Japanese boss, you would basically experience that your life is hell. As a westerner we are even subjected to far lesser rules and customs than a Japanese, and yet to me it still felt far more stifling and unbearable than any western company I worked for. Western companies have different failure modes, but intense unspoken micromanagement and stupid expectations was never one of them.
And I was a supposed “subject matter expert”, to be treated better than rank and file. That said, this clearly works for Japanese people, many of them are happy, I think they would be miserable under a western firms “do whatever the f you want as long as you get results” culture. To each their own.
Japan in some sense is stagnating if you compare it to a GOAT like US, but Japan of 1910s was also probably stagnating compared to US, in its own terms Japan is doing fine and their political situation is much more civil. So GG to them
I might be gatekeeping, but I consider a mark of actual healthy capitalism, to be creative destruction, the biggest companies of 1 generation are destroyed by the next generation and the churn keeps going on. Nothing ever lasts except the system.
By this criteria, in the entire world, only US and UK seem to do capitalism properly. Whether the current age of tech companies survive till 2050s is to be seen, (we are already seeing signs of OpenAI, Anthropic joining them but it is to be said if the existing monopolies of say Microsoft will be disrupted).
In other countries, big companies have been the same for hundreds of years, from Japan to Germany to Korea to India. This is no longer capitalism as much as it is some soft form of Feudalism, where the same set of families hold power for generations at a time till some major fortune swings occur.
It’s all written by AI and you can’t tell for sure if the tests are good. You can eyeball some but eyeballing 50k lines of code takes a lot of time. You just trust AI and YOLO, find errors later
If I didn’t know that the author used AI, then I would have liked this way more. But that is because I would assume the author did this on his own and that would feel like a cool quirky thing to do. I just don’t care for a cool quirky thing if an AI made it.
Without Claude I wouldn't have made this because I wouldn't have wanted to spend the time. Claude allowed me to try something out and I spent time with Claude experimenting with different ideas (for example, at one point I had it tile the entire plane with periodic tables but the effect wasn't as good as the single periodic table I ended up using).
In a very short period of time I got to try many different ideas and create the final site. The ideas were all mine, the implementation was Claude's. I view this as wonderful: I had an idea and was able to iterate an implementation very rapidly. I can't turn my back on a tool that helps me create more.
PS If it's any consolation, my blog posts are all hand written. I don't use AI for any of the prose; I do use a spell checker.
Yep, this is how AI has been impacting my experience at my job as well. For a given time and quality budget, we can now say "yes" to more projects. Often that means holding the time and quality constant and doing things we wouldn't have previously done at all. Other times it means holding time constant and increasing quality by spending more time refactoring, testing, fixing longer tail bugs, etc.
I'm with you, comments like the GP are just demands on the time of people who make things. For years, everyone here was adamant that founders made the company, even if they hired developers to write the actual code.
You made a cool thing, I like it. I don't care how you made it, the more cool things we have, the better for everyone. If you don't think this thing is cool, downvote and move on.
I don't think it is necessarily controversial, but I subscribe to the opposite view. I try to judge a thing by whether or not it is good, not by its provenance.
For example, if I read a book which I thought was written by a human and loved it, why should my opinion change if I learned after the fact that it was written by AI and not a human? I can't un-laugh those laughs, and un-enjoy the enjoyment I received from it, you know what I mean?
Imagine you really enjoyed your meal at a restaurant, and in the end the waiter tells you it's made of people. Is it still a good meal, and most importantly, would you recommend it to other people?
I really don't think this is the same thing. A closer analogy would be you enjoy your meal at a restaurant, and at the end the waiter tells you the chef was a robot. Why should the provenance of something make any difference at all? If the author of your favorite book was convicted of some terrible crime, would the book you loved so much before you heard the news suddenly lose all its value to you?
I care more if AI was used to churn out a bunch of slop writing, mostly because of the lack of an authorial voice, which causes most of the writing to suck. Code is different - I have never cared about how much or how little effort went into a coding project, unless the point is supposed to be a puzzle - so I literally don’t care if people use AI for their projects, only if the idea behind the demo is cool.
“Masters only programs” is a bad hack that needs to be gone. It is just a cash grab from overseas students desperate for a Visa to work in the US. Many of these programs are highly exploitative and leave overseas students with crippling debts and have almost no academic merit. I’ve seen this in supposedly good schools like CMU that offer Masters in Software Engineering which is basically a cash grab for overseas students. And many other made up masters programs. Very few 2-3 masters programs in CMU are genuine, and even then they just become a way to funnel unpaid labor to professors who before had to rely on undergrads, now have a steady stream of poor master grads willing to put in large amount of times to pad their resume or for a pitiful stipend. It inflates professor egos, and enables more brutal lab cultures that require working on weekends etc. and this is still in a relatively good school like CMU, gets much worse in other schools. Govt should just ban this whole system.
There may be issues with the implementation, but masters only programmes are absolutely commonplace in Europe. Some are better, some are worse, but good ones are genuinely helpful for people to, e.g., upskill before going into industry or decide whether they want to do a PhD.
Master's programs in Europe are commonly the pathway/requirement to applying for a PhD position. This supports why they might be commonplace there, but it also means the same reason would not justify the master's only programs in the US in the same way.
In many places, there is a distinction between "master's through research" (a gateway to PhD) and "master's through study" (more coursework, less independent research, a gateway to r-n-d-level positions in the industry).
Yeah but as a European I think we took the wrong route. I am from Italy, and until 2001 we had 5 years undergraduate programs only. We then chose to do 3 + 2, but we should have gone with 4 + 1 years instead.
I have a BSc in Computer Engineering and I'm finishing a MSc in Computer Science. The MSc has been useless other than for being able to start doing research. I could have learned additional things in 1 more year, without repeating most of the knowledge in the other year, and then start the PhD directly.
Instead I did a MSc where for 1 year I mostly repeated old topics before starting working on really new things.
I think Masters should be highly specialized for people that after a Bachelor start to work but want additional knowledge for their position.
TLDR: 4 years Bachelors -> 4 years PhD is the correct route in my opinion. We messed up in Europe
But nobody has 4 + 4? The traditional system was in Europe 5 + 3, now we mostly have 3/4 + 2 + 3 (Europe) or 3 + 1 + 3 (UK/Ireland).
I don't have a lot of experience with the US system, but from my experience after 3/4 years newly minted postgrads are probably not yet ready to knowingly commit to 5 years of specialised training. European-style MA/MSc's often feel "useless" because they actually help people switch course and find a new footing. However, good master's programmes are either flexible enough for advanced students to take more specialised modules or have high demands to begin with.
What is the demographic looking to immigrate to Japan. I’m surprised to hear Chinese as my outsider view was that China was as good if not better place to live compared to China, is it because they’re afraid of their government and want a liberal democracy instead?
Or is folks from poorer and more distressed countries looking to come to Japan.
Better passport for their kids, better and more reputable, internationally connected banking system to store their wealth. The latter bit is particularly important as China limits the amount of money one can send out of the country.
It was always ridiculously easy to get Japanese citizenship. 5 years of residency, don’t break any laws including traffic, pay your bills on time. Done.
It has recently been changed so that you now require 10 years of residency.
5 years. It's fairly easy to get. Sometimes it feels like half of the Beijing intelligentsia is in Tokyo now.
Lots of Chinese academics, engineers, investment bankers, and others shifted to Tokyo in the past few years. Even the kinds of salons and meetups you used to see at Tsinghua or Peking have almost entirely transplanted in Jimbocho based on my friends account.
I think it’s probably easier and safer for a Chinese national to obtain Japanese citizenship than American citizenship.
If you’ve got ten years (or until recently, five) of residence and can pass the interview process, the acceptance rate for Japanese citizenship is something like 95%+.
On the other hand the process of getting American citizenship can run up to twenty years or more, it’s very expensive, and throughout the process the immigrant has few rights and can be deported for basically no reason, up to the moments before the naturalization ceremony.
If I were a freshman at Fudan thinking about my exit strategy, I know which one I would pick.
20 years ago Singapore was handing out PRs and citizenships to Chinese students like candy. All of my classmates got PR a few years out of school, then citizenship again 2 years later.
And so many of them immediately moved on to the US.
China cracks down on corruption from time to time and lots of rich Chinese got their riches through corruption, so they're always looking for places to stash their ill gotten gains, their family and an offramp for themselves.
Helping launder this dirty Chinese money is a huge business here in BC (Canada) and across the world.
Too late to edit but to add to my comment, it's also the reason this segment of Chinese buyer will massively overpay for real estate, visa pathways, etc...
Western governments also look the other way since these people are defrauding China (our rival) and bringing money to the west.
Now looking back, I don’t think this story would scar me as much anymore. But I still don’t see the point it. Is it an allegory for something deeper than what it is. I still don’t like it much anymore!
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