Thanks; I forgot about the headline version. I’ve now removed.
rosehadshar
Karma: 2,587
What’s going on with ‘crunch time’?
Thanks so much for this! If this is pedantry, I am very pro pedantry :)
I think this makes my ‘Humans launch 5 objects into space’ section sufficiently dubious that I’ve removed it, but pasting here in the context of your comment:
Humans launch 5 objects into space.
It’s only in the last 8 years that the number of objects launched into space each day has exceeded 1.
there seems to be a large variance in how comfortable people are with numbers, but I think this is surmountable
Wanting to flag that my background is entirely qualitative, and I spent many years thinking this meant that I couldn’t do things with numbers. I now think this is false, they aren’t magic, and you don’t need to have deep aptitude for maths/technical training/a background in stats to be able to fiddle around with basic numbers in a way that helps you think about things.
I’ve changed the wording to make it clearer that I mean deaths per human per minute. I don’t want to change it to second; for me dying in the next minute is easier to imagine/take seriously than dying in the next second (though I imagine this varies between people).
Yes, you are completely right. I’ve added ‘farmed’ now; thanks for picking this up.
Thanks for the link to Saulius’ post; it’s great and I recommend people check it out.
On the trillion wild birds: yeah you’re right, it’s too high—should be 100 billion instead. Thanks for the spot; have changed.
The number is on p. 89 in the supplementary materials—but importantly it’s just aorder of magnitude, rather than a specific estimate. So it’s consistent with Tomasik’s range.
Yes! Thanks for the spot; updated now.
What happens on the average day?
Thanks for picking this up Wayne!
The mistake I made was number of people: it should have read 115 other people, not one. I did mean minute, and the number of animals is 1⁄116 to get a number of animals per human, rather than 1⁄60 to get a number of animals per second.
I’ve corrected the number now. (Thanks also to someone else who messaged me about the error.)
Thanks Elias, I think you’re right.
Isaac, I’ve tried to make this clearer in the table in the post.
[Also by happy chance this process made me notice that I’d lost all of my footnotes in the process of transferring from google docs, which I’ve now fixed. Thanks both for indirectly causing me to notice this.]
What’s alive right now?
Yeah, I considered moving more slowly in the way that you suggest. The reasons I’m not doing that feel a bit complicated/hard to articulate, but some of my motivations:
Not wanting to be patronising towards people. Making a cal event is not hard, anyone can do it
Feeling like ‘value this thing enough that someone in the group can make a cal event for it’ is a reasonable bar below which it maybe just makes sense for a group to fail
Having more trust/faith in groups than I think some other people have. Like, I don’t expect that by default everything will work super smoothly. But I don’t think it needs to work smoothly to be valuable, and I do expect by default that smart people will be able to notice that no one’s shared a reading yet or that there’s a scheduling conflict to resolve, even without someone being meta point person
Desire to experiment, to offer a space which I have found really valuable to others, not to drag things out for months and months on something which is actually pretty simple
Virtual how to live a good life reading groups
I think this is interesting.
On whether the moral campaign was about morality:
There’s definitely a way of reducing it to economics. At the most zoomed out level, seems likely to me that without industrialisation you don’t get colonial presence and without colonial presence the anti-footbinding campaign doesn’t take off.
I don’t think the moral campaigners were interested purely in the empowerment of women, or thought about empowerment in the way we think about it. Seems like there was prejudice and misogyny and national interest, as well as concern for young girls going through pain and suffering.
Responding to the quote from the paper (which I haven’t read):
I do think it’s interesting and important that some footbound women resisted the decline of the practice.
It’s also worth noting that many girls resisted being footbound in the first place.
Also, while the decline in footbinding did involve the unbinding of adult women’s feet, I think the bigger deal in terms of numbers of women affected longterm was that young girls stopped being footbound in the first place. I would expect that some women who had already had their feet bound would be attached to what had happened to them and resist unbinding.
I’m unsure what the author means by “the end of footbinding was by no means achieved in the interest of foot-bound women whose voices and wants have since been marginalized in Chinese history.” If they mean that the reason that moral campaigners pushed against footbinding for reasons other than the welfare of women—sure, I expect that is at least somewhat the case. If they mean that the end of footbinding was net bad for women, I think that’s a tougher case to make. I don’t buy that because the end of footbinding was imposed top down means that it was bad for little girls not to have their feet broken. Brown notes that female infanticide rates seem to go up when footbinding declines, and Bossen and Gates also guess that the status of women declined at this time. All of those scholars attribute the decline in women’s status to underlying economic conditions though, rather than claiming that the end of footbinding was the causal factor.
Some other related things I’ve pulled from my notes are arguments in Brown’s review article against Shepherd’s view:
“99 percent of women married regardless of how many had ever bound. So bound feet were clearly not needed to be able to marry. The BBG data show regional variation in whether being footbound at marriage age led to hypergamy, with significant correlations only for Sichuan (primarily from two counties) and not for North, Central, and Southwest China.17 Nevertheless, about 47 percent of women—even in Sichuan—married to households at the same wealth level as their natal households.”
Shepherd’s Taiwan data shows earlier marriage for footbound girls, but later marriage could also indicate more economic value to the parental household, so this isn’t a clear signal
“most ever-bound women had released their feet before marriage”
Thanks for this point.
I’m actually a bit unsure how true it is that the status element of footbinding was important. Certainly that’s an established narrative in the literature (e.g. Shepherd buys it).
Brown, Bossen and Hill have an article I’ve only skimmed called ‘Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconsideration of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation’ (link here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/marriage-mobility-and-footbinding-in-pre1949-rural-china-a-reconsideration-of-gender-economics-and-meaning-in-social-causation/CF5C5F1E441C5E2BF56BBA8B56F55835), which argues as follows:
“In our sample of 7,314 rural women living in Sichuan, Northern, Central, and Southwestern China in the first half of the twentieth century, two-thirds of women did not marry up. In fact, 22 percent of all women, across regions, married down. In most regions, more women married up than down, but in all regions, the majority did not marry hypergamously. Moreover, for most regions, we found no statistically significant difference between the chances of a footbound girl versus a not-bound girl in marrying into a wealthier household, despite a common cultural belief that footbinding would improve girls’ marital prospects.”
There’s an article I haven’t read called ‘Footbinding, Hypergamy, and Handicraft Labor: Evaluating the Labor Market Explanation of Footbinding’, which sounds like it pushes back on these arguments. Link here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-020-00271-9
Also, I think it’s not clear how true it is that “families who needed girls to conduct agricultural labor could not partake”:
Many scholars note anecdotal evidence of footbound women working in fields
In Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips’ model, performing agricultural labour is not significant, although girls who did agricultural labour were less likely to be footbound. I can’t immediately find a figure for % of footbound girls who did agricultural labour in their dataset unfortunately Brown in their review article puts forward several arguments against Shepherd’s view:
Bossen and Gates note “Given the wide distribution of binding we found among poor rural populations, it seems unlikely that elite emulation was the main consideration.”
How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study
Minor point on how you communicate the novelty point: I’m slightly worried about people misreading and thinking ‘oh, I have to be super original’, and then either neglecting important unoriginal things like reassessing existing work, or twisting themselves into knots to prove how original they are.
I agree with you that all else equal a new insight is more valuable than one others have already had, but as originality is often over-egged in academia, it might be worth paying attention to how you phrase the novelty criterion in particular.
Thanks; I hadn’t checked the Wikipedia current events page much previously, but I really like it.
Do you have any thoughts on how specifically the Wikipedia stuff is biased? I’m imagining that there isn’t a general tendency, and it’s more that specific entries are biased in specific ways that it’s hard to spot if you don’t have background knowledge on the area.