I think this anecdote says more about NNT than it does about Sontag. He claims to have tried to "forget" this incident but has held on to it for 15 long years to write about it in a Medium post.
Why does he feel the need to point out that Sontag's outraged assistant was "female?" That's odd.
Typically obituaries leave out the bits about "rapaciousness," so I am quite surprised that NNT "accidentally" found her obituary and read about the cost of her mansion in it. That seems unlikely to be true. I've reviewed the New York Times obituary of Sontag, and though it does contain claims of "unoriginality," "style over substance," and "controversy," it does not happen to contain the cost of her mansion. Perhaps N.N. Taleb accidentally read a different obituary than this one.
He claims to have waited so as to not "speak ill of the departed." But fifteen years after her death, Sontag remains dead. And there's little hope for her recovery.
NNT's account of this incident also elides whatever the buffoonish specifics of his side of the conversation might have been. Even the most precious and fragile of us aren't absolutely scandalized by merely discovering that a person makes their money from trading.
A fun aside: this commenter also leaves out NNT's later (in the linked article) glowing description of Dinesh D'Souza's trolling some college kids with a perpetually false and long discredited "us-vs-them" dichotomy.
I confess that the only work I've read from NNT (barring the linked article, a few visits to his increasingly timecube-esque website, and the occasional dip into his Twitter stream of consciousness) is "Black Swan," but when I did I was quite surprised to discover that nearly half the the book seemed to be dedicated to his dwelling on perceived past slights and settling scores with institutions and people that he thinks treated him badly.
Finally, to address the point of the linked Medium post: one is absolutely permitted to oppose an unjust system even if one is a beneficiary of it. Without dissenting voices, nothing will ever change for the better. NNT should be ashamed of himself for speaking ill of the dead. But more than that, he should be ashamed to have built the second act of his career as a "public intellectual" by policing who is allowed to have an opinion and what they are supposed to have an opinion about. Everything is connected and we all have "skin in the game."
Please enjoy the original article! I quite enjoyed it and I hope that it makes some people happy.
Indeed. The slippery slope is a fallacy, after all; you can in fact take a positive step without worrying about taking negative steps that are so absurdly different as to be almost caricatures.
Just because the slippery slope fallacy exists doesn't mean that every warning about unintended consequences is necessarily wrong. That would be a fallacy in the opposite direction.
Certainly. But observing unintended consequences of a specific action is quite different from claiming that that action is a slippery slope to further actions that are not in fact planned.
Well, but they can use the internet. It's just that people who don't want to hear them (which is most people) won't hear them using the internet, and that is okay and not a restriction of free speech. They can communicate freely with people who care about their viewpoints over the internet, with people who want to communicate with them, but not on the platforms whose subscribers don't want to communicate with such people.
The right to free speech doesn't include the right to force your speech on people who don't want to listen to you.
Were we still talking about platforms like Facebook or Twitter, I would agree with you. But I think it's a bit different now that platforms like Gab are themselves getting deplatformed, because those are the places these people would go to communicate with people who share their viewpoints.
I have no desire to listen to that speech, so I just don't visit Gab. It's not like I've ever been forced to.
You are advocating isolating, deplatforming, etc.. These are tactics that hurt. Hurt people hurt people. If people are allowed to be heard and socialize, they gain happiness and are less likely to hurt people.
They are not isolated from each other, they are just detached from those who don't what to hear them.
Imagine that you have a piece of rotting meat. It's unsightly and it stinks. So you hide it under the carpet. Now it's gone from view, and the smell is nearly gone. But it's still rotting down there, and at one moment you'll have to face what it will turn into.
Your analogy fails for me because the rotting meat you refer to are free people. You speak of these people as if they should be controlled. Where is the room for their inalienable rights?
Given that just shy of 30 years into this whole Web thing we're seeing it fuel probably the largest wave of white nationalism/authoritarianism/facism since WWII, it seems like that's the exact opposite of how it works.
"O Lord, this zealotry to punish the heretics could easily escape from the control of God's chosen and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform un-Christlike deeds that the Church shall repent of for all eternity!"
"Let's inquisit that heresy when we get to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"Truly, monsigneur, this escalation of the Crusade to extirpate the Lutherans could spiral out of our grasp and trigger a continental conflagration that would disturb the harmony of the Catholic Church and cause us to finalize the fracture in Christendom in its entirety!"
"Let us rupture that schism when we come to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"O Puritan Lawyers! I cannot abide this constant seeking of devilry amongst the burghers; for though thy use the Devil chained and cowed, if the Devil escapeth thine chains placyd upon hym, might he wreck also thine own soul's of pleasant Albion forevermore?"
"Let us burn that witch when we come to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"Je dis, this never-ending mission to purify France of the Anciens Regime could easily escape the control of the Bourgeosie and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform inhumane deeds against the Third Estate that we will regret in the Eye of Providence for all recorded history!"
"Let's get a-head of that when the time arrives."
SOME TIME LATER
"I say, these attempts to civilize the Savages of the outer colonies could easily escape the oversight of the Provincial Governments and not only jeopardize our economic interests, but enable the performance by Europeans of barbarisms that would surely be worse than the practices of the Savages in the first place!"
"Let us lift the White Man's burden when we reach it."
SOME TIME LATER
"I don't know Comrade, this ten-year-old five-year plan to purify Russia of the Bourgeosie could easily escape control of the Central Committee and not only jeopardize the Revolution, but also cause us to engage in the same Tsarist evils of terror that the Revolution was launched to eliminate!"
"Let's rehabilitate that kulak when we get to it."
SOME TIME LATER
> We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the hate speech it seeks to banish.
Kodak has done a lot of research in the last 20 years to create digital watermarks that resist manipulation.
So they wouldn't necessarily naively hash an image file, but they could possibly create a hash from features that are extracted from the image and remain consistent even after manipulation or transformation.
Or they could hash the original bits in the file naively then insert that hash into the original image as a digital watermark that would survive manipulation of the image.
I remember the first time I played Super Mario Bros on an NES. It was like the first time I used an iPhone. It was immediately obvious that everyone else had been doing it wrong all along.
In many ways, it's a "perfect" game. Smooth scrolling, no frame rate issues, cool art style, amazing music, excellent control. No tutorial levels, no shitty movies, no hand-holding. Just - go. It blew my mind in so many ways. Way ahead of its time.
The first game on the PC that came close to matching that experience was Commander Keen, which was, what, 1991? 6 years later...
No save games. This is a complete deal breaker. Yes, those first couple of levels are really, really good, but they are not good enough to let the developer demand that you play them again and again, instead of letting the player get on with new challenges.
I really don't consider Mario games interesting until Super Mario World, unless you have an emulator with save states.
oooh! It's not exactly the same! The arcade is quite a bit more difficult. You need 250 coins for an extra life, and there are a handful of levels that are not on the cartridge. The NES version has a couple levels (I think it's 1-3 and 2-2) which show up again later with slightly more characters, but in the arcade those later levels are completely different.
*though the graphics and mechanics are the same and I'm sure that's what you meant. I'm a big fan and it bugs me that I can only play those levels through MAME.
Everyone is talking about Playchoice 10 (which I never saw), but the Wal-Mart nearest to my house had "VS. Super Mario Bros" when I was a kid. It was like alternate reality Mario. Super Mario Bros with harder levels.
To help anyone who doesn't realize it, HN is eating the period from the end of that link in the parent post (which is necessary to avoid getting a page without any text).
In m_st's defense, this wasn't really an "arcade" version of SMB, but rather they took an NES, slapped 10 games in it, and put it in an arcade cabinet (not literally, but functionally).
Most games that originated on the arcade and later became console games were usually ports. However, in the case of PlayChoice 10, all of these games originated on the NES, and were "ported" (but mostly unmodified) from the NES.
So when sehugg thought they were playing an arcade game, they were actually playing a (slightly modified) NES.
Mario Bros. arcade was ported to the NES, and it was modified. [1]
That's a distinction without a difference. Sega built arcade hardware almost identical to their SG-1000 console and ported some of its games to it. Most Neo-Geo arcade "MVS" cartridges were the same as the home "AES" carts except for the physical connector and arcade-specific stuff (checking for coin switches).
There's no platonic ideal that makes an "arcade" game vs a home system. They come in all shapes & sizes of cabinets. Some take coins, some take cards, and some are kept on free play to keep kids from running around a restaurant screaming.
I'd say the only real difference between an arcade game and a home game is where they were meant to be played.
Agreed. My point is that back then, most console versions of arcade games were "watered down" software ports after the fact. PlayChoice 10 was one of the first, more popular exceptions to this (the software remained practically unchanged).
There was the Playchoice release and also Vs Super Mario Bros. Vs Super Mario Bros is a true arcade version of SMB, which had harder and different levels from the home version.
and to be accurate, Vs Super Mario Bros (the arcade release) is different from the home version. The levels are harder. The difficulty ramp as you progress is much steeper. It's actually a very fun version of SMB because of the changes.
Why does he feel the need to point out that Sontag's outraged assistant was "female?" That's odd.
Typically obituaries leave out the bits about "rapaciousness," so I am quite surprised that NNT "accidentally" found her obituary and read about the cost of her mansion in it. That seems unlikely to be true. I've reviewed the New York Times obituary of Sontag, and though it does contain claims of "unoriginality," "style over substance," and "controversy," it does not happen to contain the cost of her mansion. Perhaps N.N. Taleb accidentally read a different obituary than this one.
He claims to have waited so as to not "speak ill of the departed." But fifteen years after her death, Sontag remains dead. And there's little hope for her recovery.
NNT's account of this incident also elides whatever the buffoonish specifics of his side of the conversation might have been. Even the most precious and fragile of us aren't absolutely scandalized by merely discovering that a person makes their money from trading.
A fun aside: this commenter also leaves out NNT's later (in the linked article) glowing description of Dinesh D'Souza's trolling some college kids with a perpetually false and long discredited "us-vs-them" dichotomy.
I confess that the only work I've read from NNT (barring the linked article, a few visits to his increasingly timecube-esque website, and the occasional dip into his Twitter stream of consciousness) is "Black Swan," but when I did I was quite surprised to discover that nearly half the the book seemed to be dedicated to his dwelling on perceived past slights and settling scores with institutions and people that he thinks treated him badly.
Finally, to address the point of the linked Medium post: one is absolutely permitted to oppose an unjust system even if one is a beneficiary of it. Without dissenting voices, nothing will ever change for the better. NNT should be ashamed of himself for speaking ill of the dead. But more than that, he should be ashamed to have built the second act of his career as a "public intellectual" by policing who is allowed to have an opinion and what they are supposed to have an opinion about. Everything is connected and we all have "skin in the game."
Please enjoy the original article! I quite enjoyed it and I hope that it makes some people happy.