eververdant
@ever_verdant
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neo-medievalism, aesthetics, language, patterns, trees
Boston, MA
Joined December 2022
it turns out there's a small town in japan called nagi, whose birth rate (~2.7) is over twice the national average (~1.3). what is this town doing to buck the trend?
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like many towns in japan, nagi was quickly shrinking in the 2000s, due to both low birth rate and emigration to cities. in response, the town of ~6,000 pooled its funding into a childrearing-centered revitalization program, including a large multigenerational daycare center
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other local policies include monetary rewards for getting married and having children, along with smaller day-to-day expenses like carseats and babysitting. they also boast affordable housing in the scenic okayama prefecture
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the town describes its culture as very child-friendly. volunteers run nurseries to take care of children, advice is generously shared among parents, and the townspeople enthusiastically claim to accommodate children in public places
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so, why is this working?. we know from examples in wealthy countries like norway and iceland that lavish childcare spending does not inherently increase birth rate
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a skeptical explanation is that nagi is just attracting people who want to have a lot of kids, rather than causing the high birth rate through policies. i don't know if there are any stats about birth rate from natives vs newcomers, but that might tell an interesting story.
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but also, i wonder if the reason that pro-child-rearing policies are usually unsuccessful not because they don't work, but they only work if the underlying culture is already dedicated to children.
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as many know, japan's fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, around ~1.3. the japanese government has adopted various measures to combat this, including cash subsidies, pro-natalist nods from the prime minister, & even reviving traditional matchmaking services
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i.e. the biggest hurdle is finding people who want to have children, but once you find them, the incentives of these policies can actually work. maybe they have to take place within a context where community bonds can form (small towns or tight-knit cities, e.g. hasidic brooklyn).
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whatever the case, maybe this is what the future of high birth rates looks like? spatterings of communities with many children, which attract like-minded people, like tribes assorting themselves into bands.
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@eurydicelives work is something like. harnessing your skills toward a useful goal. seeing that your skills are useful has to be good for the soul.
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here are some open questions:.- is this an expected outlier because of the high variance of small towns?.- are there any other towns like this?.- will this last more than one generation or will it dissolve like the 1950s baby boom?.
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medieval monks figured out how to measure things and 5 minutes later they're utilitarians
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- what kind of religious or demographic features does this town have? (i couldn't find much information in english).- what is the level of wealth in the area?.
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turns out rice terraces are very aesthetically pleasing. this one in yuanyang county looks like stained glass
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@DilettanteryPod non-perspective also gives you much more freedom to use up space. like with the woman floating in the upper-left here โ if she were seated on the boat, then she would be partially obstructed by another figure, and the upper-left would probably just be empty space
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@LooveThyJourney there are a few interviews of local residents but i couldn't find much in english!.
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@MintySainsbury el greco is another from that time that whose works look surprisingly modern in hindsight
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@norvid_studies Peasants probably had relatively low consumption of lettuce/cucumbers, but they were mostly known for cooling properties (high water content!) and medicinal properties. Pliny the Elder, the Natural History, Chap. 38
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It's also during the Renaissance that glass became clear enough to make high quality mirrors!. Glass and mirrors existed in the ancient world, but they were comparatively cloudy, tinted, & uneven. By the Renaissance, a well-crafted mirror could clearly reflect the physical world.
The importance of the camera obscura in the history of science/optics/consciousness/self.
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"born in the wrong generation" is real, people have epochal phenotypes.
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@DilettanteryPod i wonder who was patient zero for this. it sounds like you could have a "maladaptive ______" diagnosis for anything that has the potential to be fun. like, if you stay up all night playing piano instead of sleeping are you a maladaptive pianist?
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from the measure of reality by alfred w. crosby (very good book).
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@MintySainsbury el greco is another from that time that whose works look surprisingly modern in hindsight
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@mollywithakay Ideal ren fair booths:.- jam/beer made by cistercian monks.- trad hurdy gurdy troubadours.- those guys on youtube that forge swords out of iron chains.- authentic medieval headwear
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for people who just followed me from the nagi post, here is what to expect from my account:
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i want to be charitable to bauhaus but why did their parties look like dystopian corporate memphis
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victorian literature would have been so much less complicated if england didn't dissolve the monasteries.
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rugs that look like an exquisite forest floor: underrated
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part of the recent rise in autism is due to the decline in etiquette (as a tacit guide for navigating ambiguous social situations) turning people feral.
I don't want to hear your most boomer complaint or your most millennial complaint. Tell me your most Victorian complaint.
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vitruvian seraph
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@DilettanteryPod the book primitive mentality by lucien levy-bruhl has a few examples like this. e.g. the trobriand of new guinea who believed that the christian god helps christians and his ancestral spirits help his people. or the the dayak cosmology where each nation has its own atmosphere
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some say that modern art happened because artists couldn't compete with the accuracy of photography but a better explanation is that was when artists started writing manifestos.
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why did renaissance artists decide to paint in three dimensions?. writing about the history of linear perspective on the ~blogging website~
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why did these terms go out of use? it doesn't seem to be due to simplification, since our current replacements are more verbose?. elsewhen -> another time.elsehow -> another way.elsewho -> someone else.
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why are "people who talk a lot" and "people who write a lot" such different categories?. e.g. think about how there's virtually no rationalist presence on youtube โ it's almost exclusively based on writing and the occasional podcast.
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i support renovating cathedrals but i also think we don't fully understand their value in an age of universal literacy. for illiterate medieval peasants, text played no role in worship โ your eyes were not scanning words on paper, but contemplating the symbols around you.
Banger quote from @dylanmatt:. "If I were to file effective altruism down to its more core, elemental truth, itโs this: โWe should let children die to rebuild a cathedralโ is not a principle anyone should be willing to accept."
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some ai art tells: .โข textures usually have the rubbery smoothness of a dolphin .โข dauntlessly high-contrast shadows .โข surprisingly bright colors, unlikely to be found in natural pigments .โข pre-20th century women that look faintly like anime girls.
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@quotidiania my guess is that it's like the karen meme, which everyone agrees is a real archetype, but some ppl claimed that all mildly disagreeable female behavior was being pathologized as karenness. wifejak -> replace karenness with oblivious pestering.
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some thoughts on victorian courtship (and modern d*ting):.
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trying to makes sense of how most men i follow find wifejak endearing and most women find wifejak mildly annoying (including myself). my personal theory is that wifejak *is* annoying but healthy heterosexuality makes men find it endearing when their wife is a little bit annoying.
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music presents an interesting paradox of being both very specific in meaning, yet very broad in meaning. i.e. 10 people can listen to the same song and feel like it deeply resonates with something that cannot be put into words, but that "something" is different for each.
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it has been said that conservatives look back toward a lost golden age, while progressives look forward toward utopia. how many societies in history have believed that they were living in a golden age?.
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should i write a post about how this notre dame / bed net debate already happened 2500 years ago between the confucians and the mohists.
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interesting, i think fantasy fiction is a good case study. fantasy, almost definitionally, is based on folk culture & myth. it peaked in the early 20th century, and the plot structures and archetypes have been largely frozen in time since then (some exceptions: asoiaf, etc.).
most culture was always colloquial, folk culture. we forget this fact because the things that get preserved are disproportionately formal culture. as modern mass culture developed, it still had a base of colloquial culture to draw from, but this inheritance is smaller every year.
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i wonder if being a housewife was better in the 1950s or now. now:.- food is better.- more time-saving appliances.- you can learn almost anything on the internet.- you can earn prestige remotely without a career. then:.- tighter-knit neighborhood.- safer streets / free-range kids.
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it's interesting. humans (including hunter-gatherers) sleep less than other primates, yet we spend a greater amount of sleep time in REM
@ever_verdant also sleep cycle extension/disruption/changes i think there was studies on this? or speculation anyway.
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new one: "pre-raphaelette".
bf suggested i should change my twitter bio to "software ingenue".
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you know that book about nominalists causing the decline of western philosophy? should have been called determinative nominalism.
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how many times have you ended up in a situation where physical fitness was genuinely important for your success?. (not including controlled situations like moving furniture or athletic competitions).
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looking at some nagi travel brochures (for research purposes!) and this place is breathtaking. taki shrine near mt. nagi:
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books were assumed to have a similarly magical character. bechanas of southern africa believed that a book was an "instrument of divination" in which the reader can gaze at the printed to pictures to see events taking place from afar, or tell the future or past
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interesting, are there any other "miracle towns" that have unexpectedly high fertility*?. *not due to religious factors (hasidic, mormon, amish, high fertility 1st gen. immigrants, etc.).
@ever_verdant those are all good 'real reasons', but my immediate thought was 'high variance of the small towns'-- typically smallest towns will be highest AND lowest in any stat you can imagine, because of variance.
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this often happened at first contact, wanna hear some field reports about it?.
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i get why people say video games are a waste of time and a simulacrum of real life, but some of my deepest ponderings have come from playing stardew valley at 2am.
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the dutch landed in australia a century before the english but they thought the land was rocky and barren and useless so they left
@MungoManic @Peter_Nimitz I always wondered why Polynesians or Mฤori never colonized Australia before Europeans.
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curious about the a common trend in modern aesthetics where flatness comes to be increasingly associated with style and prestige
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the joy of winter is found in contrasts. blue flames blazing in the cold, an evergreen tree within four walls, festivity among hibernation.
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but it's notable how rare it is, if you live in a safe area, for your physical fitness to have any immediate consequences on what happens to you. and when it does happen, it become viscerally clear what it's for.
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after sid meier is done, the civilization games should be written by razib khan.
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some thoughts on fire and human culture:. in addition to adding cooked food to our diet, the control of fire provided a reliable light source for seeing at night. what are the implications of this?.
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a lot of ancient writing is people whose writings did survive vehemently replying to writings that didn't survive. replies to deleted tweets remind me of that.
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thinking about this after going sailing last week with my boyfriend on a 14m catamaran. at first, the waters were calm and mild, but eventually the wind picked up and the current got decently strong.
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gift-giving is a subtle art โ it takes patience, compassion, theory of mind. you dig through your memories about someone to consider all their characteristics, until the physical instantiation of their preferences emerges as the Perfect Gift.
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translation of the Iliad where every address of a god or goddess is replaced with Chat.
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do we really need education philosophy, can't you just sign up your kid for goodreads.
Let's say your kid reads many years above grade level, as mine do and always have. Guess whatโthat just means they run out of books to read faster than everyone else!. What's the goal here? How does it benefit the child to pay $$$ to push them even farther out?.
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I don't know if this is a real Beethoven quote but it's pretty good:."Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.".
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meanwhile, revealed preferences show that we prefer dating to be fun (hot-air balloon rides, ecstatic concerts, schmancy wine bars, and much more). the appeal of fun is obvious, but it makes it unclear whether the purpose of these dates is for the courtship or the fun.
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babe you ok? you've barely touched your coursera plus subscription.
Imagine logging into LinkedIn and seeing your wife put you on blast
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not sure about moral connotation, but more sonorous languages (open vowels, fewer consonant clusters) tend to develop in hotter climates. the idea is they're more audible over large distances with more ambient noise, and people in hotter climates spend more time outside
underdiscussed by linguists and moral philosophers. how universal is it that a clash of consonants sounds sinister and alternation of consonants and vowels/ abundance of vowels sounds harmonious and graceful? (to pick but one feature).
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strava is a rare example of gamification done right. a game should reward you for the most intrinsically satisfying objectives (e.g. running), rather than store the excitement in the extrinsic rewards (e.g. log in for 7 days straight and get a loot box).
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the main benefit of tea is its multi-sensory vibe-enhancing properties (this is why japanese tea ceremonies last 4 hours) and this effect is not surfaced in laboratory studies
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product managers as the professional manifestation of victorian upper class housewives
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why does humor and tickling evoke the same response (laughter). i get why you would want to have a visceral response to spidery sensations but why does it reuse the laughter response.
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megalopolis was like watching neri oxman's thesis on film.
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after visiting sonoma county where the windows xp "bliss" photograph was taken, i'm pleasantly surprised to say that the photo doesn't look artificially saturated. the grass is really that green.
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some more things i've found about nagi through brochures/maps:. (for any who think i'm prying, nagi is a mountain resort town that boasts their tfr in their travel brochure)
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