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From Chaos, Coppola's Almost Perfect Film
Mark Seal's Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli recounts the making of the novel and movie The Godfather.
By Tom Zito
Art Streiber/August
There is one reason that movie is successful, and one reason only. It may be the greatest family movie ever made.
—Al Ruddy
Producer, The Godfather
In the late summer of 1998, I received an offer I couldn't refuse: Francis Ford Coppola wanted some help running American Zoetrope, his San Francisco film studio. I had met the man many years earlier, at the home of the writer Gay Talese, whose wife, Nan (more to come on her), had published the journals painfully kept by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, during the making of Apocalypse Now. The director told me he had just fired the company's decade-long president. Given Coppola's well-known and deep sense of loyalty, that seemed odd, until some weeks later when I discovered the reason: the president had fought with his boss, who wanted to allocate $2 million of Zoetrope funds—i.e., Coppola's own money—to finance daughter Sofia's first feature film, The Virgin Suicides.
How could anyone who had ever watched The Godfather, let alone been present at the creation of The Godfather III, not understand the sacred bond between Italian American fathers and daughters? The woman asks; the man delivers. That male-female dialectic is all but universal in Italian families. Recall the telling moment in the first movie when the character Clemenza, played by Richard Castellano, is heading off on a few errands…chief among them to eliminate his own lieutenant Paulie Gatto, who had helped engender the hit on Don Corleone. "Don't forget the cannoli," admonishes Mrs. Clemenza, blowing a kiss as her husband climbs into a soon-to-be-abandoned car, its windshield shattered, splattered with Paulie's blood, the Statue of Liberty's back creating an iconic—and ironic—backdrop to the crime. And as every lover of the movie knows, despite being mired in that messy business obligation and having to take a leak while another of his lieutenants is actually pulling the trigger, Clemenza most certainly does not forget his wife's request.
In his detail-rich and decidedly definitive saga about the creation of Mario Puzo's 1969 novel and Coppola's film three years later, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather, Mark Seal writes of that memorable moment, "It was the essence of everything: The wife, the kids, the fathers, the mothers, the kitchens, the families, and the food, always the food, and the extremes to which men had to go to put that food on the table. It was about the gun, yes, but it was more about the cannoli. It was about the statue in the distance with its back to the murder scene. It was about the country that had turned its back on these men and their community, for whom only the Godfather could offer justice and jobs and dignity."
Seal's book arrives not quite 50 years after the film's first viewers, in March 1972, witnessed the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera—a minor character Coppola wisely pulled from deeper in the novel to be the first voice we hear in the movie—deliver his "I believe in America…" plea to his godfather. As Seal notes, "Here was an Italian immigrant who tended to the dead, begging Don Corleone for more death." Coppola wrote in the margins of his notebook: "Good scene. We need a terrific actor for Bonasera." Counterintuitively, he hired an amateur, whose stage fright and halting delivery propelled his performance into the perfect expression of a character in complete awe of his patron—something Coppola must have known instinctively would happen.
Francis Ford Coppola (right) directs Marlon Brando as Don Corleone in "The Godfather."
In my brief sojourn at Zoetrope (I, too, was fired, albeit over differences of business strategy, not family-loyalty miscues), I saw a few annoying but mostly delightful sides to Coppola. He was first and foremost a family man, but he was also a talented chef; an avid and careful reader; a director who truly knew his craft ("Sit right next to the lens so the actor is performing for you"); a tinkerer who loved building things; a close and loyal friend to film-world colleagues like George Lucas and Walter Murch. In many ways he was the originator of social media, with his Virtual Studio, which encouraged anyone to submit a script and have it critiqued by others; and, perhaps most notably, that very rare individual who had become a giant in two disparate fields of endeavor, film and wine, à la Steve Jobs with Apple and Pixar. (You could even argue three, if you counted the six hotels Coppola runs.) I could get the director to engage on almost any topic, save the one I most wanted to explore: the making of The Godfather, the film I would always choose if I could choose but one. At most, he would dismiss it by saying, "That was a bad time in my life," and move on to some other topic.
"A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns."
While many of the stories and facts in Seal's account have been documented previously, in a widely varying collection of relatively obscure books and various magazine dispatches, the compiler has done a remarkable job of transforming this crazy patchwork quilt into a solidly structured narrative that's almost as astounding as what Mario Puzo got on the page and Coppola on the screen. What Seal lacks as a polished writer is more than offset by his dogged research and reporting. It's often said that making a movie is fundamentally like going to war: a constant barrage of problems, with little end in sight. If nothing else—and he certainly does much more—Seal makes it completely clear why Coppola never really wanted to discuss the filming of The Godfather. It was a constant battle; every day he faced enormous opposition to his script choices, his casting choices, his directing choices. The studio hated Marlon Brando (who would win an Academy Award for his performance), hated Al Pacino (in fact, Paramount wanted Robert Redford as Michael), and didn't want to shoot in New York. At one point, Coppola faced a mutiny of crew members on his set, with his editor as the ringleader, hoping to take over the film himself. (Coppola fired them all.) The list goes on and on. In retrospect, it seems hard to believe that an almost perfect film could have experienced so tumultuous a gestation. In the end, the battles involved in making The Godfather dwarf even the battles among the characters of its story.
As is often the case with writing projects, the Godfather novel was born of financial desperation, largely caused by its author's gambling addiction. Mario Puzo had been raised in the poverty of Hell's Kitchen, New York's melting pot for struggling Irish and Italian immigrants. When a grade-school teacher instructed the class to bring in cans of food to be distributed to poor families, the Puzo kids had to shoplift their donations. Eventually, Puzo found a seat in a writing sweatshop called Magazine Management, where authors "seemed not so much to have been hired as to have been washed ashore at the company like driftwood," observed Bruce Jay Friedman, the editorial director who would go on to write many books and screenplays of his own. In the mid-'60s, Puzo embarked on a quest to write his "Mafia Novel," modeled on The Heritage of the Desert, a Zane Grey western, although this would be a new kind of western with a new style of outlaw justice. One night at dinner, sitting across from Gay Talese's wife—herself a legend in the book business, publishing many bestsellers—Puzo realized that Nan Irene Ahearn Talese, a Westchester Cotillion debutante, was the perfect model for the Waspy wife he envisioned for his character Michael. Some time later, while chatting with a croupier in Vegas, where he was doing research on mobster Meyer Lansky—and running up serious markers at the Sands Hotel—the author witnessed a pit boss very quickly defuse an altercation started by David Janssen, star of the TV series The Fugitive. When Puzo asked the pit boss how he had done it, he replied, "I made him an offer he couldn't refuse."
As Puzo was hammering out his manuscript on his 1965 Olympia manual typewriter, Paramount offered him $50,000 for the film rights, with $10,000 as an advance. Into his bookies for that amount, the author asked if the studio could make the advance $15,000. They settled on $12,500—albeit preempting any future royalties if a movie were made; at the time, Paramount believed none ever would be. As Puzo eventually wrote in the book, "A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns." Brando experienced this even more forcefully, when he needed $100,000 to pay taxes, a month before the movie began shooting. The studio agreed to advance the money, but only if the actor would give up his future profit participation in the film—eventually worth at least $11 million.
Novelist Mario Puzo (left) and director Francis Ford Coppola.
Seal describes how publication of The Godfather changed Puzo's life profoundly; he began to be hustled by people wanting to be involved with the film. Orson Welles invited him to dinner in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, proposing that he play the don. One night at the now-long-gone but legendary showbiz hangout Chasen's, Puzo was loudly and publicly excoriated by Frank Sinatra, the author's inspiration for the Johnny Fontaine character. "Choke; go ahead and choke," screamed the singer (whom I saw pounce on a croupier in Atlantic City when his number didn't come up, on the day gambling returned to that town in 1978). All that screaming at Puzo seems profoundly counterproductive because Sinatra, like Welles, thought he should play the role of Don Corleone and was lobbying Paramount profusely in that effort. The Chairman of the Board dustup was especially painful to Puzo: "In the house where I grew up, my mother had two pictures in the kitchen: one of the Pope, and one of Sinatra."
Michael's love of family is punctuated by the gunshot he orders to slay his brother.
When I worked for Coppola, I did finally get him to answer one question…about the second Godfather film, specifically a scene that had sealed my mother's dislike of both the original and its sequel. When Fredo is shot, I asked, did the bird just happen into the frame, or was it wrangled in? Can you get more obsessive about movie minutiae? But something about fratricide felt so primal—had so horrified my mother, that a brother could, and would, descend to such moral depths—it made me wonder whether the director sensed the need to amp up the scene with an image of something flying away, being lost. For my devoutly Catholic, Sicilian mother, it was further affirmation of the death of Michael's immortal soul, which had already sailed away, for her, in the baptism scene of the first film, cutting between the christening of Connie Corleone's infant daughter (played by Talia Shire's three-week-old niece, Sofia Coppola) surrounded by her family in New York and the orchestrated massacres of family enemies happening in multiple locations, none more brutally depicted than the blood dripping from Moe Greene's eye as he lies on a Vegas massage table. For me, that baptism scene is the pinnacle of film editing and should be acknowledged as such in film schools, even more than the much-lauded Odessa-steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin, which many believe put montage on the map. If montage is the juxtaposition of disparate concepts to create a heightened emotional state, what better way to communicate Michael's horrific existential conflict than love of family punctuated by the gunshot he orders to slay his brother? It was his innocence completely gone, past the point of no return. "The bird just flew by," Coppola told me. "So given the various takes and footage, you could say it was an 'editorial decision.'"
Another editorial decision was this book's title and its concomitantly mythical place in Godfather lore. You won't find it in the script, which simply had Clemenza delivering advice well-known to any hit man (and the actor's uncle Paul was one): "Leave the gun." Those were the words on the page. But Castellano, a product of the Method school, had so inhabited his character that while waiting for the camera to roll, with the Statue of Liberty's back snubbing him, he recalled his fictional wife's admonition not to forget dessert. Thus was born a storied line in cinema history, ad-libbed by someone completely present in his role: "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."•
Gallery Books
LEAVE THE GUN, TAKE THE CANNOLI: THE EPIC STORY OF THE MAKING OF THE GODFATHER, BY MARK SEAL
Gallery Books Bookshop.org
Tom Zito Tom Zito is a serial entrepreneur.
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Home » Single-Seaters » F1 » Formula 1's travels through the USA
Formula 1's travels through the USA
November 14th 2013 - Last updated: September 19th 2019
Whisper it: the United States Grand Prix might at last have found a new spiritual home. The Circuit of the Americas' difficult birth was eased by the enthusiastic response of its 100,000-plus crowd when Formula 1 finally arrived in Texas.
It helped that the fans were treated to the best GP of 2012 – Lewis Hamilton's hunting down of Sebastian Vettel – and that F1 lightened up in response. Little things can mean a lot and cowboy hats on the podium were a nice touch warmly received.
It is too early, however, to get carried away. The 2012 championship was bubbling to a boil this time last year, whereas the 2013 title race has already gone flat. Sunday's US GP, therefore, will be judged as a stand-alone event in which Hamilton, or any other for that matter, has little hope of hunting down Vettel.
America and F1 have been here before. A record crowd attended the first GP held at Indianapolis, in 2000, yet that 'special relationship' had turned sour long before the parties involved parted company after '07. The Ferrari fix of '02 had soured it and the farcical failure to fix the Michelin saga of '05 curdled it.
Bridges needed to be built – and Austin in 2012 was an excellent foundation. Or should that be pier?
America's peak as an F1 destination
Yet it wasn't so very long ago – 1982 – that America became the first and so far only country to host three GPs in a single season: Long Beach, Detroit and (less) Vegas. The latter was a bit of flimflam, a hustle in a car park, albeit a title-decider. The others, however, possessed genuine character, albeit in a Grand Theft Auto kinda way, what with their down ramps, boulevards, tunnels and ocean liner backdrops.
Clay Regazzoni at Long Beach, 1976. Click here to download this picture as a high resolution wallpaper.
Long Beach's US GP West lasted from 1976 until entrepreneurial expat promoter Chris Pook wearied of his dealings with F1 and, wisely as it turned out, swapped allegiance to Indycars in '84. Detroit's GP ran from John Watson's slice-and-dice victory of '82 (from 17th on the grid) to Ayrton Senna's hat trick of '88. I liked both but, of the two, preferred the latter.
To race in Motown seemed wholly appropriate as the manufacturers began to flex their muscle within F1. Jackie Stewart, a fully paid up member of clan Ford, was in his element: "An amazing race track," he gushed on ABC TV. "A glamorous, glamorous way to run a motor race."
F1's American street fighters
Ayrton Senna (Detroit '86, '87, '88, Phoenix '90, '91)
Alan Jones (Long Beach & Las Vegas '81)
John Watson (Detroit '82, Long Beach '83)
Michele Alboreto (Las Vegas '82, Detroit '83)
Nelson Piquet (Long Beach '80, Detroit '84)
Keke Rosberg (Dallas '84, Detroit '85)
JYS, however, had lapsed into hyperbole. The circuit's original layout was too twisty – the hairpin left at Turn Five was bypassed the following year – and its surface had a tendency to fragment. The drivers demanded many infrastructure improvements, the schedule ran dramatically late and the 86mph lap speed did not overly impress the gas-guzzling locals when proceedings finally got under way.
It was Watson who saved the day. Passing three rivals – McLaren-Ford team-mate Niki Lauda, Eddie Cheever and Didier Pironi in a single lap – he won the restarted race by 15.7sec.
John Watson avoids the chaos in Detroit, 1982
Detroit had initiated its F1 programme to boost the image of what had become a Problem City and the 2.5-mile circuit looped beneath the aptly named and suitably grandiose 72-storey Renaissance Centre. Thanks to 'Wattie', and the appropriate relocation of sufficient greenbacks, all concerned were happy to give it another go.
Michele Alboreto won the following year to hand Tyrrell, that most 'Ford' of teams, and the Ford-backed Cosworth V8 their final GP victories. Keke Rosberg's Williams-Ford finished second and Watson was third (from 21st on the grid). Detroit's movers (and shakers) were delighted.
Read more from Paul Fearnley
Sporting dominance
Vettel vs Fangio
Paul Radisich's first World Cup win
In 1984, Nelson Piquet's Brabham's-BMW led a restarted race from first to last, while whippersnapper Martin Brundle finished second for Tyrrell in his last start before breaking his ankles. Just hours after the race, however, the controversy that would sink Uncle Ken's team that year burst its tanks.
Redoubtable street fighter Rosberg won in 1985, his Williams now Powered by Honda, while Stefan Bellof gave the 3-litre Cosworth V8 its final points with a fourth place that might have been a podium finish but for his Tyrrell's broken clutch. Team-mate Brundle had been running ahead of him when he collided with a backmarker.
Keke Rosberg, Detroit 1985
From then on Senna, the most streetwise of racers, ruled the roost. In 1986, he recovered from a rear puncture. In '87, he smoothed the actively suspended, Caddy-riding Lotus 99T to its second win in as many races. And in '88 he trounced McLaren team-mate Alain Prost.
Nobody else, however, was enjoying themselves much. The newness had worn off. The temporary pits were condemned. The bumps had begun to jar. Detroit's problems had deepened – I recommend you watch Julien Temple's thought-provoking documentary on this ongoing dystopian cultural car crash (as well as his excellent Oil City Confidential about Canvey Island pub rockers Dr Feelgood.) And fair-weather F1 slung its hook to the warmer climes of Cheever's Phoenix. (Eddie would finish third in an Arrows-Ford.)
Failure in Phoenix
This race was awarded the unifying moniker United States GP, which had lain fallow since F1 had fled Watkins Glen in 1980, but the venue was not a success and would have been almost entirely forgettable but for Jean Alesi's 1990 antics in a Tyrrell-Ford.
Money talks in F1 – especially when cross-examined by a whip-smart QC – and the United States is the greatest consumer economy. The uncomfortable bottom line, however, is that this apparent meeting of minds has usually resulted in them butting heads. Divided by a common interest, the bucks always seem greener elsewhere.
Alesi leads Senna in Phoenix, 1990
The feel-good factor at Austin 2012, however, cannot be bought. The crowd there did not consist merely of the curious, who had moseyed to the end of the road to see what was making the racket, it had undertaken a singular trip to an event made precious by its rarity and specialty. Nor did the event have the undeniable poor-relation air redolent at Indianapolis, where cavernous grandstands swallowed a huge crowd whole before spitting it out.
F1 survived without America and, obviously, vice versa, but they were the poorer without. I refer not to the narrow-minded economic sense. If they can learn again to fall in love with the 'little things' and recapture some of the Glen Motor Inn spirit – and it seems as though they might be on the verge of doing so – they will get along just dandy.
Fail, and it will be Long Beach, Vegas, Detroit, Dallas, Phoenix and Indy all over again.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Propagating Facts into Aesthetics
by Raemon13 min read19th Dec 201933 comments
Why 'aesthetics?'
What is an aesthetic?
An aesthetic is a mishmash of values, strategies, and ontologies that reinforce each other.
Are Swamps Beautiful?
Are Harsh Deserts Beautiful?
Is Helping Nearby People Other Beautiful?
"Trying on" another aesthetic
Clean Code vs Quick Hacks
Knobs to Turn
Epistemic status: Tentative. I've been practicing this on-and-off for a year and it's seemed valuable, but it's the sort of thing I might look back on and say "hmm, that wasn't really the right frame to approach it from."
In doublecrux, the focus is on "what observations would change my mind?"
In some cases this is (relatively) straightforward. If you believe minimum wage helps workers, or harms them, there are some fairly obvious experiments you might run. "Which places have instituted minimum wage laws? What happened to wages? What happened to unemployment? What happened to worker migration?"
The details will matter a lot. The results of the experiment might be weird and confusing. If I ran the experiment myself I'd probably get a lot of things wrong, misuse statistics and forget to account for some confounding factors. But I don't feel confused about how to learn better statistics, account for more confounders, etc.
But there's a problem that seems harder to me, which is how to change my mind about aesthetics. Sarah Constantin first brought this up in Naming the Nameless, and I've been thinking about it ever since.
I think a lot of deep disagreements have to do with "what is beautiful, and what is ugly?", and inability to directly address this is part of what prevents those disagreements from resolving.
In the case of the minimum wage example, you might run an experiment, and find overwhelming evidence that minimum wage helps or hurts workers. But because there's lots of confounders, the evidence might be mixed and confusing. How you interpret it will depend on how it fits into your existing worldview.
Part of this has to do with your ontological frame. But I think a lot has to do with aesthetics judgments, such as:
Is capitalism ugly and/or distasteful? You might have very salient examples of how capitalism can result in exploitation, pollution, or people becoming trapped in unhealthy power structures.
Is capitalism beautiful? Alternately, it might be salient that capitalism creates supermarkets, gains from trade, and vast surplus. Economic efficiency isn't just pretty numbers on a graph, it's real value being created.
These don't directly bear on the minimum wage question, but might make it harder to resolve.
In some cases, your aesthetic taste might make it harder to update on new information properly. In other cases, your aesthetic taste might help you to notice important patterns more readily.
I'm using the word aesthetic in a nonstandard way. When people do that, I think it's important to be clear and about what they're doing and why.
There's a few different words I might have used here, including "feelings", "ontologies", "frameworks", and "values."
Most obviously, I could have asked 'is capitalism good/bad?' instead of 'is capitalism beautiful or ugly?'.
I'm making a fairly strong claim (weakly held) that "is it beautiful or ugly?" is at least one of the important questions to be asking, in addition to "is capitalism good/bad" and "does raising minimum wage help or harm workers?". Not because it's how a flawless AI would think about it, but because it's how humans seem to often think about it.
The values reinforce "you want to use strategies that achieve these values."
The act of using a particular strategy shapes the ontology that you see the world through.
The ontology reinforces what values seem important to you.
Together, this all creates a feedback loop between your metagoals and subgoals, where the process of using this cluster of value/strategy/ontology makes each link in the chain stronger.
In humans (who have messy, entangled brains), this caches out into feelings, felt senses. The original goal and the metagoals blur together. I think "this helps me achieve my [generic] goals" might reinforce "these particular subgoals I have are good goals to help with my overall flourishing."
This might be implemented via evolution over millions of years, or via human brains over decades. A Just So Story I'm not sure I endorse but hopefully gets the point across:
"A flower is beautiful, you say. Do you think there is no story behind that beauty, or that science does not know the story? Flower pollen is transmitted by bees, so by sexual selection, flowers evolved to attract bees—by imitating certain mating signs of bees, as it happened; the flowers' patterns would look more intricate, if you could see in the ultraviolet. Now healthy flowers are a sign of fertile land, likely to bear fruits and other treasures, and probably prey animals as well; so is it any wonder that humans evolved to be attracted to flowers?
Here are some things that you might find beautiful, or distasteful:
Readable, well-written code
Clever hacks that got the job done quickly
Cities built on rectangular grids
Winding alleyways in villages where nobody has consistent names
People being physically affectionate in public
A harsh, barren desert
A lush valley with a river
Swamps / wetlands
Nature in general
Manicured gardens
Throwing away books
People speaking in languages different from yours
Dense spreadsheets laden with accurate data
Frugalism
People going out of their way to be kind to their neighbors
People going out of their way to solve small-but-common problems using math
(If you're like me, you might find it distasteful when people make moral arguments that seem rooted in distaste... and then feel kinda self conscious about the contradiction)
Sometimes you're doublecruxing with someone, and they've explained their model. And their model… makes sense. But the conclusion just seems so damn ugly. You want to take 5x the time to write beautiful code, and they just want you to get the job done and ship it.
One thing you can do is push aside your aesthetic judgment, shut up and multiply. This may be useful for expediency.
But sometimes, I think the correct thing is for one or both people to backpropagate facts through their aesthetics.
I do not think you should rush or "force" this. Your sense of beauty is there for a reason. But I have a sense that figuring out how to do this well is a key open problem in applied rationality.
Compare the swamp with a verdant forest.
If you're like me, swamps seem ugly. Forests seem pretty.
My associations with swamps come largely from stories (and perhaps most concretely, from the game "Magic the Gathering"), where they're often presented as places of disease, murky horrors and corrupt magic. In person, swamps are physically hard to walk in (sometimes solid ground turns out to be algae), and full of mosquitos that bite me.
Are these associations accurate?
Well, the solid ground and mosquito issues are definitely real.
Swamp Thing is not real, life-stealing magic is not real.
Are there additional facts I can learn? My sister evaluates land for construction projects. She says that swamps often serve important roles as a natural way to filter water, and when you naively drain swamps, water quality in an area gets worse. James Scott in Against the Grain claims that early Sumerian civilization developed in swamps, where food and resources were plentiful and life was fairly leisureful – until empires arose and subjected people and forced them to switch to easily-taxable crops instead of the ones that grew naturally. (Speaking of which: is civilization beautiful or ugly?)
I probably find forests beautiful, in part, because they represent a lot of resources that I understand how to make use of. If swamps also supply those resources, maybe I should respect them more?
I also find forests beautiful because my experience stems from a) enchanted forests in fairytales, and b) relatively manicured national parks. If I remind myself that the last time I walked through an untamed forest, it was dense with brambles that cut me 'till I bled. It wasn't actually a much nicer experience than the last time I explored a swamp. (It also had non-trivial numbers of mosquitos)
In this example, simply mulling over the facts naturally re-organizes my feelings about them. I still find swamps ugly, but less ugly than before. I expect that, if I reflected on this periodically, over time, it would shift a bit more.
I am in fact confused by this. My answer is "yes", and I don't know why. Deserts don't have much in the way of resources. Their stark beauty is more like the way a statue is beautiful than the way a forest is beautiful.
I mulled this one over for a while, am still confused and I note it here because "noticing the limits of a model" seems important.
[Edit: this was discussed more in the comments.]
The first experience I got with aesthetic doublecrux was debating "hufflepuff virtue" with Oliver Habryka.
I had a strong sense that "people helping each other out" was good and right and virtuous. There was a beauty to the sort of community where everyone notices when someone is hurting (and reaches out to help), or when a space is messy (and cleans it up). There was a cluster of attributes that seemed to fit together in a way that was stronger than the sum of its parts.
And this was visibly lacking in the Berkeley community, and it was resulting in people feeling alienated and distrustful of each other, and many spaces being either messy, or burdening a single person with cleaning up everyone else's mess.
This seemed concretely harmful. But it also just seemed… ugly and bad.
Oliver had a different view, which I summarize as the "systemization and specialization" approach. (previously discussed here)
If everyone has to pay attention to their environment and notice things that need doing, this is a lot of cognitive overhead. If people only have seven working memory slots but they're spending one of them on tracking the environment, that's a dramatic cost on their ability to think. For a community that specializes in thinking, this could be quite bad.
Moreover, "everyone pitch in" is just a really inefficient way of getting things done. A better solution is to streamline and automate as much of the work as possible, hire cleaning services, and whatever remaining work needs doing, simply pay one one of the people something commensurate for their time and effort. Specialization is how things get done when you're doing them seriously.
We argued about this over the course of three days.
I still think there are some things habryka was missing here. But eventually my worldview shifted in some significant ways:
I updated that the "everyone pitch in" way of keeping spaces clean doesn't make sense for longterm organizations with serious funding. Specialization is real, cognitive bandwidth is precious, and it's generally better to just hire a cleaning service if you can afford one.
I updated a bit (talking with Satvik) that my model that "helping each other out in low-key ways builds trust which later enables more extensive projects" wasn't as strong as I thought. Satvik asked something like "do you think startup cofounders tend to team up because they've helped each other take out the trash? I feel like it's more about sharing a clear vision and principles or something." And I thought back to some experiences and… yeah that seemed maybe more accurate.
I gained a better understanding of where and why the "everyone pitch in" approach is useful.
Cleaning services are expensive, and if you're a fledgling organization or a typical household, it's probably not worth hiring a cleaner more than once a week or so. Meanwhile, people make messes much more frequently than once a week. If you want your space nice, you have to clean it yourself.
There's a value that comes from having community spaces use the "everyone pitch in" method, in that it creates a stronger sense of ownership and buy-in for the space. It also is a mechanism by which people can relate to each other more easily. While this might not be that important for a company, it seems important for a community that's aiming to meet community-shaped-needs.
But this all left me with a nagging, frustrated sense that something important and beautiful being lost. I want to live in a world where people help each other out in small ways. It's the particular kind of beauty that a small town in a Miyazaki movie embodies. It feels important to me.
Under what circumstances should I change how I feel about that?
There's a sense in which aesthetics can't be proven wrong, or at least "trying to prove it wrong" isn't really the right frame of mind.
But… I have an aesthetic preference for consistency, and for believing true things (whether this is good is another question, but I'm taking it at face value for now), which informs my other aesthetics. Aesthetics can turn out to be built out of contradictory pieces, and they can turn out to hinge of false beliefs.
While talking to habryka, I tried to get a sense of what it's like to live in the world where systemization and specialization are obviously good and right. What was it like to be habryka? How did this fit together with his other beliefs and values?
Then, once I had a good handle on that, I tried to inhabit "what would it be like to be a Raemon who found systemization and specialization good and right?". Without actually adopting the aesthetic, I tried fitting it into my existing model. This was a bit of an aesthetic process of its own – like trying on a new outfit and seeing how I reacted in the mirror.
I'm not sure if habryka endorses considering those as an 'aesthetic', per se. But I found this process valuable.
I gained some ability to see systemization as beautiful. My sense of hufflepuff beauty became more nuanced and caveated.
Humans have (an instinctive? Learned? I'm not sure) sense that when you smell fecal matter or rotting flesh, there is probably disease nearby. It's digusting.
Dogs... well, I'm not 100% sure what's going on with dogs but I think it's something like "strong odors that mask my scent are more useful than disease is bad", and for some reason fecal matter is joyful to play around in.
Programmers often learn that spaghetti code is evidence of bugs, even if they don't know exactly what the bug is yet. It acquires a bad code smell.
Young programmers often do not have this sense of distaste, and it is important for them to acquire it.
On the flipside: there is also a thing where, well, sometimes you're rushing to ship an Minimum Viable Product and you don't have time to do everything right. It can be legitimately hard to figure out how much effort to put into "doing things right." But it seems at least sometimes, experienced coders either need to learn to "hold their nose" and do the quick fix, or to develop alternate aesthetics that they can shift between depending on circumstances.
There are a few different directions this kind of process might go:
You could shift to find something more beautiful than you did before
You could shift to find something less beautiful than you did before.
You could shift to find something more distasteful than you did before.
You could shift to find something less distasteful than you did before.
I have some sense that these are subtly different processes, although not much evidence to back that up. I also feel like in each case, going from Zero to N, or N to Zero, is different than dialing an existing aesthetic response up or down.
Gaining a new appreciation for why something is beautiful feels different than gaining a categorically new form of disgust. In particular, gaining a new form of beauty mostly makes my life feel nicer, whereas gaining a new form of disgust increases the unpleasantness
In Naming the Nameless, Sarah Constantin references this comment by Scott Alexander:
Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it's considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it – or say it only in a very careful way – in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-status or cringeworthy.
Finally the idea of "low-status" and "bad and wrong" have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it's true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question. And even then, it's in a condescending way, where I feel like the people who say it's true deserve low status for not being smart enough to remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice it, but I don't know how many times it's slipped my notice all the way to the point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement."
Sarah notes:
Now, I could say "just don't do that, then" -- but Scott of 2009 would have also said he believed in being independent and rational and not succumbing to social pressure. Good intentions aren't enough. [...]
I think it's much better to try to make the implicit explicit, to bring cultural dynamics into the light and understand how they work, rather than to hide from them.
Scott's comment gets at what I mean by "An aesthetic is a mishmash of values, strategies, beliefs, and ontologies that reinforce each other." He starts with a belief, then adopts a strategy for how he relates his communication to that belief, and then ends up with a vague sense that the belief is "cringey", and later collapsing it to "cringey and wrong".
This quite worrying epistemic horror.
I think most of what needed saying, Sarah already said, but it's worth concluding with here:
If you take something about yourself that's "cringeworthy" and, instead of cringing yourself, try to look at why it's cringeworthy, what that's made of, and dialogue honestly with the perspective that disagrees with you -- then there is, in a sense, nothing to fear.
There's an "elucidating" move that I'm trying to point out here, where instead of defending against an allegation, you say "let's back up a second" and bring the entire situation into view. It's what double crux is about -- "hey, let's find out what even is the disagreement between us." Double crux is hard enough with arguments, and here I'm trying to advocate something like double-cruxing aesthetic preferences, which sounds absurdly ambitious. But: imagine if we could talk about why things seem beautiful and appealing, or ugly and unappealing. Where do these preferences come from, in a causal sense? Do we still endorse them when we know their origins? What happens when we bring tacit things into consciousness, when we talk carefully about what aesthetics evoke in us, and how that might be the same or different from person to person?
Unless you can think about how cultural messaging works, you're going to be a mere consumer of culture, drifting in whatever direction the current takes you.
I'm hoping this post gives some nuts and bolts on how to actually make progress on that goal.
Again, I don't know that the specific techniques I list in this post are the best ones, or how often exactly aesthetic concerns are most relevant. I think it's usually good form to start with an attempt to take arguments at face value, and debate about concrete beliefs.
But, if that isn't working, I think digging into aesthetics is one of the tools that's important to have in your toolkit.
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[-]johnswentworth2y
Review for 2019 Review
I revisited this post a few months ago, after Vaniver's review of Atlas Shrugged.
I've felt for a while that Atlas Shrugged has some really obvious easy-to-articulate problems, but also offers a lot of value in a much-harder-to-articulate way. After chewing on it for a while, I think the value of Atlas Shrugged is that it takes some facts about how incentives and economics and certain worldviews have historically played out, and propagates those facts into an aesthetic. (Specifically, the facts which drove Rand's aesthetics presumably came from growing up in the early days of Soviet Russia.) It's mainly the aesthetic that's valuable.
Generalizing: this post has provided me with a new model of how art can offer value. Better yet, the framing of "propagate facts into aesthetics" suggests a concrete approach to creating or recognizing art with this kind of value. As in the case of Atlas Shrugged, we can look at the aesthetic of some artwork, and ask "what are the facts which fed into this aesthetic?". This also gives us a way to think about when the aesthetic will or will not be useful/valuable.
Overall, this is one of the gearsiest models I've seen for instrumental thinking about art, especially at a personal (as opposed to group/societal) level.
[-]Raemon2y
"Reverse engineering the facts out of an aesthetic" is an interesting takeaway. I guess it's actually not that different from the original "aesthetic doublecrux" idea that generated this post, but applying it unilaterally to a work of art without an artist to argue with is an interesting approach.
[-]bendini3y
I like this post a lot, but the example debates that seem like intractable aesthetic disagreements seem to be missing a 2 key ideas that are preventing resolution:
1. Shared verbal acknowledgement that regardless of the aesthetic considerations, the status quo is not working. If you're debating the merits of "everyone pitch in" vs "specialise and outsource" and you've failed to recognise that people are generally not clearing up after themselves or funnelling money towards the problem, your first order of business shouldn't be to get into a long-winded philosophical debate over aesthetics.
2. Overlooking resource constraints and avoiding fuzzy quantification. In the case of clean code vs quick hacks, unless you are writing the code just for fun, what each person prefers is much less relevant than the business-world constraints you are under. If you are under extreme time pressure and the thing must be done, the choice is quick hacks or death. If you are trying to "scale up" but there are no impending deadlines, whether a piece of code should be written cleanly depends on how reliant you expect to be on that code in future, how clearly you understand the problem it is solving, how much longer it will take to do things properly and the opportunity cost of that time. While you won't have precise answers to these things, they will be a lot more tractable than reconciling aesthetic disagreements.
[-]lionhearted3y
Martial valor is another interesting one that people tend to find beautiful or ugly, and rarely if ever neutral.
I wonder if there's some component of simulating yourself either participating in an environment or activity and imagining how you'd feel.
Deserts — though there's counterintuitive things like them being cold at night — probably seem more tractable on how to navigate them than swamps.
I wonder if people see a patriotic rally and implicitly attempt to simulate "what the hell would I be doing if I was there, like, waving a flag around???" — and mentally encode it ugly. Vice-versa being at a spiritual retreat for people who'd enjoy a rally.
There's quite likely some "implicitly mentally trying it on" going on, no?
Relatedly — I used to find motorcycles swerving through traffic dangerous/ugly.
After I learned to ride a motorcycle, it (1) now is more predictable and seems less dangerous and (2) now seems beautiful/reasonable/cool rather than ugly/random/annoying.
Okay, one more — Grimes's "We Appreciate Power" is an electro-pop song about artificial intelligence, simulation, and brain uploading among other things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYG_4vJ4qNA
A lot of the kids that like it no doubt enjoy it for the rebellious countersignaling aspect of it, combined with catchy beat.
But I like it on, I think, a different level than a 15 year old that'd like it. When I was 15, I listened to Rage Against the Machine — I had no idea what the heck RATM was talking about with Ireland and burning crosses or whatever, it was just, like, loud and rebellious and cool.
It's not groundbreaking to say people can appreciate things on different levels, but I wonder how much my intellectual enjoyment of We Appreciate Power backpropagates into liking the beat, vocal range, tempo, etc more.
[Bridge: Grimes & HANA]
And if you long to never die
Baby, plug in, upload your mind
Come on, you're not even alive
If you're not backed up on a drive
If you're not backed up, backed up on a drive
[-]Isnasene3y
I know this isn't exactly what this post is about (and I support having more nuanced understandings of other people's aesthetics) however...
Please be careful about changing your mind about aesthetics! Especially you currently value the aesthetic as important! And if you do choose to change your mind about aesthetics, remember to preemptively build-up a Schelling Fence to protect yourself!
Changing aesthetics in general isn't that hard -- I've done it myself (more explicitly, one of my core values "ate" another one of my cores values through sustained psychological warefare). Results of this process include
Accidentally modifying aesthetics you didn't intend to modify (since aesthetics exist as a fuzzy network of associations in a feedback loop, changing one aesthetic may interfer with the feedback loops in other aesthetic systems in unpredictable ways)
Accidentally modifying meta-level aesthetics you didn't intend to modify. This encomposses a number of possibilities including
Rendering yourself meta-level incorrigible to manage the horrifying knowledge that you can, in principle, will yourself out of existence at any time with relative ease (psychological modification doesn't trigger the same visceral response that literal death does)
Or rendering yourself meta-level incorrigible by becoming intellectually indifferent to whether things actually satisfy your core values (and just having whatever core values you have at the time your brain decides to do this
Having really weird object-level core values because your meta-level core values and object-level core values are fuzzily interlinked
IDK, in my case, modifying my aesthetic was a good decision and you may only be psychologically capable of modifying your aesthetics in situations where it's really necessary. But I'm uncertain about whether this is true in general.
I endorse this (albeit mostly from a position of general caution that clear experience)
[-]ryan_b3y
1. I strongly endorse this line of thinking, and I want to see it continue to develop. I have a very strong expectation that we will see benefits really accrue from the rationality project when we have finally hit on everything important to humans. Specifically, taking the first step in each of probability|purpose|community|aesthetics|etc will be much more impactful than puissant mastery of only probability.
I think the key word here is "stark." The desert environment is elegant, because it has fewer things in it. We can see clearly the carving of the wind into the dunes, the sudden contrast where sand abuts stone, the endless gleaming of the salt. Consider for a moment the difference between looking at the forest and looking at the trees: when I zoom out to the forest level I notice the lay of the hills beneath the trees, the gradual change from one kind of tree to another, spot the gaps where rivers run or the dirt thins. Deserts smack you in the face with the forest-level view, because there isn't another one available.
3. I like the extension to disgust. My experience was also with deserts, but in this case my impression was that deserts were clean. I found myself out in the dunes of Kuwait, where there was an abundance of flies. I figured they would go for our water, or perhaps our protein bars. Then I saw they happily landed anywhere on the sand, and I thought: wait, what do flies eat?
So now I think of deserts as beautiful and filthy.
Ah, thanks. I feel less confused about desert beauty now. :)
At MSFP we did an exercise along these lines called "taste swap" - basically identify a place where you and someone else differ in a matter of taste/aesthetics, try to convey to each other what the taste feels like, and then try to get into a mindset where you can experience the other person's taste. (In particular, we tried to apply this to research tastes.) Sounds like it's similar to what you went through with Habryka.
It's something I've kept in mind since then; installing (or at least showcasing) particular tastes has been a secondary objective for several blog posts over the past few months.
[-]habryka3y
Promoted to curated: I think this post is pointing at something that I expect will turn out to be obviously really important in a few years. I also think it's written in a really example-heavy way that allows people to engage with it, whereas most writing in this space usually stays abstract and as such often lacks grounding and concreteness.
[-]Richard Meadows3y
Slightly meta: I'd love to see more LW posts along these lines! It wasn't until reading Sarah's post that I even realised that aesthetics matter; I've been thinking about it ever since, and I'd nominate it for the review if I could.
A common criticism of rationality/LW is that it is an aesthetic-based identity movement. I think this is true, but not necessarily a bad thing. Paul Graham's advice makes sense for politics, but he overstated the case: in my experience, 'trying on' new identities is a much better strategy for nudging the elephant in a desirable direction than attempting to convince it through reasoned argument.
I've noticed that some of the most useful identities to adopt are based around beauty/aesthetics (or screening out 'ugliness'). A simple example: I used to feel a tiny bit embarrassed for being so drawn to minimalism, as a lifestyle and as a design philosophy. The severe white apartments and Swedish furniture etc seem so masturbatory, but... I kind of like that sort of thing!
Now I notice that reducing visual clutter has a surprisingly large effect on my mood and productivity[1], and also reflects values that are important to me (frugality, conscious consumerism). Aesthetics are never entirely divorced from underlying value systems, so it makes sense that values shape your sense of style. The weird part is that it goes both ways: you can also create or adopt aesthetics that nudge your underlying value system!
I don't know if this strays into Dark Arts territory or whatever, but my wild hare-brained speculation is that playing with embodiment, identity, aesthetics, and other bottom-up cues that speak directly to the elephant might generate some interesting new breakthroughs in rationality (or post-rationality, or whatever you want to call it).
[1] Related: the entire field of environmental psychology, the extended mind thesis, JBP's 'clean your room' schtick.
Nomination for 2019 Review
I think this post remains under-appreciated. Aesthetics drive a surprisingly large chunk of our behavior, and I find it likely that some aesthetics tend to outperform others in terms of good decision-making. Yet it's a hard thing to discuss at a community level, because aesthetics are often inherently tied to politics. I'd like to see more intentional exploration of aesthetic-space, and more thinking about how to evaluate how-well-different-aesthetics-perform-on-decisions, assuming the pitfalls of politicization can be avoided.
[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley3y
I suspect it's because these are really all the same thing, unified by a common mental mechanism. "Aesthetic" is as good a name for the natural category as any.
Despite having written this post with Naming the Nameless in mind, I recently re-read that post and went "holy crap, there were some really important bits here I'd forgotten about." They were so important that I added a whole new section to this post, mostly just quoting them verbatim, because I couldn't think of ways to improve on them.
[-]Tim Lyons3y
Raemon,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts here. I have a particular interest in the philosophy of aesthetics and always get excited when people are willing to wade into the tricky territory of the subject.
Two questions for you:
1: In your suggested "knobs to turn" you made a distinction between the beautiful and the distasteful, are these two ends of a spectrum or are these different things?
2: In your examples there seem to be an inherent tie between aesthetics and ethical claims. What I mean by this more clearly is there is a connection between what you are describing as aesthetically good and "the good" (not a bad thing, you are in great company with that stance). In the view presented are these things separate? Can they be? Can something be beautiful, but ethically bad?
I'm new to the Lesswrong space so excuse my ignorance if these points have been touched upon by you or others in previous posts.
Thanks for the questions!
In your suggested "knobs to turn" you made a distinction between the beautiful and the distasteful, are these two ends of a spectrum or are these different things?
I think they form an obvious spectrum, but I've personally found it's a fairly different operation to consider "should I change such that I find something viscerally distasteful, which I hadn't found distasteful before?" vs "should I find something beautiful that I didn't find beautiful before?".
In particular, gaining appreciation for a new sort of beauty mostly makes my life better (I now have a new way of appreciating the world, which I find intrinsically nice, in addition to the downstream epistemic value of properly appreciating a thing).
Gaining a source of ugliness... well, makes the world more ugly. Which feels viscerally unpleasant. I might want to do it because the ugliness is important to be able to see, and change. But the fact that it's going to be unpleasant at least gives me initial hesitation to do so (I might ultimately prefer to become the sort of person who can do this more easily, but I think I'd find it somewhat harder, and I'm not confident it's psychologically healthy to do it all the time even if the ugliness is in some sense "real").
(These are claims about what I find hard or easy, or "qualitatively different", rather than claims about what is a good or bad action to take)
In your examples there seem to be an inherent tie between aesthetics and ethical claims. What I mean by this more clearly is there is a connection between what you are describing as aesthetically good and "the good" (not a bad thing, you are in great company with that stance). In the view presented are these things separate? Can they be? Can something be beautiful, but ethically bad?
This is a good question which I was somewhat uncertain about. Some partial answers:
1. I'm pretty sure, even insofar as goodness and ethicalness are correlated, that the perception of goodness and ethicalness feel qualitatively different. (Like, the "help each other out" morality feels practically good, and also I feel romantic vibes about it's Miyazaki-Movie-Ness)
2. Also, at the very least, things like Harsh Deserts are beautiful but morally neutral at best (and possibly bad. Like, it's plausible I'd want to replace most harsh deserts with verdant land)
3. It's possible you might find a source of beauty in some bad things (like, say, romanticizing classy Jewel Thieves or charismatic con artists). This might be a case where (in light of this post), one might say "well, the correct thing is to bring that sense of beauty in line with the reality of the people who are hurt by jewel thieves and con artists." But I'm not actually sure that's a useful thing to do. (I'm on the fence about this)
Potentially relevant:
Is hard, physical labor in a greasy engine room beautiful or ugly?
This was the first post in what would become my doublecrux sequence. I think it's probably also the most novel contribution that it's going to include. (I can't actually take credit for the novelty, a lot of this is building off other people's thoughts, but I don't think it's been written up too explicitly elsewhere).
It... doesn't actually require much of the groundwork I ended up laying out first, and I think it's possible I should have just posted this first. But I kept feeling something like "this... is important, but it's only one piece of the overall framework I've explored, and I don't think it's the most important piece."
I'm leaning towards changing the title of this to 'Integrating Facts into Aesthetics' because I didn't really have a concrete 'backprop' mechanism. I do feel theres something legitimately backpropish going on but not so clearly to justify dilution of the jargon.
[-]FactorialCode3y
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the problem this post is trying to address. Are you trying to resolve disagreements between people about 'aesthetics' as you've defined them in this post?
When you say:
I think that something that you value is being lost, because you want to live in a world where people help each other in small ways. The cost of doing that might outweigh the benefits. For instance, if the community exists to serve some downstream purpose, and so everything must be optimized for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with noticing that comes at a cost.
Approximating humans as "rational agents", the same times it makes sense for an agent to modify it's utility function. For instance, if you're being offered a deal where changing your values will end up giving you more of what you currently value. Generally though, as long as your beliefs about reality are accurate, I think it's a mistake to change the way you feel about it, since that seems dangerously like ignoring you're own preferences.
It seems to me that a persons preferences for a thing should be factored into what they value and their beliefs about that thing. I can see two parties coming to an agreement about the reality of a thing. I can see them coming to an agreement about what each of them finds valuable. I can't see them coming to a consensus about whether a thing is beautiful/ugly, good/bad, or tasteful/distasteful.
[-]Kaj_Sotala2y
Aesthetics being partially fact-based seems like an important part of the cluster of ideas about how minds and values work that things like Focusing, IFS and Coherence Therapy are all about.
[-]maia3y
do you think startup cofounders tend to team up because they've helped each other take out the trash?
https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-magic-relationship-ratio-according-science/
To expand on this a little bit: I do think that sharing a vision and purpose and stuff is important, but that doing little things together and for each other can also make or break a long-term relationship. This applies to both marriages and founding startups. If your co-founder helps you take out the trash, you'll be a little less pissed off at them for whatever important stuff you're disagreeing about this week, which in turn will help resolve those disagreements more smoothly.
I think I agree with this bit, but the question at the time was "empirically, do the founders get together because they help each other take out the trash?", which I think is a bit different from "does their relationship work better, once started, if they help each other with the trash?" (which is what the linked article seems to imply)
My thought (at the time I was chatting with Satvik) was "hmm, when I think of what sort of people end up having the opportunity to consider becoming founders, do I expect small acts of trust-building to be relevant?" and upon reflection... I dunno I don't expect most potential founders to even really have the opportunity to take out the trash for each other before they get into business with each other. (Unless they were, like, roommates beforehand)
[-]Mary Chernyshenko3y
In my experience, forests might be scary or safe. Uplifting or tiring (e.g., when there's a lot of light falling mosaically which makes it harder to distinguish shape and colour, or simply if the terrain is difficult). Trashed or robust, etc. And a scary, trashed, tiring forest might take your breath away all for an accident of the sun.
What I mean, when you have seen enough of something, your aesthetics go places you never meant them to. You begin to avoid calling it "beautiful" or "ugly", you just want more of it because you know it.
[-]dspeyer3y
In addition to modifying the perceived beauty or distastefulness of a given concept, there are knobs you can turn related to the concepts themselves: nudging, splitting, merging, or even destroying (and assigning all remaining aesthetic value to other, related concepts.
Hmm, can you give some examples of what you mean? Not quite sure I understood.
[-]Richard_Kennaway3y
Speaking of which: is civilization beautiful or ugly?
[-]mike_hawke2y
In particular, gaining a new form of beauty mostly makes my life feel nicer, whereas gaining a new form of disgust increases the unpleasantness
This resonates for me, and I sometimes end up with an 'ignorance is bliss' attitude toward the latter.
Can you say more about this? Did this aesthetic shift feel good/bad/neutral, either in the moment or upon reflection? I have such shifts occasionally, and it sometimes makes me feel...tired. Like I just get weary at the thought of permanently increasing the amount of nuance that I track. Rereading the excerpt, I feel like some part of me is insisting that adding nuance and caveats is costly and unsustainable.
Hmm, I mostly see the nuance as rich/positive. (there might be some sort of meta-aesthetic-preference here that could also be updated based on facts).
Anecdote: when I went to university studying Computer Animation, one of the things I studied was how to render images with realistic lighting. In the process of doing that, I came to be able to notice lots of things about lighting and surface-texture in my environment, which made them both more beautiful, and beautiful in a wider variety of ways.
There are some cases where I add nuance to something, and the nuance mostly comes in the form of "I need to grieve over a particular type of beauty I thought I had." (For example, I think the sort of person who wants a hufflepuff aesthetic that doesn't require them to have backbone and to have to watch out / protect themselves, will have to grieve over something precious being lost). But, in this case I think I mostly saw it as deepening my understanding of something, rather than giving something up.
[-]Pattern3y
nice a week
once a week
Perhaps it's the open space.
[-]wizzwizz43y
Typo:
became more nu


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text:
Марі-Фелісіте (Марій Іванович) Броссе (, 24 січня 1802, Париж — 22 вересня 1880, Шательро) — французький історик і сходознавець, один із засновників грузинської і вірменської історії та археології. Тривалий час працював в Російській імперії.

Біографія
Народився у 1802 році в Парижі. Батько, який був дрібним підприємцем, помер через декілька місяців після його народження.

Освіта, перші роботи
Мати планувала для Марі-Фелісіте церковну кар'єру, тому він навчався у духовних семінаріях Орлеана і Парижа, де вивчав латину, грецьку, гебрейську і арабську мови. У 1818–1820 роках був послушником єзуїтського монастиря в Монружі. У 1821 році в Паризькому університеті здав екзамен на звання бакалавра мистецтв. Потім викладав стародавні мови в духовній семінарії в Сент-Ашелі.

Повернувшись до Парижу, в Колеж де Франс відвідував лекції Карла Газе з грецької, Сильвестра де Сасі з арабської, Жан-П'єра Ремюза з китайської мови. У 1825 році за роботи в галузі синології був прийнятий до Азійського товариства. Зрештою, за словами його сина Лорана, «після п'яти років невпинних зусиль, він раптом здався» і спалив всі матеріали, які напрацював.

З 1826 року Броссе присвятив себе вірменській і грузинській мовам, історії і культурі. Ці теми приваблювали його, зокрема, тим, що були зовсім не досліджені європейськими науковцями. Тільки вивченню грузинської мови поклав початок один з його викладачів Антуан-Жан Сент-Мартен.

Не отримавши у цей час бажаної посади, зокрема, в університеті, був змушений влаштуватися коректором на типографію. У 1928 році опублікував переклад частини «Витязя у тигровій шкурі» Шота Руставелі. У 1931 році Броссе видав пам'ятки середньовічної церковної літератури — «Наслідування Христу» і двотомний Новий заповіт. У 1833–1836 роках під його редакцією була видана низка томів «Історії Візантії» Ш. Лебо. Підготував і видав граматику грузинської мови, дві збірки історичних і літературних матеріалів за грузинськими рукописами Королівської бібліотеки, видав грузинські історичні хроніки 1373–1703 років та інше.

Росія
У 1937 році на запрошення графа Сергія Уварова, президента Імператорської академії наук, Броссе прибув до Санкт-Петербурга і за рік був обраний членом Академії. Після переїзду до Росії його наукові дослідження грузинської історії і літератури набули ширшого характеру.

У 1841–1842 роках він викладав грузинську мову в Петербурзькому університеті, поклавши початок викладання цієї дисципліни в російських університетах. У 1841–1843 роках працював в Петербурзькій бібліотеці, де, зокрема зробив опис всіх грузинських і вірменських рукописів. Пізніше залучався до опису вірменських книг, видав деякі грузинські і вірменські пам'ятки з зібрань бібліотеки. Також він працював в Ермітажі, з 1851 року — на посаді хранителя східних монет, з 1864 року — директора нумізматичного кабінету.

У 1847–1848 Броссе здійснив поїздку до Вірменії і Грузії. Він переклав і прокоментував всі головні грузинські хроніки середніх віків і раннього нового часу, які видав у семи томах між 1849 і 1858 роками. Його головна праця «Історія Грузії» довгий час була авторитетним джерелом з історії Грузії. Також він опублікував листування царів і королів Грузії (періоду 1639–1770 років). 1861–1868 роки він присвятив роботі над серією про вірменських істориків, робота над якою тривала до 1876 року. Загалом Броссе є автором більше 250 праць, що стосуються грузинської і вірменської історії та культури.

У 1880 році через різке погіршання здоров'я виїхав до Франції, де невдовзі помер. Після смерті Броссе його син Лоран впорядкував його рукописи та папери і у 1881 році видав бібліографію його праць.

Примітки

Література
 Bouatchidzé, Gaston. La vie de Marie Brosset, Nantes, Éditions du Petit Véhicule, 1996, 195 p. ISBN 2842730003

 Khintibidze, Elguja. Georgian literature in European scholarship
 Rapp, Stephen H. Studies in medieval Georgian historiography: Early texts and Eurasian contexts, Peeters Publishers, 2003, 522 p. ISBN 9789042913189

Французькі історики
Сходознавці
Картвелологи
Вірменознавці
Перекладачі XIX століття
Уродженці Парижа

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text:
Home - The Hills Shire Council - Logo
Orange Blossom Festival 2020
Locals for Locals
You Are Here : Home / History
The Hills Shire Orange Blossom Festival boasts a 49 year history rich with stories of cultural change, local achievement and a-coming-together of diverse groups to showcase the best of The Hills. Over the years The Hills Shire Orange Blossom Festival has taken a variety of forms including a street parade, community fair, race day, princess competition, month long festival and fun run.
History of The Hills Shire Orange Blossom Festival
The Hills Shire Orange Blossom Festival has undergone various transformations since its inception in 1969 when a group a locals envisioned an event that would bring the community together and celebrate life in the Hills.
From the 1800's, the Hills Shire was known as a major citrus producing region. The high suitability of the area for growing citrus and stone fruit established the Hills District as the first commercial provider of Oranges. Citrus orchards were plentiful and the Shire was renowned for its agriculture, in particular its fruit. When it came to naming their local community event, the festival planners turned to local industry for inspiration and so the Orange Blossom Festival was born, its name a celebration of the first blossoms of the orange tree.
What began as a parade through the main street of Castle Hill culminating in a fair at Arthur Whitling Park, grew into a month long Shire wide festival. This festival included a Gala ball, photography competition, talent search and the Hills Garden Competition.
Since then the festival has grown to reflect the vast changes in the Hills Shire's population size, age groups, attitudes and interests. Today's The Hills Shire Orange Blossom Festival positively reflects this change.
The Hills Shire Orange Blossom Festival has a rich history in the Hills with stories of cultural change, local achievement and a-coming-together of diverse groups to showcase the best of the region. It is about generating a sense of community pride and involvement and was created to highlight the progressive and diverse nature of the Hills community and present residents with the opportunity to engage in and learn about the wide range of community groups, clubs and associations they can be involved with.
In 2018, The Hills Shire Orange Blossom Festival will continue to grow with a month of community focused events and activities and the Hills Shire Council's festival day at the centre. All of The Hills Shire Orange Blossom Festival events will be run by local community groups offering a diverse range of activities for locals to enjoy.
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text:
Central America and Caribbean :: Saint Lucia
The island, with its fine natural harbor at Castries, was contested between England and France throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries (changing possession 14 times); it was finally ceded to the UK in 1814. Even after the abolition of slavery on its plantations in 1834, Saint Lucia remained an agricultural island, dedicated to producing tropical commodity crops. Self-government was granted in 1967 and independence in 1979.
Caribbean, island between the Caribbean Sea and North Atlantic Ocean, north of Trinidad and Tobago
Water: 10 sq km
three and a half times the size of Washington, DC
tropical, moderated by northeast trade winds; dry season January to April, rainy season May to August
volcanic and mountainous with some broad, fertile valleys
Highest point: Mount Gimie 950 m
forests, sandy beaches, minerals (pumice), mineral springs, geothermal potential
Permanent crops: 11.29%
30 sq km (2007)
Total: 0.02 cu km/yr (NA)
hurricanes; volcanic activity
deforestation; soil erosion, particularly in the northern region
Party to: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Wetlands, Whaling
the twin Pitons (Gros Piton and Petit Piton), striking cone-shaped peaks south of Soufriere, are one of the scenic natural highlights of the Caribbean
Noun: Saint Lucian(s)
Adjective: Saint Lucian
black/African descent 85.3%, mixed 10.9%, East Indian 2.2%, other 1.6%, unspecified 0.1% (2010 est.)
Roman Catholic 61.5%, Protestant 25.5% (includes Seventh Day Adventist 10.4%, Pentecostal 8.9%, Baptist 2.2%, Anglican 1.6%, Church of God 1.5%, other Protestant .9%), other Christian 3.4% (includes Evangelical 2.3% and Jehovah's Witness 1.1%), Rastafarian 1.9%, other 0.4%, none 5.9%, unspecified 1.4% (2010 est.)
163,362 (July 2014 est.)
0-14 years: 21.2% (male 17,814/female 16,809)
15-24 years: 16.6% (male 13,701/female 13,368)
55-64 years: 8.8% (male 6,657/female 7,717)
65 years and over: 10.2% (male 7,760/female 9,396) (2014 est.)
Elderly dependency ratio: 13.1 %
Rate of urbanization: -3.13% annual rate of change (2010-15 est.)
CASTRIES (capital) 21,000 (2011)
35 deaths/100,000 live births (2010)
Definition: age 15 and over has ever attended school
Total: 40.8%
Female: 45.5% (2004)
Conventional short form: Saint Lucia
parliamentary democracy and a Commonwealth realm
Name: Castries
10 districts; Anse-la-Raye, Canaries, Castries, Choiseul, Dennery, Gros-Islet, Laborie, Micoud, Soufriere, Vieux-Fort
22 February 1979 (from the UK)
Independence Day, 22 February (1979)
previous 1958, 1960 (preindependence); latest presented 20 December 1978, effective 22 February 1979; note - a constitutional reform report was submitted to the St. Lucian Parliament in April 2013 (2013)
Chief of state: Queen ELIZABETH II (since 6 February 1952); represented by Governor General Dame Pearlette LOUISY (since September 1997)
Head of government: Prime Minister Kenny Davis ANTHONY (since 30 November 2011)
Cabinet: Cabinet appointed by the governor general on the advice of the prime minister
Elections: the monarchy is hereditary; the governor general appointed by the monarch; following legislative elections, the leader of the majority party or the leader of a majority coalition usually appointed prime minister by the governor general; deputy prime minister appointed by the governor general
bicameral Parliament consists of the Senate (11 seats; six members appointed on the advice of the prime minister, three on the advice of the leader of the opposition, and two after consultation with religious, economic, and social groups) and the House of Assembly (17 seats; members elected by popular vote to serve five-year terms)
Elections: House of Assembly - last held on 28 November 2011 (next to be held in 2016)
Election results: House of Assembly - percent of vote by party - SLP 49.68%, UWP 45.83%; seats by party - SLP 11, UWP 6
Highest court(s): the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court (ECSC) is the itinerant superior court of record for the 9-member Organization of Eastern Caribbean States; the ECSC - with its headquarters on St. Lucia - is headed by the chief justice and is comprised of the Court of Appeal with 3 justices and the High Court with 16 judges; sittings of the Court of Appeal and High Court rotate among the member states; 3 High Court judges reside on Saint Lucia
note - Saint Lucia is a member of the Caribbean Court of Justice
Subordinate courts: magistrate's court
Lucian People's Movement or LPM [Therold PRUDENT]
Saint Lucia Labor Party or SLP [Kenny ANTHONY]
United Workers Party or UWP [Stephenson KING]
ACP, AOSIS, C, Caricom, CD, CDB, CELAC, FAO, G-77, IBRD, ICAO, ICRM, IDA, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, ILO, IMF, IMO, Interpol, IOC, ISO, ITU, ITUC (NGOs), MIGA, NAM, OAS, OECS, OIF, OPANAL, OPCW, Petrocaribe, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UPU, WCO, WFTU (NGOs), WHO, WIPO, WMO, WTO
Chief of mission: Ambassador Sonia Merlyn JOHNNY (since 12 September 2012)
Chancery: 3216 New Mexico Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016
Consulate(s) general: Coral Gables (FL), New York
the US does not have an embassy in Saint Lucia; the US Ambassador to Barbados is accredited to Saint Lucia
twin pitons (volcanic peaks); Saint Lucia parrot
Name: "Sons and Daughters of St. Lucia"
Lyrics/music: Charles JESSE/Leton Felix THOMAS
The island nation has been able to attract foreign business and investment, especially in its offshore banking and tourism industries. Tourism is Saint Lucia's main source of jobs and income - accounting for 65% of GDP - and the island's main source of foreign exchange earnings. The manufacturing sector is the most diverse in the Eastern Caribbean area. Crops such as bananas, mangos, and avocados continue to be grown for export, but St. Lucia's once solid banana industry has been devastated by strong competition. Saint Lucia is vulnerable to a variety of external shocks, including volatile tourism receipts, natural disasters, and dependence on foreign oil. Furthermore, high public debt - 77% of GDP in 2012 - and high debt servicing obligations constrain the ANTHONY administration's ability to respond to adverse external shocks. St. Lucia has experienced anemic growth since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, largely because of a slowdown in tourism - airlines cut back on their routes to St. Lucia in 2012. Also, St. Lucia introduced a value added tax in 2012 of 15%, becoming the last country in the Eastern Caribbean to do so. In 2013, the government introduced a National Competitiveness and Productivity Council to address St. Lucia's high public wages and lack of productivity.
Government consumption: 19%
bananas, coconuts, vegetables, citrus, root crops, cocoa
tourism; clothing, assembly of electronic components, beverages, corrugated cardboard boxes, lime processing, coconut processing
Revenues: $185.2 million
Expenditures: $222.2 million (2011 est.)
-$210.2 million (2013 est.)
bananas 41%, clothing, cocoa, avocados, mangoes, coconut oil
US 13.9%, UK 10.3%, Peru 9.7%, Antigua and Barbuda 9.3%, Dominica 9.1%, France 9%, Barbados 8.1%, Trinidad and Tobago 7.6%, Grenada 6.2% (2012)
food 23%, manufactured goods 21%, machinery and transportation equipment 19%, chemicals, fuels
Brazil 57.4%, US 19%, Trinidad and Tobago 9% (2012)
East Caribbean dollars (XCD) per US dollar -
2.7 (2013 est.)
362 million kWh (2011 est.)
332.9 million kWh (2010 est.)
General assessment: an adequate system that is automatically switched
Domestic: fixed-line teledensity is 25 per 100 persons and mobile-cellular teledensity is roughly 130 per 100 persons
International: country code - 1-758; the East Caribbean Fiber Optic System (ECFS) and Southern Caribbean fiber optic system (SCF) submarine cables, along with Intelsat from Martinique, carry calls internationally; direct microwave radio relay link with Martinique and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; tropospheric scatter to Barbados (2010)
3 privately owned TV stations; 1 public TV station operating on a cable network; multi-channel cable TV service available; a mix of state-owned and privately owned broadcasters operate nearly 25 radio stations including repeater transmission stations (2007)
Paved: 847 km
Major seaport(s): Castries, Cul-de-Sac, Vieux-Fort
no regular military forces; Royal Saint Lucia Police Force (includes Special Service Unit, Marine Unit) (2012)
18 years of age for voluntary security service; no national army (2012)
Males age 16-49: 41,414 (2010 est.)
Males age 16-49: 32,688
Females age 16-49: 36,289 (2010 est.)
Male: 1,574
Female: 1,502 (2010 est.)
joins other Caribbean states to counter Venezuela's claim that Aves Island sustains human habitation, a criterion under United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which permits Venezuela to extend its Economic Exclusion Zone/continental shelf over a large portion of the eastern Caribbean Sea
Current situation: St. Lucia is a destination country for persons subjected to forced prostitution and forced labor; legal and illegal immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, and South Asia, especially those working in domestic service, are vulnerable to human trafficking; some children under 18 are coerced to work in St. Lucia's commercial sex industry
Tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List - St. Lucia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so; the government did not report any investigations, prosecutions, or convictions of trafficking offenders or public officials complicit in human trafficking in 2012 or 2011, although a counter-trafficking act was passed in 2010; the government helps protect trafficking victims by funding an NGO and running a system of informal shelters but lacks formal procedures for identifying victims and referring them to available protection and assistance services; St. Lucia is not a party to the 2000 UN TIP Protocol (2013)
transit point for South American drugs destined for the US and Europe
blue, with a gold isosceles triangle below a black arrowhead; the upper edges of the arrowhead have a white border; the blue color represents the sky and sea, gold stands for sunshine and prosperity, and white and black the racial composition of the island (with the latter being dominant); the two major triangles invoke the twin Pitons (Gros Piton and Petit Piton), cone-shaped volcanic plugs that are a symbol of the island
"Saint Lucia." World Factbook, Relief Central, relief.unboundmedicine.com/relief/view/The-World-Factbook-2014/563210/all/Saint_Lucia. Accessed 19 January 2020.
Saint Lucia. World Factbook. https://relief.unboundmedicine.com/relief/view/The-World-Factbook-2014/563210/all/Saint_Lucia. Accessed January 19, 2020.
Saint Lucia. In World Factbook. Available from https://relief.unboundmedicine.com/relief/view/The-World-Factbook-2014/563210/all/Saint_Lucia
Saint Lucia [Internet]. In: World Factbook. [cited 2020 January 19]. Available from: https://relief.unboundmedicine.com/relief/view/The-World-Factbook-2014/563210/all/Saint_Lucia.
TY - ELEC T1 - Saint Lucia ID - 563210 BT - The World Factbook 2014 UR - https://relief.unboundmedicine.com/relief/view/The-World-Factbook-2014/563210/all/Saint_Lucia DB - Relief Central DP - Unbound Medicine ER -
Commonwealth C
Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean OPANAL
African Caribbean and Pacific Group of States ACP Group
Organization of American States OAS


You can get away from it all, but a stay at the 'Uit & Thuis' (Away, and At Home) Bed & Breakfast feels as comfortable and familiar as your home. Small-scale, personal, hospitable and cosy.
At 'Uit & Thuis', you can stay a few steps away from The Efteling and the beautiful National Park Loonse and Drunense Duinen (Drunen Dunes National Park) ; The bed & breakfast is located in the heart of the cosy Brabant village of Kaatsheuvel. In 2017 we created an attractive, spacious apartment behind our house, equipped with all modern conveniences and comforts.
'Uit & Thuis' is a delightful, friendly place for a romantic getaway for couples, a weekend or a week away with the family and/or close friends. It can also provide a practical base, for example for those with business to do in beautiful Brabant. Feel at home ... feel welcome ... at 'Uit & Thuis'!


text:
Q: iOS how to activate/deactivate layout constraints for a certain size class (orientation)? I have an iOS app universal interface designed using size classes and autolayout. Within the app I'm doing constraint based animations by activating and deactivating constraints.
The following approach works in "portrait", however, I have optional constraints installed for "landscape" size class. How do I account for the current screen size class when activating/deactivating constraints for animation?
For example, the image I have I want my animation code to know if it should activate some set of constraints, but not others.
-(NSArray*)layoutFullScreen
{
    return @[self.imageYCenterConstraint,
             self.imageWidthRatioConstraint];
}

-(NSArray*)layoutWorkingScreen
{
    return  @[self.textLabelCenterYConstraint,
              self.imageHeightRatioConstraint];
}

-(void)doAnimation
{
        [NSLayoutConstraint deactivateConstraints:[self layoutFullScreen]];
        [NSLayoutConstraint activateConstraints:[self layoutWorkingScreen]];

        [UIView animateWithDuration:0.6 delay:0 options:0 animations:^{
            [self.view layoutIfNeeded];

        } completion:^(BOOL finished) {
        }];
}

A: If you are using size classes, you must not think in terms of rotation, but in terms of UITraitsCollections. You can handle the size class change in traitCollectionDidChange: and fix your constraints accordingly.

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