Hello new followers! Remember that blank blog = blocked blog as blank blogs are mostly spambots.
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On a different note: Tumblr is incredibly unprofitable right now. Differently from most (all?) social media platforms, Tumblr does a terrible job at collecting your personal information and selling you targeted ads. This is definitely something I like: I hate surveillance capitalism.
Nevertheless, running a website costs real money, and if you like this place you should consider buying the ad-free subscription.
That's something I did as soon as it became available, since I love this website and I hate targeted ads. The mere fact that they're allowing this is somewhat extraordinary, that's what I'd like the internet to be (something closer to Wikipedia and AO3 than to Facebook, with their creepy ads, engagement-maximization algorithms and privacy invasions).
I really hope we'll keep the platform up for at least a few years, since this is the only online platform where I don't feel I'm made to be angry all the time, just to keep me glued to the screen and sell more ads.
I just saw a comment on fb that ran off the misconception that dowries were a sexist subjugation of women for the purposes of buying and selling them like objects, and since this morning I would rather die than engage with a stranger on fb I'm going to talk on here instead about dowries as they were around Jane Austen's era/regency England.
Basically: dowries were an inheritance. It was a way to give a daughter what they would need to live comfortably at the time when they were most likely to need it - leaving their father's care and support and beginning a home elsewhere. In Austen terms we're generally talking about a sum of money, but dowries can also include items for a household like linens and China (goods like this were called a trousseau from at least the 1830s onward). Dowries very materially improved the life of a woman as they were meant to.
Some of the ways they did this were actually before marriage. We tend to call every inheritance a woman was to receive a dowry but that's incorrect, most of Austen's heroines don't have a dowry, though we know how much they'll inherit upon the death of their father and/or mother. Fortune =/= dowry. The Bennets of Pride and Prejudice, the Dashwoods of Sense and Sensibility, Anne Elliot in Persuasion, and even Emma Woodhouse in Emma all will inherit a little to a great deal of wealth but not as a dowry. This means that even Emma, who will one day have the staggering amount of thirty thousand pounds, would not be bringing wealth immediately into a marriage (though in her circumstances she has a father who would hardly let her live impoverished if she had chosen to marry a penniless man).
For women as poor as the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice (though they should've had more money each, if their parents weren't useless, as has been discussed) the distinction between dowry and eventual inheritance didn't mean much: a max of fifty pounds per annum in interest was literally less than what some servants were paid so couldn't alleviate the need for their husbands to have an independent income. But what money a woman could bring into a marriage definitely increased the likelihood of her preferences being realised. Northanger Abbey's Catherine Moreland, who "would have three thousand pounds" means she has enough of a fortune to "smooth the descent of [General Tilney's] pride" and make him consent to the marriage of his son to her. She certainly would've been glad her parents saved this money for her, instead of feeling that she was an object being bought or sold. It empowered her choices, rather than reduced them.
That the inheritance of a woman is presented as a dowry also reduces the chances a woman and the man she loves will need to wait to marry until either of them inherit something or he makes a living. If Anne Elliot of Persuasion had had a dowry, instead of a future inheritance (a "share of ten thousand pounds which must be hers hereafter"), would she have broken off that original engagement? In ch23 she tells Captain Wentworth she would've been engaged to him when he had only "a few thousand pounds" and the likelihood of more thanks to an advantageous posting. If she would receive her own few thousand pounds upon marriage would that've been enough to remain engaged from the first, and perhaps even marry once he had added a few more thousands to that instead of needing to wait for Wentworth to build their shared fortune himself?
We can also see that a dowry was an inheritance parents provided for their daughter's benefit, rather than a sale price, by how carefully marriage articles were drawn up. This could legally define pin-money (how much money a woman would receive for her private usage and upkeep from her husband), and often specified that the husband couldn't diminish the bulk sum of his wife's fortune, only use the interest it generated, so that there would always be something to support the wife and her children no matter how spendthrift he was. Think of it like an old-fashioned pre-nup or family trust.
This is a huge reason why eloping was so bad, it meant there hadn't been articles drawn up beforehand and so the legal default of 'everything the wife has is now the husband's in full' applied instead of the chance to preserve her rights to her own fortune. If Wickham had succeeded in eloping with Georgiana Darcy in Pride and Prejudice her thirty thousand pounds would've become his in full when she turned twenty-one, though her guardians could've withheld it before then, and he could've spent it all and left her penniless without legal consequence.
There are plenty of historical examples of husbands without the regulations of marriage articles squandering the fortune and selling off assets, leaving the wife eventually destitute. Marriage articles are a response to that as father's wanted to protect their daughters and her future children. It actually limited the power of a husband in favour of preserving the comforts and rights of his wife, so was opposite of misogyny (though the society and laws which required these extra protections was undeniably sexist and male-centred)
Nor was receiving an inheritance upon marriage a specifically female-only practice. Eldest sons would generally receive the bulk of their inheritance when their father died, but it was common in this time and for centuries beforehand for them to be confirmed as heir or given a set income from their father (or one of their father's lesser estates, if we're talking nobility and the ultra rich) as part of the marriage articles (which would generally benefit the wife for the remainder of her life, either as a jointure or dower). Younger sons, if not already provided for, could also be given something upon their marriage and may have a commission in the army or a church living bought for them, to give them some independence. In Sense and Sensibility, after accepting the engagement of Edward and Elinor, Mrs Ferrars gives her son ten thousand pounds "towards augmenting their income" and this allows the marriage to occur. No one accuses Mrs Ferrars of selling Edward off in matrimony, even though what she's doing is so similar to a dowry that the narration points out it's exactly what "had been given with [her daughter] Fanny".
Fortune hunters and those marrying purely for money and a comfortable lifestyle definitely existed, as they do now, but dowries were not a socially and legally mandated way to give women to men to benefit them financially. 'Mercenary' marriages were frowned upon, and women were taught to look out for fortune hunters (like Wickham). Nor was it considered only men who might marry primarily to benefit from their spouse's wealth (Charlotte Lucas being a sympathetic female example). That both men and women could have inheritances gifted upon marriage, and were represented as seeking to marry for money, helps show that the practice of dowries wasn't a sexist practice which reduces women to little more than livestock.
In fact, there's an argument to be made that the very existence of large dowries being a cultural norm indicates that daughters were valued and loved. Instead of leaving everything they could to the sons (which would be expected if daughters were worthless objects to be given away at any price) these daughters were considered worth saving for, worth drawing up legal contracts to protect the living standard of, and worth leaving an inheritance often equal or greater than what younger sons would receive (as they could earn their own income). A dowry didn't reduce the humanity of a woman, it empowered her choices and protected her future. It was the women without dowries or an inheritance that were in danger of needing to marry whomever would take them.
it shimmers like no gemstones i've ever seen: green as malachite and emerald but shot through with opal, gold, copper. photographs can't do it justice because of how it shines, as well as the way the actual material elements have their own dimensions. you can lean in and study all the fine lines of the circuits or step back and admire how the rearranged whole forms new patterns. it's one of the most beautiful creations i've ever seen.
Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic ← everyone read this article on AI's efforts to court the humanities right now.
Or simply read these paragraphs, which to me are the key thing:
But some of their questions seemed completely off the point to me. Was AI a new kind of entity, demanding a new metaphysics? What would it mean for a large language model to have a “character”? How should that character be formed? Could Anthropic’s Claude chatbot suffer, or be harmed?
But I didn’t want to talk about Claude. I wanted to talk about the user, about addiction and dehumanisation, about power and accountability. I don’t for a minute think AI needs a new metaphysics, and nothing that was said in the “exclusive briefing” I attended made me change my mind about that. But there was resistance to my efforts to change the subject. I worried that behind this wish to draw attention to Claude’s “status” there was a hope for a kind of baptism, a moral and intellectual credit note.
So important to remember that, in conversations about the morality of AI, we have to keep dragging the focus away from the machines and back to the people they are affecting. 'Is AI a moral agent?' Not a relevant question! 'Is AI being deployed in a way that prioritises the actual good of users? What is the actual good of users? How does the physical infrastructure of AI impact the local people and their environment?' Relevant questions!
Something that I find really interesting about probability in continuous systems is that you can have events that are technically possible despite having a probability of zero.
For example, if I'm trying to pick a number between 0 and 1, and the space is continuous, there are an infinite number of numbers available. The odds of it being any particular number in the set one out of infinity, which is to say, zero, yet at the end of the day its still one of those numbers.
A second thing that is interesting about probability in continuous spaces, that is faaaaaar weirder than even the above, is that there can be two events that both have a probability of zero, while one is infinitely more likely than the other.
For example.
Imagine a right triangle.
Imagine you are throwing a dart at this right triangle.
The odds of it landing in any particular region is just the area of the region divided by the area of the triangle. One dimensional points don't have an area, so the odds of it hitting any point is, obviously, zero, but lines also don't have an area, so the odds of hitting one of those is, again, zero. But! The odds of hitting anywhere on the line x=0.5 is infinitely more likely than hitting the exact point (0.5,0.5). And then being weirder still, the odds of hitting somewhere on the line x=0.5 is exactly half of what they'd be hitting somewhere on the line x=1, what with the vertical line at x=0.5 being half the length of the vertical line at x=1. So you can have a zero probability even that is infinitely more probably than another zero probability event, and also, exactly twice as likely as another zero probability event. But they're all still zero probability. Which doesn't mean that they can't happen, just that they won't.
(Not a mathematician, this was just sort of casually explained in my Baby Quantum for Dummy Electrical Engineers and we all left the room like this:)
This reminds me of the Bus Stop Paradox, which is that the average wait time for the bus is slightly longer than the average time between busses. This is because if you arrive at a random minute, you're more likely to arrive during a longer delay, because those contain more minutes. Another version of this is that if you agreed your roommate was in charge of lightbulbs and they bought a terrible brand that burns out in 1 second 75% of the time, the average lifespan would be very low, but you might never notice because in order to know about the duds you'd have to see one, and they all get installed and removed instantly.
I'd heard a similar statistic about how your friends, on average, have more friends than you. The gist was something like if there was one guy in a town of 40,000 people that was friends with everyone, he would blow everyone's average way the fuck up, because now everyone would have one friend with 39,999 other friends. Whereas all the people with 1 or 2 friends aren't in enough friend groups to meaningfully pull the average down. Making your friend count larger doesn't just change how big the number is, it changes how many times that big number gets counted.
I have a sneaky feeling that something like this can be used to explain things like wealth inequality, but I can only kind of gesture blindly in that direction. That's just my math gut whispering to me and it is frequently wrong.
