Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"The mechanism of integration was so effective that at the end of the [2nd Century BCE] fully one-third of the members of the Seanate of Rome will be of African origin... - why did it prove impossible to integrate the Germans? Overwhelming numbers? failure to conquer them? The shift to an ethnically based Byzantine state?

"Today it is much more, and we call it philanthropy. But in Roman times it is so widespread that most of the great monuments, statues, theatres ampitheatres scattered throughout the empire are the fruit of donations made by the wealthy..." - I understand that today we would rather call it election campaigning, but today the is a division of labour between candidate and campaign financier.

"An enormous quantity of gold coins disappear beyond the frontiers of the empire to pay for all kinds of goods..." - this may actually have been an advantage to Rome; a massive influx of gold into the Spanish Empire lead to a destructive period of inflation, likewise paying for Chinese goods keeps the USD stable.

"Some dialects of Italian are much harder for Italians to understand than Romanian." - I like his analogy drawing between current Romanian migration to Italy and ancient Dacian migration to Rome, but find that linguistic claim hard to swallow.

"Can you imagine a stadium used without interuption for twelve hundred years? It would be like going to see a game today in a stadium built by Charlemagne and used without interruption since then" - actually you can attend church service in Aachen Cathedral today, what we have to imagine is a culture whose largest structutres are dedicated to worship rather than sport.

"It's like putting together in the same building the life of ease of a wealthy neighbourhood and the misery of the poorest slum" - amazing, what impact did this have on disease, crime and social mobility?

"The acquisition of skills a regular environment, an adequate environment, an adequate opportunity to practise, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions" - doesn't seem practicable for a skill as complex as thinking.

"We do not always think straight when reason, and the errors are not always due to intrusive and incorrect intuitions. Often we make mistakes we (our system 2) do not know any better". - equivocation between trying to reason and suceeding to reason. If a mistake in our 'reasoning' in pointed out, we know longer hold its conclusion as 'reasonable'.

"I often cringe when my work with Amos is credited with demonstrating that human choices are irrational, when in fact our research only showed that Humans are not well described by the rational agent model" - because this work shows that human choices are often not internally consistnent, I can't think of any account of rationality which it supports, i.e. human choices are irrational.

"The first emporer of Rome, Augustus, responding to a dramatic demographic decline, established that in order to benefit from certain economic subsidies and tax incentives a Roman woman had to have given birth to at least three children." - sounds familiar.

"And to compensate for the low birth rate, the practice of manumitting slaves...gives new blood to Roman Society, which by nature is multiethnic (but monocultural - that is essential"

"Under the Roman Empire the Senate approved a law that allowed women to control and manage all the money and property they inherited from their fathers" - So how, in countries still governed under Roman Law systems, were these rights rolled back?

"It appears the remembering self is subject to a massive focusing illusion about the life that the experiencing self endures quite confortably." - how did this evolve?

"We cannot hold a concept of well-being that ignores whar people want"

"A disposition for well-being is as heritable as height or intelligence..." - so Hungarians could be genetically pessimistic?

"Life satisfaction is not flawed measure of their experienced well-being, as I thought some years ago. It is something else entirely." - this whole theory is in urgent need of philosophical analysis.

"Many point out that they would not send either themselves or another amnesiac to climb mountains or trek through the jungle - because these experiences are mostly painful in real time" - hmmm

"Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined." - vs. "for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

"my hope is that readers of this book have acquired [a sensitivity to the power of inconsequential factors as determinants of preference] - my hope would be to acquire an immunity.

"Most people find that their System 2 has no moral intuitions of its own to answer the question" - I have been assuming that System 1 = intuition, and System 2 = thought, so this is not surprising, but are my assumptions valid?

"Medical training is, evidently, no defense against the power of framing." - investment bankers we expect to be dodgy, lawyers maybe, but doctors?

"COSTS ARE NOT LOSSES"

"...the beliefs that you endorse when you reflect about morality do not necessarily govern your emotional reactions, and the moral intuitions that come to your mind in different situations are not internally consistant."

"Everyone knew how to read, write and do arithmetic" - how, did the Roman empire have universal primary education or local school boards?

"Out on the river, meanwhile, two lightweight Roman galleys go speeding by. They are identical to the Viking longboats." - more cultural borrowing presumably, how come naval technology survived the dark ages, but building technology didn't?

"Giove (Jove or Jupiter or Thor) for giovedi (Thursday)' - is this really the same god? Odin is the chief god in the Norse pantheon. And did how become so, common descent from an Indo-European pantheon, or cultural borrowing?

"The construction with 'megvan' is used when a person has an expected item with him/her, it is not lost, and/or it is ready for use" - sounds like the accurate use of 'has got' compared to 'has'.

footnote "In addition to their use auxilliary verbs, these verbs may also stand alone, hence the term 'quasi-auxilliary'" - desperately need an IGT (an international grammatical terminology)

" In Hungarian [the direct object can be used as the verbal complement] as long as the verbal complement is not individuated" - definite direct objects not allowed? What does she mean by this? Examples please!

"the sentence is ungrammatical if the preverb position is incorrectly filled" - we desperately need examples here, and definitions of 'grammatical' and 'correct'. It's exciting to read a fuller treatment of Hungarian word order, but disappointing that it is so unclear.