Compare slipping off a balcony and falling toward a hard surface from the 50th vs the 10th floor. Would you similarly prefer falling from the 50th floor (extremely high chance of dying) to falling from the 10th floor (small chance of surviving, crippled)? I would prefer the 10th-floor fall, and also living through the nuclear war - not that it matters what I would prefer.
Does being crippled sound like an individual-scale metaphor for the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war? If not, is there a better one?
It's a fairly funny skit on Biblical criticism and the much-beloved Q document which is hypothesised to have existed, even though there is no evidence it did:
And of course the search for the Historical as against the Cosmic etc. personage, with some Mythicists claiming they never existed but were made up out of existing traditions and legends 😀
Maybe it was just an ugly set of scribbled notes, and all the important bits got copied into Matthew and Luke? Maybe it got dropped down the back of the couch, or caught fire? It's not that hard to imagine how a document could go missing.
Maybe Q wasn't actually a document, but a person (you could call him Q-anon), an old man who remembered a bunch of things that Jesus said, and got interviewed by both Matthew and Luke.
Well the latter is what I suspect, given oral tradition at the time. Although it may not have been one man. As to the document Q, why not copy that rather than write your own? Or why didn't it get multiple copies if it had at least 4.
Lots of important documents got lost between ancient times and now. Not for any particular reason; just, things get lost or destroyed. The Gospels are huge outliers in terms of the number of copies that got made.
Also Richard Whately's "Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte", which was written a few years earlier as a satirical rebuttal to Hume's essay on miracles.
I think the main argument of #25 is simply that it's not a *civilization-ending* event. The author would likely agree that diabetics dying would happen, and would be significant and bad. But it doesn't really bear all that much on the topic under discussion. It would be a tremendous tragedy, but I don't think the survival of diabetics will be the make-or-break for whether humanity continues to exist in the wake of nuclear war, so I can understand their omitting it.
(edit) to put it another way: if you think that people would be alive to worry about increased cancer rates, then you agree with the main point of #25's argument.
I also think #25 is poorly thought through. If we look at just the impact that COVID + Ever Given has had global logistics I can't image what the impact of a nuclear strike on a major US or European port would be. Heck a single strike on northern NJ that takes out NYSE data centers could probably create a complete break down of the worlds financial system. The author is too sure of their conclusions. The unknown unknowns are much too great.
Not to mention that a nuclear strike could be not so bad, but is obviously EXTREMELY bad for whoever is at the target at the time. The economic miracle of the 1950s in the US is a amazing but I don't think you can look at it and say "WW2 wasn't so bad".
The author's conclusion is essentially that we get set back about a century. That'd be bad, especially as we had a pretty strong century, but we'd recover by 2150 or 2200. In other worlds, no x risk.
However I am not convinced by his axiom that a nuclear exchange will revolve around strategic infrastructure. I see a nuclear exchange as a prelude to an extended struggle at a lower level of technology, and as such the best option would be countervalue strikes targeting population structures and civilian infrastructure to maximally set back the adversary state.
The "lower level of technology" is really a lower level of *industrialization*. We'd lose a very little off the top in terms of things we could theoretically build, e.g. the nanometer chip fabs would be gone beyond near-term reconstruction, but there would still be places that could make small batches of 80486s or whatever.
But low level of industrialization means your "extended struggle" is inherently local, because nobody has the logistics for serious global power projection. Yes, the Russians will probably still be trying to crush Ukraine when all they have are stone knives and bear cavalry, but they won't be able to march on Berlin (or vice versa) for quite some time. There may be a Russo-Chinese war, but it will be a border conflict in mostly-uninhabitable Siberia. And nobody will be invading the United States.
What happens to the technology when the generation which was educated before WW3 is dead? There's a lot of tacit knowledge that will be gone/have to be reconstructed, and people won't necessarily have the time to learn even the overt knowledge.
Why? If we get in a shooting war with Russia, is anyone planning to nuke Taiwan? If not, it's hard to see how the ability to make chips goes away. The US may not be able to make them, or afford them, any more, but the rest of the world should motor on well enough. The biggest catastrophe for the world for a big nuclear exchange is almost certainly economic -- in that the largest consumer economy in the world (that of the US) will go offline for significant period of time.
But I hardly see how India, Indonesia, Brazil, or Chile -- all very civilized and technologically sophisticated places these days -- will be wrecked by a conflict that doesn't come anywhere near their territory and doesn't involve destruction of their people and assets. They'll certainly be impacted, economically, but I don't see it as any worse for them than a serious worldwide recession.
If we get into a shooting war with Russia, China is going to conquer Taiwan and Taiwan is going to get broken in the process.
If we somehow imagine that Taiwan survives unscathed, Taiwan is not an autarky that grows 5-nm wafers from naught but local sand, and its chip fabs will go idle when the container ships stop coming. Since the container ships won't *completely* stop coming, any surviving chip fabs won't go *completely* idle, but they will be massively scaled back.
Also, China almost certainly gets nuked if only because Russia knows that nuked Russia + intact China = Russia as China's bitch and the top priority of the Putin regime is making sure Russia isn't anybody's bitch.
This is a bit paradoxical, isn't it? After this whole thing goes down, you don't really need to care about Russian economy because Russians will have way bigger problems to deal with than invading your American ass. In fact, I expect both the Russian Federation and the USA to stop existing in a single day, being replaced by some combination of small makeshift nation-states and warlord territories where said states cannot project power.
There is an existing organization in the United States that is quite well suited to that role, capable of dealing with massively-FUBARed logistics and outcompeting any other wannabe warlord. That organization is the United States Military, and it is burned into its institutional soul that the United States of America will be one nation-state, not many.
That's possible, but there's only so much negligence a region can suffer from the central authority before it secedes. I'd imagine negligence will be the default attitude given the overwhelming demand for, and meager supply of: critical supplies, order, capacity for force projection.
I did actually look at cancer rates. If my math is wrong, please show me and I'll correct it. As for other things, I think that was covered when I said "a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources". Obviously it would be very bad, but my argument didn't hinge on exactly how bad.
>I don’t know about the nuclear winter question except that I’m not sure oil well fires are a good proxy for multiple multiple nukes.
Chosen as a case where the other side preregistered their hypothesis. They claim it's different in current papers, but I'm working on a longer deconstruction of that one which isn't done yet, and the threshold for "this time it's different" is always right above what we've actually had to deal with.
Note that in the classic nuclear-winter literature, the claim is less "nuclear explosions will kick up dust that will blot out the sun" and mostly "nuclear explosions will start fires that will generate vast plumes of soot that will blot out the sun". With oil fires being a huge part of that, on account of their propensity for fine soot.
So the biggest oil fire you've got, is the best model validation you can get. Anyone who is serious and honest about this, is going to validate their models against the Kuwait oil fires, not volcanoes. And if your models overpredict stratospheric soot and cooling from those fires, you adjust the risk of nuclear winter *down*, at least until you can explain why.
I've read most of the same papers bean has, and my review is archived at SSC. This is really bad science, in the same league as what we'd get if the whole "global warming" debate was turned over to three prestigious scientists who work for Exxon. The bias isn't financial this time (I think), but it's just as strong.
"The radiation [Excess Relative Risk] decreased significantly with...time since exposure (27% per decade; P = 0.001)"
That is, even for people who were most definitely exposed to significant doses of radiation, the odds of this exposure resulting in a cancer *decrease* significantly over time. So where would a long-term increase come from?
Then perhaps you need to express yourself more carefully. What you wrote suggests the ERR increases permanently, or at least over a long time, and that is not at all what the data suggest. What the data suggest is that exposure to radiation jumps up the ERR at the time of the exposure, and then it slowly fades with time.
Sure, the ERR is *detectable* 60 years out -- provided you do very careful research on 100,000 people, like they did here. Does that mean it's a Very Big Deal? Not by itself. Indeed, one thing you'll notice is that in order to dig out the ERR from radiation they had to build a careful accurate model of the ERR for smoking, since the effects of smoking are around the same order of magnitude as being nuked. That alone tells you it isn't an existential-level risk to civilization -- basically, it suggests most of the long-term survivors of a nuclear war (i.e. those that were not killed by immediate effects) would experience the same increased level of cancer risk as if they all took up smoking. Definitely serious, but not civilization-ending by a long shot.
I assume you expected to survive a global thermonuclear war without a netflix outage and with amazon packages arriving on time?
Yes, if you're dependent on a specific, hard to manufacture product you are fucked. You may stochastically get cancer, sucks but hopefully you managed to raise a kid or two in the meantime. For the rest of us, knowing that if you manage to avoid directly getting hit the world will be survivable is really important, and changes the calculus from "guess I'll die lol" to a possibility of you and your family getting through it, if you plan correctly and get lucky.
2: The left-leaning blogosphere (purple) seems tiny compared to the right (orange, yellow). Am I missing something? Does this reflect bifurcation where the left is captured by traditional media and the right embraces "alternative" media like blogs?
17: There are two important Turing tests plant-based meat has to pass: one where it's indistinguishable to my taste buds, and another where it's indistinguishable to my wallet. We shall see if both are achievable...
The left is smaller generally, yes, and certainly at the present moment; but not by enough to explain the marked difference here. It looks like an 80/20 or higher difference in the blog map, while the right/left split in America based on opinion polls is more like 55/45, if that. See e.g. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/ for an idea of what I'm referring to.
I don't think the 40% of people who choose Democrats on a generic ballot read blogs like Instapundit, ChicagoBoyz, or Powerline. So... where on this chart do they live? What blogs do they read? My current speculation is that they just don't read blogs, they just read and listen to media produced by NYT, WaPo, NPR, and the like.
So my definition of the left is more leftist than America's definition, meaning when I told the OP that the left is a smaller group globally, they replied by misinterpreting my definition of left. I then said that it would be impossible to have this conversation if they were an American, because that would mean our definitions are vastly different and they are casting a wider net than they should be. Since then they turned it into a useless conversation about a No True Scotsman fallacy, the kind you'd see in an elementary school debate.
Meanwhile, the point is still rock solid: the blogosphere has less leftists because they are a smaller group. The OP let their American definition of the left confuse them into not understanding why the blogosphere would have less blogs that identify as left, see here:
"It looks like an 80/20 or higher difference in the blog map, while the right/left split in America based on opinion polls is more like 55/45"
... they are falsely assuming the purple blogosphere represents the one half of the partisan split in American politics, when in reality they represent a smaller group, quite possibly only 20% like the OP thought seemed ridiculous.
Correct. Lizard is making a claim about false Scotsmen, not true Scotsmen. He's claiming that Scotsmen ID test (the notorious ScID Test!) is generating an abnormally high rate of false positives for Scotsmen.
Of course, Lizard is not defining what a true Scotsman is. If kilts were considered the defining test of Scotsmandicity, Lizard would be only saying that the perceived number of men wearing kilts is larger than number of actual Scotsmen wearing kilts. Of course this begs the question of how you define a kilt. If we define a kilt as "a knee-length skirt of pleated tartan cloth" than any ballerina in a tartan tutu would be a Scotsman. And if Lizard had said "No true scotsmen would wear a tartan tutu," that would be a No True Scotsmanism — because Scotsmen have been spotted wearing tartan tutus at the Glasgow's Gay Pride Parade.
But having said that, Lefties can be notoriously parsimonious about who they define as a Lefty. And Righties are downright expansive (dare I say liberal?) in their definition of Lefties.
If you define 'left' to be a smaller group, and then clarify that actually the left is a smaller group, when the person you are responding to was defining the left as a larger group, then you have created the confusion in the post that supposedly clarifies it. The two reasonable definitions are the one that every American knows, and the one that would correspond to the French assembly in the late eighteenth century, i.e. the useful one and the original one. If you have an alternate one, ensure you are not arguing a category argument as a factual argument. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
I've heard two clusters of people earnestly arguing for a narrow definition of "left". Not sure which (if either) Lizard Man is arguing from.
One is people from countries where something like Social Democratic policies and parties are roughly the center of the Overton Window, or by extension, Americans who look at those countries and think they have the right idea. From this perspective, mainstream Democratic Party positions appear to be center-right, mainstream Republican Party positions appear far right, and positions that most Americans would call far right appear to be off the charts. This framework is valid from the perspective of the country the speaker is norming off of, but relatively unhelpful when analyzing American politics: it deviates confusingly from standard usage in that context, and it simultaneously ignores position relative to the status quo, position relative to the Overton Window, and the alignment of typical political battle lines.
The other cluster is people involved or otherwise interested in factional divisions towards the leftward side of the to usual political spectrum, and who wish to draw a general distinction between (if I understand correctly) various Revolutionary Left groups (Soviet-style Communists, Maoists, Trotskyites, Left-Anarchists, etc) and the Democratic Left (mainstream center-left groups, social democrats, progressives, what used to be called Second Internationalists, etc). People in this cluster generally seem to advocate "leftist" for the former and "liberal" for the latter. This is a useful distinction (e.g. it's extremely useful to have terms that distinguish between LBJ and Bernadine Dorhn), and the liberal vs leftist terminology seems like it's be a convenient shorthand in a context where the terms are unambiguously understood in that sense.
The correct definition of "the left" is the one used to categorize the blogosphere map! Any property, regardless of what you call it, that applies to 50% of the population but 20% of the blogosphere requires an explanation
Well, but even if we agree that purpleness should be called "liberalism" or "centrism", we still have that its blogosphere is strangely smaller than the orange and yellow blogospheres!
Academics are well known to be much more left-leaning than the total population. Academics also seem like the sort of people who would be really into blogs.
On 2, yes, both tiny and much less constellation-y. Even Krugman is findable, yet fairly small and peripheral. I think this is more about cross-linking behavior than audience size though, Glenn Greenwald is tiny and I'm not sure where Andrew Sullivan even is, and I'm pretty sure they're bigger than ACT. Also, can anyone help with the distinctions between orange/yellow and teal/red?
Use one of the other two "grouping algorithms" under "settings", I think it makes much more sense when you do so. A clear "right-leaning" cluster, a clear "left-leaning" cluster, a clear "econ" cluster, a clear "rationalist" cluster, and some architecture blogs hanging off to the side.
Yeah this is better. And I like that the algorithm is smart enough to break off the architecture blogs before it tries to split hairs within the conservative & economics clusters.
Greenwald has pretty consistently identified himself as on the left, but he seems to talk about that less and less. His articles are becoming significantly anti-Democrat, even if he's also anti-Republican (probably more anti-Republican, but he doesn't talk about it much). The Republicans disagree with him and move on, but Democrats have gone after him wholesale, and he's reacting negatively on a grand scale.
Following the timeline, he turned against the left when they refused to let him cover a real news story (Hunter Biden). That's still his single biggest pet peeve, but there are a lot of other hypocrisies that get him riled about about the left.
The US has undergone something of a political realignment the last 5-10 years, where divides like populist vs elitist, globalist vs nationalist, orthodox vs heterodox, institutional outsiders vs insiders, et al have become more salient than the old left vs right conflict, at least for some people. Quillette had an article earlier this week about a new politics/punditry mag called Compact, which is apparently run by two conservative Catholics, a Marxist, and a British Feminist philosopher:
It's a brave new world we're livin' in. GG's career is a perfect example of this. I think he remains a principled civil libertarian, a faction which used to be part of the left's big tent (to their credit!), but sadly civil libertarian attitudes have fallen very much out of favor on seemingly both the left and right except in a few contexts over the last ten years or so. Thus a guy like GG becomes politically somewhat homeless, and occasionally does some couch-surfing these days with people on the right.
I like the article on compact. I also think it does a good job of showing the disconnect between how people label themselves vs. their actual written output.
GG is no longer a principled civil libertarian. Again, couch surfing with people who applaud the banning of books means that your principles are somewhat fluid.
Civil libertarianism, in the non-Except-The-Outgroup sense, implies that applauding the banning of books is a thing you should be allowed to do.
I am not seeing whence you derive the implicit premise that being principled implies you can't conduct business with people who don't share your principles (as long as you're not directly helping them to violate your principles). Ostracism for crimethink is implied by some principles, but not all - and *particularly* not civil libertarianism.
Fair enough, but his ex-pals on the left don't seem to have any problem banning books, either. Not to mention tweets, youtube vids, public speakers, or pretty much any other form of communication. Like I said, civil libertarianism is dead.
Absolutely not. I could believe that, say, John Mearsheimer or some of the US national conservatives are useful idiots, with hard emphasis on the "idiot" part. Greenwald is different beast.
I have to think there's a corollary here to the finding that US conservatives are generally more dissatisfied with the GOP than progressives are with the Democrats. Likewise, conservatives (especially youngish 120+ IQ conservatives, which are probably the core audience for blogs) are more dissatisfied with Fox News and its like than progressives are with the MSM.
Conservative media is generally lowbrow, aimed at Boomers and the white working class, which is tough to sit through if you're a young highbrow rightist. White/Asian Democrats are generally college-educated and media aimed at them is more highbrow. You also have black media and Hispanic media targeted at those demographics.
Dissatisfaction with Fox and its ilk rings true to me. With that said, virtually all of the 120+ IQ liberals I know are similarly deeply dissatisfied with the Democrats, so I don't know what breaks the symmetry... (edit to add: if you have any sources for the finding that conservatives are more alienated than liberals, I'd love to take a peek.)
68% of self-identified Republicans polled had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, vs. 86% of Democrats for the Democratic Party. It only shows a few years there, and you can see that it briefly shot up for Republicans in early 2015 but otherwise was lower.
I'll also observe that most of the time in Presidential elections, right-populist + libertarian third-party candidates outperform the third-party leftist candidates, which is probably a signal of major-party dissatisfaction. Nader's run in the 2000 election was a notorious exception, and 2004-2008 were basically even with a minimal third-party presence, but my rule held true for 1992-96, and 2012-20.
I'd have guessed the left was more operating on social media like Twitter than writing "traditional" blogs? But that might be more "leftists", whereas you're wondering where all the generic milquetoast American left-wing people are also? A hypothesis there is that non-leftist left-wing Americans don't really generate discourse because their brand and ideology do not filter for the kind of people with a burning need to get their essays out there even if they have little power to implement it. But that may be too pat?
There’s probably at least some truth to the point that if you’re a generic leftist (and not a neo-Trotskyite or something) you can still satisfy much of your demand for leftist discourse from generic social media. Maybe you’re a fan of Star Wars and want to discuss it from a leftist perspective or read others doing so. Just go to r/starwars or whatever. Rightists always get chased out of such places unless they stay in the closet.
If you want to discuss Marvel with rightists, you will need to find a dedicated niche rightist community in which to do it.
That's a good point! (I don't read enough non SSC/ACX blogs to tell: are many of the right-wing blogs on the Blogosphere Chart "general blogs that happen to be by rightists and not shy about that fact"? I was sort of assuming they were actively political blogs at least as much as SSC/ACX.)
I guess I don’t think of this as an actively political blog. But a lot of blogging is reacting to current events. Science news, TV/movies, sports, etc. Or it can be doing a deep dive on topics of intellectual interest like history.
For example Instapundit is a big circle on there and it discusses a lot of topics of general interest.
It's not the most political of blogs, but it's got a regular "philosophy of government" feature in the form of the Dictator Book Club and Scott more generally talks about economy and the government a lot. It's a much more political blog than, I dunno, an opera review blog.
Regarding plant-based meat, my bet on that prediction depends heavily on the precise resolution criteria. Can plant-based meat be indistinguishable form a McDonalds patty? it's basically already there. Can it be indistinguishable from a good steak? I doubt we'll get there in decades.
you think a plant based steak that will be indistinguishable from a "good steak" will take decades? That's longer than most people's AGI prediction lmfao. 0 iq comment
your comment on 17 is something people would look back at in 300 years and view as completely asinine. I'm sorry the life of an animal is not worth a small difference in your tastebuds or a few dollars. Or you could just eat one of the millions of delicious plant dishes like curry.
I never watched Kony 2012 because I was already really annoyed by liberals slacktivism (I was ahead of the curve!).
BUT - from a purely marketing/tagline standpoint I could never understand why they wanted to ELECT this bad guy, Kony, in 2012. Wouldn't deposing/arresting him be preferrable? STOP KONY 2012. Was printing those extra four letters on red t-shirts really that much more expensive?
Look, in hindsight Obama vs. Romney was pretty good set of guys to choose from considering everything that's happened since, but some of us felt it was time for genuinely radical change.
HA! I"m sure the gentleman running KONY 2012 offered to fly Kony over from Uganda and that's what finally got him MK'ultra'd. "These two guys just dont' have what America needs. We need more barbarism, jungle living, and sexual assault! I mean one of these suits is a mormon! blech! America needs you Kony!"
"Rather than attacking Museveni’s army, Kony’s forces mainly attacked civilians, kidnapping children and training them to rob, maim, and kill people they believed supported Museveni. How could this possibly advance any rational goal?
What Lewis, along with the filmmakers behind the Kony 2012 video, fail to point out is that Museveni’s forces also seemed to behave irrationally. They were strong enough to defeat Kony but delayed doing so for decades. According to one of Museveni’s commanders, Kony surrendered in 1992, but then Museveni ordered his release. ...
Museveni shrewdly suppressed Kony’s pamphlets and speeches, and asserted, both to his own people and to Uganda’s foreign aid donors and diplomats, that Kony was simply crazy....
As Kony continued to wreak havoc, Museveni bolstered his own image as a champion of peace and stability. Sympathetic donors poured ever more foreign aid into his coffers, even though he and his henchmen were stealing much of it with impunity and his forces were also inflicting terror."
I'm sure someone will chime in with more correct info - but it's my understanding he was/(is?) the leader of a militia that liked to murder and rape people for fun (especially kids i think) - and that he started out in Uganda but then hung out in some nearby countries.
I mean what where the child soilders for? To be sent into the villages to find more people to rape and murder presumably. But yeah, I'm ok with these memories being intentionally vague.
The Kony story is less about the person of Kony (who is still alive but not actually very influential any more) and more about the documentary being just a vehicle for the filmmakers to make money/get attention. By the time the movies came out Kony had been pushed out of Uganda many years before so the whole point of the money (Kony is a terrible war lord) was pointless.
I think we're all relatively aware of that, hence referring to the KONY movie as slacktivism. And I think a common criticism way back in 2012 was that while Kony was still a problem he was now a problem in countries neighboring Uganda, but wasn't in Uganda itself anymore. I agree with the Twitter OP about Kony 2012 being a pivot point in politics - but from my limited vantage point I think all it did was further calcify and create cynicism for anyone who wasn't a SJW - and yes I know SJW wasn't a term in 2012.
Also read about it today just for giggles - and it's not clear if he's currently dead or not. But the general consensus I found was 'lean toward dead'.
The idea pitched in the video was that after this flashmob-like operation, "everyone would know his name," and then once people were curious, word would get out about who he was and why he had to be stopped through traditional news media. The election-like branding was just a gimmick. But I do think the idea that using ironic marketing to convey a message to huge swathes of the American public deserves ridicule.
Oh no doubt! Even though I fully understand their very convoluted idea "make him famous" as if making someone famous stops them - as if the world is as obsessed with faux fame as US teenagers are/were........... - Even though I understand that I still can't get past the fact that KONY 2012 sounds like an election slogan, and just adding the word STOP to the front solves the problem and makes the whole idea much more clear.
19. Are you worried that by posting the explanation of the Zhou Enlai quote you weaken society's ability to be circumspect about predicting the future?
But seriously, thank you for doing this every time I see it referenced earnestly I feel motivated to write an annoying pedantic email.
I think the French Revolution never really did end, and has been going in one form or another ever since. Reganaism looks to me like another incarnation of the Thermidorian reaction.
the french revolution was characterized by political instability on the macroscale, with microscale staiblity coming only when groups would temporarily hold power. What ended up happening was nobody was ever satisfied with the status quo; there were always conservatives who wanted to bring back the monarchy and people who wanted to take things more to 'the left' which lined up more or less with american notions of left/right today, as long as you translate for 250~ years ago.
So you might see the response to wokism among mainstream progressives as being akin to something like the thermidorian reaction, as analogized by a WSJ journalist:
Even without knowing the context, that quote always struck me as a translation failure. "It's too early to say" seems like the sort of thing you would say if you only half understood the question, but wanted to look like you understood it and had something profound to say.
It seems that Scott's summary of the article is maybe simplifying the thesis a little too much. What was more important to Rome during the critical struggles of the Middle Republic wasn't citizenship per se so much as the successful incorporation of the socii into a loyal and reliable confederation that was willing to shoulder much of the burden of empire, even when things were looking bad.
By the time of the Social War, when they were actually awarded citizenship, Rome didn't have a serious rival anywhere near the Mediterranean Basin.
This is one of those things where I have no idea why people trust the underlying data. I get about 6 hours of sleep a night. If you asked me if it was enough, I’d tell you definitely. Ideal, actually. I get to relax at night with my wife after putting the kids to bed, watch some tv, and still get up early enough in the morning to go for a run while still being able to make the kids breakfast. Perfect!
Then one night I’ll turn it at 8 PM and sleep until 6 and OH MY GOD IS THAT GREAT I HAD NO IDEA.
Basically I have no bead at all on what works best for me. I don’t see how Alexey and Natalia would.
I sometimes wonder whether the people advocating 7-8 hours of sleep are some kind of mutant. I couldn't sleep for 7 hours even if I tried, unless I was recently sleep deprived. If I try to go to bed early, I won't be able to sleep, and even if I do, I'll just wake up earlier. The only time I ever go to bed at 8pm is when I'm jet-lagged and extremely sleep deprived.
I'm 48 years old, I weigh about the 140 pounds -- more or less the same I weighed in college -- and I sometimes wonder if fat people actually exist. I eat what I want, exercise irregularly, and my weight never changes! All the available evidence suggests it is literally impossible to be overweight.
Yeah, there are all kinds of people who are hard to believe in. I'm moderately fat. I pretty much eat what I please.
I don't become extremely fat. I don't understand people who have to struggle to eat enough to keep their weight high enough. (These are people who have access to food. They burn it off really fast.)
I don't understand people who like hard exercise. And so on.
I consider it a valuable and somewhat difficult to keep a grasp on people having experiences which are very different from mine. How about people who spend a lot of time on hatred? Not only why do they like it, but where do they find the energy?
And there are also people who like beer. I don't understand that.
Like I said, people are wired differently. My father was that type, once he had enough sleep he couldn't stay in bed. Others of us would stay in bed as long as we were allowed.
It does seem to me, as I get older, that I do sleep less than when I was younger. Some mornings I will wake up early and get up as it's pointless staying in bed, I won't sleep. So there is that as well.
Yes, people are wired differently. It's almost as though there is a statistical distribution of outcomes. And sometimes I almost get the sense that people who live in the tails of those distributions love to post personal anecdata on message boards while claiming to simply not understand what all the fuss is about.
Meanwhile I wonder how anyone manages with less than 9 hours of sleep. I can just scrape by on 8, but notice that I'm more lethargic on it. I can also weather a single night of 5 hours, but I can absolutely not sustain that, and it messes me up badly on the day after (my sleep deprivation lags for some reason). :) But my primary is more like you; he can't sleep very long! (To be fair, he is also perpetually exhausted and miserable, which makes me wonder if he needs more sleep. But it doesn't change that he just can't and doesn't want to.) It's remarkable how different people are about sleep.
Meanwhile, if I got 7 hours of sleep every night for two weeks, I'd be straight-up depressed by the end the second week. If on a given mon-fri I slept 6 hours each night, I'll consistently sleep for 13 uninterrupted hours on Sat+Sun. I'm a young healthy person, I just need (and have always needed) a lot of sleep!
I have similar experiences with random fluctuating amounts of sleep. I might sleep for as little as four hours on some nights, and feel oddly fine. Other nights I might get 8-9+ and still feel a bit tired. When I first tracked my sleep as a teenager, I would naturally sleep 10 full hours, and was very tired if I only got 8. I probably average under 7 hours a night now and feel perfectly fine most days, though I sometimes have nights where I go to bed very early and wake up more refreshed than I would have thought I needed.
I'll talk to people who routinely get less than six hours (or worse, can't sleep more than that no matter how much time they have available) who seem fine. I also know people who get nine or more hours about every night and struggle to get up. I'm convinced that people have different needs when it comes to sleep, and that those needs can fluctuate long term and short term.
I think different people do have different sleep needs. I'll sleep as much as I can get; if I have to, I can get up early after a short amount of sleep, but more sleep is better.
Some people can only sleep six hours a night and if you force them to stay in bed, they'll just lie awake and toss and turn and be miserable.
Isn't there something to the REM cycle? Or whatever the mechanism, I know that usually when I wake up with 6 hours of sleep, I feel fine. But often with 7 hours, I feel much more tired. Basically there seems to be certain intervals in which waking up is ideal. Also a big difference between waking myself up vs. getting woken up by something external (besides maybe sunlight).
I think there is – for me anyways. I used to use an iPhone app as my wakeup alarm and it would listen to you as you sleep and time its alarm for the 'best' point in your sleep cycle (within 30 minutes or so of when you _had_ to be up at the latest). That seemed to work great (for me)!
(But I had to keep my phone plugged in all night and, because of the power draw of the app, and probably where I had my phone stored when I slept, I went thru several phone batteries – they all swelled. I _wish_ there was a standalone alarm clock like that.)
Compare slipping off a balcony and falling toward a hard surface from the 50th vs the 10th floor. Would you similarly prefer falling from the 50th floor (extremely high chance of dying) to falling from the 10th floor (small chance of surviving, crippled)? I would prefer the 10th-floor fall, and also living through the nuclear war - not that it matters what I would prefer.
Does being crippled sound like an individual-scale metaphor for the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war? If not, is there a better one?
Huh well positive feedback and a ponzi scheme are not all that different. I both cases you hit the power rail... which is the limit.
It's a fairly funny skit on Biblical criticism and the much-beloved Q document which is hypothesised to have existed, even though there is no evidence it did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source
And of course the search for the Historical as against the Cosmic etc. personage, with some Mythicists claiming they never existed but were made up out of existing traditions and legends 😀
If that Q document existed why wasn’t it, like the eventual gospels, copied verbatim. Huh?
Maybe it was just an ugly set of scribbled notes, and all the important bits got copied into Matthew and Luke? Maybe it got dropped down the back of the couch, or caught fire? It's not that hard to imagine how a document could go missing.
Maybe Q wasn't actually a document, but a person (you could call him Q-anon), an old man who remembered a bunch of things that Jesus said, and got interviewed by both Matthew and Luke.
Well the latter is what I suspect, given oral tradition at the time. Although it may not have been one man. As to the document Q, why not copy that rather than write your own? Or why didn't it get multiple copies if it had at least 4.
Lots of important documents got lost between ancient times and now. Not for any particular reason; just, things get lost or destroyed. The Gospels are huge outliers in terms of the number of copies that got made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Specific_titles
Also Richard Whately's "Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte", which was written a few years earlier as a satirical rebuttal to Hume's essay on miracles.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Historic_Doubts_Relative_to_Napoleon_Buonaparte
I think the main argument of #25 is simply that it's not a *civilization-ending* event. The author would likely agree that diabetics dying would happen, and would be significant and bad. But it doesn't really bear all that much on the topic under discussion. It would be a tremendous tragedy, but I don't think the survival of diabetics will be the make-or-break for whether humanity continues to exist in the wake of nuclear war, so I can understand their omitting it.
(edit) to put it another way: if you think that people would be alive to worry about increased cancer rates, then you agree with the main point of #25's argument.
I also think #25 is poorly thought through. If we look at just the impact that COVID + Ever Given has had global logistics I can't image what the impact of a nuclear strike on a major US or European port would be. Heck a single strike on northern NJ that takes out NYSE data centers could probably create a complete break down of the worlds financial system. The author is too sure of their conclusions. The unknown unknowns are much too great.
Not to mention that a nuclear strike could be not so bad, but is obviously EXTREMELY bad for whoever is at the target at the time. The economic miracle of the 1950s in the US is a amazing but I don't think you can look at it and say "WW2 wasn't so bad".
The author's conclusion is essentially that we get set back about a century. That'd be bad, especially as we had a pretty strong century, but we'd recover by 2150 or 2200. In other worlds, no x risk.
However I am not convinced by his axiom that a nuclear exchange will revolve around strategic infrastructure. I see a nuclear exchange as a prelude to an extended struggle at a lower level of technology, and as such the best option would be countervalue strikes targeting population structures and civilian infrastructure to maximally set back the adversary state.
"Broken-backed war" was a late-40s concept, basically wiped out by thermonuclear weapons.
The "lower level of technology" is really a lower level of *industrialization*. We'd lose a very little off the top in terms of things we could theoretically build, e.g. the nanometer chip fabs would be gone beyond near-term reconstruction, but there would still be places that could make small batches of 80486s or whatever.
But low level of industrialization means your "extended struggle" is inherently local, because nobody has the logistics for serious global power projection. Yes, the Russians will probably still be trying to crush Ukraine when all they have are stone knives and bear cavalry, but they won't be able to march on Berlin (or vice versa) for quite some time. There may be a Russo-Chinese war, but it will be a border conflict in mostly-uninhabitable Siberia. And nobody will be invading the United States.
What happens to the technology when the generation which was educated before WW3 is dead? There's a lot of tacit knowledge that will be gone/have to be reconstructed, and people won't necessarily have the time to learn even the overt knowledge.
Why? If we get in a shooting war with Russia, is anyone planning to nuke Taiwan? If not, it's hard to see how the ability to make chips goes away. The US may not be able to make them, or afford them, any more, but the rest of the world should motor on well enough. The biggest catastrophe for the world for a big nuclear exchange is almost certainly economic -- in that the largest consumer economy in the world (that of the US) will go offline for significant period of time.
But I hardly see how India, Indonesia, Brazil, or Chile -- all very civilized and technologically sophisticated places these days -- will be wrecked by a conflict that doesn't come anywhere near their territory and doesn't involve destruction of their people and assets. They'll certainly be impacted, economically, but I don't see it as any worse for them than a serious worldwide recession.
If we get into a shooting war with Russia, China is going to conquer Taiwan and Taiwan is going to get broken in the process.
If we somehow imagine that Taiwan survives unscathed, Taiwan is not an autarky that grows 5-nm wafers from naught but local sand, and its chip fabs will go idle when the container ships stop coming. Since the container ships won't *completely* stop coming, any surviving chip fabs won't go *completely* idle, but they will be massively scaled back.
Also, China almost certainly gets nuked if only because Russia knows that nuked Russia + intact China = Russia as China's bitch and the top priority of the Putin regime is making sure Russia isn't anybody's bitch.
This is a bit paradoxical, isn't it? After this whole thing goes down, you don't really need to care about Russian economy because Russians will have way bigger problems to deal with than invading your American ass. In fact, I expect both the Russian Federation and the USA to stop existing in a single day, being replaced by some combination of small makeshift nation-states and warlord territories where said states cannot project power.
There is an existing organization in the United States that is quite well suited to that role, capable of dealing with massively-FUBARed logistics and outcompeting any other wannabe warlord. That organization is the United States Military, and it is burned into its institutional soul that the United States of America will be one nation-state, not many.
That's possible, but there's only so much negligence a region can suffer from the central authority before it secedes. I'd imagine negligence will be the default attitude given the overwhelming demand for, and meager supply of: critical supplies, order, capacity for force projection.
I did actually look at cancer rates. If my math is wrong, please show me and I'll correct it. As for other things, I think that was covered when I said "a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources". Obviously it would be very bad, but my argument didn't hinge on exactly how bad.
>I don’t know about the nuclear winter question except that I’m not sure oil well fires are a good proxy for multiple multiple nukes.
Chosen as a case where the other side preregistered their hypothesis. They claim it's different in current papers, but I'm working on a longer deconstruction of that one which isn't done yet, and the threshold for "this time it's different" is always right above what we've actually had to deal with.
What bean says
Note that in the classic nuclear-winter literature, the claim is less "nuclear explosions will kick up dust that will blot out the sun" and mostly "nuclear explosions will start fires that will generate vast plumes of soot that will blot out the sun". With oil fires being a huge part of that, on account of their propensity for fine soot.
So the biggest oil fire you've got, is the best model validation you can get. Anyone who is serious and honest about this, is going to validate their models against the Kuwait oil fires, not volcanoes. And if your models overpredict stratospheric soot and cooling from those fires, you adjust the risk of nuclear winter *down*, at least until you can explain why.
I've read most of the same papers bean has, and my review is archived at SSC. This is really bad science, in the same league as what we'd get if the whole "global warming" debate was turned over to three prestigious scientists who work for Exxon. The bias isn't financial this time (I think), but it's just as strong.
Why would there be a *long-term* increase in cancer rates? That's not what the data from Hiroshima show:
https://bioone.org/journals/radiation-research/volume-187/issue-5/RR14492.1/Solid-Cancer-Incidence-among-the-Life-Span-Study-of-Atomic/10.1667/RR14492.1.full
From the article:
"The radiation [Excess Relative Risk] decreased significantly with...time since exposure (27% per decade; P = 0.001)"
That is, even for people who were most definitely exposed to significant doses of radiation, the odds of this exposure resulting in a cancer *decrease* significantly over time. So where would a long-term increase come from?
Then perhaps you need to express yourself more carefully. What you wrote suggests the ERR increases permanently, or at least over a long time, and that is not at all what the data suggest. What the data suggest is that exposure to radiation jumps up the ERR at the time of the exposure, and then it slowly fades with time.
Sure, the ERR is *detectable* 60 years out -- provided you do very careful research on 100,000 people, like they did here. Does that mean it's a Very Big Deal? Not by itself. Indeed, one thing you'll notice is that in order to dig out the ERR from radiation they had to build a careful accurate model of the ERR for smoking, since the effects of smoking are around the same order of magnitude as being nuked. That alone tells you it isn't an existential-level risk to civilization -- basically, it suggests most of the long-term survivors of a nuclear war (i.e. those that were not killed by immediate effects) would experience the same increased level of cancer risk as if they all took up smoking. Definitely serious, but not civilization-ending by a long shot.
I assume you expected to survive a global thermonuclear war without a netflix outage and with amazon packages arriving on time?
Yes, if you're dependent on a specific, hard to manufacture product you are fucked. You may stochastically get cancer, sucks but hopefully you managed to raise a kid or two in the meantime. For the rest of us, knowing that if you manage to avoid directly getting hit the world will be survivable is really important, and changes the calculus from "guess I'll die lol" to a possibility of you and your family getting through it, if you plan correctly and get lucky.
“ 1: History of the belief that garlic and magnets are natural enemies.” Pliny falls victim to the replication crisis.
Good on him for missing it when the Skeptics were around!
2: The left-leaning blogosphere (purple) seems tiny compared to the right (orange, yellow). Am I missing something? Does this reflect bifurcation where the left is captured by traditional media and the right embraces "alternative" media like blogs?
17: There are two important Turing tests plant-based meat has to pass: one where it's indistinguishable to my taste buds, and another where it's indistinguishable to my wallet. We shall see if both are achievable...
The left is smaller generally, yes, and certainly at the present moment; but not by enough to explain the marked difference here. It looks like an 80/20 or higher difference in the blog map, while the right/left split in America based on opinion polls is more like 55/45, if that. See e.g. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/ for an idea of what I'm referring to.
I don't think the 40% of people who choose Democrats on a generic ballot read blogs like Instapundit, ChicagoBoyz, or Powerline. So... where on this chart do they live? What blogs do they read? My current speculation is that they just don't read blogs, they just read and listen to media produced by NYT, WaPo, NPR, and the like.
Excellently valid point.
So my definition of the left is more leftist than America's definition, meaning when I told the OP that the left is a smaller group globally, they replied by misinterpreting my definition of left. I then said that it would be impossible to have this conversation if they were an American, because that would mean our definitions are vastly different and they are casting a wider net than they should be. Since then they turned it into a useless conversation about a No True Scotsman fallacy, the kind you'd see in an elementary school debate.
Meanwhile, the point is still rock solid: the blogosphere has less leftists because they are a smaller group. The OP let their American definition of the left confuse them into not understanding why the blogosphere would have less blogs that identify as left, see here:
"It looks like an 80/20 or higher difference in the blog map, while the right/left split in America based on opinion polls is more like 55/45"
... they are falsely assuming the purple blogosphere represents the one half of the partisan split in American politics, when in reality they represent a smaller group, quite possibly only 20% like the OP thought seemed ridiculous.
unconfuse yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
That's the No True No True Scotsman Fallacy Fallacy right there.
Correct. Lizard is making a claim about false Scotsmen, not true Scotsmen. He's claiming that Scotsmen ID test (the notorious ScID Test!) is generating an abnormally high rate of false positives for Scotsmen.
Of course, Lizard is not defining what a true Scotsman is. If kilts were considered the defining test of Scotsmandicity, Lizard would be only saying that the perceived number of men wearing kilts is larger than number of actual Scotsmen wearing kilts. Of course this begs the question of how you define a kilt. If we define a kilt as "a knee-length skirt of pleated tartan cloth" than any ballerina in a tartan tutu would be a Scotsman. And if Lizard had said "No true scotsmen would wear a tartan tutu," that would be a No True Scotsmanism — because Scotsmen have been spotted wearing tartan tutus at the Glasgow's Gay Pride Parade.
But having said that, Lefties can be notoriously parsimonious about who they define as a Lefty. And Righties are downright expansive (dare I say liberal?) in their definition of Lefties.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tartan+tutu+fancy+dress&tbm=isch&sxsrf=APq-WBuTuY7AKHHu0y5RhRxQShULxiej-A%3A1649985996011&source=hp&biw=1645&bih=780&ei=y8lYYs_cO7Lm_QaImpvgCg&iflsig=AHkkrS4AAAAAYljX3CHE8ot1r_zvMsnTwrWrwBDOqqjT&oq=tartan+tutu&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQARgBMgQIABAYMgQIABAYMgQIABAYOgcIIxDvAxAnOgUIABCABDoICAAQgAQQsQNQAFjuD2CYIWgAcAB4AIABbYgB3wiSAQM0LjeYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZw&sclient=img#imgrc=0nb9NAUd2vXxqM
If you define 'left' to be a smaller group, and then clarify that actually the left is a smaller group, when the person you are responding to was defining the left as a larger group, then you have created the confusion in the post that supposedly clarifies it. The two reasonable definitions are the one that every American knows, and the one that would correspond to the French assembly in the late eighteenth century, i.e. the useful one and the original one. If you have an alternate one, ensure you are not arguing a category argument as a factual argument. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
I've heard two clusters of people earnestly arguing for a narrow definition of "left". Not sure which (if either) Lizard Man is arguing from.
One is people from countries where something like Social Democratic policies and parties are roughly the center of the Overton Window, or by extension, Americans who look at those countries and think they have the right idea. From this perspective, mainstream Democratic Party positions appear to be center-right, mainstream Republican Party positions appear far right, and positions that most Americans would call far right appear to be off the charts. This framework is valid from the perspective of the country the speaker is norming off of, but relatively unhelpful when analyzing American politics: it deviates confusingly from standard usage in that context, and it simultaneously ignores position relative to the status quo, position relative to the Overton Window, and the alignment of typical political battle lines.
The other cluster is people involved or otherwise interested in factional divisions towards the leftward side of the to usual political spectrum, and who wish to draw a general distinction between (if I understand correctly) various Revolutionary Left groups (Soviet-style Communists, Maoists, Trotskyites, Left-Anarchists, etc) and the Democratic Left (mainstream center-left groups, social democrats, progressives, what used to be called Second Internationalists, etc). People in this cluster generally seem to advocate "leftist" for the former and "liberal" for the latter. This is a useful distinction (e.g. it's extremely useful to have terms that distinguish between LBJ and Bernadine Dorhn), and the liberal vs leftist terminology seems like it's be a convenient shorthand in a context where the terms are unambiguously understood in that sense.
The correct definition of "the left" is the one used to categorize the blogosphere map! Any property, regardless of what you call it, that applies to 50% of the population but 20% of the blogosphere requires an explanation
Well, but even if we agree that purpleness should be called "liberalism" or "centrism", we still have that its blogosphere is strangely smaller than the orange and yellow blogospheres!
(Orange and yellow under "RBConfigurationVertexPartition", that is.)
Academics are well known to be much more left-leaning than the total population. Academics also seem like the sort of people who would be really into blogs.
On 2, yes, both tiny and much less constellation-y. Even Krugman is findable, yet fairly small and peripheral. I think this is more about cross-linking behavior than audience size though, Glenn Greenwald is tiny and I'm not sure where Andrew Sullivan even is, and I'm pretty sure they're bigger than ACT. Also, can anyone help with the distinctions between orange/yellow and teal/red?
Use one of the other two "grouping algorithms" under "settings", I think it makes much more sense when you do so. A clear "right-leaning" cluster, a clear "left-leaning" cluster, a clear "econ" cluster, a clear "rationalist" cluster, and some architecture blogs hanging off to the side.
Yeah this is better. And I like that the algorithm is smart enough to break off the architecture blogs before it tries to split hairs within the conservative & economics clusters.
I don't think anyone on the left likes Greenwald anymore.
He's not even a tankie... Just something else.
Greenwald has pretty consistently identified himself as on the left, but he seems to talk about that less and less. His articles are becoming significantly anti-Democrat, even if he's also anti-Republican (probably more anti-Republican, but he doesn't talk about it much). The Republicans disagree with him and move on, but Democrats have gone after him wholesale, and he's reacting negatively on a grand scale.
Following the timeline, he turned against the left when they refused to let him cover a real news story (Hunter Biden). That's still his single biggest pet peeve, but there are a lot of other hypocrisies that get him riled about about the left.
He goes on Tucker Carlson on the regular and called him a "real socialist." Notably, Greenwald only engages in Democrat bashing on the show.
Like he can say he's on the left... but at some point, actions have to matter.
The US has undergone something of a political realignment the last 5-10 years, where divides like populist vs elitist, globalist vs nationalist, orthodox vs heterodox, institutional outsiders vs insiders, et al have become more salient than the old left vs right conflict, at least for some people. Quillette had an article earlier this week about a new politics/punditry mag called Compact, which is apparently run by two conservative Catholics, a Marxist, and a British Feminist philosopher:
https://quillette.com/2022/04/12/point-of-compact/
It's a brave new world we're livin' in. GG's career is a perfect example of this. I think he remains a principled civil libertarian, a faction which used to be part of the left's big tent (to their credit!), but sadly civil libertarian attitudes have fallen very much out of favor on seemingly both the left and right except in a few contexts over the last ten years or so. Thus a guy like GG becomes politically somewhat homeless, and occasionally does some couch-surfing these days with people on the right.
I like the article on compact. I also think it does a good job of showing the disconnect between how people label themselves vs. their actual written output.
GG is no longer a principled civil libertarian. Again, couch surfing with people who applaud the banning of books means that your principles are somewhat fluid.
Civil libertarianism, in the non-Except-The-Outgroup sense, implies that applauding the banning of books is a thing you should be allowed to do.
I am not seeing whence you derive the implicit premise that being principled implies you can't conduct business with people who don't share your principles (as long as you're not directly helping them to violate your principles). Ostracism for crimethink is implied by some principles, but not all - and *particularly* not civil libertarianism.
Fair enough, but his ex-pals on the left don't seem to have any problem banning books, either. Not to mention tweets, youtube vids, public speakers, or pretty much any other form of communication. Like I said, civil libertarianism is dead.
Lots of us on the right despised him even longer. And the term you're looking for is "agent of influence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_of_influence
You don't think "useful idiot" would be more appropriate? ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Absolutely not. I could believe that, say, John Mearsheimer or some of the US national conservatives are useful idiots, with hard emphasis on the "idiot" part. Greenwald is different beast.
I have to think there's a corollary here to the finding that US conservatives are generally more dissatisfied with the GOP than progressives are with the Democrats. Likewise, conservatives (especially youngish 120+ IQ conservatives, which are probably the core audience for blogs) are more dissatisfied with Fox News and its like than progressives are with the MSM.
Conservative media is generally lowbrow, aimed at Boomers and the white working class, which is tough to sit through if you're a young highbrow rightist. White/Asian Democrats are generally college-educated and media aimed at them is more highbrow. You also have black media and Hispanic media targeted at those demographics.
Dissatisfaction with Fox and its ilk rings true to me. With that said, virtually all of the 120+ IQ liberals I know are similarly deeply dissatisfied with the Democrats, so I don't know what breaks the symmetry... (edit to add: if you have any sources for the finding that conservatives are more alienated than liberals, I'd love to take a peek.)
I think it's generally been a long-term finding that I've heard many times. But here's the first example I found, a Pew poll from 2015:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/07/23/gops-favorability-rating-takes-a-negative-turn/
68% of self-identified Republicans polled had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, vs. 86% of Democrats for the Democratic Party. It only shows a few years there, and you can see that it briefly shot up for Republicans in early 2015 but otherwise was lower.
I'll also observe that most of the time in Presidential elections, right-populist + libertarian third-party candidates outperform the third-party leftist candidates, which is probably a signal of major-party dissatisfaction. Nader's run in the 2000 election was a notorious exception, and 2004-2008 were basically even with a minimal third-party presence, but my rule held true for 1992-96, and 2012-20.
Just checked the latest from Pew, it seems to hold up to the present day, although the effect isn't huge. Thanks for the links!
2: I don't think the left is captured by traditional media, rather the right is rejected by it.
Poe-tay-toe, poe-tah-toe?
Does anyone really say poe-tah-toe?
Not really but Scots say tatties (Tah-tees), and chemists say poe-tah-see-um
I'd have guessed the left was more operating on social media like Twitter than writing "traditional" blogs? But that might be more "leftists", whereas you're wondering where all the generic milquetoast American left-wing people are also? A hypothesis there is that non-leftist left-wing Americans don't really generate discourse because their brand and ideology do not filter for the kind of people with a burning need to get their essays out there even if they have little power to implement it. But that may be too pat?
There’s probably at least some truth to the point that if you’re a generic leftist (and not a neo-Trotskyite or something) you can still satisfy much of your demand for leftist discourse from generic social media. Maybe you’re a fan of Star Wars and want to discuss it from a leftist perspective or read others doing so. Just go to r/starwars or whatever. Rightists always get chased out of such places unless they stay in the closet.
If you want to discuss Marvel with rightists, you will need to find a dedicated niche rightist community in which to do it.
That's a good point! (I don't read enough non SSC/ACX blogs to tell: are many of the right-wing blogs on the Blogosphere Chart "general blogs that happen to be by rightists and not shy about that fact"? I was sort of assuming they were actively political blogs at least as much as SSC/ACX.)
I guess I don’t think of this as an actively political blog. But a lot of blogging is reacting to current events. Science news, TV/movies, sports, etc. Or it can be doing a deep dive on topics of intellectual interest like history.
For example Instapundit is a big circle on there and it discusses a lot of topics of general interest.
It's not the most political of blogs, but it's got a regular "philosophy of government" feature in the form of the Dictator Book Club and Scott more generally talks about economy and the government a lot. It's a much more political blog than, I dunno, an opera review blog.
Though re: [2]. Hang on. This graph tracks blogrolls, yes? Maybe right-leaning blogs just do blogrolls more often than left-leaning ones do?
Regarding plant-based meat, my bet on that prediction depends heavily on the precise resolution criteria. Can plant-based meat be indistinguishable form a McDonalds patty? it's basically already there. Can it be indistinguishable from a good steak? I doubt we'll get there in decades.
you think a plant based steak that will be indistinguishable from a "good steak" will take decades? That's longer than most people's AGI prediction lmfao. 0 iq comment
MOD DECISION: Major warning (50% of ban)
your comment on 17 is something people would look back at in 300 years and view as completely asinine. I'm sorry the life of an animal is not worth a small difference in your tastebuds or a few dollars. Or you could just eat one of the millions of delicious plant dishes like curry.
Gross lack of empathy
Almost certainly unoriginal but I have to say it: #33 is clearly wrong because that doesn't look like Elon Musk.
I never watched Kony 2012 because I was already really annoyed by liberals slacktivism (I was ahead of the curve!).
BUT - from a purely marketing/tagline standpoint I could never understand why they wanted to ELECT this bad guy, Kony, in 2012. Wouldn't deposing/arresting him be preferrable? STOP KONY 2012. Was printing those extra four letters on red t-shirts really that much more expensive?
Look, in hindsight Obama vs. Romney was pretty good set of guys to choose from considering everything that's happened since, but some of us felt it was time for genuinely radical change.
HA! I"m sure the gentleman running KONY 2012 offered to fly Kony over from Uganda and that's what finally got him MK'ultra'd. "These two guys just dont' have what America needs. We need more barbarism, jungle living, and sexual assault! I mean one of these suits is a mormon! blech! America needs you Kony!"
On this note, while there aren't many pro-Kony takes out there, this is an interesting anti-anti-Kony take I read a while back:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/03/11/uganda-truth-museveni-crimes/
This was very good and interesting. Thank you for the link.
Thanks!
"Rather than attacking Museveni’s army, Kony’s forces mainly attacked civilians, kidnapping children and training them to rob, maim, and kill people they believed supported Museveni. How could this possibly advance any rational goal?
What Lewis, along with the filmmakers behind the Kony 2012 video, fail to point out is that Museveni’s forces also seemed to behave irrationally. They were strong enough to defeat Kony but delayed doing so for decades. According to one of Museveni’s commanders, Kony surrendered in 1992, but then Museveni ordered his release. ...
Museveni shrewdly suppressed Kony’s pamphlets and speeches, and asserted, both to his own people and to Uganda’s foreign aid donors and diplomats, that Kony was simply crazy....
As Kony continued to wreak havoc, Museveni bolstered his own image as a champion of peace and stability. Sympathetic donors poured ever more foreign aid into his coffers, even though he and his henchmen were stealing much of it with impunity and his forces were also inflicting terror."
I was aware that KONY 2012 was a thing, but wasn’t aware of who Kony was, other than some bad person in Africa. Was he actually a leader of a country?
I'm sure someone will chime in with more correct info - but it's my understanding he was/(is?) the leader of a militia that liked to murder and rape people for fun (especially kids i think) - and that he started out in Uganda but then hung out in some nearby countries.
I think it was use of child soldiers, not randomly murdering children, that you’re vaguely remembering. But I only have vague memories too
I mean what where the child soilders for? To be sent into the villages to find more people to rape and murder presumably. But yeah, I'm ok with these memories being intentionally vague.
The Kony story is less about the person of Kony (who is still alive but not actually very influential any more) and more about the documentary being just a vehicle for the filmmakers to make money/get attention. By the time the movies came out Kony had been pushed out of Uganda many years before so the whole point of the money (Kony is a terrible war lord) was pointless.
I think we're all relatively aware of that, hence referring to the KONY movie as slacktivism. And I think a common criticism way back in 2012 was that while Kony was still a problem he was now a problem in countries neighboring Uganda, but wasn't in Uganda itself anymore. I agree with the Twitter OP about Kony 2012 being a pivot point in politics - but from my limited vantage point I think all it did was further calcify and create cynicism for anyone who wasn't a SJW - and yes I know SJW wasn't a term in 2012.
Also read about it today just for giggles - and it's not clear if he's currently dead or not. But the general consensus I found was 'lean toward dead'.
The idea pitched in the video was that after this flashmob-like operation, "everyone would know his name," and then once people were curious, word would get out about who he was and why he had to be stopped through traditional news media. The election-like branding was just a gimmick. But I do think the idea that using ironic marketing to convey a message to huge swathes of the American public deserves ridicule.
Oh no doubt! Even though I fully understand their very convoluted idea "make him famous" as if making someone famous stops them - as if the world is as obsessed with faux fame as US teenagers are/were........... - Even though I understand that I still can't get past the fact that KONY 2012 sounds like an election slogan, and just adding the word STOP to the front solves the problem and makes the whole idea much more clear.
19. Are you worried that by posting the explanation of the Zhou Enlai quote you weaken society's ability to be circumspect about predicting the future?
But seriously, thank you for doing this every time I see it referenced earnestly I feel motivated to write an annoying pedantic email.
I think the French Revolution never really did end, and has been going in one form or another ever since. Reganaism looks to me like another incarnation of the Thermidorian reaction.
Recently the French revolution has been focused on worrying about the Amharic influence in the American conservative movement.
Sorry I don't actually know anything about any of this so I'm resorting to silly puns rather than actually responding to you.
the french revolution was characterized by political instability on the macroscale, with microscale staiblity coming only when groups would temporarily hold power. What ended up happening was nobody was ever satisfied with the status quo; there were always conservatives who wanted to bring back the monarchy and people who wanted to take things more to 'the left' which lined up more or less with american notions of left/right today, as long as you translate for 250~ years ago.
So you might see the response to wokism among mainstream progressives as being akin to something like the thermidorian reaction, as analogized by a WSJ journalist:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dave-chappelle-peggy-noonan-comedy-special-trans-woke-pc-11634853357
I think the analogy is way more apt than she realized.
Paywall, can't read.
https://archive.ph/J3XzH
Even without knowing the context, that quote always struck me as a translation failure. "It's too early to say" seems like the sort of thing you would say if you only half understood the question, but wanted to look like you understood it and had something profound to say.
Bret Devereaux has a great series of posts touching on #11 with much the same thesis. https://acoup.blog/2021/06/25/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-ii-citizens-and-allies/
I was about to post the same link, but instead I'll just endorse your post (and the whole Romans series it's from).
I came here to post that same thing.
Thanks, this is interesting.
It seems that Scott's summary of the article is maybe simplifying the thesis a little too much. What was more important to Rome during the critical struggles of the Middle Republic wasn't citizenship per se so much as the successful incorporation of the socii into a loyal and reliable confederation that was willing to shoulder much of the burden of empire, even when things were looking bad.
By the time of the Social War, when they were actually awarded citizenship, Rome didn't have a serious rival anywhere near the Mediterranean Basin.
To be clear, Greek and Roman "citizenship" was very distinct.
This is also a good nuclear discussion w Luisa Rodríguez and Rob Wiblin
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/luisa-rodriguez-why-global-catastrophes-seem-unlikely-to-kill-us-all/
#23 (the debate on how much sleep you need)
This is one of those things where I have no idea why people trust the underlying data. I get about 6 hours of sleep a night. If you asked me if it was enough, I’d tell you definitely. Ideal, actually. I get to relax at night with my wife after putting the kids to bed, watch some tv, and still get up early enough in the morning to go for a run while still being able to make the kids breakfast. Perfect!
Then one night I’ll turn it at 8 PM and sleep until 6 and OH MY GOD IS THAT GREAT I HAD NO IDEA.
Basically I have no bead at all on what works best for me. I don’t see how Alexey and Natalia would.
I think Alexey might mostly agree with you and that his 'you can do with less than 7-8 hours of sleep' is a reaction to the conventional wisdom.
I sometimes wonder whether the people advocating 7-8 hours of sleep are some kind of mutant. I couldn't sleep for 7 hours even if I tried, unless I was recently sleep deprived. If I try to go to bed early, I won't be able to sleep, and even if I do, I'll just wake up earlier. The only time I ever go to bed at 8pm is when I'm jet-lagged and extremely sleep deprived.
I'm 48 years old, I weigh about the 140 pounds -- more or less the same I weighed in college -- and I sometimes wonder if fat people actually exist. I eat what I want, exercise irregularly, and my weight never changes! All the available evidence suggests it is literally impossible to be overweight.
I'm also fortunate enough to not gain weight easily. It's interesting how many experiences that people think are universal actually aren't.
Yeah, there are all kinds of people who are hard to believe in. I'm moderately fat. I pretty much eat what I please.
I don't become extremely fat. I don't understand people who have to struggle to eat enough to keep their weight high enough. (These are people who have access to food. They burn it off really fast.)
I don't understand people who like hard exercise. And so on.
I consider it a valuable and somewhat difficult to keep a grasp on people having experiences which are very different from mine. How about people who spend a lot of time on hatred? Not only why do they like it, but where do they find the energy?
And there are also people who like beer. I don't understand that.
Nonsense, extrapolating from myself, literally everyone in the world likes beer.
Like I said, people are wired differently. My father was that type, once he had enough sleep he couldn't stay in bed. Others of us would stay in bed as long as we were allowed.
It does seem to me, as I get older, that I do sleep less than when I was younger. Some mornings I will wake up early and get up as it's pointless staying in bed, I won't sleep. So there is that as well.
Yes, people are wired differently. It's almost as though there is a statistical distribution of outcomes. And sometimes I almost get the sense that people who live in the tails of those distributions love to post personal anecdata on message boards while claiming to simply not understand what all the fuss is about.
Meanwhile I wonder how anyone manages with less than 9 hours of sleep. I can just scrape by on 8, but notice that I'm more lethargic on it. I can also weather a single night of 5 hours, but I can absolutely not sustain that, and it messes me up badly on the day after (my sleep deprivation lags for some reason). :) But my primary is more like you; he can't sleep very long! (To be fair, he is also perpetually exhausted and miserable, which makes me wonder if he needs more sleep. But it doesn't change that he just can't and doesn't want to.) It's remarkable how different people are about sleep.
Meanwhile, if I got 7 hours of sleep every night for two weeks, I'd be straight-up depressed by the end the second week. If on a given mon-fri I slept 6 hours each night, I'll consistently sleep for 13 uninterrupted hours on Sat+Sun. I'm a young healthy person, I just need (and have always needed) a lot of sleep!
I have similar experiences with random fluctuating amounts of sleep. I might sleep for as little as four hours on some nights, and feel oddly fine. Other nights I might get 8-9+ and still feel a bit tired. When I first tracked my sleep as a teenager, I would naturally sleep 10 full hours, and was very tired if I only got 8. I probably average under 7 hours a night now and feel perfectly fine most days, though I sometimes have nights where I go to bed very early and wake up more refreshed than I would have thought I needed.
I'll talk to people who routinely get less than six hours (or worse, can't sleep more than that no matter how much time they have available) who seem fine. I also know people who get nine or more hours about every night and struggle to get up. I'm convinced that people have different needs when it comes to sleep, and that those needs can fluctuate long term and short term.
I think different people do have different sleep needs. I'll sleep as much as I can get; if I have to, I can get up early after a short amount of sleep, but more sleep is better.
Some people can only sleep six hours a night and if you force them to stay in bed, they'll just lie awake and toss and turn and be miserable.
Isn't there something to the REM cycle? Or whatever the mechanism, I know that usually when I wake up with 6 hours of sleep, I feel fine. But often with 7 hours, I feel much more tired. Basically there seems to be certain intervals in which waking up is ideal. Also a big difference between waking myself up vs. getting woken up by something external (besides maybe sunlight).
I think there is – for me anyways. I used to use an iPhone app as my wakeup alarm and it would listen to you as you sleep and time its alarm for the 'best' point in your sleep cycle (within 30 minutes or so of when you _had_ to be up at the latest). That seemed to work great (for me)!
(But I had to keep my phone plugged in all night and, because of the power draw of the app, and probably where I had my phone stored when I slept, I went thru several phone batteries – they all swelled. I _wish_ there was a standalone alarm clock like that.)