"New York and Pennsylvania are the leading producers of dairy products, while other states, such as Wisconsin and Iowa, are also significant contributors. Other significant agricultural products include tobacco, rice, and peanuts, which are primarily grown in the South. In the West, states such as California and Wyoming are major producers of beef and sheep, while fish and shellfish are produced in states such as Alaska and Massachusetts.
- California is the biggest farming state in the US, producing more than 400 different crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and dairy products. It is one of the most significant parts of the US agricultural industry, contributing over $50 billion to the national economy each year. The main Crops include oranges, avocados, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, and broccoli. The state is also a major producer of nuts, such as almonds and pistachios. California is the top producer of wine grapes in the U.S.
- Iowa is another major farming state, producing many grains, particularly corn and soybeans. It is the largest producer of soybeans in the US and one of the leading producers of corn. Iowa also produces eggs and dairy products. Iowa is the leading producer of corn, soybeans, and eggs in the country. It is also a major producer of beef and dairy products.
- Texas is the leading producer of cotton and cattle in the US, with over three million cattle and over 11 million acres of cotton production. It is also one of the leading producers of sorghum, hay, wheat, and peanuts. The state is also a major producer of beef, dairy, and poultry products.
- Nebraska is home to some of the most productive land in the US. It is a major producer of corn, soybeans and wheat. It also produces hay, grain sorghum, and sunflowers.
- Minnesota is a major producer of corn, soybeans, sugar beets, and wheat. The state is also a major producer of hogs, turkeys, and dairy products.
- Illinois "land of Lincoln" and a major agricultural state. It is a major producer of corn and soybeans, as well as oats, rye, hay, and barley. It also produces fruits and vegetables, as well as livestock such as beef, dairy, and poultry.
- Kansas is a major producer of wheat, sorghum, and hay. Kansas is the leader in wheat production in the US, producing 20.1% of the nation's wheat crop. Other States that contribute are North Dakota (17.2%), Montana (10.8%), Washington (6.7%), and Oklahoma (4.9%).
- North Carolina is a major producer of hogs, turkeys, and chicken. The state also produces sweet potatoes, tobacco, and peanuts."
Okay, we know California is Democratic. What about the rest of them? The impact is going to be on the beef, poultry, egg, dairy and pork producing states. So who, if any, are the Democratic senators from these states?
Iowa - both Republicans.
Texas - both Republicans.
Minnesota - Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, members of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party which by the name should have some agrarian component which might well be interested in a "yes" vote for the EATS act.
Illinois - Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, Democrats. Durbin has changed his position on farm subsidies, so he might be anti-EATS:
"In January 2005, Durbin changed his longstanding position on sugar tariffs and price supports. After several years of voting to keep sugar quotas and price supports, he now favors abolishing the program. "The sugar program depended on congressmen like me from states that grew corn", Durbin said, referring to the fact that, though they were formerly a single entity, the sugar market and the corn syrup market are now largely separate."
North Carolina - both Republicans.
New York - Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrats. Chuck *might* be persuaded to be pro-EATS:
"In March 2019, Schumer was one of 38 senators to sign a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue warning that dairy farmers "have continued to face market instability and are struggling to survive the fourth year of sustained low prices" and urging his department to "strongly encourage these farmers to consider the Dairy Margin Coverage program"
As might Kirsten:
"In May 2019, Gillibrand and eight other Democratic senators sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Perdue where they criticized the USDA for purchasing pork from JBS USA and wrote that it was "counterproductive and contradictory" for companies to receive funding from "U.S. taxpayer dollars intended to help American farmers struggling with this administration's trade policy." The senators requested the department "ensure these commodity purchases are carried out in a manner that most benefits the American farmer’s bottom line—not the business interests of foreign corporations."
Pennsylvania - Bob Casey Jr. and John Fetterman, Democrats. Fetterman has his own troubles and neither of them seem to have any particular positon on agricultural issues.
Wisconsin - Even I have heard of the cheese! A mixed bag, Ron Johnson who is Republican and Tammy Baldwin who is a Democrat. Baldwin again might be cajoled into being pro-EATS as like Gillibrand she signed the letter over buying pork from the Brazilian producer.
I wonder though, if we assume UFOs are doing something we currently think is impossible under the laws of physics, then does that equally open up the possibility of other supernatural phenomena?
Eg, we can't definitively prove that ghosts (or anything else) don't exist. So why do we assume out of hand that ghosts would be a silly explanation? Once we're speculating that the world doesn't work the way we think and the impossible may be possible, how do we estimate the probability of each particular thing that we currently think is impossible?
You have to be more specific about what you mean by "something we currently think is impossible under the laws of physics".
If you mean violating the principle of conservation of energy, then sure, supernatural explanations are on the table.
If you mean doing something that as far as we know can't be done, but there's no particular reason we know of _that_ it can't be done, then no, the response would just be that we need to learn more about what natural law does and doesn't allow.
Aristotle said that it was the nature of terrestrial matter to come to a stop when moving. That turned out to be wrong, but it's not difficult to understand how the mistake was made.
We later revised our idea of what the laws of physics have to say about that kind of situation, without seeing any need for a supernatural agent and, interestingly enough, without changing the conclusions that Aristotle would have given us. We still believe that objects moving along the surface of the earth will naturally come to a stop. We just do with multiple "laws of nature" what Aristotle had wanted to do with one.
I was thinking of something like FTL travel or wormholes. Moving faster than light is fundamentally equivalent to time travel according to our current understanding of relativity, and allows you to violate causality. Giving up our belief in cause and effect is a hard sell; perhaps even harder than giving up our belief in conservation of energy.
Interestingly though, apart from this issue with causality, general relativity actually doesn't forbid objects from moving faster than light if they move through warped space.
We can't prove causality is never violated, but we also can't prove energy is always conserved. We've just always observed these things to be true so far and our entire scientific framework is built on the assumption they're true.
> We can't prove causality is never violated, but we also can't prove energy is always conserved.
True, but the conservation principles are derived from invariance principles of the form "all of the same rules apply in [circumstance X] as in [circumstance Y]". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem ) So if you're willing to assume that the laws of physics, whatever they may be, are the same in the past as they are in the future, then you're stuck with conservation of energy.
Wrt causality and wormholes, given the existence of a wormhole I would kind of expect that causality would flow through it just like it flows along every other possible path. But I have no relevant training or knowledge for that statement.
Anyway, it is because violating conservation of energy cannot be done without changing what the laws of nature are that I say it goes into the realm of possibly-supernatural-phenomena. How else would we distinguish "natural" from "supernatural"?
> True, but the conservation principles are derived from invariance principles of the form "all of the same rules apply in [circumstance X] as in [circumstance Y]".
Okay, good point.
> Wrt causality and wormholes, given the existence of a wormhole I would kind of expect that causality would flow through it just like it flows along every other possible path.
As far as I understand, if you just have two fixed wormhole ends, you don't have a causality problem. But if we're talking about an alien race who can do arbitrary FTL travel at will to wherever they want to go, then they can travel through time and violate causality.
I'm agreeing with you that violating conservation of energy goes into the realm of the possibly-supernatural. I'm suggesting if FTL travel implies the ability to violate causality, it's also in the realm the possibly-supernatural.
> As far as I understand, if you just have two fixed wormhole ends, you don't have a causality problem. But if we're talking about an alien race who can do arbitrary FTL travel at will to wherever they want to go, then they can travel through time and violate causality.
Hmmm.
I assume a "violation of causality" involves the flow of information from a particular point in time and space to the same point in space at an earlier time.
It is not immediately obvious to me how teleportation would enable that. I'm willing to believe it could, though. Can you sketch an example?
The general problem I'm encountering while thinking about it is that teleporting always sends you into "the future", a time that is later than whatever you can observe from your starting point. (Because you moved faster than the light that makes observation possible.)
Working through a scenario:
I'm on planet A and you're on planet B. It takes light 100 years to travel from one of us to the other one.
I am watching you through my perfect telescope with infinite resolution. By implication, you lived "sort of 100 years" before me. You can send messages to me, but I can't send messages to you. When you look over towards planet A, you see whatever was going on 200 years before I started watching you.
So we have some points in spacetime:
A-200: visible to you.
A-100: accessible to you, if you teleport.
B-100: your natural home, visible to me.
A+0: my natural home. You can't see or access this.
B+0: accessible to me, if I teleport.
The goal is to send a message from some later point on B to some earlier point on B (the only possibility is from B+0 to B-100), or from some later point on A to some earlier point on A (three possibilities given the points we've named).
I can teleport between A+0 and B+0, and you can teleport between A-100 and B-100. There does not appear to be any way to send a message from the future into the past. You could teleport to A-100, learn something about it, teleport back to B-100, and signal to me through my telescope, but I'm already allowed to know about things that happened in the past of planet A.
---
Now, the difficulty that leaps out at me, for the scenario I just outlined, is that (as far as I understand relativity) there is no point in time on planet B that corresponds to my time and location on planet A, and therefore it isn't really possible to say what time it will be on planet B when I teleport there. I labeled that time "B+0", but that's meaningless.
What that says to me is more that, if we had the capacity to create and use wormholes to arbitrary locations, either they would target random points in time (?!) or the theory of relativity would be empirically false - it really would be possible to say that a particular point in time at some given location corresponded to a particular point in time at some other location.
So, I personally think "violation of causality" via currently understood channels such as high speed travel through curved space, is more probable than "ghosts." It might be a violation of our usual intuitions, but by my understanding it seems to be compatible with our current understanding of how the laws of physics work. And if we view the universe from the outside including the dimension of time, I don't think it's obvious that we should always expect that nothing ever be caused by things which, from certain relativistic perspectives, happened after they did.
But if we grant that ghosts are definitely more improbable than FTL travel, does it imply that if we observe ghosts, that implies that FTL travel is plausible too? I don't think it does. Maybe it would depend on *how* the ghosts turned out to work, and if it somehow turned out that our model of how physics works is completely, from the ground up, wrong, then I guess we'd have to stop believing in the light speed limit, but it's hard to imagine how that could possibly turn out to be consistent with our existing observations.
In general, I think that one part of a model failing should change your probabilities for other things, but it's never going to be as simple as "everything the model says is as unlikely as this thing we just observed is now likely to be true." You have to downgrade your confidence that the model is accurate in predicting what's true or not in the first place, but there are some things which we're confident don't exist specifically because of our confidence in our model, and there are some things where, if our model turned out to be wrong, we'd have to revert to some different, still low, default likelihood of them being true. Saying that they probably don't exist is an antiprediction- very specific things which we don't observe would have to be true for them to be true.
Neither ghosts nor Russell's teapot imply the existence of the other. Ghosts are a complicated thing which we have a lack of good evidence for, and a model that predicts that there's probably no mechanism for them to exist. If that model turns out to be wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that there *is* a mechanism for them to exist, and it certainly doesn't mean we have evidence for them. If we see FTL travel and infer ghosts, it means that we're treating the existence of ghosts as something that's granted by default, a proposition that's only retracted because the model we have doesn't offer a mechanism for them. But I don't think it makes sense to think about them that way in the first place.
But there is no _a priori_ reason to think that UFO sightings are explained by aliens. Thus, it is much more rational to assume that, whatever they are, they are caused by something that doesn’t violate the laws of physics as we know them.
Like dragons. UFOs are obviously dragons.
“But that’s ridiculous!” NO! It is strictly less ridiculous than the idea that UFOs are aliens. Neither dragons nor aliens-on-Earth are known to exist, but aliens-on-Earth would require new physics, and dragons would not. If you are a good Bayesian rationalist, then you should agree that P(UFOs are dragons) > P(UFOs are aliens).
They have tried to rebrand it as UAP ("aerial phenomena"), but UFOs are firmly established in the popular imagination, and likewise that aliens are the leading explanation. And now with literal government officials publicly testifying about physical artifacts being covered up this confusion is probably stronger than ever. So much for raising the sanity waterline.
We've gotten new physics in the past. It may be true that aliens-on-Earth would require new physics, and dragons-on-Earth wouldn't, but it is not true that the totality of what aliens-on-Earth would require is more surprising than the totality of what dragons-on-Earth would require.
If we’re going to posit new physics then why not just posit that “UFOs” are *directly* caused by the new physics (ie, they’re something like ball lightning or the aurora borealis)?
Dragons are perhaps an egregiously silly counterproposal, but the overall point remains:
1. There is no evidence that there are aliens on or around Earth.
2. Our current understanding of physics seems to rule out the possibility that there could be.
3. Thus, “UFOs are aliens” is a really really improbable conclusion to jump to based on the very small amount of evidence we have.
I don't believe that UFOs are aliens, but I also don't agree with your point 2. Yes, it would be very expensive and slow to travel between the stars, but it could be done. There's nothing about Project Orion or a generation ship that violates the laws of physics.
I second this opinion. Although I also regard the alien hypothesis as very unlikely, it's one of the few pop culture conspiracy theories that *doesn't* have to violate the laws of physics.
Wickard v. Filburn strikes again... (I recognize that the food production being regulated here does actually involve interstate commerce, making this less egregious than the facts of Wickard itself.)
My understanding is that, due to economies of scale and the structure of the industry, it is very difficult for any large food producer to operate without selling in California, and it's also very difficult to "split" a production operation such that, say, a company could make California groceries in one production chain while making Iowa groceries in another. Thus, the only option is to comply with the stringent State's regulations (could be an "intolerant minority/apathetic majority" situation). If food prices are pushed up, the majority might not stay apathetic for too long. Anyone in the food industry, please correct me if wrong.
What makes this so hard? If California eats (let's say) 10% of the nation's food, why can't producers sell to the remaining 90% of the market, and let California-specific companies sell to California?
It's the same principle as the gunboats opening the markets of East Asia. They CAN, but it's just so cheap (possibly because the costs are paid by someone else) that the attempt to expand is going to happen.
In part because segregating the product stream is nigh-unto impossible economically. Producers don't sell directly to consumers, as a general rule. They sell to a processor, who sells to a packager, who sells to a distributor; at every step they're comingling product from many different producers from very different areas. And much of the documentation doesn't persist--a single sausage may be made of meat from multiple hogs from different farms entirely.
So any tiny "contamination" in a California-bound stream opens the entire distribution network, most of which has no effectual way of looking at the conditions back up the chain, to massive penalties.
You'd basically have to have a completely separate California network from everyone else...at *massive* costs to everyone.
Surely different hot dog producers have "organic" vs. "regular" hot dogs, or beef vs. pork hot dogs, or high-quality vs. low-quality hot dogs, or something like that, and they're able to keep those separate from each other. Why would it be any harder to have "California-compliant" hot dogs as a separate product?
California produces more food than any other US state, and I think (data are complicated, hard to tell) is the largest exporter of food of any state. But like every state, it specializes in certain products and imports the ones that aren't its comparative advantage, which include pork.
If I'm wrong about this and California does regulate its food companies out of business, I think the correct sequence of events is for it to bear the brunt of its own bad policies, suffer, learn, and change them. Just as I would rather if an individual is lazy they fail to make money and have to come up with their own solution, rather than the government mandating work for them.
California has a YEAR WITHOUT MEAT and if its voters aren't happy they can have a referendum to get rid of the meat restrictions law. What's the issue?
You're asking for another axis, so you've doubled the number of bins ("california-organic", "non-ca-organic", "california-nonorganic", "non-ca-nonorganic", etc). It's not rocket science, but it's also a major effort across many businesses that are not highly technological. Sure, industrial factory farms could probably figure it out... but is that the kind of direction you want to push the food supply?
The US economy is a huge powerhouse mostly because it's a single market and there's relatively little customization needed on a per-state basis. The alternative is something like Europe before EUCU. Even post-EUCU, selling across Europe is a pain in the ass.
I think producers just object to being required to have a process on the same level of complexity as sourcing organic ingredients just for one state, with the added fear that if this is okay then they could end up needing to do it for fifty different states.
Now with more substance - organic hot dogs (salad/bread/etc) can not be processed on the same equipment as non organic without a production stopping deep clean between. The higher price charged for the organic product makes this economically possible. Same with allergens and with kosher. The levels of purity required for these (federally mandated) marketing designations are not at all required for, say, changing from beef to pork to mixed meat.
And you miss the real problem - CA can't produce enough food to feed itself. They have to import other state's surplus.
> Same with allergens and with kosher. The levels of purity required for these (federally mandated) marketing designations...
Kosher cannot be a federally mandated marketing designation. The federal government is not even allowed to have an opinion on whether any particular thing is or isn't kosher.
High quality vs low quality only considers the observable facts of the input, so that's neither here nor there.
Organic vs regular is both (a) mostly a lie (those are mostly entirely self-certified and meaningless) and (b) amortizes the much higher cost over the entire country. It also just produces (mostly) a single product per top-level distributor--you don't have the range of organic products that you do non-organic products. The entire "organic" range is comparable to a single entry in the non-organic range.
The cost of setting up a CA-specific *set* of lines (because you'd need just as many lines as the entirety of the non-organic + organic lines, including the entire distribution channels and delivery infrastructure, completely non-comingled at any point) vastly dwarfs the expense of setting up one organic chain that can mostly comingle both before and after a couple key points. And would only be amortizable over 10% of the entire market. You're talking about more than doubling the cost...for 10% of the market *max*. That's absolutely insane.
Organic products command a premium price, which is what makes them viable. California wants cruelty-free meat (with, I presume, the aim of stopping factory farming altogether) and it might well be that the production methods are considered cruel by California standards (e.g. how the cattle or pigs were slaughtered) and, for instance, I don't think they'd like or permit veal, even if it is organic.
From 2017 Irish farm advisory about going organic - it's expensive and time-consuming, so it probably works best for smaller scale operations. For really big stock raising operations, it might not be economically feasible (though I can't say about that):
For organic farming to be profitable a premium price must be achieved for produce sold. While the majority of beef supplied to the market is from steers and heifers, recent markets have emerged for calves (organic veal) and cull cows. Beef farmers interested in organic conversion should speak with other organic farmers, processors and wholesalers about potential markets. Major factory outlets for organic beef are Goodherdsmen, Slaney Meats, ABP and Jennings. Premium prices of 15 to 20% have generally been achievable for organic beef in recent years. According to processors the demand for Irish organic beef will continue to rise, especially in mainland Europe.
Complete an organic conversion plan
This involves a detailed description of management practices on the farm, the changes required on the farm, soil analysis, faecal analysis, livestock housing plan, animal health plan (in consultation with your veterinary surgeon) and land/crop rotation plan. The plan can be drawn up by the farmer alone or in consultation with the farm advisor. Attending a FETAC accredited “Introduction to organic farming course” is an excellent way of learning how to complete the conversion plan.
Provision of quality forage
To maintain farm productivity, stocking rate must be maintained as high as possible. In the absence of artificial nitrogen, white clover may be introduced into pastures to maintain grass production levels. White clover is the ‘engine’ that drives productivity on organic farms and can fix in excess of 100 kg N/ha annually. Red clover can fix in the region of 200 kg N/ha annually and can be a high yielding, high protein feed for wintering animals. Organic concentrates are more expensive than conventional concentrates. Prices for organic rations for ruminants are generally around €500/tonne. Maximising use of grass, using home-grown grain, purchasing grain from other organic producers and having the correct breed and system which matches land type and market specification required can reduce feed costs significantly. Organic straights can be purchased from a variety of organic farmers for between €300 and €350 per tonne with combi-crop mixes of peas and a cereal available for between approximately €380 and €400/tonne.
Regular topping is necessary to maintain grass quality and control weeds particularly in mid-season. High quality silages can also be produced using red clover-grass swards and enough silage should be produced on farm to meet winter feed requirements as it is not permitted to source silage from conventional farmers.
Animal health
Ensuring high animal health and welfare standards is a fundamental ethos of organic principles. The farmer must be aware that the level of stocksmanship required with animals is very high on organic farms. Routine treatment of animals with anthelmintics is prohibited, and a rotational grazing system should be in place to minimise worm burden. If a problem occurs faecal analysis is recommended and the vet must sign off the appropriate treatment on the organic farmer’s record book. Early detection of animal health problems is essential. Remember good animal husbandry is paramount. If an animal is suffering it must be treated and the necessary permission must be sought from the vet. The animal health plan, produced as part of the conversion plan, will deal with mineral deficiencies and vaccination issues.
Animal housing
Many farmers find that the greatest alterations that need to be made at farm level are changes to winter housing. More generous space allowances are required – for cattle the rule of thumb is that 1.0 m2 is required for every 100 kg live weight. All stock must have access to a dry bedded lying area. Up to 50% of this area can be slatted but the rest must be solid floor and not slatted. Conventional straw may be used for bedding."
Certainly, producing specific 'cruelty-free' meat would drive up the price of the final product, and people might then give up eating meat because it's too expensive. Which is the aim of the entire project in the first place, isn't it?
This argument is correct, and was made at greater length and with citations in amicus briefs from small farmers who are already doing exactly this. They argued that the big producers are essentially rent-seeking, trying to overrule democratic laws that disrupt their business model, because they don't want to compete in this new market as many smaller producers are already doing.
Actually, they would need to add two different types - Californian organic and Californian regular. Or rather 4 types because they already have to distinguish between four types along the axis of "organic" and "kosher". Each additional axis doubles the number of options, so just one or two additional,ones can be a big deal.
I disagree with Dobbs on the object level, but I think the justices were right that you can't just pretend the Constitution guarantees a right to abortion when it clearly doesn't.
But, there is not a States rights issue with congressional legislation in this space. The matter is clearly committed to Congress, and the Founders clearly intended to prevent this type of trade balkanization of the USA.
I mean, there obviously is a states' rights issue. This is a right that the states obviously don't have, but that doesn't meant they don't want it. Usually when someone's out there agitating for a right they don't have, we're willing to call that an issue of their rights.
That works on the assumption that they can make up that lost 10% in the remaining market. If they can convince Idahoans and New Englanders to eat more bacon, then they make up for the loss. But if the remainder of the market is already buying as much bacon as they want, then they're going to suffer a loss.
Imagine you lose 10% of your subscribers. Can you 'sell' to the remaining 90% of subscribers? No, because we're already subscribing. So you either have to persuade us to take out a more expensive subscription, or get the people who are reading but not subscribing to subscribe, and both of those are going to take effort: maybe people already subscribing are paying as much as they can afford and won't be willing to pay more, maybe the non-subscribers don't want to subscribe at all.
Or they can just take a loss. Meat companies taking a loss due to a new California law is not some tragedy we need federal intervention to prevent. The market isn't going to collapse.
They don't have to convince New Englanders to eat more meat, they can cater to the hole in the market left by other companies that decide to cater to the California market.
Let's say initially there are 10 equal-sized meat companies, each selling 10% of its products in California and 90% in the other states. As a result of the law, 1 can specialize in catering entirely to the California market, while the other 9 cater to the other states.
Of course this ignores details like transaction costs. But also, I suspect most of the gains from economies of scale are to be had well below the level of 10% of the entire USA market, which allows for more flexible specialization. (E.g. perhaps many of the smaller companies already cater primarily to one state or another. After all, in Hungary we have several domestic meat companies for 10 million people, even though we're part of the EU common market.)
> But if the remainder of the market is already buying as much bacon as they want, then they're going to suffer a loss.
It's always something in between. The price of bacon will drop, people will discover that they weren't buying _quite_ as much bacon as they wanted -- at least, not now that the price is so low -- but the bacon producers still end up with a loss. It's just a smaller loss than it would be if all of the extra bacon had been destroyed.
On a completely unrelated note, I read something a bit ago about Sinead O'Connor (sorry for the lateness of this question) that mentioned, twice, the Church's (or Irish society in general's?) handling of "gay boys and spirited girls". It left me with the distinct impression that "spirited girls" had some specific meaning, but I don't know what it might be. Do you?
I think this is an example of why people are wrong to equate, as they often do, the balance of power between the states and the federal, with the balance of power between different states.
You ask people why every state should have 2 Senators (rather than proportional by population) and the answer usually has something to do with preserving federalism, the idea being that more power to small states vs large states is the same thing as more power to states overall vs the federal government.
But this is an example of where more power to states would mean more power to *big* states, and small states push back *via* the federal government.
Wickard is not relevant to this question. There the issue was whether goods that were neither transported from their place of origin nor sold to a third party were subject to regulation under the commerce clause.
The issue here is whether goods that are undoubtedly traded in interstate commerce -- pork produced in Iowa, sold by Iowans to Californians, and then transported to California -- can be subject to Congressional regulation. I cannot think of a reason why not.
This precisely the sort of market balkanization that the commerce clause was intended to prevent.
For fresh meat products, I don't think there are so many processing steps involved. Just ship the parts of the formerly slightly happier dead animals to California and the parts of the formerly very unhappy dead animals to the rest of the states.
For preserved meat products, if reasonably phrased the CA law would allow trace amounts of otherwise disallowed meat. Then you would not need a second production line, but could just be run your sausage factory on unhappy dead animals for a month and then on slightly less unhappy animals for a week and label these tins as "CA edition".
I think that any distributor who can't handle tracking different inventories and sending different products to different states should try to look for an occupation which does not involve any logistics.
Besides the dual version solution, there are two different possible outcomes:
* If the additional cost is not large, producers might decide to follow CA rules for all of their products. This happened when the EU mandated standardized charging ports for phones (with Apple lagging behind a bit): phone manufacturers decided that the hassle of having a USB-C version of each phone for the EU and a vendor specific connector version for the rest of the world would cost them more than they would gain from selling overpriced cables. Rest of the world, you are welcome.
* They might just decide that CA is not worth it and not sell there. This is the capitalist solution (on a state level).
We know that Scott favors individual communities competing with their laws to attract citizens [0] with a minimum of higher level oversight, roughly like in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. It is very clear that the US government is way more micromanaging than UniGov or Romanova. (Of course, the US also failed to safeguard exit rights for all of her subjects until the 1860s.)
I think EATS is a blatantly pandering to special interests. The good news is that it establishes the need to improve animal welfare on a federal level, and CA is often 5-10 years ahead of the rest of the US, so a similar federal law might happen eventually. Of course, then the factory farms will whine about state rights, at which points I will be playing a sad song for them on the world's smallest violin.
The economy of scale effect and similar considerations in other areas make me generally skeptical of states' rights (as a policy, setting aside constitutional arguments). Sigh. At least California is not trying to mandate 40 Hz or 80 Hz AC power...
> Wickard v. Filburn strikes again... (I recognize that the food production being regulated here does actually involve interstate commerce, making this less egregious than the facts of Wickard itself.)
I don't see... any connection to Wickard v. Filburn. The question for the EATS act is whether Congress can stop California from banning the import of certain products from other states, and that is the very core of the Commerce Clause as originally understood. Giving Congress that power is the entire point of the Commerce Clause.
EATS is so trivially constitutional it wouldn’t go to SCOTUS. Federal government can set product/production standards. Federal preemption precludes states from legislating where the Feds have spoken.
Yeah. And this is the sort of thing the Interstate Commerce clause was *actually* written for--regularizing standards across multiple states and preventing one state from putting impediments to trade in other states.
I think California's rules are pretty dumb, but I'm not sure it's fair to say they are putting impediments to trade in other states. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm willing to believe that current law/precedent would likely rule this as constitutional, but I also _very_ strongly believe that the commerce clause is interpreted far, far, _far_ too broadly (perhaps the most over-broadly ruled clause in the entire constitution, contested only, in the opposite direction, but the under-ruled 4th amendment), and this looks at first blush to be a case where I'd think the same, even if it's less egregious than some other instances.
They're putting barriers to trade *for anyone who wants to have the potential to sell in California*. And that's what matters, IMO. I'd say that the Commerce Clause was intended (in part) to allow the federal government to step in and pre-empt this kind of thing.
California can absolutely require *packaging* differences. Such as a label "does not comply with <proposition whatever>". What they *can't*, in my judgement, do is pretend to fine companies who have no direct connection to California trade linkable by anything in the product itself.
And I'm not going to say that this is *good* legislation, but I think it's fairly squarely in the intended use of the Commerce Clause. And very much within the current jurisprudence on the matter, which I agree with you is wildly over-broad.
If I were California faced with this, I might recognize a new tort enforceable by any individual, to sue and recover on behalf of an animal who suffered unduly during production and slaughter. That seems to fall squarely under state police power and outside of the federal regulatory sphere.
In fact, Gorsuch's controlling opinion in Pork Producers v. Ross explicitly says this:
>If, as petitioners insist, California’s law really does threaten a “massive” disruption of the pork industry—if pig husbandry really does “‘imperatively demand’” a single uniform nationwide rule—they are free to petition Congress to intervene. Under the (wakeful) Commerce Clause, that body enjoys the power to adopt federal legislation that may preempt conflicting state laws. That body is better equipped than this Court to identify and assess all the pertinent economic and political interests at play across the country. And that body is certainly better positioned to claim democratic support for any policy choice it may make. But so far, Congress has declined the producers’ sustained entreaties for new legislation. See Part I, supra (citing failed efforts). And with that history in mind, it is hard not to wonder whether petitioners have ventured here only because winning a majority of a handful of judges may seem easier than marshaling a majority of elected representatives across the street.
Though note that California doesn't produce pork to any noticeable degree. It's very much intentional that all of the compliance burden of the law falls on out-of-state entities.
It's been clear for years that meat/animal welfare is on the negative polarization slope to becoming a full-on culture war issue. I think this is great news, both in the medium and long term, even if in the short term it means the Republicans are going to pass something like the EATS act next time the rural skew of the senate and electoral college help them get close to a trifecta.
Medium-term, 40% vegans vs. 40% anti-vegans yields far less animal killing than 4% vegans vs. 96% non-vegans, even if the anti-vegans try to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured meat out of spite. Long-term, I don't buy "moloch always moves left", but farm buildings are a multi-decade investment, so if industrial farmers know that national square-inches-per-hog policy will switch back and forth every time Congress changes hands, they'll have to build to the more stringent welfare standards.
The only challenge is for the animal movement to spur negative polarization enough for some fraction of the Democratic base to care about this issue as intensely as Republican hog farmers care about being allowed to race each other to the bottom of the unethically-produced-pork slide.
Good, good, let the lib-owning flow through you! This kind of hyperbolic, obtuse, and vaguely menacing response is exactly what we need to feed the reciprocal chain of reaction that will drive this issue to the big time.
In the campaign a few years back, Ted Cruz accused his opponent of wanting to make BBQ illegal. At the time this seemed comically absurd. Now I’m starting to think he was ahead of the curve.
The realization that will hit you probably only too late is that the worst things the Republicans have said about the Democrats were toned down because the truth was too implausible.
It's the "ha ha ha of course we're not gonna ban stoves/here's the proposed legislation to ban stoves" all over again. Like this piece in the Architectural Digest which flips from "the government isn't going to ban your stove, silly person" to "well not unless they're the state government":
"The short answer is no. Despite the hysteria stirred up by pundits and politicians who swore that government bureaucrats would pry your gas stove from the wall, the roughly 40% of Americans who own gas stoves have nothing to fear. In fact, a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act specifies that the government will pay you in the form of an $840 rebate should you decide to voluntarily switch from gas to electric.
That’s not to say that certain states and municipalities aren’t planning for a future with far fewer gas stoves. As part of its budgeting process, New York’s state legislature passed a measure this week which aims “to phase out the use of fossil fuels in new buildings.” The legislation would forbid the installation of any gas-powered stoves, furnaces, or propane heating in any new building under seven stories tall by 2026, with similar requirements for taller buildings kicking in by 2029."
So they're not *banning* them, they're just not letting you *install* them, which is totally different from a ban!
>The only challenge is for the animal movement to spur negative polarization enough for some fraction of the Democratic base to care about this issue as intensely as Republican hog farmers care about being allowed to race each other to the bottom of the unethically-produced-pork slide.
In the long-run, it's actually not the hog farmers who care most about this; they can pass the cost on. They're mostly worried about the short-run of potential changeover.
In the long-run, you're up against *meat-eaters*, who want cheap pork for the dinner table and (as consumers) can't pass that cost on to anyone. And that's a huge chunk of the country.
Also, remember that the culture war has negative externalities; moderately-large for now, but extreme in the worst case i.e. civil war. If you do this, and particularly if you or others building on you go the whole hog and use a Democratic trifecta to ban meat, well, that's another straw on the camel, and you've got to take account of that in your utility calculations.
Americans as voters are consistently far more anti-factory-farming than their "revealed preferences" as consumers would suggest—e.g. the Massachusetts version of Prop 12 passed with 78% support, even though only a very small fraction of these consumers truly never bought caged eggs. See Bovay and Sumner, Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 2018 for two (pro-ag but reasonably objective) economists' takes on this.
Social change always encounters resistance, however badly needed. Ending industrial animal confinement and slaughter—almost certainly the most violent and disutility-producing human endeavor in history—would be worth a lot of friction.
78% support which did not turn out to mean practice, as those voting still consumed the Bad Eggs. I don't think that means much apart from "I want to feel that I am a good person".
There is definitely a position on animal welfare and factory farming and getting changes passed. The EU has managed it. But you won't do it by forcing people without convincing them, and telling them they're murder-torturers if they eat meat and you're going to take away that choice of theirs by fiat.
>Social change always encounters resistance, however badly needed. Ending industrial animal confinement and slaughter—almost certainly the most violent and disutility-producing human endeavor in history—would be worth a lot of friction.
Okay, fine, I will engage you on the main issue.
To get "factory farming is outright disutile" you need all of these:
1) animals have moral worth
2) factory-farmed animals have negative QALY
3) even then the numbers matter; it's not a slam-dunk
Let's take your example of pork.
Assume a person eats 200g pork per day (a steak). A pig produces about 70kg of meat, so that's 1/350 pigs per day or 1.044 pigs per year, each of which lives let's say 9 months (it varies between ~4 months and ~12 months). According to the ACC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/) food-pig QALY is approximately zero, which makes that calculation simple, but you also need a sow to produce the food-pig (let's say 20 piglets per sow per year; they actually produce more like 25 but I'm assuming some die) and they say sow QALY is strongly negative (let's call it -3*), so your 1 year eating pork requires 0.0522 years of sow = -0.157 pig QALY.
How much are pigs worth? Well, let's take cortical neuron count, Scott likes that one and it's fairly objective. A pig has 2.66% of a human's cortical neuron count, so -0.157 pig QALY = -0.00416 human QALY. This then means that, if abstaining from pork is subjectively worth more than -0.00416 of your quality of life, it is morally preferable to eat factory-farmed pork than no pork. Some people like pork little enough that they shouldn't eat it, and of course nobody's forcing them to. But there are also definitely people who like meat more than that; that's not even 0.5% of your QALY.
You can absolutely be a Singer utilitarian and come out with "factory farming is a net-positive actually". You can argue that it's not as good as free-range farming, but it's not some sort of "this is obviously the worst horror in the world, any counterargument is obvious cope". The depression epidemic is literally worse than the numbers I got there.
*I don't think any form of torture could put me below -3 QALY, so I'm essentially assuming sow stalls are Room 101 here.
I'd take three years of QALY 1 life (my actual current life is probably like QALY 0.6-0.7, but that's neither here nor there) if it also meant getting a year of horrible torture (without long-term effects, obviously, since those are accounted for elsewhere). That's definitionally "horrible torture > -3 QALY/y".
I mean, if you rewired my brain so I was incapable of blocking out the pain or fainting, I could probably go lower than -3, but that's more like ideas of Hell than it is RL torture.
Assigning mammals' suffering coefficient by neuron count has the advantage of "objectivity", but the disadvantage of being neuropsychologically illiterate.
I don't disvalue suffering because I've decided that certain patterns of neural activity are abstractly distasteful to me, but because my own cognitive architecture considers my suffering to be an extremely strong motivator, and for moral consistency I should care about all homologous experiences similarly. Humans' expanded cortices (disproportionately prefrontal, not somatosensory) contribute to our distinctive ability to write poetry about our suffering, but they shouldn't affect the intensity of the sensation of suffering. Supporting this principle, human babies and people like this (https://twitter.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1683557994322173954) have much smaller brains than normal adults, but as far as they can report, their experience of suffering is no less intense than mine. So even accepting that factory-reared food pigs, living shoulder to shoulder on painful metal floors with docked tails and earsplitting noise, are util-neutral, and neglecting the negative externalities to humans who live downwind of pig lagoons or get PTSD from working in slaughterhouses, I disagree that it's objectively rational to discount those -1/7 sow QALYs.
Second, you have to calculate the *marginal* value to the consumer of eating animal flesh, relative to Beyond Meat or their preferred alternative, not the *absolute* value. I am willing to assert that claiming 1 in 7 of the experiences that make your life worth living derive from eating pork sausages *rather than Beyond sausages* constitutes "obvious cope".
>Supporting this principle, human babies and people like this (https://twitter.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1683557994322173954) have much smaller brains than normal adults, but as far as they can report, their experience of suffering is no less intense than mine.
It's literally impossible to study relative intensity of suffering between individuals. All language is suspect because people interpret it relative to their own experience, and revealed preference is useless because you can only get results up to a constant scale factor (multiply all rewards and penalties in a game by 2 and optimal play is identical, so play provides actual zero evidence about whether they've been multiplied by 2 or not). This is a form of the Problem of Other Minds.
And I mean obviously if you bite that bullet and say that *all* suffering of any individual matters equally then you wind up in crazyland because plants and even some bacteria have avoidance behaviours that are clearly analogous to pain. You wind up with "humans are less than a billionth of the worth of the Earth", which is wild and produces all sorts of mad policy prescriptions.
" I am willing to assert that claiming 1 in 7 of the experiences that make your life worth living derive from eating pork sausages *rather than Beyond sausages* constitutes "obvious cope"."
🤷♀️ I haven't ever eaten any of the Beyond brand, and while vegan alternatives are now being produced more plentifully, are more available, and range in price from reasonable to expensive, taste and quality vary.
I couldn't find a price for Beyond sausages online in Ireland, so here's the next best thing: beef burger comparisons. All prices taken from Tesco website (no advertising intended!):
Beyond burgers (made with pea protein): €6.50 for 226g
Bird's Eye burgers (made with pea protein): €3.50 for 200g
Linda McCartney burgers (made with soya protein): €2.30 for 237g
So the Beyond burgers are just under three times as expensive as Linda McCartney. As I said, I've never tried them, so are they 'as good as meat'?
Let's see what the BLOODMOUTH CARNIST burgers stack up as:
Bog-standard 'it's got meat in, don't ask what kind of meat' burger: €0.50 for 56g. That comes out to something like €2.00 for the same weight at the Beyond burgers, but yeah - I'd skip these unless you are on a *severe* budget.
Tesco burgers (stretched out by adding in pea powder etc. with the beef): €2.50 for 397g. Well, they're cheap and probably 'good enough' if you just want something fast in a hurry.
And finally the most expensive ones, Tesco organic beef burgers: €6.20 for 454g
So I can have real meat for the same price as the Beyond pea protein version - €6.50/226g as against €6.20 for 454g, which actually comes out to be twice as cheap for the meat as the fake; Beyond burgers would set me back €13.00 for 454g as against €6.20 for the real meat.
Therefore, unless and until Beyond or other fake burgers become as cheap, and as indistinguishable from the real thing in taste and feel etc., then it's not "obvious cope" if I choose to eat meat for the experiences that make my life worth living.
"even if the anti-vegans try to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured meat out of spite."
Well gosh, with an appeal to my better nature like that and a deep, humane understanding of your fellow citizens on display, you have convinced me that the only reason I eat meat is to spite the beautiful natures of the kind, moral, superior vegans, plus I enjoy torture and think it adds a special flavour to the flesh I consume!
If you're interested in empirical research on how subconscious cognitive biases influence meat consumption behavior, Wikipedia has a good albeit slightly outdated summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat.
If you're interested in proving my point that meat is a scissor issue that reliably elicits tribal self-congratulation and name-calling instead of serious reflection, just carry on, you're doing a great job.
I said it was reasonable to speculate that hypothetical people with an active *anti-vegan* cultural identity might on average be motivated to eat more and lower-welfare meat than regular *non-vegans*, but less than 2.4x as much. If you take that as a personal insult, that's your problem.
What part of "I make a decision to pay 25% less to consume pork raised in conditions so bad that it gives workers PTSD" do you find so funny?
Is it the part where some people think that animals have some consciousness of the brutality of their factory farmed existence? Because the only way you can justify your actions is if (a) you're starving or (b) you truly believe animals have no consciousness.
In that case, I presume you have no issue with punting puppies for fun right? Maybe we can cut off your pet's front legs and then put a bowl of food a few feet in front of them. Watch them struggle to get to it and make bets on whose pet will make it first.
No reason not to, these are animals with no feelings. Either way I'll buy you a new pet after the race so there's no economic loss to you.
" (b) you truly believe animals have no consciousness."
Got it in one, old bean.
"Maybe we can cut off your pet's front legs and then put a bowl of food a few feet in front of them."
Well, funnily enough - I don't keep pets. Because I'm not sentimental about animals, and I don't feel the need to keep a creature locked up inside in an alien environment purely to provide me with snuggles and 'love'. Coincidentally, I've just seen a series of posts about 'putting the cat out' where people are all "my cats are indoor cats" (this is in Ireland, mind you) where the self-righteous rationale for keeping an animal inside 24/7 in a human habitation is that "cats are a threat to native wild life".
Yeah, no shit Sherlock. Cats and dogs are meant to spend most of their time *outdoors*, and part of that is that cats are carnivores and hunt prey. Which means cutesie-wootsie Tiddles has no qualms about being destructive of your equally anthropomorphised fake view of Nature.
I don't think animals have 'feelings'. Food animals are exactly that, and if humans had never domesticated so much as a budgie, they'll still be in the wild as prey species.
Nice try at "ooh you cruel monster who likes punting puppies and torturing beasts", but my withers remain unwrung because I'm not someone who dresses up their selfishness in demanding emotional support from a creature as 'I love the little animals so much, so much!!!!' Oh, and by the bye, I've seen the inside of a slaughterhouse so nice try at grossing me out but you need to try harder, Cholmondley.
But never mind, you can snuggle up with your fur baby and be a cat dad/dog mom and get all the primate grooming needs met by making a lesser animal totally dependent on you for food, shelter, health, and replacing its natural social structure for your needs and wants.
Damn it, I'm even going to quote Lewis on the kind of people who care SO MUCH about their pets:
"But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.
Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs", those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship will be well advised to examine their real reasons."
It would be an interesting test study of how powerful alleged memetic viruses actually are. So far neither side of the Culture War has really demanded anything too onerous from less zealous allies of theirs.
Thanks. Regardless, the recent history of American policy on open borders, child labor, abortion access, and voting rights shows that in the real world, it's no safe bet that "reaches consensus among the left side of the culture war" entails "mission inevitably to be accomplished soonish".
I don't know why Yarvisians are so committed to saying this against the evidence (obviously US immigration policy of the foreseeable future is not going to be as economic-migrant-friendly as it was in the 19th century) and I'm not especially interested in finding out. Still, I have to assume it's either a mollifying psy-op or else an attempt to lay the rhetorical groundwork for declaring a state of exception and violently eliminating "threats" that would supposedly be unstoppable otherwise.If it were meant in good faith, surely longtermist neoreactionaries' top priority would be to covertly influence which issues actually reach consensus among vanguard leftist movements!
I'm not going to disavow the label, but I don't think that quite describes me. Yarvin thinks there's a way to stop it (instituting a monarchy). I don't.
An ideology promulgated by the worst elements of the southern white resistance to granting civil rights to Blacks. Names like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.
No-one believes in states' rights in the absolute sense. States gave up SOME rights when they signed the constitution, the question is which? This is an easy call that they did give up.
Did you read my previous comment? Like I said, nobody is saying that Congress doesn't have the legal right to pass this law, just that it might conflict with some principles of how government ought to be conducted.
But what principle exactly? The federal government preventing individual states putting up trade barriers was a massive reason for the constitution in the first place.
"States' rights" normally means the right for states to regulate their own, internal affairs, not to regulate inter-state affairs. Clearly the latter would devolve into a free-for-all.
I think there are trade barriers which unfairly target out of state products (e.g. tariffs or a higher sales tax on Tennessee whiskey), and there are trade barriers which affect in-state providers and out-of-state providers equally (e.g. banning weed or banning contract killing).
The former obviously need to be avoided lest trade wars happen between the states. And in some cases telling if something unfairly disadvantages another state might not be straightforward. It would also be desirable to force states to allow the transportation of locally banned goods through the state (just seal the container, worked for Lenin).
The very broad way the commerce clause is interpreted instead means that the federal government can regulate anything short of "oral-genital intimacy" (as alluded to in that infamous J. Hoover quote).
A regulation/ban is not a trade barrier, otherwise Colorado could sue Alabama for preventing its weed farmers to sell their most excellent product there (and obtain national legalization with no democratic legitimacy).
Come on, you know it's a specious reasoning and special pleading, you just want to own the libs
A regulation/ban is absolutely a trade barrier. Colorado cannot sue Alabama because the matter is in the purview of Congress. Of course Congress could mandate that Alabama cannot block the sale of marijuana in their state, or alternatively it could forbid all interstate commerce in marijuana. Or something in between (e.g. quality requirements for marijuana in interstate commerce).
There can be no doubt that if Congress enacts a law regulation commerce in an article such as meat, that law will preempt any contrary state laws. It is that simple.
I think it is a good idea for Congress to pass a law on these lines. They need to stop California from spreading its idiocy
If we accept that Congress can force a state to allow the sale of a product that state does not want to sell, then there are all sorts of examples which might impede the spirit of states rights.
Congress could force a state to tolerate the sale of
* Human meat
* Fentanyl
* Abortion-inducing drugs
* Leaded gasoline, or coal-powered cars
* Ghost guns
* Weapons of war
* Child sexual abuse material
* Slave labor and enslaved persons (after abolishing the 13th)
* Services of out-of-state contract killers (thus legalizing murder-for-profit)
This would mean in effect that state rights to regulate pretty much anything would only exist until Congress bothered to create a law.
Would? This has been the accepted law for decades. In fact, the current position is that Congress can even regulate intra-state commerce (Wickard v Filburn).
States are still be able to regulate lots of things. They can regulate the hours people work at the shop. They can (sometimes! - dormant commerce clause) regulate interstate commerce in the absence of congressional command. But they can't overrule the federal government in its core functions.
> They can regulate the hours people work at the shop.
I would assume that if some shops have a phone, and sometimes receive sales-related phone calls from out of state, the commerce clause would give Congress the ability to mandate allowing shops to stay open 24/7.
31. I think this one turned out to be bogus? They simply changed how they measured it. However, coincidentally, https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07367 shows a (much smaller) decline and still looks legit.
> Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen inaccurate data and graphs circulating on social media channels regarding Stack Overflow’s traffic...First, we recategorized our Google Analytics cookie. That was completed in May of 2022, and resulted in Google Analytics reporting on fewer visitors’ site activity. Shortly after, in September of 2022, we upgraded to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which provides additional configurable privacy-enabling settings, such as anonymous modeling of site traffic, which we have enabled.
>
> ...Although we have seen a small decline in traffic, in no way is it what the graph is showing (which some have incorrectly interpreted to be a 50% or 35% decrease). This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022. Stack Overflow remains a trusted resource for millions of developers and technologists.
>
> As anyone who has worked in the digital space knows, a website’s traffic and engagement can be influenced by a variety of factors. Stack Overflow is no different, particularly given the rapid innovation happening as a result of new technologies. In 2020, as tech workers responded to the needs of a remote workforce, we shared information about the “pandemic spikes” we saw in new questions asked around cloud and security. Conversely, in April of this year, we saw an above average traffic decrease (~14%), which we can likely attribute to developers trying GPT-4 after it was released in March. Our traffic also changes based on search algorithms, which have a big influence on how our content is discovered.
I don't know if this is just a difference in wording, but they talk about how traffic has only slightly decreased in the blog post, while the graph shows number of posts submitted.
Given that most of the traffic on StackOverflow is from Google search, new posts dynamics can stay disconnected from traffic for quite a bit of time. Of course StackOverflow stresses the (probably true as stated) part that looks good for talking to advertisers…
The site has been gradually losing traffic for a number of years. I'm sure AI isn't helping, but the inflection points don't really line up with CoPilot/GPT3/ChatGPT/GPT4. They seem to have been penalized by Google—StackOverflow links used to be at the top of Google for nearly any common programming search query, but now they're a few results down.
15. Good genealogical work, but I got there first :) I spend a little more time on the extreme improbability of a backcountry antebellum dirt farmer being Jewish in the first place.
30. No idea how to actively study / science this, but my armchair understanding has always been that 'sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive'. Evolution takes more chances with the less necessary part of the procreation pair. Makes plenty of common sense.
No, not really. It's just that X and Y sperm are, in principle, different enough that it's a good place to point while hand-waving an explanation for male–female differences.
When we talk about a man’s ‘cycle’, we are talking about their testosterone cycle.
Men actually experience a full testosterone cycle every 24 hours, with peaks and troughs in testosterone levels during this time which affect mood, attitudes and behaviour.
Testosterone in men reaches its peak in the early morning, decreasing steadily after 9am throughout the day.
Testosterone levels in men are at their lowest ebb at night, before sleep. Men’s testosterone levels build up overnight, which is why they’re at their highest in the early morning.
Men over the age of 45 have less testosterone than younger men – they also tend to have steadier testosterone levels throughout the day without the morning spike." (So Shakespeare was right there, about "the heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble" as you get older 😁)
"In a groups of 15 healthy male subjects a statistically significant circannual cycle in plasma testosterone levels was assessed by sampling blood at 3-monthly intervals. Peak levels were found in summer and early autumn and a nadir in the winter and early spring."
And maybe even a monthly cycle, comparable to the menstrual cycle?
"The object of the study was to assess the lability of testosterone levels in plasma of normal human males over a long period of time and to search for periodicities in changing levels. Blood samples obtained from 20 healthy young men every second day for 2 months were assayed for total testosterone concentration by radioligand saturation analysis with late-pregnancy plasma. The flucturations of plasma testosterone levels over the total time span were substantial for most individuals; the coefficients of variation ranged from 14 to 42% (median 21%). The presence of periodic functions in these fluctuations was tested by 4 different, relatively independent methods. Close agreement among at least 3 analytic methods was found for 12 out of the 20 subjects. These 12 subjects had cycles of plasma testosterone levels with periods ranging between 8-30 days, with a cluster of periods around 20-22 days. The majority of such cycles were significant at least at the 5% level. The mean amplitudes of these cycles ranged from 9 to 28% of the subjects' mean testosterone levels (average 17%)."
However, this shows that men have a simpler (by comparison) testosterone production cycle, in one nice neat feedback loop. Women have three loops going on, with rising and falling levels of hormones over the month:
So if male biology has more freedom, maybe variability is all part of it? Female expressiveness is dampened down because there's a lot of juggling going on to get the cycles right and you can't afford to have too much variation or else the entire thing collapses.
(Yeah, I'm talking out of my backside, but biology is *complicated*).
I don't see how this would result in greater male variability. Sperm genomes contribute to both male and female offspring. People's genomes contain contributions from sperm whether they produce them or not. If a person develops mutations in the genomes of their sperm, that affects their offspring, not their own physical traits.
Well, you could have genes for mutagenic substances on the y chromosome.
I don't buy that though, because these mutations would (depending on when they occur) be passed on to children. After n generations, a male would have his own average k mutations and k*n/2 mutations from the males in previous generations (assuming 2<<46), while a female would have k*n/2 mutations passed on from male ancestors.
(Also, I think encouraging mutations is generally foolish from the perspective of genes. Even if a mutation-causing allele wins the lottery and causes an actually beneficial mutation, the mutation might well spread while the gene which caused it vanishes because it can't pull of the beneficial mutation miracle every few generations but constantly disadvantages its bearers.)
Once you accept that 46 chromosomes can build something as complicated as a human, is it that surprising that 1 chromosome could contain the information needed to change the variance in many traits?
The process of meiosis can do that itself under the father's direction. ("Epigenetics.") It's not necessary for the Y chromosome of a spermatozoon to modify the rest of that spermatozoon's genome.
All that would really be required is for the father's meiotic process to be capable of distinguishing between Y-bearing sperm (sons) and X-bearing sperm (daughters).
It doesn't have to be a hormone - trait variability is itself under genetic control (i.e., not that the trait itself is heritable - the trait *variability* is heritable) - different inbred strains of fruit flies have different amounts of behavioral variability, and there are genes linked to variability (they might control the "noisiness" of neural development) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1503830112
So it's easy to imagine there could be male-specific genetic pathways that increase phenotypic variability.
Maybe a different way of conceptualizing this would be that the development of some traits may have a switch that can be triggered by a particular hormone? That is, the hormone is just a simple signal, and the real mechanism is in parts of the body that have evolved to respond to that signal. So the signal comes through, "1" (or maybe an analog value), and some parts of the body develop differently. Penis vs. clitoris, testicles vs. ovaries, etc. And maybe some of that "etc." is various parts of the body flipping a switch from "reduce the chance of non-viability" to "increase the chance of hyper-viability". The whole package is turned on by the same signal, which is why all the traits correlate.
Of course, there's that thing you mentioned with the animals that use doubled genes for the male. Were you talking about the ZW system, or something else?
Perhaps you could think of it in terms of error correction mechanisms? Perhaps there's a bunch of systems which are designed to prevent anything from getting too far from the mean, and the severity with which these mechanisms step in is moderated by some hormone.
One way to do it would be to have the hormone trigger a change that trades robustness for peak performance, like causing the legs grow in a way that facilitates faster running at the cost of and increased risk of being broken. The increased variance comes from different animals winning and losing that gamble.
I don't actually know anything about legs, it's a purely illustrative hypothesis.
Lots of genes where have an effect on some trait but only in a testosterone dominant environment?
I.e. there's not a hormone that makes all traits more variable, there are many genes that each use the same hormone to decide how much variation they should contribute to a trait.
“Men seem to have higher variance on a wide variety of traits (both biochemical, like cholesterol level, and socially interesting, like intelligence) compared to females (the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis). One common explanation is that men have only one X chromosome, compared to women’s two, so any unusual genes on the X chromosome get “averaged out” in women but not in men. An obvious question is whether the fraction of genes on the X chromosome is enough to explain the magnitude of greater male variability. Emil Kierkegaard does a simulation and says no, suggesting that evolution must be actively selecting for male variability somehow. I appreciate this work, but also appreciate the work showing greater female variability in animal species where the male has two of the same chromosome, suggesting that it is chromosome-based after all. I don’t know how to square these two findings.”
I don't necessarily think these two findings have to fit together perfectly. It seems quite likely to me that both of these mechanisms are at play, but for different characteristics:
• For many characteristics, like blood parameters or personality traits, the differences in variability between men and women aren't that significant. Take the study linked below, which looks at the distribution of blood cholesterol levels for both genders in the US. While the researchers did find that variability is a bit higher in men, the difference is quite small. This kind of minor difference might be due to the fact that men only have one X chromosome, though there are other possible explanations as well.
• On the other hand, for other characteristics, the disparities are more pronounced. E O W Kirkegaard's post provides an example of a notable difference in variability between men and women in their strategic choices during economic games. Men are much more inclined than women to opt for extreme strategies. There's well-documented evidence that men tend to be more prone to things like risk-taking, aggression,or valuing social hierarchy. In my view, this probably explains the observed pattern well enough, without necessarily involving the X chromosome
Eggs are only expensive relative to sperm. They aren't expensive at all in any absolute sense; what's expensive, and drives the different behavior of women relative to men, is pregnancy.
21 - I'm not sure how much of the decline it explains, but Stack Exchange has been working VERY hard to piss off its user base for the last few years. There's too much historical drama to go over it all, but the highlights are:
- Firing a well-liked moderator over confusing pronoun-usage-policy drama in a way that pissed off basically everyone, even those who agreed with the policy that they were trying to push
- Unilaterally, retroactively changing the license that applies to their user-generated content in a way that pissed off a lot of people and may have been illegal
- Firing a bunch of long-tenure, well-liked employees
- Badmouthing their volunteer moderators to the press
- Recently, an extremely aggressive and unpopular push by the CEO to use site content as AI training fodder and encourage the use of AI tools to generate posts, when most of the user base seems to think AI-generated posts should be banned
This has led to two moderator strikes and a lot of drama. Here are some links:
These events don't neatly line up with the dates of the graph, so I'm not sure if the decline is really due to this stuff or due to AI usage. But the vibe there has definitely gone from "high community buy-in" to "Stack Exchange is our enemy" in the time I've been on there (~6 years).
If you've ever tried asking a question only to have it closed as a duplicate of a locked question all of whose answers are outdated by several years, you'll see "StackExchange is the enemy" is the moderate position.
Stack Exchange was built to be something like a Q&A wiki, but looked too much like a forum to really pull that off; worse, what applies to one problem will often not apply to even a superficially similar problem. Power users hate noobs, normal users hate power-tripping mods, it all sucks.
Apparently, it lived somewhat stably when power users wrote answers to whatever they considered non-dupe and wiped whatever they considered dupes. Now when _both_ sides also hate StackExchange the company, things slowly get shakier…
But this is a big part of the point of StackOverflow and a big part of its quality as a knowledge base: you don't want 100 questions that are slight variations on the same question, with various levels of outdatedness in the answers: ideally there should be one and its answers are updated over time. (Which it supports by very rarely locking questions, and making answers editable by anyone with a moderate amount of reputation)
The bits that make it less convenient for quickly asking questions are the bits that make it a quality knowledge base: these two goals are to some degree, opposed.
---
And, a lot of the new questions are genuinely really bad - people will always cherry-pick the examples where someone asks a really good question, but it gets wrongly closed as a duplicate (there's always an error rate with these sort of decisions), but for every one of those cases there's a thousand cases where it really was a duplicate, or was incoherent, or didn't provide remotely enough information to answer a question.
As someone who moderates a programming discord focused around answering questions: I have a lot of experience in saying that asking technical questions well is *really* hard and frankly most people aren't good at it.
So it's good that things like programming Discords and chatbots exists as alternatives where people can ask (often bad) questions and still get answers... but I don't think that's actually going to replace StackOverflow, either. It's still where you're going to find the best answers in the most searchable form.
Reading StackExchange can be very useful, answering other people's question is fun, but asking questions is a frustrating experience. There is a big difference between the kind of answers I give, and the kind of answers I receive.
Many reactions are essentially people judging me for asking too simple or too complicated question. Damn you, if you know the answer, write it or at least give me a hint; if you don't know, simply close the browser tab! Most popular questions are those that can be easily answered by typing them to Google -- I suppose because that's exactly what people do: type the question to Google, write the answer using their own words, and enjoy the karma. When this doesn't work, they get frustrated, and punish the person who asked the question.
I generally downgraded my credibility prior for all the TFR-obsessed people after they foolishly made a testable prediction (the whole "Ukraine will surrender quickly because their low TFR indicates lack of Vital Spirit or something" meme that was getting passed around in February 2022)
I think "why did this group's TFR drop so quickly?" is an interesting question regardless of whether or not you use TFR to make Vast Conclusions About Society.
Just to add: "Russian almost as low tfr" is inflated by the higher tfr among "non-Russki Rossiyani" (Russki=slavic russian/"Rossiyan": citizen of Russia): Muslims, "abos" - "glad-to-dispense-with" people in Russki-mainstream-view. "For instance, Muslim women generally have more children than other women in Russia (an estimated 2.3 children per woman, compared with a national average of fewer than 1.5 children per woman)". Muslims around 15% of Russia's population now.
This sounds like a different set of TFR-obsessed people than the ones I am aware of, who are thinking that it's a problem that most of the world seems to have trouble maintaining TFR close to 2 (everyone seems to be decreasing, and countries don't seem to slow down their decrease much as they get below 2).
I read the article and didn't see any data directly about Mormons; it was using Utah's fertility rate instead. 3 problems: percentage of Mormons in Utah may be changing (I think a "small" decline, but can't find numbers), drops in fertility of the non-Mormon population (40-50%) may drive this trend, and overall there's a multi-decade downward trend which, as of that data, doesn't jump out at me as very different from the post-Trump 2015-onward trend.
I'd be wary of figures for the fertility rate of 'Mormons' too because I hear the church is weird about apostasy in a way where lots of ex-mormons could still be skewing the numbers
That's true - I know one semi-apostate who is that way in part because they fell through the cracks, and never achieved the family and children that they were taught would come to them if they were faithful.
Because someone somewhere said something silly and wrong involving the words "Total Fertility Rate" you're downgrading credibility of everything TFR-related in the future?
This seems like an excessively large epistemic splash radius.
In this case, I think the Rhodesian irrendentist guy/gal/cat is failing to check the very first anybody should check when talking about some change in group X, that is "who is the group X comprised of now? How is the label assigned now?".
He(?) would quickly discovered that LDS has wildly relaxed the requirements to stay part of the Church. The fact that now a behaviorally average Christian can call themselves a Mormon might be a more parsimonious explanation than the latest NRx Twitter meme, I'd guess
I don't believe #36 or #37 at all. #36 is so ludicrously on the nose that it reads as a libertarian fever dream. #37 I can barely parse, but seems like one of those triple-bankshot explanations. (Revulsion to Trump infected Mormons with progressive urban values? Right.)
Also probably worth mentioning that even if #36 is absolutely true and you can find dystopian Victorian literature that perfectly describes life in modern Western society, this would be merely amusing and nothing more.
I agree #36 goes strong. The writer provides a link to one example, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14540/14540-h/14540-h.htm , and using CTRL+F I'm able to find the part about police fines, so I don't think it's completely made up. I don't want to read the whole book in order to find out if he's exaggerating it or giving it a biased summary.
Having skimmed through the book looking for the word "tax" it seems that the British are suffering over extreme and burdensome taxes under the Germans, but it's not to fund big government it's to extract wealth from Britain and to make the British second class citizens (German citizens are not taxed the same as native British).
1918 was well into WW1 and after the invasion novels had been written (they were speculating about a future war with the authoritarian eternal Hun, When William Came was 1913)
Notably many figures from the old right and old wig factions of the Anglosphere considered WW1 policies on a par with totalitarianism... and so did the totalitarians... Mussolini would later say he designed fascism based off of Woodrow Wilson's "War Socialism"
Interestingly, the full book fits into Claude2's context window. Here's what it had to say about the reading:
Q: One reader commented about this book:
[quote]
Is this an accurate reading? Does the book seem to describe policies similar to modern ones as a horrifying dystopia?
Claude2: I don't think it's fully accurate to characterize the book as portraying modern policies as a "horrifying dystopia." While there are some similarities between the German occupation policies described in When William Came and current government policies, there are also important differences:
• The level of authoritarian control and loss of civil liberties under the German occupation in the book seems far more extreme and all-encompassing than in modern Western democracies.
• Many of the specific policies described, like onerous income taxes, property seizures, and gun control, are more heavy-handed than analogous current laws.
• The book is based on an alternate history premise of a foreign military conquest and occupation of Britain. This inherently creates a dystopian atmosphere very different from normal civilian governance.
• The narrator and British characters in the book view the German policies as oppressive impositions on a defeated nation, which does not closely parallel how most citizens view their own government's policies.
So while one can draw some parallels, I think it overstates the case to say the book presents modern conditions as equivalent to a horrifying dystopia. The book is better understood as a speculative fictional exploration of the themes of occupation, resistance, and collaboration unique to its alternate history setting. While it may have some resonance for debates over the proper scope of government, it is not an overt commentary on specific modern policies or conditions.
Q: Can you outline some of the ways the policies described in the book differ from analogous current laws?
Claude2: Here are some key differences between the policies described in When William Came and current laws in Western democracies:
• Taxation - The German occupiers impose extremely high direct taxes on income, described as reaching double-digit percentages. Modern income tax rates are much lower. The highest bracket in the US and UK tops out below 40%.
• Property - The Germans seize property and restrict people's ability to modify their own homes. Private property rights are much more protected today. Eminent domain requires compensation and due process.
• Gun Control - The British are prohibited from owning various firearms and subject to registration requirements. Most Western countries allow civilian gun ownership, though with restrictions like licensing.
• Fines - Germans arbitrarily fine people on the spot for minor violations. Due process rights prevent this today. Fines typically go through the court system.
• Movement - The British need permission from German police to travel outside their hometown. Free movement within and outside one's country is a core civil liberty.
• Media - The British newspapers are heavily censored during the German occupation in the book. Modern democracies have free press protections.
• Rule of Law - The occupiers are acting by decree, without constraints like legislative oversight and judicial review that bind modern governments.
So in summary, the German policies appear to be much more arbitrary, restrictive, and unchecked compared to the rule-based systems of today, even if similar policy goals exist in some areas. The book presents a more absolutist, authoritarian vision than current laws.
Not completely made up, but this supports my point about the similarities being merely amusing. I'm sure someone somewhere feels that parking citations are "unthinkable horror and tyranny that could only be enacted upon a conquered people —slavery at the societal level!" But you can contest parking tickets.
No way to get out of paying double digit percentages of your income as tax though.
I recently read about Sparta and the horrible oppression of the Helots. One of the horrible ways in which the Helots were oppressed is that the Spartans would take away a full fifty percent of whatever they produced. (Whereas I, being a citizen of a modern free nation, am only taxed at 47% so I'm nothing like a helot, whew.)
Being taxed at 50% when you're a subsistence farmer is very different from being taxed at 50% when you're a millionaire, or even an office worker. There is no way that anybody in a free modern nation who is on the edge of starvation is taxed at 50%.
Yes, but as income tends to infinity, your total wealth also tends to infinity. No amount of tax burden is particularly onerous if it leaves you with infinite wealth.
Actually, in many countries, like the UK, total wedge between what is spent on your labour and what you consume is much wider, because of national insurance, VAT, and duties.
A quick search for the word "gun" found the registration bit: a decree comes down from the Kaiser that since the British are such a peaceful and pacifistic people they would be exempt from compulsary military service, and since they won't have any need to fight in the military they won't need any guns so "therefore all rifle clubs, drill associations, cadet corps and similar bodies were henceforth declared to be illegal. No weapons other than guns for specified sporting purposes, duly declared and registered and open to inspection when required, could be owned, purchased, or carried. The science of arms was to be eliminated altogether from the life of a people who had shown such marked repugnance to its study and practice."
So the book does say guns are outlawed unless registered for sport purposes, though the reasoning behind it in the book is clearly to keep Britian a subject nation with no opportunity to rebel against their conquerors.
That is extremely close to the gun control situation in Canada (it doesn't have to be for sporting purposes, but the restrictions are such that home defence with them is pretty iffy).
Thinking about this a bit further, #36 pushes me in very much the opposite direction as the author. It underscores the extent to which our notions of dystopia reflect our own present-day fears and obsessions and the extent to which we are therefore probably wrong about how bad these things actually are.
For example, it would be extremely easy to write a dystopian fable in which privacy no longer exists: we are monitored online by the giant corporations that provide us with the mindless distraction we crave; and offline by a panopticon of our own creation, with every public space monitored ceaselessly by cameras and other sensors. We rarely go outside anyway, because virtual realms, spun by sentient AIs that are more intelligent and creative than we could ever hope to be, have proved so much more alluring than the "real" world. We barely even have sex anymore, at least with each other. When (if) we want children, we order them from genetic labs. "Delivery" means something very different than it used to.
So here's the thing: a lot of this could actually come to pass in the next thousand years, maybe all of it. And...it could be fine. People could still live lives of meaning, find joy and connection, and be more or less as satisfied, happy, and healthy as they have ever been. Perhaps more so. They'll have wealth, leisure, freedom from resource competition. Someone a thousand years hence could wave around a copy of my hackneyed dystopian fable and scream, "Don't you all see what you've become?" And most people would -- correctly -- just shrug and avert their eyes from the crank.
To the degree that 36 is an accurate description of the book, I'd guess it's because the book was trying to argue against policies that were being pushed in the UK at the time by linking them with the kaiser.
Problem with #37 is that it's using Utah's TFR as a proxy for Mormon TFR. The Mormon percentage of Utah's population has been going down over time, so there's a much simpler explanation of the data. It's possible Mormon TFR is going down as well over time, but it's unwise to get into guessing games over causes when you're using surrogate endpoints to measure the effect to begin with.
Right. The Mormon TFR has been dropping over time but is still well above the TFR of non-Mormon Americans. Meanwhile the Mormon pct of all Utah residents has been dropping steadily, to the point that the state's most-populous county (having two-fifths of the total state population) is no longer majority Mormon.
Yeah, I tried a bit of searching, and couldn't find good numbers. But I did see that the most-populous county is an outlier; Mormon percentage in many other counties is going up. Overall, they said the statewide trend was slightly downward, but I didn't get any numbers. :-/
36 is highly suspect. Income tax isn’t a kaiserite idea, or a German one. Britain had it since 1799. Britain also restricted some firearms by 1900 (mostly for celts and Catholics) and in the next 20 years after 1900 enacts many more laws. No invasion necessary. These two things I kind of knew.
Just googling arms control in Germany (which I didn’t know) and wiki informs me that “[prior to 1914] … possession of guns and weapons was not generally restricted, but regulations about carrying arms in public came into use.”
After the war “The general disarming of citizens and a generic gun law was imposed by the Allies after World War I. “
I am actually doubting these books existed. They very much seem like something a 20/21st C American libertarian would detest, but not a conservative voting church going Anglican in Victorian Britain. A British conservative of the era would be quite happy with restrictions on what can be done to property. Very few members of that class wanted millionaires buying the ancient buildings of Britain and turning them into some modern monstrosity.
( It’s socialists who, later on, tended to support the knocking down of old Victorian or Georgian buildings, as part of heavy handed slum clearances, it was conservatives who opposed them.)
And regulation was common in Britain for centuries.
the W link says the subtitle was "A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns," which is pretty funny since the house of "Windsor" had not even yet been renamed from the very Germanic "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha". I wonder if that part was satirical?
Saki was a master of satire. I just posted links to a few of his stories, above, and I expect there's many more that would better illustrate the point. When I first read the description of the book, I assumed it was serious, but the instant I learned it was by Saki, I switched to suspecting that he was satirizing anti-German panic. Although he was probably skewering everything within sight, regardless of side.
(Of course, he did die in WWI, after having turned down a commission, and instead having enlisted as a trooper even though he was 43 and overage. So there's that.)
I was already familiar with Saki's style from his short stories; but when I read When William Came, it came over as very earnest and serious - and not trying to be funny at all. I think it's straight, not satire.
PS the short stories are wonderful, but When William Came is at best a historical oddity.
If it's by Saki, then it may well be a multi-layered satire. Saki may have been conservative in a bunch of ways, but he was also a British homosexual in the Oscar Wilde era, so he had that thing where he observed society from the outside while simultaneously moving through it undetected.
Or it might have been serious. He turned down a commission in WWI, and instead enlisted as a trooper even though he was too old. And he died there, killed by a sniper. Apparently his last words were, "Put that bloody cigarette out!".
Jaywalking specifically barely exists as a crime in the crime in the UK.
"Jaywalking laws vary widely by jurisdiction. In many countries such as the United Kingdom, the word is not generally used and, with the exception of certain high-speed roads, there are no laws limiting how pedestrians can use public highways."
...or anywhere else but in the US, that I am aware of. I still remember when I was scolded by passers-by in Berkeley, back in first time visit in the1990s, for crossing a regular city street outside designated places, and not in a straight line. My immediate reaction: " and people here say we in Europe live in an overregulated society!"
Well, I'd argue that experience was anomalous, assuming you weren't forcing traffic to brake. I'm American and have jaywalked many, many times, and the only time I recall any sort of protest or acknowledgement was doing it in sight of a police car, who did that thing where he turns his siren on for half a second just to say "I saw that" as he drove past.
At least when I was there a bit in the late 1970s, California was already notable inside the US for being a state that actually enforced jaywalking laws.
I was not alive in the late 1970s, but my multiple decades of experience living in California suggest that the enforcement rate of any putative jaywalking laws is zero.
It's illegal in Hungary. (A summary offence, not a crime, as I assume anywhere it's illegal.) It's rarely enforced, but it means that if you jaywalk and get hit by a car, it's likely that it will be assumed that it's your fault. Looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems to be illegal in many European and other countries.
The link for 37 rambles on a lot about insidious liberal infiltration of culture, but for some reason doesn't seem to be interested in looking at the demographic trends of mormons/Utah and how they compare to other populations that have had the same phenomenon.
I'd bet heavily on priors that it turns out to neatly track the known correlations around rising cost of raising children, greater education, delayed marriage age, etc.
6- Plot idea (1920s style, in keeping with the time period of the "Murchison Murders"): A writer of mystery novels and his friend are being blackmailed by a ex-convict. The author concocts a "fool-proof" murder method involving the disposal of a body with fire, acid, etc., and makes sure that his blackmailer is known to have heard about it. Shortly afterward, the author's friend disappears, but some of his personal jewelry is found amidst what looks suspiciously like charred animal/human remnants as outlined in the author's "foolproof" body-disposal technique. The blackmailer (an ex-convict, remember, and so already the object of mistrust and suspicion) is arrested, convicted, and hanged. Shortly afterward, the friend reemerges with the excuse (true enough) that he had been on a round-the-world yachting cruise with his new wife after secretly eloping with her.
No, it's not very original. But it's the first thing I thought of when reading that wikipedia article -- how neatly everything was stacked against the man who got hanged in that case!
I mean, if an ex-con were blackmailing me to devise an effective murder method, I'd want him in jail forever or dead. He's known to be capable of criminal behaviour both in the past and present (blackmail is illegal!), and he wants an effective murder method; one would presume that he intends to use it.
The EATS Act is not a power grab. It is only a violation of states rights in the extremely weak sense that it violates Maryland's rights to have to allow people with Virginia driver's licenses to drive in Maryland, or that it violates Texas's rights to have to recognize marriages (even gay ones!) performed in California. It is true that states aren't sovereign nations, being part of the United States means there are some limitations on states rights. One of those limitations is that states don't get to regulate things that happen in other states. California grossly violated that principle. California engaged in an outrageous power grab. California undemocratically used its market power to impose its preferred policy on the rest of the country. That is not how federalism is supposed to work. And Congress is rightly stepping in to correct the problem.
I'll also note that when the republicans talk about banning interstate travel for abortions, liberals are (rightly) happy to rely on this principle that states don't get to regulate activities that occur outside their borders. If you want to toss the principle in the name of animals, you will loose it when it comes to abortions too. And who knows how many other issues? Is this a trade you really want to make?
I think that protectionism is a pretty strong political urge, and many states would have loved to have laws that prevent the importation into their state of certain goods from other states in order to prop up their local producers.
Preventing this kind of thing, which otherwise would have been widespread, was precisely the original intention of the interstate commerce clause.
Can you enlighten us what role the commerce clause played in the civil war?
I think at best, one can make the case that the federal government became stronger over time, and stopping the slaver states from seceding was a milestone on the way, and the overly broad application of the commerce clause followed later.
Nothing significant I can think of. Why do you ask?
I wouldn't single out the tyrannies supposedly authorized by the Commerce clause as a particular power the Federal Government grabbed: with the conquest of the South came many spoils. Vae victis.
Are states allowed to ban other people travelling to them to do things that are legal in that state? (E.g. if a state with legal weed got annoyed at people driving over the border to smoke, could it make that illegal without making weed illegal for residents?)
This tangentially reminds me, did Washington and Oregon ever do anything about the border tax thing? I know there was a time when Washington had sales tax but no property tax, and Oregon had property tax but no sales tax, so people bought homes in Washington on the border and then drove to Oregon to grocery shop, paying tax in neither.
Nope, not as far as I'm aware. That's why the city of Vancouver, WA exists, right across the Columbia River from Oregon, and 15 minutes from downtown Portland.
I think technically you're supposed to report some types of purchase to the WA government, but I think in practice this only matters if you buy a car somewhere else and then immediately register it in WA. This probably also applies to other big-ticket items that the state needs to know about for some reason, like boats and stuff.
Also, although WA has the highest liquor taxes in the nation, this doesn't help much because OR has the second highest. :-/
There's a very large liquor store in northern California (two, actually) that is juuuuuuuust over the border from Oregon. When I was in college in Eugene and had cause to drive to California, a friend of mine asked me to purchase a significant amount of alcohol for him.
States banning abortion in other states = prosecuting someone for what they did in another state.
CA regulating food in CA = prosecuting California stores for what they sell in California.
It seems like in general states have the right to regulate what trade goods enter them. For example, California has legalized marijuana, but Texas hasn't. If it annoys California marijuana brownie producers that they can't sell their marijuana brownies in Texas, should Texas be forced to legalize marijuana? Is there some sense in which Texas is oppressing Californian producers by not buying their brownies?
California isn't regulating other states in any way. Those states can do whatever they want, they just can't sell to California unless they meet California's standards. California has the right to decide who they buy from. If California is such a big market that other states really want to sell to it, they can either satisfy Californians' buying preferences, or get out of that market.
Unless I've seriously misunderstood the California policy, it is NOT CA regulating food in CA. The food that enters CA is literally the same food no matter how humanely or inhumanely it was produced. CA is trying to regulate the treatment of animals that live their entire lives outside of its borders. The product that crosses California's borders is the meat, after it has been slaughtered. That meat doesn't carry some metaphysical essence of how the animal was treated with it.
That's an interesting distinction which I hadn't considered.
I think we can ignore this distinction for the current act under consideration, since IIUC it also denies California the right to eg restrict food based on toxin level, which is a specific quality of the food involved.
But I would argue that even if that wasn't true, and it was entirely about animal cruelty, it's your right to place whatever restrictions you want on your purchases, and wanting cruelty-free meat isn't a less valid preference than wanting fat-free meat or whatever.
I guess an equivalent would be something like "Texas, which has every right to choose who to hire as a schoolteacher, says it will not hire anyone who had an abortion in another state". My guess is this violates a bunch of other federal nondiscrimination laws, but I don't think it's clearly an impingement on the right of other states to have the abortion laws they want.
>>>it's your right to place whatever restrictions you want on your purchases, and wanting cruelty-free meat isn't a less valid preference than wanting fat-free meat or whatever.
Then the State of CA can make that choice for the purchases of the State, not for the individual purchases of it's citizens and businesses.
But didn't California citizens collectively decide on this restriction via ballot proposition? One can ask whether the 62% who voted yes on Prop 12 deserve to be able to impose their will on the remaining 38%, but surely the majority support lends some validity to CA exercising that power.
>surely the majority support lends some validity to CA exercising that power.
Not really. The whole point of having a constitutional republic is that some things aren't subject to popular vote, especially on a state level. Whether the constitution prohibits this particular move is an open question, but if the residents of a state voted overwhelmingly to, say, mandate a certain religion, they would correctly be told to pound sand.
As we have seen with previous propositions, it only counts if the result accords with the Zeitgeist.
Ask Brendan Eich.
I think majority rule *should* apply in votes, but this seems like another case of "we lost by 20% to 80%, we'll try again; we lost by 40% to 60%, we'll try again; we lost by 45% to 55%, we'll try again; we won by 51% to 49%, no more referenda, this is settled and fixed law forever now" by liberal activists.
The poor CA voters who lost their right to buy cheap meat in an in-state ballot proposition will be saved from the tyranny of the majority by the shining white knights of Congress, which will surely only consider the philosophy of the rights of the states and the individuals and not vote based on partisan lines or lobbying from special interests.
Then some years later, factory farming is banned federally, perhaps.
"IIUC it also denies California the right to eg restrict food based on toxin level"
It doesn't reach this at all, because California can bar the sale of meat containing toxins based on the existence of the toxins. EATS only pre-empts laws addressing the "production or manufacture of any agricultural products"
This is correct. There is no testing California could do to determine compliance. The material being imported is the same regardless of the relevant conduct, and it is the conduct in the foreign state that California is regulating.
So if treating animals inhumanely causes them stress, which leaves a chemical imprint on the meat (e.g. the remnants of stress hormones), does that mean California would have the right to ban it?
Would California be banning it to protect the health of humans eating meat in California, or to ensure the humane treatment of nonhuman animals in Iowa? Even if California claimed the latter, given California's behavior so far, I would presume the true reason was the animals, and the stated reason of human health was a sham. If that is the case, I would still say California was engaging in an outrageous power grab that will set a bad precedent for abortion and who knows what else.
> That meat doesn't carry some metaphysical essence of how the animal was treated with it.
Maybe it does. In general, the origin of an object matters a lot! We care about whether our art is real or forged, whether our goods were made by hand or by a robot, and whether they were made with free or forced labor.
It may matter to people, but states are obviously not people. States are a very different sort of thing. States are the way that people in a particular area make decisions about what happens in that area. Even if many of those people, as individual people, care about what happens in a different area, that doesn't make it ok for them to use the institution of the state to try to control what happens in that different area. I don't want Texans imposing their morals in me in New York, so I don't want the state of New York to try to impose any values on Texans. It's a kind of reciprocity. That that holds even if I, as an individual, choose not to buy products that Texas produces in a way that I find morally repugnant.
Except... they're not. Literally, someone in TX can buy the meat of an animal that is tortured daily all they want.
These arguments are ridiculous and being made in bad faith. If you want to torture and eat the output of your torture, you are welcome to do it elsewhere. Same with a myriad of other god awful things that we as a society have decided has no business in ours: murder, rape, torture of humans, bestiality, theft, selling goods intentionally poisoned, selling counterfeit materials, etc.
Please explain EXACTLY how CA law is going to prevent a Texan from eating a torture burger? I do not accept "durr companies cannot have separate production lines"....because that is nonsense and we all know it. They do. They literally already do. I've worked in CPG for years....
You are attacking straw man. I never claimed that CA was trying to regulate what Texans eat. My argument is that CA is trying to regulate how Texans treat animals in Texas. Your own analogy makes my point perfectly. Could California prohibit thefts, rapes, and murders that occur in Texas? Of course not. That is for Texas to do or not do as it chooses. Just as it is not for Texas to decide whether anyone should be prosecuted for shoplifting from a store in San Francisco.
I think an argument can be made that all things being equal, animals in more crowded conditions are more likely to be infected with viruses which may jump to humans.
This risk is statistical, but probably quantifiable. Likewise, I would argue that Texas was allowed to ban the import of blood donations by MSM, citing higher HIV risk, even if there is no physical indication on the individual blood bag.
If Mason Verger successfully lobbied Maryland to legalize him raising pigs on human meat, should other states be allowed to ban the sale of his pork for either ethical or health concerns?
I agree with you when you say that California isn't regulating other states.
However, states do not have the unfettered right to regulate what trade goods enter them. The authority "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes" belongs to Congress. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3. If Congress wants to oblige California to let in any meat meeting Texas's ethical standards, it can.
It seems to me that the appropriate analogy here is car emissions regulations. California was the only state that had its own emissions regulations policy in place before the federal government passed rules intended to supersede the states. California got to keep its right to make new air quality rules for cars, and other states have a choice of accepting the California rules or the federal rules.
Many Thanks! I was reading this whole thread, and had a vague itch in my mind, partially remembering that there was something strange about car emissions in California. Thanks for clarifying what had happened and how!
Serious question: in the antebellum US, did free states ban products made with slave labor? Because that seems like the best analogy to what California's trying.
One of the most successful campaigns for the abolitionist movement was encouraging British people, especially women, not to buy or use goods produced by slaves in the West Indies, particularly sugar. Around 300,000 people boycotted sugar and sales dropped dramatically."
"AROUND 1828, A HANDFUL OF British publications contained a very unusual advertisement. A certain B. Henderson wanted to inform the “Friends of Africa” that her china warehouse in England was selling assorted basins for sugar. These basins came emblazoned with bright golden letters, which read “East India sugar not made by slaves.”
By 1792, some 400,000 Britons were either abstaining from sugar or sourcing it from India. (Many consumers believed that East Indian sugar, while still produced in grim conditions, was preferable to sugar produced under slavery.) James Wright, a Quaker shopkeeper, advertised that he would no longer sell sugar, “till I can procure it through channels less contaminated, more unconnected with slavery, less polluted with human blood.” Pro-slavery politicians soon complained that the popular press was against them."
Regarding the elimination of advanced math classes for equity reasons, I'm short of time right now so I haven't and am not going to research this much for now, but I've heard discussions of this type of proposal on Glenn Loury's podcast in his conversations with John McWhorter. My (again not at all educated) guess would be that they're singling out math because that's where the starkest performance disparities are and/or that's where the disparities seem to fall most along racial lines. (I can at least attest that there seems to be more of a cultural belief in a line between people who are Good At Math and those who are Bad At Math than for most other subjects.)
I agree it's probably where the starkest disparities are, it just doesn't make much sense to me to draw the line at big disparities but say medium disparities and small disparities are okay. Once you've admitted that some people will do better in English class than others and that's okay and you shouldn't think of it as racism, I don't know why you can't extend that principle to math class.
Barring further thought and research on my part, I'm inclined to agree with you, but it's pretty clear to me that that's not the way these people think: they're trying to hack at the system in whatever possible way will most practically and directly make outcome data look more equal between races so as to look like they're bringing about racial justice. Entirely eliminating all higher grades of school clearly isn't practical; shortening the math sequence (potentially) is.
Almost like a metaphor for a paperclip maximizer, except in this case they're trying to minimize measures of racial disparity and a (what should be clearly misaligned) way to do so is to make your measurements less precise.
Because you have to start somewhere so you start at the most obviously unequal subject, and also people have it in their heads that 'stem' jobs are a fountain of wealth that black people are being unfairly excluded from because they can't jump through the math hoop because inequity.
Because it's hardest to get away with selective grade inflation in math.
Suppose you have the following groups of subjects: Math, Art, English, History, and Science, and your explicit goal is equality of outcome. To achieve this, you need to inflate the grades of the worst students, without inflating the grades of the best students to the same degree. The only way to do that is to reduce the influence actual learning has on the final grade.
English and art are both trivial for a teacher to game. Just have a large chunk of the final grade be assignments with no objective criteria, and then grade them according to how you want the final outcome to look.
History and science are a little harder, but not much. You can reduce the gap between the smartest and dumbest students by including art projects and calling them science projects, with 'points for creativity'. My high school literally did this. Draw a mole (either the animal, or the anatomical feature) and write Avogadro's number on the paper somewhere, for a nontrivial amount of your final grade.
With math, especially higher level math, it's harder to cover up the gap between the best and worst students while still pretending that you're teaching.
If you give easier problems, the D students will become B students, and the A students will get perfect scores on everything. If you increase the weight of homework (with the understanding that the poor students will all cheat), then when the test comes, the disparity will become obvious.
Because you can't unfairly advantage your worst students, math classes are where the disparities are most stark. So if you want to lower the GPA gap between your worst students and your best students, you need to reduce the degree to which math factors into GPA, which can be most easily accomplished by reducing the available math classes.
The problem is students in every other school district, private schools, and tutors will all have access to the "advanced math".
You can't roll the clock backwards. Once an education standard has been set for a given age group, your group will either need to embrace it or fall permanently behind the rest of society. All a law like this does is force some people to spend more money then they want to keep up with the rest of society, or some who cannot to fall into the left behind group.
When conservatives scream about communists .... this is the type of outcome they're worried about. Equality through subtraction ... who actually is winning?
3 envisions congestion pricing as applying only to visitors. But good congestion pricing applies to all drivers. It's a price mechanism for roads, not a tax on visitors. (But congestion pricing is probably more politically feasible if it applies to visitors only, sure.)
"Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011) was an English-American author and journalist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential atheists of the 20th and 21st centuries" -Wikipedia
Difficult to know who knew what at a given point in time. Kudos to Scott for bringing current, better info to the forefront.
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Every time I read about a popularized historical inaccuracy I think of being told that Eli Whitney(cotton gin inventor) was black and my grade school teacher showing a 8x11 picture of him to the class. A few years back someone mentioned this discrepancy online so I guess it was widespread. I kinda get it but then I get angry all over again!
To quickly address the other culture war link(s), regarding the London Pride speaker, I see the merits of posting about it because it's certainly disturbing but am kind of bothered that the link to the statement standing by the speaker comes from such a nakedly biased (in the anti-trans direction) journalistic source (going off on a rant about how trans people don't have anything to complain about, deliberately misgendering the controversial speaker, etc.) that I don't know how much to trust any of the facts it's claiming beyond the "punch TERFs in the face" words of the speaker. For instance, the statement issued by the organizers is ambiguous without further context: where the organizers addressing/excusing the violent criminal history, or were they acting unaware of the history and merely addressing the "punch"ing language by saying "we don't condone violence but understand the strong emotions", etc.?
In Scott's defense (possibly), I wouldn't be particularly surprised to find that there aren't any non-anti-trans-biased sources discussing this anywhere to be found, since it looks pretty embarrassing for the London Pride organizers.
It confirms that the mayor and organizers in defending this activist wasn't addressing the criminal history at all, just the "punch a TERF in the face" comments. Which, on the one hand, comes across as possibly a convenient omission on the part of the mayor and organizers, but on the other hand is not as bad as openly defending the idea of giving a microphone to someone with that history.
Well, these are the same people that declare speech is violence if you misgender them or are not up on the latest correct terminology, so sauce, goose, gander, you know?
The UnHerd article is full-steam ahead the other side of the culture war. It makes Scott look less grey and more red. It both misgenders the person and then this brilliant piece of immediately-self-destroying spin:
> incited violence against women. “If you see a terf, punch them in the fucking face,”
Since it might not go without saying, if I were to organise an Anti-TERF rally, I would not condone people using violent language, especially if they have violent pasts short on amends (which I have not checked in this case).
Thought police much? Can’t grown ups perceive bias on their own? I’m pretty sure I would find any disclaimer you offered quite biased itself, because your comment so obviously leans in a particular direction. Or perhaps you think someone like Scott somehow has an infallible way to determine the correct way to perceive an event? Nah, I’m guessing you just don’t like ideas you disagree with and throw tantrums when you encounter them. Out here in the adult world, I don’t need a nanny warning me to stay away from dangerous ideas.
He kidnapped and raped a teenage boy before threatening to knife him. He was out of prison on license (a good behaviour bond), and was recalled to prison after his public threats. Threats made before a cheering crowd at the 'pride' parade.
From that article: "After he was kidnapped [the victim] was subjected to appalling beatings and forced to carry out humiliating sex acts before being trussed up in a cupboard and left to die."
"Neutral" (read: pro-trans) sources are unwilling to cover this kind of thing, so we're stuck with the "anti-trans" sources. You don't like it? Well the only alternative is not talking about the issue at all, and doing so simply rewards bad faith trans activists.
The speaker wrote a book about her time in prison, and the book appears to have been widely covered in the UK LGBT press. I'd be surprised if the organisers *weren't* aware she had a criminal history, but possibly they didn't know the details. On the other hand, you don't usually spend thirty years inside for unpaid parking tickets.
Love that there are splinter events already. "Trans revolutionary" is it? Makes me nostalgic of the distant past i Scandinavia, where any city with more than 20.000 inhabitants had at least 15 revolutionary groups in constant in-fighting with each other: At least two Trotskyist groups hating each other (4th versus 5th International), as well as Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinists, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinst-Maoists, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Hoxaists, Kim il Sung people, ararchists, anarchist-syndicalists, capital-logic (kapitallogik) people, Marxologists (not to be mixed up with Marxists), left-Hegelians ("we are like Marx but not of Marx"), Money-Critics (all countries that use money are capitalist countries, easy to remember), "honest progressives" (which all the others agreed to laugh at - a rare case of agreement); many of them arranging their own events on May 1st, counter-demonstrating each other in the small city center.
(That's why I cannot get too worked up of today's Woke-stuff. It is still insane, but appeal far less to the type of insanity that can sway a majority. Therefore woke-groups are not really dangerous, the way some of these groups could have been.)
I have been able to dodge this and related questions by saying something like: "I am a conceptual pragmatic. As long as we agree on the definition of a concept, I can go with any definition. So please first tell me how you define "man", and I'll give my reply as to if men can get pregnant."
...then again, I live outside the US, and you guys are usually three-four years ahead of us when it comes to what you can [not] say before someone screams. At least as long as you stay away from X.
Hoxaists? Oh man, that takes me back to the days of "the only real true pure Communism is that in Albania, and maybe China, but even China needs to be scrutinised carefully" 😁
There was a saying that "The first thing on the agenda of any new Irish political party is The Split". Sounds like we'd fit right in!
To quote an old friend years later when we reminisced about our youth over several beers: "We were all insane, but it was an intellectually very stimulating form of insanity".
Yeah, well, true, but the point my friend was making (which I believe has some truth to it) is that the hyper-charged intellectualism of these small groups, with a prestige premium to those who were best at noticing hair-splitting conceptual and theortical differences (intellectual insanity), was actually a very good school in academic thinking (for better or worse, I might add). The joint looking-down-upon "honest progressives" (people who thought politics had something to do with intuitively-perceived "morals" - ahahah) in this small-group culture, worked in the same direction.
Compared to that, my hunch is that today's "woke" culture is different - today, there seems to be a prestige premium for those small groups that adopt a holier-than-thou attitude; a signals-arms-race in the opposite direction, to feel rather than to think. It is also insanity, but in the opposite direction - emotional insanity.
Perhaps one can make an argument for the golden mean, for those who prefer sanity 🧝♂️ 🧛♀️
You have a typo here, which I wouldn't normally comment about, except that for a second my brain auto-corrected it to "arachnids", leading to a truly amazing image.
..."arachnids" sure conjures up an interesting visual of a miniature political group! A pity no ideological sub-group with a bit of self-irony has used that label so far...long live arachnidism. I'll keep the typo 🙃
> El Salvador’s murder crackdown claims results of 90% decrease in homicides, 44% decrease in emigration to US, and 90% approval rating for president Nayyib Bukele
The 92% decrease is since the 2015 peak. Bukele has been president since 2019. There was already a 65% decrease from 2015 to 2019 (though the 2019 rate was still near-world-record), and a further 79% from 2019 to 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/ Idk to what extent Bukele's methods were necessary for the further decrease.
There was a gang truce from 2012-14. In 2014-15 the gangs attempted to negotiate with the government and the government, after saying the demands were outrageous, rejected the offer and began the "hard hand" policy. Effectively a crackdown. Bukele then came in and took those policies even further. Bukele was part of the FMLN, the party leading the crackdowns, at the time they happened before he joined a new, more populist political party.
So you got a local high point because of the gang war erupting after a few years of peace (during which there was still significant killing but less). Then the government crackdown led to a lower murder rate. The Bukele's even more extreme crackdown led to it reducing even more dramatically.
And note that Bukele came to power in June 2019, not January 2019. The homicide rate for January to May 2019 was 49, while the homicide rate from June to December 2019 was 27.
So basically there was a 52% decrease in 4 years (103 to 49) before he came to power. And then since he has been in power, there's been a 96% decrease in 4 years (49 to 2.2).
36. This article includes a lot of claims that I'm not capable of evaluating fully but seem fishy:
"The British Military would force lodge soldiers in the homes of suspected revolutionaries and key persons of colonial America so as to observe all their private interactions and cripple their ability to interact and organize. NSA data centers didn’t exist in Colonial America, so instead of putting Amazon Alexa in your living room, they put Corporal Alexander in your guest room."
I have never heard of this and even an article from, uh, "libertarianism.org" doesn't mention it, instead emphasizing that it was meant as a check on the ability of the federal government to maintain a standing army, since the British had used billeting as a temporary expediency for stationing soldiers in the colonies: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/historical-context-third-amendment
"The Koran is not a 'Living Text', etc."
It's not clear to me how attentively this guy has read the (interesting!) blog post he kinks to about how Islam is much more resistant to revisionism than other religions. A lot of Islamic jurisprudence hinges not on the Koran, but on hadiths.
Yassine (the other blogger) remarks: "Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they’re heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they’re fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission."
He mentions the hadiths but doesn't mention that their exact number and contents are subject to dispute: they don't constitute an "an unalterable, unamendable, non-interpretable core text" since they are not even a single undisputed text. (In practice I get the impression there's scholarly consensus, at least within individual jurisprudential schools, about which hadiths are reliable.)
Quartering is a widely accepted fact. I agree the idea that Alexa is the same as being forced to put soldiers in your home is ridiculous. And I agree in general the guy seems a bit sloppy in his anecdotes and comparisons. But the Third Amendment is a thing and this is what it was meant to stop.
Yes? Again, uncontroversially part of the historical record. It was a normal tactic to send these troops into regions that were considered insufficiently loyal and for them to prefer houses of suspect political loyalties. It wasn't so secret surveillance by any means. But it was surveillance as well as punishment.
That it was a "normal tactic" in the 18th century does not prove that this was the intent or effect of quartering British soldiers in the Thirteen Colonies specifically. After the French and Indian War, the British government kept ten thousand troops in America rather than demobilizing them; it was expected that the colonies would contribute to their maintenance. This preceded any civil unrest in the colonies.
The American Revolutionaries cited that as an abuse of power and were quite upset about it. Though you're right it preceded the actual revolution by quite a bit. Meanwhile, no one seriously disputes that the quartering of troops in Massachusetts after unrest was meant to punish and control the colonists. It was combined with other things like the Intolerable Acts to punish the colony. The commanders on the ground also understood what was intended and said as much in letters, diaries, etc. As did the colonists.
General Gauge actually pulled back from some of their orders out of fear that he was going to provoke the very rebellion such harsh measures were meant to suppress. And he was eventually proved right as efforts to disarm the population led to Lexington and Concord. You cite there is 'no evidence' that they were billeted in private homes. This is simply not true and, insofar as it was not common, it was because General Gage gave orders to avoid it whenever possible instead of the more usual practice. And once the actual Revolution started the British routinely confiscated land, burned homes and farms of revolutionaries, or kicked people out and took them as homes for soldiers.
I'll second Erusian in that this what I was taught in my standard American elementary school classes. I don't think the word "surveillance" was used, specifically, but it was definitely something done to suppress revolutionary activity in an area. I think the idea wasn't so much that the soldiers would see what the people were doing and report it, as that they'd see what the people were doing and stop it (one way or another), which meant that the people wouldn't do it in the first place.
Also, the soldiers had a reputation for being rude, and sometimes violent, and sometimes drunk, and sometimes ... in elementary-school-language, they looked a bit too long at the women. It's unclear how much of this actually went on, though - I'm sure we've all got our favorite examples of isolated incidents that get widely publicized and then are assumed to be typical of a group. There's a whole lot of propaganda in the stories back then.
It's disputed whether British troops were ever quartered in private homes (rather than inns and the like) and the Quartering Act of 1765 only contemplates the quartering of soldiers in "UNINHABITED houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings" in the event that barracks and inns were insufficient. Certainly billeting was done at various times and places as a tool of political repression but there is no evidence that British soldiers in the Thirteen Colonies were quartered in occupied private homes for the purposes of surveilling their residents.
It may be disputed by some academics, but it was taught as truth for years in primary schools. **shrug**
Now I'm curious, did you go to American public schools as a child? I hesitate to ask when and where, since you're another pseudonymous commenter, but I'm really curious about how things might have changed over the years. :-)
It was not being taught in primary schools in upstate New York, even adjacent to major Revolutionary War battlefields, in the 1970s. I did independently come to the conclusion that something like that (quartering as surveillance/intimidation) was probably going on, but not because anybody taught me. And to the extent that I looked, I couldn't find much supporting evidence either way.
If the academic consensus points one way and the public school teachers point the other, I'm going to lean towards the academics.
It's true that there remains disagreement regarding the number/content of "authentic" hadiths, but there's not much that can be done resolve these conflicts given the heavy reliance on historical accounts for the chain of transmission in discerning authenticity. That work is necessarily based on a factual inquiry of something that happened a very long time ago, so the evidence on that front has long ago settled into solid sediment by early historians/scholars. In contrast to something like US legal jurisprudence, there's no "new" information to shake things up, and so disagreements about hadiths have generally remained static along geographic and sect boundaries.
6- And after emerging from a Wikipedia dive, I now know that the 70s disco band Boney M, of Rasputin fame, is named after a television show about the character Napoleon "Boney" Bonaparte, who is the detective in the mystery novel that came up with the method used in the Murchinson Murders.
Wow, I am a great fan of the Boney M and they Rasputon song, and was already suprised when I learned that the lyrics were quite closed to the historical description (very lileky imaginary but hey!) of the murder of Rasputin. I love to learn where the name of the band comes from and its relationship to the M murders, thanks for the info!
4. Wow, I assumed that graph had gdp per capita on the Y axis that the Chinese were failing to match us in, but nope, that's just overall GDP level. Damn, score one for democracy and the rule of law.
7. I don't mean this to be insulting or provocative to blue tribe members, but it seems as though there's also been an increase in self-righteousness, intolerance for other points of view, and a sort of quasi-puritanical thinking among young liberals as well during this same time period. I don't know that the there's a causal relationship with the data presented here, but I would bet the correlation is not zero, either.
12. What happened when the pilots had to take a dump? That truck is right beneath them; I hope that tether has a little more length to it.
18. Because certain minority groups basically wouldn't get in at all based on test scores, so you have two different factions arguing against objective measures: not-so-bright or hardworking children of the wealthy, and moderately bright minority students. And then there are useful idiots ( stillbright, but a bit naive, I suppose).
Re: 7 - I don't think this is a natural correlation; lots of religious communities have these same things, but usually much fewer mental health problems.
Anecdata time: based on my observations (and to some extent my experience, too), one way people cope with depression/anxiety, life-is-meaningless thoughts and the like is spending too much time online, and part of that too much time online consists of consuming bad ragebait about how your political outgroup is evil, stupid, and an omnipresent threat to all that you hold dear.
I don't think this is good for anyone prone to depression, for pretty obvious reasons. The idea that your country is locked in an epic struggle for power between the forces of good and evil isn't exactly comforting, especially given that the struggle never actually ends; it just pauses til the next election cycle. Furthermore, people who spend too much time yakking about politics online may begin doing so in real life too, which is a bore, and so good luck making any new friends or even maintaining your existing ones if you fall into this trap (this is where the intolerance and puritannical attitudes I was talking about come in). Lastly, believing that roughly half your fellow citizens are evil and stupid has to be somewhat demoralizing too, given that they're not just gonna like, pack up and move to Canada anytime soon.
There's also the theory that a lot of these people don't actually subscribe to the full belief-set, and so their public stridence is partly to keep people from suspecting their internal heresy. And, the theory goes, this kind of disconnect leads to unhappiness. (As opposed to what would happen if they were true believers whose inner and outer faces were in perfect accord.)
I think its more that progressives have much more of a religious-style political ideology that forms the basis of their identity, whereas conservatives are much more likely to just want to grill.
China has about four times the population of the US. If they can't even get to parity in national GDP, there's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Have you considered that the US is exceptionally rich for a variety of historical and geopolitical reasons that have nothing to do with what one would call "democracy" today? A fairer test would be to compare the US today with the US in the recent past, say, 1960 in terms of "democracy," however you choose to define it, and percentage of world GDP.
I think it's very unlikely that the US is exceptionally rich for reasons that have nothing at all to do with its government, society or institutions. And I think that the existence of democracy is fundamental to the US's government, society and institutions.
Much as I may criticise the institutions of the US, it's a big deal that people can start businesses and be reasonably confident that their wealth won't be entirely confiscated by the government.
It's an interesting idea, although I would question whether 1960 is a sensible comparison point, given that the rest of the industrialized world had committed collective suicide less than two decades prior. If I start the clock one generation after WW2, and look at US GDP as a percentage of world GDP from 1975 to now, it is...basically constant. Europe has dropped by a lot though, which maybe is a strike against the `democracy' theory.
US GDP being constant as a percentage of world GDP is a strike against the rest of the world.
If everyone developed normally, the US's proportion of world GDP would inevitably fall as a mathematical necessity of other countries' increasing populations and increasing wealth as they "catch up" to the economic frontier.
That it hasn't fallen is an indictment of their institutions and political elites.
Europe's trajectory is what you would expect if institutions didn't matter. That it is what it is, while the US's trajectory is what it is, suggests that their institutions are worse than those of the US but no worse than anywhere else's.
(*mildly horrified at self for writing this* ... but the evidence is what it is.)
I think most but not all of the recent divergence between Europe and the US is driven by dollar appreciation. The EU (plus U.K.) had a higher GDP than the US pre 2008.
Except it isn't just the US that's exceptionally rich, but a lot of democracies, including ones in East Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, half points for Hong Kong and Singapore). In fact, the exceptionally rich countries that aren't rich due to oil wealth and slave labor are all at least semi-democracies (though admittedly, not all democracies are rich).
China started from a totally economically backward country less than half a century ago and industrialized rapidly.
Half a century ago, the US were already the wealthiest country in the world.
If you think sound political leadership and economic management over the past 50 years explains why the US still has a higher GDP than China, you simply aren't thinking about this properly. The US is wealthy for mostly legacy factors, and these factors mean that the US can endure hopeless political leadership for many, many decades. If Joe Biden and US congresspeople were in charge of China, do you honestly think China would be doing significantly better than it is today?
That's like the US pointing at the Roman Empire to pretend to ancient pedigree: China as it exists today has little to nothing to do with anything so old.
As I understand it China's leaders and institutions were very well suited to the stage of economic development it was in for the decades leading up to 2010 or so (specifically the stage where the country was lacking in capital and massive state infrastructure projects could significantly improve productivity). Now that that stage is over, they're struggling and so far show little signs of being able to adapt successfully.
I don't know if Joe Biden and the US congress would have done better running China's economy in the past but I expect if they took over today they'd handle things better than Xi Jinping.
"If Joe Biden and US congresspeople were in charge of China, do you honestly think China would be doing significantly better than it is today?"
Not only would it be much better, it would already be a developed country, and the unquestioned economic, diplomatic, and military hegemon of the world. The only thing China's economy needed to grow was for the communists to stop messing with it. When Mao messed with it, it collapsed and tens of millions starved to death. Today, Xi is messing with it, and it's growing a lot more slowly than in the 2000s or early 2010s, with a huge youth unemployment crisis and youth across the country "lying flat". If Biden and the Congressmen take over the country and do absolutely nothing, China will experience an economic miracle.
“Its current lack of economic freedom relative to Western countries like the USA and Germany and other East Asian countries like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea explains why it so much poorer per capita than them”
No it doesn’t. You can only say that when chinas growth drops to the level of developed countries. Not before.
Unclear, but probably the same reason fertility has decreased almost everywhere, only more so: some combination of economic growth, urbanization, decreased infant mortality, improved healthcare more generally, empowerment of women, access to contraception, "family planning" (here, a euphemism for abortion/infanticide), and yes, incentives due to governmental intervention of the kind you're probably thinking of.
The one child policy, which is what one thinks of instantly, paradoxically temporarily arrested the secular decline in total fertility rate in China.
The "barefoot doctor" program, started in the 1960s, started the decline.
Safe water supplies, the germ theory of disease, sanitary disposal of waste, elementary hygiene in midwifery and childcare, vaccination, primary-school education (basic literacy)... all the same things as elsewhere. These are what decreased TFR in China.
Ignore what large-readership popular magazines and books have to say on the subject, particularly when it comes to "othering" talk about infanticide and the one child policy.
Only the last graph has China not overtaking the US - and that slowdown seems pretty suspect. I expect it assumes a major economic embargo on China, and it’s from a different source than the others.
By and large extrapolating from now - or even the last few years - is never that useful. In a given year if China is growing at 6% and the US at 1%, and you naively extrapolate from that you will find China is set to race ahead, however if Chinese growth drops to 4% and the U.S. increases to 2% the compounded effect is hugely different.
Recently the US has been doing fairly well and China not so well. No doubt China will take longer than expected to match the U.S. GDP, I wouldn’t bet against it.
>4. Wow, I assumed that graph had gdp per capita on the Y axis that the Chinese were failing to match us in, but nope, that's just overall GDP level. Damn, score one for democracy and the rule of law.
This is an insane jump. There's no reason whatever to think that China wouldn't be facing it's current economic headwinds if they had allowed more elections.
Japan and South Korea both benefitted enormously for having western style institutions imposed on them. I was using "democracy and the rule of law" as a kind of shortand for this; if you would prefer to replace that with "western style institutions" you wind up in the same place.
In the case of China in particular right now, I'm not sure, but there's definitely pretty strong evidence that without democracy/rule of law/the basic human rights package no country proceeds beyond a certain level of economic development.
Looking at this list and excluding a handful of oil-based despotisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita the top 60 or so countries are all reasonably-functional democracies. Then at the $14K per year mark we suddenly start running into the other ones -- Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea all in a relatively thin band.
#3 seems like it fundamentally misunderstands the point of a congestion tax. You're not trying to discourage visitors, you're trying to discourage cars.
What you're trying to do is irrelevant. What happens to the people in the cars you discouraged? Do they all still visit by another means, or do some of them cancel their visit entirely?
It's not irrelevant, it gives you the metric by which you measure your success. If a congestion tax destroys your tourist population, then it has not worked as desired. I'm sure that even in a very well targeted congestion tax, it rules out some visitors entirely, but any locale that implements one should have a robust enough public transit system that the tax simply encourages people to use that instead.
I've always assumed that the metric by which you measure your success is how easily the Mayor's limousine can get around without being slowed down by unimportant people. What it does to the city's economic activity is beside the point.
You are being unfair by saying it's just about the Mayoral Limousine. It's also about the Mayor's ability to hand out discretionary favours and buy off interest groups. For instance, did you know both taxis and EVs are immune from the London Congestion Charge? Obviously, this is fully justified from the point of view of rational administration, because these vehicles have the ability to fly over traffic jams, and therefore do not cause congestion.
"From 25 December 2025, the cleaner vehicle discount will be discontinued. From this date, all vehicle owners, unless in receipt of another discount or exemption, will need to pay to enter the Congestion Charge zone during charging hours."
Does taxing cars simply encourages people to use public transport, or do demand curves slope down? If public transport is so wonderful that everyone wants to use it, why do people prefer driving through severe congestion? If it doesn't discourage visitors, it would be superfluous!
And visitors != tourists.
The best counterargument to Tyler is Sumner's, which is to grant that congestion charges will reduce visitors, but that people will substitute by moving into the locale. And that's great, but presumes that we have sensible land use policies that will allow significant further densification. In other words, a congestion charge needs to come after planning liberalisation.
Public transit can be good and yet have an overabundance of people whose default preference would be to use a car. The goal is to hit the sweet spot, where you have less congestion without reducing the number of people. In practice you will of course have some number of people who choose not to go at all, but to frame congestion taxes as though that was the goal or the entirety of their effect is simply wrong.
You are attempting to convert an extant tax paid in the currency of wasted time into one paid in cash. Congestion already discourages people from travelling to these places by car, and some fraction of those people also decide to just not go there at all. I imagine that if a real tax on cars reduced congestion, it's not outside the realm of possibility that the total number of visitors actually increases due to better preference division drawing back in people who aren't willing to pay in time, but would gladly pay money.
> it's not outside the realm of possibility that the total number of visitors actually increases due to better preference division drawing back in people who aren't willing to pay in time, but would gladly pay money.
Think this through. If more people are coming, is congestion more or less? So are they paying in time?
More people are coming, and there is less congestion. Math goes like this:
100 people want to travel to City X.
25 would like to travel by subway, 75 would like to travel by car.
When more than 40 travel by car, 25 of those who would travel choose not to, due to wasted time in traffic.
So the city at base has 75 people in it, 25 who travel by subway, and 50 who take a very miserable car commute.
A congestion tax is put into place. Half the current drivers are unwilling to pay to drive, and switch to taking the subway. 10 of those who previously had not gone to the city at all are willing to do it if all they have to do is pay cash.
You now have 50 people traveling by subway, and 35 traveling by car, an increase of 10 people.
This is a completely made up hypothetical, obviously, I put no certainty one way or the other. I present it to point out that cars and total visitors is not necessarily a 1:1 ratio, I would need to see evidence before I believed that congestion taxes directly and predictably reduce the number of people in a city.
Public transport is more effective if other transport is banned, because it doesn't get stuck in traffic. It doesn't have a fixed level of desirability.
Of any city in the US, NYC is the one where visitors are most likely to not use a car. The congestion pricing also only covers a small portion of the city so one could easily drive their car in the other portions, park it there, then walk/subway to the areas behind the pricing scheme. Also prices to get into manhattan via car on bridges and tunnels is already very very high so this extra pricing may not have much of an effect on top of the already high price to drive onto the island.
Can someone find the link for #7? I can't find it on the relevant twitter page but I'm interested in looking into this further.
To be clear, I'm not skeptical of his link or something; it just that spent 20 minutes scrolling through that dudes twitter page and can't find it and I'm sure I'm just not used to using twitter
Re: #6, Upfield's Bony novels are quite good if you can make it past the racism in the first book, which is the casual kind of days gone by, shocking to present-day sensibilities, that at the time was probably seen as slightly forward thinking, a la Huck Finn.
Wikipedia reports that Detective Bony himself has an aboriginal mother (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bony_(character) ). Does the racism that you refer to include Upfield's portrayal of Bony?
Bony is a very clever detective, and the portrayal of him is very positive. However, Bony will, on occasion, give a monologue to other characters about having roots in a more civilized society and a less civilized society, or various descriptions to that effect. Bony does make clear that they have an equal amount of knowledge, just differing in expression.
In many novels there will be some full-blooded aboriginal characters, including in the first, and the way the other characters talk about them is the part that wouldn't fly today, including but not limited to the use of a certain notorious word. Also some stereotypes in the narration about the aboriginal peoples that were not mean-spirited by the standards of the day but are off limits today.
The Bony novels were the inspiration for Tony Hillerman's Navajo detectives series, if you're familiar with those. Hillerman is a lot closer in time and sensibility to modern readers and doesn't include anything that would raise eyebrows with them.
He has Bony speak about the tension between the more civilised, white half of him and the aboriginal side, and it's got what I understand publishers nowadays refer to as "period-specific racism". It's certainly *difficult* for him as a "half-caste" because he's clearly mixed-race so whites underestimate him or don't take him seriously, but fully native Aboriginals don't think he fits in, either, as he's been mostly raised 'white'.
There's views about aboriginal culture that wouldn't fly today, but on the other hand some of the white Australians are shown as being pretty crappy, too.
#18 All these graphs regarding ivy admissions seem to have the same pattern where there is a decline of admission chance by decile until you reach the top 1% and it jumps back up massively. This seems to confirm more than anything the ol' High&Low vs Middle (HLvM) class divide that various right wingers have identified in recent years.
The animal rights branch of effective altruism really rubs me the wrong way. All of the other cause areas are at worst a waste of resources, but farm animal suffering legislation makes other people’s lives WORSE. Cheap meat is a massive boost to marginal utility. A middle class American can afford to eat his or her favorite food every day. If you don’t want to eat meat, fine. It’s a free country. Do what you want. But when you start taking other people’s money and happiness away out of some misguided sense of responsibility, backlash is frankly deserved.
Scott is correct that the EATS Act (or some other legislation on the same topic) doesn’t protect state’s rights, but it does protect individual rights, and it’s good interstate commerce policy.
On animal rights grounds, yes - that's probably true.
Do they concern themselves with chicken wastewater being flushed deep into the ground, that sort of thing? I expect about as much as they oppose dams built to "benefit" cities.
And of course, there is the downward pressure of immigration on labor - I doubt that comes into their heads. They would likely consider it humane, for instance, that the Guatemalan kid and his family were permitted to steal into the country to take that job with the company that processes 2 million birds a week. What happens after entry, I think, rather lies outside their vision. Whether workplace safety standards are more or less likely to be observed, equipment as gloves offered ... And well, when said teen gets tangled in the machinery and dies - well, that doesn't comport very well with their views in any degree - how could it - so doesn't really enter in.
But none of that means the premise - meat is too cheap, unsustainably so - is wrong.
Throwing a live lobster into boiling water or killing baby cows (ie. veal) should be illegal, but killing unborn human babies should be legal. Two presuppositions which are, rationally, difficult to reconcile.
Not if the first two are sentient (by the "has feelings" meaning), and the latter isn't (at however many weeks you wish to allow abortions). Then the rule is just don't hurt sentient beings.
No indeed, that might be a line that could be drawn but I think it might be difficult to find arguments that support the fact that a lobster is more sentient than an unborn baby (for which abortions were - until very recently - alllowed up until birth in the US, no?)
So if I go to an animal shelter, adopt a needy puppy, then drown it in my sink, then repeat the process every day for fifteen years, I haven't done anything morally wrong whatsoever?
When the sentient AIs take over we'll be "the animals" and we'd better hope our suffering doesn't round off to zero in the first approximation because it's minsicule compared to their own greater, more sophisticated capacity to experience the world.
(This is meant as an illustrative analogy, not a claim that the behavior of our future AI overlords should determine how we think about this question.)
Reading the link to the Boris Pasternak wikipedia page brings forward the wry realization that we are supposed to be retroactively upset with the CIA for anything it may have done with respect to getting that book disseminated.
28. Henry Ward Beecher was basically the living embodiment of the Lecherous Pastor stereotype in his personal life. Given how common that particular foible is, I just assume it's a side-effect of selecting for charismatic, personable religious leaders - Protestant congregations don't have the Catholic or Mormon thing of being able to have boring clergy because they're embedded in a much vaster organization.
Amusingly enough, it might have deep roots. I remember Barbara Tuchman's "Distant Mirror" about the 14th century said that one of the most common complaints about Friars - the wandering preachers of medieval Catholicism - is that they were lecherous.
I wonder if Mormon's rotating clergy also has something to do with it. Church leaders will choose a member in good standing to act as the ward's bishop (read: priest) for a length of time and then they go back to being regular members. So not only do they tend to be boring, they also don't necessarily have power as long as in a more mainstream church. (it is longer than for usual callings, which are two to five years, but there's also a lot more bureaucracy with calling a bishop)
The founders of many (most?) religions, seem to have ended up wealthy, powerful and surrounded by women who were theirs for the taking (Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Islam...)
37. It's been suggested that the move to more female missionaries had something to do with it:
"Perlich said she doesn't know exactly why Utah's birthrate is declining faster than the national figure, but it may have something to do with the October 2012 decision by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to reduce the minimum age for female missionaries to 19 from 21.
That led to a historic influx of women serving missions and may be prompting them to wait longer to get married and start families, Perlich said. Women serve 18 months on proselyting missions around the world."
I wouldn't be surprised if female missionaries are vastly more successful than male missionaries in spreading the word, so maybe this will be counteracted by a future vast influx of Mormon converts.
Anecdotally (I was an LDS missionary a few years back) I don’t think this is the case. The big determinant is the area the missionary is in—as a paradigm, white people basically don’t convert in any appreciable numbers in 2023. A male missionary in Brazil will see far bigger conversion numbers than a female missionary in Europe (who, if she has any converts at all, will almost definitely see them only among refugees and first-gen immigrants).
The higher numbers of female missionaries is definitely a contributor to any lower birth rate, but I would not expect a massive convert wave from it as you describe.
> 4: H/T @StefanFSchubert: “Forecasts used to say China would quickly overtake US GDP, but that's no longer the case”:
This is real "line goes up" territory. As I pointed out a few years back (I think 2017): If China's current growth trajectory continued then China would be 50% of the world's economy by about 2030. I find this on its face less likely than China experiencing the kind of secular percentage slowing that happens as most economies become more advanced.
Remember, as an economy grows the raw amount of output increase needed to get an 8% growth rate increases. For example, if an economy has $10,000 GDP per capita then to get a 10% rate it needs $1,000 the first year, $1,100 the next year, and so on to maintain the 10%. If it simply maintains the $1,000 per year then the percent increase will slowly decrease. (This is likewise why, despite having a much lower growth rate, the average American gains more wealth each year than the average Chinese person.)
This is without getting into the Middle Income Trap or the structure of the Chinese economy and how much it looks like the other advanced parts of East Asia. Just thirty years behind and much bigger. And the way the rest of East Asia got out of that trap was compromising with their trade partners, opening themselves up to foreign services (especially in finance), and political reform. None of which seems like an option for China.
Let's take for granted that China's economy will face long-term slow GDP growth this century. With that big assumption, we can focus on how likely the current slow period is to be the start of that long slow period.
In 1994, the Japanese share of world GDP peaked at around 18%. Japan had around 2% of world population at the time.
That year, Japanese GDP per capita was about 8 times higher than world GDP per capita.
In 2022, Chinese GDP was around 18% of world GDP. Coincidentally, China's share of world population was also around 18%. Thus Chinese GDP per capita was about the same as world GDP per capita. (Right?)
Those per capita figures were around 37-38% of 2022 Japanese GDP per capita.
Naively, I would forecast that China is more likely to have a lot of growth left than it is to have already entered the long-term slow growth phase. I have minimal background in macroeconomics; can someone tell me why these proportions might be nearly irrelevant? (Also, does it make sense to use current US$ for 29-year-old Japanese figures?)
It is not a "big assumption" that as China gets richer its growth will slow like every other economy has slowed as it's gotten richer. The big assumption would be China is some magical country whose growth will not slow unlike everyone else.
And you're only looking at the success cases and ignores things like Mexico. If you look at China's own numbers the issue is quite clear. China has a large but minority population that's already at first world levels and a gigantic population that's still, effectively, peasants or otherwise rural and involved in informal economies. The economy has significant structures to keep it this way. For example, you inherit a residential status that determines the quality of school you go to. For your analysis to be valid it has to find a way to close that gap. Mexico failed to do it, despite a much more open system, and its growth stalled out.
Maybe China will solve all its problems. That really is entirely possible. But it has far more of them than Japan did and less capacity to deal with them. If they do then you can expect China to experience a new spurt of growth fueled by these rural people being brought closer to average. If they don't then China's going to have increasing domestic problems (which, at least at the moment, appears to be what's happening.)
China in fact uses that rural population to maintain growth. Relax the restrictions on settlement every generation and they can move to the city as factory workers. In the next generation, their offspring become engineers or technocrats.
This is not actually happening. Instead you have generational cycles based on hukou due to educational disparities and work authorizations. Some exceptional people rise out of the provinces and get hukou changes of course. But the movement into cities dramatically slowed about a generation ago.
If China's growth slows as it gets richer in the same way that Japan's growth slowed as it got richer, China ends up with by far the largest GDP of any country. For China to remain lower GDP than the US, its growth needs to slow at a significantly lower level of per-capita GDP than Japan. Of course, it's entirely possible that will happen.
Yes, my point was that whether China ends up being Japan or Mexico its growth rate will slow. The idea it won't slow is completely ridiculous. The idea it might "only" slow to the point they get Japanese GDP per capita is defensible. Personally, I think it depends on if the Chinese government can overcome pretty significant challenges.
I don't think anyone was claiming that China's GDP growth rate won't slow. My point is that unless it slows quickly and immediately, it will still end up with a larger economy than the US by dint of its population.
> I don't think anyone was claiming that China's GDP growth rate won't slow.
"I find this on its face less likely than China experiencing the kind of secular percentage slowing that happens as most economies become more advanced."
"Let's take for granted that China's economy will face long-term slow GDP growth this century. With that big assumption"
Someone was saying that, yes.
> My point is that unless it slows quickly and immediately, it will still end up with a larger economy than the US by dint of its population.
If you project out current statistics, including second derivative rate of rate of change and working age population, then you get the US and Chinese economies reaching parity sometime between 2040 and 2070 depending on how optimistic you are about China. And then China falling behind starting in the 2060s to 2080s.
Of course, there's no reason to believe current trends will continue in such a deterministic way. The US could fail or China could succeed beyond what is currently happening.
> 18: Previous work showed that after adjusting for selection bias, “what college you go to doesn’t matter” for average earnings. I was always skeptical of this - are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason? Now Chetty, Deming, and Friedman find that: [...] One of the authors, David Deming, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth. Like everyone else, this study also finds that rich people are using “holistic admissions” and the de-emphasis of standardized testing to gain an advantage: [...] H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.” Cf. Erik Hoel.
The idea college prestige didn't matter was always a lie. If they did not know it was a lie it was because they had motivation to avoid the obvious truth of the matter. More likely, they were just avoiding an unpleasant truth because they benefitted from the hypocrisy.
The "smart" argument for why it doesn't disadvantage people who don't get in is that it's an advantage but only for kids from backgrounds where they wouldn't have those advantages otherwise. In which case they've accidentally admitted that there are advantages that you won't get at other schools. In which case prestige does matter and they are effectively transferring those benefits. It is a simple logical contradiction to say that Ivy admission helps overcome disadvantage but also it's not an advantage. The argument requires literal doublethink.
There's no evidence it helps anyone who isn't already at least clsoe to being intellectually elite. It's really just a matter of which elite students get the benefit, which is to say that once again the idea that sending lower-SES to "good" colleges isn't a way of helping them or decreasing inequality.
I don't either. But I also don't see the relevance. Are you assuming that people who go to Harvard are going to end up randomly distributed on the income scale? Because two Harvard grads who marry each other and make $120k a year are top 5%.
> 19: From @data_depot: “In 2002, 48% of Americans said "the govt is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." 52% said "it is run for the benefit of all people." In 2020, 84% said the govt is run by a few big interests. Only 16% said it is run for the benefit of all people.” [...] Source seems to be here, which reveals 2002 was a local peak in trust in government; maybe because of post-9/11 unity, but even 2000 was 34%, much better than our current 16%. My first instinct is to attribute this to a rise in vulgar Marxism, in the sense of everyone (even conservatives) now being trained to think in terms of an elite class screwing over everyone else (cf my review of Manufacturing Consent). But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know.
The trend line needs to go back further to understand what happened. American trust in government was roughly 70-80% for most of the post-war era until Johnson. Then there was a sharp decline to about 50% that continued into the Nixon era (with Watergate causing another dramatic drop).
It then settled into a pattern where it hovered around 20-30% except when a conservative was in power where it could go up to 40% since hardcore conservatives would approve of the government in general when their side was in charge. There was a brief burst of unity and good sentiment which was ruined first by Clinton's scandals then the War on Terror becoming unpopular. And since then we've hovered around 20% with both liberals and conservatives distrusting the government even when their side is in charge.
It's quite clear to see what causes the line to go up or down. When the national leadership is upright in its conduct and doesn't lie to the public it goes up. When they lie, or are perceived to have lied, or they act corrupt or have scandals it goes down. You can very often see specific dips tracking specific scandals even from the already low level. (Interestingly, weaponization and lying seem to matter far more than failures or even material issues like recessions. Probably could do a time series and work that out if I was a researcher.)
Lol, no. Gingrich has a PhD in European history and he understood that in Europe governments come and go and so he believed if he could remove Clinton and Gore he could install himself as president via impeachment and the public would eventually accept it as legitimate. The biggest force that people didn’t quite understand was the fracturing of the media around the turn of the century and unfortunately George W Bush was the only individual to really benefit from the dynamic. Bush was wholly unfit to be president and most of the issues we have in America are the result of Bush having an over 80% approval after 9/11 and mismanaging the federal government and abusing his power.
I don't think there's any evidence for this. I think a more realistic interpretation is that the Republicans thought that removing Clinton would result in a lame-duck Gore presidency that would then be easier to beat in the next election.
I’ve found articles from that time that say Gingrich believed the Starr Report would be so damaging that both Clinton and Gore would have to be removed.
The Senate isn't going to vote to convict overnight. So if it looks at all likely that they're going to do that eventually, then Gore resigns, Clinton appoints a new and untainted VP, and then New Democratic Guy gets to be POTUS if Clinton is impeached and convicted.
The GOP delegation in the Senate could pull a Merrick Garland and just say "ha ha you don't have the votes to make us confirm your new guy, so we'll just leave the office vacant until Newt takes over", but that would be so obviously a naked power grab with only a fig leaf of constitutional norms and respect for the integrity of the office that the Democratic Senate delegation would counter with "you don't have the votes to convict Clinton without our help, so we're going to nakedly grab on to the power we already have by keeping our old guy in office even if he is a crook"
I don't see any path to a Gingrich presidency in 1998, and I don't think Gingrich was foolish enough to imagine he could see such a path.
Andrew Johnson was impeached and almost removed because there was no VP and a Republican would have become president upon removal and governed very differently.
Clinton would have been removed first and then Gore becomes president and Gingrich and House Republicans wouldn’t have confirmed anyone Gore nominated. Gingrich then gets Gore removed and Gingrich becomes president and controls the House.
I don't think reordering matters here: there would still be fanning the outrage over blocking VP nominations, and only 34 of 45 Democratic party senators would need to call it an absolute deal-breaker.
The Gingrich who prevents House from confirming a bland democratic VP appointment, will not be able to get any president removed. Naked power grab results in equal and opposite power grab, and there are enough Democrats in the Senate to keep Gore and/or Clinton in office until there's a democratic VP in place.
Interesting theory. But the trust in government statistic starts to decline under Johnson when Gingrich was a teenager. I don't deny that the whole Star Report and Clinton's scandals had a negative effect on trust in government. But most of the decline happened under Johnson and the rest under Nixon.
Vietnam and Watergate…but keep in mind Ford was a president nobody but Congress voted for. UK had a prime minister for a few weeks last year…that’s what Gingrich studied for his PhD and Gingrich is known as a master parliamentarian. Finally our current media environment excels at driving up negatives of opposing candidates and so we have Democrats watching endless negative news about candidates they will never vote for and vice versa…it’s very strange.
>It's quite clear to see what causes the line to go up or down. When the national leadership is upright in its conduct and doesn't lie to the public it goes up. When they lie...
I don't think this is true - Obama's conduct was pretty upright, and the line goes down and then stabilises under him.
>... or are perceived to have lied, or they act corrupt or have scandals it goes down.
This, I think is the real explanation, combined with a polarised media environment than means that nowadays it is more or less guaranteed that 50% of the electorate will perceive the president to have lied all the time, along with being maximally terrible in all other ways, without guaranteeing matching support from the other 50%. Nowadays 50% is a /ceiling/ for a presidential approval rating, and it's easy to drop below that.
>Obama's conduct was pretty upright, and the line goes down and then stabilises under him.
You will have a more accurate intuition here if you don't look at your own side. If you're a partisan you're likely to be unaware, or already have pre-cached arguments, about why what your side did wasn't really a scandal and it was just the other side making up controversy. Obama has two big drops: 2011 when you had Fast and Furious and Solyndra as well as some corruption allegations and then 2013 during the IRS targeting scandal as well as large power grabs contradicting statements he'd made a few years earlier. (For example: You might like the dreamers but Obama had just a few years earlier said he didn't have the authority to do that. And then suddenly reversed once he had a Republican Congress. Such things tend to decrease confidence.)
> Nowadays 50% is a /ceiling/ for a presidential approval rating, and it's easy to drop below that.
We're not talking about presidential approval ratings. We're talking about trust in government. I agree that partisanship (which I don't think is fully media driven) means there's a much lower ceiling on what individual ratings can be. But trust in government numbers haven't been above 26% since the Bush years.
>You will have a more accurate intuition here if you don't look at your own side. If you're a partisan you're likely to be unaware, or already have pre-cached arguments, about why what your side did wasn't really a scandal and it was just the other side making up controversy.
This feels like irrefutable Bulverism, so I won't try to refute it, I'll just reiterate that I agree with you that trust in government has a lot to do with perceptions of corruption, but continue to state that I don't think perceptions of corruption are all that strongly correlated with actual levels of corruption.
It's not irrefutable bulverism. It's neither irrefutable or bulverism. You could trivially refute it by pointing out that instead of scandals that actually occurred it correlated with the intensity of Fox News coverage, for example. And in order for it to be Bulverism I would have to say that your argument proceeds from your identity ("of course you think that, you're a liberal.") Which I'm not.
I'm saying that if you are on one side you are likely to have cognitive biases that excuse your own side and condemn the other. You can refute that too, if you want. But I think it's pretty common and obvious that that's how it is for most people.
If you don't want to have this conversation that's fine. But be honest enough to admit you just don't want to engage and not pretend that I'm wrongfooting you or pretend I'm not giving you every chance to make your case.
> 24: The Republicans are considering weakening PEPFAR, a program which saved millions of lives by providing cheap anti-AIDS medication to Africa, based on concerns that some of the money might be going to abortions (this doesn’t seem to be happening in a meaningful way).
PEPFAR doesn't fund abortions but does fund organizations that fund abortions. The program was originally started by Bush and, like Bush, was fairly conservative. It promoted abstinence only education and would not touch most people who did abortions. Then Obama came into office and brought PEPFAR in line with his own policy preferences such that, by the 2013 renewal, it was teaching more liberal safe sex standards. As well as partnering with organizations that provide abortions. This included exempting PEPFAR from the Mexico City rule which could have otherwise blocked some cooperation with organizations that provide abortions.
Trump tried to basically cancel the entire program but after he lost that fight kind of shrugged and ignored it. Now Republicans have dug in their heels and want it reformed but, since the Democrats won't return the program to its earlier conservative bent, are willing to just let it die.
Personally, I think that funding contraception and all that is a worthwhile goal and that if you want to fight AIDS you have to go where AIDS is. But I'd appreciate if everyone would stop lying about this. I also understand the political dynamics that encourage lying. But I don't have to like being lied to.
That just shows Trump’s transformation into a Freedom Caucus Republican…in 2015 Trump viewed Planned Parenthood positively because the clinics are generally in African American neighborhoods and provide free birth control to those communities…so all Republicans should support PP! ;)
Yeah, some people conveniently ignore the fungibility of money: it's literally as fungible as things get! They (mostly the same people) do exactly the same thing with unions and political contributions.
Surely just because money is fungible doesn't mean it is actually being, uh, funged (?) in any given instance?
If I'm an organization that previously spent $50k/annum on abortions and $50k/annum on AIDS prevention, and after being given an extra $100k/annum by the US, started spending $150k/annum on AIDS prevention (while still spending $50k/annum on abortions) I don't see that this means that the US is funding abortions in any meaningful way.
If you can demonstrate that "No, scout's honour, the American money is in a totally separate account and is not being spent on the abortion stuff", then sure. But can you do that?
And the disapproval would be of the "spending money at all on abortion" anyway. Think of it as "Okay, yeah, we spend $50k on anti-Jewish propaganda, but the extra $100k from the US is going to providing prosthetics for three-legged kittens, what is the problem then?"
Do you think that "But the funding we do provide isn't going to promote their anti-Semitism activities, so we're technically not promoting anti-Semitism" would fly as an excuse?
I was really just questioning the claim that PEPFAR is being dishonest about this.
I don't think your analogy holds up, though, because there's no connection between kitten prosthetics and antisemitism, whereas, in the absence of legal issues, conflicting religious affiliations, or political pressure, abortion is a normal part of healthcare provision.
(If you - as a hypothetical charitable organization - were providing funding to supermarket chains to provide food to homeless people, it wouldn't be reasonable IMO to later withdraw from the deal on the grounds that some of the supermarkets also sold alcohol or cigarettes, no matter how much you disapprove of drinking and smoking.)
Edit: a more painful hypothetical for me would be "should the US withdraw military cooperation with Japan over whaling?" I think I would have to say no - but I admit that I might have said yes when I was younger.
Why do you assume anti-Semites can't love little kittens and want to make their lives easier?
"abortion is a normal part of healthcare provision."
That's the entire complaint right there. This is one of those issues where those on side A have strong, entrenched views and those on side B have strong, entrenched views, and there's little to no chance of compromise (just as there is no such thing as "a little bit pregnant", there's no such thing as "just a few abortions" as we've seen with the definition creep on what constitutes a 'threat to the life of the mother' and the hard cases of 'well what about the incestuously raped pregnant ten year old?' which then is used for "well if *she* can have an abortion, why can't I? you've already given in on it as a right").
Regarding the first point, there's no particular reason to expect any given kitten-prosthetics provider to be antisemitic, so it would be reasonable to speculate that that specific provider was chosen precisely because of their antisemitic views. Also, it would presumably be easy to switch funding to a non-antisemitic provider offering similar kitten-prosthetics services, so a failure to do so would be suspicious.
So far as I'm aware, neither of these observations carry over to the PEPFAR case.
Regarding the second point, it seems to me that in a contrafactual world where abortion was not a political issue, and nobody had any strong, entrenched opinions about it, most non-religious healthcare providers would provide or allow for abortions - not for political reasons, but simply because there is a demand for them; that's the sense in which I mean that abortion is a normal part of healthcare.
(In a way, I actually live in that world; abortion is not a hot political topic here in New Zealand.)
The only point I'd like to add is that Republicans have put forward concrete conditions under which they'd vote for it. What they're asking for is to add "Mexico City" to PEPFAR, which would strengthen the guarantee that PEPFAR not fund abortions. [https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/PEPFAR-Coalition-Letter.pdf] Which you'd think would be reasonable, given that Democrats claim PEPFAR isn't funding abortions anyway. So, the conversation seems to have been something like:
R: "We're not going to vote to extend PEPFAR, since it funds abortions and abortion advocacy."
D: "PEPFAR doesn't fund abortions."
R: "Okay, then put in a Mexico City Policy amendment to guarantee that. Then we'll vote for it."
D: "No."
Vox: "Republicans hate Africans and want them to die of AIDS."
I myself very much hope that negotiations continue beyond this point.
According to Wikipedia, the Mexico City Policy is a lot more restrictive than you're suggesting. It is also noteworthy that George W Bush's administration excluded PEPFAR from Mexico City, presumably for good reason.
Yeah, I think the initial negotiations with Republicans depended on PEPFAR being a temporary emergency crisis response, so they were willing to accept it without full Mexico City type restrictions. But it's clearly not actually temporary.
What's still kind of a mystery to me is why they picked the Biden administration to dig in their heels over it. If they're so against Planned Parenthood International aborting a bunch of Ethiopian kids while giving out condoms to their parents, why'd they lay down and take it during Clinton and Obama?
PEPFAR was started during the George W. Bush administration, so it was after Clinton's time.
Perhaps the difference is that during the Obama administration the Republicans cared more about Bush's legacy than they do in the Trump era? I don't follow American politics all that closely, but I gather Bush and Trump don't get along.
"I imagine Mormon girls gasping in shock at how not respectable Trump's "grab her by the pussy" take was, and slowly drifting ever outward towards progressivism... buying contraceptive and deciding to do "One more degree" or get just that much more established, or pursue an Urban career just that much further, recoiling in horror at the improper aggression with which Roe v. Wade was overturned, or the vulgarity of conservative politics as she veers further and further left and Mormon birth rates decline further and further below replacement."
Does this guy know any religious women? Because if you're in your early 20s and deciding "Hey, I think I'll go to the doctor for contraceptives and then sleep around like a ho", it's not down to "well really now that politician is not a gentleman!" but because you're young, in a sex-saturated culture, you're horny, and there are people who want to sleep with you and you want to sleep with them. If your religiosity is only that, it's not a strong enough anchor to hold you fast against the current of the world.
I've seen a lot of wacky things pinned on Trump but "Mormons Go Wild" wasn't what I expected on the bingo card, I have to say.
Agreed, that one made no sense to me and is a rather wild tabloid like conclusion. If anything they tended to look past his personal foibles in he election with a practical attitude and a truely disgusted view of Hillary. None of which has much of anything to do with their own fertility.
All fertility is down, most likely due to phthalates dropping speed counts for men and other impact ps from our pollutes environment. Too bad though, humanity can die out with no kids, we’ve got some short sighted corporate profits to make and those are big industries in plastics! What a dumb reason to go extinct. Maybe we deserve it since we cannot suppress the psychopaths amongst us, instead we’ve out them in charge.
We can argue about the relative contributions of the various causes of decreasing fertility, but I'm highly confident that it's almost entirely a matter of choice and pollution accounts for close to 0%.
Agreed, that article's explanation doesn't make much sense.
Here's an explanation that does: contraception for non-medical reasons was actively preached against by Mormon leaders during the 1960's and 1970's, and that preaching only really stopped in the late 90's. Even then, traditions are slow to change. Church members often quote church leader talks from years ago in various church meetings, so old teachings endure somewhat. Still, eventually it becomes more acceptable for husband and wife to consider using birth control, and we see the change.
"Here's an explanation that does: contraception for non-medical reasons was actively preached against by Mormon leaders during the 1960's and 1970's, and that preaching only really stopped in the late 90's. "
Same thing happened to the Anglicans with the 1930 Lambeth Conference. "We are going to reluctantly accept that married couples may use contraception for the sole purpose of spacing out their children and family planning, and for no other reason, and we certainly still frown upon the practice, and of course this will *never* be acceptable as general usage for the unmarried or for dodging having children at all".
In 1920, it had:
"Supported political lobbying against "such incentives to vice as indecent literature, suggestive plays and films, the open or secret sale of contraceptives, and the continued existence of brothels."
In 1930 it had given in on contraception, while still against abortion and sex outside of marriage:
"Resolution 15 allowed "in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles." The vote for this Resolution was 193 for it, 67 against it, and 47 not voting. This was the only Resolution for which a record of the numbers voting was required.
The Times of June 30, 1930, predicted that the Lambeth Conference would change the "social and moral life" of humanity. This was done by the Conference's Resolution 15 in which in contradiction to earlier Resolutions (1908 Resolution 41 and 1920 Resolution 66) allowed the use of contraception in marriage.
Resolution 16 expressed "abhorrence of the sinful practice of abortion."
Resolution 18 reckoned "sexual intercourse between persons who are not legally married" to be "a grievous sin."
By 1948, there's nothing about that, but a rather pathetic appeal about divorce:
"Inasmuch as easy divorce in Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere, has gravely weakened the idea of the life-long nature of marriage, and has also brought untold suffering to children, this Conference urges that there is a strong case for the reconsideration by certain states of their divorce laws."
1958 has less condemnation, just appeals to the conscience:
"Resolution 115
The Family in Contemporary Society - Marriage
The Conference believes that the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents everywhere; that this planning, in such ways as are mutually acceptable to husband and wife in Christian conscience, is a right and important factor in Christian family life and should be the result of positive choice before God. Such responsible parenthood, built on obedience to all the duties of marriage, requires a wise stewardship of the resources and abilities of the family as well as a thoughtful consideration of the varying population needs and problems of society and the claims of future generations."
By now, the Anglican Church is not in step with society but trailing behind attitudes on everything from family prayer to divorce, contraception (and later on, abortion). It manages to keep up, however, the attitude that "the Pope is not the boss of me" from 1948 where it can't bring itself to repeat the old positive strictures that "This thing is WRONG and SINFUL" but is rock-solid on "Anglicans shouldn't marry Catholics because the Catholic Church wants the kids raised as Catholics and Anglicans can't believe Catholic doctrines", to 1968 and "Yeah, Humanae Vitae is great and all that, but he's still wrong about contraception" 😀
"The Conference earnestly warns members of our Communion against contracting marriages with Roman Catholics under the conditions imposed by modern Roman canon law, especially as these conditions involve, among other things, a promise to have their children brought up in a religious system which they cannot themselves accept."
In 1998 they do *try*, still maintaining that the official position is that sex should be within marriage, but let's face it: that's feeble in the face of the changes in society, which they have gone along with, and they're more concerned with the new categories of what is (currently) considered bad:
"Clearly some expressions of sexuality are inherently contrary to the Christian way and are sinful. Such unacceptable expression of sexuality include promiscuity, prostitution, incest, pornography, paedophilia, predatory sexual behaviour, and sadomasochism (all of which may be heterosexual and homosexual), adultery, violence against wives, and female circumcision. From a Christian perspective these forms of sexual expression remain sinful in any context. We are particularly concerned about the pressures on young people to engage in sexual activity at an early age, and we urge our Churches to teach the virtue of abstinence."
Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's never going back in.
Thank you, and no. Nothing past the bottom drawer kind of writing, at least, where all the scraps, half-finished or never got started, pieces are stored on the hard drive and are definitely not going to escape into the wild.
> 29: Gwern: why hasn’t AI-generated music taken off in the same way as AI-generated art or AI-generated text? He thinks it’s a combination of copyright, low demand, and technical difficulty.
Because there's no money in music. In unit cost terms each song listen gets you roughly a fifth of a cent. That means there's not even that much room for a spread. If you're using ChatGPT to generate lyrics on the fly you're actually losing money since it'd cost about six cents to generate the lyrics. And that's before you generate music or anything else.
I have (and have had since before the AI boom) a utility that generates corporate background music for video presentations. I specifically chose this because the music is so formulaic and because it has an actual use case in those corporate videos. Everyone always says it's a cool idea and I do get some mileage out of it. But it competes with buying stock music. And when push comes to shove they buy the stock music and cut it in.
In gross terms: The cut off to be a top ten earning artist from streams/music sales is like $10 million. Taylor swift only makes about $60 million and she's double the #2 spot. And to be honest, Taylor Swift or Drake don't get people to buy their music because their music is just the greatest music ever. It's because they're celebrities. And no AI model is going to get the kind of loyalty Drake gets from his money giveaways or Taylor gets from her private sessions.
Music really is a celebrity game. I could write about that for a long time honestly.
Do you see or expect to see AI-based tools like mixers or effects? Or instruments? I can totally see a drum machine being asked to “play it like Ringo in 4/4 at 108”.
Eventually? Sure. Digital instruments are already a thing. And you can already mix together instrument sounds digitally to get new instruments. A good example of this is in Avatar where the Tsungi Horn is a literal digital mix of a sousaphone and French horn. Not done with AI but still very cool.
Specifically what I would expect is some ability to produce samples/loops that people could then mix in. Once you have the audio engineer or producer I expect they will want fine tune control rather than procedural generation. But session musicians make, on average, $19 an hour. (To continue the theme: less than an average journalist.) So the labor cost you're replacing isn't huge. Buying premade loops is even cheaper (you can even get a significant number free). And you'd need a very small, tight knit world prefer to do it over bringing in the contractors or buying premade.
Stock music is another use case. But it's already cheap and common. I thought providing some customization would be a selling point but it appears the market's very price sensitive. Who knows, maybe that will change! Or maybe someone with actual musical connections will have more success than a hobbyist like me.
Related to this - there's been a small boom in "AI covers" on social media using voice synthesis/cloning. Make one artist cover another's song, or have a cartoon character do it. There's a lot of Kanye ones.
> But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know.
I just finished listening to a 10+ hour Scott Horton podcast on Waco. There may have been recent, salient reasons for people to be skeptical of government acting in the interests of its people.
Indeed, I think this was also the time when the mega churches in the Midwest with their extreme version of insular evangelical Christians really blew up into a large political movement and cultural warriors. Christian music, camps, yoga without the Hindu parts, and book burners, and their struggles against gay rights and abortion and such took off in a big way. Maybe there were clinic protests and arson before that, but it took off as a cultural fixation in the early 1990s.
I feel like if you talked to those same mid westerners in 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1995 you’d find a clear trend towards distrust. I single them out as they were a bastion of trust in governance before thst and tend to move as a collective block of opinion. Later after Clinton with Bush the second in the presidency and republican control of congress, they felt they were getting their way, leading to a local peak in 2000 in government trust by commoners. The swing of evangelical political activism and views could explain a lot of this movement in popular polls.
I’d guess the reason Scott didn’t feel much was going on in 1994 with Clinton in office, will and grace on tv, and such, is that he was young, agreed with those issues or didn’t care about them or know people who did care? Guessing. But evangelicals in the mid west certain did care a lot. American cultural discourse power shifted from southern and civil war politics with Arkansas Clinton to a new paradigm of Texan Midwestern centre of American evangelical power.
24. PEPFAR was about getting the UN to support invading Iraq and CYA and profits for Big Pharma after American government defended their patents in Africa as Cipla and DWB and various countries decided to break the patents in order to save lives. PEPFAR for years spent $5 billion a year on $500 million worth of HIV medications.
Cipla CEO says millions more could have been treated had they just bought from him in 2003…obviously that’s self serving but I trust him a lot more than the Bush administration.
Meanwhile, Yusuf Hamied, chairman of the Indian generic pharmaceutical company Cipla, put the blame squarely on Ambassador Randall Tobias, who was tapped by Bush in 2003 to launch PEPFAR as the nation’s first U.S. global AIDS coordinator.
Hamied said that Tobias, who was president and CEO of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly from 1993 until 1999, “worked out a scheme” to “hoodwink the generics. They put in a lot of hurdles [to ensure] that the PEPFAR money wouldn’t go to the generics.”
Regarding LK-99, I'm really wondering what's up with the videos purporting to show flux pinning. Apparently one of them is an admitted fake. Should we just conclude all of them are probably fake...?
"Should we just conclude all of them are probably fake"
At this point that's how I'm leaning. Before hearing about the fake, I was guessing maybe a 25% probability that LK-99 would turn out to be real. Sometime replicating a real synthesis can be hard - and quite often people fool themselves when looking at ambiguous data. But given that this looked sketchy _before_ one of the videos was admitted to be a fake... I'd downgrade it to the equivalent of a stock market "dead cat bounce" stock.
19. Wouldn't you say it's more likely that the loss of faith is because the US political system seems uniquely suited to ignoring the concerns of everyday Americans? There's a two party system, ineffective Congress, unambitious regulators, widening inequality, loss of economic prospects, and no political will to change any of it.
(Basically, all the reasons Trump *actually* got elected)
The preconditions may not have changed, but I would argue the impacts on the voting public have started to ramp up. All these things have long term consequences which get worse over time.
The study seems to be about "growth mindset interventions" rather than growth mindset. Even to the extent a growth mindset is useful, it's probably difficult to change people's entire mindset with a two-hour "hey kids" intervention.
And people who have a 'growth mindset' without it being imposed as an intervention are probably selected for other beneficial traits in the first place.
37. As a Mormon myself who recently had two kids to prop up the birthrate, I’ll share my “on-the-ground” impression: the big, palpable, elephant-in-the-room change going on in the last few years is that the population is moving to cheap Utah/Arizona/Texas/Nevada and out of California and other more expensive regions. This change is massive. Probably HALF the Mormons in SoCal have left in the last decade.
Is there some degree to which some fertility is lost by being too “close to the vortex of the progressive-liberal-urban monoculture” in the wake of Trump? Some, sure. But I am much more likely to attribute any drop in birth rates to the easily observable phenomenon of people moving than anything else that I’m not observing en masse. Perhaps they are less settled, they don’t know where their family will be in a few years, uprooting disrupts social connections and impairs new family formation, etc. Plenty of potential causal pathways there.
And as far as I can tell, the whole “Mormon fertility has gone off a cliff in the last 5 years” story is really only based on Utah birth rates dropping. Now, that may be a reasonable proxy in most circumstances, but I haven’t seen any actual numbers that are specifically reflective of Mormons and not Utahns. Given that the makeup of Utah is changing so rapidly at the moment, I think this adds a lot of uncertainty to the use of this proxy.
What about more gentiles moving to Utah for the snow?? The people that move to places for snow and mountain biking generally don’t have a lot of children and hang out at craft breweries and smoke marijuana.
That’s one thing I’m getting at—though tons of Mormons are moving to Utah as well, it’s a very big jump for me to say that declining Utah numbers are really representative of the Mormon population, as everyone writing about it seems to do.
Yeah, I tried looking for information for a bit, but didn't come up with anything solid. There was one place that claimed that the LDS percentage of Utah's population, overall, was undergoing a very slight decline, but no numbers. And no numbers on LDS and non-LDS birthrates in Utah. And even the graph used didn't seem to have *that* severe a dropoff after 2015: it seemed like the continuation of the long decline.
sort of disappointing that the only choices given are 'is government run for the benefit of a few big interests...or the benefit of all?' how about 'for the benefit of government regulators?' No one thinks the FDA is run for the benefit of 'a few big interests' or for the benefit of 'all'-- it's run for the benefit of the FDA regulators and managers. Why should we think the case is any different with the State Dept. or 'Health and Human Services'?
Why wouldn't FDA count as a "big interest"? The "deep state" complaint is popular these days, and regulators are about as central example of it as anything.
yeah, I thought about that; and you could legitimately consider 'labor' a 'big interest' too, at least in the form of 'organized labor' aka unions; or retired people as a big interest, with AARPA and social security and medicare; or the 'cathedral' (newspapers/magazines/schools/universities) as a big interest. But it seems like the question is badly framed, if not deliberately misleading. People answering the question are going to assume the question is about 'big business' not AARP or the deep state. And people looking at the results are going to assume the same thing. .
Well, that's certainly the interpretation that the "cathedral" members who posed that question intended, consciously or unconsciously. Just goes to show, how far-reaching the influence of their ideology is.
I think Scott’s position on 19 about people thinking government serves the 1% through corruption and why he doesn’t agree with this also explains why I think 18 about ivy league benefits continues to seemingly elude explanation.
The ivies are a recruiting ground for the young upper aristocracy to meet promising recruits in their future roles as heads of this and owners of that. The system is a series of hoops for poodles to jump through and whoever jumps through the hoops the best without touching the edges is considered to have merit.
Those young ambitious hoop jumping commoners who also manage to succeed in the arena of explicitly not taught soft skills of befriending and impressing your ‘betters’ end up doing very woo for themselves. Tim Ferriss is an example of a commoner class man who deeply impressed an older wealthy man and gained sponsorship to start his fraudulently advertised smart protein powder brand which made him a multi millionaire by working 16 hour days 7 days a week for a few years.
Those who fail to gain patronage from the clucking elite pouring over them to select out the ones they want, do indeed end up with only modestly better economic outcomes. It is that simple.
Find a patron, understand the need to read between the lines, or get rejected back into the pool of other commoners to fight it out on your own with a few mild advantages as a thank you for trying.
The merit system has never applied to the aristocracy, they run it is a game, a trial, a selection method to sort out who is good enough to work for them. They want smart, compliant, and socially aware enough o understand the game and their role as prized future servants. It is so simple. Who decides what is meritorious? Who changes this over time? The poodle who is smart enough to see the hand holding the hoops they jump through can be a good boy and get a special treat. The dumb dog who thinks it is smart and rushes through every hoop blindly at top speed with straight As, gets to the end of their degree and finds no masters around to reward them as they failed to comprehend the unspoken purpose of the subtle game. The path to the special track is at the parties and secret circles where the real audition for elite approval occurs.
If we look to the various fairs, competitions, and other get together where the elite found promising lower nobles, children of merchants, and standout talents from the commoners who they could sponsor and act as patrons of…then we would find the same thing, but with fewer exams. China had this far more formalised than Europe with explicit exams for various administrative higher servant roles in ancient times, modern time too. England began to approach this level of formality in their empire.
This is a way to more mechanistically sort out the commoner class and to identity lesser administrative staff without the elite having to work or go over vast numbers of middling servants in detail. But the top servants who do the work for the elites, those are always going to be hand selected.
The easy and non academic selection is partly to ensure their own scions get into these institutions, but is primarily a different sort of selection system focusing on soft skills essential for them. In a way there is a system of competition with merit to a much lesser degree amongst the elite class, but it is around skills they don’t want any commoner to have. It is a measure of how much early investment a child receives which no poor family can emulate.
And like a mother animal tossing out the runts, those elite children who fail in even the most basic task of yachting, lacrosse, equestrian, etc. elite hobbies will not be effective soft skill members of the ruling class.
The elite select to avoid the burnouts and deeply underperforming members of their clans who get shuffled off into lives of luxury and doing nothing, while the commoners have an inverse merit selection process where instead of weeding out only the low quality ones, insets the very best hoop jumpers are selected.
This ensures enough competent servants are around to guide the continued wealth and prosperity of the elite who don’t need to be that good or competent themselves. If anything Ivies are a collective shorthand and a training ground for the young scions to learn about and play out their future roles to spend their entire lives selecting who to hire to work for them. After all, an ownership class needs to ensure quality top servants are selected, such as their CEO workers.
I’m can see why this is not more widely understood. Shifting through merit exam data and averages of earnings isn’t where one will find the answers. Why is it uneducated peasants in the 200s get this more readily than modern commoner in the 2000s? Perhaps our so called education is more indoctrination than not.
What's the x Axis for the NYT graph in point 18? Wealth by percentile? Income? It's a dramatic increase, so I'm wondering if it is the 1% that gets this bonus or more like the 10% or .1%?
30 - I posted this on his blog, but the X-inactivation story still holds up. He estimates that the X is 3.8% of the genome, but that's probably estimated on coding regions. On a basepair comparison, it's more like 4.8%, and standard texts suggest non-coding regions are probably enriched for loci affecting quantitative traits. A 4.8% figure fits the variability data better.
My gut intuition was that OAI is probably on some really powerful next-gen jukebox, but it is not good enough to merit an update. I assume that the quality is fairly good and they surpassed the original jukebox in terms of melody, beat, "catching the vibe of a musician." However, since the actual words are not tokens but frequency combinations I imagine the new jukebox achieves even more weird artificial vocals that sort of sound like words, but are actually gibberish. In the original jukebox it already sounded haunting - I guess they don't just want to release an even realer weird sounding machinery.
7. What I find fishy about this is that it is about 12th graders. When I was a 12th grader in the '80s, I couldn't have told you whether I was a conservative or a liberal. I doubt any of my friends could have either. There must have been a few kids at my school who could have, but I'd bet it was less than 10% of the class. Politics wasn't part of a typical high-schooler's identity in the '80s. Your identity was mostly determined by what music you listened to. So how the hell did they poll kids on this question in the '80s?
I mean, if you asked a kid in the 80s whether they were a Republican or a Democrat, they would most likely say whatever their parents were, assuming their parents both voted for the same party, which wasn't nearly as much of a given back then. If you asked them if they were a conservative or a liberal, they may have had no idea what the terms meant, particularly in the South, which still had plenty of conservative Democrats.
If the pollsters assume Democrat = Liberal in the 80s, that's pretty horrible political science, because for instance Democrat George Wallace was still the governor of Alabama in the mid 80s.
You really think the median high-schooler in the '80s had the awareness to know which Democrats were conservatives and which were liberals?
OTOH, if the poll asked them asked them whether they preferred The Cure or George Strait, THAT would have been a reasonable way to determine the latent politics dormant in most 80s students.
I remember when I was about five I heard something on the news about "employers" vs "employees". I didn't know what these words meant, but I asked my Mum whether Dad was an employer or an employee.
She said he was an employer, and I decided I was on the employers' side. And I think that's how I became a conservative.
Ah heck I was (and am) The Cure all the way, but that doesn't link up with my political inclinations so yeah, asking kids "are you liberal or conservative?" probably is a terrible question, because you'll always get the outliers who like this culture but only to an extent and behave completely differently in their personal life to what is being assumed along with "oh so you like this artist? that must mean you agree with... this, this, and this".
I mean, yeah, *mostly* teenagers are going to be sex'n'drugs'n' rock and roll, but *some* of us liked the rock and roll on its own 😀
We had mock presidential elections every four years with the real candidates and parties, so partisanship was a thing. As far as gradients within those categories... when did political AM radio become a thing?
I’m with Hank. I can think of a few kids who loudlynproclaimed their party affiliation, but very few who held political beliefs strongly enough to be put on a liberal/conservative axis. Same holds for religion. I knew who was catholic or Protestant or Jewish sure, but pretty
But you weren't in highschool in the 80s, right? My point is that highschoolers identifying in political terms is something that has happened since then. Being online is probably a major part of it.
12th grade is 6th year in Irish terms, yes? I was a school leaver in the early 80s and while I wouldn't have described myself politically as such (I voted the way my family voted for a certain party instead of a different party, for instance, and not because I had gone deeply into X is better than Y or X policies agree with what I want), I would have had a sense of 'preferring A to B values'.
I was always socially conservative, even if I wouldn't have described myself as such. Things like contraception were beginning to be agitated about and made into campaigns, and it was encountering posters for the pro-side put up in a college* space that made me realise "no, I'm not on this side" (and also made me grapple with "I vehemently disagree with this presentation of the argument; I know people on this side routinely pull down, tear down, or otherwise destroy posters and other materials put up by their opponents; do I tear this down or leave it up?" and come to the reluctant conclusion that I had to agree with free speech, so even if I wanted to tear it down, I should leave it up).
As for tastes in music, well - punk had happened when I was in Third Year, so I segued from New Wave into the more goth and New Romantic bands. I remember the arguments over "Did Spandau Ballet move towards a form of neo-fascism with the song Musclebound?" which seems ironic in light of their later evolutions and changes of direction, as the 80s progressed, to being a slick, polished pop-rock band as exemplified by their big break-out hit Gold.)
Don't really have anything from The Sex Pistols, I thought they were a bit too much of a gimmick band (Malcolm McLaren's influence) but Johnny Rotten/John Lydon as a solo artist was fine:
A nice list! I mostly agree with your view of Sex Pistols, and also that Johnny Rotten/John Lydon as a solo artist is fine. (I remember an interiew with him far back in his Sex Pistol days, the journalist asked what he thought of the anarchist-label. He replied: "We are not anarchists, we are for chaos." "Wow this guy knows what he is talking about" was my reaction.)
Thanks also for the link to Sultans of Ping in particular, I was not aware of them!
(And before we leave the Lost Train of Youth, let us not forget that Patti Smith is also on board. In fact, she occupies a whole railway carriage by herself.)
My experience, albeit a bit later: I took AP Government in 12th grade, and at the beginning of the year the teacher taught us the difference between conservative and liberals, and she arranged the desks in the classroom based on that, similar to congress. I have vivid memories of where many of the students in class were politically. Some of it was surprising—one of my friends, whom I remembered reading Rush Limbaugh books in middle school, ended up being the most liberal.
Many of my close friendships felt stained once we all realized how different we were politically, and things in the classroom got very heated at times. It didn't help that it was during an election year, and the teacher clearly favored one of the candidates. It all felt like a Jane Elliott experiment.
The political discourse back then felt quaint compared to today, so I can't imagine what it would be like in a classroom like that today.
Thomas Dixon, the author of "The Birth of a Nation", wrote a sequel titled "The Fall of a Nation", and directed it as one of the earliest movie sequels. It evolves the Kaiser conquering the US after foolish pacifists like Henry Ford delude the country into letting their guard down. A pro-war Congressman then joins up with a suffragette to overthrow them.
PEPFAR, like the malaria nets charities seem to me to be a bit of a self-licking ice cream cone. A creepy cycle that ends with a demand for never ending support:
Step 1: Medical intervention in Africa
Step 2: Lives saved
Step 3: Population explodes
Step 4: Need more of the intervention, no progress towards supplying it internally, return to step 1.
And the people pushing this stuff also support brain drain from Africa to the west, robbing the countries that need (reasonably) smart people more than anywhere else does.
Lowering malaria _incidence_ makes it more likely for kids to complete school, dramatically increasing lifetime earnings. While the death toll is horrifying in itself, malaria also has serious impacts when it’s non-fatal. (Similar argument as to why deworming is so effective).
(9) I don't think it's accurate to say that Bush "alone fled" Chichi Jima. He was the pilot of an Avenger torpedo bomber, and attacked the radio station on Chichi Jima, with Ted White as turret gunner and John Delaney as radioman. Bush's plane was hit during the attack, and he told the others to bail out. Then, Bush bailed out, just before his plane exploded. Bush landed in the water about 4 miles from Chichi Jima and was picked up by a submarine. The others didn't survive the evacuation.
Aside from the eight prisoners killed, other flyers had been captured and evacuated to Japan. This incident is well documented in "Flyboys: A True Story of Courage", by James Bradley.
(18) "Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm."
I haven't heard whether the study authors try to separate out selection effects in admissions vs. recruiting practices by "prestigious firms" vs. effects of family connections. I expect the causality differs whether we're talking about top 1% earnings, vs. attending an elite graduate school, vs. working at a prestigious firm.
I could tell a story that the people who end up at the top of the earnings distribution, at least in some fields, get there with the help of family or family friends who help open the right doors at the right time, and that these same connections helped them get into the Ivy-Plus college in the first place.
I've read that the professors at elite graduate schools give great weight to performance at a top undergraduate program, and confess themselves unable to evaluate a top graduate from, say, Texas A&M. In these cases, the elite schools are gatekeepers to the elite graduate programs.
Many "prestigious firms" (and, I believe government offices) limit their recruiting to a small number of elite schools. They use the school to screen for "smart enough" - they don't need top scholars, nor do they need the very smartest people. They need people who are significantly smarter than average and can "fit in" to the social milieu - whether company culture or client relations. In these cases, the elite schools are gatekeepers to these firms. But smart people from less elite colleges can perform well and advance to the top of corporate hierarchies. Graduates of elite colleges are not particularly dominant in the top ranks of major corporations.
Thanks. I don't doubt that SAT is a valid predictor for success in college (which was its intent) or in later life. I don't think this is directly related to the points that attendance at the Ivy-Plus colleges gives a significant advantage in ending up in very prestigious positions (academic, professional, or income), even though graduates of (slightly) lesser colleges do as well on average. I meant to suggest that there are potential confounding variables that could be summarized as human capital, and might be pretty directly related to parents' income.
I agree that attending Ivy-Plus gives a huge edge for very prestigious positions. My point in linking the Hsu discussion is both to affirm your comments about grad admissions and recruiting, but also to point out that modeling these elite institutions as *primarily* wanting smart enough people with good pedigree doesn't seem accurate. While Ivy-plus helps people get a foot in the door, those with higher academic scores upon admission take an outsized advantage of these greater opportunities and those from the top 1% don't. This is some evidence towards elite institutions actively pursuing the very brightest, as opposed to those who are good enough and well connected.
EATS is a straight-forward application of the Commerce Clause. It is, in fact, one of the very reasons the Commerce Clause exists. The CA effort is an attempt by California to use its market power to regulate the activities of people in other states. The Commerce Clause was a reaction against tariffs and trade barriers being established by states against each other and foreign nations. The power of the United States was significantly founded on the size and scope of the free trade zone created by the Commerce Clause.
CA could ban pork containing poisons or toxins from being sold in California, as that would directly relate to the status of the pork being sold. But this law doesn't depend on the status of the pork being sold. It depends on how the pig the pork comes from was treated.
California is effectively saying "In order to import pork into the State of California, you must first import the regulations of the State of California into your state." At the time of the Founding, it was laws exactly in this vein that created animosity between states, and why Congress was granted authority over this field.
As for the abortion issue mentioned elsewhere, any state, but let's use Texas, could make it a felony to perform, facilitate or support an abortion and not include a statute of limitations. Then an abortion doctor travels from California to Florida, with a stopover in Dallas. In Dallas, she is arrested for the abortions done in California, because her conduct is criminal in Texas and she entered Texas having committed felonies under Texas law while in California.
In exactly the same way pork producers in Texas are prohibited from selling in California because their farm operations violate California law (and not being allowed to sell is the punishment for not following this law), abortions performed in California violate Texas law and once the Dr. enters Texas she is subject to arrest.
Is there not a distinction between “California is effectually circumventing the Commerce Clause” and “California is actually circumventing the Commerce Clause”? So far as I understand it is only for practical considerations that the pork industry nationwide would kneel to California law, but they could if they felt it economical raise CA pork for CA and US pork for the US. If they can choose to not obey CA regulations for some markets, but simply choose not to, it seems that your argument loses a lot of strength. What’s your take on that? Is there something you think I’m missing?
The fundamental issue is that California shouldn't be able to reach into another state and enforce California regulations there in any way, by any means. The EATS act just says "You can't do that."
California could just ban pork possession, that's legal, because possession is intrastate. But they can't ban imports on pork while allowing domestic production (even assuming they haven't killed domestic production already).
But, IIRC, California legislators were pretty explicit about the goal of this legislation: Use California's market power to impose nationwide regulations that they couldn't get through Congress.
> California could just ban pork possession, that's legal, because possession is intrastate. But they can't ban imports on pork while allowing domestic production (even assuming they haven't killed domestic production already).
Hang on a second. Is California treating domestic pork any differently to imported pork? My understanding is that this is a simple, clear-cut, black-and-white case of California regulating trade within California, with no attempt to reach into other states and enforce regulations there whatsoever
Unless there's a detail I've missed, California are not saying that you can't produce pork as cruelly as you like in other states, and nor are they treating imported pork any differently from domestic pork. All they are saying is that you are not allowed to possess inhumanely produced pork in the state of California, regardless of where it came from.
It looks to me as though the only people trying to tell another state what to do are the pig-torturers.
I don't expect an honest take from someone calling all the pig farms in the US "pig torturers", but they drove off all the hog farms in California so there's basically no domestic production. California is saying "You must import our production regulations if you are to import your products", and the Constitution gives Congress the power to say "No, you can't do that."
You've moved the goalposts from "California shouldn't be able to reach into another state and enforce California regulations" to "it is not unconstitutional for Congress to forbid California from passing laws concerning what products may or may not be sold in California", but yes, I agree with the second claim - it would be appalling for them to do so, but it's not unconstitutional.
I didn't move the goalposts. Both things are true. California should not be able to regulate farms in Ohio, and the Constitution gives Congress the power to prevent it.
I think it's a complicated question, because it would be fine for California to have food adulteration laws in place saying "We will not import foods that contain more than X parts per million of this bacteria" or "We will not import foods that contain this carcinogen". Banning something that is harmful is not interfering with commerce (I imagine?)
But can you equate cruelty-free meat with harm to human health, is the thing. If free range organic eggs and battery hen eggs don't negatively impact the health of consumers, then can you say "We will only import free range eggs and not battery hen eggs"? If the eggs are okay by Dept of Agriculture standards whether they're from cage hens or free range hens, then you are interfering with the ability of the battery farm to sell its eggs and promoting the free range producer (unfairly).
Unfortunately, I don't have the time for a deep dive and I couldn't find anything up-front, but you're right that the period of the Articles of Confederation is really interesting and informs a lot of the Constitution.
#5 My understanding of Libertarianism (but I'm not a Libertarian's) is that if you argue practical benefits, you are just another neo Liberal, not a Libertarian. Looks like an interesting discussion.
In my experience it's more of a "yes-and" kind of thing.
YES the libertarian approach is morally superior under a certain moral framework, AND also it produces practical benefits in many real world circumstances.
" Munger realized his fellow free-marketers come in two flavors: directionalists--who take our political realities as given and try to move outcomes closer to the ideal--and destinationists--who want no compromises with what they see as the perfect outcome"
The directionalists vs destinationists issue is present in other political parties and movements too.
#18: I'm interested in understanding the mechanism that could cause such a sudden uptick in ratings for the top 1%. I can easily imagine many mechanisms that would cause a steady increase from left to right, but the sudden uptick surprises me, to the extent that I wonder if it's some kind of statistical artefact.
The only thing I can come up with is that there's some genuinely useful social skills that the upper class understand but the rest of us miss out on. The upper middle class teaches their children to work hard to succeed within the system, while the upper class teaches their children to see through the Matrix, to understand the social dynamics that governs every system, to cultivate people as assets regardless of your own personal feelings about them, and to smoothly climb the ladders that the rest of us can't even see.
The plotted effect is once academic effects are subtracted though. And besides, I'd expect all of those effects to apply smoothly and monotonically, not to be flat from the zeroth to the 95th percentile and then suddenly shoot up.
>E.g., you really think there aren't enough legacies with 4.0s at great schools and near perfect test scores to fill princeton or wherever?
Isn't that just an artefact of bad tests? If large numbers of people can get perfect test scores then you need to make your tests harder until they're better at distinguishing between the top 0.1% and the top 0.0001%.
“you really think there aren't enough legacies with 4.0s at great schools and near perfect test scores to fill princeton or wherever?”
I’m not American but I suppose so. Either way legacy admissions are not meritocratic if there’s any bias towards them at all. Want meritocracy, abandon that.
Legacies at harvard and princeton have higher SAT scores than the general admit population Im pretty sure. The meme is that legacy admission is “affirmative action for white people”, but it doesnt seem to be the case generally. You can google the harvard stats but heres a link for princeton at least:
> Survey data also shows, however, that legacy students have higher SAT scores, even when controlled by income, higher Princeton GPAs, and are more likely to go into nonprofit or public service professions.
Combination of entry through the back door (a big enough donation will always get your kid in, though `how big is big enough' will depend on how close the kid is to entry through the front door); universities wanting to recruit the children of the rich and famous (does anybody doubt that a POTUS's kids, or e.g. Bezos's kids, can't write their own ticket?); and also recruitment for `aristocratic sports' like fencing, crew, sailing etc...which only the children of the ultra wealthy learn in the first place. Of course the first two mechanisms are not open to `mere' one percenters, you would need more decimal points, but even a `mere' one percenter could send their kids to a fancy private school with a fencing and sailing team.
Well, I think `aristocratic sports' is probably the biggest contributor by numbers (together with other advantages offered by expensive private schools), followed by `kids of the sufficiently rich and famous being able to write their own ticket' (note that you don't need to be literally POTUS or centibillionaire, US Senator or foreign major political figure or something is enough), followed by, yes, literal buying your way in. Note that Harvard's undergraduate class is only 1.6k/yr, so it doesn't take that many special cases to show up in statistics.
What does ‘competent’ mean? What does‘ deserving’ mean? If you ranked all candidates on some absolute scale of individual goodness, do you dispute that there would be some legacy admits with worse rank than any non dei non legacy admit?
Of course if you just define competent as a binary corresponding to ‘above some bar’ (which would also be cleared by most of the students of eg UMichigan) then sure, all the legacies are `competent.’
Are you really going to be the Ivy that refused Obama's daughters entry? 😁
I have no idea about Sasha and Malia's brains, presumably they're smart (though I see Malia got into Harvard whereas Sasha went to University of Michigan before going to University of Southern California) but while they probably would have to get in on their merits, there might be some room for the admissions office to slide them in rather than have it "we turned down the daughter of the former president".
And besides, even if you can find a fencing club and pay the non-trivial cost of equipment and lessons, you're probably not going to fit in. Kids would rather do sports where they can hang out with their friends, they're not interested in hanging out with people they hate for ten hours a week in order to gain some small theoretical advantage.
For what it's worth, I did fencing for a year or so in high school; I wasn't good at it and didn't enjoy it much, it was a lot of standing around wearing uncomfortable gear and then actual bouts which lasted a few seconds . I remember it being mentioned to us that having a Blue in Fencing would be very useful if we ever wanted a Rhodes scholarship or similar, but I demonstrated my lack of true upper class credentials by not caring about getting a Rhodes Scholarship; with a more upper class upbringing I probably would have understood that being selected for prestigious awards is incredibly important because each prestigious award you get raises your chance of getting the next prestigious award until eventually you get something you actually want.
I own a fencing club and our youth classes are hilariously uniformly Jewish and Asian. It's not even that expensive. $1000/year to train and maybe that again to compete regularly at the state level. But our parking lot is packed with cars priced like small houses during youth classes.
Partly lack of knowledge - is it widely known that sailing improves your odds of getting into Harvard? Partly lack of opportunity. Sailing isn't exactly a cheap sport, nor one that is easy to pursue unless you are living in a handful of fairly select areas, or can afford to send your kids to a fancy private school.
Accessibility and interest. For a rowing club, it helps to live beside a river. It's not a cheap sport, and despite efforts in modern times by all sports to get working and lower class children involved, there still hangs over it the aura of being the wealthy man's hobby.
"Sir John Keane, who rowed for Cambridge in the 1836 boat race and defeated Oxford by four lengths, is the man who started it all."
With the best will in the world, Sir John's gardener or one of his tenants is highly unlikely to be in one of the boats or a member of the club. Down the generations, it becomes fixed that some sports are for certain people.
Certainly, the newly emerged middle class can (try to) join rowing clubs and yacht clubs, but there is still going to be an element of snobbery there, even in egalitarian America:
Another thing is that aristocrats get why it's important. My friends who fenced in high school told me that it was insanely intense, because parents had both their normal college admissions and child's sports intensities combined at once. I think that a nonarostocrat who isn't as familiar with the system and has no real interest in fencing is going to struggle to build the level of intensity that forces a child to become skilled at a sport.
It's a credential, not an objective measure of whether the kids play the sports. Kids do get credit for national rankings, but most kids get credit for playing sports because the university recognizes the club because it is policed by the school.
It could just be fraud. We know that the decentralized people who actually meet Asian applicants rate them as having good personalities, but the central office rates them as having bad personalities. We know that the central office ratings are lies, so why draw any conclusion from them? It would be good to make a similar comparison between the centralized and decentralized ratings, but that would probably take another lawsuit.
AI music *will* take off as soon as AI human-like robots are performing live. I'll give 5 to 1, 2 years. they'll start as backups for name acts. the problem is establishing a recognized oeuvre.
Milli Vanilli, the Monkeys, Britney Spears, Spice Girls - celebrities can be created. Ticketmaster would rather pocket all the money than pay actual artisans. see WGA strike.
I don’t think anybody is going to go to an AI concert. Maybe some nightclub might have an AI DJ mixing tunes, but why not have a human DJ Front that?
The way I see it now the general attitude to AI has gone from „that’s amazing that it can be done at all“ to an assumption that AI will produce mediocre art and literature (or even „copy“).
Re (9), I was disappointed that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident didn't say what Tachibana et. al. ate _with_ POW liver. Presumably not "fava beans and a nice chianti". Maybe saké ?
2. Davidic Dynasty? As likely as finding the descendants of of Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanoff, Grand Duchess of Russia. For much the same reason. Jews have seldom been able to live peaceably in one place for long periods of time. The Holocaust was not the first persecution, just the biggest, most systematic, and most recent.
In those circumstances records are lost, families are broken up, and new identities are assumed. The odds of preserving a genealogy over 2000 years in those circumstances are vanishingly close to zero. Further, the incentives for making stuff up to improve your lot in life are enormous.
The fictional Dr. Gregory House: “It’s a basic truth of the human condition, that everybody lies."
My wife's family fled Vienna in 1939 after Kristalnacht. Her Uncle told his children that they were descended from the Esterházys*. Which is pure nonsense. Kind of sad, but kind of funny. For the record, my wife has documents. They were working class Jews from a Bohemian town east of Prague. We went there. We saw their graves.
RE: 36 and 37. KulakRevolt has a talent for lurid prose, but his factual accuracy has suffered even as he ascends to Twitter fame. Some Motte discussion of his take on the 3rd Amendment [here](https://www.themotte.org/post/579/teach-a-man-to-revolt-dreams).
The second link is correct Elvis was not a Jew. But, he was a Mensch who had a lot of Jewish colleagues and friends. BTW, Louis Armstrong wore a star of David in honor of the Jewish family who took him in as a child and lent him money to buy his first cornet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong
In regard to item 22, "Cambridge MA schools decide to stop teaching advanced math, because some students can’t understand it and so it would be “inequitable”", you say "I don’t understand this even on its own terms". Let me squawk like an economist and say that you're not paying attention to the incentives that people face. If the *reported difference* in achievement between white students and black students in Cambridge schools gets too high, the administrators and teachers will feel the heat. And while it may be difficult to raise the achievement of black students, it's not difficult to reduce the achievement of white students.
This general principle shows up in a lot of places because the appearance of fairness is valued a lot more than the absolute value that people receive. That sounds stupid until you realize that people are fundamentally fighting over their place in the the status rankings of society, not their absolute well-being. They're perfectly willing to pay $1 if everybody else loses $2. Of course, in this case, white parents have unfair alternatives, but those alternatives don't show up in the statistics by which school administrators are judged.
Maths is an easy one to go after. Average person doesn't care that much about it, probably just passed it in school, and doesn't see the problem with dropping advanced classes.
They may go after English classes next, if the same kind of disparities show up there, and probably the angle of attack on that will be "it's all Dead White Males like Shakespeare which are not relevant to modern life, instead we're going to implement improvements in literacy for dealing with the way we live now". That one is trickier, because in general parents *do* care if little Johnny can't read while they're not that bothered if he's not doing algebra.
The same disparities do show up in English class, but it's much easier to hide them, because grading in English class is fully subjective. You can just give high grades to blacks and low grades to whites and no one can prove you were wrong.
If you try the same thing in a math class, it's easy to prove that you're doing something wrong.
FYI, this was a temporary thing from the Pandemic. I got an email from Cambridge Public Schools last week with "we are writing to share a summary of our plan to offer Algebra I to all of our 8th grade students by 2025, integrating units into the 8th grade curriculum thoughtfully and at a steady pace."
"For context, the pandemic and transition to remote learning interrupted the initial implementation of Algebra I, which all five of the Upper Schools committed to during the 2019-2020 school year. We believe we are now at a point where we can resume the rollout to ensure that each of our students are afforded the opportunity to access Algebra I in 8th grade. "
I'm not sure how to square this with the report that it's "no longer offered".
I think it would be very difficult. Partly because American crime even I'm the worst places is nowhere near that bad, so you don't have the kind of crisis that pushes real action anywhere. And partly because US police forces aren't nearly as cooperative or motivated, as Eric Adams found out when he ran on being the pro-cop candidate and promptly failed to get the NYPD to actually do anything.
America's worst cities actually do have El Salvador levels of crime. E.g. in 2019, the year Bukele was elected, El Salvador had 36 homicides per 100,000, while Detroit had 40, New Orleans had 41, Baltimore had 59, and Saint Louis had 66.
I'm not aware of any major US cities that reached El Salvador's 2015 homicide peak of 103, though.
> America's worst cities actually do have El Salvador levels of crime. E.g. in 2019, the year Bukele was elected, El Salvador had 36 homicides per 100,000, while Detroit had 40, New Orleans had 41, Baltimore had 59, and Saint Louis had 66.
I don't think those numbers are comparable. The United States has lower levels of homicide than that. It's true that murders are concentrated in certain locales and therefore the residents of Baltimore experience a murder rate that is above the national average.
But this is surely also true of El Salvador! Bukele's popularity doesn't come from bringing the murder rate down from 36 per hundred thousand nationally -- it comes from bringing the murder rate down from something a lot higher than that locally! This implies that Detroit's 40 homicides per hundred thousand residents is, in fact, not at "El Salvador levels".
On Sunday Peter Hermann and Jasmine Hilton reported for the Washington Post: Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8), whose district includes the place where three people were fatally shot and two others wounded Saturday night, said in a text message, “We need the National Guard in D.C.” “The crime is out of control and getting worse by the day,” White said. “Kids and innocent people are getting killed. It’s becoming status quo with no end in sight.” D.C. has recorded at least 158 homicides this year, according to a police spokesman, an increase of about 22 percent over this time in 2022 that puts the city on a trajectory for its deadliest year in two decades. By Tuesday the city’s official homicide total had reached 161. In a little more than seven months, the number of D.C. homicides now exceeds the 12-month totals for each of the three years ending in 2018.
* * *
Kate Ryan of WTOP radio reports: Standing not far from where three people were shot and killed in the Anacostia neighborhood Saturday night, D.C. Ward 8 Council member Trayon White called for the deployment of the National Guard to help the District get a grip on the tide of killings that have taken place... “I know those who live here know that we are clearly in a war zone,” he declared. “I’m going to say it again: We are clearly in a war zone.” As he repeated the phrase, the crowd joined in on those last four words and chanted along with him: “In! A! War! Zone!” White was referencing the words of acting D.C. police Chief Pamela Smith, who said over the weekend that the District was not a war zone, despite the jump in deadly shootings.
7. Since the very beginning of leftist radicalism its attraction has been religious in nature. It proposed an apocalypse -- the Revolution -- that would lead to a paradise on earth: communism. They could be optimistic because they thought that the revolution was historically inevitable and that human nature could be reformed and perfected thereafter.
The collapse of the Soviet Union killed that dream. The one they took up after it is the environmental apocalypse, that can only be prevented by reforming humanity. A task that may be impossible. Redemption is no longer inevitable. Now they are becoming despondent.
Conservatives have never believed that humanity could be redeemed by its own actions. They have believed that not strait thing can be made from the crooked timber of humanity. They believe that happy is the man who puts his trust in Jacob's god (Ps. 146:5). They can be happy. They can look at mankind and laugh.
Theist conservatives believe in a fixed moral truth outside of their own subjective perceptions and that fixed, external truth lends meaning and purpose to their lives. Whether they are right or wrong, believing your existence is meaningful leads to happiness. Atheist liberals are necessarily adrift in their own subjectivity. The only truth they can believe in is a strictly physical, materialist truth as defined and measured by the scientific method, this has no bearing on morality and is unable to create meaning or purpose. Environmentalism (in its religious sense) arises as an attempt to give physical matter some sort of greater spiritual purpose or meaning, to the point where many who follow this creed are apparently able to feel some happiness imagining a pristine earth in which humanity has been eliminated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement). But it seems illusory to me to find happiness in some hypothetical future which may never exist and, even if it eventually does, you will never be able to contemplate or enjoy because you have - necessarily - already disappeared into absolute nothingness.
...belief that AI is of paramount importance (ie. it will either save or doom humanity), is the other attempt to raise material, scientifically-obtained truths into the realm of the spiritual...
One cannot dispute the inalienable right to PURSUE happiness. If some people gain happiness by imagining a universe without people then they are welcome to do so, and no one has the power to take that away.
Atheists must define their own purpose(s). As pointed out, it doesn't matter for happiness purposes whether the purposes are actually true or not, so long as the belief is and pursuit of them is genuine, so the atheist may pursue happiness in his/her own way.
I do wonder about this right to pursue happiness. Is it inalienable? Is it even a right?
But whether or which, I think the very important distinction nearly all of us miss is that it's a right to PURSUE happiness. It says nothing about whether we will BE happy. We can pursue happiness and fail to achieve it. I think most people conflate that right to pursue happiness with "I have a right to BE happy and if I'm not happy, Something Must Be Done - the goverment or somebody must make it so that I'm happy".
You may well be right in the misinterpretation of the pursuit. No one has the right to BE happy, only to pursue it. The only one that can take away your right to pursue happiness is...you.
No one actually has a right to life or liberty, at least not an inalienable right. One must earn it, or have it provided by someone else.
It's not that there's a right to pursue happiness, it's that there's a general right to do what you want (as long as you don't X, Y or Z) and that most people will if left to their own devices, pursue happiness.
But there's nothing stopping you from using that right to pursue sadness, if sadness is what floats your boat.
"Inalienable" means "can't be taken away", and it clearly can be taken away. More of a verbal flourish than anything that actually adds meaning.
"Atheist liberals are necessarily adrift in their own subjectivity. The only truth they can believe in is a strictly physical, materialist truth as defined and measured by the scientific method, this has no bearing on morality and is unable to create meaning or purpose"
Where do you... find... these people? Like is this a Platonic construct that disposes with the messy stuff of actually asking a living and breathing atheist liberal if he's "adrift in his own subjectivity" and only believes in "materialist truth as defined and measured by the scientific method".
"Honey, I'm going to conduct an experiment to measure the concentration of endorphins in my blood to determine my true feelings for you. I will update my Bayesian priors of the likelihood of our relationship continuation for the next defined period based on the results".
I am considering atheism in the strictest sense., ie. there is nothing beyond the absolutely physical-material world as measurable by science. Everything not measurable by science is superstition. A true atheist cannot, for example, consider love as anything more than just a series of chemical reactions in their brain (like you allude to in the facetious last part of your comment). Believing in some kind of overarching purpose or meaning for human existence becomes a superstition. In this case, one would necessarily become aware that the only possibility to derive meaning would be from within one's own brain or, somehow, from the purely physical world (including the other lumps of purposeless flesh with whom one interacts). And I think that believing in this scenario certainly makes it harder to be happy (which doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true...)
Why are you considering something that doesn't exist? (ok, in a world of 8 billion people almost any weirdness can exist, but come on). You created a cardboard caricature that is even worse than "homo economicus" of the Chicago School. My last sentence was over-the-top satire designed to illustrate the absurdity of your "true atheist" creation. I cannot fathom you take a proposition that there are millions and millions of people who actually think this way seriously.
Okay, so you are saying that we all believe in some non-strictly-materialist concepts which give our lives meaning. I think that is probably true. But then why so much ridicule of people who believe in a god in order to give their lives meaning?
Yes, we do. As to "why ridicule", I don't know what to say... Dawkins is a jerk? There are jerks / inconsiderate people / Elon Musk who enjoy ridiculing others for the sake of it? Especially online, where the danger of the sharp end of an elbow violently colliding with their orbital bones in response is... remote? I'm with you, we all can do with less ridicule and more empathy, and Twitter should die, like literally crossed out of existence.
Anyone going far enough to actually reject all superstitions is going far enough to outright choose a purpose according to personal taste — as an exercise of the sovereign personal authority to do so.
And note that the other clumps of matter are not obligated to be purposeless either: they might, as an emergent property, also have chosen a purpose, or, worse but still not nothing, have accepted a purpose advertised by yet other clumps. Whatever they chose is their own purpose, though.
Yes, the idea of choosing a purpose or creating your own purpose from within yourself is, I believe, the standard atheist attempt at finding meaning in a godless world. Personally I reject that utterly. I cannot see anyway that anything truely meaningful could emerge entirely from within my own limited and isolated consciousness. (But then you would probably just say that my rejection of such a possibility is the "purpose" I have chosen...)
Well, I reject even that meaninglessness is the worst case, it's a zero, and what many religions (or VHEM, if we do not call them an atheistic religion) offer is a clear (to me) negative.
The theists who claim that a materialist universe is less meaningful than one made by their God are many, but the next one to offer a coherent explanation of why will be the first.
The problem is that you have proceeded from the undefended assumption that to be someone else's property is a necessary condition for a meaningful life. If I accept this as an axiom, then sure, it follows that -- given we do not live in a society where humans are allowed to own one another -- the only possible way to grant life meaning would be to discover a super-slaveowner who is too powerful to be bound by our society's laws. But I don't.
"The problem is that you have proceeded from the undefended assumption that to be someone else's property is a necessary condition for a meaningful life". Are you trying to say that the defining characteristic of god is that we are his/her property? Where did you get that idea? If there is a god, then he/she gave us life (without which nothing - including the concept of property, the concept of law, or the concept of life itself - as far as your or I are concerned, exists). And this hypothetical god would seem to have made us free, ie. gave us a free will which we can use to do whatever we want. I don't know how an entity which brought your consciousness (and thus, your universe) into existence and gave you the moral freedom to do whatever you want could be considered a slaveowner? (though in the Christian tradition I guess Lucifer indeed thought so!). And if there is a god, then society's laws would only be mimicking what would be divine laws so its a bit silly to speak about such a god not being subject to "our" laws. Frankly your conception of god seems rather more akin to that of a comic book villain...
>Are you trying to say that the defining characteristic of god is that we are his/her property?
No, I'm saying the defining characteristic of ownership is that if X owns Y, then X decides what purpose Y is meant to be used for. It's possible to conceive of a god that exists but does not own us, but such a god would not be able to impose purpose on us without our consent, which would make your earlier argument irrelevant.
I mention "theist conservatives", not conservatives in general, and the "weird beliefs" you mention, ie. believing in a fixed moral truth (God, if you prefer), is implicit in the "theist" part. And I think its fair to say that most theists are conservatives as most atheists are liberals. Atheist conservatives (of which there are some, no doubt), are a mystery to me...
Even many (most?) theist conservatives don't believe those things. Ask a random Christian conservative whether "no strait thing can be made from the crooked timber of humanity" and they'll probably have no idea what you're talking about
"Gods are capricious" - yes, in the sense of the greek gods or those gods that show up in Marvel comics, but those have nothing in common with the concept of "god" in the context which I am using it in (which is that god = fixed-moral-truth = love)
In the comment I responded to, you explicitly contrast "theist" with "atheist". So no, that's not the way you're using the concept of "god". Believing in a fixed moral truth is not implicit in non-atheism.
The aggravating thing, and Freddie de Boer recognises this, is that this kind of action is in fact patronising and harmful. 'Let's do away with anything challenging because we can't expect the poor/minority kids to be able to handle it' which in effect means "they're stupid, it's not their fault, they were born stupid and can't change that". That is way more insulting than "Jamal failed the advanced maths test" because okay, maybe Jamal just isn't good at maths, many of us are not! But doing away with the advanced maths test because "Jamal is too stupid to pass and if he fails it will hurt his little feelings and we can't have that" is way, way worse. It's writing off Jamal as stupid and that all school will be for him is babysitting, maybe we can teach him to write his own name.
Probably kids have fallen behind due to the pandemic and lockdowns and remote schooling, and a heck of a lot of remedial teaching is needed. But dumping classes because "some kids will be better prepared than others, and that's not fair" is not helping anyone. It's not helping the kids who fell behind, and it's not helping the more able or better prepared kids.
Well, they also do their best to write off maths itself, another of those insidious arbitrary colonialist tools of oppression invented by dead white dudes to keep everybody else down. Their own "education" was likely structured so as to remove any indications contradicting this worldview.
Something similar happens with reading where non-phonics based approaches are taught. The kids can't read, the parents know it, the parents that can afford it get their kids private tutors, the rest can't. And this if for 1st/2nd graders!
I honestly don't remember learning to read, but I was about four and a half when I started school (a bit later than the usual age of four in Ireland at the time, as preschools and kindergartens were not yet a thing) and I could read by then, having been taught at home by my mother, my father, and my grandmother.
Here's where the ignorance comes in: is it really that hard to teach your kids to read, yourself? Do you really have to spend hours at a time drilling them? I think I mostly learned to read out of a copy of "The Cat in the Hat" 😁
The existence of private reading tutors suggests your logic is incorrect. Many parents don’t have the time, desire, or knowledge to teach their own kids to read. Some can afford to outsource this task to make up for failures of schools to teach reading effectively.
Perhaps the Chinese GDP trend is explained partially by biased statistics? If growth is 4% each year but you say it is 5%, at first no one will be able to call you on it but after many years it'll be obvious you've been exaggerating, since the gap will grow.
Wasn’t Ravens the IQ test that autists tended to do better on relative to other tests? I think Michelle Dawson suggested that was the case in her CWT, and that it was especially true for autists that were not very verbal. But I haven’t seen anything else on the topic since then.
Well, that denial that Ravens tests anything well and that verbal ability is more g-loaded is very flattering to my vanity, because on an online Ravens test I scored a whopping 98 IQ (whoo! go me!) whereas I crush vocabulary tests 😁
Naturally, anything that says "no, you are Really Smart based on words words words" is stroking my ego the right way!
I thought vocabulary tests were afraid to be in the same room as you, because they *understood* what all the words you'd inevitably throw at them mean.
Re 4: Goldman Sachs is not in the economics mainstream, and no growth economist paid attention to what GS said.
The default assumption was always that once its catch-up growth petered out, China would have great difficulty transitioning to a frontier-of-productivity growth regime because of structural factors, demographics, and antiproductive institutions. (Not just counterproductive, antiproductive.)
Greater variability in whichever gender has dissimilar sex chromosomes could be down to reversed causality: perhaps in species for which one gender would benefit from variability, there's an evolutionary incentive to develop mechanisms to provide such variability, _one_ of which is dissimilar chromosomes.
This would explain why Kierkegaard finds the chromosomes aren't the whole story: they're just one mechanism among several, all of which confer advantage.
(This is pure armchair reasoning though. I can think of lots of plausible stories for why variability would be beneficial, but I don't know if they're true in practice for the species in question).
The Kaiserist dystopia is provocative in a good way as in making us look at our society from a new angle. However, the dystopia's author perspective is that of a middle- (or even upper-) class person, and people working 12 hours a day or more, starving in Ireland or being driven from the land they had lived on for centuries probably wouldn't have said that that was the time of great liberty.
I was never much impressed by Snopes but crikey, they've really gone downhill: uncritically accepting claims that are very dubious:
"Again, names often tell a story and two of Martha’s brothers were given Jewish names, Sidney and Jerome"
Well, gosh: I guess that means Sidney Poitier is Jewish? Jerome K. Jerome must be double-Jewish? And naturally Saint Jerome must be the most Jewish of all!
"According to Max Wallace and Jonathan Goldstein, authors of "Schmelvis: In Search of Elvis Presley's Jewish Roots," Nancy Burdine “probably” came from a family that immigrated from Lithuania around the time of the American Revolution."
That "probably" is doing a lot of work. And they can definitely pin down that the Burdines (whatever the original spelling or form of the name) who emigrated around 1776 are the same family as Nancy Burdine's family, can they? Because two damn seconds looking it up tells me:
"The surname Burdine was first found in Brittany (French: Bretagne), where the family held a family seat from ancient times" and "The most Burdine families were found in USA in 1880. In 1840 there were 6 Burdine families living in South Carolina. This was about 20% of all the recorded Burdines in the USA" and "BURDINE Name Meaning Altered form of French Bourdin. History: This surname is listed along with its original form Bourdin in the (US) National Huguenot Society's register of qualified Huguenot ancestors."
So - Lithuanian Jews or French Huguenots? Your guess is as good as mine, but not for Snopes, apparently.
"So Presley’s maternal great-great grandmother was Jewish"
So we get from "probably" and "had names that could be Jewish if you think of them in that way" to "she was and so he was". *Even* if that was true, and his great-great-grandmother was 100% Jewish, then Gladys would have been one-eighth Jewish and Elvis one-sixteenth. That's "real Cherokee Princess" levels, and we don't even know if Nancy *was* 100% Jewish.
Which I am going to think was not the case because, uh, her dad was a minister:
Born in Saltillo, Lee, Mississippi, USA on Abt. 1805 to Reverend John Fletcher Burdine and Susannah Tarrant. Nancy J Burdine married Abner Hampton Tackett and had 7 children. She passed away on 1860 in Saltillo, Lee, Mississippi, United States."
Reverend Burdine was born in South Carolina, which matches up with what is said above about the Burdines in the USA and I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose that the descendant of French Huguenots is more likely to become a Protestant clergyman than the descendant of Lithuanian Jews, call me crazy, I know, it's a wild guess!
Whatever money Snopes is making, pay me about half of that for twice the accuracy!
EDIT: Genealogy is fascinating; another website says that Abner Tackett was born in South Carolina (so that matches up with the Burdines) and Nancy's daughter Martha was born in Mississippi.
Though that may be wrong, because another site says he was born in 1803 in Kentucky. Given this variance, I'm dubious about "we were able to trace back to 1776" on accuracy of which Burdines (Bourdons, etc.) were which. Because this article claims Abner was never married to Nancy at all, he had two other spouses, so even if Nancy was Jewish, she's not related to Elvis at all!
"I utilized the extensive tools and records available at Ancestry.com and started my search for Elvis’ roots by building a family tree for him. Starting with Elvis’ date of birth and using what information I could find on him; I was able to build the tree out to the point where the rumour about Nancy Burdine starts.
Whether Elvis is Jewish comes down to one critical fact… who was Elvis’ great great grandmother? Was it Nancy J. Burdine or great great grandfather Abner Tackett’s first wife, Celia Ann Butler? Which one was the actual mother of Elvis’ great grandmother Martha Sue Tackett?
...By the 1870 Federal Census Abner is living in Lee County, Mississippi with Sarah Willett, who, according to the Mississippi U.S. Compiled Marriage Index 1776-1935, becomes his second wife in July of 1873. Living with them are the two of the younger Tackett children, Sidney and Jerome and three other children. Of the three other children, one is a 13-year-old boy, who could either be a previous child of Sarah or possibly her much younger sibling, and the other two are younger children, presumably children of Abner and Sarah. Martha married Albert White Mansell in January of 1870 and is living next door to the rest of the family at the time of the 1870 census.
...What I also didn’t find was any record that shows a Nancy J. Burdine in the life of Abner, Celia, or any of the children. I found many Nancy J. Burdine records, but none that had any sourced connection to the Tackett family."
I'm wondering about this cousin Oscar who said he was at school in Tennessee with Nancy and that she was Jewish:
"According to Elvis’ third cousin Oscar Tackett (who shared the same ancestors Abner and Nancy), Nancy was Jewish. She and Abner had met as schoolmates in Tennessee". Was he just embroidering a family story? Was he claiming to be related to the big famous star? Who knows?
Yes but I think Jewish law sees people as Jewish through the matrilineal line. Which actually makes sense as it is the only line we can actually be certain of.
That's if you go by the Orthodox religious definition (and there are contentions around that, where people ask why the child of a Jewish father is not considered Jewish and the Conservative branch):
"The practice of matrilineal descent differs by denomination. Each denomination has protocols for conversion for those who are not Jewish by birth.
Orthodox Judaism practices matrilineal descent. Orthodox Judaism holds that anyone with a Jewish mother also has irrevocable Jewish status; that even were such a Jew to convert to another religion, that person would still be considered Jewish by Jewish Law."
Even there, I think that if there have been generations of marrying out with Gentiles, the descendants are not going to be considered Jewish, but I don't know the ins and outs of that. So perhaps they might indeed regard "if your mother was Jewish, then you're Jewish even if you're raised as a Christian or no belief", and that continues down through the generations:
"The Israeli Chief Rabbinate requires documents proving the Jewishness of one’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother when applying for marriage.
...In general, Orthodox Judaism considers individuals born of Jewish mothers to be Jewish, even if they convert to or are raised in another religion.
Historically, a Jew who has been declared to be a heretic (Hebrew: מין, romanized: min) or Christian (Hebrew: נוצרי, romanized: notzri, meaning "Nazarene") may have had a cherem (similar to excommunication) placed on him or her; but the practice of communal and religious exclusion does not affect their status of Jewish birth. Judaism also views as Jewish those who involuntarily convert from Judaism to another religion (Hebrew: anusim, אנוסים, meaning "forced ones"), and their matrilineal descendants are likewise considered to be Jewish.
The same rules in principle apply to the matrilineal descendants of such persons, though some rabbinical authorities may require stricter proof of Jewish descent than others. Whether such persons are required to undergo a full formal conversion depends on the community and their individual circumstances. For example, a male who has had a brit milah, who has a general understanding of Judaism, but who has been raised in a secular home might not be required to undergo ritual conversion. However, a male who has not had a brit milah, a male or female who has converted to or been brought up in another religion, or an individual raised in a completely secular home without any Jewish education, in most communities, may be required to undergo a full ritual conversion. For full participation in the community (for example, to marry with the participation of a rabbi), they may be required to display sincerity, such as a declaration of commitment to Judaism."
As I said, even if it were true, it's about the same level of Elizabeth Warren being Native American: an ancestor way back doesn't make you that. So *if* Nancy Burdine was born of a Jewish family, then her matrilineal descendants could be considered Jewish, but Elvis would have had to formally convert or make some other declaration to be accepted into the community. But I don't think it has been established beyond doubt that her family line was Jewish (and not French).
Consider the viewpoint of a very high authority: Unsong
“No.” Jalaketu smiled. “My mother was a Hindu, but Hinduism passes through the paternal line. My father, perhaps if he teaches me Torah then he is Jewish. But Judaism passes through the maternal line. I am nothing.”
No because baptism for the dead has no effect unless the person accepts it. We do not count those they have baptized on any sort of census or tally sheet. Ultimately, we plan on baptizing everyone and letting God sort it out.
> "Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work."
I'm confused here. The authors found no effect on mean incomes between their two cohorts (waitlist admits/rejects), but show that the chances of being in the top 1% of incomes go up substantially. Doesn't this imply that the Ivy-Plus cohort also was overrepresented at the lower end of income (or at least, there must be some range in which the non-Ivy group outperforms the Ivy group for income to make the means the same)? I wasn't able to find any discussion of this from the authors, but it seems peculiar.
They find nearly 0 effect on mean income *percentile*
So, maybe 3 Harvard kids end up at the 80th, 90th, and 99th percentile. Maybe 3 Berkeley kids end up at 84th, 90th, 95th percentiles - that would be 0 effect on mean income percentile, but a large effect on mean income.
But also, they did find a small mean income percentile effect (about 2pp IIRC), so in my above contrived example you could end up with
Harvard: 85, 91, 99
Berkeley: 84, 90, 95
And that's broadly consistent with the study. The point being that a large increase in top-1% earning wouldn't show up very much in the mean income percentile statistic. For this reason, there wouldn't be much effect to "cancel out" via lower incomes.
While I generally think it vastly more probably that Eliezer will win his bet than not, I think he discounts a fairly obvious and plausible scenario for how aliens might generally remain hidden but occasionally fly around in big sighted biologically piloted craft that crash: the alien laws specify that they should not interfere with us, but occasionally individual aliens piloting their personal joy-craft disregard the law in favor of skimming by earth so they can freak out the primitives. The law is probably such that outright revealing yourself will get you caught and harshly punished, but UFO style sighting are hard to detect and/or prove in court. Alternatively, the aliens are running a primitive society tour and occasionally the tour boats malfunction because the company is skimping on maintenance costs in a misguided attempt to improve profit margins, thus rendering their craft either temporarily visible or causing them to crash.
Small possible correction on point 22, near as I can tell from Google, Sarah Jane Baker has not raped anyone, and was in fact raped herself. Possible I missed a story that was buried by Google, but I read a lot of articles to check. Unless you have a source for rapist, I suggest you cross our that word. Everything else is accurate, and imo inexcusable.
Yes, it seems this person is not a rapist, they're a murderer (attempted):
"Sarah Jane Baker is a talented musician, poet and author who has served 25 years of a life sentence for the attempted murder of another prisoner. The winner of countless awards and a qualified counsellor, she is (as Alan Baker before her transition) the author of Life Imprisonment: An Unofficial Guide (Waterside Press, 2013)."
25 years in the UK for only an attempted murder is a hefty sentence, I think that the talented fabulous wonderful person may not be *completely* telling all the messy details here. Though presumably, if you're already doing time for torture and assault, a second attempt at murder will bump up the amount of time you're serving.
Let's have a deeper dig. "The Pink News" can probably be considered not a TERF or conservative publication:
"The activist was released on parole in 2019 after serving 30 years of a life sentence for kidnapping and torturing her stepmother’s brother in the late 1980s and the later attempted murder of a child rapist while she was in prison.
In 2020, during her imprisonment, Baker told PinkNews that she suffered physical attacks, had been stabbed, and had been raped a number of times as a result of being trans."
"At the age of 19, in 1989, she was convicted of kidnapping and torturing her stepmother’s brother, and was given a nine-year tariff. She was later given a life sentence for the attempted murder of a child rapist while she was in prison."
What a charmer. And was the prisoner they attacked a child rapist? I don't know, other articles say "alleged" so whether that's lawyer speak or whether they mean "the only person who says this is so is Baker" I leave up to you to decide.
Account of what this 19 year old and their brother did to their stepbrother, with seemingly no remorse afterwards:
This is a *very* sceptical account of Baker's claims, so this could well be exaggerated in the other direction, but my admittedly biased impression is that Baker is a violent, dangerous person who now relishes all the attention they are getting for being "a transgender prisoner" and is providing all the lurid stories of being attacked, assaulted, raped etc. while in jail in order to keep the sympathisers on side:
"In 2014 Baker made an allegation of assault and torture by two prison officers on the way back from an appointment at Charing Cross Hospital’s gender clinic. The prison has denied the claims."
Yeah, I think that qualifies as "rapist". Looking at Baker's appearance in the video, and this is my personal biased opinion, they're not a woman (even a trans woman). They're a man in a dress. They're probably not trans, they're one of that subset of violent men who suddenly (when in prison or faced with prison) discover that actually they are A Real Woman. It's really odd how many rapists/sexual assaulters suddenly discover their real inner feminity:
"MtF transitioners were over 6 times more likely to be convicted of an offence than female comparators and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent offence. The group had no statistically significant differences from other natal males, for convictions in general or for violent offending. The group examined were those who committed to surgery, and so were more tightly defined than a population based solely on self-declaration.
...The question of whether transwomen match male or female patterns of criminality is specifically addressed by the 2020 FOI referenced by Fair Play For Women (who have submitted evidence to the Committee). This is first time there has been official data to compare the rate of sex offending in 3 different groups. Men vs women vs transwomen. The hyperlinks below link to the FOI spreadsheet.
MOJ stats show 76 of the 129 male-born prisoners identifying as transgender (not counting any with GRCs) have at least 1 conviction of sexual offence. This includes 36 convictions for rape and 10 for attempted rape. These are clearly male type crimes (rape is defined as penetration with a penis).
Here is the number compared with figures for sex offending rates in men and women over the same period. Comparisons of official MOJ statistics from March / April 2019 (most recent official count of transgender prisoners):
76 sex offenders out of 129 transwomen = 58.9%
125 sex offenders out of 3,812 women in prison = 3.3%
13,234 sex offenders out of 78,781 men in prison = 16.8%
Michael Biggs, ‘The Transition from Sex to Gender in English Prisons: Human Rights and Queer Theory’, SocArXiv, 17 May 2020
On pages 10 and 11 Biggs reference the MOJ and Fair Play for Women statistics. On page 11 he states:
‘Of the 125 transgender prisoners counted by the prison service in 2017, 60 had been convicted of sexual offenses, including 27 convicted of rape (BBC News 2018). In the overall prison population, by comparison, 19% of males had been convicted of sexual crimes and only 4% of females (Ministry of Justice 2018).’"
I know Blanchard's theory gets a lot of criticism, but I do think that for a subset of those claiming to be trans, AGP fits the bill a lot better. Part fetish, part "I can game the system for better treatment". Baker, to me, is one of these.
> they're one of that subset of violent men who suddenly (when in prison or faced with prison) discover that actually they are A Real Woman.
I wonder, if maybe women are actually *more* violent than men, but because they are physically weaker on average, their violence typically causes less damage, so it is taken less seriously.
If this hypothesis is true, then trans women get the worst possible combination: a violent female mind in a physically strong male body.
35 Ravens is a TERRIBLE IQ test for a reason not mentioned by Jensen. If you could get a culture-blind test at the expense problems mentioned in the link, that would be a great tradeoff. I assume everyone using it knows these problems and thinks it's a great tradeoff. But the real problem is that it has a huge learning effect. This is particularly bad for cross-cultural comparisons and negates its whole purpose. It is the least culture-blind test and thus good for nothing.
We would like IQ tests to be a measure of what people can learn. But the fact that everyone gets much better at Ravens after taking it, without even seeing the answers, shows that it is about things that are very easy to learn. People who score highly on it are probably people who have been exposed to the kind of problems before. If it were a measure of expensive years of education/exposure, that would be good for something, but it might be just a measure of superficial exposure. In particular, people who do very badly on it, like people in the third world or people in the developed world before the Flynn effect, probably can be quickly brought up to speed.
Jensen mentions test-retest reliability. That should include the learning effect, but particular measurements might not if they just define it as correlation. Moreover, he assumes it away by interpreting the failure of reliability as noise. The first comment on the post, by Emil Kierkegaard, mentions the learning effect as perhaps a bigger problem than the problems Jensen mentions, but I think he really underplays the problem.
"The rule-dependence model explains the commonalities between the
Flynn effect and IQ gains via retesting" by Elijah L. Armstrong and Michael A. Woodley
Silly observation perhaps, but re: 19, looking at the long-term graph, I find it deeply ironic that the previous local maximum in trust in government being (literally) 1984. TINACBNIEAC
18. I'm personally skeptical of the interpretation that the Ivy League increasing one's chance of being in the top 1% by 60% is important. I haven't read the full study yet but I've skimmed it and read the earlier Dale & Krueger study that found no result for the average student. This is anecdotal, but the students that I knew who went to Ivy Leagues (this is mostly in the last few years) were treating it as a safety net preventing low incomes or a raise to the median income, not a better chance of getting a high income. Claiming that this result then validates societal preferences feels like moving the goalposts. I'm also skeptical of a few bits of the methodology, although again I need to look into this more and it's on my list of things to read. The big one is that they compare waitlist admits to other people on the waitlist; all the things I read when applying to college a few years ago say that waitlist admits aren't random.
> The big one is that they compare waitlist admits to other people on the waitlist; all the things I read when applying to college a few years ago say that waitlist admits aren't random.
The authors go to great pains to show they are effectively random. They also show the two groups match on basically all observed variables. They also show that getting off (e.g.) Harvard's waitlist doesn't correlate with getting off (e.g.) Yale's waitlist, which suggests they largely match on unobserved variables too.
My understanding is that waitlists are generally used to plug "gaps" in the class (e.g., if it looks like too many athletes and legacies have matriculated, they'll let in some really academically gifted applicants who were otherwise borderline in order to bring the SAT scores and GPAs reported to the various ranking organizations back up to par). Undergrad admissions tend to be something of a black box, but for law school admissions at least, which I'm much more familiar with, waitlist admits tend to be disproportionately "splitters" (people with a particularly high LSAT but low GPA and vice versa), indicating that they're admitting people specifically to balance out impressive but "lopsided" people they've already admitted. Since different schools have different things they need to balance at the end of the admission cycle, it makes sense that success at one school wouldn't correlate with success at another.
I don't know if you're intending to argue that your thesis invalidates the study, but, if so, I disagree. Group assignment doesn't need to be truly random to infer causation from an experiment (or quasi experiment)* - the assignment must merely be independent of the shared variance between the variables of interest. In my opinion, your story is completely consistent with this and so doesn't really cast any doubt on the validity of the causal inference.
If you were merely commenting and not arguing, mea culpa - that's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before.
* Its unclear that "truly random" is even a coherent concept anyway, except insofar as it means "independent of anything we care about"
Tyler's congestion pricing claim confuses me. I've mostly understood congestion pricing as being a tax on cars, whether they are owned by a resident or not, and usually applied to something like a highway or bridge or tunnel, not a neighborhood. Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I can't say I've seen a lot of YIMBYs say that locals should be exempted.
edit 2: he says that demand curves slope downward, but the capacity of cars is low so the total number of people being discouraged from going in at all isn't that high (the fact that alternatives already exist also make this slop very low). I think this ends up being outweighed by the increased desirability of the city itself.
Once had a patient walk up to my (pharmacy) consultation window and start with "so I accidentally mixed bleach and ammonia", didn't even let them finish, told them they need to go (literally next door where there was a hospital) to the ER NOW.
Per #24, on PEPFAR, I looked into it, and my summary of the situation is different from Scott's. Basically, it's not about PEPFAR funds being used for abortions, as far as I can tell -- it's about PEPFAR funds being used for pro-choice advocacy in foreign countries. Republicans are being pressured by pro-life advocacy groups that care about this, and have a lot of sway over Republican voters. Hopefully it's okay for me to repost a comment from a previous thread, since it's relevant here, too:
>> Looks like the pro-life groups object to PEPFAR funds being used to lobby foreign governments to enact pro-choice legislation. That seems like a pretty normal stance for a political advocacy group to take: "We will rate you badly if you vote to give money to groups who lobby against our cause." The specific organizations they accuse of doing this are Population Services International, Village Reach and Pathfinder International. Who knows whether it's true or not. Seems like a screwed-up situation.
People sort of conflate PEPFAR with the fact the public health community discovered around the turn of the century that HIV meds not only prevent AIDS but prevent spread of HIV…but any American that supports reducing funds that definitively reduce spread of HIV even on a different continent would be the biggest fucking moron on the planet!
Since this got linked in Open Thread 290, I'll add some urls for posterity.
Here's a dear colleague letter from Chris Smith, the Republican who seems to be spearheading the effort. It contains the specific accusations I mentioned.
And, if you're interested in the actual right-wing position on this issue, and the way it fits into their broader political views, this longish essay from The Heritage Foundation explains it:
Oh, and I think my initial understanding of it was somewhat wrong, too, when I said, "it's not about PEPFAR funds being used for abortions", since there are definitely Republicans and pro-life advocacy groups who say that PEPFAR funds are being used for abortions. I'd walk that back, some.
For 35: Raven's, it's important to note the definition of "good IQ test" when you say Raven's is not one. The definition of "good IQ test" is "correlates well with established IQ batteries, which often test vocab and math". It's no surprise that Raven's correlates less well with an IQ battery that tests math and vocab than math and vocab tests do.
As I often remark, there is no such thing as "True Intelligence" and just because all IQ tests correlate it does not follow that you can statistically extract the One True IQ and have it be independent of the choice of battery. The g factor is dependent on the battery choice.
The studies that show the g factor is indifferent to the battery used are bunk. They are based on a misunderstanding of how factor analysis works. I wrote about it here:
As far as I am aware there are exactly two studies that show the g factor does not depend on the battery. They have overlapping authors and both make the exact same mistake (as I explained in my reddit post).
I'm considering something like this. It's not my field so I'd have to figure out the norms regarding these things (e.g. which venue, do I submit as a paper or a letter or something else, etc.). Perhaps I should also collect some other papers (not about g factor invariance) that also make the same mistake.
Those are the same thing. The way to measure "high g loading" is to use a battery of IQ tests; the g loading is a correlation with the g factor, which is itself a summary statistic of a bunch of IQ tests. So "g loading" equals "correlation with certain other IQ tests".
Number 6 reminds me of a Dave Barry anecdote. He was staying with his friend, mystery author Ridley Pearson, while he was on a book tour or vacation or something, when the two of them went to the grocery store. While they were grinding coffee at the in-store grinder, Pearson suddenly paused, stared at the grinder, and said something like, "You could put poison in the grinder," (or in the beans, I can't remember), "and later someone would come along, grind some beans, and end up being poisoned. It would be untraceable." Then he went his merry way, leaving Barry standing there thinking about how he was a guest in this man's house.
That's not really the same thing; poison-in-the-coffee-grinder is potentially untraceable (depending on whether the store has in-store cameras), but it also doesn't target anyone. You'll just end up poisoning a bunch of people unknown to you. There's no point.
37 one more time: It is not necessary to bring in any Mormon-specific cultural theory to explain the drop in their fertility rate, since they are following the same trajectory of other late-starting groups.
It is a characteristic of the demographic transition (the transition from women having many children to having on average 2.1 children or below) that groups which start the transition late, usually move faster to low fertility than groups who started the transition earlier. So if Mormons kept their fertility high longer than other faiths in the US, their transition to low fertility should happen more rapid than among US faiths that started the transition earlier.
We see this pattern also between countries. Fertility decline has been much more rapid in Middle East countries during the last two decades than the earlier, comparable fertility decline in Europe. In short: Start late, and you move faster to low fertility.
The demographic transition is also characterized by hierarchical diffusion: Urban high-educated women reduce their fertility first, rural women and women with lower education reduce their fertility later. But they eventually do.
With regard to Hasidic versus secular Jews in Israel, Hasidic Jews have much higher fertility, but the trend is downward [edit: if takes into consideration that there is net transition out of the Hasidic community]. The most traditional Hasidic communities are losing members to less-traditional forms (that is, quite a lot of young members leave the most traditional communities, and there are few who convert in). This is likely to speed up fertility decline, since less-traditional versions of a faith (almost any faith) is correlated with lower fertility.
I do not know of there is also significant net conversion from Mormonism, at least in its most traditional forms, to more "modern" Mormonism and/or other faiths (including the faith of non-faith). If so, this is an added factor that will speed up fertility decline among people born into the Mormon faith. Could be interesting to know.
Interesting, that is somewhat lower than I have seen elsewhere. Thanks for the graph! That said, Haredi Judaism is composed of several groups, and the differences between them - as well as the degree of traditional practice within each of them (in particular among younger members) - may vary, even though they continue to self-identify as members. I am not an expert on the internal distinctions within Haredi Judaism by any means, to make that clear! But I notice the following from an article on the issue:
"Regev’s preliminary figures distinguish between the non-Hasidic so-called Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community and Sephardi Haredim. They show that, when all of the age groups are included, the dropout rate in the Hasidic community is 5%; compared to 13% among Lithuanian Haredim; and 30% among Sephardim. Regev attributed the high Sephardi dropout rate to the shift towards ultra-Orthodoxy among Sephardim about two decades ago. Now there is a tendency among the subsequent generation to return to what would be defined as a “traditional” but non-Orthodox lifestyle....When the three segments of the ultra-Orthodox population are combined, the data indicate an overall 15% to 18% dropout rate among Haredim."
As to your point connecting shifts within the Haredi population to decreasing Haredi fertility, the graphs here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1665925810018975744 suggest that Haredi fertility has not declined significantly (data ends 2017).
As to whether former Haredim who cease to be counted as Haredim lower their fertility, that doesn't seem to be significant enough to be noticeable. The following graph shows total fertility rates to be somewhat increasing (although the labelling is less clear).
In short, I see no evidence that "the trend is downward."
[It may be true that the child of someone who identifies as Haredi will on average have fewer children than their parents, since there is a chance they will stop being Haredi (and a chance that if they do, that they will have lower fertility than they would otherwise), but that is independent of net transition. Even if more people joined the Haredi community than left it, that would still be true.]
I am not wholly sure of the graph (From Twitter/X) showing increased fertility for all Jews 1979-2017. According to World Bank data, aggregate fertility went down in Israel, from 3.30 to 3.11 (and in 2019 it was 3.01). Reduction in aggregate fertility is also the longer trend in Israel (as everywhere else), if you use a longer time series (from 1960 onwards):
That said, the World Bank data set highly likely also includes the Arab population, which has shown declining fertility. So this probably explains the discrepancy.
Moving on to the the main question in this thread: The fertility of different faiths among Jews in Israel. Your graphs (from Twitter/X) show fairly stable fertility across all Israeli faiths 1979-2017 (not only among the Haredim): Fair enough. My point was/is that even though the Haredim viewed separately has stable fertility, there is likely to be a downward trend if we also factor in that Haredim lose members to less-religious worldviews, assuming that those who convert out adopt fertility closer to the non-Haredim.
You (and Alexander Turuk earlier in this thread) doubt if net conversion is significant enough to bend the fertility curve downward. And I'll add some self-criticism here: Maybe I am wrong in the magnitude of net conversion away from the Haredim. See the exchange with Alexander Turuk earlier in this thread.
...also, maybe converts from Haredim maintain fertility close to their old faith than the faith they convert into. I have not seen any data on this, and I doubt if anyone collects such data. But converts from Haredim to non-Haredim, as well as converts from less-religious to even-less-religious worldviews, might perhaps explain why fertility is quite stable also for all the other faiths in Israel, even for those who hold the faith of no-faith (the seculars). They may all get a net influx of higher-fertility converts "from next levels up" so to speak, that prevents the fertility of their group from going down.
...Until perhaps in some distant future, there is no-one left above them that represents a potential pool of converts that can boost their group's fertility. ("Convert" is probably a too strong word; there are shades of gray between adherence to a faith and adherence to something else, but I have not found any softer word for change in a person's worldview.)
My main source for these admittedly not-written-in-stone conclusions is an excellent paper by Alex Weinreb and Nachum Blass (2018): "Trends in Religiosity Among the Jewish Population in Israel."
Their main take-home point, as I read it, is that the somewhat-religious in Israel are in a longer-term demographic squeeze from two sides: The Haredim are growing, since their high fertility is large enough to offset net conversion out of the Haredim; and non-believers are also growing, since their dismal fertility (bottom of the heap) is more than offset by receiving more net converts than any other faith. Link here:
16. "UFOs...it’s unlikely that any civilization advanced enough..."
Based on what I know and don't about all space-faring alien races' psychology and history, I'd say it's just a likely they all pilot saucer-shaped craft with a transparent bubble canopy top(coincidentally like 50s sci-fi).
'The only subcultures that have managed to achieve above replacement fertility at average incomes above 5-10k are Jewish Conservatives and American Conservatives.'
As if they have analysed all subcultures in every country and discounted every one - checking that every group above 10k average income has <2.1 TFR. It's such a transparently made up fact.
Yeah and that's just what you can think of off the top of your head right! I think if the author's going to make that case and hang their argument on it they could at least spend a while looking for counterexamples.
If we're talking entire countries: Kazahkstan, Seychelles, Saudi Arabia
If we're talking subcultures (which is the much stronger claim that the author was actually making), there seems like probably dozens or hundreds of possibilities. It's limited by data availability, but the following all seem like reasonable examples: Practicing Catholics in France and Britain, Pacific people in New Zealand, Indigenous Canadians:
Probably 'conservatives' (especially in more rural areas) in every country have higher than average fertility, and in many cases that would make fertility rates above replacement.
The question, however, is if we are dealing with permanent differences between ethnic and religious groups, or (only) a leaders-laggards scenario. The latter is my expectation, based on an hypothesis that the demographic transition takes place everywhere, including in all geographical areas, ethnicities, religious groups and education levels: The only thing that varies, is the timing of the transition, plus how fast the transition is (and perhaps to how far below 2.1 children per woman fertility falls before it stabilises).
It's an easy hypothesis to test, provided one has reliable data across time for all the groups one is interested in. Looking at your links, the data on France, Britain and Canada seem to be at only one point in time. So they cannot be used to differentate the hypotheses.
The data from Tatauranga does however include a time series from 2001 to 2018 with regard to Total Fertility Rates between Maoris, Pacific Islanders, Asians and Europeans. And simply eyeballing the differences suggests that Maoris and Pacific Islanders have TFRs much closer to Europeans in 2018 than in 2001 . Which strengthens the leaders-laggards hypothesis, and weakens the permanent-differences-between-ethnicities hypothesis. (Less clear relative to Asians, at least when only using eyeballing as the empirical test.)
Caveat: We should ideally have time series of Cohort Fertility Rates (CFRs) at the end of several cohorts' reproductive life cycle, to differentiate these two hypotheses, rather than TFRs across time. Few countries have time series on CFRs yet. So the jury is still out in most countries. But my money is on the leaders-laggards scenario.
Yeah I pretty much agree with this - the trends are very important. I'd have slightly different expectations that geography matters at least in terms of rural vs urban (rural birthrate higher), and religiousity to be associated with higher (long term) birthrates.
But when you say 'the question however is'... my point was that the author of the post doesn't even attempt to use the data analysis you suggest, or even a simple google of subgroups for comparison. They just assert that the two high-fertility groups (probably subcultures they just happen to be familiar with) must be unique examples in the world, requiring a complex explanation. You don't need a time series to refute the first line in the post.
Sure, and I agree that urban-rural is also an important dimension in the leaders-laggards scenario. (To some extent the liberal-conservative dimension also. All of these dimensions overlap to a considerable extent.)
Religiosity is the most interesting. As you indicate, it is the most important counter-argument to assuming this is "only" a leaders-laggards scenario.
I have speculated myself if atheism as a worldview will turn out to be a "demographic sink", sort-of the equivalent to the cities in Medieval Europe, who could only maintain their population through net immigration from the countryside, due to high urban mortality (the corresponding idea being that atheism can only maintain a long-term presence in the world through net conversion from other faiths, since atheists have a dismal fertility rate; bottom of the heap as far as faiths go).
However, I have a counter-argument: There is net conversion from very religious to less religious to not-at-all religious world views (observed for example in Israel today). Which might imply that the very religious will not inherit the Earth after all, if one can assume that net conversion out of the faith will turn out to be a stronger long-term tendency than the above-2.1-fertility-rate that can be observed among the very religious in most faiths. Time will show, as they say...
The homework behind 37 is definitely lacking. As I’ve said elsewhere in these comments, the whole thing is based not on any actual Mormon birth rates but on Utah birth rates and relies on the assumption that they’re basically the same in an age with lots of non-LDS immigration to Utah.
The piece reads like the author had a grand theory (there is a memetic virus of Anglo-liberal culture that reduces birthrates, American conservatives are uniquely immune but Trump has spread it to the mormons), but then found it too inconvenient to check if their base assumptions are even true, or consider any different explanations. Then went on ahead anyway.
18: `Ivy plus' seems like a weird grouping to me, because it is three tier. In particular it groups (Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Yale), which are clearly super-elite institutions, with (Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth) which, to my mind, are decidedly not. Does the data allow finer grained resolution regarding whether any of the purported `far tail' benefits actually accrue to the lesser Ivies? My mental model says that (Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth) will look no better (and perhaps worse) than (UMichigan, UCBerkeley, UTAustin) with regards to `far right tail.' I'm not sure about (Penn, Columbia, Duke, UChicago) - those to my mind are `more prestigious than the flagship publics, but not THAT much more prestigious.'
Also 18: Re: `are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason' - it is theoretically conceivable that `kid attends Ivy league school' is a status symbol, same as a Rolex watch only more expensive, and that rich people were going it for bragging rights.
I don't believe it though. It may not boost earnings power, but on some level the conclusions about `far right tail' are kinda obvious. e.g. two schools seem to have produced eight of nine justices on the SCOTUS.
That's for law school, and the law schools at Harvard and Yale have consistently ranked as the best in the nation, and their graduates are often chosen for prestigious clerkships, giving them a leg up on ascending the ladder, creating a feedback loop.
For undergraduate education, there's a slightly more diverse selection: we currently have Harvard (2), Yale, Princeton (3), Columbia, College of the Holy Cross, and Rhodes College.
It’s a quick fix that, IMO, will make people on the left WAY more likely to listen to what you’re saying and actually stop having such speakers.
For point #30, an even quicker fix is to switch “females” to “women” in the first sentence (or alternatively, switch “men” to “males”). r/menandfemales is a good illustration of how some readers might ding you for it otherwise.
The problem there is that while it might make people on the left happier, I genuinely don't think this person is a woman, even a trans woman. I do think this is a man who has severe violent tendencies and probably a selection of mental issues, who is making a fetish out of performative feminity and glommed onto trans issues as a way of extracting money, attention, and sympathy from a gullible audience. Their self-aggrandising book and descriptions of themself don't make me sympathetic to "Sarah Jane is a real true woman".
It’s possible that you’re right, but it reeks of “No True Scotsman” to me. Trans women, like anyone else, can have severe violent tendencies and mental issues.
But more importantly, I don’t think there’s a great way to assert that Sarah Jane isn’t a real woman without also catching many genuine, legitimate trans women in the crossfire. She’s certainly gone to some pretty extreme measures to assert herself as a woman, at least—I doubt even most cis women, if they suddenly landed it a body with testicles, could bring themselves to cut them off.
So if an article is saying that Sarah Jane isn’t enough of a woman, trans people and trans allies will have good reason to be very skeptical of that article. IMO it’s better to focus on the actual problem with her—being a criminal inciting violence and still being invited to be a speaker—and avoid controversial claims about whether she’s a real woman entirely.
>London’s Pride parade featured a convicted kidnapper/torturer/rapist/sadist as a speaker, who advocated that anti-trans people should be “punch[ed] in the f**king face” ; the organizers say they stand by her.
The person has now apparently been arrested for making threats.
Also, Scott's description is incorrect. It wasn't a threat against people—it was "TERFs." Isn't it funny how people like this always only want to hurt women?
I am the author of 31., the post on germicidal far-UVC for air disinfection and pandemic mitigation. If anyone has questions, let me know!
Scott, thanks for the shoutout. Your tl;dr is fairly accurate, I am only confused where you got the “UV air filters would have fewer safety concerns but be less effective.” from. I don't mention UV air filters in the post but make a comparison to indoor air purifiers (with regular HEPA filters). Those are quite common and are fairly cheap and useful, although probably less effective at getting rid of airborne pathogens (depending on the UV dose you are comparing them to).
Fwiw air purifiers with UV also exist but I don't see any reason to use them instead of regular air purifiers with HEPA filters.
Re: Advanced Math - The program being cut is a parallel math track for talented students that ends with taking Algebra 1 in 8th grade instead of 9th. The reason that advanced math is being cut and not any other advanced subject is that math is the only subject with an advanced track. A voracious reader can't take Advanced English, and history buffs don't have a separate track that gives them an ends with them taking high school history in middles school. Math isn't being restricted compared to other subjects, kids who are talented at math are just no longer being offered a perk that kids who are talented at other subjects were never offered. I still don't support axing the program - I was in a similar program myself and think it was beneficial - but this should provide additional context.
> Paramedic. Elderly woman complains that her mouth is dry and she felt a bit dizzy climbing the stairs earlier. Go through the whole rigamarole of getting a medical history, vitals, more detail on symptoms. Ask her what she's had to drink today.
> A cup of tea, ten hours ago.
> Any water? No.
> Guess what fixed it within five minutes.
This is something I think more people should be aware of. I once passed out and fell down (two to three) stairs due to dehydration. It is not well known that dizziness (and blacking-out vision) is a symptom of dehydration. (Dry mouth... I think most people are aware that drinking water can help with that.)
Honestly I feel like most of the time when I have weird symptoms I'm just dehydrated.
(Alternative possibility: every time I have some weird symptoms, I sit down and drink some water and I feel better and manage to reassure myself that I was just dehydrated but actually it was a transient attack of some other horrible disease that will eventually kill me.)
It's misleading to call the event which platformed Sarah Jane Barker "London's pride parade" when it isn't the largest or most notable pride parade there.
London Trans+ Pride is orders of magnitude smaller and younger than Pride in London.
Looks like the story is that a breakaway group of hardliners are willing to platform* unsavoury people. I'm not enormously shocked by this revelation.
*or not deplatform? Looks like she wasn't an official speaker
The Murchison Murders thing is a bit like what happens in Robert Galbraith's novel The Silkworm, where a writer writes a book where his self insert is murdered in a specific and gruesome way, and then he is murdered in that way. If someone wants to reply to this with a spoiler for the book for some reason, someone should encode it in rot13 cipher.
I mean, I realize it's not as noteworthy when it happens in a book instead of real life.
I suppose it depends if there are Democrats who represent agricultural constituencies. According to this website:
https://timesagriculture.com/farming-states-in-the-united-states-of-america-complete-overview/
"New York and Pennsylvania are the leading producers of dairy products, while other states, such as Wisconsin and Iowa, are also significant contributors. Other significant agricultural products include tobacco, rice, and peanuts, which are primarily grown in the South. In the West, states such as California and Wyoming are major producers of beef and sheep, while fish and shellfish are produced in states such as Alaska and Massachusetts.
- California is the biggest farming state in the US, producing more than 400 different crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and dairy products. It is one of the most significant parts of the US agricultural industry, contributing over $50 billion to the national economy each year. The main Crops include oranges, avocados, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, and broccoli. The state is also a major producer of nuts, such as almonds and pistachios. California is the top producer of wine grapes in the U.S.
- Iowa is another major farming state, producing many grains, particularly corn and soybeans. It is the largest producer of soybeans in the US and one of the leading producers of corn. Iowa also produces eggs and dairy products. Iowa is the leading producer of corn, soybeans, and eggs in the country. It is also a major producer of beef and dairy products.
- Texas is the leading producer of cotton and cattle in the US, with over three million cattle and over 11 million acres of cotton production. It is also one of the leading producers of sorghum, hay, wheat, and peanuts. The state is also a major producer of beef, dairy, and poultry products.
- Nebraska is home to some of the most productive land in the US. It is a major producer of corn, soybeans and wheat. It also produces hay, grain sorghum, and sunflowers.
- Minnesota is a major producer of corn, soybeans, sugar beets, and wheat. The state is also a major producer of hogs, turkeys, and dairy products.
- Illinois "land of Lincoln" and a major agricultural state. It is a major producer of corn and soybeans, as well as oats, rye, hay, and barley. It also produces fruits and vegetables, as well as livestock such as beef, dairy, and poultry.
- Kansas is a major producer of wheat, sorghum, and hay. Kansas is the leader in wheat production in the US, producing 20.1% of the nation's wheat crop. Other States that contribute are North Dakota (17.2%), Montana (10.8%), Washington (6.7%), and Oklahoma (4.9%).
- North Carolina is a major producer of hogs, turkeys, and chicken. The state also produces sweet potatoes, tobacco, and peanuts."
Okay, we know California is Democratic. What about the rest of them? The impact is going to be on the beef, poultry, egg, dairy and pork producing states. So who, if any, are the Democratic senators from these states?
Iowa - both Republicans.
Texas - both Republicans.
Minnesota - Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, members of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party which by the name should have some agrarian component which might well be interested in a "yes" vote for the EATS act.
Illinois - Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, Democrats. Durbin has changed his position on farm subsidies, so he might be anti-EATS:
"In January 2005, Durbin changed his longstanding position on sugar tariffs and price supports. After several years of voting to keep sugar quotas and price supports, he now favors abolishing the program. "The sugar program depended on congressmen like me from states that grew corn", Durbin said, referring to the fact that, though they were formerly a single entity, the sugar market and the corn syrup market are now largely separate."
North Carolina - both Republicans.
New York - Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrats. Chuck *might* be persuaded to be pro-EATS:
"In March 2019, Schumer was one of 38 senators to sign a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue warning that dairy farmers "have continued to face market instability and are struggling to survive the fourth year of sustained low prices" and urging his department to "strongly encourage these farmers to consider the Dairy Margin Coverage program"
As might Kirsten:
"In May 2019, Gillibrand and eight other Democratic senators sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Perdue where they criticized the USDA for purchasing pork from JBS USA and wrote that it was "counterproductive and contradictory" for companies to receive funding from "U.S. taxpayer dollars intended to help American farmers struggling with this administration's trade policy." The senators requested the department "ensure these commodity purchases are carried out in a manner that most benefits the American farmer’s bottom line—not the business interests of foreign corporations."
Pennsylvania - Bob Casey Jr. and John Fetterman, Democrats. Fetterman has his own troubles and neither of them seem to have any particular positon on agricultural issues.
Wisconsin - Even I have heard of the cheese! A mixed bag, Ron Johnson who is Republican and Tammy Baldwin who is a Democrat. Baldwin again might be cajoled into being pro-EATS as like Gillibrand she signed the letter over buying pork from the Brazilian producer.
Wyoming - both Republicans.
It's amusing that even atheist Jews apparently can't perform this role.
I wonder though, if we assume UFOs are doing something we currently think is impossible under the laws of physics, then does that equally open up the possibility of other supernatural phenomena?
Eg, we can't definitively prove that ghosts (or anything else) don't exist. So why do we assume out of hand that ghosts would be a silly explanation? Once we're speculating that the world doesn't work the way we think and the impossible may be possible, how do we estimate the probability of each particular thing that we currently think is impossible?
You have to be more specific about what you mean by "something we currently think is impossible under the laws of physics".
If you mean violating the principle of conservation of energy, then sure, supernatural explanations are on the table.
If you mean doing something that as far as we know can't be done, but there's no particular reason we know of _that_ it can't be done, then no, the response would just be that we need to learn more about what natural law does and doesn't allow.
Aristotle said that it was the nature of terrestrial matter to come to a stop when moving. That turned out to be wrong, but it's not difficult to understand how the mistake was made.
We later revised our idea of what the laws of physics have to say about that kind of situation, without seeing any need for a supernatural agent and, interestingly enough, without changing the conclusions that Aristotle would have given us. We still believe that objects moving along the surface of the earth will naturally come to a stop. We just do with multiple "laws of nature" what Aristotle had wanted to do with one.
I was thinking of something like FTL travel or wormholes. Moving faster than light is fundamentally equivalent to time travel according to our current understanding of relativity, and allows you to violate causality. Giving up our belief in cause and effect is a hard sell; perhaps even harder than giving up our belief in conservation of energy.
Interestingly though, apart from this issue with causality, general relativity actually doesn't forbid objects from moving faster than light if they move through warped space.
We can't prove causality is never violated, but we also can't prove energy is always conserved. We've just always observed these things to be true so far and our entire scientific framework is built on the assumption they're true.
> We can't prove causality is never violated, but we also can't prove energy is always conserved.
True, but the conservation principles are derived from invariance principles of the form "all of the same rules apply in [circumstance X] as in [circumstance Y]". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem ) So if you're willing to assume that the laws of physics, whatever they may be, are the same in the past as they are in the future, then you're stuck with conservation of energy.
Wrt causality and wormholes, given the existence of a wormhole I would kind of expect that causality would flow through it just like it flows along every other possible path. But I have no relevant training or knowledge for that statement.
Anyway, it is because violating conservation of energy cannot be done without changing what the laws of nature are that I say it goes into the realm of possibly-supernatural-phenomena. How else would we distinguish "natural" from "supernatural"?
> True, but the conservation principles are derived from invariance principles of the form "all of the same rules apply in [circumstance X] as in [circumstance Y]".
Okay, good point.
> Wrt causality and wormholes, given the existence of a wormhole I would kind of expect that causality would flow through it just like it flows along every other possible path.
As far as I understand, if you just have two fixed wormhole ends, you don't have a causality problem. But if we're talking about an alien race who can do arbitrary FTL travel at will to wherever they want to go, then they can travel through time and violate causality.
I'm agreeing with you that violating conservation of energy goes into the realm of the possibly-supernatural. I'm suggesting if FTL travel implies the ability to violate causality, it's also in the realm the possibly-supernatural.
> As far as I understand, if you just have two fixed wormhole ends, you don't have a causality problem. But if we're talking about an alien race who can do arbitrary FTL travel at will to wherever they want to go, then they can travel through time and violate causality.
Hmmm.
I assume a "violation of causality" involves the flow of information from a particular point in time and space to the same point in space at an earlier time.
It is not immediately obvious to me how teleportation would enable that. I'm willing to believe it could, though. Can you sketch an example?
The general problem I'm encountering while thinking about it is that teleporting always sends you into "the future", a time that is later than whatever you can observe from your starting point. (Because you moved faster than the light that makes observation possible.)
Working through a scenario:
I'm on planet A and you're on planet B. It takes light 100 years to travel from one of us to the other one.
I am watching you through my perfect telescope with infinite resolution. By implication, you lived "sort of 100 years" before me. You can send messages to me, but I can't send messages to you. When you look over towards planet A, you see whatever was going on 200 years before I started watching you.
So we have some points in spacetime:
A-200: visible to you.
A-100: accessible to you, if you teleport.
B-100: your natural home, visible to me.
A+0: my natural home. You can't see or access this.
B+0: accessible to me, if I teleport.
The goal is to send a message from some later point on B to some earlier point on B (the only possibility is from B+0 to B-100), or from some later point on A to some earlier point on A (three possibilities given the points we've named).
I can teleport between A+0 and B+0, and you can teleport between A-100 and B-100. There does not appear to be any way to send a message from the future into the past. You could teleport to A-100, learn something about it, teleport back to B-100, and signal to me through my telescope, but I'm already allowed to know about things that happened in the past of planet A.
---
Now, the difficulty that leaps out at me, for the scenario I just outlined, is that (as far as I understand relativity) there is no point in time on planet B that corresponds to my time and location on planet A, and therefore it isn't really possible to say what time it will be on planet B when I teleport there. I labeled that time "B+0", but that's meaningless.
What that says to me is more that, if we had the capacity to create and use wormholes to arbitrary locations, either they would target random points in time (?!) or the theory of relativity would be empirically false - it really would be possible to say that a particular point in time at some given location corresponded to a particular point in time at some other location.
So, I personally think "violation of causality" via currently understood channels such as high speed travel through curved space, is more probable than "ghosts." It might be a violation of our usual intuitions, but by my understanding it seems to be compatible with our current understanding of how the laws of physics work. And if we view the universe from the outside including the dimension of time, I don't think it's obvious that we should always expect that nothing ever be caused by things which, from certain relativistic perspectives, happened after they did.
But if we grant that ghosts are definitely more improbable than FTL travel, does it imply that if we observe ghosts, that implies that FTL travel is plausible too? I don't think it does. Maybe it would depend on *how* the ghosts turned out to work, and if it somehow turned out that our model of how physics works is completely, from the ground up, wrong, then I guess we'd have to stop believing in the light speed limit, but it's hard to imagine how that could possibly turn out to be consistent with our existing observations.
In general, I think that one part of a model failing should change your probabilities for other things, but it's never going to be as simple as "everything the model says is as unlikely as this thing we just observed is now likely to be true." You have to downgrade your confidence that the model is accurate in predicting what's true or not in the first place, but there are some things which we're confident don't exist specifically because of our confidence in our model, and there are some things where, if our model turned out to be wrong, we'd have to revert to some different, still low, default likelihood of them being true. Saying that they probably don't exist is an antiprediction- very specific things which we don't observe would have to be true for them to be true.
Neither ghosts nor Russell's teapot imply the existence of the other. Ghosts are a complicated thing which we have a lack of good evidence for, and a model that predicts that there's probably no mechanism for them to exist. If that model turns out to be wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that there *is* a mechanism for them to exist, and it certainly doesn't mean we have evidence for them. If we see FTL travel and infer ghosts, it means that we're treating the existence of ghosts as something that's granted by default, a proposition that's only retracted because the model we have doesn't offer a mechanism for them. But I don't think it makes sense to think about them that way in the first place.
But there is no _a priori_ reason to think that UFO sightings are explained by aliens. Thus, it is much more rational to assume that, whatever they are, they are caused by something that doesn’t violate the laws of physics as we know them.
Like dragons. UFOs are obviously dragons.
“But that’s ridiculous!” NO! It is strictly less ridiculous than the idea that UFOs are aliens. Neither dragons nor aliens-on-Earth are known to exist, but aliens-on-Earth would require new physics, and dragons would not. If you are a good Bayesian rationalist, then you should agree that P(UFOs are dragons) > P(UFOs are aliens).
They have tried to rebrand it as UAP ("aerial phenomena"), but UFOs are firmly established in the popular imagination, and likewise that aliens are the leading explanation. And now with literal government officials publicly testifying about physical artifacts being covered up this confusion is probably stronger than ever. So much for raising the sanity waterline.
We've gotten new physics in the past. It may be true that aliens-on-Earth would require new physics, and dragons-on-Earth wouldn't, but it is not true that the totality of what aliens-on-Earth would require is more surprising than the totality of what dragons-on-Earth would require.
If we’re going to posit new physics then why not just posit that “UFOs” are *directly* caused by the new physics (ie, they’re something like ball lightning or the aurora borealis)?
Dragons are perhaps an egregiously silly counterproposal, but the overall point remains:
1. There is no evidence that there are aliens on or around Earth.
2. Our current understanding of physics seems to rule out the possibility that there could be.
3. Thus, “UFOs are aliens” is a really really improbable conclusion to jump to based on the very small amount of evidence we have.
I don't believe that UFOs are aliens, but I also don't agree with your point 2. Yes, it would be very expensive and slow to travel between the stars, but it could be done. There's nothing about Project Orion or a generation ship that violates the laws of physics.
I second this opinion. Although I also regard the alien hypothesis as very unlikely, it's one of the few pop culture conspiracy theories that *doesn't* have to violate the laws of physics.
EATS Act may or may not be wise policy, but it doesn't look like a states' rights violation, just a straightforward use of the Commerce Clause.
Wickard v. Filburn strikes again... (I recognize that the food production being regulated here does actually involve interstate commerce, making this less egregious than the facts of Wickard itself.)
My understanding is that, due to economies of scale and the structure of the industry, it is very difficult for any large food producer to operate without selling in California, and it's also very difficult to "split" a production operation such that, say, a company could make California groceries in one production chain while making Iowa groceries in another. Thus, the only option is to comply with the stringent State's regulations (could be an "intolerant minority/apathetic majority" situation). If food prices are pushed up, the majority might not stay apathetic for too long. Anyone in the food industry, please correct me if wrong.
What makes this so hard? If California eats (let's say) 10% of the nation's food, why can't producers sell to the remaining 90% of the market, and let California-specific companies sell to California?
It's the same principle as the gunboats opening the markets of East Asia. They CAN, but it's just so cheap (possibly because the costs are paid by someone else) that the attempt to expand is going to happen.
In part because segregating the product stream is nigh-unto impossible economically. Producers don't sell directly to consumers, as a general rule. They sell to a processor, who sells to a packager, who sells to a distributor; at every step they're comingling product from many different producers from very different areas. And much of the documentation doesn't persist--a single sausage may be made of meat from multiple hogs from different farms entirely.
So any tiny "contamination" in a California-bound stream opens the entire distribution network, most of which has no effectual way of looking at the conditions back up the chain, to massive penalties.
You'd basically have to have a completely separate California network from everyone else...at *massive* costs to everyone.
Surely different hot dog producers have "organic" vs. "regular" hot dogs, or beef vs. pork hot dogs, or high-quality vs. low-quality hot dogs, or something like that, and they're able to keep those separate from each other. Why would it be any harder to have "California-compliant" hot dogs as a separate product?
Why doesn't CA have sufficient food producers to feed itself? Because it regulates the companies out of business.
Scott, this is where your idea of what should be is getting in the way of what is fair/legal.
California produces more food than any other US state, and I think (data are complicated, hard to tell) is the largest exporter of food of any state. But like every state, it specializes in certain products and imports the ones that aren't its comparative advantage, which include pork.
If I'm wrong about this and California does regulate its food companies out of business, I think the correct sequence of events is for it to bear the brunt of its own bad policies, suffer, learn, and change them. Just as I would rather if an individual is lazy they fail to make money and have to come up with their own solution, rather than the government mandating work for them.
Isn't that really California's problem?
California has a YEAR WITHOUT MEAT and if its voters aren't happy they can have a referendum to get rid of the meat restrictions law. What's the issue?
You're asking for another axis, so you've doubled the number of bins ("california-organic", "non-ca-organic", "california-nonorganic", "non-ca-nonorganic", etc). It's not rocket science, but it's also a major effort across many businesses that are not highly technological. Sure, industrial factory farms could probably figure it out... but is that the kind of direction you want to push the food supply?
The US economy is a huge powerhouse mostly because it's a single market and there's relatively little customization needed on a per-state basis. The alternative is something like Europe before EUCU. Even post-EUCU, selling across Europe is a pain in the ass.
I think producers just object to being required to have a process on the same level of complexity as sourcing organic ingredients just for one state, with the added fear that if this is okay then they could end up needing to do it for fifty different states.
Now with more substance - organic hot dogs (salad/bread/etc) can not be processed on the same equipment as non organic without a production stopping deep clean between. The higher price charged for the organic product makes this economically possible. Same with allergens and with kosher. The levels of purity required for these (federally mandated) marketing designations are not at all required for, say, changing from beef to pork to mixed meat.
And you miss the real problem - CA can't produce enough food to feed itself. They have to import other state's surplus.
> Same with allergens and with kosher. The levels of purity required for these (federally mandated) marketing designations...
Kosher cannot be a federally mandated marketing designation. The federal government is not even allowed to have an opinion on whether any particular thing is or isn't kosher.
High quality vs low quality only considers the observable facts of the input, so that's neither here nor there.
Organic vs regular is both (a) mostly a lie (those are mostly entirely self-certified and meaningless) and (b) amortizes the much higher cost over the entire country. It also just produces (mostly) a single product per top-level distributor--you don't have the range of organic products that you do non-organic products. The entire "organic" range is comparable to a single entry in the non-organic range.
The cost of setting up a CA-specific *set* of lines (because you'd need just as many lines as the entirety of the non-organic + organic lines, including the entire distribution channels and delivery infrastructure, completely non-comingled at any point) vastly dwarfs the expense of setting up one organic chain that can mostly comingle both before and after a couple key points. And would only be amortizable over 10% of the entire market. You're talking about more than doubling the cost...for 10% of the market *max*. That's absolutely insane.
Organic products command a premium price, which is what makes them viable. California wants cruelty-free meat (with, I presume, the aim of stopping factory farming altogether) and it might well be that the production methods are considered cruel by California standards (e.g. how the cattle or pigs were slaughtered) and, for instance, I don't think they'd like or permit veal, even if it is organic.
From 2017 Irish farm advisory about going organic - it's expensive and time-consuming, so it probably works best for smaller scale operations. For really big stock raising operations, it might not be economically feasible (though I can't say about that):
https://www.teagasc.ie/media/website/publications/2017/1-Organic-beef-production-in-Ireland-structure-and-steps-to-successful-conversion.pdf
"Assess the market
For organic farming to be profitable a premium price must be achieved for produce sold. While the majority of beef supplied to the market is from steers and heifers, recent markets have emerged for calves (organic veal) and cull cows. Beef farmers interested in organic conversion should speak with other organic farmers, processors and wholesalers about potential markets. Major factory outlets for organic beef are Goodherdsmen, Slaney Meats, ABP and Jennings. Premium prices of 15 to 20% have generally been achievable for organic beef in recent years. According to processors the demand for Irish organic beef will continue to rise, especially in mainland Europe.
Complete an organic conversion plan
This involves a detailed description of management practices on the farm, the changes required on the farm, soil analysis, faecal analysis, livestock housing plan, animal health plan (in consultation with your veterinary surgeon) and land/crop rotation plan. The plan can be drawn up by the farmer alone or in consultation with the farm advisor. Attending a FETAC accredited “Introduction to organic farming course” is an excellent way of learning how to complete the conversion plan.
Provision of quality forage
To maintain farm productivity, stocking rate must be maintained as high as possible. In the absence of artificial nitrogen, white clover may be introduced into pastures to maintain grass production levels. White clover is the ‘engine’ that drives productivity on organic farms and can fix in excess of 100 kg N/ha annually. Red clover can fix in the region of 200 kg N/ha annually and can be a high yielding, high protein feed for wintering animals. Organic concentrates are more expensive than conventional concentrates. Prices for organic rations for ruminants are generally around €500/tonne. Maximising use of grass, using home-grown grain, purchasing grain from other organic producers and having the correct breed and system which matches land type and market specification required can reduce feed costs significantly. Organic straights can be purchased from a variety of organic farmers for between €300 and €350 per tonne with combi-crop mixes of peas and a cereal available for between approximately €380 and €400/tonne.
Regular topping is necessary to maintain grass quality and control weeds particularly in mid-season. High quality silages can also be produced using red clover-grass swards and enough silage should be produced on farm to meet winter feed requirements as it is not permitted to source silage from conventional farmers.
Animal health
Ensuring high animal health and welfare standards is a fundamental ethos of organic principles. The farmer must be aware that the level of stocksmanship required with animals is very high on organic farms. Routine treatment of animals with anthelmintics is prohibited, and a rotational grazing system should be in place to minimise worm burden. If a problem occurs faecal analysis is recommended and the vet must sign off the appropriate treatment on the organic farmer’s record book. Early detection of animal health problems is essential. Remember good animal husbandry is paramount. If an animal is suffering it must be treated and the necessary permission must be sought from the vet. The animal health plan, produced as part of the conversion plan, will deal with mineral deficiencies and vaccination issues.
Animal housing
Many farmers find that the greatest alterations that need to be made at farm level are changes to winter housing. More generous space allowances are required – for cattle the rule of thumb is that 1.0 m2 is required for every 100 kg live weight. All stock must have access to a dry bedded lying area. Up to 50% of this area can be slatted but the rest must be solid floor and not slatted. Conventional straw may be used for bedding."
Certainly, producing specific 'cruelty-free' meat would drive up the price of the final product, and people might then give up eating meat because it's too expensive. Which is the aim of the entire project in the first place, isn't it?
This argument is correct, and was made at greater length and with citations in amicus briefs from small farmers who are already doing exactly this. They argued that the big producers are essentially rent-seeking, trying to overrule democratic laws that disrupt their business model, because they don't want to compete in this new market as many smaller producers are already doing.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-468/233586/20220815212509809_IndFarmers_Ross_Amicus%20Document%20August%2015%202022%20EFile.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-468/233586/20220815212509809_IndFarmers_Ross_Amicus%20Document%20August%2015%202022%20EFile.pdf
Actually, they would need to add two different types - Californian organic and Californian regular. Or rather 4 types because they already have to distinguish between four types along the axis of "organic" and "kosher". Each additional axis doubles the number of options, so just one or two additional,ones can be a big deal.
As I said above, This precisely the sort of market balkanization that the commerce clause was intended to prevent.
I think congress should move swiftly to stop California from spreading this kind of busybody idiocy.
"This seems like a clear states’ rights violation to me."
At what point did you turn into George Wallace?
You must have been thrilled with the Dobbs decision.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ for what I think pretty naturally cashes out as a states rights argument.
I disagree with Dobbs on the object level, but I think the justices were right that you can't just pretend the Constitution guarantees a right to abortion when it clearly doesn't.
Sorry, just being snippy.
But, there is not a States rights issue with congressional legislation in this space. The matter is clearly committed to Congress, and the Founders clearly intended to prevent this type of trade balkanization of the USA.
I mean, there obviously is a states' rights issue. This is a right that the states obviously don't have, but that doesn't meant they don't want it. Usually when someone's out there agitating for a right they don't have, we're willing to call that an issue of their rights.
"You must have been thrilled with the Dobbs decision."
Everyone who had an honest appraisal of the Constitution agreed with Dobbs.
That works on the assumption that they can make up that lost 10% in the remaining market. If they can convince Idahoans and New Englanders to eat more bacon, then they make up for the loss. But if the remainder of the market is already buying as much bacon as they want, then they're going to suffer a loss.
Imagine you lose 10% of your subscribers. Can you 'sell' to the remaining 90% of subscribers? No, because we're already subscribing. So you either have to persuade us to take out a more expensive subscription, or get the people who are reading but not subscribing to subscribe, and both of those are going to take effort: maybe people already subscribing are paying as much as they can afford and won't be willing to pay more, maybe the non-subscribers don't want to subscribe at all.
Or they can just take a loss. Meat companies taking a loss due to a new California law is not some tragedy we need federal intervention to prevent. The market isn't going to collapse.
They don't have to convince New Englanders to eat more meat, they can cater to the hole in the market left by other companies that decide to cater to the California market.
Let's say initially there are 10 equal-sized meat companies, each selling 10% of its products in California and 90% in the other states. As a result of the law, 1 can specialize in catering entirely to the California market, while the other 9 cater to the other states.
Of course this ignores details like transaction costs. But also, I suspect most of the gains from economies of scale are to be had well below the level of 10% of the entire USA market, which allows for more flexible specialization. (E.g. perhaps many of the smaller companies already cater primarily to one state or another. After all, in Hungary we have several domestic meat companies for 10 million people, even though we're part of the EU common market.)
> But if the remainder of the market is already buying as much bacon as they want, then they're going to suffer a loss.
It's always something in between. The price of bacon will drop, people will discover that they weren't buying _quite_ as much bacon as they wanted -- at least, not now that the price is so low -- but the bacon producers still end up with a loss. It's just a smaller loss than it would be if all of the extra bacon had been destroyed.
On a completely unrelated note, I read something a bit ago about Sinead O'Connor (sorry for the lateness of this question) that mentioned, twice, the Church's (or Irish society in general's?) handling of "gay boys and spirited girls". It left me with the distinct impression that "spirited girls" had some specific meaning, but I don't know what it might be. Do you?
This is exactly the question Taleb answers in this essay https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
I think this is an example of why people are wrong to equate, as they often do, the balance of power between the states and the federal, with the balance of power between different states.
You ask people why every state should have 2 Senators (rather than proportional by population) and the answer usually has something to do with preserving federalism, the idea being that more power to small states vs large states is the same thing as more power to states overall vs the federal government.
But this is an example of where more power to states would mean more power to *big* states, and small states push back *via* the federal government.
Wickard is not relevant to this question. There the issue was whether goods that were neither transported from their place of origin nor sold to a third party were subject to regulation under the commerce clause.
The issue here is whether goods that are undoubtedly traded in interstate commerce -- pork produced in Iowa, sold by Iowans to Californians, and then transported to California -- can be subject to Congressional regulation. I cannot think of a reason why not.
This precisely the sort of market balkanization that the commerce clause was intended to prevent.
For fresh meat products, I don't think there are so many processing steps involved. Just ship the parts of the formerly slightly happier dead animals to California and the parts of the formerly very unhappy dead animals to the rest of the states.
For preserved meat products, if reasonably phrased the CA law would allow trace amounts of otherwise disallowed meat. Then you would not need a second production line, but could just be run your sausage factory on unhappy dead animals for a month and then on slightly less unhappy animals for a week and label these tins as "CA edition".
I think that any distributor who can't handle tracking different inventories and sending different products to different states should try to look for an occupation which does not involve any logistics.
Besides the dual version solution, there are two different possible outcomes:
* If the additional cost is not large, producers might decide to follow CA rules for all of their products. This happened when the EU mandated standardized charging ports for phones (with Apple lagging behind a bit): phone manufacturers decided that the hassle of having a USB-C version of each phone for the EU and a vendor specific connector version for the rest of the world would cost them more than they would gain from selling overpriced cables. Rest of the world, you are welcome.
* They might just decide that CA is not worth it and not sell there. This is the capitalist solution (on a state level).
We know that Scott favors individual communities competing with their laws to attract citizens [0] with a minimum of higher level oversight, roughly like in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. It is very clear that the US government is way more micromanaging than UniGov or Romanova. (Of course, the US also failed to safeguard exit rights for all of her subjects until the 1860s.)
I think EATS is a blatantly pandering to special interests. The good news is that it establishes the need to improve animal welfare on a federal level, and CA is often 5-10 years ahead of the rest of the US, so a similar federal law might happen eventually. Of course, then the factory farms will whine about state rights, at which points I will be playing a sad song for them on the world's smallest violin.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
The economy of scale effect and similar considerations in other areas make me generally skeptical of states' rights (as a policy, setting aside constitutional arguments). Sigh. At least California is not trying to mandate 40 Hz or 80 Hz AC power...
> Wickard v. Filburn strikes again... (I recognize that the food production being regulated here does actually involve interstate commerce, making this less egregious than the facts of Wickard itself.)
I don't see... any connection to Wickard v. Filburn. The question for the EATS act is whether Congress can stop California from banning the import of certain products from other states, and that is the very core of the Commerce Clause as originally understood. Giving Congress that power is the entire point of the Commerce Clause.
EATS is so trivially constitutional it wouldn’t go to SCOTUS. Federal government can set product/production standards. Federal preemption precludes states from legislating where the Feds have spoken.
Indeed.
Yeah. And this is the sort of thing the Interstate Commerce clause was *actually* written for--regularizing standards across multiple states and preventing one state from putting impediments to trade in other states.
I think California's rules are pretty dumb, but I'm not sure it's fair to say they are putting impediments to trade in other states. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm willing to believe that current law/precedent would likely rule this as constitutional, but I also _very_ strongly believe that the commerce clause is interpreted far, far, _far_ too broadly (perhaps the most over-broadly ruled clause in the entire constitution, contested only, in the opposite direction, but the under-ruled 4th amendment), and this looks at first blush to be a case where I'd think the same, even if it's less egregious than some other instances.
They're putting barriers to trade *for anyone who wants to have the potential to sell in California*. And that's what matters, IMO. I'd say that the Commerce Clause was intended (in part) to allow the federal government to step in and pre-empt this kind of thing.
California can absolutely require *packaging* differences. Such as a label "does not comply with <proposition whatever>". What they *can't*, in my judgement, do is pretend to fine companies who have no direct connection to California trade linkable by anything in the product itself.
And I'm not going to say that this is *good* legislation, but I think it's fairly squarely in the intended use of the Commerce Clause. And very much within the current jurisprudence on the matter, which I agree with you is wildly over-broad.
If I were California faced with this, I might recognize a new tort enforceable by any individual, to sue and recover on behalf of an animal who suffered unduly during production and slaughter. That seems to fall squarely under state police power and outside of the federal regulatory sphere.
In fact, Gorsuch's controlling opinion in Pork Producers v. Ross explicitly says this:
>If, as petitioners insist, California’s law really does threaten a “massive” disruption of the pork industry—if pig husbandry really does “‘imperatively demand’” a single uniform nationwide rule—they are free to petition Congress to intervene. Under the (wakeful) Commerce Clause, that body enjoys the power to adopt federal legislation that may preempt conflicting state laws. That body is better equipped than this Court to identify and assess all the pertinent economic and political interests at play across the country. And that body is certainly better positioned to claim democratic support for any policy choice it may make. But so far, Congress has declined the producers’ sustained entreaties for new legislation. See Part I, supra (citing failed efforts). And with that history in mind, it is hard not to wonder whether petitioners have ventured here only because winning a majority of a handful of judges may seem easier than marshaling a majority of elected representatives across the street.
Yeah. How is what California is doing qualitatively different from putting a tariff on out-of-state meat?
Because it's applying precisely the same standard to in-state meat.
Fair enough.
Though note that California doesn't produce pork to any noticeable degree. It's very much intentional that all of the compliance burden of the law falls on out-of-state entities.
It's been clear for years that meat/animal welfare is on the negative polarization slope to becoming a full-on culture war issue. I think this is great news, both in the medium and long term, even if in the short term it means the Republicans are going to pass something like the EATS act next time the rural skew of the senate and electoral college help them get close to a trifecta.
Medium-term, 40% vegans vs. 40% anti-vegans yields far less animal killing than 4% vegans vs. 96% non-vegans, even if the anti-vegans try to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured meat out of spite. Long-term, I don't buy "moloch always moves left", but farm buildings are a multi-decade investment, so if industrial farmers know that national square-inches-per-hog policy will switch back and forth every time Congress changes hands, they'll have to build to the more stringent welfare standards.
The only challenge is for the animal movement to spur negative polarization enough for some fraction of the Democratic base to care about this issue as intensely as Republican hog farmers care about being allowed to race each other to the bottom of the unethically-produced-pork slide.
Good, good, let the lib-owning flow through you! This kind of hyperbolic, obtuse, and vaguely menacing response is exactly what we need to feed the reciprocal chain of reaction that will drive this issue to the big time.
Save an animal - eat a vegan! 😁
Technically, most vegans (except for the odd sentient AI perhaps) are also animals.
In the campaign a few years back, Ted Cruz accused his opponent of wanting to make BBQ illegal. At the time this seemed comically absurd. Now I’m starting to think he was ahead of the curve.
The realization that will hit you probably only too late is that the worst things the Republicans have said about the Democrats were toned down because the truth was too implausible.
It's the "ha ha ha of course we're not gonna ban stoves/here's the proposed legislation to ban stoves" all over again. Like this piece in the Architectural Digest which flips from "the government isn't going to ban your stove, silly person" to "well not unless they're the state government":
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/whats-going-on-with-the-gas-stove-ban
"The short answer is no. Despite the hysteria stirred up by pundits and politicians who swore that government bureaucrats would pry your gas stove from the wall, the roughly 40% of Americans who own gas stoves have nothing to fear. In fact, a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act specifies that the government will pay you in the form of an $840 rebate should you decide to voluntarily switch from gas to electric.
That’s not to say that certain states and municipalities aren’t planning for a future with far fewer gas stoves. As part of its budgeting process, New York’s state legislature passed a measure this week which aims “to phase out the use of fossil fuels in new buildings.” The legislation would forbid the installation of any gas-powered stoves, furnaces, or propane heating in any new building under seven stories tall by 2026, with similar requirements for taller buildings kicking in by 2029."
So they're not *banning* them, they're just not letting you *install* them, which is totally different from a ban!
>The only challenge is for the animal movement to spur negative polarization enough for some fraction of the Democratic base to care about this issue as intensely as Republican hog farmers care about being allowed to race each other to the bottom of the unethically-produced-pork slide.
In the long-run, it's actually not the hog farmers who care most about this; they can pass the cost on. They're mostly worried about the short-run of potential changeover.
In the long-run, you're up against *meat-eaters*, who want cheap pork for the dinner table and (as consumers) can't pass that cost on to anyone. And that's a huge chunk of the country.
Also, remember that the culture war has negative externalities; moderately-large for now, but extreme in the worst case i.e. civil war. If you do this, and particularly if you or others building on you go the whole hog and use a Democratic trifecta to ban meat, well, that's another straw on the camel, and you've got to take account of that in your utility calculations.
Americans as voters are consistently far more anti-factory-farming than their "revealed preferences" as consumers would suggest—e.g. the Massachusetts version of Prop 12 passed with 78% support, even though only a very small fraction of these consumers truly never bought caged eggs. See Bovay and Sumner, Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 2018 for two (pro-ag but reasonably objective) economists' takes on this.
Social change always encounters resistance, however badly needed. Ending industrial animal confinement and slaughter—almost certainly the most violent and disutility-producing human endeavor in history—would be worth a lot of friction.
78% support which did not turn out to mean practice, as those voting still consumed the Bad Eggs. I don't think that means much apart from "I want to feel that I am a good person".
There is definitely a position on animal welfare and factory farming and getting changes passed. The EU has managed it. But you won't do it by forcing people without convincing them, and telling them they're murder-torturers if they eat meat and you're going to take away that choice of theirs by fiat.
>Social change always encounters resistance, however badly needed. Ending industrial animal confinement and slaughter—almost certainly the most violent and disutility-producing human endeavor in history—would be worth a lot of friction.
Okay, fine, I will engage you on the main issue.
To get "factory farming is outright disutile" you need all of these:
1) animals have moral worth
2) factory-farmed animals have negative QALY
3) even then the numbers matter; it's not a slam-dunk
Let's take your example of pork.
Assume a person eats 200g pork per day (a steak). A pig produces about 70kg of meat, so that's 1/350 pigs per day or 1.044 pigs per year, each of which lives let's say 9 months (it varies between ~4 months and ~12 months). According to the ACC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/) food-pig QALY is approximately zero, which makes that calculation simple, but you also need a sow to produce the food-pig (let's say 20 piglets per sow per year; they actually produce more like 25 but I'm assuming some die) and they say sow QALY is strongly negative (let's call it -3*), so your 1 year eating pork requires 0.0522 years of sow = -0.157 pig QALY.
How much are pigs worth? Well, let's take cortical neuron count, Scott likes that one and it's fairly objective. A pig has 2.66% of a human's cortical neuron count, so -0.157 pig QALY = -0.00416 human QALY. This then means that, if abstaining from pork is subjectively worth more than -0.00416 of your quality of life, it is morally preferable to eat factory-farmed pork than no pork. Some people like pork little enough that they shouldn't eat it, and of course nobody's forcing them to. But there are also definitely people who like meat more than that; that's not even 0.5% of your QALY.
You can absolutely be a Singer utilitarian and come out with "factory farming is a net-positive actually". You can argue that it's not as good as free-range farming, but it's not some sort of "this is obviously the worst horror in the world, any counterargument is obvious cope". The depression epidemic is literally worse than the numbers I got there.
*I don't think any form of torture could put me below -3 QALY, so I'm essentially assuming sow stalls are Room 101 here.
>*I don't think any form of torture could put me below -3 QALY
Instantaneously, or cumulatively? You don't think it's possible for you to experience -3 QALY over say a year under any form of torture?
-3 QALY per year is what I meant, yes.
I'd take three years of QALY 1 life (my actual current life is probably like QALY 0.6-0.7, but that's neither here nor there) if it also meant getting a year of horrible torture (without long-term effects, obviously, since those are accounted for elsewhere). That's definitionally "horrible torture > -3 QALY/y".
I mean, if you rewired my brain so I was incapable of blocking out the pain or fainting, I could probably go lower than -3, but that's more like ideas of Hell than it is RL torture.
Assigning mammals' suffering coefficient by neuron count has the advantage of "objectivity", but the disadvantage of being neuropsychologically illiterate.
I don't disvalue suffering because I've decided that certain patterns of neural activity are abstractly distasteful to me, but because my own cognitive architecture considers my suffering to be an extremely strong motivator, and for moral consistency I should care about all homologous experiences similarly. Humans' expanded cortices (disproportionately prefrontal, not somatosensory) contribute to our distinctive ability to write poetry about our suffering, but they shouldn't affect the intensity of the sensation of suffering. Supporting this principle, human babies and people like this (https://twitter.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1683557994322173954) have much smaller brains than normal adults, but as far as they can report, their experience of suffering is no less intense than mine. So even accepting that factory-reared food pigs, living shoulder to shoulder on painful metal floors with docked tails and earsplitting noise, are util-neutral, and neglecting the negative externalities to humans who live downwind of pig lagoons or get PTSD from working in slaughterhouses, I disagree that it's objectively rational to discount those -1/7 sow QALYs.
Second, you have to calculate the *marginal* value to the consumer of eating animal flesh, relative to Beyond Meat or their preferred alternative, not the *absolute* value. I am willing to assert that claiming 1 in 7 of the experiences that make your life worth living derive from eating pork sausages *rather than Beyond sausages* constitutes "obvious cope".
>Supporting this principle, human babies and people like this (https://twitter.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1683557994322173954) have much smaller brains than normal adults, but as far as they can report, their experience of suffering is no less intense than mine.
It's literally impossible to study relative intensity of suffering between individuals. All language is suspect because people interpret it relative to their own experience, and revealed preference is useless because you can only get results up to a constant scale factor (multiply all rewards and penalties in a game by 2 and optimal play is identical, so play provides actual zero evidence about whether they've been multiplied by 2 or not). This is a form of the Problem of Other Minds.
And I mean obviously if you bite that bullet and say that *all* suffering of any individual matters equally then you wind up in crazyland because plants and even some bacteria have avoidance behaviours that are clearly analogous to pain. You wind up with "humans are less than a billionth of the worth of the Earth", which is wild and produces all sorts of mad policy prescriptions.
" I am willing to assert that claiming 1 in 7 of the experiences that make your life worth living derive from eating pork sausages *rather than Beyond sausages* constitutes "obvious cope"."
🤷♀️ I haven't ever eaten any of the Beyond brand, and while vegan alternatives are now being produced more plentifully, are more available, and range in price from reasonable to expensive, taste and quality vary.
I couldn't find a price for Beyond sausages online in Ireland, so here's the next best thing: beef burger comparisons. All prices taken from Tesco website (no advertising intended!):
Beyond burgers (made with pea protein): €6.50 for 226g
Bird's Eye burgers (made with pea protein): €3.50 for 200g
Linda McCartney burgers (made with soya protein): €2.30 for 237g
So the Beyond burgers are just under three times as expensive as Linda McCartney. As I said, I've never tried them, so are they 'as good as meat'?
Let's see what the BLOODMOUTH CARNIST burgers stack up as:
Bog-standard 'it's got meat in, don't ask what kind of meat' burger: €0.50 for 56g. That comes out to something like €2.00 for the same weight at the Beyond burgers, but yeah - I'd skip these unless you are on a *severe* budget.
Tesco burgers (stretched out by adding in pea powder etc. with the beef): €2.50 for 397g. Well, they're cheap and probably 'good enough' if you just want something fast in a hurry.
Tesco Aberdeen Angus burgers (better quality, 99% beef); €3.75 for 454g
And finally the most expensive ones, Tesco organic beef burgers: €6.20 for 454g
So I can have real meat for the same price as the Beyond pea protein version - €6.50/226g as against €6.20 for 454g, which actually comes out to be twice as cheap for the meat as the fake; Beyond burgers would set me back €13.00 for 454g as against €6.20 for the real meat.
Therefore, unless and until Beyond or other fake burgers become as cheap, and as indistinguishable from the real thing in taste and feel etc., then it's not "obvious cope" if I choose to eat meat for the experiences that make my life worth living.
"even if the anti-vegans try to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured meat out of spite."
Well gosh, with an appeal to my better nature like that and a deep, humane understanding of your fellow citizens on display, you have convinced me that the only reason I eat meat is to spite the beautiful natures of the kind, moral, superior vegans, plus I enjoy torture and think it adds a special flavour to the flesh I consume!
Or maybe not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviyEJRZX30
Come, my fellow BLOOD MOUTH CARNISTS, let's all sing along!
"Kitchen aromas aren't very homely
It's not comforting, cheery or kind
It's sizzling blood and the unholy stench of murder
It's not natural, normal or kind
The flesh you so fancifully fry
The meat in your mouth
As you savour the flavour of murder
No, no, no, it is murder
No, no, no, it is murder"
If you're interested in empirical research on how subconscious cognitive biases influence meat consumption behavior, Wikipedia has a good albeit slightly outdated summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat.
If you're interested in proving my point that meat is a scissor issue that reliably elicits tribal self-congratulation and name-calling instead of serious reflection, just carry on, you're doing a great job.
So true, organoid, I am motivated solely by spite. Spite and malice and rancour and animosity.
That's why I accused vegans of "trying to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured produce out of spite"
Oh, wait...
I said it was reasonable to speculate that hypothetical people with an active *anti-vegan* cultural identity might on average be motivated to eat more and lower-welfare meat than regular *non-vegans*, but less than 2.4x as much. If you take that as a personal insult, that's your problem.
Ah, so these hypothetical anti-vegans are just spherical cows and don't exist in reality.
So your argument is all theoretical and doesn't mean anything in practice. Good to know!
What part of "I make a decision to pay 25% less to consume pork raised in conditions so bad that it gives workers PTSD" do you find so funny?
Is it the part where some people think that animals have some consciousness of the brutality of their factory farmed existence? Because the only way you can justify your actions is if (a) you're starving or (b) you truly believe animals have no consciousness.
In that case, I presume you have no issue with punting puppies for fun right? Maybe we can cut off your pet's front legs and then put a bowl of food a few feet in front of them. Watch them struggle to get to it and make bets on whose pet will make it first.
No reason not to, these are animals with no feelings. Either way I'll buy you a new pet after the race so there's no economic loss to you.
" (b) you truly believe animals have no consciousness."
Got it in one, old bean.
"Maybe we can cut off your pet's front legs and then put a bowl of food a few feet in front of them."
Well, funnily enough - I don't keep pets. Because I'm not sentimental about animals, and I don't feel the need to keep a creature locked up inside in an alien environment purely to provide me with snuggles and 'love'. Coincidentally, I've just seen a series of posts about 'putting the cat out' where people are all "my cats are indoor cats" (this is in Ireland, mind you) where the self-righteous rationale for keeping an animal inside 24/7 in a human habitation is that "cats are a threat to native wild life".
Yeah, no shit Sherlock. Cats and dogs are meant to spend most of their time *outdoors*, and part of that is that cats are carnivores and hunt prey. Which means cutesie-wootsie Tiddles has no qualms about being destructive of your equally anthropomorphised fake view of Nature.
I don't think animals have 'feelings'. Food animals are exactly that, and if humans had never domesticated so much as a budgie, they'll still be in the wild as prey species.
Nice try at "ooh you cruel monster who likes punting puppies and torturing beasts", but my withers remain unwrung because I'm not someone who dresses up their selfishness in demanding emotional support from a creature as 'I love the little animals so much, so much!!!!' Oh, and by the bye, I've seen the inside of a slaughterhouse so nice try at grossing me out but you need to try harder, Cholmondley.
But never mind, you can snuggle up with your fur baby and be a cat dad/dog mom and get all the primate grooming needs met by making a lesser animal totally dependent on you for food, shelter, health, and replacing its natural social structure for your needs and wants.
Damn it, I'm even going to quote Lewis on the kind of people who care SO MUCH about their pets:
"But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.
Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs", those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship will be well advised to examine their real reasons."
It would be an interesting test study of how powerful alleged memetic viruses actually are. So far neither side of the Culture War has really demanded anything too onerous from less zealous allies of theirs.
The expression is usually "Cthulhu swims only left."
Thanks. Regardless, the recent history of American policy on open borders, child labor, abortion access, and voting rights shows that in the real world, it's no safe bet that "reaches consensus among the left side of the culture war" entails "mission inevitably to be accomplished soonish".
You're blowing those ephemeral and insignificant changes way out of proportion. As inexorable as the march of time, the Left WILL win.
I don't know why Yarvisians are so committed to saying this against the evidence (obviously US immigration policy of the foreseeable future is not going to be as economic-migrant-friendly as it was in the 19th century) and I'm not especially interested in finding out. Still, I have to assume it's either a mollifying psy-op or else an attempt to lay the rhetorical groundwork for declaring a state of exception and violently eliminating "threats" that would supposedly be unstoppable otherwise.If it were meant in good faith, surely longtermist neoreactionaries' top priority would be to covertly influence which issues actually reach consensus among vanguard leftist movements!
I'm not going to disavow the label, but I don't think that quite describes me. Yarvin thinks there's a way to stop it (instituting a monarchy). I don't.
I'm pretty sure Scott was talking about "states' rights" in the sense of the ideological principle, not the legalistic one.
An ideology promulgated by the worst elements of the southern white resistance to granting civil rights to Blacks. Names like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.
So California is racist? Well, if you say so!
Deeply
The state that just failed its massive push to get rid of the prohibition on differential treatment of its subjects by race?
You could argue that California isn't racist because that prohibition is still in place, though it is mostly honored in the breach.
But what do you think California wants to be doing?
No-one believes in states' rights in the absolute sense. States gave up SOME rights when they signed the constitution, the question is which? This is an easy call that they did give up.
Did you read my previous comment? Like I said, nobody is saying that Congress doesn't have the legal right to pass this law, just that it might conflict with some principles of how government ought to be conducted.
But what principle exactly? The federal government preventing individual states putting up trade barriers was a massive reason for the constitution in the first place.
"States' rights" normally means the right for states to regulate their own, internal affairs, not to regulate inter-state affairs. Clearly the latter would devolve into a free-for-all.
I think there are trade barriers which unfairly target out of state products (e.g. tariffs or a higher sales tax on Tennessee whiskey), and there are trade barriers which affect in-state providers and out-of-state providers equally (e.g. banning weed or banning contract killing).
The former obviously need to be avoided lest trade wars happen between the states. And in some cases telling if something unfairly disadvantages another state might not be straightforward. It would also be desirable to force states to allow the transportation of locally banned goods through the state (just seal the container, worked for Lenin).
The very broad way the commerce clause is interpreted instead means that the federal government can regulate anything short of "oral-genital intimacy" (as alluded to in that infamous J. Hoover quote).
A regulation/ban is not a trade barrier, otherwise Colorado could sue Alabama for preventing its weed farmers to sell their most excellent product there (and obtain national legalization with no democratic legitimacy).
Come on, you know it's a specious reasoning and special pleading, you just want to own the libs
A regulation/ban is absolutely a trade barrier. Colorado cannot sue Alabama because the matter is in the purview of Congress. Of course Congress could mandate that Alabama cannot block the sale of marijuana in their state, or alternatively it could forbid all interstate commerce in marijuana. Or something in between (e.g. quality requirements for marijuana in interstate commerce).
Correct. The exact question presented to the court was whether the the commerce clause preempted California's action law in the absence of active regulation by Congress. This is the doctrine of the Dormant Commerce Clause. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-8/clause-3/overview-of-dormant-commerce-clause
There can be no doubt that if Congress enacts a law regulation commerce in an article such as meat, that law will preempt any contrary state laws. It is that simple.
I think it is a good idea for Congress to pass a law on these lines. They need to stop California from spreading its idiocy
If we accept that Congress can force a state to allow the sale of a product that state does not want to sell, then there are all sorts of examples which might impede the spirit of states rights.
Congress could force a state to tolerate the sale of
* Human meat
* Fentanyl
* Abortion-inducing drugs
* Leaded gasoline, or coal-powered cars
* Ghost guns
* Weapons of war
* Child sexual abuse material
* Slave labor and enslaved persons (after abolishing the 13th)
* Services of out-of-state contract killers (thus legalizing murder-for-profit)
This would mean in effect that state rights to regulate pretty much anything would only exist until Congress bothered to create a law.
Would? This has been the accepted law for decades. In fact, the current position is that Congress can even regulate intra-state commerce (Wickard v Filburn).
States are still be able to regulate lots of things. They can regulate the hours people work at the shop. They can (sometimes! - dormant commerce clause) regulate interstate commerce in the absence of congressional command. But they can't overrule the federal government in its core functions.
> They can regulate the hours people work at the shop.
I would assume that if some shops have a phone, and sometimes receive sales-related phone calls from out of state, the commerce clause would give Congress the ability to mandate allowing shops to stay open 24/7.
Well, you know what they say about when you assume.
15. If you're interested in Anthropic & scaling, I highly recommend https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/dario-amodei#%C2%A7transcript (I suggested several questions.)
31. I think this one turned out to be bogus? They simply changed how they measured it. However, coincidentally, https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07367 shows a (much smaller) decline and still looks legit.
33. Metaculus is all the way down to 2% now https://www.metaculus.com/questions/18177/room-temp-superconductor-replicated-by-2025/ so looks like there's room to arbitrage fake-internet-points?
21: Do you have a link to an explanation of why bogus?
Looks like https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-overflows-traffic/ is it.
> Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen inaccurate data and graphs circulating on social media channels regarding Stack Overflow’s traffic...First, we recategorized our Google Analytics cookie. That was completed in May of 2022, and resulted in Google Analytics reporting on fewer visitors’ site activity. Shortly after, in September of 2022, we upgraded to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which provides additional configurable privacy-enabling settings, such as anonymous modeling of site traffic, which we have enabled.
>
> ...Although we have seen a small decline in traffic, in no way is it what the graph is showing (which some have incorrectly interpreted to be a 50% or 35% decrease). This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022. Stack Overflow remains a trusted resource for millions of developers and technologists.
>
> As anyone who has worked in the digital space knows, a website’s traffic and engagement can be influenced by a variety of factors. Stack Overflow is no different, particularly given the rapid innovation happening as a result of new technologies. In 2020, as tech workers responded to the needs of a remote workforce, we shared information about the “pandemic spikes” we saw in new questions asked around cloud and security. Conversely, in April of this year, we saw an above average traffic decrease (~14%), which we can likely attribute to developers trying GPT-4 after it was released in March. Our traffic also changes based on search algorithms, which have a big influence on how our content is discovered.
I don't know if this is just a difference in wording, but they talk about how traffic has only slightly decreased in the blog post, while the graph shows number of posts submitted.
Given that most of the traffic on StackOverflow is from Google search, new posts dynamics can stay disconnected from traffic for quite a bit of time. Of course StackOverflow stresses the (probably true as stated) part that looks good for talking to advertisers…
Thanks, fixed / edited in.
I remember looking at it a few months ago: https://coagulopath.com/is-chatgpt-killing-stackoverflow/
The site has been gradually losing traffic for a number of years. I'm sure AI isn't helping, but the inflection points don't really line up with CoPilot/GPT3/ChatGPT/GPT4. They seem to have been penalized by Google—StackOverflow links used to be at the top of Google for nearly any common programming search query, but now they're a few results down.
15. Good genealogical work, but I got there first :) I spend a little more time on the extreme improbability of a backcountry antebellum dirt farmer being Jewish in the first place.
https://genealogian.substack.com/p/was-elvis-jewish
Thanks, I've added in a link to your article.
The Snopes link says this:
> Again, names often tell a story and two of Martha’s brothers were given Jewish names, Sidney and Jerome.”
Those don't look like Jewish names to me, and behindthename.com indicates that Sidney is from English (!) and Jerome is from Greek. What gives?
2 „lately he’s been casting kabbalistic death curses on Israeli prime ministers.“
Good empirical test of Kaballa, there.
They did both die within a few months...
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."?
Someone should do a RCT on that.
(Good luck finding an IRB willing to sign off that, though.)
"In conclusion, Ian Fleming was right. About everything."
30. No idea how to actively study / science this, but my armchair understanding has always been that 'sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive'. Evolution takes more chances with the less necessary part of the procreation pair. Makes plenty of common sense.
I agree there's a plausible argument for *why*, but I'm still hung up on *how*. How would you have a hormone that makes all traits "more variable"?
You're right that an increased-variability hormone is implausible.
A better conjecture would be mutations in the sperm genomes.
Can you explain more how that would work?
No, not really. It's just that X and Y sperm are, in principle, different enough that it's a good place to point while hand-waving an explanation for male–female differences.
I'm vaguely (very vaguely) wondering if female biology is more tightly constrained due to hormones.
That is, there's a much greater level of regulation and that means tighter control over expression of the genes in the physical environment.
Men seem to have a testosterone cycle, but it's simpler by comparison with the female hormonal cycle:
https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/the-health-hub/conditions/mens-health/men-master-your-hormones/
"The male hormone cycle
When we talk about a man’s ‘cycle’, we are talking about their testosterone cycle.
Men actually experience a full testosterone cycle every 24 hours, with peaks and troughs in testosterone levels during this time which affect mood, attitudes and behaviour.
Testosterone in men reaches its peak in the early morning, decreasing steadily after 9am throughout the day.
Testosterone levels in men are at their lowest ebb at night, before sleep. Men’s testosterone levels build up overnight, which is why they’re at their highest in the early morning.
Men over the age of 45 have less testosterone than younger men – they also tend to have steadier testosterone levels throughout the day without the morning spike." (So Shakespeare was right there, about "the heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble" as you get older 😁)
Though by this, men may have an annual cycle:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1270587/
"In a groups of 15 healthy male subjects a statistically significant circannual cycle in plasma testosterone levels was assessed by sampling blood at 3-monthly intervals. Peak levels were found in summer and early autumn and a nadir in the winter and early spring."
And maybe even a monthly cycle, comparable to the menstrual cycle?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1117056/
"The object of the study was to assess the lability of testosterone levels in plasma of normal human males over a long period of time and to search for periodicities in changing levels. Blood samples obtained from 20 healthy young men every second day for 2 months were assayed for total testosterone concentration by radioligand saturation analysis with late-pregnancy plasma. The flucturations of plasma testosterone levels over the total time span were substantial for most individuals; the coefficients of variation ranged from 14 to 42% (median 21%). The presence of periodic functions in these fluctuations was tested by 4 different, relatively independent methods. Close agreement among at least 3 analytic methods was found for 12 out of the 20 subjects. These 12 subjects had cycles of plasma testosterone levels with periods ranging between 8-30 days, with a cluster of periods around 20-22 days. The majority of such cycles were significant at least at the 5% level. The mean amplitudes of these cycles ranged from 9 to 28% of the subjects' mean testosterone levels (average 17%)."
However, this shows that men have a simpler (by comparison) testosterone production cycle, in one nice neat feedback loop. Women have three loops going on, with rising and falling levels of hormones over the month:
https://opentextbc.ca/biology/chapter/24-4-hormonal-control-of-human-reproduction/
https://opentextbc.ca/biology/wp-content/uploads/sites/96/2015/10/Figure_43_04_01-1024x436-1.jpg
https://opentextbc.ca/biology/wp-content/uploads/sites/96/2021/03/Figure_43_04_02f.png
So if male biology has more freedom, maybe variability is all part of it? Female expressiveness is dampened down because there's a lot of juggling going on to get the cycles right and you can't afford to have too much variation or else the entire thing collapses.
(Yeah, I'm talking out of my backside, but biology is *complicated*).
Sounds like a reasonable hypothesis to me.
I don't see how this would result in greater male variability. Sperm genomes contribute to both male and female offspring. People's genomes contain contributions from sperm whether they produce them or not. If a person develops mutations in the genomes of their sperm, that affects their offspring, not their own physical traits.
Well, you could have genes for mutagenic substances on the y chromosome.
I don't buy that though, because these mutations would (depending on when they occur) be passed on to children. After n generations, a male would have his own average k mutations and k*n/2 mutations from the males in previous generations (assuming 2<<46), while a female would have k*n/2 mutations passed on from male ancestors.
(Also, I think encouraging mutations is generally foolish from the perspective of genes. Even if a mutation-causing allele wins the lottery and causes an actually beneficial mutation, the mutation might well spread while the gene which caused it vanishes because it can't pull of the beneficial mutation miracle every few generations but constantly disadvantages its bearers.)
Perhaps a hormone that upregulates some inherently stochastic process during fetal development?
Once you accept that 46 chromosomes can build something as complicated as a human, is it that surprising that 1 chromosome could contain the information needed to change the variance in many traits?
Indeed! One gene, SRY is enough to cause the quite numerous differences between men and women. One whole chrosome can do many things!
Wild guess: Could there be a gene on the Y chromosome that deactivates some of the otherwise-paired genes on some of the _other_ chromosome pairs?
The process of meiosis can do that itself under the father's direction. ("Epigenetics.") It's not necessary for the Y chromosome of a spermatozoon to modify the rest of that spermatozoon's genome.
All that would really be required is for the father's meiotic process to be capable of distinguishing between Y-bearing sperm (sons) and X-bearing sperm (daughters).
Good point! Many Thanks!
It doesn't have to be a hormone - trait variability is itself under genetic control (i.e., not that the trait itself is heritable - the trait *variability* is heritable) - different inbred strains of fruit flies have different amounts of behavioral variability, and there are genes linked to variability (they might control the "noisiness" of neural development) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1503830112
So it's easy to imagine there could be male-specific genetic pathways that increase phenotypic variability.
Maybe a different way of conceptualizing this would be that the development of some traits may have a switch that can be triggered by a particular hormone? That is, the hormone is just a simple signal, and the real mechanism is in parts of the body that have evolved to respond to that signal. So the signal comes through, "1" (or maybe an analog value), and some parts of the body develop differently. Penis vs. clitoris, testicles vs. ovaries, etc. And maybe some of that "etc." is various parts of the body flipping a switch from "reduce the chance of non-viability" to "increase the chance of hyper-viability". The whole package is turned on by the same signal, which is why all the traits correlate.
Of course, there's that thing you mentioned with the animals that use doubled genes for the male. Were you talking about the ZW system, or something else?
Perhaps you could think of it in terms of error correction mechanisms? Perhaps there's a bunch of systems which are designed to prevent anything from getting too far from the mean, and the severity with which these mechanisms step in is moderated by some hormone.
One way to do it would be to have the hormone trigger a change that trades robustness for peak performance, like causing the legs grow in a way that facilitates faster running at the cost of and increased risk of being broken. The increased variance comes from different animals winning and losing that gamble.
I don't actually know anything about legs, it's a purely illustrative hypothesis.
Lots of genes where have an effect on some trait but only in a testosterone dominant environment?
I.e. there's not a hormone that makes all traits more variable, there are many genes that each use the same hormone to decide how much variation they should contribute to a trait.
“Men seem to have higher variance on a wide variety of traits (both biochemical, like cholesterol level, and socially interesting, like intelligence) compared to females (the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis). One common explanation is that men have only one X chromosome, compared to women’s two, so any unusual genes on the X chromosome get “averaged out” in women but not in men. An obvious question is whether the fraction of genes on the X chromosome is enough to explain the magnitude of greater male variability. Emil Kierkegaard does a simulation and says no, suggesting that evolution must be actively selecting for male variability somehow. I appreciate this work, but also appreciate the work showing greater female variability in animal species where the male has two of the same chromosome, suggesting that it is chromosome-based after all. I don’t know how to square these two findings.”
I don't necessarily think these two findings have to fit together perfectly. It seems quite likely to me that both of these mechanisms are at play, but for different characteristics:
• For many characteristics, like blood parameters or personality traits, the differences in variability between men and women aren't that significant. Take the study linked below, which looks at the distribution of blood cholesterol levels for both genders in the US. While the researchers did find that variability is a bit higher in men, the difference is quite small. This kind of minor difference might be due to the fact that men only have one X chromosome, though there are other possible explanations as well.
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7189954/)
• On the other hand, for other characteristics, the disparities are more pronounced. E O W Kirkegaard's post provides an example of a notable difference in variability between men and women in their strategic choices during economic games. Men are much more inclined than women to opt for extreme strategies. There's well-documented evidence that men tend to be more prone to things like risk-taking, aggression,or valuing social hierarchy. In my view, this probably explains the observed pattern well enough, without necessarily involving the X chromosome
Eggs are only expensive relative to sperm. They aren't expensive at all in any absolute sense; what's expensive, and drives the different behavior of women relative to men, is pregnancy.
21 - I'm not sure how much of the decline it explains, but Stack Exchange has been working VERY hard to piss off its user base for the last few years. There's too much historical drama to go over it all, but the highlights are:
- Firing a well-liked moderator over confusing pronoun-usage-policy drama in a way that pissed off basically everyone, even those who agreed with the policy that they were trying to push
- Unilaterally, retroactively changing the license that applies to their user-generated content in a way that pissed off a lot of people and may have been illegal
- Firing a bunch of long-tenure, well-liked employees
- Badmouthing their volunteer moderators to the press
- Recently, an extremely aggressive and unpopular push by the CEO to use site content as AI training fodder and encourage the use of AI tools to generate posts, when most of the user base seems to think AI-generated posts should be banned
This has led to two moderator strikes and a lot of drama. Here are some links:
- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper
- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-community-managers-stack-exchange-is-not-interested-in-cooperating-with
- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334575/dear-stack-exchange-a-statement-and-a-letter-from-your-moderators
- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/388401/new-blog-post-from-our-ceo-prashanth-community-is-the-future-of-ai
- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389582/what-is-the-network-policy-regarding-ai-generated-content
These events don't neatly line up with the dates of the graph, so I'm not sure if the decline is really due to this stuff or due to AI usage. But the vibe there has definitely gone from "high community buy-in" to "Stack Exchange is our enemy" in the time I've been on there (~6 years).
If you've ever tried asking a question only to have it closed as a duplicate of a locked question all of whose answers are outdated by several years, you'll see "StackExchange is the enemy" is the moderate position.
Stack Exchange was built to be something like a Q&A wiki, but looked too much like a forum to really pull that off; worse, what applies to one problem will often not apply to even a superficially similar problem. Power users hate noobs, normal users hate power-tripping mods, it all sucks.
SE is not long for this world.
Apparently, it lived somewhat stably when power users wrote answers to whatever they considered non-dupe and wiped whatever they considered dupes. Now when _both_ sides also hate StackExchange the company, things slowly get shakier…
But this is a big part of the point of StackOverflow and a big part of its quality as a knowledge base: you don't want 100 questions that are slight variations on the same question, with various levels of outdatedness in the answers: ideally there should be one and its answers are updated over time. (Which it supports by very rarely locking questions, and making answers editable by anyone with a moderate amount of reputation)
The bits that make it less convenient for quickly asking questions are the bits that make it a quality knowledge base: these two goals are to some degree, opposed.
---
And, a lot of the new questions are genuinely really bad - people will always cherry-pick the examples where someone asks a really good question, but it gets wrongly closed as a duplicate (there's always an error rate with these sort of decisions), but for every one of those cases there's a thousand cases where it really was a duplicate, or was incoherent, or didn't provide remotely enough information to answer a question.
As someone who moderates a programming discord focused around answering questions: I have a lot of experience in saying that asking technical questions well is *really* hard and frankly most people aren't good at it.
So it's good that things like programming Discords and chatbots exists as alternatives where people can ask (often bad) questions and still get answers... but I don't think that's actually going to replace StackOverflow, either. It's still where you're going to find the best answers in the most searchable form.
Reading StackExchange can be very useful, answering other people's question is fun, but asking questions is a frustrating experience. There is a big difference between the kind of answers I give, and the kind of answers I receive.
Many reactions are essentially people judging me for asking too simple or too complicated question. Damn you, if you know the answer, write it or at least give me a hint; if you don't know, simply close the browser tab! Most popular questions are those that can be easily answered by typing them to Google -- I suppose because that's exactly what people do: type the question to Google, write the answer using their own words, and enjoy the karma. When this doesn't work, they get frustrated, and punish the person who asked the question.
> Same author: why did Mormon fertility drop?
I generally downgraded my credibility prior for all the TFR-obsessed people after they foolishly made a testable prediction (the whole "Ukraine will surrender quickly because their low TFR indicates lack of Vital Spirit or something" meme that was getting passed around in February 2022)
I think "why did this group's TFR drop so quickly?" is an interesting question regardless of whether or not you use TFR to make Vast Conclusions About Society.
Agreed that it's an interesting question! And at a certain level their conclusion is... plausible - would love to see other perspectives on it.
I agree that some people say that and we're foolish to say it, but also it seems dumb even without hindsight, since Russian tfr is almost as low
Just to add: "Russian almost as low tfr" is inflated by the higher tfr among "non-Russki Rossiyani" (Russki=slavic russian/"Rossiyan": citizen of Russia): Muslims, "abos" - "glad-to-dispense-with" people in Russki-mainstream-view. "For instance, Muslim women generally have more children than other women in Russia (an estimated 2.3 children per woman, compared with a national average of fewer than 1.5 children per woman)". Muslims around 15% of Russia's population now.
Was anybody other than Hanania (not exactly a core example of a Birthrate Boy) making this claim?
And Hanania didn't even make that claim, he made the claim that there wouldn't be guerilla warfare.
This sounds like a different set of TFR-obsessed people than the ones I am aware of, who are thinking that it's a problem that most of the world seems to have trouble maintaining TFR close to 2 (everyone seems to be decreasing, and countries don't seem to slow down their decrease much as they get below 2).
I read the article and didn't see any data directly about Mormons; it was using Utah's fertility rate instead. 3 problems: percentage of Mormons in Utah may be changing (I think a "small" decline, but can't find numbers), drops in fertility of the non-Mormon population (40-50%) may drive this trend, and overall there's a multi-decade downward trend which, as of that data, doesn't jump out at me as very different from the post-Trump 2015-onward trend.
Thank you for reading the article and pointing out a few objections.
I skimmed a few paragraphs, and thought "this person writes like someone whose brain has been damaged by cannabis. Life is too short."
I'd be wary of figures for the fertility rate of 'Mormons' too because I hear the church is weird about apostasy in a way where lots of ex-mormons could still be skewing the numbers
That's true - I know one semi-apostate who is that way in part because they fell through the cracks, and never achieved the family and children that they were taught would come to them if they were faithful.
Because someone somewhere said something silly and wrong involving the words "Total Fertility Rate" you're downgrading credibility of everything TFR-related in the future?
This seems like an excessively large epistemic splash radius.
"epistemic splash radius"
I like this phrase and I hereby vote for its incorporation into established rationalist argot.
In this case, I think the Rhodesian irrendentist guy/gal/cat is failing to check the very first anybody should check when talking about some change in group X, that is "who is the group X comprised of now? How is the label assigned now?".
He(?) would quickly discovered that LDS has wildly relaxed the requirements to stay part of the Church. The fact that now a behaviorally average Christian can call themselves a Mormon might be a more parsimonious explanation than the latest NRx Twitter meme, I'd guess
I don't believe #36 or #37 at all. #36 is so ludicrously on the nose that it reads as a libertarian fever dream. #37 I can barely parse, but seems like one of those triple-bankshot explanations. (Revulsion to Trump infected Mormons with progressive urban values? Right.)
Also probably worth mentioning that even if #36 is absolutely true and you can find dystopian Victorian literature that perfectly describes life in modern Western society, this would be merely amusing and nothing more.
I agree #36 goes strong. The writer provides a link to one example, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14540/14540-h/14540-h.htm , and using CTRL+F I'm able to find the part about police fines, so I don't think it's completely made up. I don't want to read the whole book in order to find out if he's exaggerating it or giving it a biased summary.
Many of the policies were already implemented in the US at the time. The top tax bracket in 1918 was 77%! https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/historical-highlights-of-the-irs
Having skimmed through the book looking for the word "tax" it seems that the British are suffering over extreme and burdensome taxes under the Germans, but it's not to fund big government it's to extract wealth from Britain and to make the British second class citizens (German citizens are not taxed the same as native British).
1918 was well into WW1 and after the invasion novels had been written (they were speculating about a future war with the authoritarian eternal Hun, When William Came was 1913)
Notably many figures from the old right and old wig factions of the Anglosphere considered WW1 policies on a par with totalitarianism... and so did the totalitarians... Mussolini would later say he designed fascism based off of Woodrow Wilson's "War Socialism"
Interestingly, the full book fits into Claude2's context window. Here's what it had to say about the reading:
Q: One reader commented about this book:
[quote]
Is this an accurate reading? Does the book seem to describe policies similar to modern ones as a horrifying dystopia?
Claude2: I don't think it's fully accurate to characterize the book as portraying modern policies as a "horrifying dystopia." While there are some similarities between the German occupation policies described in When William Came and current government policies, there are also important differences:
• The level of authoritarian control and loss of civil liberties under the German occupation in the book seems far more extreme and all-encompassing than in modern Western democracies.
• Many of the specific policies described, like onerous income taxes, property seizures, and gun control, are more heavy-handed than analogous current laws.
• The book is based on an alternate history premise of a foreign military conquest and occupation of Britain. This inherently creates a dystopian atmosphere very different from normal civilian governance.
• The narrator and British characters in the book view the German policies as oppressive impositions on a defeated nation, which does not closely parallel how most citizens view their own government's policies.
So while one can draw some parallels, I think it overstates the case to say the book presents modern conditions as equivalent to a horrifying dystopia. The book is better understood as a speculative fictional exploration of the themes of occupation, resistance, and collaboration unique to its alternate history setting. While it may have some resonance for debates over the proper scope of government, it is not an overt commentary on specific modern policies or conditions.
A follow-up:
Q: Can you outline some of the ways the policies described in the book differ from analogous current laws?
Claude2: Here are some key differences between the policies described in When William Came and current laws in Western democracies:
• Taxation - The German occupiers impose extremely high direct taxes on income, described as reaching double-digit percentages. Modern income tax rates are much lower. The highest bracket in the US and UK tops out below 40%.
• Property - The Germans seize property and restrict people's ability to modify their own homes. Private property rights are much more protected today. Eminent domain requires compensation and due process.
• Gun Control - The British are prohibited from owning various firearms and subject to registration requirements. Most Western countries allow civilian gun ownership, though with restrictions like licensing.
• Fines - Germans arbitrarily fine people on the spot for minor violations. Due process rights prevent this today. Fines typically go through the court system.
• Movement - The British need permission from German police to travel outside their hometown. Free movement within and outside one's country is a core civil liberty.
• Media - The British newspapers are heavily censored during the German occupation in the book. Modern democracies have free press protections.
• Rule of Law - The occupiers are acting by decree, without constraints like legislative oversight and judicial review that bind modern governments.
So in summary, the German policies appear to be much more arbitrary, restrictive, and unchecked compared to the rule-based systems of today, even if similar policy goals exist in some areas. The book presents a more absolutist, authoritarian vision than current laws.
40% is double digit. I guess the AI is still not that good at math.
Almost every one of them seems like a case of "you are _saying_ this is different, but your descriptions don't actually seem different"
I'm suspecting that this is the RLAIF writing the bottom line first (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).
10% is double digit, and is as old as the Bible. It's a pretty insane complaint for someone to make in the first place.
That was tithing which was separate from taxes.
"The Germans seize property and restrict people's ability to modify their own homes. Private property rights are much more protected today."
The LLM didn't have HOAs in its training set? :-)
I'd like to register my opinion that I'm very much not interested in LLM's weighing in on threads that weren't already about LLM's.
I think this is a pretty genius use of an LLM.
I mean, what it showed about Claude was actually pretty interesting. Insofar as revealing things about the topic, no, I'm not convinced.
I agree with you. I want to hear what people have to say about these things based on their experience, knowledge, and values.
Signed. If I wanted to read AI output, I can go to an AI directly.
Not completely made up, but this supports my point about the similarities being merely amusing. I'm sure someone somewhere feels that parking citations are "unthinkable horror and tyranny that could only be enacted upon a conquered people —slavery at the societal level!" But you can contest parking tickets.
No way to get out of paying double digit percentages of your income as tax though.
I recently read about Sparta and the horrible oppression of the Helots. One of the horrible ways in which the Helots were oppressed is that the Spartans would take away a full fifty percent of whatever they produced. (Whereas I, being a citizen of a modern free nation, am only taxed at 47% so I'm nothing like a helot, whew.)
Being taxed at 50% when you're a subsistence farmer is very different from being taxed at 50% when you're a millionaire, or even an office worker. There is no way that anybody in a free modern nation who is on the edge of starvation is taxed at 50%.
You're right - when I'm taxed at 50% as a millionaire or an office worker, they're taking *even more* from me than if I was a subsistence farmer.
Are you really taxed at $0.47 for every $1, or is 47% your top tax band?
My country has a high rate of tax and a 47% effective rate would (I think) be impossible, regardless of the level of earnings.
Doesn't the effective rate asymptote to the top-band rate as income tends to infinity?
Yes, but as income tends to infinity, your total wealth also tends to infinity. No amount of tax burden is particularly onerous if it leaves you with infinite wealth.
Are you factoring in the taxes on salary paid by the employer and the VAT?
Actually, in many countries, like the UK, total wedge between what is spent on your labour and what you consume is much wider, because of national insurance, VAT, and duties.
A quick search for the word "gun" found the registration bit: a decree comes down from the Kaiser that since the British are such a peaceful and pacifistic people they would be exempt from compulsary military service, and since they won't have any need to fight in the military they won't need any guns so "therefore all rifle clubs, drill associations, cadet corps and similar bodies were henceforth declared to be illegal. No weapons other than guns for specified sporting purposes, duly declared and registered and open to inspection when required, could be owned, purchased, or carried. The science of arms was to be eliminated altogether from the life of a people who had shown such marked repugnance to its study and practice."
So the book does say guns are outlawed unless registered for sport purposes, though the reasoning behind it in the book is clearly to keep Britian a subject nation with no opportunity to rebel against their conquerors.
That is extremely close to the gun control situation in Canada (it doesn't have to be for sporting purposes, but the restrictions are such that home defence with them is pretty iffy).
Thinking about this a bit further, #36 pushes me in very much the opposite direction as the author. It underscores the extent to which our notions of dystopia reflect our own present-day fears and obsessions and the extent to which we are therefore probably wrong about how bad these things actually are.
For example, it would be extremely easy to write a dystopian fable in which privacy no longer exists: we are monitored online by the giant corporations that provide us with the mindless distraction we crave; and offline by a panopticon of our own creation, with every public space monitored ceaselessly by cameras and other sensors. We rarely go outside anyway, because virtual realms, spun by sentient AIs that are more intelligent and creative than we could ever hope to be, have proved so much more alluring than the "real" world. We barely even have sex anymore, at least with each other. When (if) we want children, we order them from genetic labs. "Delivery" means something very different than it used to.
So here's the thing: a lot of this could actually come to pass in the next thousand years, maybe all of it. And...it could be fine. People could still live lives of meaning, find joy and connection, and be more or less as satisfied, happy, and healthy as they have ever been. Perhaps more so. They'll have wealth, leisure, freedom from resource competition. Someone a thousand years hence could wave around a copy of my hackneyed dystopian fable and scream, "Don't you all see what you've become?" And most people would -- correctly -- just shrug and avert their eyes from the crank.
To the degree that 36 is an accurate description of the book, I'd guess it's because the book was trying to argue against policies that were being pushed in the UK at the time by linking them with the kaiser.
Problem with #37 is that it's using Utah's TFR as a proxy for Mormon TFR. The Mormon percentage of Utah's population has been going down over time, so there's a much simpler explanation of the data. It's possible Mormon TFR is going down as well over time, but it's unwise to get into guessing games over causes when you're using surrogate endpoints to measure the effect to begin with.
Right. The Mormon TFR has been dropping over time but is still well above the TFR of non-Mormon Americans. Meanwhile the Mormon pct of all Utah residents has been dropping steadily, to the point that the state's most-populous county (having two-fifths of the total state population) is no longer majority Mormon.
Yeah, I tried a bit of searching, and couldn't find good numbers. But I did see that the most-populous county is an outlier; Mormon percentage in many other counties is going up. Overall, they said the statewide trend was slightly downward, but I didn't get any numbers. :-/
36 is highly suspect. Income tax isn’t a kaiserite idea, or a German one. Britain had it since 1799. Britain also restricted some firearms by 1900 (mostly for celts and Catholics) and in the next 20 years after 1900 enacts many more laws. No invasion necessary. These two things I kind of knew.
Just googling arms control in Germany (which I didn’t know) and wiki informs me that “[prior to 1914] … possession of guns and weapons was not generally restricted, but regulations about carrying arms in public came into use.”
After the war “The general disarming of citizens and a generic gun law was imposed by the Allies after World War I. “
I am actually doubting these books existed. They very much seem like something a 20/21st C American libertarian would detest, but not a conservative voting church going Anglican in Victorian Britain. A British conservative of the era would be quite happy with restrictions on what can be done to property. Very few members of that class wanted millionaires buying the ancient buildings of Britain and turning them into some modern monstrosity.
( It’s socialists who, later on, tended to support the knocking down of old Victorian or Georgian buildings, as part of heavy handed slum clearances, it was conservatives who opposed them.)
And regulation was common in Britain for centuries.
https://www.createstreets.com/the-long-history-of-british-land-use-regulation/
Saki is a well known British writer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saki
Wikipedia confirms the book is real
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_William_Came
the W link says the subtitle was "A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns," which is pretty funny since the house of "Windsor" had not even yet been renamed from the very Germanic "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha". I wonder if that part was satirical?
Saki was a master of satire. I just posted links to a few of his stories, above, and I expect there's many more that would better illustrate the point. When I first read the description of the book, I assumed it was serious, but the instant I learned it was by Saki, I switched to suspecting that he was satirizing anti-German panic. Although he was probably skewering everything within sight, regardless of side.
(Of course, he did die in WWI, after having turned down a commission, and instead having enlisted as a trooper even though he was 43 and overage. So there's that.)
Thanks for the extra info - genuinely interesting. I had never heard of him until this!
I only stumbled across him last month, listening to a podcast from earlier in the year (Econtalk, "Zach Weinersmith on Beowulf and Bea Wolf", https://simplecast.econtalk.org/episodes/zach-weinersmith-on-beowulf-and-bea-wolf)
I was already familiar with Saki's style from his short stories; but when I read When William Came, it came over as very earnest and serious - and not trying to be funny at all. I think it's straight, not satire.
PS the short stories are wonderful, but When William Came is at best a historical oddity.
Saki is **scathing**. I have only read small amounts, but he's on top of my fiction pile.
"Sredni Vashtar"
https://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/1891/
"The Toys of Peace"
https://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/1903/
"Tobermory"
https://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/1901/
"The Story-Teller"
https://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/1896/
Saki is incredible; I don't think there is any story he wrote that is not worth reading.
I particularly love "The Feast of Nemesis" and "The She-Wolf"
Thanks for the recommendations!
If it's by Saki, then it may well be a multi-layered satire. Saki may have been conservative in a bunch of ways, but he was also a British homosexual in the Oscar Wilde era, so he had that thing where he observed society from the outside while simultaneously moving through it undetected.
Or it might have been serious. He turned down a commission in WWI, and instead enlisted as a trooper even though he was too old. And he died there, killed by a sniper. Apparently his last words were, "Put that bloody cigarette out!".
Robin Hanson also noticed a trend of dystopias being horrified by trends we now partly see as normal:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-industrial-revolution-continueshtml
Jaywalking specifically barely exists as a crime in the crime in the UK.
"Jaywalking laws vary widely by jurisdiction. In many countries such as the United Kingdom, the word is not generally used and, with the exception of certain high-speed roads, there are no laws limiting how pedestrians can use public highways."
...or anywhere else but in the US, that I am aware of. I still remember when I was scolded by passers-by in Berkeley, back in first time visit in the1990s, for crossing a regular city street outside designated places, and not in a straight line. My immediate reaction: " and people here say we in Europe live in an overregulated society!"
Well, I'd argue that experience was anomalous, assuming you weren't forcing traffic to brake. I'm American and have jaywalked many, many times, and the only time I recall any sort of protest or acknowledgement was doing it in sight of a police car, who did that thing where he turns his siren on for half a second just to say "I saw that" as he drove past.
At least when I was there a bit in the late 1970s, California was already notable inside the US for being a state that actually enforced jaywalking laws.
I was not alive in the late 1970s, but my multiple decades of experience living in California suggest that the enforcement rate of any putative jaywalking laws is zero.
I know someone who got a ticket for jaywalking in Berkeley, might have been in the 70's.
It's illegal in Hungary. (A summary offence, not a crime, as I assume anywhere it's illegal.) It's rarely enforced, but it means that if you jaywalk and get hit by a car, it's likely that it will be assumed that it's your fault. Looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems to be illegal in many European and other countries.
The link for 37 rambles on a lot about insidious liberal infiltration of culture, but for some reason doesn't seem to be interested in looking at the demographic trends of mormons/Utah and how they compare to other populations that have had the same phenomenon.
I'd bet heavily on priors that it turns out to neatly track the known correlations around rising cost of raising children, greater education, delayed marriage age, etc.
6- Plot idea (1920s style, in keeping with the time period of the "Murchison Murders"): A writer of mystery novels and his friend are being blackmailed by a ex-convict. The author concocts a "fool-proof" murder method involving the disposal of a body with fire, acid, etc., and makes sure that his blackmailer is known to have heard about it. Shortly afterward, the author's friend disappears, but some of his personal jewelry is found amidst what looks suspiciously like charred animal/human remnants as outlined in the author's "foolproof" body-disposal technique. The blackmailer (an ex-convict, remember, and so already the object of mistrust and suspicion) is arrested, convicted, and hanged. Shortly afterward, the friend reemerges with the excuse (true enough) that he had been on a round-the-world yachting cruise with his new wife after secretly eloping with her.
No, it's not very original. But it's the first thing I thought of when reading that wikipedia article -- how neatly everything was stacked against the man who got hanged in that case!
I mean, if an ex-con were blackmailing me to devise an effective murder method, I'd want him in jail forever or dead. He's known to be capable of criminal behaviour both in the past and present (blackmail is illegal!), and he wants an effective murder method; one would presume that he intends to use it.
The EATS Act is not a power grab. It is only a violation of states rights in the extremely weak sense that it violates Maryland's rights to have to allow people with Virginia driver's licenses to drive in Maryland, or that it violates Texas's rights to have to recognize marriages (even gay ones!) performed in California. It is true that states aren't sovereign nations, being part of the United States means there are some limitations on states rights. One of those limitations is that states don't get to regulate things that happen in other states. California grossly violated that principle. California engaged in an outrageous power grab. California undemocratically used its market power to impose its preferred policy on the rest of the country. That is not how federalism is supposed to work. And Congress is rightly stepping in to correct the problem.
I'll also note that when the republicans talk about banning interstate travel for abortions, liberals are (rightly) happy to rely on this principle that states don't get to regulate activities that occur outside their borders. If you want to toss the principle in the name of animals, you will loose it when it comes to abortions too. And who knows how many other issues? Is this a trade you really want to make?
Or rather, it IS a power grab, but one that was successfully completed circa 1865.
1787, actually
No, it was nowhere near complete that early.
The Commerce Clause is an original part of the Constitution.
So? The words don't count for much if you can't enforce them reliably; the power grab wasn't completed at least until the conquest of the South.
I don't really care if the power wasn't exercised, the power existed. And I question the justification of putting it post-Civil War
I think that protectionism is a pretty strong political urge, and many states would have loved to have laws that prevent the importation into their state of certain goods from other states in order to prop up their local producers.
Preventing this kind of thing, which otherwise would have been widespread, was precisely the original intention of the interstate commerce clause.
Can you enlighten us what role the commerce clause played in the civil war?
I think at best, one can make the case that the federal government became stronger over time, and stopping the slaver states from seceding was a milestone on the way, and the overly broad application of the commerce clause followed later.
Nothing significant I can think of. Why do you ask?
I wouldn't single out the tyrannies supposedly authorized by the Commerce clause as a particular power the Federal Government grabbed: with the conquest of the South came many spoils. Vae victis.
Are states allowed to ban other people travelling to them to do things that are legal in that state? (E.g. if a state with legal weed got annoyed at people driving over the border to smoke, could it make that illegal without making weed illegal for residents?)
Yes. See Corfield v. Coryell (1825).
This tangentially reminds me, did Washington and Oregon ever do anything about the border tax thing? I know there was a time when Washington had sales tax but no property tax, and Oregon had property tax but no sales tax, so people bought homes in Washington on the border and then drove to Oregon to grocery shop, paying tax in neither.
Nope, not as far as I'm aware. That's why the city of Vancouver, WA exists, right across the Columbia River from Oregon, and 15 minutes from downtown Portland.
I think technically you're supposed to report some types of purchase to the WA government, but I think in practice this only matters if you buy a car somewhere else and then immediately register it in WA. This probably also applies to other big-ticket items that the state needs to know about for some reason, like boats and stuff.
Also, although WA has the highest liquor taxes in the nation, this doesn't help much because OR has the second highest. :-/
There's a very large liquor store in northern California (two, actually) that is juuuuuuuust over the border from Oregon. When I was in college in Eugene and had cause to drive to California, a friend of mine asked me to purchase a significant amount of alcohol for him.
s/property/income
I don't understand the analogy to abortion.
States banning abortion in other states = prosecuting someone for what they did in another state.
CA regulating food in CA = prosecuting California stores for what they sell in California.
It seems like in general states have the right to regulate what trade goods enter them. For example, California has legalized marijuana, but Texas hasn't. If it annoys California marijuana brownie producers that they can't sell their marijuana brownies in Texas, should Texas be forced to legalize marijuana? Is there some sense in which Texas is oppressing Californian producers by not buying their brownies?
California isn't regulating other states in any way. Those states can do whatever they want, they just can't sell to California unless they meet California's standards. California has the right to decide who they buy from. If California is such a big market that other states really want to sell to it, they can either satisfy Californians' buying preferences, or get out of that market.
Unless I've seriously misunderstood the California policy, it is NOT CA regulating food in CA. The food that enters CA is literally the same food no matter how humanely or inhumanely it was produced. CA is trying to regulate the treatment of animals that live their entire lives outside of its borders. The product that crosses California's borders is the meat, after it has been slaughtered. That meat doesn't carry some metaphysical essence of how the animal was treated with it.
U.S. law prohibits imports produced with forced labor, which is the same idea, whatever you may think about its "metaphysical essence."
Sure, the Constitution gives Congress the authority over foreign and interstate commerce.
That's an interesting distinction which I hadn't considered.
I think we can ignore this distinction for the current act under consideration, since IIUC it also denies California the right to eg restrict food based on toxin level, which is a specific quality of the food involved.
But I would argue that even if that wasn't true, and it was entirely about animal cruelty, it's your right to place whatever restrictions you want on your purchases, and wanting cruelty-free meat isn't a less valid preference than wanting fat-free meat or whatever.
I guess an equivalent would be something like "Texas, which has every right to choose who to hire as a schoolteacher, says it will not hire anyone who had an abortion in another state". My guess is this violates a bunch of other federal nondiscrimination laws, but I don't think it's clearly an impingement on the right of other states to have the abortion laws they want.
>>>it's your right to place whatever restrictions you want on your purchases, and wanting cruelty-free meat isn't a less valid preference than wanting fat-free meat or whatever.
Then the State of CA can make that choice for the purchases of the State, not for the individual purchases of it's citizens and businesses.
But didn't California citizens collectively decide on this restriction via ballot proposition? One can ask whether the 62% who voted yes on Prop 12 deserve to be able to impose their will on the remaining 38%, but surely the majority support lends some validity to CA exercising that power.
>surely the majority support lends some validity to CA exercising that power.
Not really. The whole point of having a constitutional republic is that some things aren't subject to popular vote, especially on a state level. Whether the constitution prohibits this particular move is an open question, but if the residents of a state voted overwhelmingly to, say, mandate a certain religion, they would correctly be told to pound sand.
As we have seen with previous propositions, it only counts if the result accords with the Zeitgeist.
Ask Brendan Eich.
I think majority rule *should* apply in votes, but this seems like another case of "we lost by 20% to 80%, we'll try again; we lost by 40% to 60%, we'll try again; we lost by 45% to 55%, we'll try again; we won by 51% to 49%, no more referenda, this is settled and fixed law forever now" by liberal activists.
The poor CA voters who lost their right to buy cheap meat in an in-state ballot proposition will be saved from the tyranny of the majority by the shining white knights of Congress, which will surely only consider the philosophy of the rights of the states and the individuals and not vote based on partisan lines or lobbying from special interests.
Then some years later, factory farming is banned federally, perhaps.
"IIUC it also denies California the right to eg restrict food based on toxin level"
It doesn't reach this at all, because California can bar the sale of meat containing toxins based on the existence of the toxins. EATS only pre-empts laws addressing the "production or manufacture of any agricultural products"
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-117s2619is/html/BILLS-117s2619is.htm
"You can't sell this because it's poison" isn't impacted by EATS. "You can't sell it because you produced it using poison" is prohibited by EATS.
This is correct. There is no testing California could do to determine compliance. The material being imported is the same regardless of the relevant conduct, and it is the conduct in the foreign state that California is regulating.
So if treating animals inhumanely causes them stress, which leaves a chemical imprint on the meat (e.g. the remnants of stress hormones), does that mean California would have the right to ban it?
Would California be banning it to protect the health of humans eating meat in California, or to ensure the humane treatment of nonhuman animals in Iowa? Even if California claimed the latter, given California's behavior so far, I would presume the true reason was the animals, and the stated reason of human health was a sham. If that is the case, I would still say California was engaging in an outrageous power grab that will set a bad precedent for abortion and who knows what else.
> That meat doesn't carry some metaphysical essence of how the animal was treated with it.
Maybe it does. In general, the origin of an object matters a lot! We care about whether our art is real or forged, whether our goods were made by hand or by a robot, and whether they were made with free or forced labor.
It may matter to people, but states are obviously not people. States are a very different sort of thing. States are the way that people in a particular area make decisions about what happens in that area. Even if many of those people, as individual people, care about what happens in a different area, that doesn't make it ok for them to use the institution of the state to try to control what happens in that different area. I don't want Texans imposing their morals in me in New York, so I don't want the state of New York to try to impose any values on Texans. It's a kind of reciprocity. That that holds even if I, as an individual, choose not to buy products that Texas produces in a way that I find morally repugnant.
Except... they're not. Literally, someone in TX can buy the meat of an animal that is tortured daily all they want.
These arguments are ridiculous and being made in bad faith. If you want to torture and eat the output of your torture, you are welcome to do it elsewhere. Same with a myriad of other god awful things that we as a society have decided has no business in ours: murder, rape, torture of humans, bestiality, theft, selling goods intentionally poisoned, selling counterfeit materials, etc.
Please explain EXACTLY how CA law is going to prevent a Texan from eating a torture burger? I do not accept "durr companies cannot have separate production lines"....because that is nonsense and we all know it. They do. They literally already do. I've worked in CPG for years....
You are attacking straw man. I never claimed that CA was trying to regulate what Texans eat. My argument is that CA is trying to regulate how Texans treat animals in Texas. Your own analogy makes my point perfectly. Could California prohibit thefts, rapes, and murders that occur in Texas? Of course not. That is for Texas to do or not do as it chooses. Just as it is not for Texas to decide whether anyone should be prosecuted for shoplifting from a store in San Francisco.
I think an argument can be made that all things being equal, animals in more crowded conditions are more likely to be infected with viruses which may jump to humans.
This risk is statistical, but probably quantifiable. Likewise, I would argue that Texas was allowed to ban the import of blood donations by MSM, citing higher HIV risk, even if there is no physical indication on the individual blood bag.
If Mason Verger successfully lobbied Maryland to legalize him raising pigs on human meat, should other states be allowed to ban the sale of his pork for either ethical or health concerns?
I agree with you when you say that California isn't regulating other states.
However, states do not have the unfettered right to regulate what trade goods enter them. The authority "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes" belongs to Congress. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3. If Congress wants to oblige California to let in any meat meeting Texas's ethical standards, it can.
In fact, there's a plausible argument that California has to let in Texas's meat even absent a clear Congressional command. This would be part of the so-called "Dormant Commerce Clause" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause). The California law in question was challenged all the way to SCOTUS, and only upheld by a 5-4 vote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Pork_Producers_Council_v._Ross).
It seems to me that the appropriate analogy here is car emissions regulations. California was the only state that had its own emissions regulations policy in place before the federal government passed rules intended to supersede the states. California got to keep its right to make new air quality rules for cars, and other states have a choice of accepting the California rules or the federal rules.
The California exemption is explicitly written into the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act preempts state regulation of motor vehicle emissions, except that California is allowed to continue to do its own thing (with EPA review). Here's a good explanation: https://www.epa.gov/state-and-local-transportation/vehicle-emissions-california-waivers-and-authorizations
Congress could have preempted all states' regulation of motor vehicle emissions, but chose not to.
Many Thanks! I was reading this whole thread, and had a vague itch in my mind, partially remembering that there was something strange about car emissions in California. Thanks for clarifying what had happened and how!
Serious question: in the antebellum US, did free states ban products made with slave labor? Because that seems like the best analogy to what California's trying.
The sugar boycott by the abolitionists in Britain is the nearest analogy here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3rj7ty/revision/7
"The sugar boycott
One of the most successful campaigns for the abolitionist movement was encouraging British people, especially women, not to buy or use goods produced by slaves in the West Indies, particularly sugar. Around 300,000 people boycotted sugar and sales dropped dramatically."
Quakers in the US were heavily involved in this:
https://theconversation.com/how-18th-century-quakers-led-a-boycott-of-sugar-to-protest-against-slavery-174114
There were special "not made by slaves" sugar bowls:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-boycotts-slavery
"AROUND 1828, A HANDFUL OF British publications contained a very unusual advertisement. A certain B. Henderson wanted to inform the “Friends of Africa” that her china warehouse in England was selling assorted basins for sugar. These basins came emblazoned with bright golden letters, which read “East India sugar not made by slaves.”
By 1792, some 400,000 Britons were either abstaining from sugar or sourcing it from India. (Many consumers believed that East Indian sugar, while still produced in grim conditions, was preferable to sugar produced under slavery.) James Wright, a Quaker shopkeeper, advertised that he would no longer sell sugar, “till I can procure it through channels less contaminated, more unconnected with slavery, less polluted with human blood.” Pro-slavery politicians soon complained that the popular press was against them."
From what I gather, back a few centuries ago, rum used to have a bad reputation in progressive circles due to the slave labor involved in sugar.
Regarding the elimination of advanced math classes for equity reasons, I'm short of time right now so I haven't and am not going to research this much for now, but I've heard discussions of this type of proposal on Glenn Loury's podcast in his conversations with John McWhorter. My (again not at all educated) guess would be that they're singling out math because that's where the starkest performance disparities are and/or that's where the disparities seem to fall most along racial lines. (I can at least attest that there seems to be more of a cultural belief in a line between people who are Good At Math and those who are Bad At Math than for most other subjects.)
My theory is the people proposing such policies were, themselves, not good at math. They still harbor mistrust and resentment about it, deep down.
This. Particularly people who think themselves otherwise intelligent. Failure at mathematics poisons their self belief.
They should take solace in the fact that their ability to do the math of disparities probably makes them brighter than the typical person, at math.
I agree it's probably where the starkest disparities are, it just doesn't make much sense to me to draw the line at big disparities but say medium disparities and small disparities are okay. Once you've admitted that some people will do better in English class than others and that's okay and you shouldn't think of it as racism, I don't know why you can't extend that principle to math class.
Barring further thought and research on my part, I'm inclined to agree with you, but it's pretty clear to me that that's not the way these people think: they're trying to hack at the system in whatever possible way will most practically and directly make outcome data look more equal between races so as to look like they're bringing about racial justice. Entirely eliminating all higher grades of school clearly isn't practical; shortening the math sequence (potentially) is.
Almost like a metaphor for a paperclip maximizer, except in this case they're trying to minimize measures of racial disparity and a (what should be clearly misaligned) way to do so is to make your measurements less precise.
Procrustean paperclips.
Because you have to start somewhere so you start at the most obviously unequal subject, and also people have it in their heads that 'stem' jobs are a fountain of wealth that black people are being unfairly excluded from because they can't jump through the math hoop because inequity.
Because it's hardest to get away with selective grade inflation in math.
Suppose you have the following groups of subjects: Math, Art, English, History, and Science, and your explicit goal is equality of outcome. To achieve this, you need to inflate the grades of the worst students, without inflating the grades of the best students to the same degree. The only way to do that is to reduce the influence actual learning has on the final grade.
English and art are both trivial for a teacher to game. Just have a large chunk of the final grade be assignments with no objective criteria, and then grade them according to how you want the final outcome to look.
History and science are a little harder, but not much. You can reduce the gap between the smartest and dumbest students by including art projects and calling them science projects, with 'points for creativity'. My high school literally did this. Draw a mole (either the animal, or the anatomical feature) and write Avogadro's number on the paper somewhere, for a nontrivial amount of your final grade.
With math, especially higher level math, it's harder to cover up the gap between the best and worst students while still pretending that you're teaching.
If you give easier problems, the D students will become B students, and the A students will get perfect scores on everything. If you increase the weight of homework (with the understanding that the poor students will all cheat), then when the test comes, the disparity will become obvious.
Because you can't unfairly advantage your worst students, math classes are where the disparities are most stark. So if you want to lower the GPA gap between your worst students and your best students, you need to reduce the degree to which math factors into GPA, which can be most easily accomplished by reducing the available math classes.
The problem is students in every other school district, private schools, and tutors will all have access to the "advanced math".
You can't roll the clock backwards. Once an education standard has been set for a given age group, your group will either need to embrace it or fall permanently behind the rest of society. All a law like this does is force some people to spend more money then they want to keep up with the rest of society, or some who cannot to fall into the left behind group.
When conservatives scream about communists .... this is the type of outcome they're worried about. Equality through subtraction ... who actually is winning?
3 envisions congestion pricing as applying only to visitors. But good congestion pricing applies to all drivers. It's a price mechanism for roads, not a tax on visitors. (But congestion pricing is probably more politically feasible if it applies to visitors only, sure.)
#11 Mother Teresa...
Given: " painkillers were just generally in short supply in India during her era"
It's easy to believe she told her patients: "suffering brought people closer to God"
One wonders how many well-intentioned teachers of historical fact make this kind of mistake...
I remember hearing this kind of thing about Mother Teresa growing up. I think Christopher Hitchens believed it too.
This Christopher Eric Hitchens:
"Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011) was an English-American author and journalist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential atheists of the 20th and 21st centuries" -Wikipedia
Difficult to know who knew what at a given point in time. Kudos to Scott for bringing current, better info to the forefront.
---
Every time I read about a popularized historical inaccuracy I think of being told that Eli Whitney(cotton gin inventor) was black and my grade school teacher showing a 8x11 picture of him to the class. A few years back someone mentioned this discrepancy online so I guess it was widespread. I kinda get it but then I get angry all over again!
To quickly address the other culture war link(s), regarding the London Pride speaker, I see the merits of posting about it because it's certainly disturbing but am kind of bothered that the link to the statement standing by the speaker comes from such a nakedly biased (in the anti-trans direction) journalistic source (going off on a rant about how trans people don't have anything to complain about, deliberately misgendering the controversial speaker, etc.) that I don't know how much to trust any of the facts it's claiming beyond the "punch TERFs in the face" words of the speaker. For instance, the statement issued by the organizers is ambiguous without further context: where the organizers addressing/excusing the violent criminal history, or were they acting unaware of the history and merely addressing the "punch"ing language by saying "we don't condone violence but understand the strong emotions", etc.?
In Scott's defense (possibly), I wouldn't be particularly surprised to find that there aren't any non-anti-trans-biased sources discussing this anywhere to be found, since it looks pretty embarrassing for the London Pride organizers.
It confirms that the mayor and organizers in defending this activist wasn't addressing the criminal history at all, just the "punch a TERF in the face" comments. Which, on the one hand, comes across as possibly a convenient omission on the part of the mayor and organizers, but on the other hand is not as bad as openly defending the idea of giving a microphone to someone with that history.
Well, these are the same people that declare speech is violence if you misgender them or are not up on the latest correct terminology, so sauce, goose, gander, you know?
I don't think it's about sympathies.
The UnHerd article is full-steam ahead the other side of the culture war. It makes Scott look less grey and more red. It both misgenders the person and then this brilliant piece of immediately-self-destroying spin:
> incited violence against women. “If you see a terf, punch them in the fucking face,”
Since it might not go without saying, if I were to organise an Anti-TERF rally, I would not condone people using violent language, especially if they have violent pasts short on amends (which I have not checked in this case).
Men can be feminists, men can be TERFs, which the pronoun in the quote also hints at.
Yeah, I looked for more neutral sources but couldn't find any. This is a constant problem in trying to discuss culture war stuff!
Unfortunate but unsurprising, fair enough. But I still think it might be a good idea to include a brief disclaimer along with the link.
Some people out there provide disclaimers when linking to Scott, so I think the disclaimer is built-in?
Thought police much? Can’t grown ups perceive bias on their own? I’m pretty sure I would find any disclaimer you offered quite biased itself, because your comment so obviously leans in a particular direction. Or perhaps you think someone like Scott somehow has an infallible way to determine the correct way to perceive an event? Nah, I’m guessing you just don’t like ideas you disagree with and throw tantrums when you encounter them. Out here in the adult world, I don’t need a nanny warning me to stay away from dangerous ideas.
https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/07/11/london-trans-pride-sarah-jane-barker-terf/
Doesn't mention the criminal history, but I'm not sure how relevant that is?
He kidnapped and raped a teenage boy before threatening to knife him. He was out of prison on license (a good behaviour bond), and was recalled to prison after his public threats. Threats made before a cheering crowd at the 'pride' parade.
What's the source on the rape? I can only find https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12299927/Man-tortured-trans-activist-brands-dangerous-violent-individual.html (yes, yes, Daily Mail, I know) which shows the activist in questioning kidnapping and torturing a teenager along with her brother, including an excerpt from a 1989 newspaper.
Torture is obviously not much of an improvement over rape, but I can't find a source for the rape claims.
From that article: "After he was kidnapped [the victim] was subjected to appalling beatings and forced to carry out humiliating sex acts before being trussed up in a cupboard and left to die."
From the article:
"I [the 19 year old male victim] was forced to perform oral sex on them at knifepoint."
The point is about the reaction the pride organizers had, not about the person herself.
Why not the Telegraph article that is cited by the UnHerd article? (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/09/trans-pride-defends-activist-who-told-crowd-to-punch-terfs/ or https://web.archive.org/web/20230725034243/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/09/trans-pride-defends-activist-who-told-crowd-to-punch-terfs/)
Maybe stop including it then? I don't think we are getting anything useful from "is this specific left wing person evil"
Bad luck. Period.
"Neutral" (read: pro-trans) sources are unwilling to cover this kind of thing, so we're stuck with the "anti-trans" sources. You don't like it? Well the only alternative is not talking about the issue at all, and doing so simply rewards bad faith trans activists.
What's wrong with https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/09/trans-pride-defends-activist-who-told-crowd-to-punch-terfs/
(If it's paywalled, https://web.archive.org/web/20230725034243/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/09/trans-pride-defends-activist-who-told-crowd-to-punch-terfs/ )
> were they acting unaware of the history
The speaker wrote a book about her time in prison, and the book appears to have been widely covered in the UK LGBT press. I'd be surprised if the organisers *weren't* aware she had a criminal history, but possibly they didn't know the details. On the other hand, you don't usually spend thirty years inside for unpaid parking tickets.
By the way, this wasn't at the main London Pride event, but a smaller splinter event: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Trans%2B_Pride
Love that there are splinter events already. "Trans revolutionary" is it? Makes me nostalgic of the distant past i Scandinavia, where any city with more than 20.000 inhabitants had at least 15 revolutionary groups in constant in-fighting with each other: At least two Trotskyist groups hating each other (4th versus 5th International), as well as Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinists, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinst-Maoists, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Hoxaists, Kim il Sung people, ararchists, anarchist-syndicalists, capital-logic (kapitallogik) people, Marxologists (not to be mixed up with Marxists), left-Hegelians ("we are like Marx but not of Marx"), Money-Critics (all countries that use money are capitalist countries, easy to remember), "honest progressives" (which all the others agreed to laugh at - a rare case of agreement); many of them arranging their own events on May 1st, counter-demonstrating each other in the small city center.
(That's why I cannot get too worked up of today's Woke-stuff. It is still insane, but appeal far less to the type of insanity that can sway a majority. Therefore woke-groups are not really dangerous, the way some of these groups could have been.)
I have been able to dodge this and related questions by saying something like: "I am a conceptual pragmatic. As long as we agree on the definition of a concept, I can go with any definition. So please first tell me how you define "man", and I'll give my reply as to if men can get pregnant."
...then again, I live outside the US, and you guys are usually three-four years ahead of us when it comes to what you can [not] say before someone screams. At least as long as you stay away from X.
Hoxaists? Oh man, that takes me back to the days of "the only real true pure Communism is that in Albania, and maybe China, but even China needs to be scrutinised carefully" 😁
There was a saying that "The first thing on the agenda of any new Irish political party is The Split". Sounds like we'd fit right in!
To quote an old friend years later when we reminisced about our youth over several beers: "We were all insane, but it was an intellectually very stimulating form of insanity".
Ah yeah, youth is the time of "I know *exactly* what is wrong with the world and *exactly* how to fix it!" 😀
Yeah, well, true, but the point my friend was making (which I believe has some truth to it) is that the hyper-charged intellectualism of these small groups, with a prestige premium to those who were best at noticing hair-splitting conceptual and theortical differences (intellectual insanity), was actually a very good school in academic thinking (for better or worse, I might add). The joint looking-down-upon "honest progressives" (people who thought politics had something to do with intuitively-perceived "morals" - ahahah) in this small-group culture, worked in the same direction.
Compared to that, my hunch is that today's "woke" culture is different - today, there seems to be a prestige premium for those small groups that adopt a holier-than-thou attitude; a signals-arms-race in the opposite direction, to feel rather than to think. It is also insanity, but in the opposite direction - emotional insanity.
Perhaps one can make an argument for the golden mean, for those who prefer sanity 🧝♂️ 🧛♀️
Hah, yes. AFAICT London Trans Pride is by and for people who think that the main London Pride event is full of dangerous transphobes.
Ah, yes, I can see the ideological dividing lines
> ararchists
You have a typo here, which I wouldn't normally comment about, except that for a second my brain auto-corrected it to "arachnids", leading to a truly amazing image.
Neural nets, gotta love 'em.
..."arachnids" sure conjures up an interesting visual of a miniature political group! A pity no ideological sub-group with a bit of self-irony has used that label so far...long live arachnidism. I'll keep the typo 🙃
> El Salvador’s murder crackdown claims results of 90% decrease in homicides, 44% decrease in emigration to US, and 90% approval rating for president Nayyib Bukele
The 92% decrease is since the 2015 peak. Bukele has been president since 2019. There was already a 65% decrease from 2015 to 2019 (though the 2019 rate was still near-world-record), and a further 79% from 2019 to 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/ Idk to what extent Bukele's methods were necessary for the further decrease.
There was a gang truce from 2012-14. In 2014-15 the gangs attempted to negotiate with the government and the government, after saying the demands were outrageous, rejected the offer and began the "hard hand" policy. Effectively a crackdown. Bukele then came in and took those policies even further. Bukele was part of the FMLN, the party leading the crackdowns, at the time they happened before he joined a new, more populist political party.
So you got a local high point because of the gang war erupting after a few years of peace (during which there was still significant killing but less). Then the government crackdown led to a lower murder rate. The Bukele's even more extreme crackdown led to it reducing even more dramatically.
Very interesting, thank you!
Note that the homicide rate has continued to decline in 2023 and is now down to 2.2 per 100k annualized: https://elsalvadorinfo.net/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/
And note that Bukele came to power in June 2019, not January 2019. The homicide rate for January to May 2019 was 49, while the homicide rate from June to December 2019 was 27.
So basically there was a 52% decrease in 4 years (103 to 49) before he came to power. And then since he has been in power, there's been a 96% decrease in 4 years (49 to 2.2).
> A commenter corrected me: painkillers were just generally in short supply in India during her era
The link here is broken.
Thanks - I think I fixed it now - should be https://www.academia.edu/52432750/Mother_Teresas_care_for_the_dying
36. This article includes a lot of claims that I'm not capable of evaluating fully but seem fishy:
"The British Military would force lodge soldiers in the homes of suspected revolutionaries and key persons of colonial America so as to observe all their private interactions and cripple their ability to interact and organize. NSA data centers didn’t exist in Colonial America, so instead of putting Amazon Alexa in your living room, they put Corporal Alexander in your guest room."
I have never heard of this and even an article from, uh, "libertarianism.org" doesn't mention it, instead emphasizing that it was meant as a check on the ability of the federal government to maintain a standing army, since the British had used billeting as a temporary expediency for stationing soldiers in the colonies: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/historical-context-third-amendment
"The Koran is not a 'Living Text', etc."
It's not clear to me how attentively this guy has read the (interesting!) blog post he kinks to about how Islam is much more resistant to revisionism than other religions. A lot of Islamic jurisprudence hinges not on the Koran, but on hadiths.
Yassine (the other blogger) remarks: "Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they’re heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they’re fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission."
He mentions the hadiths but doesn't mention that their exact number and contents are subject to dispute: they don't constitute an "an unalterable, unamendable, non-interpretable core text" since they are not even a single undisputed text. (In practice I get the impression there's scholarly consensus, at least within individual jurisprudential schools, about which hadiths are reliable.)
>I have never heard of this
Quartering is a widely accepted fact. I agree the idea that Alexa is the same as being forced to put soldiers in your home is ridiculous. And I agree in general the guy seems a bit sloppy in his anecdotes and comparisons. But the Third Amendment is a thing and this is what it was meant to stop.
I mean the idea it was done as a means of surveilling revolutionaries.
Yes? Again, uncontroversially part of the historical record. It was a normal tactic to send these troops into regions that were considered insufficiently loyal and for them to prefer houses of suspect political loyalties. It wasn't so secret surveillance by any means. But it was surveillance as well as punishment.
That it was a "normal tactic" in the 18th century does not prove that this was the intent or effect of quartering British soldiers in the Thirteen Colonies specifically. After the French and Indian War, the British government kept ten thousand troops in America rather than demobilizing them; it was expected that the colonies would contribute to their maintenance. This preceded any civil unrest in the colonies.
The American Revolutionaries cited that as an abuse of power and were quite upset about it. Though you're right it preceded the actual revolution by quite a bit. Meanwhile, no one seriously disputes that the quartering of troops in Massachusetts after unrest was meant to punish and control the colonists. It was combined with other things like the Intolerable Acts to punish the colony. The commanders on the ground also understood what was intended and said as much in letters, diaries, etc. As did the colonists.
General Gauge actually pulled back from some of their orders out of fear that he was going to provoke the very rebellion such harsh measures were meant to suppress. And he was eventually proved right as efforts to disarm the population led to Lexington and Concord. You cite there is 'no evidence' that they were billeted in private homes. This is simply not true and, insofar as it was not common, it was because General Gage gave orders to avoid it whenever possible instead of the more usual practice. And once the actual Revolution started the British routinely confiscated land, burned homes and farms of revolutionaries, or kicked people out and took them as homes for soldiers.
I'll second Erusian in that this what I was taught in my standard American elementary school classes. I don't think the word "surveillance" was used, specifically, but it was definitely something done to suppress revolutionary activity in an area. I think the idea wasn't so much that the soldiers would see what the people were doing and report it, as that they'd see what the people were doing and stop it (one way or another), which meant that the people wouldn't do it in the first place.
Also, the soldiers had a reputation for being rude, and sometimes violent, and sometimes drunk, and sometimes ... in elementary-school-language, they looked a bit too long at the women. It's unclear how much of this actually went on, though - I'm sure we've all got our favorite examples of isolated incidents that get widely publicized and then are assumed to be typical of a group. There's a whole lot of propaganda in the stories back then.
It's disputed whether British troops were ever quartered in private homes (rather than inns and the like) and the Quartering Act of 1765 only contemplates the quartering of soldiers in "UNINHABITED houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings" in the event that barracks and inns were insufficient. Certainly billeting was done at various times and places as a tool of political repression but there is no evidence that British soldiers in the Thirteen Colonies were quartered in occupied private homes for the purposes of surveilling their residents.
It may be disputed by some academics, but it was taught as truth for years in primary schools. **shrug**
Now I'm curious, did you go to American public schools as a child? I hesitate to ask when and where, since you're another pseudonymous commenter, but I'm really curious about how things might have changed over the years. :-)
It was not being taught in primary schools in upstate New York, even adjacent to major Revolutionary War battlefields, in the 1970s. I did independently come to the conclusion that something like that (quartering as surveillance/intimidation) was probably going on, but not because anybody taught me. And to the extent that I looked, I couldn't find much supporting evidence either way.
If the academic consensus points one way and the public school teachers point the other, I'm going to lean towards the academics.
It's true that there remains disagreement regarding the number/content of "authentic" hadiths, but there's not much that can be done resolve these conflicts given the heavy reliance on historical accounts for the chain of transmission in discerning authenticity. That work is necessarily based on a factual inquiry of something that happened a very long time ago, so the evidence on that front has long ago settled into solid sediment by early historians/scholars. In contrast to something like US legal jurisprudence, there's no "new" information to shake things up, and so disagreements about hadiths have generally remained static along geographic and sect boundaries.
6- And after emerging from a Wikipedia dive, I now know that the 70s disco band Boney M, of Rasputin fame, is named after a television show about the character Napoleon "Boney" Bonaparte, who is the detective in the mystery novel that came up with the method used in the Murchinson Murders.
Wow, I am a great fan of the Boney M and they Rasputon song, and was already suprised when I learned that the lyrics were quite closed to the historical description (very lileky imaginary but hey!) of the murder of Rasputin. I love to learn where the name of the band comes from and its relationship to the M murders, thanks for the info!
And as for me, I'm a fan of the Boney novels and did not know that about the group.
4. Wow, I assumed that graph had gdp per capita on the Y axis that the Chinese were failing to match us in, but nope, that's just overall GDP level. Damn, score one for democracy and the rule of law.
7. I don't mean this to be insulting or provocative to blue tribe members, but it seems as though there's also been an increase in self-righteousness, intolerance for other points of view, and a sort of quasi-puritanical thinking among young liberals as well during this same time period. I don't know that the there's a causal relationship with the data presented here, but I would bet the correlation is not zero, either.
12. What happened when the pilots had to take a dump? That truck is right beneath them; I hope that tether has a little more length to it.
18. Because certain minority groups basically wouldn't get in at all based on test scores, so you have two different factions arguing against objective measures: not-so-bright or hardworking children of the wealthy, and moderately bright minority students. And then there are useful idiots ( stillbright, but a bit naive, I suppose).
Re: 7 - I don't think this is a natural correlation; lots of religious communities have these same things, but usually much fewer mental health problems.
Anecdata time: based on my observations (and to some extent my experience, too), one way people cope with depression/anxiety, life-is-meaningless thoughts and the like is spending too much time online, and part of that too much time online consists of consuming bad ragebait about how your political outgroup is evil, stupid, and an omnipresent threat to all that you hold dear.
I don't think this is good for anyone prone to depression, for pretty obvious reasons. The idea that your country is locked in an epic struggle for power between the forces of good and evil isn't exactly comforting, especially given that the struggle never actually ends; it just pauses til the next election cycle. Furthermore, people who spend too much time yakking about politics online may begin doing so in real life too, which is a bore, and so good luck making any new friends or even maintaining your existing ones if you fall into this trap (this is where the intolerance and puritannical attitudes I was talking about come in). Lastly, believing that roughly half your fellow citizens are evil and stupid has to be somewhat demoralizing too, given that they're not just gonna like, pack up and move to Canada anytime soon.
There's also the theory that a lot of these people don't actually subscribe to the full belief-set, and so their public stridence is partly to keep people from suspecting their internal heresy. And, the theory goes, this kind of disconnect leads to unhappiness. (As opposed to what would happen if they were true believers whose inner and outer faces were in perfect accord.)
I think its more that progressives have much more of a religious-style political ideology that forms the basis of their identity, whereas conservatives are much more likely to just want to grill.
Except that conservatives are more religious, not just religious style.
For a certain definition of "religious," maybe. But a lot of purported atheists talk and act like animists.
Have you not come across this essay by Musa al-Gharbi on the well being gap?
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/
4. The decline is a forecast, probably based on demographic collapse. Any connection to "democracy and the rule of law" seems dubious.
China has about four times the population of the US. If they can't even get to parity in national GDP, there's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Have you considered that the US is exceptionally rich for a variety of historical and geopolitical reasons that have nothing to do with what one would call "democracy" today? A fairer test would be to compare the US today with the US in the recent past, say, 1960 in terms of "democracy," however you choose to define it, and percentage of world GDP.
I have considered it and rejected it, thank you.
Ah, a jingoist of the "prosperity gospel" variety! I thought your kind had died out by the turn of the century.
Try again, Shankar.
I think it's very unlikely that the US is exceptionally rich for reasons that have nothing at all to do with its government, society or institutions. And I think that the existence of democracy is fundamental to the US's government, society and institutions.
Much as I may criticise the institutions of the US, it's a big deal that people can start businesses and be reasonably confident that their wealth won't be entirely confiscated by the government.
It's a big deal that the US has had only one civil war in the last 250 years (which was admittedly a pretty terribly big deal) whereas China has had a dozen or more depending how you count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War_(disambiguation)
It's an interesting idea, although I would question whether 1960 is a sensible comparison point, given that the rest of the industrialized world had committed collective suicide less than two decades prior. If I start the clock one generation after WW2, and look at US GDP as a percentage of world GDP from 1975 to now, it is...basically constant. Europe has dropped by a lot though, which maybe is a strike against the `democracy' theory.
US GDP being constant as a percentage of world GDP is a strike against the rest of the world.
If everyone developed normally, the US's proportion of world GDP would inevitably fall as a mathematical necessity of other countries' increasing populations and increasing wealth as they "catch up" to the economic frontier.
That it hasn't fallen is an indictment of their institutions and political elites.
Europe's trajectory is what you would expect if institutions didn't matter. That it is what it is, while the US's trajectory is what it is, suggests that their institutions are worse than those of the US but no worse than anywhere else's.
(*mildly horrified at self for writing this* ... but the evidence is what it is.)
I think most but not all of the recent divergence between Europe and the US is driven by dollar appreciation. The EU (plus U.K.) had a higher GDP than the US pre 2008.
Except it isn't just the US that's exceptionally rich, but a lot of democracies, including ones in East Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, half points for Hong Kong and Singapore). In fact, the exceptionally rich countries that aren't rich due to oil wealth and slave labor are all at least semi-democracies (though admittedly, not all democracies are rich).
China started from a totally economically backward country less than half a century ago and industrialized rapidly.
Half a century ago, the US were already the wealthiest country in the world.
If you think sound political leadership and economic management over the past 50 years explains why the US still has a higher GDP than China, you simply aren't thinking about this properly. The US is wealthy for mostly legacy factors, and these factors mean that the US can endure hopeless political leadership for many, many decades. If Joe Biden and US congresspeople were in charge of China, do you honestly think China would be doing significantly better than it is today?
I think it's odd to say the US had a great head start on China - after all, Chinese civilisation existed long before America was colonized.
That's like the US pointing at the Roman Empire to pretend to ancient pedigree: China as it exists today has little to nothing to do with anything so old.
So in what regard did the US have a great head start on China?
As I understand it China's leaders and institutions were very well suited to the stage of economic development it was in for the decades leading up to 2010 or so (specifically the stage where the country was lacking in capital and massive state infrastructure projects could significantly improve productivity). Now that that stage is over, they're struggling and so far show little signs of being able to adapt successfully.
I don't know if Joe Biden and the US congress would have done better running China's economy in the past but I expect if they took over today they'd handle things better than Xi Jinping.
"If Joe Biden and US congresspeople were in charge of China, do you honestly think China would be doing significantly better than it is today?"
Not only would it be much better, it would already be a developed country, and the unquestioned economic, diplomatic, and military hegemon of the world. The only thing China's economy needed to grow was for the communists to stop messing with it. When Mao messed with it, it collapsed and tens of millions starved to death. Today, Xi is messing with it, and it's growing a lot more slowly than in the 2000s or early 2010s, with a huge youth unemployment crisis and youth across the country "lying flat". If Biden and the Congressmen take over the country and do absolutely nothing, China will experience an economic miracle.
Putting some numbers to it: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin/comment/21923152.
“Its current lack of economic freedom relative to Western countries like the USA and Germany and other East Asian countries like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea explains why it so much poorer per capita than them”
No it doesn’t. You can only say that when chinas growth drops to the level of developed countries. Not before.
OK, but what led to their demographic collapse?
Unclear, but probably the same reason fertility has decreased almost everywhere, only more so: some combination of economic growth, urbanization, decreased infant mortality, improved healthcare more generally, empowerment of women, access to contraception, "family planning" (here, a euphemism for abortion/infanticide), and yes, incentives due to governmental intervention of the kind you're probably thinking of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_child_policy went beyond what one would call mere «incentives», and this is quite a relevant difference from most other places.
The one child policy, which is what one thinks of instantly, paradoxically temporarily arrested the secular decline in total fertility rate in China.
The "barefoot doctor" program, started in the 1960s, started the decline.
Safe water supplies, the germ theory of disease, sanitary disposal of waste, elementary hygiene in midwifery and childcare, vaccination, primary-school education (basic literacy)... all the same things as elsewhere. These are what decreased TFR in China.
Ignore what large-readership popular magazines and books have to say on the subject, particularly when it comes to "othering" talk about infanticide and the one child policy.
If you want a small glimpse into the culture, check out the Chinese Doom Scroll substack:
https://weibo.substack.com/
She translates a bit of Weibo every day. I've been following for a month or so. At times it's brutal.
I follow it already, actually, and yeah it's really interesting. I particularly found her explanation of home buying culture there eye-opening
Only the last graph has China not overtaking the US - and that slowdown seems pretty suspect. I expect it assumes a major economic embargo on China, and it’s from a different source than the others.
By and large extrapolating from now - or even the last few years - is never that useful. In a given year if China is growing at 6% and the US at 1%, and you naively extrapolate from that you will find China is set to race ahead, however if Chinese growth drops to 4% and the U.S. increases to 2% the compounded effect is hugely different.
Recently the US has been doing fairly well and China not so well. No doubt China will take longer than expected to match the U.S. GDP, I wouldn’t bet against it.
>4. Wow, I assumed that graph had gdp per capita on the Y axis that the Chinese were failing to match us in, but nope, that's just overall GDP level. Damn, score one for democracy and the rule of law.
This is an insane jump. There's no reason whatever to think that China wouldn't be facing it's current economic headwinds if they had allowed more elections.
Japan and South Korea both benefitted enormously for having western style institutions imposed on them. I was using "democracy and the rule of law" as a kind of shortand for this; if you would prefer to replace that with "western style institutions" you wind up in the same place.
In the case of China in particular right now, I'm not sure, but there's definitely pretty strong evidence that without democracy/rule of law/the basic human rights package no country proceeds beyond a certain level of economic development.
Looking at this list and excluding a handful of oil-based despotisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita the top 60 or so countries are all reasonably-functional democracies. Then at the $14K per year mark we suddenly start running into the other ones -- Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea all in a relatively thin band.
Noah Smith argues that at least some of China's economic woes are squarely Xi Jinping's fault: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-21a#%C2%A7chinas-economy-just-keeps-looking-weaker
12. They only hooked up to the truck like that when they had to refuel (twice daily).
#3 seems like it fundamentally misunderstands the point of a congestion tax. You're not trying to discourage visitors, you're trying to discourage cars.
What you're trying to do is irrelevant. What happens to the people in the cars you discouraged? Do they all still visit by another means, or do some of them cancel their visit entirely?
It's not irrelevant, it gives you the metric by which you measure your success. If a congestion tax destroys your tourist population, then it has not worked as desired. I'm sure that even in a very well targeted congestion tax, it rules out some visitors entirely, but any locale that implements one should have a robust enough public transit system that the tax simply encourages people to use that instead.
I've always assumed that the metric by which you measure your success is how easily the Mayor's limousine can get around without being slowed down by unimportant people. What it does to the city's economic activity is beside the point.
You are being unfair by saying it's just about the Mayoral Limousine. It's also about the Mayor's ability to hand out discretionary favours and buy off interest groups. For instance, did you know both taxis and EVs are immune from the London Congestion Charge? Obviously, this is fully justified from the point of view of rational administration, because these vehicles have the ability to fly over traffic jams, and therefore do not cause congestion.
Not just taxis, busses. It's almost like you need to retain some ability to travel.
We'd still be able to travel if taxis had to pay the charge. It's a naked subsidy to a concentrated interest.
Nah, just make it a conglomeration of 15 minute communities, then no transportation required!
"From 25 December 2025, the cleaner vehicle discount will be discontinued. From this date, all vehicle owners, unless in receipt of another discount or exemption, will need to pay to enter the Congestion Charge zone during charging hours."
https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge/discounts-and-exemptions
Does taxing cars simply encourages people to use public transport, or do demand curves slope down? If public transport is so wonderful that everyone wants to use it, why do people prefer driving through severe congestion? If it doesn't discourage visitors, it would be superfluous!
And visitors != tourists.
The best counterargument to Tyler is Sumner's, which is to grant that congestion charges will reduce visitors, but that people will substitute by moving into the locale. And that's great, but presumes that we have sensible land use policies that will allow significant further densification. In other words, a congestion charge needs to come after planning liberalisation.
Public transit can be good and yet have an overabundance of people whose default preference would be to use a car. The goal is to hit the sweet spot, where you have less congestion without reducing the number of people. In practice you will of course have some number of people who choose not to go at all, but to frame congestion taxes as though that was the goal or the entirety of their effect is simply wrong.
You are attempting to convert an extant tax paid in the currency of wasted time into one paid in cash. Congestion already discourages people from travelling to these places by car, and some fraction of those people also decide to just not go there at all. I imagine that if a real tax on cars reduced congestion, it's not outside the realm of possibility that the total number of visitors actually increases due to better preference division drawing back in people who aren't willing to pay in time, but would gladly pay money.
> it's not outside the realm of possibility that the total number of visitors actually increases due to better preference division drawing back in people who aren't willing to pay in time, but would gladly pay money.
Think this through. If more people are coming, is congestion more or less? So are they paying in time?
More people are coming, and there is less congestion. Math goes like this:
100 people want to travel to City X.
25 would like to travel by subway, 75 would like to travel by car.
When more than 40 travel by car, 25 of those who would travel choose not to, due to wasted time in traffic.
So the city at base has 75 people in it, 25 who travel by subway, and 50 who take a very miserable car commute.
A congestion tax is put into place. Half the current drivers are unwilling to pay to drive, and switch to taking the subway. 10 of those who previously had not gone to the city at all are willing to do it if all they have to do is pay cash.
You now have 50 people traveling by subway, and 35 traveling by car, an increase of 10 people.
This is a completely made up hypothetical, obviously, I put no certainty one way or the other. I present it to point out that cars and total visitors is not necessarily a 1:1 ratio, I would need to see evidence before I believed that congestion taxes directly and predictably reduce the number of people in a city.
Public transport is more effective if other transport is banned, because it doesn't get stuck in traffic. It doesn't have a fixed level of desirability.
Of any city in the US, NYC is the one where visitors are most likely to not use a car. The congestion pricing also only covers a small portion of the city so one could easily drive their car in the other portions, park it there, then walk/subway to the areas behind the pricing scheme. Also prices to get into manhattan via car on bridges and tunnels is already very very high so this extra pricing may not have much of an effect on top of the already high price to drive onto the island.
Tyler hasn't really responded to his fellow economists on the issue:
https://www.econlib.org/density-and-congestion/
Sumner is of course right... unless the city was run by idiots who prevented housing supply from adjusting to the change.
Oh.
Can someone find the link for #7? I can't find it on the relevant twitter page but I'm interested in looking into this further.
To be clear, I'm not skeptical of his link or something; it just that spent 20 minutes scrolling through that dudes twitter page and can't find it and I'm sure I'm just not used to using twitter
Re: #6, Upfield's Bony novels are quite good if you can make it past the racism in the first book, which is the casual kind of days gone by, shocking to present-day sensibilities, that at the time was probably seen as slightly forward thinking, a la Huck Finn.
Wikipedia reports that Detective Bony himself has an aboriginal mother (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bony_(character) ). Does the racism that you refer to include Upfield's portrayal of Bony?
Bony is a very clever detective, and the portrayal of him is very positive. However, Bony will, on occasion, give a monologue to other characters about having roots in a more civilized society and a less civilized society, or various descriptions to that effect. Bony does make clear that they have an equal amount of knowledge, just differing in expression.
In many novels there will be some full-blooded aboriginal characters, including in the first, and the way the other characters talk about them is the part that wouldn't fly today, including but not limited to the use of a certain notorious word. Also some stereotypes in the narration about the aboriginal peoples that were not mean-spirited by the standards of the day but are off limits today.
The Bony novels were the inspiration for Tony Hillerman's Navajo detectives series, if you're familiar with those. Hillerman is a lot closer in time and sensibility to modern readers and doesn't include anything that would raise eyebrows with them.
He has Bony speak about the tension between the more civilised, white half of him and the aboriginal side, and it's got what I understand publishers nowadays refer to as "period-specific racism". It's certainly *difficult* for him as a "half-caste" because he's clearly mixed-race so whites underestimate him or don't take him seriously, but fully native Aboriginals don't think he fits in, either, as he's been mostly raised 'white'.
There's views about aboriginal culture that wouldn't fly today, but on the other hand some of the white Australians are shown as being pretty crappy, too.
#18 All these graphs regarding ivy admissions seem to have the same pattern where there is a decline of admission chance by decile until you reach the top 1% and it jumps back up massively. This seems to confirm more than anything the ol' High&Low vs Middle (HLvM) class divide that various right wingers have identified in recent years.
The animal rights branch of effective altruism really rubs me the wrong way. All of the other cause areas are at worst a waste of resources, but farm animal suffering legislation makes other people’s lives WORSE. Cheap meat is a massive boost to marginal utility. A middle class American can afford to eat his or her favorite food every day. If you don’t want to eat meat, fine. It’s a free country. Do what you want. But when you start taking other people’s money and happiness away out of some misguided sense of responsibility, backlash is frankly deserved.
Scott is correct that the EATS Act (or some other legislation on the same topic) doesn’t protect state’s rights, but it does protect individual rights, and it’s good interstate commerce policy.
The externalities to cheap meat production don't end with animal suffering, but I can see that that is how an urbanite probably views it.
It's the urbanites who fight hardest against cheap meat.
On animal rights grounds, yes - that's probably true.
Do they concern themselves with chicken wastewater being flushed deep into the ground, that sort of thing? I expect about as much as they oppose dams built to "benefit" cities.
And of course, there is the downward pressure of immigration on labor - I doubt that comes into their heads. They would likely consider it humane, for instance, that the Guatemalan kid and his family were permitted to steal into the country to take that job with the company that processes 2 million birds a week. What happens after entry, I think, rather lies outside their vision. Whether workplace safety standards are more or less likely to be observed, equipment as gloves offered ... And well, when said teen gets tangled in the machinery and dies - well, that doesn't comport very well with their views in any degree - how could it - so doesn't really enter in.
But none of that means the premise - meat is too cheap, unsustainably so - is wrong.
So, animal suffering doesn't matter at all?
So torturing animals should be legal?
Throwing a live lobster into boiling water or killing baby cows (ie. veal) should be illegal, but killing unborn human babies should be legal. Two presuppositions which are, rationally, difficult to reconcile.
Not if the first two are sentient (by the "has feelings" meaning), and the latter isn't (at however many weeks you wish to allow abortions). Then the rule is just don't hurt sentient beings.
No indeed, that might be a line that could be drawn but I think it might be difficult to find arguments that support the fact that a lobster is more sentient than an unborn baby (for which abortions were - until very recently - alllowed up until birth in the US, no?)
So if I go to an animal shelter, adopt a needy puppy, then drown it in my sink, then repeat the process every day for fifteen years, I haven't done anything morally wrong whatsoever?
They were going to be sent to a kill shelter anyways. You're just performing free labor for them.
Maybe PETA will give him a grant.
Surely you can imagine a world in which that isn't the case and provide a thoughtful answer to CW's question.
To a first approximation, sure.
If it does, then we just get repugnant conclusioned now instead of when the sentient AIs take over.
We don't have to accept the repugnant conclusion to think animal suffering is bad.
When the sentient AIs take over we'll be "the animals" and we'd better hope our suffering doesn't round off to zero in the first approximation because it's minsicule compared to their own greater, more sophisticated capacity to experience the world.
(This is meant as an illustrative analogy, not a claim that the behavior of our future AI overlords should determine how we think about this question.)
Reading the link to the Boris Pasternak wikipedia page brings forward the wry realization that we are supposed to be retroactively upset with the CIA for anything it may have done with respect to getting that book disseminated.
28. Henry Ward Beecher was basically the living embodiment of the Lecherous Pastor stereotype in his personal life. Given how common that particular foible is, I just assume it's a side-effect of selecting for charismatic, personable religious leaders - Protestant congregations don't have the Catholic or Mormon thing of being able to have boring clergy because they're embedded in a much vaster organization.
Amusingly enough, it might have deep roots. I remember Barbara Tuchman's "Distant Mirror" about the 14th century said that one of the most common complaints about Friars - the wandering preachers of medieval Catholicism - is that they were lecherous.
>one of the most common complaints about Friars - the wandering preachers of medieval Catholicism - is that they were lecherous
This definitely comes up in the Canterbury Tales.
I wonder if Mormon's rotating clergy also has something to do with it. Church leaders will choose a member in good standing to act as the ward's bishop (read: priest) for a length of time and then they go back to being regular members. So not only do they tend to be boring, they also don't necessarily have power as long as in a more mainstream church. (it is longer than for usual callings, which are two to five years, but there's also a lot more bureaucracy with calling a bishop)
The founders of many (most?) religions, seem to have ended up wealthy, powerful and surrounded by women who were theirs for the taking (Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Islam...)
The prosperity gospel in action.
37. It's been suggested that the move to more female missionaries had something to do with it:
"Perlich said she doesn't know exactly why Utah's birthrate is declining faster than the national figure, but it may have something to do with the October 2012 decision by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to reduce the minimum age for female missionaries to 19 from 21.
That led to a historic influx of women serving missions and may be prompting them to wait longer to get married and start families, Perlich said. Women serve 18 months on proselyting missions around the world."
https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=3362824&itype=CMSID
I wouldn't be surprised if female missionaries are vastly more successful than male missionaries in spreading the word, so maybe this will be counteracted by a future vast influx of Mormon converts.
Anecdotally (I was an LDS missionary a few years back) I don’t think this is the case. The big determinant is the area the missionary is in—as a paradigm, white people basically don’t convert in any appreciable numbers in 2023. A male missionary in Brazil will see far bigger conversion numbers than a female missionary in Europe (who, if she has any converts at all, will almost definitely see them only among refugees and first-gen immigrants).
The higher numbers of female missionaries is definitely a contributor to any lower birth rate, but I would not expect a massive convert wave from it as you describe.
34: This research (and many others concerning LLMs) is a bit dubious http://opensamizdat.com/posts/self_report/
> 4: H/T @StefanFSchubert: “Forecasts used to say China would quickly overtake US GDP, but that's no longer the case”:
This is real "line goes up" territory. As I pointed out a few years back (I think 2017): If China's current growth trajectory continued then China would be 50% of the world's economy by about 2030. I find this on its face less likely than China experiencing the kind of secular percentage slowing that happens as most economies become more advanced.
Remember, as an economy grows the raw amount of output increase needed to get an 8% growth rate increases. For example, if an economy has $10,000 GDP per capita then to get a 10% rate it needs $1,000 the first year, $1,100 the next year, and so on to maintain the 10%. If it simply maintains the $1,000 per year then the percent increase will slowly decrease. (This is likewise why, despite having a much lower growth rate, the average American gains more wealth each year than the average Chinese person.)
This is without getting into the Middle Income Trap or the structure of the Chinese economy and how much it looks like the other advanced parts of East Asia. Just thirty years behind and much bigger. And the way the rest of East Asia got out of that trap was compromising with their trade partners, opening themselves up to foreign services (especially in finance), and political reform. None of which seems like an option for China.
Let's take for granted that China's economy will face long-term slow GDP growth this century. With that big assumption, we can focus on how likely the current slow period is to be the start of that long slow period.
Naively, I've calculated some proportions using https://data.worldbank.org/. All of this uses current US$:
In 1994, the Japanese share of world GDP peaked at around 18%. Japan had around 2% of world population at the time.
That year, Japanese GDP per capita was about 8 times higher than world GDP per capita.
In 2022, Chinese GDP was around 18% of world GDP. Coincidentally, China's share of world population was also around 18%. Thus Chinese GDP per capita was about the same as world GDP per capita. (Right?)
Those per capita figures were around 37-38% of 2022 Japanese GDP per capita.
Naively, I would forecast that China is more likely to have a lot of growth left than it is to have already entered the long-term slow growth phase. I have minimal background in macroeconomics; can someone tell me why these proportions might be nearly irrelevant? (Also, does it make sense to use current US$ for 29-year-old Japanese figures?)
It is not a "big assumption" that as China gets richer its growth will slow like every other economy has slowed as it's gotten richer. The big assumption would be China is some magical country whose growth will not slow unlike everyone else.
And you're only looking at the success cases and ignores things like Mexico. If you look at China's own numbers the issue is quite clear. China has a large but minority population that's already at first world levels and a gigantic population that's still, effectively, peasants or otherwise rural and involved in informal economies. The economy has significant structures to keep it this way. For example, you inherit a residential status that determines the quality of school you go to. For your analysis to be valid it has to find a way to close that gap. Mexico failed to do it, despite a much more open system, and its growth stalled out.
Maybe China will solve all its problems. That really is entirely possible. But it has far more of them than Japan did and less capacity to deal with them. If they do then you can expect China to experience a new spurt of growth fueled by these rural people being brought closer to average. If they don't then China's going to have increasing domestic problems (which, at least at the moment, appears to be what's happening.)
China in fact uses that rural population to maintain growth. Relax the restrictions on settlement every generation and they can move to the city as factory workers. In the next generation, their offspring become engineers or technocrats.
This is not actually happening. Instead you have generational cycles based on hukou due to educational disparities and work authorizations. Some exceptional people rise out of the provinces and get hukou changes of course. But the movement into cities dramatically slowed about a generation ago.
If China's growth slows as it gets richer in the same way that Japan's growth slowed as it got richer, China ends up with by far the largest GDP of any country. For China to remain lower GDP than the US, its growth needs to slow at a significantly lower level of per-capita GDP than Japan. Of course, it's entirely possible that will happen.
Yes, my point was that whether China ends up being Japan or Mexico its growth rate will slow. The idea it won't slow is completely ridiculous. The idea it might "only" slow to the point they get Japanese GDP per capita is defensible. Personally, I think it depends on if the Chinese government can overcome pretty significant challenges.
I don't think anyone was claiming that China's GDP growth rate won't slow. My point is that unless it slows quickly and immediately, it will still end up with a larger economy than the US by dint of its population.
> I don't think anyone was claiming that China's GDP growth rate won't slow.
"I find this on its face less likely than China experiencing the kind of secular percentage slowing that happens as most economies become more advanced."
"Let's take for granted that China's economy will face long-term slow GDP growth this century. With that big assumption"
Someone was saying that, yes.
> My point is that unless it slows quickly and immediately, it will still end up with a larger economy than the US by dint of its population.
If you project out current statistics, including second derivative rate of rate of change and working age population, then you get the US and Chinese economies reaching parity sometime between 2040 and 2070 depending on how optimistic you are about China. And then China falling behind starting in the 2060s to 2080s.
Of course, there's no reason to believe current trends will continue in such a deterministic way. The US could fail or China could succeed beyond what is currently happening.
> 18: Previous work showed that after adjusting for selection bias, “what college you go to doesn’t matter” for average earnings. I was always skeptical of this - are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason? Now Chetty, Deming, and Friedman find that: [...] One of the authors, David Deming, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth. Like everyone else, this study also finds that rich people are using “holistic admissions” and the de-emphasis of standardized testing to gain an advantage: [...] H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.” Cf. Erik Hoel.
The idea college prestige didn't matter was always a lie. If they did not know it was a lie it was because they had motivation to avoid the obvious truth of the matter. More likely, they were just avoiding an unpleasant truth because they benefitted from the hypocrisy.
The "smart" argument for why it doesn't disadvantage people who don't get in is that it's an advantage but only for kids from backgrounds where they wouldn't have those advantages otherwise. In which case they've accidentally admitted that there are advantages that you won't get at other schools. In which case prestige does matter and they are effectively transferring those benefits. It is a simple logical contradiction to say that Ivy admission helps overcome disadvantage but also it's not an advantage. The argument requires literal doublethink.
There's no evidence it helps anyone who isn't already at least clsoe to being intellectually elite. It's really just a matter of which elite students get the benefit, which is to say that once again the idea that sending lower-SES to "good" colleges isn't a way of helping them or decreasing inequality.
Even if this is true it doesn't change that, among that cohort, it significantly affects life chances.
I don't find "doesn't matter for average earnings" and "makes a huge difference for the top 5% of earners" at all difficult to reconcile.
I don't either. But I also don't see the relevance. Are you assuming that people who go to Harvard are going to end up randomly distributed on the income scale? Because two Harvard grads who marry each other and make $120k a year are top 5%.
> 19: From @data_depot: “In 2002, 48% of Americans said "the govt is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." 52% said "it is run for the benefit of all people." In 2020, 84% said the govt is run by a few big interests. Only 16% said it is run for the benefit of all people.” [...] Source seems to be here, which reveals 2002 was a local peak in trust in government; maybe because of post-9/11 unity, but even 2000 was 34%, much better than our current 16%. My first instinct is to attribute this to a rise in vulgar Marxism, in the sense of everyone (even conservatives) now being trained to think in terms of an elite class screwing over everyone else (cf my review of Manufacturing Consent). But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know.
The trend line needs to go back further to understand what happened. American trust in government was roughly 70-80% for most of the post-war era until Johnson. Then there was a sharp decline to about 50% that continued into the Nixon era (with Watergate causing another dramatic drop).
It then settled into a pattern where it hovered around 20-30% except when a conservative was in power where it could go up to 40% since hardcore conservatives would approve of the government in general when their side was in charge. There was a brief burst of unity and good sentiment which was ruined first by Clinton's scandals then the War on Terror becoming unpopular. And since then we've hovered around 20% with both liberals and conservatives distrusting the government even when their side is in charge.
It's quite clear to see what causes the line to go up or down. When the national leadership is upright in its conduct and doesn't lie to the public it goes up. When they lie, or are perceived to have lied, or they act corrupt or have scandals it goes down. You can very often see specific dips tracking specific scandals even from the already low level. (Interestingly, weaponization and lying seem to matter far more than failures or even material issues like recessions. Probably could do a time series and work that out if I was a researcher.)
Lol, no. Gingrich has a PhD in European history and he understood that in Europe governments come and go and so he believed if he could remove Clinton and Gore he could install himself as president via impeachment and the public would eventually accept it as legitimate. The biggest force that people didn’t quite understand was the fracturing of the media around the turn of the century and unfortunately George W Bush was the only individual to really benefit from the dynamic. Bush was wholly unfit to be president and most of the issues we have in America are the result of Bush having an over 80% approval after 9/11 and mismanaging the federal government and abusing his power.
I don't think there's any evidence for this. I think a more realistic interpretation is that the Republicans thought that removing Clinton would result in a lame-duck Gore presidency that would then be easier to beat in the next election.
I’ve found articles from that time that say Gingrich believed the Starr Report would be so damaging that both Clinton and Gore would have to be removed.
The Senate isn't going to vote to convict overnight. So if it looks at all likely that they're going to do that eventually, then Gore resigns, Clinton appoints a new and untainted VP, and then New Democratic Guy gets to be POTUS if Clinton is impeached and convicted.
The GOP delegation in the Senate could pull a Merrick Garland and just say "ha ha you don't have the votes to make us confirm your new guy, so we'll just leave the office vacant until Newt takes over", but that would be so obviously a naked power grab with only a fig leaf of constitutional norms and respect for the integrity of the office that the Democratic Senate delegation would counter with "you don't have the votes to convict Clinton without our help, so we're going to nakedly grab on to the power we already have by keeping our old guy in office even if he is a crook"
I don't see any path to a Gingrich presidency in 1998, and I don't think Gingrich was foolish enough to imagine he could see such a path.
Andrew Johnson was impeached and almost removed because there was no VP and a Republican would have become president upon removal and governed very differently.
Clinton would have been removed first and then Gore becomes president and Gingrich and House Republicans wouldn’t have confirmed anyone Gore nominated. Gingrich then gets Gore removed and Gingrich becomes president and controls the House.
I don't think reordering matters here: there would still be fanning the outrage over blocking VP nominations, and only 34 of 45 Democratic party senators would need to call it an absolute deal-breaker.
The Gingrich who prevents House from confirming a bland democratic VP appointment, will not be able to get any president removed. Naked power grab results in equal and opposite power grab, and there are enough Democrats in the Senate to keep Gore and/or Clinton in office until there's a democratic VP in place.
Interesting theory. But the trust in government statistic starts to decline under Johnson when Gingrich was a teenager. I don't deny that the whole Star Report and Clinton's scandals had a negative effect on trust in government. But most of the decline happened under Johnson and the rest under Nixon.
Vietnam and Watergate…but keep in mind Ford was a president nobody but Congress voted for. UK had a prime minister for a few weeks last year…that’s what Gingrich studied for his PhD and Gingrich is known as a master parliamentarian. Finally our current media environment excels at driving up negatives of opposing candidates and so we have Democrats watching endless negative news about candidates they will never vote for and vice versa…it’s very strange.
>It's quite clear to see what causes the line to go up or down. When the national leadership is upright in its conduct and doesn't lie to the public it goes up. When they lie...
I don't think this is true - Obama's conduct was pretty upright, and the line goes down and then stabilises under him.
>... or are perceived to have lied, or they act corrupt or have scandals it goes down.
This, I think is the real explanation, combined with a polarised media environment than means that nowadays it is more or less guaranteed that 50% of the electorate will perceive the president to have lied all the time, along with being maximally terrible in all other ways, without guaranteeing matching support from the other 50%. Nowadays 50% is a /ceiling/ for a presidential approval rating, and it's easy to drop below that.
>Obama's conduct was pretty upright, and the line goes down and then stabilises under him.
You will have a more accurate intuition here if you don't look at your own side. If you're a partisan you're likely to be unaware, or already have pre-cached arguments, about why what your side did wasn't really a scandal and it was just the other side making up controversy. Obama has two big drops: 2011 when you had Fast and Furious and Solyndra as well as some corruption allegations and then 2013 during the IRS targeting scandal as well as large power grabs contradicting statements he'd made a few years earlier. (For example: You might like the dreamers but Obama had just a few years earlier said he didn't have the authority to do that. And then suddenly reversed once he had a Republican Congress. Such things tend to decrease confidence.)
> Nowadays 50% is a /ceiling/ for a presidential approval rating, and it's easy to drop below that.
We're not talking about presidential approval ratings. We're talking about trust in government. I agree that partisanship (which I don't think is fully media driven) means there's a much lower ceiling on what individual ratings can be. But trust in government numbers haven't been above 26% since the Bush years.
>You will have a more accurate intuition here if you don't look at your own side. If you're a partisan you're likely to be unaware, or already have pre-cached arguments, about why what your side did wasn't really a scandal and it was just the other side making up controversy.
This feels like irrefutable Bulverism, so I won't try to refute it, I'll just reiterate that I agree with you that trust in government has a lot to do with perceptions of corruption, but continue to state that I don't think perceptions of corruption are all that strongly correlated with actual levels of corruption.
It's not irrefutable bulverism. It's neither irrefutable or bulverism. You could trivially refute it by pointing out that instead of scandals that actually occurred it correlated with the intensity of Fox News coverage, for example. And in order for it to be Bulverism I would have to say that your argument proceeds from your identity ("of course you think that, you're a liberal.") Which I'm not.
I'm saying that if you are on one side you are likely to have cognitive biases that excuse your own side and condemn the other. You can refute that too, if you want. But I think it's pretty common and obvious that that's how it is for most people.
If you don't want to have this conversation that's fine. But be honest enough to admit you just don't want to engage and not pretend that I'm wrongfooting you or pretend I'm not giving you every chance to make your case.
> 24: The Republicans are considering weakening PEPFAR, a program which saved millions of lives by providing cheap anti-AIDS medication to Africa, based on concerns that some of the money might be going to abortions (this doesn’t seem to be happening in a meaningful way).
PEPFAR doesn't fund abortions but does fund organizations that fund abortions. The program was originally started by Bush and, like Bush, was fairly conservative. It promoted abstinence only education and would not touch most people who did abortions. Then Obama came into office and brought PEPFAR in line with his own policy preferences such that, by the 2013 renewal, it was teaching more liberal safe sex standards. As well as partnering with organizations that provide abortions. This included exempting PEPFAR from the Mexico City rule which could have otherwise blocked some cooperation with organizations that provide abortions.
Trump tried to basically cancel the entire program but after he lost that fight kind of shrugged and ignored it. Now Republicans have dug in their heels and want it reformed but, since the Democrats won't return the program to its earlier conservative bent, are willing to just let it die.
Personally, I think that funding contraception and all that is a worthwhile goal and that if you want to fight AIDS you have to go where AIDS is. But I'd appreciate if everyone would stop lying about this. I also understand the political dynamics that encourage lying. But I don't have to like being lied to.
That just shows Trump’s transformation into a Freedom Caucus Republican…in 2015 Trump viewed Planned Parenthood positively because the clinics are generally in African American neighborhoods and provide free birth control to those communities…so all Republicans should support PP! ;)
>so all Republicans should support PP! ;)
Everyone should. America's problem absolutely ISN'T "not enough low income kids born to single mothers".
Too moderate, and distracts from effective solutions.
What is the effective solution to the existence of low-income kids born to single mothers?
Yeah, some people conveniently ignore the fungibility of money: it's literally as fungible as things get! They (mostly the same people) do exactly the same thing with unions and political contributions.
Surely just because money is fungible doesn't mean it is actually being, uh, funged (?) in any given instance?
If I'm an organization that previously spent $50k/annum on abortions and $50k/annum on AIDS prevention, and after being given an extra $100k/annum by the US, started spending $150k/annum on AIDS prevention (while still spending $50k/annum on abortions) I don't see that this means that the US is funding abortions in any meaningful way.
If you can demonstrate that "No, scout's honour, the American money is in a totally separate account and is not being spent on the abortion stuff", then sure. But can you do that?
And the disapproval would be of the "spending money at all on abortion" anyway. Think of it as "Okay, yeah, we spend $50k on anti-Jewish propaganda, but the extra $100k from the US is going to providing prosthetics for three-legged kittens, what is the problem then?"
Do you think that "But the funding we do provide isn't going to promote their anti-Semitism activities, so we're technically not promoting anti-Semitism" would fly as an excuse?
I was really just questioning the claim that PEPFAR is being dishonest about this.
I don't think your analogy holds up, though, because there's no connection between kitten prosthetics and antisemitism, whereas, in the absence of legal issues, conflicting religious affiliations, or political pressure, abortion is a normal part of healthcare provision.
(If you - as a hypothetical charitable organization - were providing funding to supermarket chains to provide food to homeless people, it wouldn't be reasonable IMO to later withdraw from the deal on the grounds that some of the supermarkets also sold alcohol or cigarettes, no matter how much you disapprove of drinking and smoking.)
Edit: a more painful hypothetical for me would be "should the US withdraw military cooperation with Japan over whaling?" I think I would have to say no - but I admit that I might have said yes when I was younger.
But see also https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-august-2023/comment/22171207 which puts a rather different light on things.
Why do you assume anti-Semites can't love little kittens and want to make their lives easier?
"abortion is a normal part of healthcare provision."
That's the entire complaint right there. This is one of those issues where those on side A have strong, entrenched views and those on side B have strong, entrenched views, and there's little to no chance of compromise (just as there is no such thing as "a little bit pregnant", there's no such thing as "just a few abortions" as we've seen with the definition creep on what constitutes a 'threat to the life of the mother' and the hard cases of 'well what about the incestuously raped pregnant ten year old?' which then is used for "well if *she* can have an abortion, why can't I? you've already given in on it as a right").
Regarding the first point, there's no particular reason to expect any given kitten-prosthetics provider to be antisemitic, so it would be reasonable to speculate that that specific provider was chosen precisely because of their antisemitic views. Also, it would presumably be easy to switch funding to a non-antisemitic provider offering similar kitten-prosthetics services, so a failure to do so would be suspicious.
So far as I'm aware, neither of these observations carry over to the PEPFAR case.
Regarding the second point, it seems to me that in a contrafactual world where abortion was not a political issue, and nobody had any strong, entrenched opinions about it, most non-religious healthcare providers would provide or allow for abortions - not for political reasons, but simply because there is a demand for them; that's the sense in which I mean that abortion is a normal part of healthcare.
(In a way, I actually live in that world; abortion is not a hot political topic here in New Zealand.)
The only point I'd like to add is that Republicans have put forward concrete conditions under which they'd vote for it. What they're asking for is to add "Mexico City" to PEPFAR, which would strengthen the guarantee that PEPFAR not fund abortions. [https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/PEPFAR-Coalition-Letter.pdf] Which you'd think would be reasonable, given that Democrats claim PEPFAR isn't funding abortions anyway. So, the conversation seems to have been something like:
R: "We're not going to vote to extend PEPFAR, since it funds abortions and abortion advocacy."
D: "PEPFAR doesn't fund abortions."
R: "Okay, then put in a Mexico City Policy amendment to guarantee that. Then we'll vote for it."
D: "No."
Vox: "Republicans hate Africans and want them to die of AIDS."
I myself very much hope that negotiations continue beyond this point.
According to Wikipedia, the Mexico City Policy is a lot more restrictive than you're suggesting. It is also noteworthy that George W Bush's administration excluded PEPFAR from Mexico City, presumably for good reason.
Yeah, I think the initial negotiations with Republicans depended on PEPFAR being a temporary emergency crisis response, so they were willing to accept it without full Mexico City type restrictions. But it's clearly not actually temporary.
What's still kind of a mystery to me is why they picked the Biden administration to dig in their heels over it. If they're so against Planned Parenthood International aborting a bunch of Ethiopian kids while giving out condoms to their parents, why'd they lay down and take it during Clinton and Obama?
PEPFAR was started during the George W. Bush administration, so it was after Clinton's time.
Perhaps the difference is that during the Obama administration the Republicans cared more about Bush's legacy than they do in the Trump era? I don't follow American politics all that closely, but I gather Bush and Trump don't get along.
"I imagine Mormon girls gasping in shock at how not respectable Trump's "grab her by the pussy" take was, and slowly drifting ever outward towards progressivism... buying contraceptive and deciding to do "One more degree" or get just that much more established, or pursue an Urban career just that much further, recoiling in horror at the improper aggression with which Roe v. Wade was overturned, or the vulgarity of conservative politics as she veers further and further left and Mormon birth rates decline further and further below replacement."
Does this guy know any religious women? Because if you're in your early 20s and deciding "Hey, I think I'll go to the doctor for contraceptives and then sleep around like a ho", it's not down to "well really now that politician is not a gentleman!" but because you're young, in a sex-saturated culture, you're horny, and there are people who want to sleep with you and you want to sleep with them. If your religiosity is only that, it's not a strong enough anchor to hold you fast against the current of the world.
I've seen a lot of wacky things pinned on Trump but "Mormons Go Wild" wasn't what I expected on the bingo card, I have to say.
Agreed, that one made no sense to me and is a rather wild tabloid like conclusion. If anything they tended to look past his personal foibles in he election with a practical attitude and a truely disgusted view of Hillary. None of which has much of anything to do with their own fertility.
All fertility is down, most likely due to phthalates dropping speed counts for men and other impact ps from our pollutes environment. Too bad though, humanity can die out with no kids, we’ve got some short sighted corporate profits to make and those are big industries in plastics! What a dumb reason to go extinct. Maybe we deserve it since we cannot suppress the psychopaths amongst us, instead we’ve out them in charge.
We can argue about the relative contributions of the various causes of decreasing fertility, but I'm highly confident that it's almost entirely a matter of choice and pollution accounts for close to 0%.
Agreed, that article's explanation doesn't make much sense.
Here's an explanation that does: contraception for non-medical reasons was actively preached against by Mormon leaders during the 1960's and 1970's, and that preaching only really stopped in the late 90's. Even then, traditions are slow to change. Church members often quote church leader talks from years ago in various church meetings, so old teachings endure somewhat. Still, eventually it becomes more acceptable for husband and wife to consider using birth control, and we see the change.
See https://religionnews.com/2019/06/15/the-incredible-shrinking-mormon-american-family/ for more.
Combine that with changing Utah demographics (the percent of Utah that is Mormon has been decreasing due to people moving in, wish I had a better source, but at least see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints_in_Utah), and you have more reasonable explanations for the phenomena.
"Here's an explanation that does: contraception for non-medical reasons was actively preached against by Mormon leaders during the 1960's and 1970's, and that preaching only really stopped in the late 90's. "
Same thing happened to the Anglicans with the 1930 Lambeth Conference. "We are going to reluctantly accept that married couples may use contraception for the sole purpose of spacing out their children and family planning, and for no other reason, and we certainly still frown upon the practice, and of course this will *never* be acceptable as general usage for the unmarried or for dodging having children at all".
In 1920, it had:
"Supported political lobbying against "such incentives to vice as indecent literature, suggestive plays and films, the open or secret sale of contraceptives, and the continued existence of brothels."
In 1930 it had given in on contraception, while still against abortion and sex outside of marriage:
"Resolution 15 allowed "in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles." The vote for this Resolution was 193 for it, 67 against it, and 47 not voting. This was the only Resolution for which a record of the numbers voting was required.
The Times of June 30, 1930, predicted that the Lambeth Conference would change the "social and moral life" of humanity. This was done by the Conference's Resolution 15 in which in contradiction to earlier Resolutions (1908 Resolution 41 and 1920 Resolution 66) allowed the use of contraception in marriage.
Resolution 16 expressed "abhorrence of the sinful practice of abortion."
Resolution 18 reckoned "sexual intercourse between persons who are not legally married" to be "a grievous sin."
By 1948, there's nothing about that, but a rather pathetic appeal about divorce:
"Inasmuch as easy divorce in Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere, has gravely weakened the idea of the life-long nature of marriage, and has also brought untold suffering to children, this Conference urges that there is a strong case for the reconsideration by certain states of their divorce laws."
1958 has less condemnation, just appeals to the conscience:
"Resolution 115
The Family in Contemporary Society - Marriage
The Conference believes that the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents everywhere; that this planning, in such ways as are mutually acceptable to husband and wife in Christian conscience, is a right and important factor in Christian family life and should be the result of positive choice before God. Such responsible parenthood, built on obedience to all the duties of marriage, requires a wise stewardship of the resources and abilities of the family as well as a thoughtful consideration of the varying population needs and problems of society and the claims of future generations."
By now, the Anglican Church is not in step with society but trailing behind attitudes on everything from family prayer to divorce, contraception (and later on, abortion). It manages to keep up, however, the attitude that "the Pope is not the boss of me" from 1948 where it can't bring itself to repeat the old positive strictures that "This thing is WRONG and SINFUL" but is rock-solid on "Anglicans shouldn't marry Catholics because the Catholic Church wants the kids raised as Catholics and Anglicans can't believe Catholic doctrines", to 1968 and "Yeah, Humanae Vitae is great and all that, but he's still wrong about contraception" 😀
"The Conference earnestly warns members of our Communion against contracting marriages with Roman Catholics under the conditions imposed by modern Roman canon law, especially as these conditions involve, among other things, a promise to have their children brought up in a religious system which they cannot themselves accept."
In 1998 they do *try*, still maintaining that the official position is that sex should be within marriage, but let's face it: that's feeble in the face of the changes in society, which they have gone along with, and they're more concerned with the new categories of what is (currently) considered bad:
"Clearly some expressions of sexuality are inherently contrary to the Christian way and are sinful. Such unacceptable expression of sexuality include promiscuity, prostitution, incest, pornography, paedophilia, predatory sexual behaviour, and sadomasochism (all of which may be heterosexual and homosexual), adultery, violence against wives, and female circumcision. From a Christian perspective these forms of sexual expression remain sinful in any context. We are particularly concerned about the pressures on young people to engage in sexual activity at an early age, and we urge our Churches to teach the virtue of abstinence."
Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's never going back in.
That seems like a weird place in that sentence to put "(all of which may be heterosexual or homosexual)".
I really really love your style! Do you by any chance have plans to write some fiction??
Thank you, and no. Nothing past the bottom drawer kind of writing, at least, where all the scraps, half-finished or never got started, pieces are stored on the hard drive and are definitely not going to escape into the wild.
> 29: Gwern: why hasn’t AI-generated music taken off in the same way as AI-generated art or AI-generated text? He thinks it’s a combination of copyright, low demand, and technical difficulty.
Because there's no money in music. In unit cost terms each song listen gets you roughly a fifth of a cent. That means there's not even that much room for a spread. If you're using ChatGPT to generate lyrics on the fly you're actually losing money since it'd cost about six cents to generate the lyrics. And that's before you generate music or anything else.
I have (and have had since before the AI boom) a utility that generates corporate background music for video presentations. I specifically chose this because the music is so formulaic and because it has an actual use case in those corporate videos. Everyone always says it's a cool idea and I do get some mileage out of it. But it competes with buying stock music. And when push comes to shove they buy the stock music and cut it in.
In gross terms: The cut off to be a top ten earning artist from streams/music sales is like $10 million. Taylor swift only makes about $60 million and she's double the #2 spot. And to be honest, Taylor Swift or Drake don't get people to buy their music because their music is just the greatest music ever. It's because they're celebrities. And no AI model is going to get the kind of loyalty Drake gets from his money giveaways or Taylor gets from her private sessions.
Music really is a celebrity game. I could write about that for a long time honestly.
Do you see or expect to see AI-based tools like mixers or effects? Or instruments? I can totally see a drum machine being asked to “play it like Ringo in 4/4 at 108”.
Eventually? Sure. Digital instruments are already a thing. And you can already mix together instrument sounds digitally to get new instruments. A good example of this is in Avatar where the Tsungi Horn is a literal digital mix of a sousaphone and French horn. Not done with AI but still very cool.
Specifically what I would expect is some ability to produce samples/loops that people could then mix in. Once you have the audio engineer or producer I expect they will want fine tune control rather than procedural generation. But session musicians make, on average, $19 an hour. (To continue the theme: less than an average journalist.) So the labor cost you're replacing isn't huge. Buying premade loops is even cheaper (you can even get a significant number free). And you'd need a very small, tight knit world prefer to do it over bringing in the contractors or buying premade.
Stock music is another use case. But it's already cheap and common. I thought providing some customization would be a selling point but it appears the market's very price sensitive. Who knows, maybe that will change! Or maybe someone with actual musical connections will have more success than a hobbyist like me.
Thank you, this is… elucidating. 19/hr for a skill that takes a decade of intense practice to master. Jesus wept.
Was Jesus a musician? I weep because I went to music school..
Yet more proof that the Labor Theory of Value is bunk.
Related to this - there's been a small boom in "AI covers" on social media using voice synthesis/cloning. Make one artist cover another's song, or have a cartoon character do it. There's a lot of Kanye ones.
Examples - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dXyOmEmfbA (Starboy by the Weeknd, covered by Taylor Swift)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo5G4NVJx4k (Somebody I Used to Know by Gotye, covered by Kanye West and Playboy Carti).
> But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know.
I just finished listening to a 10+ hour Scott Horton podcast on Waco. There may have been recent, salient reasons for people to be skeptical of government acting in the interests of its people.
Indeed, I think this was also the time when the mega churches in the Midwest with their extreme version of insular evangelical Christians really blew up into a large political movement and cultural warriors. Christian music, camps, yoga without the Hindu parts, and book burners, and their struggles against gay rights and abortion and such took off in a big way. Maybe there were clinic protests and arson before that, but it took off as a cultural fixation in the early 1990s.
I feel like if you talked to those same mid westerners in 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1995 you’d find a clear trend towards distrust. I single them out as they were a bastion of trust in governance before thst and tend to move as a collective block of opinion. Later after Clinton with Bush the second in the presidency and republican control of congress, they felt they were getting their way, leading to a local peak in 2000 in government trust by commoners. The swing of evangelical political activism and views could explain a lot of this movement in popular polls.
I’d guess the reason Scott didn’t feel much was going on in 1994 with Clinton in office, will and grace on tv, and such, is that he was young, agreed with those issues or didn’t care about them or know people who did care? Guessing. But evangelicals in the mid west certain did care a lot. American cultural discourse power shifted from southern and civil war politics with Arkansas Clinton to a new paradigm of Texan Midwestern centre of American evangelical power.
Will and Grace didn't premier until 1998. Maybe Ellen was on in 94?
24. PEPFAR was about getting the UN to support invading Iraq and CYA and profits for Big Pharma after American government defended their patents in Africa as Cipla and DWB and various countries decided to break the patents in order to save lives. PEPFAR for years spent $5 billion a year on $500 million worth of HIV medications.
Do you have a source for how many doses they actually distributed?
Cipla CEO says millions more could have been treated had they just bought from him in 2003…obviously that’s self serving but I trust him a lot more than the Bush administration.
Do you have actual numbers?
Do you have a source?
Meanwhile, Yusuf Hamied, chairman of the Indian generic pharmaceutical company Cipla, put the blame squarely on Ambassador Randall Tobias, who was tapped by Bush in 2003 to launch PEPFAR as the nation’s first U.S. global AIDS coordinator.
Hamied said that Tobias, who was president and CEO of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly from 1993 until 1999, “worked out a scheme” to “hoodwink the generics. They put in a lot of hurdles [to ensure] that the PEPFAR money wouldn’t go to the generics.”
https://www.icij.org/investigations/divine-intervention/pepfar-policy-hinders-treatment-generic-terms/
Regarding LK-99, I'm really wondering what's up with the videos purporting to show flux pinning. Apparently one of them is an admitted fake. Should we just conclude all of them are probably fake...?
"Should we just conclude all of them are probably fake"
At this point that's how I'm leaning. Before hearing about the fake, I was guessing maybe a 25% probability that LK-99 would turn out to be real. Sometime replicating a real synthesis can be hard - and quite often people fool themselves when looking at ambiguous data. But given that this looked sketchy _before_ one of the videos was admitted to be a fake... I'd downgrade it to the equivalent of a stock market "dead cat bounce" stock.
The video claiming to show flux pinning just doesn't look like flux pinning to me. It's just more levitation.
19. Wouldn't you say it's more likely that the loss of faith is because the US political system seems uniquely suited to ignoring the concerns of everyday Americans? There's a two party system, ineffective Congress, unambitious regulators, widening inequality, loss of economic prospects, and no political will to change any of it.
(Basically, all the reasons Trump *actually* got elected)
But this hasn't change substantially in the past ~60 years (at least) so why does the polling fluctuate so much over just 10/15 year periods?
The preconditions may not have changed, but I would argue the impacts on the voting public have started to ramp up. All these things have long term consequences which get worse over time.
You're trying to explain a change by attributing it to things that haven't changed; that's almost never correct.
See my reply above
Growth mindset doesn't replicate... Yet. Growth mindset.
(I just like saying "yet; growth mindset!" even if it's not real. it's funny)
"The Little Blue Engine" by Shel Silverstein
The little blue engine looked up at the hill.
His light was weak, his whistle was shrill.
He was tired and small, and the hill was tall,
And his face blushed red as he softly said,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
So he started up with a chug and a strain,
And he puffed and pulled with might and main.
And slowly he climbed, a foot at a time,
And his engine coughed as he whispered soft,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
With a squeak and a creak and a toot and a sigh,
With an extra hope and an extra try,
He would not stop — now he neared the top —
And strong and proud he cried out loud,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can!”
He was almost there, when — CRASH! SMASH! BASH!
He slid down and mashed into engine hash
On the rocks below... which goes to show
If the track is tough and the hill is rough,
THINKING you can just ain’t enough!
> THINKING you can just ain’t enough!
Unless, perhaps, you're a psion :-)
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0494.html
**psigh** ;-P
Growth mindset has hugely benefitted me, personally. But I'm happy to accept that it has a negligible expected impact for others.
The study seems to be about "growth mindset interventions" rather than growth mindset. Even to the extent a growth mindset is useful, it's probably difficult to change people's entire mindset with a two-hour "hey kids" intervention.
And people who have a 'growth mindset' without it being imposed as an intervention are probably selected for other beneficial traits in the first place.
37. As a Mormon myself who recently had two kids to prop up the birthrate, I’ll share my “on-the-ground” impression: the big, palpable, elephant-in-the-room change going on in the last few years is that the population is moving to cheap Utah/Arizona/Texas/Nevada and out of California and other more expensive regions. This change is massive. Probably HALF the Mormons in SoCal have left in the last decade.
Is there some degree to which some fertility is lost by being too “close to the vortex of the progressive-liberal-urban monoculture” in the wake of Trump? Some, sure. But I am much more likely to attribute any drop in birth rates to the easily observable phenomenon of people moving than anything else that I’m not observing en masse. Perhaps they are less settled, they don’t know where their family will be in a few years, uprooting disrupts social connections and impairs new family formation, etc. Plenty of potential causal pathways there.
And as far as I can tell, the whole “Mormon fertility has gone off a cliff in the last 5 years” story is really only based on Utah birth rates dropping. Now, that may be a reasonable proxy in most circumstances, but I haven’t seen any actual numbers that are specifically reflective of Mormons and not Utahns. Given that the makeup of Utah is changing so rapidly at the moment, I think this adds a lot of uncertainty to the use of this proxy.
What about more gentiles moving to Utah for the snow?? The people that move to places for snow and mountain biking generally don’t have a lot of children and hang out at craft breweries and smoke marijuana.
That’s one thing I’m getting at—though tons of Mormons are moving to Utah as well, it’s a very big jump for me to say that declining Utah numbers are really representative of the Mormon population, as everyone writing about it seems to do.
Yeah, I tried looking for information for a bit, but didn't come up with anything solid. There was one place that claimed that the LDS percentage of Utah's population, overall, was undergoing a very slight decline, but no numbers. And no numbers on LDS and non-LDS birthrates in Utah. And even the graph used didn't seem to have *that* severe a dropoff after 2015: it seemed like the continuation of the long decline.
sort of disappointing that the only choices given are 'is government run for the benefit of a few big interests...or the benefit of all?' how about 'for the benefit of government regulators?' No one thinks the FDA is run for the benefit of 'a few big interests' or for the benefit of 'all'-- it's run for the benefit of the FDA regulators and managers. Why should we think the case is any different with the State Dept. or 'Health and Human Services'?
Why wouldn't FDA count as a "big interest"? The "deep state" complaint is popular these days, and regulators are about as central example of it as anything.
yeah, I thought about that; and you could legitimately consider 'labor' a 'big interest' too, at least in the form of 'organized labor' aka unions; or retired people as a big interest, with AARPA and social security and medicare; or the 'cathedral' (newspapers/magazines/schools/universities) as a big interest. But it seems like the question is badly framed, if not deliberately misleading. People answering the question are going to assume the question is about 'big business' not AARP or the deep state. And people looking at the results are going to assume the same thing. .
Well, that's certainly the interpretation that the "cathedral" members who posed that question intended, consciously or unconsciously. Just goes to show, how far-reaching the influence of their ideology is.
I think Scott’s position on 19 about people thinking government serves the 1% through corruption and why he doesn’t agree with this also explains why I think 18 about ivy league benefits continues to seemingly elude explanation.
The ivies are a recruiting ground for the young upper aristocracy to meet promising recruits in their future roles as heads of this and owners of that. The system is a series of hoops for poodles to jump through and whoever jumps through the hoops the best without touching the edges is considered to have merit.
Those young ambitious hoop jumping commoners who also manage to succeed in the arena of explicitly not taught soft skills of befriending and impressing your ‘betters’ end up doing very woo for themselves. Tim Ferriss is an example of a commoner class man who deeply impressed an older wealthy man and gained sponsorship to start his fraudulently advertised smart protein powder brand which made him a multi millionaire by working 16 hour days 7 days a week for a few years.
Those who fail to gain patronage from the clucking elite pouring over them to select out the ones they want, do indeed end up with only modestly better economic outcomes. It is that simple.
Find a patron, understand the need to read between the lines, or get rejected back into the pool of other commoners to fight it out on your own with a few mild advantages as a thank you for trying.
The merit system has never applied to the aristocracy, they run it is a game, a trial, a selection method to sort out who is good enough to work for them. They want smart, compliant, and socially aware enough o understand the game and their role as prized future servants. It is so simple. Who decides what is meritorious? Who changes this over time? The poodle who is smart enough to see the hand holding the hoops they jump through can be a good boy and get a special treat. The dumb dog who thinks it is smart and rushes through every hoop blindly at top speed with straight As, gets to the end of their degree and finds no masters around to reward them as they failed to comprehend the unspoken purpose of the subtle game. The path to the special track is at the parties and secret circles where the real audition for elite approval occurs.
If we look to the various fairs, competitions, and other get together where the elite found promising lower nobles, children of merchants, and standout talents from the commoners who they could sponsor and act as patrons of…then we would find the same thing, but with fewer exams. China had this far more formalised than Europe with explicit exams for various administrative higher servant roles in ancient times, modern time too. England began to approach this level of formality in their empire.
This is a way to more mechanistically sort out the commoner class and to identity lesser administrative staff without the elite having to work or go over vast numbers of middling servants in detail. But the top servants who do the work for the elites, those are always going to be hand selected.
The easy and non academic selection is partly to ensure their own scions get into these institutions, but is primarily a different sort of selection system focusing on soft skills essential for them. In a way there is a system of competition with merit to a much lesser degree amongst the elite class, but it is around skills they don’t want any commoner to have. It is a measure of how much early investment a child receives which no poor family can emulate.
And like a mother animal tossing out the runts, those elite children who fail in even the most basic task of yachting, lacrosse, equestrian, etc. elite hobbies will not be effective soft skill members of the ruling class.
The elite select to avoid the burnouts and deeply underperforming members of their clans who get shuffled off into lives of luxury and doing nothing, while the commoners have an inverse merit selection process where instead of weeding out only the low quality ones, insets the very best hoop jumpers are selected.
This ensures enough competent servants are around to guide the continued wealth and prosperity of the elite who don’t need to be that good or competent themselves. If anything Ivies are a collective shorthand and a training ground for the young scions to learn about and play out their future roles to spend their entire lives selecting who to hire to work for them. After all, an ownership class needs to ensure quality top servants are selected, such as their CEO workers.
I’m can see why this is not more widely understood. Shifting through merit exam data and averages of earnings isn’t where one will find the answers. Why is it uneducated peasants in the 200s get this more readily than modern commoner in the 2000s? Perhaps our so called education is more indoctrination than not.
What's the x Axis for the NYT graph in point 18? Wealth by percentile? Income? It's a dramatic increase, so I'm wondering if it is the 1% that gets this bonus or more like the 10% or .1%?
The original link to the study has all such graphs with percentile on the x-axis. Pretty sure it’s percentile and not absolute income.
30 - I posted this on his blog, but the X-inactivation story still holds up. He estimates that the X is 3.8% of the genome, but that's probably estimated on coding regions. On a basepair comparison, it's more like 4.8%, and standard texts suggest non-coding regions are probably enriched for loci affecting quantitative traits. A 4.8% figure fits the variability data better.
> 29
My gut intuition was that OAI is probably on some really powerful next-gen jukebox, but it is not good enough to merit an update. I assume that the quality is fairly good and they surpassed the original jukebox in terms of melody, beat, "catching the vibe of a musician." However, since the actual words are not tokens but frequency combinations I imagine the new jukebox achieves even more weird artificial vocals that sort of sound like words, but are actually gibberish. In the original jukebox it already sounded haunting - I guess they don't just want to release an even realer weird sounding machinery.
7. What I find fishy about this is that it is about 12th graders. When I was a 12th grader in the '80s, I couldn't have told you whether I was a conservative or a liberal. I doubt any of my friends could have either. There must have been a few kids at my school who could have, but I'd bet it was less than 10% of the class. Politics wasn't part of a typical high-schooler's identity in the '80s. Your identity was mostly determined by what music you listened to. So how the hell did they poll kids on this question in the '80s?
I'm not wholly convinced you're right that this was the normal level of political involvement in the 80s
I mean, if you asked a kid in the 80s whether they were a Republican or a Democrat, they would most likely say whatever their parents were, assuming their parents both voted for the same party, which wasn't nearly as much of a given back then. If you asked them if they were a conservative or a liberal, they may have had no idea what the terms meant, particularly in the South, which still had plenty of conservative Democrats.
If the pollsters assume Democrat = Liberal in the 80s, that's pretty horrible political science, because for instance Democrat George Wallace was still the governor of Alabama in the mid 80s.
You really think the median high-schooler in the '80s had the awareness to know which Democrats were conservatives and which were liberals?
OTOH, if the poll asked them asked them whether they preferred The Cure or George Strait, THAT would have been a reasonable way to determine the latent politics dormant in most 80s students.
In the early eighties, when I was in middle school, I asked my mom what a liberal was. She said “they want to take your money.”
I remember when I was about five I heard something on the news about "employers" vs "employees". I didn't know what these words meant, but I asked my Mum whether Dad was an employer or an employee.
She said he was an employer, and I decided I was on the employers' side. And I think that's how I became a conservative.
Smart mom.
Simple mom.
Ah heck I was (and am) The Cure all the way, but that doesn't link up with my political inclinations so yeah, asking kids "are you liberal or conservative?" probably is a terrible question, because you'll always get the outliers who like this culture but only to an extent and behave completely differently in their personal life to what is being assumed along with "oh so you like this artist? that must mean you agree with... this, this, and this".
I mean, yeah, *mostly* teenagers are going to be sex'n'drugs'n' rock and roll, but *some* of us liked the rock and roll on its own 😀
We had mock presidential elections every four years with the real candidates and parties, so partisanship was a thing. As far as gradients within those categories... when did political AM radio become a thing?
I definitely could have told you. I was in a civics class and still remember which class members were liberal vs. conservative.
I’m with Hank. I can think of a few kids who loudlynproclaimed their party affiliation, but very few who held political beliefs strongly enough to be put on a liberal/conservative axis. Same holds for religion. I knew who was catholic or Protestant or Jewish sure, but pretty
Much nobody was “religious” in a meaningful way
But you weren't in highschool in the 80s, right? My point is that highschoolers identifying in political terms is something that has happened since then. Being online is probably a major part of it.
12th grade is 6th year in Irish terms, yes? I was a school leaver in the early 80s and while I wouldn't have described myself politically as such (I voted the way my family voted for a certain party instead of a different party, for instance, and not because I had gone deeply into X is better than Y or X policies agree with what I want), I would have had a sense of 'preferring A to B values'.
I was always socially conservative, even if I wouldn't have described myself as such. Things like contraception were beginning to be agitated about and made into campaigns, and it was encountering posters for the pro-side put up in a college* space that made me realise "no, I'm not on this side" (and also made me grapple with "I vehemently disagree with this presentation of the argument; I know people on this side routinely pull down, tear down, or otherwise destroy posters and other materials put up by their opponents; do I tear this down or leave it up?" and come to the reluctant conclusion that I had to agree with free speech, so even if I wanted to tear it down, I should leave it up).
As for tastes in music, well - punk had happened when I was in Third Year, so I segued from New Wave into the more goth and New Romantic bands. I remember the arguments over "Did Spandau Ballet move towards a form of neo-fascism with the song Musclebound?" which seems ironic in light of their later evolutions and changes of direction, as the 80s progressed, to being a slick, polished pop-rock band as exemplified by their big break-out hit Gold.)
Musclebound - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08M-9kHB_20
Gold - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntG50eXbBtc
*Not a university, more practical/vocational training after I finished school at 17.
Oh heck, if we're discussing teenage musical favourites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6meCXQ6UKb0
Just gimme a good harpsichord basso continuo and I'm easy to please!
Thanks for sharing.
And as for teenage musical favourites, some of us were even more easily pleased:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbAZU4bukDQ
Ah, Sham 69! If we're swapping musical memories tinged with politics:
That Petrol Emotion 'You gotta agitate, educate, organise!'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXAfWKOgo2Q
And of course we have to have The Ramones up in here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kynpOa5BIKM
The Knack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbr60I0u2Ng
Don't really have anything from The Sex Pistols, I thought they were a bit too much of a gimmick band (Malcolm McLaren's influence) but Johnny Rotten/John Lydon as a solo artist was fine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq7JSic1DtM
And of course the mods/ska revival were tilted towards labour/socialist politics:
The Specials, Ghost Town
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2oXzrnti4
The Jam, Town Called Malice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfpRm-p7qlY
XTC, Making Plans For Nigel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-X3Wy-svIY
Not the mods/ska revival, but old-style rock activism:
Robert Wyatt, Shipbuilding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Res3-YX4X8g
"It's just a rumor that was spread around town
A telegram for a picture postcard
Within weeks, they'll be reopening the shipyard
And notifying the next of kin once again"
Just for personal indulgence, to relive the long-lost days of youth:
The Clash, London Calling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c
Visage, Fade to Grey (yes, full of arty-farty pretension but come on, which of us was not at that age?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMPC8QJF6sI
Ultravox, Vienna (*insanely* popular, was Number One for *weeks*)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJeWySiuq1I
Oh gosh, all the memories are coming back!
Irish bands (Northern Irish)
From the 90s, when they were *maybe* a bit too old to be singing these kind of lyrics because we were all facing into thirty, Bob:
Therapy? - Screamager
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zZ44S3ZIJM
Back to the 80s and The Undertones - My Perfect Cousin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgqa3cVOxUc
Go down South, jump forward to the 90s, and Cork's finest:
The Sultans of Ping - Where's Me Jumper?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB69zdycLIM
Moving out of Ireland -
Half Man Half Biscuit, Dickie Davies Eyes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCvs2w_Mjeg
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Joan of Arc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwMhjbThKg
This Mortal Coil, Song to the Siren
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFWKJ2FUiAQ
And I haven't even touched The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Damned or the rest of them! 😁
Great, I got to go through these when tomorrow comes.
But ah, yes, The Undertones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PinCg7IGqHg
Early Clash also still holds up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6XijqjtJoA
Memories, memories....
A nice list! I mostly agree with your view of Sex Pistols, and also that Johnny Rotten/John Lydon as a solo artist is fine. (I remember an interiew with him far back in his Sex Pistol days, the journalist asked what he thought of the anarchist-label. He replied: "We are not anarchists, we are for chaos." "Wow this guy knows what he is talking about" was my reaction.)
Thanks also for the link to Sultans of Ping in particular, I was not aware of them!
(And before we leave the Lost Train of Youth, let us not forget that Patti Smith is also on board. In fact, she occupies a whole railway carriage by herself.)
My experience, albeit a bit later: I took AP Government in 12th grade, and at the beginning of the year the teacher taught us the difference between conservative and liberals, and she arranged the desks in the classroom based on that, similar to congress. I have vivid memories of where many of the students in class were politically. Some of it was surprising—one of my friends, whom I remembered reading Rush Limbaugh books in middle school, ended up being the most liberal.
Many of my close friendships felt stained once we all realized how different we were politically, and things in the classroom got very heated at times. It didn't help that it was during an election year, and the teacher clearly favored one of the candidates. It all felt like a Jane Elliott experiment.
The political discourse back then felt quaint compared to today, so I can't imagine what it would be like in a classroom like that today.
Thomas Dixon, the author of "The Birth of a Nation", wrote a sequel titled "The Fall of a Nation", and directed it as one of the earliest movie sequels. It evolves the Kaiser conquering the US after foolish pacifists like Henry Ford delude the country into letting their guard down. A pro-war Congressman then joins up with a suffragette to overthrow them.
PEPFAR, like the malaria nets charities seem to me to be a bit of a self-licking ice cream cone. A creepy cycle that ends with a demand for never ending support:
Step 1: Medical intervention in Africa
Step 2: Lives saved
Step 3: Population explodes
Step 4: Need more of the intervention, no progress towards supplying it internally, return to step 1.
And the people pushing this stuff also support brain drain from Africa to the west, robbing the countries that need (reasonably) smart people more than anywhere else does.
"Step 1: Medical intervention in Africa
Step 2: Lives saved
Step 3: Population explodes"
Aid makes countries richer and richer countries have lower fertility, it's unclear what effect dominates.
Does lowering malaria deaths necessarily make the country meaningfully wealthier?
Lowering malaria _incidence_ makes it more likely for kids to complete school, dramatically increasing lifetime earnings. While the death toll is horrifying in itself, malaria also has serious impacts when it’s non-fatal. (Similar argument as to why deworming is so effective).
PEPFAR does for sure: https://i.imgur.com/qvyIklT.png
I think we can look at Africa's recent population boom pretty confidently.
Moreover, I think the more important point is that "inability to make malaria nets or antivirals domestically" is the effect that truly dominates.
(9) I don't think it's accurate to say that Bush "alone fled" Chichi Jima. He was the pilot of an Avenger torpedo bomber, and attacked the radio station on Chichi Jima, with Ted White as turret gunner and John Delaney as radioman. Bush's plane was hit during the attack, and he told the others to bail out. Then, Bush bailed out, just before his plane exploded. Bush landed in the water about 4 miles from Chichi Jima and was picked up by a submarine. The others didn't survive the evacuation.
Aside from the eight prisoners killed, other flyers had been captured and evacuated to Japan. This incident is well documented in "Flyboys: A True Story of Courage", by James Bradley.
(18) "Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm."
I haven't heard whether the study authors try to separate out selection effects in admissions vs. recruiting practices by "prestigious firms" vs. effects of family connections. I expect the causality differs whether we're talking about top 1% earnings, vs. attending an elite graduate school, vs. working at a prestigious firm.
I could tell a story that the people who end up at the top of the earnings distribution, at least in some fields, get there with the help of family or family friends who help open the right doors at the right time, and that these same connections helped them get into the Ivy-Plus college in the first place.
I've read that the professors at elite graduate schools give great weight to performance at a top undergraduate program, and confess themselves unable to evaluate a top graduate from, say, Texas A&M. In these cases, the elite schools are gatekeepers to the elite graduate programs.
Many "prestigious firms" (and, I believe government offices) limit their recruiting to a small number of elite schools. They use the school to screen for "smart enough" - they don't need top scholars, nor do they need the very smartest people. They need people who are significantly smarter than average and can "fit in" to the social milieu - whether company culture or client relations. In these cases, the elite schools are gatekeepers to these firms. But smart people from less elite colleges can perform well and advance to the top of corporate hierarchies. Graduates of elite colleges are not particularly dominant in the top ranks of major corporations.
You might want to take a look at Steve Hsu's twitter comments on the matter. Here are a couple that are relevant:
https://twitter.com/hsu_steve/status/1683827020432564224
https://twitter.com/hsu_steve/status/1684036237663911937
Thanks. I don't doubt that SAT is a valid predictor for success in college (which was its intent) or in later life. I don't think this is directly related to the points that attendance at the Ivy-Plus colleges gives a significant advantage in ending up in very prestigious positions (academic, professional, or income), even though graduates of (slightly) lesser colleges do as well on average. I meant to suggest that there are potential confounding variables that could be summarized as human capital, and might be pretty directly related to parents' income.
I agree that attending Ivy-Plus gives a huge edge for very prestigious positions. My point in linking the Hsu discussion is both to affirm your comments about grad admissions and recruiting, but also to point out that modeling these elite institutions as *primarily* wanting smart enough people with good pedigree doesn't seem accurate. While Ivy-plus helps people get a foot in the door, those with higher academic scores upon admission take an outsized advantage of these greater opportunities and those from the top 1% don't. This is some evidence towards elite institutions actively pursuing the very brightest, as opposed to those who are good enough and well connected.
EATS is a straight-forward application of the Commerce Clause. It is, in fact, one of the very reasons the Commerce Clause exists. The CA effort is an attempt by California to use its market power to regulate the activities of people in other states. The Commerce Clause was a reaction against tariffs and trade barriers being established by states against each other and foreign nations. The power of the United States was significantly founded on the size and scope of the free trade zone created by the Commerce Clause.
CA could ban pork containing poisons or toxins from being sold in California, as that would directly relate to the status of the pork being sold. But this law doesn't depend on the status of the pork being sold. It depends on how the pig the pork comes from was treated.
California is effectively saying "In order to import pork into the State of California, you must first import the regulations of the State of California into your state." At the time of the Founding, it was laws exactly in this vein that created animosity between states, and why Congress was granted authority over this field.
As for the abortion issue mentioned elsewhere, any state, but let's use Texas, could make it a felony to perform, facilitate or support an abortion and not include a statute of limitations. Then an abortion doctor travels from California to Florida, with a stopover in Dallas. In Dallas, she is arrested for the abortions done in California, because her conduct is criminal in Texas and she entered Texas having committed felonies under Texas law while in California.
In exactly the same way pork producers in Texas are prohibited from selling in California because their farm operations violate California law (and not being allowed to sell is the punishment for not following this law), abortions performed in California violate Texas law and once the Dr. enters Texas she is subject to arrest.
Is there not a distinction between “California is effectually circumventing the Commerce Clause” and “California is actually circumventing the Commerce Clause”? So far as I understand it is only for practical considerations that the pork industry nationwide would kneel to California law, but they could if they felt it economical raise CA pork for CA and US pork for the US. If they can choose to not obey CA regulations for some markets, but simply choose not to, it seems that your argument loses a lot of strength. What’s your take on that? Is there something you think I’m missing?
The fundamental issue is that California shouldn't be able to reach into another state and enforce California regulations there in any way, by any means. The EATS act just says "You can't do that."
California could just ban pork possession, that's legal, because possession is intrastate. But they can't ban imports on pork while allowing domestic production (even assuming they haven't killed domestic production already).
But, IIRC, California legislators were pretty explicit about the goal of this legislation: Use California's market power to impose nationwide regulations that they couldn't get through Congress.
> California could just ban pork possession, that's legal, because possession is intrastate. But they can't ban imports on pork while allowing domestic production (even assuming they haven't killed domestic production already).
Hang on a second. Is California treating domestic pork any differently to imported pork? My understanding is that this is a simple, clear-cut, black-and-white case of California regulating trade within California, with no attempt to reach into other states and enforce regulations there whatsoever
Unless there's a detail I've missed, California are not saying that you can't produce pork as cruelly as you like in other states, and nor are they treating imported pork any differently from domestic pork. All they are saying is that you are not allowed to possess inhumanely produced pork in the state of California, regardless of where it came from.
It looks to me as though the only people trying to tell another state what to do are the pig-torturers.
I don't expect an honest take from someone calling all the pig farms in the US "pig torturers", but they drove off all the hog farms in California so there's basically no domestic production. California is saying "You must import our production regulations if you are to import your products", and the Constitution gives Congress the power to say "No, you can't do that."
You've moved the goalposts from "California shouldn't be able to reach into another state and enforce California regulations" to "it is not unconstitutional for Congress to forbid California from passing laws concerning what products may or may not be sold in California", but yes, I agree with the second claim - it would be appalling for them to do so, but it's not unconstitutional.
I didn't move the goalposts. Both things are true. California should not be able to regulate farms in Ohio, and the Constitution gives Congress the power to prevent it.
I think it's a complicated question, because it would be fine for California to have food adulteration laws in place saying "We will not import foods that contain more than X parts per million of this bacteria" or "We will not import foods that contain this carcinogen". Banning something that is harmful is not interfering with commerce (I imagine?)
But can you equate cruelty-free meat with harm to human health, is the thing. If free range organic eggs and battery hen eggs don't negatively impact the health of consumers, then can you say "We will only import free range eggs and not battery hen eggs"? If the eggs are okay by Dept of Agriculture standards whether they're from cage hens or free range hens, then you are interfering with the ability of the battery farm to sell its eggs and promoting the free range producer (unfairly).
...Anybody tried arguing that abortion criminalization impedes the commerce of abortion doctors?
Yes, but it doesn't fly because states can *ban* anything not protected by state or Federal constitutions.
>At the time of the Founding, it was laws exactly in this vein that created animosity between states
Any good examples? This sounds like interesting history.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time for a deep dive and I couldn't find anything up-front, but you're right that the period of the Articles of Confederation is really interesting and informs a lot of the Constitution.
#5 My understanding of Libertarianism (but I'm not a Libertarian's) is that if you argue practical benefits, you are just another neo Liberal, not a Libertarian. Looks like an interesting discussion.
In my experience it's more of a "yes-and" kind of thing.
YES the libertarian approach is morally superior under a certain moral framework, AND also it produces practical benefits in many real world circumstances.
You might be interested in this podcast: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-the-perfect-vs-the-good/
" Munger realized his fellow free-marketers come in two flavors: directionalists--who take our political realities as given and try to move outcomes closer to the ideal--and destinationists--who want no compromises with what they see as the perfect outcome"
The directionalists vs destinationists issue is present in other political parties and movements too.
#18: I'm interested in understanding the mechanism that could cause such a sudden uptick in ratings for the top 1%. I can easily imagine many mechanisms that would cause a steady increase from left to right, but the sudden uptick surprises me, to the extent that I wonder if it's some kind of statistical artefact.
The only thing I can come up with is that there's some genuinely useful social skills that the upper class understand but the rest of us miss out on. The upper middle class teaches their children to work hard to succeed within the system, while the upper class teaches their children to see through the Matrix, to understand the social dynamics that governs every system, to cultivate people as assets regardless of your own personal feelings about them, and to smoothly climb the ladders that the rest of us can't even see.
Definitely a part of it too.
The plotted effect is once academic effects are subtracted though. And besides, I'd expect all of those effects to apply smoothly and monotonically, not to be flat from the zeroth to the 95th percentile and then suddenly shoot up.
If they were so smart why would they need legacy admissions? 🤷♂️ it’s a bit odd to argue meritocracy here.
>E.g., you really think there aren't enough legacies with 4.0s at great schools and near perfect test scores to fill princeton or wherever?
Isn't that just an artefact of bad tests? If large numbers of people can get perfect test scores then you need to make your tests harder until they're better at distinguishing between the top 0.1% and the top 0.0001%.
“you really think there aren't enough legacies with 4.0s at great schools and near perfect test scores to fill princeton or wherever?”
I’m not American but I suppose so. Either way legacy admissions are not meritocratic if there’s any bias towards them at all. Want meritocracy, abandon that.
Legacies at harvard and princeton have higher SAT scores than the general admit population Im pretty sure. The meme is that legacy admission is “affirmative action for white people”, but it doesnt seem to be the case generally. You can google the harvard stats but heres a link for princeton at least:
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2023/07/princeton-legacy-senior-survey-frosh-survey-gpa-sat-act-career
> Survey data also shows, however, that legacy students have higher SAT scores, even when controlled by income, higher Princeton GPAs, and are more likely to go into nonprofit or public service professions.
Combination of entry through the back door (a big enough donation will always get your kid in, though `how big is big enough' will depend on how close the kid is to entry through the front door); universities wanting to recruit the children of the rich and famous (does anybody doubt that a POTUS's kids, or e.g. Bezos's kids, can't write their own ticket?); and also recruitment for `aristocratic sports' like fencing, crew, sailing etc...which only the children of the ultra wealthy learn in the first place. Of course the first two mechanisms are not open to `mere' one percenters, you would need more decimal points, but even a `mere' one percenter could send their kids to a fancy private school with a fencing and sailing team.
Well, I think `aristocratic sports' is probably the biggest contributor by numbers (together with other advantages offered by expensive private schools), followed by `kids of the sufficiently rich and famous being able to write their own ticket' (note that you don't need to be literally POTUS or centibillionaire, US Senator or foreign major political figure or something is enough), followed by, yes, literal buying your way in. Note that Harvard's undergraduate class is only 1.6k/yr, so it doesn't take that many special cases to show up in statistics.
ETA: Also legacies. And of course genetics.
What does ‘competent’ mean? What does‘ deserving’ mean? If you ranked all candidates on some absolute scale of individual goodness, do you dispute that there would be some legacy admits with worse rank than any non dei non legacy admit?
Of course if you just define competent as a binary corresponding to ‘above some bar’ (which would also be cleared by most of the students of eg UMichigan) then sure, all the legacies are `competent.’
Are you really going to be the Ivy that refused Obama's daughters entry? 😁
I have no idea about Sasha and Malia's brains, presumably they're smart (though I see Malia got into Harvard whereas Sasha went to University of Michigan before going to University of Southern California) but while they probably would have to get in on their merits, there might be some room for the admissions office to slide them in rather than have it "we turned down the daughter of the former president".
What prevents nonaristocrats from teaching their kids those sports?
I don’t think there are many fencing or sailing clubs in poor areas.
And besides, even if you can find a fencing club and pay the non-trivial cost of equipment and lessons, you're probably not going to fit in. Kids would rather do sports where they can hang out with their friends, they're not interested in hanging out with people they hate for ten hours a week in order to gain some small theoretical advantage.
For what it's worth, I did fencing for a year or so in high school; I wasn't good at it and didn't enjoy it much, it was a lot of standing around wearing uncomfortable gear and then actual bouts which lasted a few seconds . I remember it being mentioned to us that having a Blue in Fencing would be very useful if we ever wanted a Rhodes scholarship or similar, but I demonstrated my lack of true upper class credentials by not caring about getting a Rhodes Scholarship; with a more upper class upbringing I probably would have understood that being selected for prestigious awards is incredibly important because each prestigious award you get raises your chance of getting the next prestigious award until eventually you get something you actually want.
I own a fencing club and our youth classes are hilariously uniformly Jewish and Asian. It's not even that expensive. $1000/year to train and maybe that again to compete regularly at the state level. But our parking lot is packed with cars priced like small houses during youth classes.
Partly lack of knowledge - is it widely known that sailing improves your odds of getting into Harvard? Partly lack of opportunity. Sailing isn't exactly a cheap sport, nor one that is easy to pursue unless you are living in a handful of fairly select areas, or can afford to send your kids to a fancy private school.
Accessibility and interest. For a rowing club, it helps to live beside a river. It's not a cheap sport, and despite efforts in modern times by all sports to get working and lower class children involved, there still hangs over it the aura of being the wealthy man's hobby.
See the history of this local rowing club:
http://www.patrickcomerford.com/2020/08/cappoquin-rowing-club-old-dark-blues.html
"Sir John Keane, who rowed for Cambridge in the 1836 boat race and defeated Oxford by four lengths, is the man who started it all."
With the best will in the world, Sir John's gardener or one of his tenants is highly unlikely to be in one of the boats or a member of the club. Down the generations, it becomes fixed that some sports are for certain people.
Certainly, the newly emerged middle class can (try to) join rowing clubs and yacht clubs, but there is still going to be an element of snobbery there, even in egalitarian America:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Yacht_Club_(New_York)
The children of families who make their living from sailing etc. are going to end up working on trawlers, not rowing for Harvard.
Another thing is that aristocrats get why it's important. My friends who fenced in high school told me that it was insanely intense, because parents had both their normal college admissions and child's sports intensities combined at once. I think that a nonarostocrat who isn't as familiar with the system and has no real interest in fencing is going to struggle to build the level of intensity that forces a child to become skilled at a sport.
It's a credential, not an objective measure of whether the kids play the sports. Kids do get credit for national rankings, but most kids get credit for playing sports because the university recognizes the club because it is policed by the school.
It could just be fraud. We know that the decentralized people who actually meet Asian applicants rate them as having good personalities, but the central office rates them as having bad personalities. We know that the central office ratings are lies, so why draw any conclusion from them? It would be good to make a similar comparison between the centralized and decentralized ratings, but that would probably take another lawsuit.
AI music *will* take off as soon as AI human-like robots are performing live. I'll give 5 to 1, 2 years. they'll start as backups for name acts. the problem is establishing a recognized oeuvre.
Totally plausible that there will be a next-gen Gorillaz that is actually more or less what Gorillaz has long acted as.
Live music is built around celebrity.
Milli Vanilli, the Monkeys, Britney Spears, Spice Girls - celebrities can be created. Ticketmaster would rather pocket all the money than pay actual artisans. see WGA strike.
I don’t think anybody is going to go to an AI concert. Maybe some nightclub might have an AI DJ mixing tunes, but why not have a human DJ Front that?
The way I see it now the general attitude to AI has gone from „that’s amazing that it can be done at all“ to an assumption that AI will produce mediocre art and literature (or even „copy“).
Re (9), I was disappointed that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident didn't say what Tachibana et. al. ate _with_ POW liver. Presumably not "fava beans and a nice chianti". Maybe saké ?
2. Davidic Dynasty? As likely as finding the descendants of of Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanoff, Grand Duchess of Russia. For much the same reason. Jews have seldom been able to live peaceably in one place for long periods of time. The Holocaust was not the first persecution, just the biggest, most systematic, and most recent.
In those circumstances records are lost, families are broken up, and new identities are assumed. The odds of preserving a genealogy over 2000 years in those circumstances are vanishingly close to zero. Further, the incentives for making stuff up to improve your lot in life are enormous.
The fictional Dr. Gregory House: “It’s a basic truth of the human condition, that everybody lies."
My wife's family fled Vienna in 1939 after Kristalnacht. Her Uncle told his children that they were descended from the Esterházys*. Which is pure nonsense. Kind of sad, but kind of funny. For the record, my wife has documents. They were working class Jews from a Bohemian town east of Prague. We went there. We saw their graves.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esterh%C3%A1zy
RE: 36 and 37. KulakRevolt has a talent for lurid prose, but his factual accuracy has suffered even as he ascends to Twitter fame. Some Motte discussion of his take on the 3rd Amendment [here](https://www.themotte.org/post/579/teach-a-man-to-revolt-dreams).
13. "Elvis Was Our Shabbos Goy: Some people lean on neighbors for a cup of sugar. The Fruchters, of Memphis, Tennessee, needed theirs to help them keep the Sabbath". https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/vox-tablet/elvis-was-our-shabbos-goy
The second link is correct Elvis was not a Jew. But, he was a Mensch who had a lot of Jewish colleagues and friends. BTW, Louis Armstrong wore a star of David in honor of the Jewish family who took him in as a child and lent him money to buy his first cornet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong
In regard to item 22, "Cambridge MA schools decide to stop teaching advanced math, because some students can’t understand it and so it would be “inequitable”", you say "I don’t understand this even on its own terms". Let me squawk like an economist and say that you're not paying attention to the incentives that people face. If the *reported difference* in achievement between white students and black students in Cambridge schools gets too high, the administrators and teachers will feel the heat. And while it may be difficult to raise the achievement of black students, it's not difficult to reduce the achievement of white students.
This general principle shows up in a lot of places because the appearance of fairness is valued a lot more than the absolute value that people receive. That sounds stupid until you realize that people are fundamentally fighting over their place in the the status rankings of society, not their absolute well-being. They're perfectly willing to pay $1 if everybody else loses $2. Of course, in this case, white parents have unfair alternatives, but those alternatives don't show up in the statistics by which school administrators are judged.
I think he's asking 'why (just) math?'
Maths is an easy one to go after. Average person doesn't care that much about it, probably just passed it in school, and doesn't see the problem with dropping advanced classes.
They may go after English classes next, if the same kind of disparities show up there, and probably the angle of attack on that will be "it's all Dead White Males like Shakespeare which are not relevant to modern life, instead we're going to implement improvements in literacy for dealing with the way we live now". That one is trickier, because in general parents *do* care if little Johnny can't read while they're not that bothered if he's not doing algebra.
The same disparities do show up in English class, but it's much easier to hide them, because grading in English class is fully subjective. You can just give high grades to blacks and low grades to whites and no one can prove you were wrong.
If you try the same thing in a math class, it's easy to prove that you're doing something wrong.
Math is an easy target because a lot of mid-intelligence people already hated it because it shattered their illusions of being smart in HS.
FYI, this was a temporary thing from the Pandemic. I got an email from Cambridge Public Schools last week with "we are writing to share a summary of our plan to offer Algebra I to all of our 8th grade students by 2025, integrating units into the 8th grade curriculum thoughtfully and at a steady pace."
"For context, the pandemic and transition to remote learning interrupted the initial implementation of Algebra I, which all five of the Upper Schools committed to during the 2019-2020 school year. We believe we are now at a point where we can resume the rollout to ensure that each of our students are afforded the opportunity to access Algebra I in 8th grade. "
I'm not sure how to square this with the report that it's "no longer offered".
10: El Salvador’s murder crackdown. Some American politician is going to do that and become very popular.
I think it would be very difficult. Partly because American crime even I'm the worst places is nowhere near that bad, so you don't have the kind of crisis that pushes real action anywhere. And partly because US police forces aren't nearly as cooperative or motivated, as Eric Adams found out when he ran on being the pro-cop candidate and promptly failed to get the NYPD to actually do anything.
America's worst cities actually do have El Salvador levels of crime. E.g. in 2019, the year Bukele was elected, El Salvador had 36 homicides per 100,000, while Detroit had 40, New Orleans had 41, Baltimore had 59, and Saint Louis had 66.
I'm not aware of any major US cities that reached El Salvador's 2015 homicide peak of 103, though.
> America's worst cities actually do have El Salvador levels of crime. E.g. in 2019, the year Bukele was elected, El Salvador had 36 homicides per 100,000, while Detroit had 40, New Orleans had 41, Baltimore had 59, and Saint Louis had 66.
I don't think those numbers are comparable. The United States has lower levels of homicide than that. It's true that murders are concentrated in certain locales and therefore the residents of Baltimore experience a murder rate that is above the national average.
But this is surely also true of El Salvador! Bukele's popularity doesn't come from bringing the murder rate down from 36 per hundred thousand nationally -- it comes from bringing the murder rate down from something a lot higher than that locally! This implies that Detroit's 40 homicides per hundred thousand residents is, in fact, not at "El Salvador levels".
"Washington’s ‘War Zone’ Cries for more aggressive policing are getting louder in the capital city." By James Freeman Aug. 9, 2023
https://www.wsj.com/articles/washingtons-war-zone-6af67a39
* * *
On Sunday Peter Hermann and Jasmine Hilton reported for the Washington Post: Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8), whose district includes the place where three people were fatally shot and two others wounded Saturday night, said in a text message, “We need the National Guard in D.C.” “The crime is out of control and getting worse by the day,” White said. “Kids and innocent people are getting killed. It’s becoming status quo with no end in sight.” D.C. has recorded at least 158 homicides this year, according to a police spokesman, an increase of about 22 percent over this time in 2022 that puts the city on a trajectory for its deadliest year in two decades. By Tuesday the city’s official homicide total had reached 161. In a little more than seven months, the number of D.C. homicides now exceeds the 12-month totals for each of the three years ending in 2018.
* * *
Kate Ryan of WTOP radio reports: Standing not far from where three people were shot and killed in the Anacostia neighborhood Saturday night, D.C. Ward 8 Council member Trayon White called for the deployment of the National Guard to help the District get a grip on the tide of killings that have taken place... “I know those who live here know that we are clearly in a war zone,” he declared. “I’m going to say it again: We are clearly in a war zone.” As he repeated the phrase, the crowd joined in on those last four words and chanted along with him: “In! A! War! Zone!” White was referencing the words of acting D.C. police Chief Pamela Smith, who said over the weekend that the District was not a war zone, despite the jump in deadly shootings.
7. Since the very beginning of leftist radicalism its attraction has been religious in nature. It proposed an apocalypse -- the Revolution -- that would lead to a paradise on earth: communism. They could be optimistic because they thought that the revolution was historically inevitable and that human nature could be reformed and perfected thereafter.
The collapse of the Soviet Union killed that dream. The one they took up after it is the environmental apocalypse, that can only be prevented by reforming humanity. A task that may be impossible. Redemption is no longer inevitable. Now they are becoming despondent.
Conservatives have never believed that humanity could be redeemed by its own actions. They have believed that not strait thing can be made from the crooked timber of humanity. They believe that happy is the man who puts his trust in Jacob's god (Ps. 146:5). They can be happy. They can look at mankind and laugh.
Like I said, it's a religion.
Theist conservatives believe in a fixed moral truth outside of their own subjective perceptions and that fixed, external truth lends meaning and purpose to their lives. Whether they are right or wrong, believing your existence is meaningful leads to happiness. Atheist liberals are necessarily adrift in their own subjectivity. The only truth they can believe in is a strictly physical, materialist truth as defined and measured by the scientific method, this has no bearing on morality and is unable to create meaning or purpose. Environmentalism (in its religious sense) arises as an attempt to give physical matter some sort of greater spiritual purpose or meaning, to the point where many who follow this creed are apparently able to feel some happiness imagining a pristine earth in which humanity has been eliminated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement). But it seems illusory to me to find happiness in some hypothetical future which may never exist and, even if it eventually does, you will never be able to contemplate or enjoy because you have - necessarily - already disappeared into absolute nothingness.
...belief that AI is of paramount importance (ie. it will either save or doom humanity), is the other attempt to raise material, scientifically-obtained truths into the realm of the spiritual...
One cannot dispute the inalienable right to PURSUE happiness. If some people gain happiness by imagining a universe without people then they are welcome to do so, and no one has the power to take that away.
Atheists must define their own purpose(s). As pointed out, it doesn't matter for happiness purposes whether the purposes are actually true or not, so long as the belief is and pursuit of them is genuine, so the atheist may pursue happiness in his/her own way.
I do wonder about this right to pursue happiness. Is it inalienable? Is it even a right?
But whether or which, I think the very important distinction nearly all of us miss is that it's a right to PURSUE happiness. It says nothing about whether we will BE happy. We can pursue happiness and fail to achieve it. I think most people conflate that right to pursue happiness with "I have a right to BE happy and if I'm not happy, Something Must Be Done - the goverment or somebody must make it so that I'm happy".
You may well be right in the misinterpretation of the pursuit. No one has the right to BE happy, only to pursue it. The only one that can take away your right to pursue happiness is...you.
No one actually has a right to life or liberty, at least not an inalienable right. One must earn it, or have it provided by someone else.
It's not that there's a right to pursue happiness, it's that there's a general right to do what you want (as long as you don't X, Y or Z) and that most people will if left to their own devices, pursue happiness.
But there's nothing stopping you from using that right to pursue sadness, if sadness is what floats your boat.
"Inalienable" means "can't be taken away", and it clearly can be taken away. More of a verbal flourish than anything that actually adds meaning.
"Atheist liberals are necessarily adrift in their own subjectivity. The only truth they can believe in is a strictly physical, materialist truth as defined and measured by the scientific method, this has no bearing on morality and is unable to create meaning or purpose"
Where do you... find... these people? Like is this a Platonic construct that disposes with the messy stuff of actually asking a living and breathing atheist liberal if he's "adrift in his own subjectivity" and only believes in "materialist truth as defined and measured by the scientific method".
"Honey, I'm going to conduct an experiment to measure the concentration of endorphins in my blood to determine my true feelings for you. I will update my Bayesian priors of the likelihood of our relationship continuation for the next defined period based on the results".
I am considering atheism in the strictest sense., ie. there is nothing beyond the absolutely physical-material world as measurable by science. Everything not measurable by science is superstition. A true atheist cannot, for example, consider love as anything more than just a series of chemical reactions in their brain (like you allude to in the facetious last part of your comment). Believing in some kind of overarching purpose or meaning for human existence becomes a superstition. In this case, one would necessarily become aware that the only possibility to derive meaning would be from within one's own brain or, somehow, from the purely physical world (including the other lumps of purposeless flesh with whom one interacts). And I think that believing in this scenario certainly makes it harder to be happy (which doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true...)
Why are you considering something that doesn't exist? (ok, in a world of 8 billion people almost any weirdness can exist, but come on). You created a cardboard caricature that is even worse than "homo economicus" of the Chicago School. My last sentence was over-the-top satire designed to illustrate the absurdity of your "true atheist" creation. I cannot fathom you take a proposition that there are millions and millions of people who actually think this way seriously.
Okay, so you are saying that we all believe in some non-strictly-materialist concepts which give our lives meaning. I think that is probably true. But then why so much ridicule of people who believe in a god in order to give their lives meaning?
Yes, we do. As to "why ridicule", I don't know what to say... Dawkins is a jerk? There are jerks / inconsiderate people / Elon Musk who enjoy ridiculing others for the sake of it? Especially online, where the danger of the sharp end of an elbow violently colliding with their orbital bones in response is... remote? I'm with you, we all can do with less ridicule and more empathy, and Twitter should die, like literally crossed out of existence.
Anyone going far enough to actually reject all superstitions is going far enough to outright choose a purpose according to personal taste — as an exercise of the sovereign personal authority to do so.
And note that the other clumps of matter are not obligated to be purposeless either: they might, as an emergent property, also have chosen a purpose, or, worse but still not nothing, have accepted a purpose advertised by yet other clumps. Whatever they chose is their own purpose, though.
Yes, the idea of choosing a purpose or creating your own purpose from within yourself is, I believe, the standard atheist attempt at finding meaning in a godless world. Personally I reject that utterly. I cannot see anyway that anything truely meaningful could emerge entirely from within my own limited and isolated consciousness. (But then you would probably just say that my rejection of such a possibility is the "purpose" I have chosen...)
Well, I reject even that meaninglessness is the worst case, it's a zero, and what many religions (or VHEM, if we do not call them an atheistic religion) offer is a clear (to me) negative.
The theists who claim that a materialist universe is less meaningful than one made by their God are many, but the next one to offer a coherent explanation of why will be the first.
If there is a god then it might mean that we were put here for a purpose, if there is not then our existence is quite certainly banal and meaningless.
The problem is that you have proceeded from the undefended assumption that to be someone else's property is a necessary condition for a meaningful life. If I accept this as an axiom, then sure, it follows that -- given we do not live in a society where humans are allowed to own one another -- the only possible way to grant life meaning would be to discover a super-slaveowner who is too powerful to be bound by our society's laws. But I don't.
"The problem is that you have proceeded from the undefended assumption that to be someone else's property is a necessary condition for a meaningful life". Are you trying to say that the defining characteristic of god is that we are his/her property? Where did you get that idea? If there is a god, then he/she gave us life (without which nothing - including the concept of property, the concept of law, or the concept of life itself - as far as your or I are concerned, exists). And this hypothetical god would seem to have made us free, ie. gave us a free will which we can use to do whatever we want. I don't know how an entity which brought your consciousness (and thus, your universe) into existence and gave you the moral freedom to do whatever you want could be considered a slaveowner? (though in the Christian tradition I guess Lucifer indeed thought so!). And if there is a god, then society's laws would only be mimicking what would be divine laws so its a bit silly to speak about such a god not being subject to "our" laws. Frankly your conception of god seems rather more akin to that of a comic book villain...
>Are you trying to say that the defining characteristic of god is that we are his/her property?
No, I'm saying the defining characteristic of ownership is that if X owns Y, then X decides what purpose Y is meant to be used for. It's possible to conceive of a god that exists but does not own us, but such a god would not be able to impose purpose on us without our consent, which would make your earlier argument irrelevant.
Many (most?) conservatives don't hold those weird beliefs you attribute to them
I mention "theist conservatives", not conservatives in general, and the "weird beliefs" you mention, ie. believing in a fixed moral truth (God, if you prefer), is implicit in the "theist" part. And I think its fair to say that most theists are conservatives as most atheists are liberals. Atheist conservatives (of which there are some, no doubt), are a mystery to me...
Even many (most?) theist conservatives don't believe those things. Ask a random Christian conservative whether "no strait thing can be made from the crooked timber of humanity" and they'll probably have no idea what you're talking about
Ah, sorry, you were referring to Sobchak's comment (not mine). My mistake, ignore my rebuttal then...
> believing in a fixed moral truth (God, if you prefer), is implicit in the "theist" part
That is most certainly not the case. Gods are capricious; it is normal to believe in them with no implication that they represent fixed moral truths.
"Gods are capricious" - yes, in the sense of the greek gods or those gods that show up in Marvel comics, but those have nothing in common with the concept of "god" in the context which I am using it in (which is that god = fixed-moral-truth = love)
In the comment I responded to, you explicitly contrast "theist" with "atheist". So no, that's not the way you're using the concept of "god". Believing in a fixed moral truth is not implicit in non-atheism.
Well that is the way I meant to use it: god=love=truth.
But my apologies to all the Greek/Marvel-pantheon theists out there (apparently they are legion...) for any confusion caused.
18 & 22. Are different sides of the same coin.
18: "H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “ ... It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.”
22. "Critics note that Cambridge parents’ only option to give their kids a full education will now be to private-school or home-school them."
You would almost think that it is a vicious strategy to keep the poor people down.
The aggravating thing, and Freddie de Boer recognises this, is that this kind of action is in fact patronising and harmful. 'Let's do away with anything challenging because we can't expect the poor/minority kids to be able to handle it' which in effect means "they're stupid, it's not their fault, they were born stupid and can't change that". That is way more insulting than "Jamal failed the advanced maths test" because okay, maybe Jamal just isn't good at maths, many of us are not! But doing away with the advanced maths test because "Jamal is too stupid to pass and if he fails it will hurt his little feelings and we can't have that" is way, way worse. It's writing off Jamal as stupid and that all school will be for him is babysitting, maybe we can teach him to write his own name.
Probably kids have fallen behind due to the pandemic and lockdowns and remote schooling, and a heck of a lot of remedial teaching is needed. But dumping classes because "some kids will be better prepared than others, and that's not fair" is not helping anyone. It's not helping the kids who fell behind, and it's not helping the more able or better prepared kids.
Well, they also do their best to write off maths itself, another of those insidious arbitrary colonialist tools of oppression invented by dead white dudes to keep everybody else down. Their own "education" was likely structured so as to remove any indications contradicting this worldview.
Something similar happens with reading where non-phonics based approaches are taught. The kids can't read, the parents know it, the parents that can afford it get their kids private tutors, the rest can't. And this if for 1st/2nd graders!
I honestly don't remember learning to read, but I was about four and a half when I started school (a bit later than the usual age of four in Ireland at the time, as preschools and kindergartens were not yet a thing) and I could read by then, having been taught at home by my mother, my father, and my grandmother.
Here's where the ignorance comes in: is it really that hard to teach your kids to read, yourself? Do you really have to spend hours at a time drilling them? I think I mostly learned to read out of a copy of "The Cat in the Hat" 😁
Deiseach is right. The parents can read; there would be no point in hiring private tutors. Everyone can afford to teach their own children to read.
The existence of private reading tutors suggests your logic is incorrect. Many parents don’t have the time, desire, or knowledge to teach their own kids to read. Some can afford to outsource this task to make up for failures of schools to teach reading effectively.
Perhaps the Chinese GDP trend is explained partially by biased statistics? If growth is 4% each year but you say it is 5%, at first no one will be able to call you on it but after many years it'll be obvious you've been exaggerating, since the gap will grow.
Wasn’t Ravens the IQ test that autists tended to do better on relative to other tests? I think Michelle Dawson suggested that was the case in her CWT, and that it was especially true for autists that were not very verbal. But I haven’t seen anything else on the topic since then.
Well, that denial that Ravens tests anything well and that verbal ability is more g-loaded is very flattering to my vanity, because on an online Ravens test I scored a whopping 98 IQ (whoo! go me!) whereas I crush vocabulary tests 😁
Naturally, anything that says "no, you are Really Smart based on words words words" is stroking my ego the right way!
I thought vocabulary tests were afraid to be in the same room as you, because they *understood* what all the words you'd inevitably throw at them mean.
WARNING for the Pequod: almost all its fiction reviews include MAJOR SPOILERS, from revealing one big twist to detailed plot summaries.
Re 4: Goldman Sachs is not in the economics mainstream, and no growth economist paid attention to what GS said.
The default assumption was always that once its catch-up growth petered out, China would have great difficulty transitioning to a frontier-of-productivity growth regime because of structural factors, demographics, and antiproductive institutions. (Not just counterproductive, antiproductive.)
I don’t think that was mainstream belief at all, until recently. Also Goldman Sachs is surely mainstream anyway.
Greater variability in whichever gender has dissimilar sex chromosomes could be down to reversed causality: perhaps in species for which one gender would benefit from variability, there's an evolutionary incentive to develop mechanisms to provide such variability, _one_ of which is dissimilar chromosomes.
This would explain why Kierkegaard finds the chromosomes aren't the whole story: they're just one mechanism among several, all of which confer advantage.
(This is pure armchair reasoning though. I can think of lots of plausible stories for why variability would be beneficial, but I don't know if they're true in practice for the species in question).
The Kaiserist dystopia is provocative in a good way as in making us look at our society from a new angle. However, the dystopia's author perspective is that of a middle- (or even upper-) class person, and people working 12 hours a day or more, starving in Ireland or being driven from the land they had lived on for centuries probably wouldn't have said that that was the time of great liberty.
I was never much impressed by Snopes but crikey, they've really gone downhill: uncritically accepting claims that are very dubious:
"Again, names often tell a story and two of Martha’s brothers were given Jewish names, Sidney and Jerome"
Well, gosh: I guess that means Sidney Poitier is Jewish? Jerome K. Jerome must be double-Jewish? And naturally Saint Jerome must be the most Jewish of all!
"According to Max Wallace and Jonathan Goldstein, authors of "Schmelvis: In Search of Elvis Presley's Jewish Roots," Nancy Burdine “probably” came from a family that immigrated from Lithuania around the time of the American Revolution."
That "probably" is doing a lot of work. And they can definitely pin down that the Burdines (whatever the original spelling or form of the name) who emigrated around 1776 are the same family as Nancy Burdine's family, can they? Because two damn seconds looking it up tells me:
"The surname Burdine was first found in Brittany (French: Bretagne), where the family held a family seat from ancient times" and "The most Burdine families were found in USA in 1880. In 1840 there were 6 Burdine families living in South Carolina. This was about 20% of all the recorded Burdines in the USA" and "BURDINE Name Meaning Altered form of French Bourdin. History: This surname is listed along with its original form Bourdin in the (US) National Huguenot Society's register of qualified Huguenot ancestors."
So - Lithuanian Jews or French Huguenots? Your guess is as good as mine, but not for Snopes, apparently.
"So Presley’s maternal great-great grandmother was Jewish"
So we get from "probably" and "had names that could be Jewish if you think of them in that way" to "she was and so he was". *Even* if that was true, and his great-great-grandmother was 100% Jewish, then Gladys would have been one-eighth Jewish and Elvis one-sixteenth. That's "real Cherokee Princess" levels, and we don't even know if Nancy *was* 100% Jewish.
Which I am going to think was not the case because, uh, her dad was a minister:
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/genealogy/records/nancy-j-burdine-24-dh4pk4
"Nancy J Burdine
Birth
Abt. 1805 - Saltillo, Lee, Mississippi, USA
Death
1860 - Saltillo, Lee, Mississippi, United States
Mother
Susannah Tarrant
Father
Reverend John Fletcher Burdine
Born in Saltillo, Lee, Mississippi, USA on Abt. 1805 to Reverend John Fletcher Burdine and Susannah Tarrant. Nancy J Burdine married Abner Hampton Tackett and had 7 children. She passed away on 1860 in Saltillo, Lee, Mississippi, United States."
Reverend Burdine was born in South Carolina, which matches up with what is said above about the Burdines in the USA and I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose that the descendant of French Huguenots is more likely to become a Protestant clergyman than the descendant of Lithuanian Jews, call me crazy, I know, it's a wild guess!
Whatever money Snopes is making, pay me about half of that for twice the accuracy!
EDIT: Genealogy is fascinating; another website says that Abner Tackett was born in South Carolina (so that matches up with the Burdines) and Nancy's daughter Martha was born in Mississippi.
https://famouskin.com/family-group.php?name=27955+elvis+presley&ahnum=30
Though that may be wrong, because another site says he was born in 1803 in Kentucky. Given this variance, I'm dubious about "we were able to trace back to 1776" on accuracy of which Burdines (Bourdons, etc.) were which. Because this article claims Abner was never married to Nancy at all, he had two other spouses, so even if Nancy was Jewish, she's not related to Elvis at all!
https://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/feature/was-elvis-jewish/
"I utilized the extensive tools and records available at Ancestry.com and started my search for Elvis’ roots by building a family tree for him. Starting with Elvis’ date of birth and using what information I could find on him; I was able to build the tree out to the point where the rumour about Nancy Burdine starts.
Whether Elvis is Jewish comes down to one critical fact… who was Elvis’ great great grandmother? Was it Nancy J. Burdine or great great grandfather Abner Tackett’s first wife, Celia Ann Butler? Which one was the actual mother of Elvis’ great grandmother Martha Sue Tackett?
...By the 1870 Federal Census Abner is living in Lee County, Mississippi with Sarah Willett, who, according to the Mississippi U.S. Compiled Marriage Index 1776-1935, becomes his second wife in July of 1873. Living with them are the two of the younger Tackett children, Sidney and Jerome and three other children. Of the three other children, one is a 13-year-old boy, who could either be a previous child of Sarah or possibly her much younger sibling, and the other two are younger children, presumably children of Abner and Sarah. Martha married Albert White Mansell in January of 1870 and is living next door to the rest of the family at the time of the 1870 census.
...What I also didn’t find was any record that shows a Nancy J. Burdine in the life of Abner, Celia, or any of the children. I found many Nancy J. Burdine records, but none that had any sourced connection to the Tackett family."
I'm wondering about this cousin Oscar who said he was at school in Tennessee with Nancy and that she was Jewish:
"According to Elvis’ third cousin Oscar Tackett (who shared the same ancestors Abner and Nancy), Nancy was Jewish. She and Abner had met as schoolmates in Tennessee". Was he just embroidering a family story? Was he claiming to be related to the big famous star? Who knows?
Yes but I think Jewish law sees people as Jewish through the matrilineal line. Which actually makes sense as it is the only line we can actually be certain of.
That's if you go by the Orthodox religious definition (and there are contentions around that, where people ask why the child of a Jewish father is not considered Jewish and the Conservative branch):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineality_in_Judaism
"The practice of matrilineal descent differs by denomination. Each denomination has protocols for conversion for those who are not Jewish by birth.
Orthodox Judaism practices matrilineal descent. Orthodox Judaism holds that anyone with a Jewish mother also has irrevocable Jewish status; that even were such a Jew to convert to another religion, that person would still be considered Jewish by Jewish Law."
Even there, I think that if there have been generations of marrying out with Gentiles, the descendants are not going to be considered Jewish, but I don't know the ins and outs of that. So perhaps they might indeed regard "if your mother was Jewish, then you're Jewish even if you're raised as a Christian or no belief", and that continues down through the generations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_is_a_Jew%3F
"The Israeli Chief Rabbinate requires documents proving the Jewishness of one’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother when applying for marriage.
...In general, Orthodox Judaism considers individuals born of Jewish mothers to be Jewish, even if they convert to or are raised in another religion.
Historically, a Jew who has been declared to be a heretic (Hebrew: מין, romanized: min) or Christian (Hebrew: נוצרי, romanized: notzri, meaning "Nazarene") may have had a cherem (similar to excommunication) placed on him or her; but the practice of communal and religious exclusion does not affect their status of Jewish birth. Judaism also views as Jewish those who involuntarily convert from Judaism to another religion (Hebrew: anusim, אנוסים, meaning "forced ones"), and their matrilineal descendants are likewise considered to be Jewish.
The same rules in principle apply to the matrilineal descendants of such persons, though some rabbinical authorities may require stricter proof of Jewish descent than others. Whether such persons are required to undergo a full formal conversion depends on the community and their individual circumstances. For example, a male who has had a brit milah, who has a general understanding of Judaism, but who has been raised in a secular home might not be required to undergo ritual conversion. However, a male who has not had a brit milah, a male or female who has converted to or been brought up in another religion, or an individual raised in a completely secular home without any Jewish education, in most communities, may be required to undergo a full ritual conversion. For full participation in the community (for example, to marry with the participation of a rabbi), they may be required to display sincerity, such as a declaration of commitment to Judaism."
As I said, even if it were true, it's about the same level of Elizabeth Warren being Native American: an ancestor way back doesn't make you that. So *if* Nancy Burdine was born of a Jewish family, then her matrilineal descendants could be considered Jewish, but Elvis would have had to formally convert or make some other declaration to be accepted into the community. But I don't think it has been established beyond doubt that her family line was Jewish (and not French).
Consider the viewpoint of a very high authority: Unsong
“No.” Jalaketu smiled. “My mother was a Hindu, but Hinduism passes through the paternal line. My father, perhaps if he teaches me Torah then he is Jewish. But Judaism passes through the maternal line. I am nothing.”
https://unsongbook.com/chapter-29-he-who-respects-the-infants-faith/
I was taught that no matter who your parents are, if you get baptized you're cast out of the tribe.
Does it matter if "Jewish law" claims someone is Jewish if they don't identify as that themselves?
Isn't this a bit like the Mormons posthumously baptising dead randoms as Mormons without their consent?
No because baptism for the dead has no effect unless the person accepts it. We do not count those they have baptized on any sort of census or tally sheet. Ultimately, we plan on baptizing everyone and letting God sort it out.
> "Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work."
I'm confused here. The authors found no effect on mean incomes between their two cohorts (waitlist admits/rejects), but show that the chances of being in the top 1% of incomes go up substantially. Doesn't this imply that the Ivy-Plus cohort also was overrepresented at the lower end of income (or at least, there must be some range in which the non-Ivy group outperforms the Ivy group for income to make the means the same)? I wasn't able to find any discussion of this from the authors, but it seems peculiar.
They find nearly 0 effect on mean income *percentile*
So, maybe 3 Harvard kids end up at the 80th, 90th, and 99th percentile. Maybe 3 Berkeley kids end up at 84th, 90th, 95th percentiles - that would be 0 effect on mean income percentile, but a large effect on mean income.
But also, they did find a small mean income percentile effect (about 2pp IIRC), so in my above contrived example you could end up with
Harvard: 85, 91, 99
Berkeley: 84, 90, 95
And that's broadly consistent with the study. The point being that a large increase in top-1% earning wouldn't show up very much in the mean income percentile statistic. For this reason, there wouldn't be much effect to "cancel out" via lower incomes.
While I generally think it vastly more probably that Eliezer will win his bet than not, I think he discounts a fairly obvious and plausible scenario for how aliens might generally remain hidden but occasionally fly around in big sighted biologically piloted craft that crash: the alien laws specify that they should not interfere with us, but occasionally individual aliens piloting their personal joy-craft disregard the law in favor of skimming by earth so they can freak out the primitives. The law is probably such that outright revealing yourself will get you caught and harshly punished, but UFO style sighting are hard to detect and/or prove in court. Alternatively, the aliens are running a primitive society tour and occasionally the tour boats malfunction because the company is skimping on maintenance costs in a misguided attempt to improve profit margins, thus rendering their craft either temporarily visible or causing them to crash.
Indeed! The zoo hypothesis has always be might favorite, it could be so much fun!
Small possible correction on point 22, near as I can tell from Google, Sarah Jane Baker has not raped anyone, and was in fact raped herself. Possible I missed a story that was buried by Google, but I read a lot of articles to check. Unless you have a source for rapist, I suggest you cross our that word. Everything else is accurate, and imo inexcusable.
Yes, it seems this person is not a rapist, they're a murderer (attempted):
"Sarah Jane Baker is a talented musician, poet and author who has served 25 years of a life sentence for the attempted murder of another prisoner. The winner of countless awards and a qualified counsellor, she is (as Alan Baker before her transition) the author of Life Imprisonment: An Unofficial Guide (Waterside Press, 2013)."
25 years in the UK for only an attempted murder is a hefty sentence, I think that the talented fabulous wonderful person may not be *completely* telling all the messy details here. Though presumably, if you're already doing time for torture and assault, a second attempt at murder will bump up the amount of time you're serving.
Let's have a deeper dig. "The Pink News" can probably be considered not a TERF or conservative publication:
"The activist was released on parole in 2019 after serving 30 years of a life sentence for kidnapping and torturing her stepmother’s brother in the late 1980s and the later attempted murder of a child rapist while she was in prison.
In 2020, during her imprisonment, Baker told PinkNews that she suffered physical attacks, had been stabbed, and had been raped a number of times as a result of being trans."
"At the age of 19, in 1989, she was convicted of kidnapping and torturing her stepmother’s brother, and was given a nine-year tariff. She was later given a life sentence for the attempted murder of a child rapist while she was in prison."
What a charmer. And was the prisoner they attacked a child rapist? I don't know, other articles say "alleged" so whether that's lawyer speak or whether they mean "the only person who says this is so is Baker" I leave up to you to decide.
Account of what this 19 year old and their brother did to their stepbrother, with seemingly no remorse afterwards:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12299927/Man-tortured-trans-activist-brands-dangerous-violent-individual.html
This is a *very* sceptical account of Baker's claims, so this could well be exaggerated in the other direction, but my admittedly biased impression is that Baker is a violent, dangerous person who now relishes all the attention they are getting for being "a transgender prisoner" and is providing all the lurid stories of being attacked, assaulted, raped etc. while in jail in order to keep the sympathisers on side:
https://the-lies-they-tell.org/2023/05/20/profile-of-trans-activist-sarah-jane-baker/
"In 2014 Baker made an allegation of assault and torture by two prison officers on the way back from an appointment at Charing Cross Hospital’s gender clinic. The prison has denied the claims."
According to this they forced the man they tortured to perform oral sex, which might or might not count as rape depending on how you define it but it's certainly a defensible claim: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12299927/Man-tortured-trans-activist-brands-dangerous-violent-individual.html
Yeah, I think that qualifies as "rapist". Looking at Baker's appearance in the video, and this is my personal biased opinion, they're not a woman (even a trans woman). They're a man in a dress. They're probably not trans, they're one of that subset of violent men who suddenly (when in prison or faced with prison) discover that actually they are A Real Woman. It's really odd how many rapists/sexual assaulters suddenly discover their real inner feminity:
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/
"MtF transitioners were over 6 times more likely to be convicted of an offence than female comparators and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent offence. The group had no statistically significant differences from other natal males, for convictions in general or for violent offending. The group examined were those who committed to surgery, and so were more tightly defined than a population based solely on self-declaration.
...The question of whether transwomen match male or female patterns of criminality is specifically addressed by the 2020 FOI referenced by Fair Play For Women (who have submitted evidence to the Committee). This is first time there has been official data to compare the rate of sex offending in 3 different groups. Men vs women vs transwomen. The hyperlinks below link to the FOI spreadsheet.
MOJ stats show 76 of the 129 male-born prisoners identifying as transgender (not counting any with GRCs) have at least 1 conviction of sexual offence. This includes 36 convictions for rape and 10 for attempted rape. These are clearly male type crimes (rape is defined as penetration with a penis).
Here is the number compared with figures for sex offending rates in men and women over the same period. Comparisons of official MOJ statistics from March / April 2019 (most recent official count of transgender prisoners):
76 sex offenders out of 129 transwomen = 58.9%
125 sex offenders out of 3,812 women in prison = 3.3%
13,234 sex offenders out of 78,781 men in prison = 16.8%
Michael Biggs, ‘The Transition from Sex to Gender in English Prisons: Human Rights and Queer Theory’, SocArXiv, 17 May 2020
On pages 10 and 11 Biggs reference the MOJ and Fair Play for Women statistics. On page 11 he states:
‘Of the 125 transgender prisoners counted by the prison service in 2017, 60 had been convicted of sexual offenses, including 27 convicted of rape (BBC News 2018). In the overall prison population, by comparison, 19% of males had been convicted of sexual crimes and only 4% of females (Ministry of Justice 2018).’"
I know Blanchard's theory gets a lot of criticism, but I do think that for a subset of those claiming to be trans, AGP fits the bill a lot better. Part fetish, part "I can game the system for better treatment". Baker, to me, is one of these.
> they're one of that subset of violent men who suddenly (when in prison or faced with prison) discover that actually they are A Real Woman.
I wonder, if maybe women are actually *more* violent than men, but because they are physically weaker on average, their violence typically causes less damage, so it is taken less seriously.
If this hypothesis is true, then trans women get the worst possible combination: a violent female mind in a physically strong male body.
35 Ravens is a TERRIBLE IQ test for a reason not mentioned by Jensen. If you could get a culture-blind test at the expense problems mentioned in the link, that would be a great tradeoff. I assume everyone using it knows these problems and thinks it's a great tradeoff. But the real problem is that it has a huge learning effect. This is particularly bad for cross-cultural comparisons and negates its whole purpose. It is the least culture-blind test and thus good for nothing.
We would like IQ tests to be a measure of what people can learn. But the fact that everyone gets much better at Ravens after taking it, without even seeing the answers, shows that it is about things that are very easy to learn. People who score highly on it are probably people who have been exposed to the kind of problems before. If it were a measure of expensive years of education/exposure, that would be good for something, but it might be just a measure of superficial exposure. In particular, people who do very badly on it, like people in the third world or people in the developed world before the Flynn effect, probably can be quickly brought up to speed.
Jensen mentions test-retest reliability. That should include the learning effect, but particular measurements might not if they just define it as correlation. Moreover, he assumes it away by interpreting the failure of reliability as noise. The first comment on the post, by Emil Kierkegaard, mentions the learning effect as perhaps a bigger problem than the problems Jensen mentions, but I think he really underplays the problem.
"The rule-dependence model explains the commonalities between the
Flynn effect and IQ gains via retesting" by Elijah L. Armstrong and Michael A. Woodley
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/armstrong2014.pdf
Silly observation perhaps, but re: 19, looking at the long-term graph, I find it deeply ironic that the previous local maximum in trust in government being (literally) 1984. TINACBNIEAC
18. I'm personally skeptical of the interpretation that the Ivy League increasing one's chance of being in the top 1% by 60% is important. I haven't read the full study yet but I've skimmed it and read the earlier Dale & Krueger study that found no result for the average student. This is anecdotal, but the students that I knew who went to Ivy Leagues (this is mostly in the last few years) were treating it as a safety net preventing low incomes or a raise to the median income, not a better chance of getting a high income. Claiming that this result then validates societal preferences feels like moving the goalposts. I'm also skeptical of a few bits of the methodology, although again I need to look into this more and it's on my list of things to read. The big one is that they compare waitlist admits to other people on the waitlist; all the things I read when applying to college a few years ago say that waitlist admits aren't random.
> The big one is that they compare waitlist admits to other people on the waitlist; all the things I read when applying to college a few years ago say that waitlist admits aren't random.
The authors go to great pains to show they are effectively random. They also show the two groups match on basically all observed variables. They also show that getting off (e.g.) Harvard's waitlist doesn't correlate with getting off (e.g.) Yale's waitlist, which suggests they largely match on unobserved variables too.
My understanding is that waitlists are generally used to plug "gaps" in the class (e.g., if it looks like too many athletes and legacies have matriculated, they'll let in some really academically gifted applicants who were otherwise borderline in order to bring the SAT scores and GPAs reported to the various ranking organizations back up to par). Undergrad admissions tend to be something of a black box, but for law school admissions at least, which I'm much more familiar with, waitlist admits tend to be disproportionately "splitters" (people with a particularly high LSAT but low GPA and vice versa), indicating that they're admitting people specifically to balance out impressive but "lopsided" people they've already admitted. Since different schools have different things they need to balance at the end of the admission cycle, it makes sense that success at one school wouldn't correlate with success at another.
That's a plausible story.
I don't know if you're intending to argue that your thesis invalidates the study, but, if so, I disagree. Group assignment doesn't need to be truly random to infer causation from an experiment (or quasi experiment)* - the assignment must merely be independent of the shared variance between the variables of interest. In my opinion, your story is completely consistent with this and so doesn't really cast any doubt on the validity of the causal inference.
If you were merely commenting and not arguing, mea culpa - that's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before.
* Its unclear that "truly random" is even a coherent concept anyway, except insofar as it means "independent of anything we care about"
Tyler's congestion pricing claim confuses me. I've mostly understood congestion pricing as being a tax on cars, whether they are owned by a resident or not, and usually applied to something like a highway or bridge or tunnel, not a neighborhood. Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I can't say I've seen a lot of YIMBYs say that locals should be exempted.
edit: his original Bloomberg article (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-08/new-york-s-congestion-pricing-plan-is-bad-economics?sref=htOHjx5Y) also seems weird since congestion pricing is a thing primarily applied to cars (trains into NYC from the suburbs already have differential pricing for peak times!) and *encourages* more people to be there, since cars are so bad for a big city and take up so much space.
edit 2: he says that demand curves slope downward, but the capacity of cars is low so the total number of people being discouraged from going in at all isn't that high (the fact that alternatives already exist also make this slop very low). I think this ends up being outweighed by the increased desirability of the city itself.
Once had a patient walk up to my (pharmacy) consultation window and start with "so I accidentally mixed bleach and ammonia", didn't even let them finish, told them they need to go (literally next door where there was a hospital) to the ER NOW.
Per #24, on PEPFAR, I looked into it, and my summary of the situation is different from Scott's. Basically, it's not about PEPFAR funds being used for abortions, as far as I can tell -- it's about PEPFAR funds being used for pro-choice advocacy in foreign countries. Republicans are being pressured by pro-life advocacy groups that care about this, and have a lot of sway over Republican voters. Hopefully it's okay for me to repost a comment from a previous thread, since it's relevant here, too:
>> Looks like the pro-life groups object to PEPFAR funds being used to lobby foreign governments to enact pro-choice legislation. That seems like a pretty normal stance for a political advocacy group to take: "We will rate you badly if you vote to give money to groups who lobby against our cause." The specific organizations they accuse of doing this are Population Services International, Village Reach and Pathfinder International. Who knows whether it's true or not. Seems like a screwed-up situation.
People sort of conflate PEPFAR with the fact the public health community discovered around the turn of the century that HIV meds not only prevent AIDS but prevent spread of HIV…but any American that supports reducing funds that definitively reduce spread of HIV even on a different continent would be the biggest fucking moron on the planet!
Since this got linked in Open Thread 290, I'll add some urls for posterity.
Here's a dear colleague letter from Chris Smith, the Republican who seems to be spearheading the effort. It contains the specific accusations I mentioned.
https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/06/ca11a653-Dear-Colleague_PEPFAR_CS.pdf
Here's a letter from a bunch of pro-life advocacy groups explaining their position:
https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/PEPFAR-Coalition-Letter.pdf
And, if you're interested in the actual right-wing position on this issue, and the way it fits into their broader political views, this longish essay from The Heritage Foundation explains it:
https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/report/congress-must-stop-bidens-misuse-us-foreign-aid-impose-his-radical-social
Oh, and I think my initial understanding of it was somewhat wrong, too, when I said, "it's not about PEPFAR funds being used for abortions", since there are definitely Republicans and pro-life advocacy groups who say that PEPFAR funds are being used for abortions. I'd walk that back, some.
For 35: Raven's, it's important to note the definition of "good IQ test" when you say Raven's is not one. The definition of "good IQ test" is "correlates well with established IQ batteries, which often test vocab and math". It's no surprise that Raven's correlates less well with an IQ battery that tests math and vocab than math and vocab tests do.
As I often remark, there is no such thing as "True Intelligence" and just because all IQ tests correlate it does not follow that you can statistically extract the One True IQ and have it be independent of the choice of battery. The g factor is dependent on the battery choice.
Not if the battery is diverse enough I don't think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#%22Indifference_of_the_indicator%22
The studies that show the g factor is indifferent to the battery used are bunk. They are based on a misunderstanding of how factor analysis works. I wrote about it here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/13cxghf/discussion_thread_56_may_2023/jlkbkjd/
It's statistical illiteracy to suggest that the g factor does not depend on the battery.
Are there no studies that use a valid methodology to study that in your opinion?
As far as I am aware there are exactly two studies that show the g factor does not depend on the battery. They have overlapping authors and both make the exact same mistake (as I explained in my reddit post).
Interesting. Maybe you should write an academic response to those papers?
I'm considering something like this. It's not my field so I'd have to figure out the norms regarding these things (e.g. which venue, do I submit as a paper or a letter or something else, etc.). Perhaps I should also collect some other papers (not about g factor invariance) that also make the same mistake.
Usually the definition of "good IQ test" would be "high g-loading", not "high correlation with certain other tests".
Those are the same thing. The way to measure "high g loading" is to use a battery of IQ tests; the g loading is a correlation with the g factor, which is itself a summary statistic of a bunch of IQ tests. So "g loading" equals "correlation with certain other IQ tests".
Number 6 reminds me of a Dave Barry anecdote. He was staying with his friend, mystery author Ridley Pearson, while he was on a book tour or vacation or something, when the two of them went to the grocery store. While they were grinding coffee at the in-store grinder, Pearson suddenly paused, stared at the grinder, and said something like, "You could put poison in the grinder," (or in the beans, I can't remember), "and later someone would come along, grind some beans, and end up being poisoned. It would be untraceable." Then he went his merry way, leaving Barry standing there thinking about how he was a guest in this man's house.
ETA: found the story! https://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article1937843.html
That's not really the same thing; poison-in-the-coffee-grinder is potentially untraceable (depending on whether the store has in-store cameras), but it also doesn't target anyone. You'll just end up poisoning a bunch of people unknown to you. There's no point.
37 one more time: It is not necessary to bring in any Mormon-specific cultural theory to explain the drop in their fertility rate, since they are following the same trajectory of other late-starting groups.
It is a characteristic of the demographic transition (the transition from women having many children to having on average 2.1 children or below) that groups which start the transition late, usually move faster to low fertility than groups who started the transition earlier. So if Mormons kept their fertility high longer than other faiths in the US, their transition to low fertility should happen more rapid than among US faiths that started the transition earlier.
We see this pattern also between countries. Fertility decline has been much more rapid in Middle East countries during the last two decades than the earlier, comparable fertility decline in Europe. In short: Start late, and you move faster to low fertility.
The demographic transition is also characterized by hierarchical diffusion: Urban high-educated women reduce their fertility first, rural women and women with lower education reduce their fertility later. But they eventually do.
With regard to Hasidic versus secular Jews in Israel, Hasidic Jews have much higher fertility, but the trend is downward [edit: if takes into consideration that there is net transition out of the Hasidic community]. The most traditional Hasidic communities are losing members to less-traditional forms (that is, quite a lot of young members leave the most traditional communities, and there are few who convert in). This is likely to speed up fertility decline, since less-traditional versions of a faith (almost any faith) is correlated with lower fertility.
I do not know of there is also significant net conversion from Mormonism, at least in its most traditional forms, to more "modern" Mormonism and/or other faiths (including the faith of non-faith). If so, this is an added factor that will speed up fertility decline among people born into the Mormon faith. Could be interesting to know.
The Haredi retention rate is very high: https://res.cloudinary.com/cea/image/upload/v1667995844/mirroredImages/mDkfEjt64DQEtyAmr/dvxpypxfg5yliokz4kwb.png
Interesting, that is somewhat lower than I have seen elsewhere. Thanks for the graph! That said, Haredi Judaism is composed of several groups, and the differences between them - as well as the degree of traditional practice within each of them (in particular among younger members) - may vary, even though they continue to self-identify as members. I am not an expert on the internal distinctions within Haredi Judaism by any means, to make that clear! But I notice the following from an article on the issue:
"Regev’s preliminary figures distinguish between the non-Hasidic so-called Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community and Sephardi Haredim. They show that, when all of the age groups are included, the dropout rate in the Hasidic community is 5%; compared to 13% among Lithuanian Haredim; and 30% among Sephardim. Regev attributed the high Sephardi dropout rate to the shift towards ultra-Orthodoxy among Sephardim about two decades ago. Now there is a tendency among the subsequent generation to return to what would be defined as a “traditional” but non-Orthodox lifestyle....When the three segments of the ultra-Orthodox population are combined, the data indicate an overall 15% to 18% dropout rate among Haredim."
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-11-13/ty-article/.premium/haredim-are-leaving-the-fold-but-the-community-is-growing/0000017f-f1a8-d223-a97f-fdfd0b820000
As to your point connecting shifts within the Haredi population to decreasing Haredi fertility, the graphs here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1665925810018975744 suggest that Haredi fertility has not declined significantly (data ends 2017).
As to whether former Haredim who cease to be counted as Haredim lower their fertility, that doesn't seem to be significant enough to be noticeable. The following graph shows total fertility rates to be somewhat increasing (although the labelling is less clear).
In short, I see no evidence that "the trend is downward."
[It may be true that the child of someone who identifies as Haredi will on average have fewer children than their parents, since there is a chance they will stop being Haredi (and a chance that if they do, that they will have lower fertility than they would otherwise), but that is independent of net transition. Even if more people joined the Haredi community than left it, that would still be true.]
I am not wholly sure of the graph (From Twitter/X) showing increased fertility for all Jews 1979-2017. According to World Bank data, aggregate fertility went down in Israel, from 3.30 to 3.11 (and in 2019 it was 3.01). Reduction in aggregate fertility is also the longer trend in Israel (as everywhere else), if you use a longer time series (from 1960 onwards):
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman-world-bank?tab=table&time=1979..latest
That said, the World Bank data set highly likely also includes the Arab population, which has shown declining fertility. So this probably explains the discrepancy.
Moving on to the the main question in this thread: The fertility of different faiths among Jews in Israel. Your graphs (from Twitter/X) show fairly stable fertility across all Israeli faiths 1979-2017 (not only among the Haredim): Fair enough. My point was/is that even though the Haredim viewed separately has stable fertility, there is likely to be a downward trend if we also factor in that Haredim lose members to less-religious worldviews, assuming that those who convert out adopt fertility closer to the non-Haredim.
You (and Alexander Turuk earlier in this thread) doubt if net conversion is significant enough to bend the fertility curve downward. And I'll add some self-criticism here: Maybe I am wrong in the magnitude of net conversion away from the Haredim. See the exchange with Alexander Turuk earlier in this thread.
...also, maybe converts from Haredim maintain fertility close to their old faith than the faith they convert into. I have not seen any data on this, and I doubt if anyone collects such data. But converts from Haredim to non-Haredim, as well as converts from less-religious to even-less-religious worldviews, might perhaps explain why fertility is quite stable also for all the other faiths in Israel, even for those who hold the faith of no-faith (the seculars). They may all get a net influx of higher-fertility converts "from next levels up" so to speak, that prevents the fertility of their group from going down.
...Until perhaps in some distant future, there is no-one left above them that represents a potential pool of converts that can boost their group's fertility. ("Convert" is probably a too strong word; there are shades of gray between adherence to a faith and adherence to something else, but I have not found any softer word for change in a person's worldview.)
My main source for these admittedly not-written-in-stone conclusions is an excellent paper by Alex Weinreb and Nachum Blass (2018): "Trends in Religiosity Among the Jewish Population in Israel."
Their main take-home point, as I read it, is that the somewhat-religious in Israel are in a longer-term demographic squeeze from two sides: The Haredim are growing, since their high fertility is large enough to offset net conversion out of the Haredim; and non-believers are also growing, since their dismal fertility (bottom of the heap) is more than offset by receiving more net converts than any other faith. Link here:
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/trendsinreligiosity-1.pdf
16. "UFOs...it’s unlikely that any civilization advanced enough..."
Based on what I know and don't about all space-faring alien races' psychology and history, I'd say it's just a likely they all pilot saucer-shaped craft with a transparent bubble canopy top(coincidentally like 50s sci-fi).
I mean who wouldn't. : )
Everything I need to know I learned from Spaceman Spiff.
Truth!
37 Literally the first line seems very dubious.
'The only subcultures that have managed to achieve above replacement fertility at average incomes above 5-10k are Jewish Conservatives and American Conservatives.'
As if they have analysed all subcultures in every country and discounted every one - checking that every group above 10k average income has <2.1 TFR. It's such a transparently made up fact.
The only counterexample I can think of is the Faroe Islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Faroe_Islands
There are also various pacific islands, but they are rather poor.
Yeah and that's just what you can think of off the top of your head right! I think if the author's going to make that case and hang their argument on it they could at least spend a while looking for counterexamples.
If we're talking entire countries: Kazahkstan, Seychelles, Saudi Arabia
If we're talking subcultures (which is the much stronger claim that the author was actually making), there seems like probably dozens or hundreds of possibilities. It's limited by data availability, but the following all seem like reasonable examples: Practicing Catholics in France and Britain, Pacific people in New Zealand, Indigenous Canadians:
https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demographic-facts-sheets/focus-on/level-of-education-and-religiosity-in-france-and-britain-impacts-on-fertility/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWomen%20reporting%20no%20religious%20affiliation,%2C%20Britain%20and%20France.%E2%80%9D%20Two
https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/births-and-deaths-year-ended-june-2021/
https://cichprofile.ca/module/7/section/5/page/number-of-children-per-woman-total-fertility-rate-by-indigenous-identity-canada-2010-2011/
Probably 'conservatives' (especially in more rural areas) in every country have higher than average fertility, and in many cases that would make fertility rates above replacement.
Nice data.
The question, however, is if we are dealing with permanent differences between ethnic and religious groups, or (only) a leaders-laggards scenario. The latter is my expectation, based on an hypothesis that the demographic transition takes place everywhere, including in all geographical areas, ethnicities, religious groups and education levels: The only thing that varies, is the timing of the transition, plus how fast the transition is (and perhaps to how far below 2.1 children per woman fertility falls before it stabilises).
It's an easy hypothesis to test, provided one has reliable data across time for all the groups one is interested in. Looking at your links, the data on France, Britain and Canada seem to be at only one point in time. So they cannot be used to differentate the hypotheses.
The data from Tatauranga does however include a time series from 2001 to 2018 with regard to Total Fertility Rates between Maoris, Pacific Islanders, Asians and Europeans. And simply eyeballing the differences suggests that Maoris and Pacific Islanders have TFRs much closer to Europeans in 2018 than in 2001 . Which strengthens the leaders-laggards hypothesis, and weakens the permanent-differences-between-ethnicities hypothesis. (Less clear relative to Asians, at least when only using eyeballing as the empirical test.)
Caveat: We should ideally have time series of Cohort Fertility Rates (CFRs) at the end of several cohorts' reproductive life cycle, to differentiate these two hypotheses, rather than TFRs across time. Few countries have time series on CFRs yet. So the jury is still out in most countries. But my money is on the leaders-laggards scenario.
Yeah I pretty much agree with this - the trends are very important. I'd have slightly different expectations that geography matters at least in terms of rural vs urban (rural birthrate higher), and religiousity to be associated with higher (long term) birthrates.
But when you say 'the question however is'... my point was that the author of the post doesn't even attempt to use the data analysis you suggest, or even a simple google of subgroups for comparison. They just assert that the two high-fertility groups (probably subcultures they just happen to be familiar with) must be unique examples in the world, requiring a complex explanation. You don't need a time series to refute the first line in the post.
Sure, and I agree that urban-rural is also an important dimension in the leaders-laggards scenario. (To some extent the liberal-conservative dimension also. All of these dimensions overlap to a considerable extent.)
Religiosity is the most interesting. As you indicate, it is the most important counter-argument to assuming this is "only" a leaders-laggards scenario.
I have speculated myself if atheism as a worldview will turn out to be a "demographic sink", sort-of the equivalent to the cities in Medieval Europe, who could only maintain their population through net immigration from the countryside, due to high urban mortality (the corresponding idea being that atheism can only maintain a long-term presence in the world through net conversion from other faiths, since atheists have a dismal fertility rate; bottom of the heap as far as faiths go).
However, I have a counter-argument: There is net conversion from very religious to less religious to not-at-all religious world views (observed for example in Israel today). Which might imply that the very religious will not inherit the Earth after all, if one can assume that net conversion out of the faith will turn out to be a stronger long-term tendency than the above-2.1-fertility-rate that can be observed among the very religious in most faiths. Time will show, as they say...
The homework behind 37 is definitely lacking. As I’ve said elsewhere in these comments, the whole thing is based not on any actual Mormon birth rates but on Utah birth rates and relies on the assumption that they’re basically the same in an age with lots of non-LDS immigration to Utah.
Yeah that's a great point too!
The piece reads like the author had a grand theory (there is a memetic virus of Anglo-liberal culture that reduces birthrates, American conservatives are uniquely immune but Trump has spread it to the mormons), but then found it too inconvenient to check if their base assumptions are even true, or consider any different explanations. Then went on ahead anyway.
18: `Ivy plus' seems like a weird grouping to me, because it is three tier. In particular it groups (Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Yale), which are clearly super-elite institutions, with (Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth) which, to my mind, are decidedly not. Does the data allow finer grained resolution regarding whether any of the purported `far tail' benefits actually accrue to the lesser Ivies? My mental model says that (Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth) will look no better (and perhaps worse) than (UMichigan, UCBerkeley, UTAustin) with regards to `far right tail.' I'm not sure about (Penn, Columbia, Duke, UChicago) - those to my mind are `more prestigious than the flagship publics, but not THAT much more prestigious.'
Also 18: Re: `are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason' - it is theoretically conceivable that `kid attends Ivy league school' is a status symbol, same as a Rolex watch only more expensive, and that rich people were going it for bragging rights.
I don't believe it though. It may not boost earnings power, but on some level the conclusions about `far right tail' are kinda obvious. e.g. two schools seem to have produced eight of nine justices on the SCOTUS.
That's for law school, and the law schools at Harvard and Yale have consistently ranked as the best in the nation, and their graduates are often chosen for prestigious clerkships, giving them a leg up on ascending the ladder, creating a feedback loop.
For undergraduate education, there's a slightly more diverse selection: we currently have Harvard (2), Yale, Princeton (3), Columbia, College of the Holy Cross, and Rhodes College.
On point #22, I’d recommend switching the second link to something that doesn’t misgender the activist. From a very quick google search, it seems like this article fits the bill: https://www.gbnews.com/news/trans-activist-arrested-after-telling-rally-of-supporters-to-punch-feminists
It’s a quick fix that, IMO, will make people on the left WAY more likely to listen to what you’re saying and actually stop having such speakers.
For point #30, an even quicker fix is to switch “females” to “women” in the first sentence (or alternatively, switch “men” to “males”). r/menandfemales is a good illustration of how some readers might ding you for it otherwise.
The problem there is that while it might make people on the left happier, I genuinely don't think this person is a woman, even a trans woman. I do think this is a man who has severe violent tendencies and probably a selection of mental issues, who is making a fetish out of performative feminity and glommed onto trans issues as a way of extracting money, attention, and sympathy from a gullible audience. Their self-aggrandising book and descriptions of themself don't make me sympathetic to "Sarah Jane is a real true woman".
It’s possible that you’re right, but it reeks of “No True Scotsman” to me. Trans women, like anyone else, can have severe violent tendencies and mental issues.
But more importantly, I don’t think there’s a great way to assert that Sarah Jane isn’t a real woman without also catching many genuine, legitimate trans women in the crossfire. She’s certainly gone to some pretty extreme measures to assert herself as a woman, at least—I doubt even most cis women, if they suddenly landed it a body with testicles, could bring themselves to cut them off.
So if an article is saying that Sarah Jane isn’t enough of a woman, trans people and trans allies will have good reason to be very skeptical of that article. IMO it’s better to focus on the actual problem with her—being a criminal inciting violence and still being invited to be a speaker—and avoid controversial claims about whether she’s a real woman entirely.
>London’s Pride parade featured a convicted kidnapper/torturer/rapist/sadist as a speaker, who advocated that anti-trans people should be “punch[ed] in the f**king face” ; the organizers say they stand by her.
The person has now apparently been arrested for making threats.
Also, Scott's description is incorrect. It wasn't a threat against people—it was "TERFs." Isn't it funny how people like this always only want to hurt women?
I am the author of 31., the post on germicidal far-UVC for air disinfection and pandemic mitigation. If anyone has questions, let me know!
Scott, thanks for the shoutout. Your tl;dr is fairly accurate, I am only confused where you got the “UV air filters would have fewer safety concerns but be less effective.” from. I don't mention UV air filters in the post but make a comparison to indoor air purifiers (with regular HEPA filters). Those are quite common and are fairly cheap and useful, although probably less effective at getting rid of airborne pathogens (depending on the UV dose you are comparing them to).
Fwiw air purifiers with UV also exist but I don't see any reason to use them instead of regular air purifiers with HEPA filters.
Re: Advanced Math - The program being cut is a parallel math track for talented students that ends with taking Algebra 1 in 8th grade instead of 9th. The reason that advanced math is being cut and not any other advanced subject is that math is the only subject with an advanced track. A voracious reader can't take Advanced English, and history buffs don't have a separate track that gives them an ends with them taking high school history in middles school. Math isn't being restricted compared to other subjects, kids who are talented at math are just no longer being offered a perk that kids who are talented at other subjects were never offered. I still don't support axing the program - I was in a similar program myself and think it was beneficial - but this should provide additional context.
#20:
> Paramedic. Elderly woman complains that her mouth is dry and she felt a bit dizzy climbing the stairs earlier. Go through the whole rigamarole of getting a medical history, vitals, more detail on symptoms. Ask her what she's had to drink today.
> A cup of tea, ten hours ago.
> Any water? No.
> Guess what fixed it within five minutes.
This is something I think more people should be aware of. I once passed out and fell down (two to three) stairs due to dehydration. It is not well known that dizziness (and blacking-out vision) is a symptom of dehydration. (Dry mouth... I think most people are aware that drinking water can help with that.)
Honestly I feel like most of the time when I have weird symptoms I'm just dehydrated.
(Alternative possibility: every time I have some weird symptoms, I sit down and drink some water and I feel better and manage to reassure myself that I was just dehydrated but actually it was a transient attack of some other horrible disease that will eventually kill me.)
Sure, but the dizziness and blacking-out vision are bog-standard symptoms of dehydration and I was never taught about either.
It's misleading to call the event which platformed Sarah Jane Barker "London's pride parade" when it isn't the largest or most notable pride parade there.
London Trans+ Pride is orders of magnitude smaller and younger than Pride in London.
Looks like the story is that a breakaway group of hardliners are willing to platform* unsavoury people. I'm not enormously shocked by this revelation.
*or not deplatform? Looks like she wasn't an official speaker
The Murchison Murders thing is a bit like what happens in Robert Galbraith's novel The Silkworm, where a writer writes a book where his self insert is murdered in a specific and gruesome way, and then he is murdered in that way. If someone wants to reply to this with a spoiler for the book for some reason, someone should encode it in rot13 cipher.
I mean, I realize it's not as noteworthy when it happens in a book instead of real life.
"32: Jake Selinger, currently dying of cancer with “a few weeks or months” left to live"
I appreciate the link, but my last name is actually Seliger!