This sounds familiar; I used to play the same game, but notably one could challenge a word and then try to draw a connection, Maybe we called it "Africa"?
Yeah, I briefly considered getting it, but I'm worried most people would interpret it as a political thing ("oh, weak liberals are terrified of anyone who doesn't wear a mask")
I mean it isn't that bad. I just occasionally see a weird yellow sign on the walls and some bum that looks like a zombie appears to be following me when I walk outside.
Is there a simple explanation for people who don't get the reference? What is the search term I should Google? (I assume "I wear no mask" isn't going to be helpful.)
The book is The King In Yellow. It's a cosmic horror story that involves a play that drives people insane.
There are a few quotes from the play scattered through the book (from the first act, which doesn't drive people insane), and the quote on the mask is one of them.
1) there are precisely two different kinds of metabolisms that humans can have. Call them A and B.
For people with an A metabolism, low glycemic index diets are totally correct, easy to maintain, and lead to healthy weight regulation, while if they try a high glycemic index diet, they'll constantly be hungry and not really lose much weight.
B is exactly the opposite: only high glycemic index diets work, while low glycemic index diets don't let them lose weight and leave them miserable.
2) literally nobody in the populace believes or suspects that 1) is true
In this case you should expect:
- some people will have tried the 'correct' diet for themselves and will talk it up to the moon
- many other people will try this diet and have it fail miserably
- anyone doing analysis on this would reach the conclusion "low glycemic diets don't work any better than high glycemic diets. For some reason some people seem to lose weight but we can't figure out why"
Does anyone else get the feeling like we are kind of living in this world?
The best 'general purpose advice ' is, i think, "have excellent self-knowledge", and yet i get the impression that most people run around with the idea that either:
- everything is determined by luck and so there's no bother trying. (this one seems really common)
- that there is something wrong with them, personally, that prevents them from accomplishing even simple goals like weight loss (This one seems very common too)
Has anyone else noticed this? It doesn't seem to me like 'most people are trying various strategies to accomplish their goals and failing because of biases or inaccuracies or goals beyond their level' - i get the impression most people feel more or less pushed through life by forces beyond their control, and that this is generally taken to be 'the standard state of affairs' for most people.
No, it pops up in many spiritual texts, such as the gnostic Gospel of Truth:
25. Whoever lacks root also lacks fruit, but still he thinks to himself: "I have become, so I shall decease---For everything that (earlier) did not (yet) exist, (later) shall no (longer) exist." What therefore does the Father desire that such a person think about them self?: "I have been like the shadows and the phantoms of the night!" When the dawn shines upon him, this person ascertains that the terror which had seized him was nothing. They were thus unacquainted with the Father because the did not behold him. Hence there occurred terror and turmoil and weakness and doubt and division, with many deceptions and empty fictions at work thru these.
26. It was as if they were sunk in sleep and found themselves in troubled dreams--either fleeing somewhere, powerlessly pursuing others, or delivering blows in brawls, or themselves suffering blows, or falling from high place, or sailing thru the air without wings. Sometimes it even seems as if they are being murdered although no one pursues them, or as if they themselves are murdering their neighbors since they are sullied by their blood.
27. Then the moment comes when those who have endured all this awaken, no longer to see all those troubles--for they are naught. Such is the way of those who have cast off un-acquaintance like sleep and consider it to be nothing, neither considering its various events as real, but rather leaving it behind like a dream of the night. Recognizing the Father brings the dawn! This is what each one has done, sleeping in the time when he was unacquainted. And this is how, thus awakened, he comes to recognition.
Gurdjieff put it much more succinctly: he insisted that everyone is asleep, and very much not in some metaphoric way.
Akrasia seems very related to this, though I think the various spiritualities are pointing at something far more subtle and pervasive than that.
I'm just a dabbler. I brought up Gurdjieff, but there's something off about him. "Ye shall know them by their fruits": there are Gurdjieffian cults, and they sound nasty. I recommend reading the Bhagavad Gita, the Ashtavakra Gita, and Idries Shah's Learning How to Learn.
Well, the Bhagavad Gita is basically a praise of war. It does, of course, have other parts.
If you're going down that route I'd recommend "The Word" allegedly by the Buddha, or possibly "The Gateless Gate". Some of the Daoists had really original diet plans, based around "the toxic creates the anti-toxin".
All of these "traditional sources" have context that we don't really know, much less understand. Many of them have political subtexts that were a lot more central to their message than any dietary stuff. E.g. many of the Kosher laws are based around medieval Jews fearing that the folks they bought food from were scheming to poison them. The original rules in Deuteronomy were aimed at suppressing the cults of competing gods, several of which had their religious foods (either favored or forbidden).
And why are wafers in the Roman Catholic mass required to be made from wheat?
No, this is off. In the broader context of the Mahabharata, it is made very clear that war is to be avoided, just not to the extreme of pacifism. Even in chapter 2 in the Gita itself, when the song of God properly starts, the exhortation to Arjuna is to bear the suffering of having to kill a good chunk of his family and respected mentors in battle by recognizing that suffering as a transient illusion, along with the claim that death is impossible ("Life cannot slay! Life is not slain!").
He is not enjoined to rejoice in the passions of battle, as a true "praise of war" would do.
Yes, having recently read it, the most that can be said along those lines is that it is a defense of the regrettable and tolerable necessity of war, and even that is closely tied to the context of a single specific war.
[48.] The bread used in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of decomposition. It follows therefore that bread made from another substance, even if it is grain, or if it is mixed with another substance different from wheat to such an extent that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, does not constitute valid matter for confecting the Sacrifice and the Eucharistic Sacrament. It is a grave abuse to introduce other substances, such as fruit or sugar or honey, into the bread for confecting the Eucharist. Hosts should obviously be made by those who are not only distinguished by their integrity, but also skilled in making them and furnished with suitable tools.
[49.] By reason of the sign, it is appropriate that at least some parts of the Eucharistic Bread coming from the fraction should be distributed to at least some of the faithful in Communion. “Small hosts are, however, in no way ruled out when the number of those receiving Holy Communion or other pastoral needs require it”, and indeed small hosts requiring no further fraction ought customarily to be used for the most part.
[50.] The wine that is used in the most sacred celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice must be natural, from the fruit of the grape, pure and incorrupt, not mixed with other substances. During the celebration itself, a small quantity of water is to be mixed with it. Great care should be taken so that the wine intended for the celebration of the Eucharist is well conserved and has not soured. It is altogether forbidden to use wine of doubtful authenticity or provenance, for the Church requires certainty regarding the conditions necessary for the validity of the sacraments. Nor are other drinks of any kind to be admitted for any reason, as they do not constitute valid matter."
The Idiot's Shorter Guide (by me, resident idiot) is that basically we are trying to stick to the conditions of the Last Supper, the Passover (maybe? there's a lot of discussion about was this an actual seder) meal with Christ and the Apostles where it is considered that the sacrament of the Eucharist was instituted.
Just as you can't mess around with the words of institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_of_Institution so you can't mess around with the items for the Eucharist. They have to be bread and wine, and that has to be as above: bread which is wheat bread and wine which is fermented grape juice. There has been a *lot* of discussion about "what constitutes bread" etc. and decisions about "no gluten-free hosts" regularly get some people hot under the collar: 'my child is coeliac, they can't receive the Host, this means they can't participate in the Mass!'. Missus, your child can receive the Blood instead (the consecrated Eucharistic wine). 'I'm not giving my child alcohol to drink!' It's barely a mouthful, even an eight year old should not get drunk on that.
This is also why I internally screamed when I saw things some American Protestant denominations produce for their versions of the Lord's Supper: individual 'serving size' crackers'n'juice. In handy hygienic disposable plastic containers.
We had some discussion of this in our (LDS) congregation. We're not too particular about the type of "bread" used; we've been using rice chex for the wheat-sensitive kids. There was some discussion about whether it should be "broken"; we're usually particular about breaking the bread by hand instead of using a wafer. But we use water to represent the blood; originally out of caution from some supposed conspiracy by enemies of the church to poison wine or something similar, but also to comply with the "no alcohol" rule.
Thanks for sharing the Catholic position. I always find it interesting to learn more about why things are done certain ways.
The diet hypothesis seem not likely. Were there any diets that were consistently high glycemic index pre industrial rev? Why would a low glycemic index diet innately be miserable for absorption reasons, as opposed to it being miserable because it has less sugar soybean oil fried muffins?
And most people’s idea of how and why they are fat and what they can do about it is totally fucked. Thanks advertising, schools, self help books!
For one example of high GI pre-industrial revolution diets, take medieval English peasants. Primarily bread, ale/beer, and pottage (basically porridge with e.g. peas and a little fat). Some eggs, a little bit of fruit and veg, occasional meat/fish. But bread, pottage, and beer/ale were the bulk of their calories, all pretty high glycemic index. AFAIK this was fairly typical in premodern Europe.
As noted in my other reply near here, whole wheat bread and whole grain porridge is “medium glycemic index”, instead of the “high” white bread. So they’d be intermediate, although beer is high index
I would expect most diets of agricultural communities to be fairly high glycemic index, since wheat and rice both have an index above 70. Do modern diets have enough sugar to be significantly above that?
Admittedly this is from the Wikipedia article, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index#Grouping it seems like the glycemic index of “wheat and rice” is not just one thing - unmilled grains have low glycemic indices, whole / brown milled grains medium, and then endosperm only / white grains having the >70 high index. So I’d expect them to be higher than huntergatherers but lower than moderns. (And their “whole grains” were much more whole than ours, with much harsher taste and more indigestible stuff per endosperm, likely low- selective breeding as we’ve done it in the past few hundred years is powerful)
I think the main issue with this concept is that if there's some hypothetical "glycemic metabolism gene" (or set of genes, more realistically, of course), you'd expect it to correlate with *something*, likely along racial lines.
Almost certainly, one race would be more likely to have the gene than others, since this seems to be just how genetics works generally. So you'd see results like "high glycemic diets are 50% more likely to be effective for Asians" and you could narrow results from there.
It seems a little unlikely that half the population 'has the gene' and the other half doesn't and these two halves just happen to perfectly cancel each other out in studies without showing up in meaningful subgroups.
IIRC, weight watchers said that there were three or four different metabolisms, and each had a different optimal diet. The only guide they gave was a set of different diet plans you could try marked to the type of metabolism that they were appropriate for. I didn't see any real evidence that their ideas had been run through an experiment, or where they came from, but one of the diets "sort of" works for me. (OTOH, I didn't have the motivation do really do the switch until I developed serious health problems. So...no sugar, almost no starches, extra fiber.)
" accomplishing even simple goals like weight loss"
Simple? For billions of years, back to our single celled ancestors, we've faced the ever present threat of starvation. Getting enough food was a constant struggle. As such we have any number of paths ensuring that we eat and that we're hungry. Fighting against billions of years of evolution is anything but easy.
on the one hand, i think this is a really good point.
but on the other hand, compare 'losing weight' to "starting a thriving, profitable business"
you could argue that we are much more evolutionarily inclined to work together in groups towards abstract goals, but it seems to me like there are more people who've started a business than lost weight
though maybe these two things are just in different categories, and it doesn't make senes to say one goal is 'simple' and another is 'complex' given that people are different, and what might be simple for one person might be really, really difficult for another
It's sort of like exercise. Some people are exercise non responders. Even under closely supervised conditions, where they are carefully observed, exercise doesn't result in any observable changes. At the other hand extreme you have exercise super responders. Under similar conditions they experience tremendous gains. It's likely diets work the same way.
Temporarily, sure. But after dieting some peoples caloric needs drop by several hundred calories. You couldn’t stick to eating 700 less calories for the rest of your life.
But keep in mind much like exercise non-responders it varies considerable between people.
I knew a Borgia once. I thought she was the last of her name, with no brothers to pass it on; I'm somewhat heartened to hear that there are more branches out there.
Reassuring to think that scions of that fine upstanding family are still around - though the heritability indices for murder and incest are probably low
There's a Borgia saint, St. Francis Borgia, and really when you read his background he did very well to actually live according to his vows, both in secular and then in religious life - he was a duke, then resigned and after his wife died he became a Jesuit:
" His father was Juan Borgia, 3rd Duke of Gandía, the son of Giovanni Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). His mother was Juana, daughter of Alonso de Aragón, Archbishop of Zaragoza, who, in turn, was the illegitimate son of King Ferdinand II of Aragon.
...His diplomatic abilities came into question after his failed attempt at arranging a marriage between Prince Philip of Spain and the Princess of Portugal, thus ending a hope of bringing these two countries together, and resulting in his retirement as duke, handing his title to his son, Carlos.
...IIn 1546 his wife Eleanor died, and Francis then decided to enter the newly formed Society of Jesus, after making adequate provisions for his children. He put his affairs in order circa 1551, renounced his titles in favour of his eldest son Carlos de Borja-Aragon y de Castro-Melo, and became a Jesuit priest. He helped in the establishment of what is now the Gregorian University in Rome.[4] Upon Francis’ return from a journey to Peru, Pope Julius III made known his intention to make him a cardinal.[3] To prevent this, Borgia decided, in agreement with St. Ignatius, to leave the city secretly and go to the Basque Country, where it was thought he would be safe from the papal desires.[5] He felt drawn to spend time in seclusion and prayer, but his administrative talents also made him a natural for other tasks. In time his friends persuaded him to accept the leadership role that nature and circumstances had destined him for: in 1554, he became the Jesuit commissary-general in Spain,[6] where he founded a dozen colleges.[4] After only two years, St. Francis was also given responsibility for missions in the East and West Indies.[3] In 1565, he was elected the third "Father General" or Superior General of the Society of Jesus, after the death in January 1565 of Diego Laynez, (Almazán, Spain, 1512 – January 1565).
His successes during the period 1565–1572 have caused historians to describe Francis as the greatest General after Saint Ignatius. He founded the Collegium Romanum, which was to become the Gregorian University, advised kings and popes, and closely supervised all the affairs of the rapidly expanding order."
American connections!
"Parishes are dedicated to St. Francis Borgia in Chicago, Illinois, Sturgis, Kentucky, Washington, Missouri, Blair, Nebraska, and Cedarburg, Wisconsin. ...The Jesuit-founded city of São Borja, in southern Brazil, is named after him.
Saint Francis Borgia Regional High School is located in Washington, Missouri."
Were he lecherous and treacherous there would be records of illegitimate children and nasty deeds. He had the opportunity to take advantage of secular life to live as luxuriously as he wished; a Spanish duke related to the royal family and with other relatives highly placed in the Church.
Re Cuomo, it's certainly true that the sexual harassment allegations were trumped-up. The moral I draw from the story is that if you run a 20-million-person state as your personal fief and abuse your staff until they quit, very few people will stick around you for more than a few minutes once it's clear you're toast. Sexual harassment was the solution to a coordination problem.
I hear a lot of people saying this, but I feel like there isn't enough consensus that, if true, it would be really bad. Sure, Cuomo deserved to go, but "if elites don't like someone, they make up false allegations as an excuse to get rid of them" is a really bad system of government!
I think we have some clear examples of people weathering worse accusations (Trump, Kavenaugh). I think (if elites orchestrated this all to oust Cuomo) it’s probably closer to “Elites want to oust someone who is widely disliked for reasons that the elites can’t get behind, so they make up allegations so they can oust him for reasons that are consistent with their image.
I think there's a study to be written in who weathers accusations and why.
IMHO the only solution is to come out fighting, to never concede an inch (ie the Trump, Kavanaugh, Clinton strategy).
The question of interest to me is why Cuomo was willing to roll over, in a way that these three were not. Personality-wise he seems in the same camp, and the Democrats (admittedly a somewhat different part 25 years ago) were willing to support Clinton.
Which makes me wonder how much is Jacob's original point -- that most of the people who would be expected to support Cuomo have reason to hate him at a personal level. Maybe not enough to lie against him, or to take a dive for him; but certainly enough to remain silent when the sharks attack him.
In other words, this is all about personality and much less about ideology or principle; and anyone hoping to cash in on it via a repeat against someone who isn't so universally loathed will see the same outcome as the attacks against Justice Thomas.
Does Bork fit into the same mold? Could have weathered it except enough people remembered his Nixon role and were unwilling to forgive that? My guess is yes.
The resignation of Melissa DeRosa was a turning point. Cuomo is certainly stubborn and self-aggrandizing enough to fight this to the bitter end, but when his inner circle of aides started abandoning him, it was over and even he could recognize it.
Seems simple enough to me: Trump and Cavanaugh are Republicans, Clinton was in the 1990s. The Democratic establishment cannot tolerate credible allegations like this in 2021, and no politician can stay once he loses the support of his own party.
Justin Fairfax is still in office. If I recall correctly, it was around the same time as Al Franken, and the allegations were worse, the evidence was stronger, and the calls for resignation louder. For that matter, Biden has multiple allegations against him - but he hasn't been 25th'd yet.
I think the Franken/Fairfax split illustrates the real thing that decides whether someone gets forced out. Franken was in a safe district, so his replacement could reliably be expected to come from the same party. But Fairfax is in the swing state of Virginia, and the allegations surfaced at the same time as Northam's blackface scandal, so him resigning would have actually presented a threat to the balance of power - and he was allowed to remain. Realpolitik wins every time.
"The question of interest to me is why Cuomo was willing to roll over, in a way that these three were not."
The choice was to jump rather than be pushed? He was going to run for a fourth term in 2022, but between the nursing homes affair and now these accusations, that would never fly. Even if he clung on to the bitter end, he gains nothing and only increases the ire against him. Falling on his sword means he can clear the way and, by appeasing those who want him gone, gives him a chance to still be involved somehow or somewhere in Democratic politics. He probably knows where some bodies are buried, so to speak, and has built up a network of connections that, while it didn't save him now, once the publicity has died down and after a cooling-off period so it will be safe to be seen in his vicinity once more, will remain useful.
I don't think that's the system, It's more that Cuomo and his predecessors have set up a profoundly corrupt and undemocratic political system in New York State such that the only way to get rid of him was to make it clear to the Albany power brokers that the writing was on the wall.
In some sense, yes, before these allegations Cuomo was popular and so these allegations were magnified (I wouldn't say fabricated -- there is true and troubling stuff there, it's just a much less big deal than say Harvey Weinstein and wouldn't suffice to get most popular politicians expelled from office). But Cuomo's popularity was contingent on the political and media environment that he created! For instance, Cuomo is notorious for promising to support popular things and then blocking or slow-walking them -- marijuana legalization, congestion pricing, gay marriage, etc. -- while blaming it on other people with the connivance of his allies.
So I don't think you can say "there was a neutral media environment in which Cuomo was popular and then a biased/false media environment in which he was unpopular". The media is wrong about everything all the time and you can't separate the coverage that people receive from the power that they wield and the relationships that uphold it.
This is by no means a *good* system of government but I don't think that, conditioned on New York State working the way it does, forcing Cuomo out on these allegations makes it worse.
There was something about the Giuliani mythos which may have impacted Cuomo's trajectory also. After 9/11 when Giuliani was mayor and made his reputation standing up to disaster, so to speak, then when he was involved with the Trump administration I think he lost a lot of standing in some people's eyes. Then when Covid hit, here was another New Yorker, this time governor, who was standing up in a crisis. Mario Cuomo, his father and also former governor, had a lot of standing, so there was Giuliani mythos plus generational Cuomo mythos and people wanted a leader/savior.
But the progressive wing of the Democrats in addition to the DSA are making inroads in NY and state legislature seats in addition to Congressional seats have been at risk. Cuomo would be a liability to moderate Democrats trying to defend their seats, in a way that Kathy Hochul will not be, since apparently she is also a moderate Democrat.
I think he stayed as long as he did partly due to mythology and they cut him loose when a) the mythology dissolved (nursing home deaths, sexual harassment) and b) when the rest of the NY party had to consider what they'd lose if they supported him. I think you are right about the system there.
What is the true and troubling stuff in the Cuomo allegations? I'd agree the breast-touching allegation specifically would be troubling, but that seems really unlikely to be true to me. Everything else I've heard about seems like plain harmless banter spun to look like something worse. Maybe I missed something.
There's a lot of nonconsensual touching, and the stuff about getting the cute state trooper transferred to his detail so he could creep on her. I don't think anyone should go to jail for it or anything but if an upper manager at a large US company acted like that, they'd get reprimanded and potentially even fired, and with good reason.
If Cuomo had set up the governor's office such that people could get their concerns addressed by him and his staff without going public, maybe that would have been a better remedy and he would have gotten less handsy and apologized and it would be fine. But again this is why I don't think you can separate the sexual harassment allegations from Cuomo's whole deal. He built up this whole edifice to make it career suicide to criticize him, so the *only* way to get him was to go public and fight it out in the media.
All the nonconsensual touching I heard about (setting aside the hand-under-blouse breast-groping) were things like putting an arm around someone's waist in a picture, or kissing someone on the cheek as a greeting. I realize not everyone is on the same page about that stuff, but seriously, get a grip. We've gone way overboard characterizing such acts as "harassment". I'm not much one for kissing on the cheek either, but I just fucking go along with it and don't make a big deal of it when (a usually older) someone initiates it. It of course depends a lot on specifics (e.g., if the person explicitly asked them to stop), but I simply disagree that things like that are "good reason" to reprimand, and certainly fire, someone, in absence of these negative specifics. Yes, we all know that that's how it goes in large US companies. Doesn't mean it isn't stupid.
It's possible that some of the allegations do claim that they had previously asked him to stop - I don't think I've heard so but I could've missed it. But given how coordinated and dishonest other aspects of this appear to be, I'd be reluctant to take the word of these accusers on that too. Some people said some things. A lot of those things now appear untrue or intentionally trumped up. I'm inclined to disregard their claims and trust heavily in my prior which would be that he probably would've stopped if asked directly, but that he probably wasn't asked directly in the first place since most people do just go along with such things so as not to appear cold.
People go along (or went along) with such things with Andrew Cuomo so that he wouldn't destroy their careers and reputations, which he was perfectly willing to do whenever he felt slighted or threatened.
Some of the allegations you've brought up would indeed be troubling, had they occurred. I stand corrected on that point. It's the "true" part that I still think doesn't apply, or at least I think we don't have sufficient evidence evidence to make that claim without qualification.
It's worth remembering that the nursing home thing didn't just go away. There was an ongoing impeachment investigation when he resigned. According to this article they had already accesses 500k pages of documents.
My (not particularly well informed) take on Cuomo is that he was going down for COVID in nursing homes, but once the writing was on the wall, MeToo came in and stole the kill.
I don't think that this is particularly system, because I would prefer the public reason for ousting someone to be the same as the actual reason. But it worked this way because everyone involved (including Cuomo?) thinks that MeToo should have more wins.
I'm confused about the nursing home thing - although it was really bad, I think the period of creepy Cuomo idolization was after he made that decision - what was the process by which people who weren't against it at the time switched to being so against it that it brought him down?
Trump lost, so Cuomo was no longer needed as the most vocal and visible anti-Trump-on-COVID governor. They were never in favor of dead grandmas in nursing homes, but making too much noise about the issue was something evil Trump voters did. Good Democrats can’t be seen parroting Republican talking points in an election year.
But now it’s 2021 and Cuomo has outlived his usefulness.
Cuomo's nursing home policy was in effect from March 25 - May 5. A lot of people thought it was stupid and Cuomo was pressured into reversing it.
That a lot of people died as a result of Cuomo's policy wasn't initially clear. The reported data didn't show that New York had disproportionately many nursing home deaths. During Fall / Winter, data irregularities in nursing home deaths were ironed out and the reported number increased from 6,600 to 15,000.
Cuomo didn't start going down until the evidence became public that his policies weren't just stupid - they actually killed thousands of people.
That Cuomo had likely killed a lot of seniors was definitely circulating in right wing sources much earlier. It just took until fall/winter (conveniently post election...) that the evidence became so overwhelming that Democrat friendly sources couldn’t reasonably continue ignoring it.
Cuomo leaving office for sexual harassment also keeps the nursing home issue out of the news, which possibly protects the other Democratic governors that implemented similar policies.
The nursing home issue was mainly being raised by Republicans (who are a shrinking minority in the legislature and could not have mounted an impeachment on their own), and easy enough for Cuomo to deflect blame to the health department should it have become an issue of bipartisan concern.
I don't think Cuomo was ever "going down" for the nursing homes thing. The nursing homes decision may have been dumb, but it was not corrupt and it was consistent with the panic at the time that hospitals would be overrun.
What got Cuomo is that he made enemies to his left. The most important of his accusers had a political motive for revenge. Alone, that may not have been enough. This got started at a time when Cuomo was being very critical of anti-police movements, strongly opposed increasing taxes, and was starting to reduce Covid restrictions while politicians in the city wanted him to keep them going. That gave the accusers some influential allies to Cuomo's left. Obviously the Republicans would go along with anything that got rid of Cuomo.
Finally, Letitia James, the AG, clearly has ambitions to run for Governor, but Cuomo was planning a run for a fourth term. The AG report is dramatically biased in its view of the evidence. She saw a way to get rid of her principal opponent and took it.
Cuomo has had enemies to his left for nearly his entire career. Zephyr Teachout and Cynthia Nixon both got a third of the primary vote against him in his re-election campaigns. (I don't believe there was a left campaign during his initial election - just the "rent is too damn high" guy.) I don't follow a lot of left communities, but I've always hated Cuomo for his "idiosyncratic" take on transit, which involves last-minute cancellations of good projects, to be substituted with attention-grabbing bad projects with his name on them.
Several people have pushed back against my statement that COVID in nursing homes was a big enough issue to big down Cuomo. I still think that Cuomo would still have resigned / been impeached / lost the next election without the sexual harassment allegations and would not have resigned / been impeached / lost the next election if his only scandal were the sexual harassment allegations.
From a purely legal standpoint, Cuomo did lie about the number of deaths that occurred in nursing homes, even after the DOJ requested the information. There is an obstruction of justice case that could be made here.
Democrats were starting to turn against Cuomo. On Feb 12, 14 Democratic state senators called for an end of his emergency powers. [1] One allegation had been made by that point, but the allegations weren't widespread until the end of February. [2] Of course, Republican criticism was more frequent, sooner, and more extreme.
Causing the deaths of thousands of your constituents is one of the worst things that you can do as a politician. Even in our highly polarized environment, scandals can cost about 10 percentage points (short term?) and being a terrible person can cost an additional 10 percentage points (long term). My source for these estimates is 538's analysis of Doug Jones's victory in Alabama. [3] Since New York is both less partisan [4] and more elastic [5] than Alabama, Cuomo could have lost to a Republican in 2022, especially if the national environment favored Republicans [6]. Even if Cuomo held on in New York, he would be a drag on anyone associated with him, which would encourage his party to turn against him.
Once the party did decide to turn against Cuomo, then they chose the reason why. Instead of making this "Who's the worst for COVID?" they instead fit it into the MeToo narrative. I don't think that this is a good system of government, simply because it is dishonest. But I don't it is as bad as a system where a small number of people can ruin anyone's career by making unsupported claims, which is Tracey's description of what happened.
IDK, I read the report and if it is true the allegations seemed very well substantiated, with text message records and multiple witnesses. And TBH, if I were making up harassment claims I would probably go with something a little more explosive than stuff like "my boss told me he'd like to ride a motorcycle into the mountains with a woman" or "my boss asked me if I could fix him up with any of my friends". OTOH, I'm also quite sure that if Cuomo had more allies these allegations wouldn't have gone anywhere or been investigated.
The well-documented claims are trivial and most people would laugh them off if the media reported them verbatim instead of as generic "sexual harassment." The serious claims are not well-documented and seem unlikely to be true.
China isn't destroying its tech industry; it's destroying independent internet biz-to-consumer companies. It's still struggling to build an entire chip-fabrication ecosystem, and is clearly going to completely own opto-electronics in the near future (since approximately 100% of grad students in the US working in opto-electronics are from mainland China).
China's "tech smashing" is transparently easy to understand.
Recall that China recently banned for-profit tutoring, and teching kids under the age of six the school syllabus. China's leadership is worried about the country's low tottal fertility rate and the implications for population, and therefore China's power, in the second half of the century.
"Video games are spiritual opium": young men, get off the internet cafe screen and interact with women.
Likewise, the social media and fintech app curtailment are aimed at reducing shopping and other alternatives to making babies.
These policy announcements are not mysterious at all. China will do anything except the things that really make a difference: rasing the retirement age for urban residents, revoking the hukou system of residence permits, pensions, free healthcare (especially for children and mothers), and eliminating the gaokao.
After 50+ years of trying really hard to give people the benefit of the doubt, I think Scott's point "missing a developmental milestone" is correct.
It's not just public health people, and it's not just cost-benefit; it's everything everywhere.
It's an inability to even conceive of the fact that the world is imperfect and tradeoffs are always necessary.
For example you may, if you have had an especially good political education, be aware that after any proposal the immediate response should be "compared to what?"
But when were you ever presented with this in history class?
Black slaves treated abominably? Sure -- but compared to what? How were white laborers treated? What were death rates like for sailors on slaver ships?
Colonialism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? How was the local system treating women/gays/the poor/everyone before the colonials took over?
Capitalism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?
Ultimately I think there's an even more basic developmental flaw at the root of this which I call one-dimensional-thinking. This is a form of cognitive dissonance, an ability to maintain in the same mind the idea that something may be good along one dimension while simultaneously bad along a second dimension. Thus we get people apparently sincerely incapable of both appreciating the comedian part of Bill Cosby's life while also deploring the sexual behavior part.
Incapable of admitting even a single good thing in the presidency of Trump (or Obama or Clinton).
Incapable of seeing the past in all its (very high dimensional) variety.
And incapable of conceding that a policy they like (medical, political, ecological, ...) might have some downsides; or vice versa for a policy they don't like...
When you're incapable of even conceiving of the world in two dimensions, your problem is not that you don't know how to trade-off type I vs type-II errors, or how to perform a cost-benefit analysis; it's that you don't not believe these things even exist, and automatically assume anyone who raises them is an ideological enemy who is driven by the usual isms and hatreds.
The demon-haunted world is real; it's even more depressing and irrational than Sagan ever imagined; and it's where 90%+ of our fellow citizens live (including a goodly fraction of those who read this web site).
I don't know where I got it from, just that I got it from somewhere and it changed my thinking profoundly a decade or so ago: Saying things like "human life can't be calculated in money" might sound nice, but just means the calculation will be based on intuition instead. It doesn't mean there won't be a calculation. Doing the math, or reverse-engineering the math from your intuitions, exposes your hidden calculations, allowing them to be discussed, reworked, improved, and that is important even if a lot of people have a visceral moral reaction to it that renders them unable to.
A lot of it might be attributed to a non-utilitarian ethical framework, though - convincing someone that something makes utilitarian sense is futile if max utility isn't their goal. And the examples you give seem a bit disingenuous in that it's perfectly possible to judge something without lauding the "control group", on absolute terms, and especially in regards to history you're veering into "what if" territory quickly.
While I mostly agree with all this, I'm gonna push back on one of them
> Capitalism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?
This is myopic thinking. Nothing truly new could ever be brought about if this is the standard. Particularly in the political arena, where situations that call for approaches without precedent arise, as history shows.
It sounds like someone in 1774 in the US saying "the rule of England bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?"
The answer is "we need to make one up ourselves, a true cost-benefit analysis is impossible here."
Well, yes. If you have a detailed and realistic plan to compare something against then you are not engaging in the fallacy of "bad compared to I don't know what".
Sorry, but I want to push back against this, myself.
Item the first, what they were saying in 1774 was "we want to go back to the system we had twenty years ago, before Great Britain raised tariffs and tried to actually enforce laws against smuggling." They were very clear that they were demanding, not only 'their ancient rights as Englishmen', but the specific rights they had before Great Britain tried to make the colonies pay for themselves.
Item the second, when they started system-building (largely after the revolution), they didn't invent a new system from the ground up, they said, "Look at this set of systems: Ancient Rome, England, Switzerland. These are or were all super-successful. What elements of these systems can we add to what we were already doing in order to be able to survive without British protection?" What they were fundamentally doing was trying to copy elements that had worked well in the past, rather than invent a new future; there were very few actually new inventions (even the Constitution was, fundamentally, a matter of writing down a contract that people felt had been largely implicit before), and most of them were accidental, or a product of compromises between various groups who all wanted something tried-and-tested, but wanted different tried-and-tested things.
But America was completely the creation of a bunch of history geeks, which (speaking as a history geek) is one of the reasons why I expect we survived.
I don't think a cost-benefit analysis was performed that determined that shooting up the British in the Revolutionary War was the best course of action, or that the founding of America was the result of a sober consideration of the tradeoffs involved. Indeed, it seems impossible for a sedate intellectual analysis like that to reach the conclusion to go to war, any war, except perhaps a defensive one.
Sure, the Founding Fathers were not jumping off an airplane without a parachute, not really, but by the standards OP is pushing, they absolutely were.
No, I don't think a cost-benefit analysis was performed. Men got angry at soldiers living in their houses, eating their food and groping their wives, so they started shooting. Partway through the shooting, they decided, "hey, we need an exit strategy that doesn't rely on our enemies cooperating," and they ended up starting the discussions that led to (first) the Articles of Confederation and (then) the Constitution.
But when they were doing their system-designing, they didn't start with the idea of 'we will build all anew according to the brilliant system our theorists derived from first principles.' They started with 'so now we will go back to what we were doing before THEY changed the rules on US, plus some historically-derived solutions to the problems this will cause.'
What needs pushing back against isn't the statement that they did a cost-benefit analysis, but they had a clear response to "the rule of England bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?" The answer was "Here 20-30 years ago!" and the question was how to achieve that without British cooperation, and their answers to that were based on solutions that had been tried successfully before by other countries.
The alternative we used--a system of checks and balances--had already been proposed by Montesquieu. But I don't think you can hold the American Revolution up as the gold standard for a morally justifiable revolution.
I am not saying Capitalism is perfect, far from it. I am attacking the WAY the arguments against Capitalism are structured...
Marx, for example, was perfectly willing to concede the many achievements and virtues of the bourgeoisie. It's his acolytes unwilling to concede these achievements that have my contempt.
To add to this, you seem to be demonstrating my point -- assuming that the goal of ANY statement is to make a point; whereas I see the goal of a statement is to understand the world.
If you're being intellectually honest, then how can you have opinions about these things if you don't know the context, don't know what the alternatives at the time were? Of course most people don't care about being intellectually honest...
Your OP is not purely descriptive, it has clearly normative, making-a-point aspects ("missing a developmental milestone", [this mode of thinking] is "a developmental flaw"). I don't disagree with the overarching point, and I don't see you as an enemy. My claim is that consideration of the tradeoffs is not possible in every decision-making context (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qocmVDu3BE for a blatant example of one such context).
> If you're being intellectually honest, then how can you have opinions about these things if you don't know the context, don't know what the alternatives at the time were?
You clearly do not think an understanding of the situation down to the elementary particles was needed before decisions could be made, so the point at which one decides enough analysis was performed to know the context is somewhat arbitrary.
I would be suspicious of an analysis that claimed slavery was not so bad, which would imply that the violent acts the Americans and British undertook to end slavery were excessive. Broadly, there are some positions that no amount of analysis or consideration of the tradeoffs could convince me to adopt, and I think the same is true of you.
E.g. you think there is an analysis that could convince you we should turn the world and everyone in it into hedonium? That we should all sterilize ourselves, as the antinatalists want? Does the presence of intellectual no-go zones like that mean we're intellectually dishonest?
It's "clap if you believe in fairies" writ large. Believe in yourself (or in something else) and the unwaveringness of your belief determines the success. It precludes analysis of any kind, because that takes energy away from believing. It is the plot of many Disney films and most Americans have seen a lot of Disney. I don't blame the Disney company entirely, it is amplifying a long-running cultural trend.
I think when political or social movements in the US exhibit this behavior, the political or social context has simply coalesced around the "Must Have Faith" framework encouraged by Disney and most organized religion. The millennarian left encourages it ("Here comes utopia! Or Jesus! Or something! Believe more!").
In this environment, analysis is betrayal, so yeah.
I see this "must have faith" dogma as a consequence of a prior belief, which we find all around the world, that what is "good" is intuitively obvious to everyone, and is context-insensitive (uses virtue or rule-based ethics). Analysis isn't necessary; in fact, it's evil, because just doing it proves you've rejected the good.
I didn't notice until I started reading fan-fiction that there are almost no stories published in print in the English language in which the challenge to the protagonist is to figure out what the best action is, rather than to choose the action that everybody already knows is more-virtuous (Huckleberry Finn is one example); and I can't at this moment think of any non-fan-fiction stories in which the author doesn't take a firm stand on which action is, "in fact", more virtuous.
The entire genre of fantasy seems today to be preaching the opposite message: that the law of karma works, and that choosing the "virtuous" action magically guarantees getting the highest-utility outcome without being utilitarian. (Randel Helms, in /Tolkien's World/ p. 79, gave the 3rd Law of Middle-Earth as "Moral and magical law have the force of physical law.")
That's why there was a (poorly worded) question about that in my survey on metaphysics.
I strongly agree that you can't impose the values of the present on the past, and that there has to be comparison of like with like (e.g. women getting paid less than men - is that for the same job with the same hours etc.?)
But when you come to saying things like "sure, black slaves were treated abominably - but compared to what?" then you really are inviting "well, compared to everyone else WHO WERE NOT BEING BOUGHT AND SOLD LIKE CATTLE".
Comparing black and white outcomes *today* does need the "compared to what?" caveat, e.g. the "black names on job applications" study where it's not comparing "is this based on class as well as race, i.e. these black names are considered lower-class or ghetto, whereas an application from 'John McWhorter' will go in the "for consideration" pile?"
But when you're talking about slavery, you can only compare it to "slavery is not permissible, you cannot own human beings" even if you treat your slaves nicely.
From "Martin Chuzzlewit":
"‘And may I ask,’ said Martin, glancing, but not with any displeasure, from Mark to the negro, ‘who this gentleman is? Another friend of yours?’
‘Why sir,’ returned Mark, taking him aside, and speaking confidentially in his ear, ‘he’s a man of colour, sir!’
‘Do you take me for a blind man,’ asked Martin, somewhat impatiently, ‘that you think it necessary to tell me that, when his face is the blackest that ever was seen?’
‘No, no; when I say a man of colour,’ returned Mark, ‘I mean that he’s been one of them as there’s picters of in the shops. A man and a brother, you know, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, favouring his master with a significant indication of the figure so often represented in tracts and cheap prints.
‘A slave!’ cried Martin, in a whisper.
‘Ah!’ said Mark in the same tone. ‘Nothing else. A slave. Why, when that there man was young—don’t look at him while I’m a-telling it—he was shot in the leg; gashed in the arm; scored in his live limbs, like crimped fish; beaten out of shape; had his neck galled with an iron collar, and wore iron rings upon his wrists and ankles. The marks are on him to this day. When I was having my dinner just now, he stripped off his coat, and took away my appetite.’
‘Is this true?’ asked Martin of his friend, who stood beside them.
‘I have no reason to doubt it,’ he answered, shaking his head ‘It very often is.’
‘Bless you,’ said Mark, ‘I know it is, from hearing his whole story. That master died; so did his second master from having his head cut open with a hatchet by another slave, who, when he’d done it, went and drowned himself; then he got a better one; in years and years he saved up a little money, and bought his freedom, which he got pretty cheap at last, on account of his strength being nearly gone, and he being ill. Then he come here. And now he’s a-saving up to treat himself, afore he dies, to one small purchase—it’s nothing to speak of. Only his own daughter; that’s all!’ cried Mr Tapley, becoming excited. ‘Liberty for ever! Hurrah! Hail, Columbia!’
‘Hush!’ cried Martin, clapping his hand upon his mouth; ‘and don’t be an idiot. What is he doing here?’
‘Waiting to take our luggage off upon a truck,’ said Mark. ‘He’d have come for it by-and-bye, but I engaged him for a very reasonable charge (out of my own pocket) to sit along with me and make me jolly; and I am jolly; and if I was rich enough to contract with him to wait upon me once a day, to be looked at, I’d never be anything else.’
The fact may cause a solemn impeachment of Mark’s veracity, but it must be admitted nevertheless, that there was that in his face and manner at the moment, which militated strongly against this emphatic declaration of his state of mind.
‘Lord love you, sir,’ he added, ‘they’re so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with ‘em. They’ve such a passion for Liberty, that they can’t help taking liberties with her. That’s what it’s owing to.’"
The issues I am trying to bring forward (in this particular case) include
- impressment (ie effective slavery of English sailors on ships)
- where did the slaves come from (ie slavery on the African continent by other Africans)
- the nature of other political relationships around the world (eg caste relationships in India)
etc etc
You are exhibiting PRECISELY the point I am bemoaning. Leaping into the fray with an insistence that the slavery of blacks by white was sui generis, based on zero knowledge of the way the world worked, across all societies and all times, up until very recently.
This is history not as an attempt to understand the world, but history as virtue signaling.
I think her point is simply "slavery was bad and needed to be stopped", not that it was a uniquely white evil. Don't see how taking in the broader context impinges on "we need to stop slavery".
But when you come to saying things like "sure, black slaves were treated abominably - but compared to what?" then you really are inviting "well, compared to everyone else WHO WERE NOT BEING BOUGHT AND SOLD LIKE CATTLE".
>>
I stated the "compared to what" that I had in mind. That is not what she said, or what you said.
History is full of horrible things that we all agree are horrible. Content-free insistence that we all, yet again, ritually assert they were awful, is, in fact, exactly what virtue signaling is.
Your priority is the ritual invocation of "THIS PARTICULAR X was uniquely bad"
My priority is "I want to understand the world. This includes particular X, but it also includes a lot of other X-adjacent stuff."
If you cannot see the difference between these two stances after my five posts on the subject, well, that's proves my point.
5% of the population see history as something to be understood, 95% see it as a cudgel with which to beat their enemies.
I didn't say the Transatlantic slave trade was uniquely evil, just that it was bad enough that it needed to be stopped. You're putting words in both my and Deiseach's mouth. I don't see how "understanding the world" clashes with even the mere "SLAVERY BAD", or how "SLAVERY BAD" implies the Transatlantic slave trade was a unique evil.
Were I to mischaracterise you as you have mischaracterised me, I would put forward that you are a weak-chinned young man who tries to disguise said weak chin with a scrubby meggle ("goat's beard" in the Hiberno-English vernacular) with a smug expression of I AM VRY SMRT on your features.
But going on the assumption that you are not, in fact, a dick-head, let me assure you that I did not come down in the last shower and I am fully aware slavery existed in many nations, many races, and many, many years before ever the Triangle Trade occurred.
I could hardly have avoided becoming aware of this, what with St. Brigid being the daughter of a slave woman, or the Epistle of St. Paul to Philemon and the part regarding Onesimus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onesimus
I am also well aware that white people, yellow people, brown people, black people and red people have all been treated shittily by each other, by different tribes, and by stranger peoples. A Russian serf and an African-American slave of the 19th century might not have wanted to swop places, and they might have found very much in common in their respective stations in life.
I still maintain slavery is wrong. Absolutely, not relatively.
I avoided discussing colonialism for the good reason that, as an Irish person and our tangled history with Great Britain, I am full aware of my biases there.
How about we both agree not to have itchy trigger fingers when typing replies? And here's a song that may be about impressment, in at least one version, The Lowlands Of Holland:
Why do you feel that this is something that needs to be said?
How would you feel if you were engaged in a discussion of South East Asian history and I posted "by the way the Khmer Rouge were the most evil thing ever and your refusal to even condemn it in your discussion of opening a cable and wire factory in Vietnam shows that you are 'weak-chinned young man who tries to disguise said weak chin'."
Do you think a discussion of evolution is a great locus for you to tell everyone your opinions about meat-eating? How about interrupting a discussion of the latest IBM mainframe to tell us "you know what IBM did 70 years ago? Help the Nazi's that's what! How come you aren't condemining Nazi's in between talking about the details of cache structure and branch predictors?"
I am making a point about how little context people know, even about the issues they claim to be most important to them. You seem to feel that is a great occasion for insisting on telling me your ethics.
Let's recall: these ethics are not in doubt. I do not believe you will find a SINGLE PERSON on this page who thinks "you know what we should bring back -- slavery! that really gets an undeserved bad rap"
Every one of us know your opinion of slavery, because it is exactly the same as our opinions of slavery. AND YET you feel it important to make the ritual invocation, and you feel it important to criticize me for refusing to make the ritual invocation.
If that is not virtue signaling, I don't know what is.
And that's precisely my starting point. People who cannot think along more than one dimension about anything. Thus, eg, people who cannot think about cost-benefit tradeoffs because they simply cannot get past "dying is bad, mmkk", and even worse, won't allow people who can get past that to get on with rational analysis.
"I posted "by the way the Khmer Rouge were the most evil thing ever and your refusal to even condemn it in your discussion of opening a cable and wire factory in Vietnam shows that you are 'weak-chinned young man who tries to disguise said weak chin'."
You are so right! I forgot to include the "scraggly hair" in the description!
Now, it's valid to compare the Khmer Rouge to other movements, both contemporaneous and historical.
But, if in a history class about how on balance the Khmer Rouge were Not All That Good, someone stuck up their paw and went "But reeeelllly, was being dragged out and being shot in the head just because you wore glasses so bad, compared to what? Reeeeeelllly?", then sat back with a smirk on their gob that portrayed "beat me if you can, you can't, ha!"
Then I'm going to go "Yes. Yes, it was". And if that's virtue signalling, then let me signal my virtue with a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, followed by the kick line of the Radio City Rockettes, with the massed bands of the U.S. Armed Forces conducted by the ghost of John Philip Sousa accompanying the resurrected for this occasion Red Army Choir.
That you appear unable to distinguish "some examples are not as cutting as you imagine for example using slavery as 'compared to what is so bad about slavery'" from "I'm right and any difference of opinion on this is virtue signalling" just reinforces the point I am trying to make.
"For example you may, if you have had an especially good political education, be aware that after any proposal the immediate response should be "compared to what?"
But when were you ever presented with this in history class?
Black slaves treated abominably? Sure -- but compared to what? How were white laborers treated? What were death rates like for sailors on slaver ships?
Colonialism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? How was the local system treating women/gays/the poor/everyone before the colonials took over?
Capitalism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?"
Then let me take a page out of your book and be guided by your examples.
Virtue signalling bad? Sure - but compared to what? All you've done so far is claim that any dissent from your examples as above is virtue signalling, and this is bad, because it means the people doing it are big ole poopy-heads who can't handle the truth people like you see, "This is a form of cognitive dissonance, an ability to maintain in the same mind the idea that something may be good along one dimension while simultaneously bad along a second dimension."
I am not asking for any ritual denunciations. I am asking you to put your money where your mouth is, and tell us all the dimension along which slavery - and I don't mean merely the institution of it a practiced in the United States - was good. You're the one who brought this up, and I wanted to point out that sometimes a person can shoot themselves in the foot by trying to defend the indefensible.
You said something like "After 50+ years of trying really hard to give people the benefit of the doubt", so the presumption I take away from that is that you are 50+ years of age. But if all you want to do is post a contrarian take like "X wasn't so bad, heh, I'm so daring and brave and stunning because I have the Big Brain that can conceive of concepts the normies could never handle!", then regardless of your chronological age - yes, you are the weak-chinned young man with the goatee and straggly hair sitting back in the lecture room smirking about how he has come up with a stumper (that is actually something irrelevantly trivial or so old it has whiskers) that nobody else has ever thought of.
If you want to engage people in "how about considering that something may have both good and bad points?", then don't lead off with something that everyone does agree is Not Good. And if you *do* lead off with it, then back it up, don't just make a blanket statement and bask in the euphoria of your superior intellect.
Me, I'm simple-minded, literal, and concrete: murder bad, rape bad, torture bad, slavery bad, bad things bad even if done for good reasons or in order that good may come. If that makes me dumber than you and inferior NPC type person, well - I shall just have to bear up under the crushing burden of your disapproval as best I may.
It's not that they can't conceive of such a world. It's that the mental strain of constantly lying about your beliefs knowing you were letting lots of ppl die bc, if you expressed the views your C/Bs screamed were hugely important you'd be out of power in a week.
Give most ppl a statusful job ensure they know they'll lose it if they have the wrong views (likely to be replaced w/ someone worse) they'll figure out a way to believe (in some sense) what they must to keep the job.
> It's an inability to even conceive of the fact that the world is imperfect and tradeoffs are always necessary
I'd add that it is necessary to recognise that systems have a practical ceiling, they can realistically only get so good. Nothing ever has and ever will be perfect (capitalism being a perfect example, it's just less flawed than any other system it would seem)
This reminds me of something I've speculated about, about why people refuse to treat their opponent's beliefs as a real, empirically verifiable thing. My speculation was that people don't want to understand what their opponents are thinking, because that would imply (by their own rules) that they should sympathize with them and give them everything in the world. I don't know how much this is a cause versus effect of modern American hyperpartisanship, but today the partisan Left and partisan Right act like seeing things from the perspective of some marginalized group [racial minorities/rural white poor people] should lead to you prioritizing their suffering above all else and giving them everything you can to make up for their suffering.
If you take this view, that understanding is compassion or demands compassion, then 'refusing to treat other peoples's beliefs and behaviors as a real phenomenon' is perfectly understandable. It's the old 'arguments are soldiers' (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer), this time with understanding as treason, or at least sedition. The enemy cannot have any perspective to understand. If they did, then we wouldn't hate them as much (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences). That's a stab in the back of the war effort.
This goes doubly so when you treat everyone you do understand as a Utility Monster, like they're the only people whose suffering matters. It's the old Smithian tale of the loss of one's little finger versus the destruction of China (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7267664-let-us-suppose-that-the-great-empire-of-china-with), except you really do sacrifice the lives of millions for one little finger, because it's not *your* little finger. And that means you can hail yourself as a good and selfless person, because you saved the little finger of someone else (crucially, someone you liked and could see), rather than a monster who hurt millions of people they could not see.
I believe that psychological research has established that moral licensing is a thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing); people allow themselves to be evil in the name of good, because a good person isn't evil right? I think that inability to do cost-benefit analysis arises from something similar: an inability to see evil in good, the broader consequences of an isolated good action. Yes, it is good that public health officials value the health of children so highly they refuse to let them be vaccinated, when everyone else could be vaccinated instead. But the broader consequences are disastrous, even just to the children themselves. Even without selective empathy for some people over others, people just seem incapable of seeing the evil in good. Let alone the good in the evil of seeing things from your opponent's perspective and admitting that they have a perspective at all - selective empathy, when it is there, makes things so much worse.
TL;DR: It's not a demon haunted world. It's an angels and demons haunted world, where there is no good in evil nor evil in good. And you already know which side people see themselves on in this angels and demons divide. The holier-than-thou and self-moral-licensing attitudes of the past never went away, they just found new forms of 'good' and 'evil' to infest. And the most scorching righteous fury of all is reserved for those who undermine this entire schema by engaging in cost-benefit analysis and sympathy for the devil.
Yes, I think that's a good re-ordering of my points.
The scientifically interesting questions are
(a) Why is it so important to humans that everyone around them do things the same way, and think the same thoughts. I can't answer the why as to temporal ordering and causality, but I *suspect* it's ultimately tied into the success of language in our species.
For language to work, the speakers all have to be on more or less the same page as to the meaning of each element of language, and the usual evolutionary pressures and co-options might have grown the necessity (ie evolutionary benefit) of thinking and performing language the same way to generic thinking and performing.
Insofar as other primates possess rudimentary language (based much more on hand gestures than on vocalization) I'd be VERY curious as to how they handle differences. Does the "speech" of one chimpanzee tribe match that of a tribe far away?
If you teach one gorilla a particular version of ASL, and a different gorilla a somewhat different version, do you see anger and fighting between the two of them over the "right" way to say something?
(b) I think the above mostly gets at the root of your "Ideas are soldiers" point; is that ultimately the same phenomenon as my "one dimensional thinking" (ie people or concepts can only be rated on a line of good vs bad, they can't be rated as good in terms of X and bad in terms of Y) point? I honestly don't know. I can clear clear elements of similarity, but also differences.
(c) The most tragic aspect of all this is education has clearly had zero effect. The same people who have been taught through twelve years of school and four+ years of college that colonialists were bad for making zero attempt to understand the world view of the inhabitants of foreign countries gleefully engage in the exact same practice, with the exact same condemnation of those who are attempting to act as explainers and bridges, and with zero self-awareness of the identicality of their behavior.
This is very very depressing, and it makes me wonder if the project is, quite literally hopeless. There has never been a society, so exposed from birth onwards, to an insistence on at least superficial tolerance and diversity, and yet none of it seems to stick at anything beyond the shallowest skin-deep. All that is achieved is the construction of a different type of outgroup ala https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ .
I had previously seen the "Can I believe it"/"Must I believe it" quote about motivated reasoning attributed to Tom Gilovich, not EY for what it's worth.
I'm probably being paranoid, but the "degrowth" movement genuinely scares me, not so much for what it is now but for what it could become.
The "rich countries sacrifice so that the poor can develop" is very noble, but if literally all you care about is preventing climate change, then actively sabotaging the development of poor countries, or even deliberately trying to lower their populations through war and famine seems like a more effective approach. I obviously think this would be evil, but the very alarmist rhetoric around climate change makes this seem worrying plausible in the near future.
The sentiment isn’t new, and the modern environmental movement just to me seems to have less of the sort of influence for something like degrowth than in the past. If all the things that could happen, the current environmental degrowth movement doesn’t seem likely to cause that
Well, if the environmentalists are right, it's not like much development of poor countries is possible: if they really try to develop the same as the First World, civilization would collapse due to severe environmental degradation.
This. I'm not really worried about degrowth like, ever actually being seriously implemented. The less abstract calls for degrowth become, the more obviously unpopular they will be received. But this is why I'm worried about green technology and sustainability advocates getting sucked into the degrowth narrative, it could waste decades of time just like the anti-nuke movement did.
Yes but I think this one is interesting because it goes beyond the general rule. There's a lurking battle of high-level generators of disagreement. A friend of mine who studied environmental science dichotomized his classmates across the following distinction: those who think we should colonize Mars, and those who don't.
I'm obviously in the "colonize Mars" camp. To those opposed, however, there's something instinctually wrong or aesthetically abhorrent about human civilization spreading across the cosmos. The metaphor of humans being like viruses jumping from host to host, while mildly charming to me, is (understandably) grotesque to many others, but to the degree where they really stand in opposition to it happening.
So I think you can't just tell degrowthers it won't work. I don't think their position comes from pragmatism, I think it's something deeper.
I think there may be a third camp: "Colonize Mars, but only after implementing Communism." This is what Asimov seemed to believe, judging from the Robot series.
What about a generalization of this, colonize Mars after we're actually ready to do it? I like the point that somebody made - judging by the propaganda hysteria, our most pressing current problem is apparently the climate change, which essentially boils down to us being unable to solve a problem with 0.01% of our atmosphere. Meanwhile, Mars happens to have a problem with 100% of its atmosphere.
If the economic system were not capitalism it would be much easier to implement degrowth. A fully planned economy could expand and contract as needed.
However, 'degrowth' is often an important part of capitalist economy too. Attempts on the part of the capitalist to supress wages is a degrowth from the worker's point of view. So really we need to think about terminology and class when looking at an issue like 'degrowth'.
I think there is a strawman argument that Kelsey makes a compelling case against, but I worry that the fundamentals of degrowth aren't really explored - and are important for us to actually consider. As someone who has spent years in the rationalist and EA circles, and a year exploring post growth, I offered a few perspectives to balance out Kelsey's on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/HiNaryan/status/1423368067917045760
Would love to continue the conversation with anyone who feels curious :)
Count me as curious, though I am somewhat pessimistic about this particular cause. You don't seem to have public DMs on though, or I'm just too much of a twitter noob.
Jefferson is a state designed to *exclude* San Francisco. The move of eastern Oregon into Idaho is part of that same project, but they'd also like bits of northern California (but not the Bay Area).
By the by, I don't know if you meant for this "Related: “the metacontextual hyperamericas to which we have never not owed our allegiance”" to link elsewhere but currently it's going to the same tweet you linked above
How come Northern Ireland gets to vote in the US election in 2060? There are sufficient Irish in America, and some Americans in Ireland, that we here in the Republic should also have a vote! Particularly if Scotland, Wales and Devon/Cornwall also have votes.
Either us and England sank beneath the waves (which is strange, because if we go, the North goes as well, we *are* one island) or there's something funny going on.
From the twitter thread below that image, I found this unreasonably amusing:
"The "red planet goes blue" jokes amused the (now very old) millenials on the late night shows for a solid five years after everyone else stopped finding them funny"
Also, I think I need a list of all the jokes I'm missing from that picture. I hadn't even noticed Alaska was missing until I scrolled down in the twitter thread and saw the about 5 billion people mention it (apparently it got traded for Siberia).
The image of Baghdad from the post contradicts the map from the linked article (and the common sense too): the city cannot be densely populated inside and change into some vaguely drawn fields immediately outside of the gates. If anything, higher-value crops would be grown to supply the city (so orchards, not fields) and there should be plenty of buildings too, especially along the roads.
It the aim of the wall is protection then most sizeable buildings would be inside. You probably don’t want to be outside. There may have been some temporary buildings. Eventually over time a city or town extends its walls.
Farmers probably farm what they can on whatever soil is available.
I agree that *sizeable* buildings would be inside. I'm saying that the outside would not be flat but would contain orchards, palm groves, channels, huts etc and not only flat fields. The farmers would want to plant perishable high added value stuff as close as possible to sell to the city dwellers. The palm groves are explicitly mentioned in the article. See the map too, there is a lot of stuff around the walled city.
While I agree that there would be shanty towns and fields outside the walls, you wouldn't see orchards within bowshot of the walls, since orchards would provide cover to attackers. Any field close to the walls is getting burned come wartime, and that's kind of fine for annual crops but not for trees that take a decade before they start producing.
Right, but that would only be a relatively thin ring around the walls (one bow-shot being 50-100 yards generally and the diameter of the city being more than a mile)
See the ACOUP posts referenced below, but TL, DR: buildings are cheap and walking many miles to and from your field or orchard every day is an expensive waste of a farmer's time. Unless there is an enemy army marching over the horizon as you speak, farmers live and work and keep all their stuff in buildings as close to their fields as practical. So do the people who regularly trade with farmers. When, and only when, the enemy army approaches, they grab their highest-value stuff and retreat to the city.
Also, if you've got a city-sized market and labor force nearby, farmers farm what they can on soil they have extensively modified to maximize its productivity of high-value goods. This looks nothing at all like an empty field, or even a broad field of standing grain.
In the original Conan the Barbarian stories, on two separate occasions, Conan encounters a Lonely City and reasonably assumes it must be abandoned. (Both times he's mistaken; they have a magical food source inside the city walls. Oddly, neither incident reminds him of the other.)
"The author wouldn't be lazy enough to recycle the same plot, so it must actually be abandoned this time."
(Apologies to the late Robert E. Howard, I actually did enjoy the Conon stories - pulpy, entertaining, and hilariously influential on later Fantasy, they probably had at least as much impact as Tolkien)
Yeah, these are great posts. Being charitable, we can say that this depicts Al-Mansur's fantasy - or dream - which probably didn't include boring details. In any case no human being could have seen the city from that angle, Baghdad, unlike Minas Tirith, not having a huge mountain nearby.
The 'artist's impression' doesn't even *do* vaguely-drawn fields, it has the city (which is plainly beside a river) plonked down in a sandy-brown desert. Even if you don't include farmlands and pastures, there would be natural wild greenery in that environment as in this photograph:
The 1883 map included in the article shows, besides the Tigris, a network of canals, and before the city was even built, the location was selected in part for its climate:
"We are told, for instance, that when Mansur was hunting for his new capital, sailing up and down the Tigris to find a suitable site, he was initially advised of the favourable location and climate by a community of Nestorian monks who long predated Muslims in the area."
I agree that it's in part due to ignorance of what would actually lie on the outskirts of an ancient city, but also that probably it is in part unconscious "well it's in Iraq, that's the Middle East, sand and deserts, right?"
I don't understand #23 (the PhDs and anti-vaxx attitudes thing). I can't read the table as Scott describes it. PhD's in January have neither the highest nor lowest numbers (and I'm not sure what the numbers are).
As a colorblind that took psychedelics, I saw no improvements at all (same results on colorblindness tests). We should be a bit wary of results like that as people that become suddenly not colorblind are going to be way more vocal than people that just stayed colorblind.
It's extremely common in smaller nations. Turkmen book Ruhnama says that Turkmens invented the wheel and metalworking, Kazakh scientists have proven that Adam was a Kazakh, Kirghiz are the most ancient people on Earth. And Russia was the first, greatest and only empire on Earth up until 18th century when it was devastated by a giant flood and the entire world history was falsified. Why would you *not* expect this kind of folk history be common?
About micro-dosing causing visual distortion in colorblind people, there's plenty of serotonin receptors in the retina (as well as in visual cortex), so it could interact with colorblindness, although I'm skeptical of such anecdata. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300908418303213 The retina is incredibly complicated, so I doubt anyone can provide an answer that's very scientifically constrained. Assuming the report is true, a way to make progress on this would be to compare the effect of microdosing on different kinds of colorblindness, but I doubt the effect is consistent enough to feasibly get enough statistical power to make real progress, given the rarity of different kinds of colorblindness.
I had the same thought when I read this. "Wait, which kind of colorblindness? There are many." Whenever I see something like that, where the imputed effect lumps a diverse population together without realizing it and then makes a blanket claim, I'm skeptical of the claim.
#10: I like that the author pointed out this instance scare-mongering going on at the Sierra Club. I think most people don't realize how unscrupulous non-profit organizations can be when it comes to fund-raising. They just think "oh, these people are doing something for the greater good; you can tell because the organization that employs them is a not for profit. That is good. I will give them money so I can feel good about myself."
#11: didn't they also put ship builders to death in the 1500s, because the emperor was worried about maritime merchants becoming a rival power center?
I’m a little suspicious of the idea that nothing’s happened to insects on the whole, given that compared to say 400 years ago we’ve totally wiped out many precious large swarming behaviors of insects, and turned much of their previous habitats into farmland monoculture (where some species thrive but not others) or single tree species or concrete. But short term, it makes sense not much has happened.
IRB approvals often suck, and presumptions of harm being arbitrary are generally dumb, but cotton masks have a presumption of being totally fine that is IMO entirely justified, because it’s a sheet of cotton. And n95s are also fine because it’s a sheet of plastic. It’s not like many medical professionals haven’t been wearing them this entire time. From the experimental studies I read, if you’re exercising heavily, you have to breathe a bit harder to push the air, but it’s only a bit harder and it doesn’t effect much. It is likely reasonable to subject life critical intravenous solution to a higher standard than a piece of plastic.
And yeah having infants never see faces is probably not ideal, but I suspect not really catastrophic (I’m sure you can find some culture somewhere that already does something like this, and I’m sure their kids can recognize faces and expressions just fine when they’re older. I’m reminded of one tribal culture that (it was reported) never talks to their youngest kids, and they just learn by observing secondary conversations, and they srill learn as well as other kids. I don’t know if or how often in Islamic cultures women (mothers? Wet nurses? Servants?) wear face veils in the home, but that’d be a comparison if some do.)
>That's pretty much how pandemic-era face masks are used too.
Not really (in the context of infants seeing faces), because pre-school etc isn't really a thing there. But good luck using "strictly islamic cultures" as a control (we haven't even established strictly islamic cultures do "just fine" in any meaningful sense, and then good luck adjusting for confounders).
I think I'm confused about the dialectic now. The question is how much infants are affected by some reduction in the amount of time they spend seeing whole faces, because of either masking or veiling traditions. My thought was that most of the time, infants are inside the home, with only the family present, and during that time, both in pandemic cultures and traditional Islamic cultures, the infants would be seeing whole faces. The face coverings are only relevant for the hours of the day that the infant is outside the home, or in a public room while guests are present.
As far as I can tell nobody(*) is worried about infants seeing masked faces at home (because nobody(*) wears a mask at home); the question is whether them only seeing masked faces in daycare/preschool/wherever our culture sends infants during the day harms their development.
I wouldn't be so sure. Infant development is not an ansynchronous thing, where you just do #1, #2, #3 in that order and it doesn't matter how long it takes, so if #1 is delayed no big deal. Generally, infant psychological development is closely tied to physical development -- actual multiplication and differentiation of cells -- which is on a strict clock. It's entirely reasonable that if you miss some key stimulus at its scheduled point in time, development proceeds permanently along some different track, and the child never returns to the same track. Whether that is harmful or not is another question, and how harmful yet another.
I give you as an obvious example language acquisition. Babies are born with the ablility to distinguish phonemes from essentially all human languages, but lose this ability around their first birthday and retain the ability to distinguish among only those to which they have been exposed (i.e. the language their parents use to speak to them)[1]. This underlies the difficulties older children and adults have acquiring fluency in foreign langauges, and is one reason truly bilingual people have to be exposed to the 2nd language at a very young age.
I’m not really sure then. My instinct still leans towards “they’ll be fine”, especially given most kids won’t be around adults with masks 24:7, although I’m think there are some parents who are wearing masks 24:7 in their homes.
I'm definitely suspicious of anything published in Quillette that takes the form "look at these crazy liberals making such a big deal about X, when X isn't actually a problem at all!" They're often right that X is being overrated as a problem, but the Quillette schtick is usually equally an overreaction in the opposite direction - the truth is usually not that there is *zero* problem here, but rather that the problem just isn't quite as big as some people on the internet were saying (which we could probably all have realized if we put it like that).
Pushing back on the "exercise is only a bit harder", it depends greatly on the mask. If the layers can't hold their shape, the inner-most layer can get damp, at which point it tends to get sucked onto the airway, at which point you're trying to breathe through a damp piece of cloth the size of a quarter. There are better masks that don't have this problem, but expecting the typical antimasker to invest in a high-end performance mask is an amusing thought :)
I can (anecdotally) say that there's a change in my lifetime in the behavior and population of monarch butterflies, as one example, and there was definitely a bee die-off recently. I think we tend to freak out too easily, but also not freak out enough to do anything sometimes.
For example, I keep meaning to maintain a patch of milkweed in my garden, and never get around to it.
My understanding is that the bee thing was a bit more complicated than media reports made it out to be. "Colony collapse disorder" meant that every winter, for several years, commercial honeybee colonies were having much greater population declines than they did in normal winters. But my understanding is that this was made up for by increased reproduction every summer. And it primarily seemed to affect commercial honeybees more than native bees. And it may also have stopped (or at least declined) in recent years. We still don't have a clear sense of what was causing it, which is definitely troubling, but it sounds like it was never the existential threat to bees that some reports made it seem like.
Agreeing with name99 who commented earlier, this is definitely not only public health people, I'd seen the exact kind of hole in argumentation with environmentalists and with anti-racists, and honestly I've seen it with edgy /pol/ dwellers too.
I have two interpretations for the cause, no idea which one is more suitable.
1. They feel that performing some sort of analysis or calculation is in itself immoral, unempathic to the victims and/or displaying disloyalty to the cause which is being thwarted or endangered. Like if upon hearing that some baby might have died your first impulse is to do a utility calculation and not become sad and enraged and whatever, something is wrong with you.
2. (perhaps more charitable/steelman-like) This occurs with people being so involved in a moral cause that even a (comparatively very small) damage to their cause, presumably a cost to extract a larger social benefit, to them seems like a massive disutility and that reverses the conclusions of the cost-benefit analysis.
You have good points. I think the part in common with all of it is the "steadfast belief guarantees results" part. People feel 1) because spending any energy on analysis takes away from the energy budget for believing (hence a betrayal). Very close to 2), except maybe independent of the cause. I think striving for "purity of belief" is a driving force behind a large number of US behaviors.
All this is deeply analyzed in Thomas Sowell's "A conflict of visions". The gist of the argument is that leftism is at its roots a belief that humanity is perfectible, which leads to a belief in solutions not tradeoffs.
If you start mentally labelling people as "solutionizers" vs "trade-off-izers" then you'll find the labels line up almost exactly with classical left/right divisions. I'm a big believer in Sowell's theories.
I think it's a lot simpler than that. "Solutions-seeking" versus "trade-offs" sounds like a nice, easy division, but in reality, we seem to get mountains of skulls as a result of people who do trade-offs.
(We get them as a result of people seeking solutions as well, of course, because humans are all too prone to go "gotta break some eggs if you want to make the omelette").
And I think that's why people don't like trade-off arguments: because we start with "is it really worth spending $50,000 on a 'wonder drug' to give this dying person six more months of life that will be of miserable quality and death is still inevitable?" and we end up with "eh, who cares if seventeen hundred thousand peasants die, if they wanted to get medical treatment they should have become billionaires because you deserve the $50,000 wonder drug if you can pay for it".
Who are you thinking of when you say mountains of skulls? Most of the skull-mountain-makers I can think of in history were those who saw a shining utopia in the future, and all it required was some sort of (final) solution with not too much worrying about the costs of getting there.
Your final paragraph seems to be suggesting that healthcare should be entirely outside the normal world of cost-benefit analysis because if any is done at all, then the inexorable conclusion will be that lots of "peasants" die and that's unacceptable. In reality we use insurance to even out the peasants and the billionaires, so I don't really understand why you argue this slippery slope is a big deal.
Really, I feel like that's the basic problem with the public health community summed up in one paragraph: insisting that nobody should ever be unhealthy, regardless of cost, makes them feel morally superior and so they end up quite insanely. Other people look at the costs and say, actually, yeah, there are things that are theoretically possible to do to save one life that aren't worth doing.
Ironically there's a really simple solution for the peasants/billionaires problem. Everyone who feels that way can just purchase health insurance for their friendly local peasants, or contribute to their health costs in some other way. Bill Gates is a good example of a billionaire doing exactly that.
By the 1900s, you had utopian dreamers like the Bolsheviks and the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge and the Maoists racking up some pretty impressive skull mountains.
The word "perfectible" kind of gives away the game. One doesn't have to think that humans are perfectible to think improving societal conditions is good. In the US context I don't think you can call the right tradeoff-izers. These days they seem more nihilistic than anything else.
I think it's more about acceptance by their peers (or public if in public health). Excepting only *maybe* a community whose organizing principle is some kind of rationality thing (tho even there it's prob just a different effect) only a very small part of even elite members of the community will have seriously slogged through C/B analysis for the related issues.
But if you do honest C/B analysis some will be violently at odds both with intuitions and what ppl want to signal or even sound like their agreeing with the other side. And remember how we treat heretics relative to pagans.
In short building a social movement and feeling like you are part of that movement means u gotta either lie your ass off or find a psych mechanism that lets you feel good about being a member of that group even when it's screaming for something that fails C/B big-time. It's way easier to come up with a reason to ignore/disregard that C/B than it is to engage in the sociopathic level of deceit it would require to lie your way through.
Depending on who is talking, another option is 'they feel they are not experts on doing good cost-benefit analysis, it is their job to notice and draw attention to problems and a different expert's job to do cost-benefit analysis about those problems and propose policy.'
Of course, that's not a valid defense for many types of speakers and many types of claims, but I think it may apply much of the time.
Re the Chinese tech industry. The null hypothesis would be that it isn't any grand plan in either direction, but a self interested attempt to capture the money for the elites, regardless of the larger economic impact. Which tends to be the pattern in authoritarian countries whenever a new industry is successful. (To take a simpler example, someone discovers gold, digs a mine, and starts selling it, once that effort has already gone in its easy enough to move in your son/cousin/crony to take it over and give you a cut of the profits)
They're destroying the companies, not expropriating them - expropriation in China has more commonly taken the form of corruption trials, I think.
I think social control is not a bad null hypothesis, but a planned economy visions is also very plausible, since that is a favourite of Communist regimes and maybe the CCP is forgetting why they shifted to communism-in-name-only
The thing about glycemic index is that it's oblivious to fructose, which is the likely main culprit in metabolic syndrome. So finding that GI is useless as an index is roughly as I would have expected.
Pretty sure it's the other way around: *only* glucose can be metabolized directly by almost all cells, all the other monosaccharides are mostly converted first in the liver to something more useful.
The human body handles glucose and fructose — the most abundant sugars in our diet — in different ways. Virtually every cell in the body can break down glucose for energy. About the only ones that can handle fructose are liver cells. What the liver does with fructose, especially when there is too much in the diet, has potentially dangerous consequences for the liver, the arteries, and the heart.
I got interested in this back in 2009 when I saw a viral youtube lecture by Professor Lustig at UCSF. He was a little bit fringe back then, but I think the science is moving towards his position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
A counter-argument to fructose or even simple carbs being a culprit - modern and primitive hunter-gatherers in Africa got between 10-20% of their calories from honey (Herman Pontzer talks about this in his research and in his book 'Burn' which is excellent).
On a more anecdotal level - many people who live in tropical climates consume substantial quantities of very sweet fruits throughout summer when they are in season (e.g. mangoes and jackfruits in my home state in India, Kerala) and have done so for a very long time, much before obesity was a problem.
The developmental milestones thing... reading this probably gave me the most profound insight since "OMG, when I instantiate a variable, I'm INSTANTIATING a VARIABLE", just more useful - you mean, other people don't understand these things?! Like, it's not that they just make fun of me, they haven't made it to these points? (yet?) also, about a dozen therapists, psychiatrists and people of similar ilk will be glad to hear that the effort they've put into me over the last 20 years hasn't been for nothing.
I recently had an epiphany about programming, and the fact that (in Python) I am creating a THING in the memory of my computer when I declare a variable... it was basically an epiphany about the physicality of things happening inside of a computer. (I'm not using the correct terms here, but it was a massive insight for my small little world)
"Part of the problem with education is that it tends to exacerbate these sorts of insecurities [fear of being stupid because of not knowing things' by abstracting away from the actual purpose of learning something, which is to be able to do something. Even thinking is a kind of handwork."
I've put it as "in school, people are rewarded for knowing things, not for learning them".
I think very few college-educated people literally don't understand it, although it often feels that way! Most people who don't typically do cost/benefit analysis fall in one of two camps.
The first type rejects the framework, because of some other ethical framework they have.
The second type understands cost/benefit analysis *when pressed*, but it's just not something that comes naturally to them. They often get weirded out by probabilities and other quantitative estimates, but they become more accommodating if you use qualitative language. They all have done cost/benefit analysis at some point in their life, but in a qualitative way.
The problem with cost-benefit analyses is that they're a categorical error for anything involving ethics with many ethical framework. If you consider it fundamentally immoral to take away a person's right to not get vaccinated, any cost-benefit analysis about gun ownership is meaningless. If you think it's fundamentally immoral to put any child in a situation that kills them, any cost-benefit analysis about the rate of that happening (where the rate > 0) is a category error.
Of course the nice thing about consequentialist frameworks is that you can decide between two bad options because one will usually be better than the other.
If you consider it fundamentally immoral to take away a person's right to not get vaccinated, then that's fine, but your argument should be that it's fundamentally immoral. If you start talking about how it has a negligible impact, or bring up that unvaccinated people deserve what they get, or something else, then you're inviting the other party to respond in kind, which just ends up hiding the true point of disagreement.
Well put. I would also broaden this point and suggest that while some people have a well thought-out fundamental moral objection, that’s probably a minority.
I suspect a bigger group of people have an uncomfortable feeling which might be expressed as “I think it’s wrong to X”, but which is not part of any framework with axioms to which the phrase “categorical error” could be meaningfully applied.
I think a good cost-benefit analysis can be a way of helping people to shake out the inconsistencies in their belief systems (true for all levels of sophistication but particularly for such intuitive moralities), by exposing the tensions/inconsistencies and giving tools for prioritizing/resolving them.
At the margin this should help people to change their minds or be more sure that their mind is made in the right way, although away from the margin, of course there are many who would not change their values even when presented with a clear contradiction in their system.
The thing is that we can't progress as a society if we don't agree on things like that. For some people, taking away their right to not get vaccinated is fundamentally immoral. For me, taking away my right to go back to normal life is fundamentally immoral. So what do we do? Well, we have to see how much value we put into each of those things, and try to compromise.
Yes! We "try to compromise" in order to "progress as a society." But if compromise is not possible, as is often the case, does that imply regress? And who gets to adjudicate what/who is regressive and what price there will be to pay? In the end does it not all come down to the acquisition and exercise of power? That certainly seems to be one, if not the, primary lesson of human history - notions of moral right and social progress notwithstanding. How about this as a sort of meta-compromise, a golden one as it were: I don't exercise power - whether individually or collectively - against you and vice versa, with the understanding of course that we may simply not be able to compromise otherwise and will just need to go our separate ways.
>In the end does it not all come down to the acquisition and exercise of power?
Yes, and what's more, the real power resides not in those who carry swords, but those who get to preach in the temples after the war is over. It's they who establish what's moral and what's not. Their gods may be fictional, but the power of the "divinely inspired" words is most certainly not.
>the understanding of course that we may simply not be able to compromise otherwise and will just need to go our separate ways.
Well, this probably used to be the case until all the habitable space on Earth was claimed, so until we're able to disperse elsewhere this plan is on hold.
> For me, taking away my right to go back to normal life is fundamentally immoral.
I'm more in the "let's compel more people" camp, but the other camp would say "the thing that is preventing us from getting back to normal isn't us, it's the people who insist on punishing you."
But the statements we're talking about are usually in reference to public policy proposals, and public policy is definitely an ethical framework that centers cost-benefit analysis.
> If you think it's fundamentally immoral to put any child in a situation that kills them, any cost-benefit analysis about the rate of that happening (where the rate > 0) is a category error.
What frustrates me to no end is people who reason along these lines re: COVID, but then suddenly change their tune as soon as you propose banning cars or swimming pools.
I think what's going on is that most people will do some sort of rudimentary cost-benefit when you force them to. But, they round cost and benefits which are (in their opinion) small to zero, and then argue as if that rounding never happened and you want to kill children for fun
> Is it true that, as GK Chesterton claimed, people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything? IE that Christianity fills a useful religion-shaped-hole in people’s heads, and so non-religious people are easy prey for cults, conspiracy theories, etc? I hear this a lot, but here’s a study finding that church-goers were more likely to believe in QAnon, even after “adjusting for confounders” (remember, this is hard and doesn’t always work). The same article notes that “white evangelicals” are more likely to believe in vaccine-autism connections, moon landing fraud, etc - although I find this less convincing than I would if they just gave me the church attendance statistics without bringing race and denomination into it.
For starters, I don't think this bears much at all on Chesterton's claim -- a conspiracy theory is not a "religion", not even in the vague "God-shaped hole" sense of "a psychological construct that fills the same niche as Christianity/etc in devout believers". Qanon may be something like a cult, at least in the center of it, but the other "conspiracy theories" they cite (election fraud/vaccines/moon landing) are just single straightforward factual beliefs. Trying to get at the question of whether non-Christians or non-churchgoers are more likely to hold other "religion-equivalent psychological constructs" seems very hard, using anything like modern social science methodology, but this isn't a decent attempt.
That said, regarding this study in particular, I'm pretty sure they're just getting confounded by "broad political attitude" (and I don't believe their model successfully controlled for this). Note that Qanon, 2020 election fraud, and nefarious vaccines all currently have a heavy political valence. (And note also that their question about Qanon is a simple favorable/unfavorable, and can't get at whether the respondents are deeply involved in the more culty aspects or believe the weirder claims.) White Evangelicals are among the most heavily churchgoing demographics, and also quite right-aligned on the culture war axis. So I'm pretty sure all those answers are best interpreted as just "yay, Trump! boo, The Establishment/Deep State/whatever!" (Note that the most straightforwardly political theory, the election fraud one, has by far the strongest effect, and the least political one, moon landing hoax, has basically no effect.)
I would *really* like to see some sources on that Economist chart. It's very skimpy, to say the least, and they do some wibbling on the QAnon result: it's not "amongst white Evangelicals as a whole", it's "amongst people who had heard of QAnon, excluding 'don't knows'" and I'd interpret it as "White Evangelicals hold less unfavourable view of QAnon" rather than "White Evangelicals hold most favourable view of QAnon" - they have *negative* numbers at the top of their scale, which I am going to assume means "-80 is most unfavourable, 0 is neutral". By that score, people what never goes to church are -80 and white Evangelicals are -50 or thereabouts, so it's not clear what the heck they're measuring exactly. It's a "least least favourable" view rather than a "most favourable view".
Re: the microchips, autism and faked Moon landing (where at least white Evangelicals are close to the majority view on that one), I'd like to know what they asked and who they asked. Singling out white Evangelicals looks more like they want to go for the "well of course they're all redneck racists so they believe dumb conspiracy theories" angle.
Singling out white Evangelicals basically means they're singling out Trump supporters and this is really about politics instead of religion. Obviously Trump supporters are more likely to believe the conspiracy theory that paints Trump as a hero.
QAnon is a lot more religious-seeming than most conspiracy theories - most are just "the government lied about X and that's bad," but QAnon is very specifically "someday Real Soon Now, the government is going to reveal all the secret conspiracy's it's been working on to help people, cleanse the world of the satanic baby-eating elites, and usher in a new golden age." It's very messianic in its thinking - "just hold on and trust the plan, and things will eventually get better."
Also, if you're going to demand a rigorous definition of "god-shaped hole" from the study authors, you should probably demand the same of Mr. Chesterton - what sort of beliefs was he thinking of when he wrote that quote? What did he see as "filling the hole" for atheists, and would QAnon plausibly fit that definition?
I don't think the study authors were thinking of Chesterton at all. Scott is the one who made that connection.
If you wanted to study whether religious people were generically more credulous, or something, that would require a whole different study design that avoided the political confound here. But that would still be a separate question from what Chesterton (seems to be) talking about.
As for Qanon's cult-like qualities, they arguably exist, but this study more or less filters them out. The great majority of people who have heard of Qanon aren't its 4chan-reading core audience. By asking only about favorable/unfavorable with respect to the signifier "Qanon", you filter out basically all the weird culty stuff and are left with the public understanding of the signifier -- which is almost purely "Trump good" plus "government bad". So all you're really doing is a roundabout way of asking people's opinion on Trump, and it's no surprise evangelicals are high there.
Yes, but in that case, why distinguish *white* Evangelicals? Black Evangelicals are also very religious, has anyone asked them their opinions on QAnon?
I am forced to agree that "The Economist" is using "white Evangelicals" as shorthand for "Trump voters" and the conclusion they want all us right-thinking people to draw is "Trump voters crazy loons, Orange Man Bad". This disappoints me, as I would have hoped for better reporting and less opinion-column posturing disguised as reportage from this publication.
I see it as perhaps mainly eshatalogical. Since believers already have faith in a future where all things are made right after life they wouldn't have created something like communism where the perfect society was envisioned as achievable on a timeline at a great enough cost
The woke movement seems comparable though thankfully they seem to envision far lower costs, however much things could turn out badly. The CRT classes in schools and corporations seem centered on repetition of magic spell like statements that will dissipate the white supremacy all around us by changing discourses in an evolution of post modern theory that language is the center of power
In practice this appears to mean they choose a simple "heaven on earth" magical solution to injustice rather than practical efforts to improve lives and this approach has enormous cultural power compared to equivalents among believers
Re. cost-benefit analysis ("a lot of people just never seem to consider it at all, and I’m starting to notice this more and more everywhere, kind of like a missing developmental milestone thing."):
I've spent the past 5 years studying the history of Western culture, and concluded a few years ago that a very large fraction of it can be described as a ~3,000-year-long battle between rationalists and empiricists. One of the key disagreements in this battle is about integers vs. real numbers. Western Rationalists owe most of their beliefs to Plato; and to them, only the integers are "Real" (by which they mean "unreal"), and they ought really be called "ordinals", because their primary purpose is not to /measure/ but to /order/ things (in order of their closeness to God).
In Western academia, all of the sciences but math are controlled by empiricists, and all of the humanities except economics, psychology, and linguistics are ruled by rationalists. Hence the science / humanities split, which is far wider than I think anybody else realizes, because both sides use the same words in their epistemologies (like "truth", "reality", "proof", and "knowledge"), but mean entirely different things by them. People in the humanities use these words with the same meaning they've used them for the past 2,500 years:
- Only eternal, transcendent, universal categories are "real". Races are real; you and I are not (except in Platonism, Christianity, and other rationalist religions in which individuals have distinct souls).
- Propositions are either knowledge about these eternal categories, or facts about temporal individuals deduced from eternal knowledge. All propositions are either True or False.
- A True proposition is absolutely, eternally, universally true, regardless of context.
- Knowledge consists of universally-quantified and eternally-true propositions about transcendent Forms which are either (A) divinely revealed, (B) proven (as in geometry) with 100% certainty, or (C) arbitrary cultural constructs taken as fiat. ("The sun will rise tomorrow" can't be knowledge based merely on the empirical observation that it's risen every day for at least several thousand years; this requires the deductive proof of universal laws governing its behavior. "Socrates is mortal", which doesn't appear in any ancient Greek texts AFAIK, isn't knowledge, but a fact about a temporal being which was deduced from knowledge of eternal truths.)
Scientists who venture into the humanities quickly notice their high insanity quotient, and learn to just not think about epistemology, since its importance to practicing science isn't obvious. People in the humanities rarely have any familiarity with the sciences, and are blissfully unaware that science has changed since the days of Aristotle. This is why we have post-modernism, which argues that Aristotelian metaphysics are unsatisfactory and then thinks it's refuted science. (In my metaphysics survey, 43% of respondents agreed that science claims to prove or disprove beliefs about the physical world with certainty. I haven't correlated this with Scott's data yet, but I expect this correlates strongly with majoring in humanities and/or stopping after getting a B.S..)
The humanities base their epistemology on Greek geometry. In ancient Greek geometry, there were no numbers. Nobody measured anything; lengths and areas weren't given numerically. (That's why Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem is much longer than most of the proofs we use today.) The humanities are part of the continuous, usually-dominant, rationalist school of epistemology, within which measurements are a kind of heresy. Measurements can be made only of earthly things, which are profane and misleading, and which true scholars should never pay attention to.
This applies /especially/ to measurements of value. This is why the rationalist tradition has always despised money, merchants, and utilitarianism, all the way back to Homer. (Odysseus was once accused of being a merchant; he indignantly replied that he was a pirate, which was much more respectable.) Rationalist moralities are based on some eternal ordering of categories or virtues, from the most-important to the least-important, where the most-important things have absolute priority over all less-important things, regardless of quantity or context. If the value of individual things can vary over time, then you would /have/ to use utilitarianism; no deontological or virtue-based system could work. (This is why Marx wanted a labor theory of value; as a Hegelian, he required that value be an essential property of a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time. It's also why, for most of Western history, merchants and businessmen were despised as parasites; they merely move things from place to place, or order around the people who "actually make things", while contributing nothing to a thing's value.)
That is, to a rationalist, you can't separate a thing's utility value or market value from its moral value, which must be an eternally-constant value inherited from its category rather than a product of its individual peculiarities and its circumstances.
A cost-benefit analysis, besides involving measurements of value, is premised on the belief that whether principle X takes priority over principle Y depends on the numeric quantities involved. Rationalists call that "relativism" and consider it evil. They're mentally incapable of distinguishing someone who considers numeric quantities while making a moral decision, from someone who has no morals at all. Their ontologies can't represent moral decisions as value trade-offs.
This is a super thoughtful comment and one that really gets to the heart of the difficulty of persuading people who have a sort of "folk epistemology" that draws a straight line from empirical science to transcendent categories; thus we end up with "believe the science" appeals to authority.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can really grok the absence of certainty without doing research/applied stats/ML work on your own. There's a huge need for some pedagogy that could introduce those concepts at an earlier age before certainty sets in.
The one point I would disagree with you is in the humanities; more often I think you're dealing with a group who doesn't have some conception of finding the capital-T truth, but rather making the case that things are contingently true under present circumstance (i.e. the Platonic Harvard may not discriminate against Asians, but the real one sure does). So while "race is a social construct" in the abstract, it can be essential over the course of single lifetime. The rough analogy are fixed costs in econ; fixed costs are fixed because they can't be changed *in the short run* - in the long run, anything is fair game.
Last but not least, the metaphysics questions were super interesting (and really well written) and I hope you will publish some general stats along with anything interesting that presents itself!
interesting, and totally agree that CBA and stats should be taught earlier in schools - even if an individual or culture does decide there are absolute values, sacred cows, taboos and hill to die on, at least they should be open about the decision-making process
> he required that value be an essential property of a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time
All the other stuff aside, doesn’t Marx have an orientation against essences? The German ideology, “all that is solid melts into air”, commodity fetishism, materialist, ...
People often make the mistake of believing Marx's own characterization of his beliefs. He said his system was materialist, and also that it was scientific. By "scientific" he meant that he could prophesize the future with 100% certainty, which is the opposite of "scientific", as science can be distinguished from religion in that science doesn't claim certainty.
By "materialist" he meant that he believed history was determined by "material conditions". But if you look at how he described "material conditions", you'll find he didn't want to measure things, but to talk about the essences of abstract classes, like "capitalist", "bourgeoisie", and "proletariat", which have eternal inherent natures, which determine a person's nature in exactly the same way Plato's Forms do. Also, like Plato's Forms, there are no transitions from one class to another in Marx's theory. Also, Marx never described the governing mechanisms of communism, and this is what essentialists do, because they don't believe in mechanisms. Like Aristotle, Marx thought that the nature of a government was strictly the sum of the nature of the Form of that government, plus the natures of the people comprising it. He never imagined that how they interacted with each other could make any difference.
Another obvious way in which Marxism is spiritualist / essentialist is in its historicism. Marx copy-pasted a lot of it from Hegel, including his certainty that revolutionary progress would move inevitably along the predestined path of History. But Hegel guaranteed that certainty by saying that the process was supervised by the World Spirit, which is just Hegel's term for God, to guarantee that things kept moving towards their predestined end. Marx said that in his system, as in Hegel's, change was also guaranteed to move inevitably towards a predestined end. This requires a World Spirit.
(There are a lot of other ways in which Marx misrepresented or misunderstood his own theory. For instance, his definition of "capitalism" describes feudalism, and is closer to "everything except capitalism" than to capitalism. Capitalism may be the only known economic system in which the owners of the means of production *don't* control them, and in which wage laborers are *not* kept by those owners at the bare minimum needed for survival, and in which social mobility between classes is high. Similarly, the introduction of money, and of a middle class, have just the opposite of the effects he claimed they did.)
I mean I could critique atomic theory by taking about the essence of atoms being false. I don’t think that’s a good one.
I generally agree that Marx made a lot of mistakes and his ideas aren’t that awesome. I think your assertions are a bit too stark and unsubtle though, but honestly I haven’t read Marx so I don’t really have much to work with.
Very valuable comment - I really want to know more about this old-school rationalist tradition and how it survived to the present day. I imagine Christianity was a big part of that.
I've often had the thought "Christianity contains [bad idea]" but never "Christianity carried [bad idea] from Plato all the way to my life in 2021."
Unless you derive conclusions from your observations, all empiricism is doing is counting a pile of rocks, then counting them again, and doing that over and over without any result being acceptable except "There are fifteen rocks. Second count, fifteen rocks. Nth count, fifteen rocks". Are you really going to dispute that the sun will rise in the morning because that's not an empirical observation, that is a rationalist deduction?
I think Mr. Getz is incorrect about his "science versus humanities" split, how it happened, who is lined up on either side, and what exactly he means by Rationalists versus Empiricists. "Scientists who venture into the humanities quickly notice their high insanity quotient" is just impertinence, and unless I am to assume that Mr. Getz has travelled here via time machine from the early 19th century, his valorisation of "science is simply the observable facts, that is all!" is outmoded because empiricism is a starting point and a tool but unless you do something with the observations and the facts that you have piled up, you are doing nothing more than Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill again and again and again.
Dragging in Christianity as a punching bag doesn't help, except perhaps to clarify that what was originally meant was nothing more than the old-fashioned "science versus religion" notion.
"Are you really going to dispute that the sun will rise in the morning because that's not an empirical observation, that is a rationalist deduction?"
Hume did. I'm still not sure the degree to which he was trolling, but it is important to recognize the moment when you transition from accumulating observations to boiling them down into a law because it's very easy to elide that distinction. I have been super into this lecture by Robert Sapolsky, the introduction to a freshman level human biology course he teaches at Stanford. I think it does a masterful job of introducing students to holding two difficult thoughts in their head at the same time, to wit:
1. You have to think using categories. The world is too complex and changes too quickly for you to avoid classifying events or objects as similar or different and thereby create ontologies.
2. Ultimately, the categories only exist in your mind. This is not to say that the categories don't describe something meaningful about the external world, nor is it to say that you can't share those categories with other humans, though you generally have to be very careful to make sure that you are working from a common definition. It's only to say that each of us inherits from our culture a set of ontologies, primarily through language, that filters our perceptions of the world at a preconscious level.
Biology is a weak area in my knowledge base, so I've really enjoyed these lectures. Sapolsky is very good at emphasizing and illustrating that for any given phenomenon in life, different specialties of biology will bring to bear a different set of tools, ranging in scale from the biophysics within individual cells to the ecology of the entire planet, and that none of these specialties gives you "the right answer". They're all useful but none of them possess the whole truth.
>Are you really going to dispute that the sun will rise in the morning because that's not an empirical observation, that is a rationalist deduction?
Careful, I'm allergic to straw. Is "sun will rise tomorrow" a deduction? I'd thought it was the perfect example of an *induction* from previous empirical data.
I won't claim the humanities are infected by this school of thought, but I've definitely met individual people who are, so I'm interested in it for that reason.
And please understand, I don't take shots at religion just for the heck of it. My personal experience with the ideas op describes has been heavily mediated by Christianity (and has been negative), so I'm making a connection from their ideas to my own experiences.
I agree the presentation was pretty in-your-face, but you may be taking more offense at the tone than the content merits. Surely it's difficult to *really* dispute that attitudes in the hard sciences and its technological daughters are quite different from the so-called "softer" disciplines? And that a great deal of this revolves around the revolution from scholastic to empirical inquiry initiated in the 1600s (and interestingly largely as a result of the support of the Catholic Church for natural philosophy)?
I would have argued that the distinction is more in the role of experiment and measurement. To the modern empirical scientist, experiment and measurement are king. If we have a dozen excellent and apparently bulletproof logical arguments why an electron around a nucleus should not be stable (and we did, circa 1900, it was an absolute no-brainer) AND YET we do the experiment and find that it is stable, the empiricist says "well that's that, we trust the experiment and we reject the theory. Time for a better theory." In a scholastic tradition, we are far more inclined to believe the logic and dispute the measurement -- perhaps it was not done properly, perhaps it's the kind of river into which no man can step twice and we cannot *expect* to have repeatable measuremnts, perhaps there is some ineffable intervention (of God, say). Each of the latter is a common and well-accepted critique that can be offered from the scholastic side, and would be taken far more seriously by the scholastic than by the empiricist. Conversely, the fetishization (as it would be described) of experiment by the empiricist would baffle the scholastic: "Why do you waste your time attempting to prove what any idiot knows, from his mother wit, received wisdom, common sense, plain logic?"
And there is an excellent reason why the pre-eminence of logic and argument as the tools by which Truth is mined has remained in the humanities far more than in physics or chemistry: because the necessary experiments are far harder to do, so hard if we admitted only empirical discovery as an approach to truth we would have to settle for very slow progress indeed.
Exempli gratia, is diversity strength? Is it better to rear a child with oodles of affirmation and self-esteem, or does sparing the rod spoil the child? Are traditional (for some definition of that word) sex roles dysfunctional or not? These are all questions which *in principle* we could decide by experiment, but in practice the required conditions would be unbelievably expensive, take too long, or perhaps be unethical (considering informed consent). So we don't -- instead, we argue about them, and we tend to think the best and most persuasive argument is the key signpost for the way to the truth. (We may certainly adduce observational evidence, and plot nice graphs and such, but the plausibility of the argument is the core of our judgment of its truth, not the outcome of an experiment.)
I would also agree with you that the role of the Church in this split is ambiguous. On the one hand, the Church certainly has a very long tradition of deductive scholastic argument, and its easy fusion with neo-Platonic thought early in its history is a good example of this. But the Church also has a long history of being interested in natural knowledge per se -- praise God by understanding and appreciating His works and all that, not to mention the practical benefit of technology to the flock -- and therefore in sponsoring its acquisition.* Indeed, Christianity (and its parent Judaism) are almost unique in the degree to which they are pro-technology and pro-progress -- most other religions seem to me far more focused on acceptance of the status quo and bad luck, and in some cases are even somewhat anti-progress.
I'm inclined to think religious scholasticm and what remains of it in philosophy simply have a common root, which is the natural human tendency to believe the shadow-play in his or her own head more than external reality. We are *all* natural neo-Platonic scholastics, and genuine empiricism comes very hard -- we have to work at it, and only in cases where it has strong and immediate benefits can we sustain the effort. A carpenter will become empirical about how best to build a good chair, because direct necessity and benefit, and a society may become empirical about how best to build smartphones, for the same reason. But when the empiricism is very costly (how to rear the best children, how to pick mates, how to create justice for all) or the cost/benefits less directly felt (what is the best intervention in Afghanistan?) we revert to our natural belief in the really good argument as the royal road to truth.
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* There may also be a weird additional factor, which is that Christianity and Judaism ask us to believe in something apparently deeply contradictory: that the world is full of evil and misfortunate, as we can easily see, but also that it is all part of a Divide Plan which is through-and-through good, not the smallest detail of which could be altered without proving ultimately disastrous. We're asked to take the love of God *on faith* which means willy nilly we are required to curb some of our innate faith in our reasoning. If you practice each Sunday saying "well this makes no fucking sense to me, how God can allow such-and-such, but I guess there might be some reason that escapes my mortal mind" then you are somewhat better prepared, come Monday and in the context of something baffling about the natural world, to say "well this observation makes no fucking sense to me, but maybe there is some reason, unknown to me yet, why it is not a mistake." This practice of psychic flexibility might not happen as much with the older religious tradition, in which God (or the gods) are *not* omnipotent (or don't give a crap about people), and so the observation of evil and bad luck requires no rationalization.
> These are all questions which *in principle* we could decide by experiment.
Only if we all agree on the axioms of morality as well, which seems to be even less tractable.
"Harder" sciences also have the advantage of there no being much substantial dispute about how to interpret the results of experiments (although when they get sufficiently weird the philosophical quandaries do begin to arise, e.g. the interpretations of QM). Whereas, when the human condition itself becomes the object of study, it's always embedded in an established value system, through the lens of which the results are interpreted. The system itself isn't expected to be amended in the course of scientific inquiry, that is supposed to happen in the course of some mysterious holistic "moral progress" instead.
"This is why Marx wanted a labor theory of value; as a Hegelian, he required that value be an essential property of a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time."
Can you quote a passage from Marx where he argues anything like value is "an essential property a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time"?
Yeah, "Marx wanted an essentialist LTV" is something of a shibboleth for sloppy thinking about Marx. Marx distinguished perfectly well between several kinds of value, and he was arguably more flexible about exchange-value than classical economists, acknowledging that the amount of labour necessary to produce a thing depends on circumstances of the society in which it is being produced.
However, what I take to be Phil Gaetz's basic point - that 'empiricists' describe and 'rationalists' prescribe - is a good one. I just wish both stayed in their respective lanes a bit more reliably.
"Perhaps it was implied in his zero-rating of the value provided by capitalists."
Can you quote Marx where he says the value provided by capitalists is zero?
Even if Marx gave a zero-rating of the value provided by capitalists (assuming you can find a quote like this), that actually does not imply that _all_ value is an "essential property of a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time."
Ruh roh. Your username rings a bell :) Are you really going to die on this hill? Marx's entire philosophy was to encourage violent revolutions to eliminate the capitalist class, because he thought they were shameless exploiters of the working class:
"In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
Yes, because Marx was a vague and inconsistent thinker you can find other quotes where he 'damns with faint praise' the capitalist class by admitting that capitalism has created great progress, but in the next sentences he usually states that despite this small detail capitalism and by extension capitalists still need to be swept aside.
But I actually half agree with you that Marx didn't seem to totally subscribe to the essentialist value fallacy. He refers to the price of labour being set by competition in a bunch of places, for example. I've read somewhere that Osama bin Laden was someone who did subscribe to this worldview and argued that there was a kind of 'natural' price of oil dictated by its nature. On the other hand I never saw any direct quotes from him saying that either, so who knows, maybe this fallacy is only ever ascribed to people who don't actually believe it.
There is nothing faint about the praise expressed by the passage to which I suspect you're referring. ("The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground; what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?")
And there is nothing vague or inconsistent about acknowledging all those gains and yet concluding that the trade-off (optimising for extraction of workers' surplus labour in the way that e.g. the profit-apathetic feudal nobleman did not) is untenable. Trade-offs, after all, are what this whole subthread is about, no?
That's a very long-winded way of saying that you haven't yet found any such quote. If Marx argued that there was zero "value provided by capitalists" you should be able to find it quoted in his works. If you cannot do so, perhaps you are not being charitable to an outgroup thinker.
If Marx was a "vague" or "inconsistent" thinker then you should be able to find evidence of that too.
This is definitely an interpretation that some people have. Lyndon LaRouche made an entire cult/religion/political organization out of this, seeing the Rationalists as the heroes of history and the Empiricists as the villains (and I believe, destroyed the state Democratic parties of a few states in the 1970s, and made a friend of mine drop out of college and move in with the cult - and I recently read somewhere that the LaRouchies were getting China's Belt and Road project to invest in some infrastructure vaporware to dump the Congo River into Lake Chad).
#25 We got to watch this flip in real time regarding wearing masks. In March 2020, it was “we have no conclusive evidence that masks work to prevent COVID, therefore you should NOT wear a mask”. In May 2020, it was “we have no conclusive evidence that masks DON’T work, but it seems like they might, so you MUST wear a mask”.
The evidence didn’t really change from March to May, just the establishment consensus on what conclusion we ought to draw from the evidence. In both cases, openly disagreeing with this consensus was considered “anti-Science”.
I think part of the reason for the establishment consensus was a motivation to prevent regular people from buying the masks that were in short supply and arguably more necessary for health care workers. Once the shortage was over, that motivation disappeared, allowing the recommendation to switch.
You may be right, but then that's hardly "following the science," is it? I thought we were supposed to be "following the science," or as Dr Steven Koonin puts it, The Science.
And if you are correct, it suggests something else rather disturbing about our so-called scientific and medical leadership. Suppose St Anthony and the rest made a decision to lie to the public about masks to ensure medical personnel had enough supplies (the man certainly is a persistent liar). So what did he expect to do when the moment came around when, you know, he was going to actually try to slow the spread of the disease? He's already declared the inefficacy of masks.
Either these people can't think two weeks in advance, or they are such consummate liars they can't be embarrassed. Or both.
No, that's what they made up afterwards to try and badly justify the sudden switch. But that was never their real concern and we know this in many ways:
1. This explanation is basically a conspiracy theory. Officials of many countries said masks don't work. Fauci etc are asserting that public health officials and health workers were all instantly and perfectly co-ordinated via some kind of hidden worldwide conspiracy, one that was dropped only once China ramped up mask production. A conspiracy on this enormous scale would have left behind some sort of documentary evidence, especially once the perpetrators aren't hiding it, but no such documents have emerged. Instead all documents obtained via FOIA requests state that officials did indeed believe masks were ineffective.
2. The original claims about masks being ineffective or at least there being no evidence of effectiveness match the contents of the scientific literature. If they really all believed masks are super effective, on what pre-2020 evidentiary basis were they concluding this?
3. Governments don't need to lie to their citizens to control mask distribution. Nearly all masks were being imported, and (surgical/N95) mask factories are easily identified. It would have been trivial to seize control of the mask supply if that was the real concern. Indeed lying about this is the most catastrophically stupid approach to stopping mask hoarding one can possibly come up with. If you actually believe this, you have to believe that at a stroke Fauci and other officials burned massive amounts of public health credibility to merely attempt to partially reduce the severity of a very short range tactical problem, when there were more direct alternatives available that would have preserved trust, and that nobody around him objected to this or thought it was insane.
Unfortunately the evidence here is really all quite consistent: Fauci and other public health officials are all massive liars and have been lying about nearly everything from the start. At the very beginning they were telling the truth until they suddenly realized that they had the world in the palm of their hand: they could say or do literally anything and people would accept it. Because they're all collectivist solution-izers that led to their prevailing ideology overriding what little commitment to science they previously had and the result was this about face.
What's really made me sad in the past 18 months is, frankly, the number of people who actually believe and support this noble lie stuff. Our society has truly grievous problems.
Im not saying I know what did happen, but I do think this can happen without documented conspiracy or coordination. One “credible”/public person says it early and many others follow.
It's indeed the probable reason, but this in itself is a huuuge problem: it means that "scientific facts" are not informative facts at all, but just parts of propaganda, i.e. messages used to induce a particular behavior. The truth has no value in this context, the behavioral influence of the message that count. Mixing scientific truth with population control is imho the reason why science trust is eroding. Not that it is new, but this accelerated out of control lately in the West, it looks like there is some king of singularity coming....
not sure saying evidence didn't change is fair - maybe they didn't change regarding the efficacy of masks themselves, but consensus around things like aerosolization risk or asymptomatic transmission sure did and that would've changed the equation. Also the crisis got much much worse in scale and expected duration, so i can see how at some point the leadership just got desperate and was willing to try anything that _might_ work - bleach, masks, whatever.
Your last sentence kind of proves my point though - it’s not like there was some new, definitive study that masks would be really effective against COVID. In both March and May (and today) the evidence was pretty inconclusive.
But officials had to do something, so they flipped their standard from “NO, unless we have irrefutable evidence of efficacy” to “YES, unless there is irrefutable evidence of harm”. Both positions were presented to the public as pretty black and white, with the opposite position criticized as both an intellectual (anti-Science) and moral (selfish) failing.
This is exactly the type of inverted standard of evidence Scott points out in #25.
Incidentally, I don’t think “YES, unless there is irrefutable evidence of harm” is necessarily a bad position for the public health establishment to take regarding interventions in a pandemic. Frankly I wish they’d applied it more broadly to allow vaccine challenge trials and vaccine use for children. It’s the flip-flop, dishonesty, and moralizing that irks.
Zeynep Tukfeci did a very good job of laying out how this particular corner of "The Science" about aerosol transmission of pathogens was dusty, full of cobwebs and needed a good cleaning. I can't get too mad at Fauci and other American public health officials about their initial position on masks. One of the fixed points in their analysis had to be the vital priority of getting PPE to medical workers, since if too high a proportion of them got sick at any one time, the situation would have gotten dramatically worse. Given what we're seeing now in how the buying power of wealthy countries is distorting the distribution of vaccines to everyone's detriment, doing what they could to forestall a run on N95's (which, bear in mind, were to their minds at that time the only effective mask in any circumstance because the state of knowledge about aerosol transmission was so bad) was a bad call but understandable.
What frustrates me is that, in general, we're not taking advantage of this experience to update our priors about general infection control measures. The degree to which the flu got absolutely crushed this past winter feels to me like Nature is jumping up and down saying "Hey, hey, look, this fruit is so low-hanging it's six inches off the goddamn ground, experiment more to see what you can get out of masks & hand-washing". The silver lining of this idiocy about banning mask mandates in schools is that it's setting up natural experiments this winter. I hope the CDC has the infrastructure in place to collect the data that comes off of them.
COVID wasn't stopped by any of these measures though, and SARS-CoV-2 is not different from influenza in any way that would matter for NPIs. So this idea seems inconsistent.
There's a much simpler explanation for why flu disappeared: it's being mis-identified as COVID. The symptoms of COVID are so vague it can be confused with more or less any heavy respiratory infection, so we rely entirely on the claimed precision of PCR testing to separate SARS-CoV-2 from other coronaviruses. Unfortunately there are lots of reasons to have grave doubts about the integrity of these tests and in particular that at least some of them aren't specific to SARS-CoV-2 at all.
Flu tests have been performed just as much over the past year as they were in previous years, but far fewer of them have turned up positive. I don't think they've changed how they're doing the flu tests to magically turn positive results for flu into negative results.
This is an interesting point and I had not considered the relative difficulty of distinguishing SARS-CoV-2 from other coronaviruses. However, I don't immediately see its relevance to my point about general purpose infection control measures because we can test for flu directly.
That is a two order of magnitude difference in positive flu specimens reported to the CDC between the 2019-20 & 2020-21 seasons. Now, I admit I have not dug into the data to look at the denominator here. My naive assumption would be that a clinician would order both a COVID test and a flu test for a patient who presents with a heavy respiratory infection, but it's entirely possible that labs were so overloaded that they shifted nearly all available capacity to SARS-Cov-2.
Some proportion of that difference can be attributed to changes in behavior of patients who never came into a clinic in the first instance. Some proportion of that difference can be attributed to social isolation, which I do not want to maintain as a permanent state of affairs. Some proportion of that difference can be attributed to masks & handwashing. I would like to know the relative percentages. What can we keep with better habits and what do we have to give back to resume something like our pre-pandemic life?
Early on, even medical workers were being discouraged from wearing masks. It was only after the fact that people started making up the justification of avoiding shortages for their bad advice.
Even if we accept for the sake of argument that there was significantly less flu in the 2020-21 season, that alone does not provide knock-down evidence for the efficacy of masks. Huge swaths of the country conducted classes and work entirely online. This is entirely consistent with "masks do absolutely nothing, but preventing people from gathering in common buildings and physically interacting with each other on a daily basis stops all sorts of diseases."
22: You say PhDs were least likely to be against vaccines in January, but unless I'm completely misunderstanding that table, PhDs in January have a value of 23.1, which is lower than "high school" (35.0) and "some college" (27.3), but higher than "bachelor's" (15.4), "master's" (11.8), or "professional" (12.8). Explain?
You now say "PhDs were one of the more pro-vaccine demographics", which still seems to me like a misleading way to describe a group that is ranked 4th out of 6 and noticeably bucks the trend of education otherwise being positively correlated with vaccine support.
Did you remember to purge your cached thoughts after discovering you had made a mistake?
2. Real estate - yes the up and coming folks with more money move out of their poorer houses and into fancier houses and if there are not enough fancy houses, then they can't do it. But in their wake as they leave their old poorer homes...it can lead to overall prices rising.
This group of people who are leaving their poor home because they now have too much money to live amongst the poorer folks are typically taking a lot of equity they've built up meaning they're selling for more than they bought their houses for 5-10 years ago. Often a big part of their upward house movement is fuelled by rising house prices. Meaning they'll vote for, support, and benefit from policies which see house prices rise. Certainly theri old home is 'freed up' in the sense that a chair you get up from is now free, but it is only a pedantic truth. Overall it has little bearing on their effect on the market other than to say most folks don't keep both homes to live in, they'll at least rent out the old home if they choose to retain ownership.
3. Cost Benefit 'missing' in action. I think this is often a form of rhetoric and manipulation and dark arts more so than it is missing. Even if the person using that style of rhetoric isn't consciously aware of it, people will tend to shy away from ideas which have a low probability of supporting their position or are too complex/nuanced to be useful in an argument. Scott might be falling into a 'good faith' assumption a bit too much in this case.
9. Insect Apocolypse...umm...I think sometimes smart people talk themselves into corners and end up missing what is obvious. Since the green revolution of turning war crime level chemicals into something we put on our food crops...then slowly ban them one by one over decades in a game of cat and mouse where getting caught means dying of cancer.
Anyhow...insecticides kill insects...I don't get how or why people are confused by this. Farmland soil managed in the 'conventional' way is devoid of insects to an insane degree - partly due to monocrop farming and large scale biome changes with habitat loss, but also due to these chemicals which do stick around for a long long time and do spread out across the land, waterways, and oceans. I'm simply incapable of looking at the dead body of the Butler with the Candlestick in the Library and saying...hmm this meta analysis says that Butler's almost never die to candlestick injuries.
re:RE - I agree there aren't many significant market participants who make money when prices go down and thus policies tend to favor current equity holders. Having said that, more inventory drives prices down and there's nothing pedantic or semantic about those effects.
re:farming - Farmers are doing a great job for consumers and the environment. We're lucky to have so many of them pursuing the agrarian way of life. There's a strong suspicion in that community where all these criticisms originate from and I share that skepticism when we seem to be literally inventing issues to give farmers a hard time about.
"Anyhow...insecticides kill insects...I don't get how or why people are confused by this."
well, in that case given that guns kill people (notwithstanding NRA claims), and number of guns has risen exponentially over last couple centuries, humans must be on the brink of extinction.
Am not comparing guns and pesticides, am making a comment how isolating one factor and drawing conclusions is not the way to go. Insecticides kill insects, but could other parts of human life be promoting their spread? E.g monocultures apparently encourage insect reproduction. I agree the overall effect is probably not good for insect numbers, but does that necessarily affect biodiversity? The original quip was far too simplistic.
On the insect apocalypse thing, the Quillette article seems to start with "we don't have good evidence that 75% is the amount that insect biomass has gone down over the past few decades" and then conclude "therefore, we should probably think there's no reason to be concerned about insects at all", with some moves in between about how confused people on Reddit have been about bees. I agree with the first part, but not the conclusion. (And yes, people on Reddit are very confused about bees.)
The link in the caption for “the metacontextual hyperamericas to which we have never not owed our allegiance” goes to the same place as the "source" link above. Is that intentional?
Always love your link collections. That artist rendition of Bagdad is stunning! (Sorry for brevity, post-second-jab, only one of my arms is working well today!)
One small bit of info for you: Non-US folks (and apparently even some US folks, judging by my living-in-Boston boyfriend) don't know what happened with Cuomo, and "all this" is an accordingly confusing summary. COVID-19 politics was my first guess, but only weakly. No biggie! Just letting you know for calibration purposes.
If foreigners still haven't heard of Cuomo, I don't want to be the one to ruin what little respect they probably still have of us after everything else.
Between Giuliani and Cuomo, maybe this is just the Universe's way of balancing out "Big name Italian-American New York politicians whose reputations went from venerated to execrated"?
14: A member of a discriminated group X needs a higher ability threshold to get through the hiring filter than a member of non-discriminated group Y. So among those that get hired, objective measures of job performance should be higher for group X than for group Y. That seems like the best way to measure discrimination -- if your Xs outperform Ys on average, then you're probably setting the bar too high for Xs or too low for Ys. So far I haven't seen any data showing blacks outperforming whites on objective measures of job performance -- all the studies I've ever heard of had the opposite result.
So why would the resume name-swapping test show discrimination when the job-performance test doesn't?
A perfectly rational Bayesian superintelligence with a goal of "hire the more qualified person for the job", when presented with two identical resumes, but one of them has the name "Steven" and the other has the name "Lakisha", will choose Steven, because the base rate of competence is higher for Stevens, and a degree D from college C is not infinitely strong evidence so it doesn't completely eliminate the relative effect of those priors. Throw affirmative action into the mix, and D becomes even weaker evidence in favor of Lakisha.
This is a good point. I was going to include a caveat about variance in the OP but I cut it out for simplicity.
In practice, applicant pools are sort of capped, because anyone who is grossly overqualified for the job would be applying to some other job.
How does this work if we're only hiring people between +1 and +1.5, and the bar is probabilistic with a 50% chance of admission at +1 and a 100% chance of admission at +1.5 (linear in-between)? I'd expect that reduces the average difference between X hires and Y hires.
This is a reasonable way to model discrimination, but not the only way. For example, you could have some racist firms that never hire blacks, and other completely-non-racist firms that hire them at the exact same rate as everyone else. i think you'd expect no difference in this case.
Can you link to the studies showing equal/worse job performance among blacks, I'm curious how that works and what the filters for those positions were.
This meta-analysis of job performance found whites did slightly better on all metrics (corrected d between 0.12 and 0.61 depending on the metric in table 3) Objective metrics showed slightly larger differences than subjective metrics. It doesn't have details of the hiring processeses at the companies that the data came from.
This Meta-analysis' abstract claims an average d of 0.26 favoring whites, but I wasn't able to get the full paper on scihub.
These were the first two papers that came up on google scholar when I searched "meta analysis black white job performance subjective objective" with a >2000 date restriction, so I don't think I am cherrypicking, but I am not super confident about the state of the literature.
Your metric would only catch irrational discrimination, not rational discrimination (i.e. taking reversal to the mean into account). I would expect the former to be something the market would generally get rid of without any coercion, whereas the latter is presumably the reason antidiscrimination laws exist. If employers were acting rationally, they would require higher test scores (or whatever) from those belonging to lower-ability groups (which would be discriminatory), but this would not lead to employees belonging to those groups having higher average ability.
The real problem with the CV study is that it is based on class, not race. When I went hunting for the original study, it was based on names in Boston, and the "white" names were nice, middle-class ones such as Emily. The "black" names did resonate as 'lower class' the same way if you got applications from Thomas Campbell versus Earl Huston, you might pick Thomas over Earl.
So if the applications had been from Mickey McGlone versus D'Arius Jones, and McGlone got call-backs while Jones didn't, you can then say it's racism. Unless you just shrug and say "It's Boston, it's the Irish mafia in action".
"A perfectly rational Bayesian superintelligence with a goal of "hire the more qualified person for the job", when presented with two identical resumes, but one of them has the name "Steven" and the other has the name "Lakisha", will choose Steven, because the base rate of competence is higher for Stevens, and a degree D from college C is not infinitely strong evidence so it doesn't completely eliminate the relative effect of those priors."
You don't need "infinitely strong evidence" to wash out a prior like this. A resume would usually be plenty to wash out the significance of a name.
If I want to know whether a given event at 5:30 pm will be rained on, then if I just know whether the event was in Denver or in Houston, I would guess the Houston one is more likely to be rained on. But if I also know that it was raining at 5 pm on the day in question, then the fact that one is in Denver and the other is in Houston will be basically washed out, since both cities tend to have storms that last some amount of time but often pass within half an hour.
It might be that Stevens are more likely to do well on the skill you're interested in than Lakishas, but if you know that the person did well on this skill for the past few years, then I don't see why you would expect the influence of the name to persist. (Unless you have some very detailed information about persistence of skills in people of different gender and race, as opposed to the general information about the rate of basic training in these skills that I assumed your prior was based on.)
Think of it in terms of test-retest reliability. If you take a random person p1 from a group with a mean of 0, and you test him and he scores +n, upon retest the score is expected to drop by r*n, for some r, 0<r<1. For IQ tests r would be around 0.2 iirc.
Now suppose you take another person p2 from a group with a mean of -1, and you test him and he scores +n, upon retest his score is expected to drop by r*(n+1).
Maybe if you give someone a sufficiently comprehensive battery of tests the test-retest reliability will be better so the difference will be smaller. As r approaches zero the difference between p1's expected retest and p2's expected retest approaches zero.
(But I don't think anything on anyone's resume is that reliable. Someone can cruise through college taking the easiest classes and get a 4.0, while someone else can volunteer to take the hardest classes and get a 4.0. Someone can get hired to work for company X for 3 years and get fired for incompetence, while someone else can be a superstar at company X for the same amount of time and then quit, but their resumes will look the same.)
For an example of your effect, when my sister went to Bolt (Berkeley law school), about 10% of the students were female. One year, of the six top students (two in each of the three years), five were women.
I am pleased to be able to claim responsibility for the addition to the Cox-Zucker page. I saw Jadagul's link to the memorial note from Cox, and added it to Wikipedia. Long live the amusingly vulgar!
Apparently Cox and Zucker were graduate students all the way back in the early 70's. When I was a grad student myself I actually briefly studied Mordell-Weil groups of elliptic surfaces over the projective line but don't remember hearing of the Cox-Zucker machine. I was studying alongside at least one fellow grad student who I remember as being a bit of a "bro" (but ironic about it) who loved coming up with wordplay connecting mathematical names to obscene terms, so I'm sure if the Cox-Zucker machine had come up, I would remember someone making jokes about it.
When I was in math grad school and very immature (now a math professor and, um, well...) we used to have fun coming up with dirty sounding math terms. Sometimes you had to strain to do it. Sometimes it was painfully easy. My advisor spoke often (unironically) of the "going-down" theorem (which I still use a lot to this day). And one semester names of my four professors were Oh, Isaacs, Wainger, Ono. In that case the Universe just made it too easy.
I've heard the Going-Down Theorem snickered at quite a few times as well, and there's always the abbreviation of analytic germs as "anal germs" (which I think is listed in the index of a prominent graduate-level textbook although I can't remember which).
One of my students a few years ago posted on Facebook: "Doing real anal with my girlfriend in the library. Most people just don't understand how hard it is."
11. I tend to lean towards Door #1 there, although with a degree of moralizing "We need real industry, not this social media crap!" sentiment among China's rather old leadership (Xi is no Joe Biden, but he's still 68 years).
James Palmer is one of the more interesting Twitter follows on China, and I remember him saying you got to beware of this kind of stuff. One of the top guys who later fell out of power got a lot of praise in his day for crushing corruption and organized crime . . . only it came out later that he was just wiping out rivals and putting HIS people in positions of power to exploit corruption and organized crime.
EDIT: Deleted my older comment. Not sure commenting on that was appropriate.
>although with a degree of moralizing "We need real industry, not this social media crap!" sentiment among China's rather old leadership (Xi is no Joe Biden, but he's still 68 years).
Could you explain to me the societal value-added of social media, beyond the "online phonebook"?
(Not the business model. I get that it's lucrative because you get data to target ads. But predatory ads are generally not positive-sum for society - they're just Molochian competition.)
Might the PhD vaccination thing be due to age, i.e. a random 30-year-old is much more likely than a random 80-year-old to have a PhD and less likely to be vaccinated?
The number of PhDs has grown a lot over time, so we would expect some age effects. But so have bachelor's degrees and other graduate degrees. I don't think you could get this effect size from the PhDs relative to the other groups from age.
Which one do you mean? It's well know that the number of people doing PhDs has been growing over at least the past half century or so (except possibly very recently), and I'd expect that all other things being equal more elderly than young people have been vaccinated because the former have been eligible for longer.
Ah, I didn't know that. I couldn't see a reason why there would be more younger than older PhDs, but if there are just more people starting them than in the past, that checks out.
Very likely. In fact, the RR in vaccine hesitancy between PhDs and bachelor's holders shrinks from 2.4 to 1.2 after controls are applied. PhD also becomes less vaccine-hesitant than high school graduates (and also some college, IIRC). I can't say for sure that age is the control doing the heavy lifting here, but it seems most likely.
The other interesting takeaway is that Asians were only 20% as likely to be vaccine-hesitant as whites.
There's probably a bit. But there's probably also a major effect that PhD's are both selected and trained to have strange views on things and be very insistent on them. I knew HIV denialist professors in the early 2000's, but I don't believe I've ever encountered an HIV denialist elsewhere (though I guess Thabo Mbeki's government in South Africa might have some examples).
#14 are there any studies which attempt to disentangle racial from class effects in these sorts of "fake CV" studies? What's the effect of a name like Billy-Bob or Bubba versus Bryce or Beauregard?
I would rather hire Mark than Cletus, and I'm also pretty sure that has nothing to do with race. White-coded lower class names I've seen locally include Blade, Colton, Gunnar, Trista, Ruger, Trinity, and many others. I would be very interested in a study that reviewed those types of names in comparison to lower class associated black names and a control group of more standard names.
I'm of two minds about the whole "reposting Xinhua" thing. I know Xinhua isn't very good at what they do, and we're mostly just laughing at them, but there's this niggling voice in the back of my head saying "making a practice of sharing hostile memetic weapons doesn't seem like a very good idea" (cf. "Meditations on Moloch", "Sort by Controversial").
(NB: I'm not *normally* a deplatformer. I think people have the right to have their opinions heard. I'm nervous about Xinhua - and I mean *nervous*, not "how dare you do this" - because what comes out of there isn't "opinion" so much as "propaganda", and because their endgame isn't to convince us to improve ourselves or be nice to them - as with most domestic propaganda - but to set the West against itself as a prelude to military attack.)
This is much more true of say a Chen Weihua tweet, as he’s actually funny in the way he intends to be. Even then though I still think one should share away, it’s gonna happen anyway and he’s sometimes right by accident, but you are doing a bit of what he wants. What Scott did probably doesn’t matter though, as all I did was laugh at how absurd it was without taking away even what their intended political message was.
Would you consider stopping linking to Vox articles? That site is like what you would tell a kid about to make them grok why lying is wrong. From the Orwellian motto down to the clickbait titles, it is a dumpster fire.
It isn't just that they make mistakes. None of us are perfect. But honest mistakes are unpredictable, as likely to be wrong one way as another. Vox's mistakes are always in the same direction, always aimed at compelling obedience.
The crew at Vox strategically lies to people dumb enough to believe them in order to make them do what they want, and they do it in the name of 'explaining the news'. Until they own up to being an arm of the Democratic party, dedicated to getting their guys in power whether that means telling lies or telling the truth, they don't meet the smell test in terms of being worth reading.
The article he linked is by Kelsey Piper, who is someone who’s been a member of the rationalist community, so that makes that specifically different from Vox as a whole. Vox is pretty bad though, although I’d argue it is for different reasons than you do.
+1 - I generally can't bear reading Vox articles but Kelsey Piper's are usually much better. It's always good for me to have that contrast and then I add in the thought that maybe I read Piper's posts with more of an open mind as they have a 'Scott- approved' flavour. So, a periodic welcome dose of prejudice-revealing..
While I agree that Vox has a lot of its own biases, you are mischaracterising the article about pro-life and Hillary. The writer isn't urging fellow pro-lifers to vote for Hillary, he is saying that voting for Trump will do nothing, as Trump won't do anything about Roe vs. Wade (and probably won't even get elected anyway, see reference to 'imaginary first term'). Hillary is firmly in the Planned Parenthood camp, he says, but for all Trump's courting of pro-life vote he will in reality do nothing.
It doesn't say to vote for Hillary, in fact it doesn't say to vote for anyone but it does say "don't vote for Trump". Given that there are only two major candidates, that means either don't vote at all or vote for a third party option if your state offers one.
Vox and Quillette basically have equal and opposite biases, though as others have mentioned, Kelsey Piper and the whole "Future Perfect" team at Vox are quite different from the rest of the site.
"Would you consider stopping linking to Vox articles?"
This is only my opinion but if you want to support a helpful norm, I would suggest downplaying or ignoring the publication and focusing more on the writer. That is to say, you should take note of the reporters who are knowledgeable about their beats and who are the ones trying to make a career off of confirmation bias, who are the ones writing thoughtful, well-researched analysis and who are the one operating mainly as hacks and PR flacks. Support the former and ignore the latter.
The way that media works now is that young journalists start writing almost immediately in styles that flatter the audience of their target publication in hopes that they can one day get a job there. The result is that prestige media is full of bland, cookie-cutter versions of the same points of view. If young journalists knew that they could build larger audiences by doing good work, that could change the incentives enough to make a difference.
I'm assuming that if your bucket is "above college graduate" you're dominated by masters, PhDs are a tiny drop in the bucket, and it doesn't really end up contradicting the poll's claim that MAs are into vaccines much more than PhDs. Or am I missing a finer breakdown somewhere?
No Babylon 5 watchers for #15? The show had a running joke with the character Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle) hitting on the character Talia Winters (Andrea Thompson). Later on, Doyle and Thompson actually got married, so in the end Talia was Garibaldi's wife.
Creativity test is cool. But a few people I shared it with did it properly once and then instinctively did it to get as low a score as possible. This might mean that the earnest get more flattering results.
Re: hiring bias study. I took a look at the abstract but its approach isn't going to capture most of the bias that does exist, because it's only looking at CV callbacks. In many of the most biased sectors like tech, finance, politics, the arts etc interviews aren't allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis by looking at CVs. There is a strong preference towards people who are already known to the organization in some way, usually via referrals (all tech firms award large referral bonuses to employees), but also via head-hunting directly via technical forums and these days, just by going directly to universities. The giant pile of dodgy material labelled "submitted CVs" is looked at only as a last resort.
I would always be very skeptical of claims that hiring isn't gender or race biased, because so many companies proudly assert on their own websites that it is and so many people have stories of directly experiencing it. In particular, giving women a much easier time through the hiring process and targeting headhunters only at women is very widespread, to the extent that if the law were actually enforced many big firms would find themselves hauled before the courts as in most jurisdictions, there's no way their practices can be legal. But western culture has developed in a direction whereby bending the rules for women and racial minorities is OK, so de-facto discrimination against "white men" and "Asian men" is often not even perceived as such - or is, but is justified as the right kind of discrimination.
FYI link and text in first para is broken in the RSS feed. Probably you've already fixed it and feedly is still serving a cache but just in case figured I'd mention it.
> vaccine-autism connections, moon landing fraud, et
The cofounder here is obviously the "set of weird beliefs chosen". Say you have group A of which 1% believes conspiracy theory X, and group B of which 10% believes conspiracy theory Y, if you test only for conspiracy theory X of course you'll find that group A is more susceptible to conspiracy theories.
Pick a theory like "the experts know with high confidence how the trajectory of corona cases will evolve given mask wearing vs no mask wearing" or "russia colluded with Trump and facebook to manipulate the 2020 elections" or "the reason we can't have nice things is billionaires hogging all the cash" and see whether these results replicate.
I don't think Wales and Cornwall would vote Republican. Wales is pretty left-wing and always has been. Cornwall does vote Tory, but my subjective impression is that they're quite middle-class, socially liberal tories (i.e. Democrats).
Of course, by 2060 the Democrats and Republicans could have switched axes of opposition and even switched sides two or three times, but given that the American part of the map still looks pretty similar to how it does today, I don't think we're meant to assume that.
But the main thing I want to know is the backstory of how Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and London all ended up joining the USA but the rest of England didn't. :D
The British party system is substantially less advanced than the American. The working class votes less conservative, while the rich vote more conservative. So simply extrapolating the conservative-labour divide in Britain to the US parties wouldn't work.
I agree you can't extrapolate with certainty (and at the end of the day this is just a silly and fun thought experiment), but I do think the guy saying "Wales would vote Republican" has more work to do than the guy saying "Wales would vote Democrat".
An aside, because I think it's cool: The creativity test uses word vector distance (specifically GloVe vectors) as its measure of semantic distance. Word vectors were the hot thing in natural language processing before giant language models like BERT and GPT-3 took over, and the idea is pretty simple: Take a giant corpus of text, and count how often words occur in each other's company. Next, assign each word a vector, which you can think of as a point in space. Usually this will be very high-dimensional space, but you can imagine it as a big cube with lots of word-points floating around inside it like bubbles. (To quote the great Geoffrey Hinton: "To deal with a fourteen-dimensional space, visualize a three-dimensional space and then say the word 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it.")
Where does each word vector end up in this space? Simple: Near the vectors for words it co-occurs with. You can imagine each word being pulled towards the ones it frequently occurs with (like "university" and "professor") and away from the ones it very rarely occurs with (like "spoon" and "hydroelectric"). Fun properties emerge from this - even if two words don't co-occur with each other extremely frequently, they can end up in similar regions of space if they both share the same neighbours because of said neighbours' gravitational pull - perhaps "professor" and "lecturer" are rarely mentioned together, because someone is usually referred to as one or the other but not both, but they both share the same verbal surroundings and contexts, and that's going to pull their vectors closer together than their isolated co-occurrence might suggest.
Once we have our vectors, the measure of semantic distance used in that test falls out for free - we can just measure the distance (technically the angle, but that's an implementation detail) between two vectors and that tells us how 'similar' they are, where that similarity is essentially derived from their co-occurrence or context-similarity as described above. In other words, what you're really being asked for is a set of words that are are rarely if ever seen together, and that share completely different clusters of acquaintances as well.
As to cost-benefit analysis - a lot of people have more or less principled beliefs that engaging in cost-benefit analysis is morally sinful. They are crazy, but they're basically up front about what they think and their craziness is mostly limited to saying (as opposed to doing) crazy things.
But there's another large group of people who believe that engaging in cost-benefit analysis is scientifically invalid because it conflicts with (in general) the Precautionary Principle or (in medicine) the Hippocratic Oath, both of which specify that, if taking an action would have any costs of any kind, then taking that action is prohibited. Benefits are irrelevant.
It continually astounds me how many people are happy to loudly invoke the Precautionary Principle without realizing that it prohibits every course of action equally. And how many other people are willing to go along with it when that happens. People seem to have some natural defenses against arguments of the first type, that go "if we can stop one child from stubbing his toe, isn't that worth paying absolutely any price?". But those defenses apparently don't apply to arguments that go "as long as there are rocks outside, the Precautionary Principle tells us that we must never leave our homes". I don't understand the difference.
#21 I was recently thinking how creating a counter bias instead of removing the existing one leads to higher polarisation and conflicts. With reference to how something can be similtaniously overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/
Suppose we have two groups and one group has some priviledged way to succeed, inaccessible two the second. Trying to counterbalance it, we create a new way for a second group to succeed inaccessible to the first. This makes experience of both groups more unique as they now have more different insentives. Moreover, previously we had people in the second group who felt opresed due to not having the benifits of the first group. Now we can have people in both groups simultaniously feeling opressed by the other one. Their beliefs are justified by their experience, but the members of the other group can't understand it as they have the direct opposite experience. Political thinking makes everything worse. Every group want to shout louder about their oppression, treating every claim of the opposite group as an reactionary attempt to prevent their liberation.
Calling Vsevolod Ivanov a "conspiracy theorist" is perhaps selling him a bit short. He was actually a very famous and popular (system aligned) author in the Soviet Union.
Looks like those are different Vsevolods. The one you're talking about Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov was a communist writer and died in 1963. The one mentioned in the post Vsevolod Borisovich Ivanov is still alive and you can commission a work from him if you speak Russian https://www.xn--80adaabjf0azyfbf5a.xn--p1acf/obo-mne
Regarding 19, visual disturbances in people with red green color blindness while microdosing:
All I could find on this is that several color blind individuals dropped out of Fadiman’s study because of visual ‘tracers’ that persisted for days after a microdose.
The tracers were similar to those seen with a full ‘tripping’ dose of LSD.
“ MD'ing is not recommended if you ar red/green color blind. This is based of a study of 248 microdosing men. Five of the men dropped out of the study due to tracers and all had colorblindness..”
About the insects: What's the alternative narrative for the fact that windshields used to be full of dead gnats when I was a kid, and now that's not the case anymore? (People I asked confirmed that impression.) Did car aerodynamics change?
Wait did someone actually calculate 20, 30, 40 years ago how many bugs would smoosh on windshields per hour of driving? Or is this just people remembering what they think windshields were like when they were kids?
It's just people remembering what they think windshields were like when they were younger in general (not just when they were kids, also people remembering what it was like for them as drivers). Of course that's distorted memories etc. But I don't see a way around that. It would be fantastic to have a time machine that would enable us to actually count dead bugs, but I would guess at the time nobody thought that might be interesting. Though maybe some engineers did?
Well we still have old cars around. We can drive some classic cars 50 miles or so and compare to newer cars that drove the same route. If bug smooshes seem to be the same for both, that would hint that memory might be right. If classic cars have a lot more, then it is still possible there were more insects back in the day, but car smooshes by memory can't be trusted.
That's a very clever idea, possibly worth pursuing. My guess is that, yes, improvements in aerodynamics have resulted in substantially fewer smooshed bugs, but data trumps intuition and this would be pretty cheap data.
Though possibly not terribly valuable data, if all it does is confirm vague memories. Next we'd need a methodology for counting bug-smooshes on old car photos as a proxy for insect population, and that would be much trickier.
Interesting, but it doesn't seem like a huge evolutionary advantage to me. Highways are a pretty small sliver when you look at all the land in use and there's a lot of bugs, a real lot of bugs.
13. I gotta say I like it. It's propaganda but it makes absolutly zero sense at all. Is the idea that the scientist (who one thinks studies dangerous viruses) would fooled into thinking a poisen apple is safe? Is the idea that if she participates in an investigation sincerely her words would be twisted and she would be taken advantage of? Who the hell is Kung Fo Panda? This requires a decade Marvel style cinematic arc to explain all these backstories.
25. OK but a caregiver would have access to a child for a few hours at most. Presumably parents at home would not mask around the child so dose is a pretty big question here.
The cost-benefit thing has been a real bugbear of mine over the last year and a half, as so many people I discuss Covid with don't seem to get it. They just seem to think you can compare countries directly in terms of Covid deaths per capita, and whichever country had the lowest Covid deaths per capita "wins". I've pointed out to people that one cost associated with lockdowns has been a drop in referrals for cancer treatment - many of the people I've pointed this out to seem legitimately shocked to hear it, as if nothing like it had ever even occurred to them before.
I wouldn't call myself "anti-lockdown", but a lot of the people taking part in the conversation about lockdowns don't yet seem capable to me of making a cost-benefit analysis - they seem stuck in a mindset of "anything which brings Covid cases and deaths down is an unalloyed good; anything which causes Covid cases and deaths to rise is an unqualified bad; anyone who expresses any scepticism about any measures taken to curb Covid is a selfish geronticidal maniac who'd step over his own mother's corpse for the chance of a pint in a pub with his friends".
The problem here is it feels as if it is just adding a bunch of speculation. We were told by some last year that lockdowns were causing a suicide spike. But now it seems the suicide rate was either flat or lower. School closures were supposed to harm children, yet a few days ago we got a lot of research that shows that probably isn't the case.
An anti-lockdown advocate can simply add endlessly to the cost column while poo pooing the benefit column by downplaying Covid deaths say by using flu as a proxy early on in the pandemic or doing the old 'but pre-existing conditions' gambit as they did later on.
A precautionary based mindset, which people like Taleb espouse, would first cost benefit the cost benefit concept and find it quite wanting. A cost-benefit analysis could not incorporate possibilities like a new varient starts making children as sick as it does adults. There is no law of nature against it. Cost benefit only works by straigtlining previous risks faced but that has a big back door, you assign stuff you never saw before a risk of zero. Hence Pearl Harbor could never have happened because no one ever did a surprise attack using planes launched from aircraft carriers. But it did.
Additionally a more mature cost benefit would suffer from trying to think of all possibilities. An intelligent admiral might very well have considered that new aircraft carrieres could open up the possibility of a sneak attack on battleships grouped together. But what about submarines following ships that are spread out and picking them off? How about modified airships with massive bomb capacity? How about sabatogue by agents inside the US, which was the original reason battleships were drawn together at Pearl Harbor? If you replayed WWII again and allowed both Japan and the US to change tactics as they pleased, even very well read historically minded people would almost certainly be shocked at the variations that could have played out.
I think you're right. Although that is an odd response. If the planes were spread out sabatage would have been limited to whatever few planes the agents could get too, unless they thought there was a huge number of potential agents capable of attacking multiple locations at once.
I guess this leads me to the question of what was their larger vision? Did they think an attempt would be made to sabatage a handful of planes? If that's all that happened, so what? But then if Japan did have some agents blow up a few planes, that would be an act of war and things were already pretty tense.
So if they thought Japan was about to set off a war, one would think Japan would want something more for their first strike than a handful of planes getting damaged. That opens the question if Japan wanted to make a massive first strike to open a war, the only two ways to do it would be subs attacking the ships or planes attacking the ships. It seems if thi swas your thinking, then they should have had the planes flying as many patrols as possible to try to spot either subs or carriers on the open seas.
I know hindsight is 20/20 but it really seems like a screw up.
Lockdowns were not efficient even before we take into account any cost-benefit calculation. But let's assume that it was not immediately apparent. After first 2 weeks when they didn't perform as expected we definitely had to take cost-benefit into account but sadly was never done.
Notice the phase "as expected". This is exactly what is wrong with the cost-benefit mindset as opposed tothe precautionary mindset.
Is it a good idea to infect most of the population with a virus we know next to nothing about? No it is not. Yet cost-benefit advocates presume to declare yes it is because they can tell us closing schools for a bit will cause kids to become dumb for life, will cause people to become depressed and kill themselves, will cause 23,342 men to beat their wives on odd days of the month and 23,462 to beat their wives on even days.
Yet at no point do we ever hear abut the 'as expected' of ending lockdowns? How has that worked out compared to the 'as expected'?
The point is that lockdowns didn't limit the spread significantly and we realized it after first 2 weeks of lockdowns. Then it didn't matter anymore what the virus could do potentially because it made no difference. Although at that time from Diamond Princess we actually knew the age distribution of mortality and could have tried more targeted approach. I have no idea why it was never done. Maybe the project cost-benefit ratio was too low. But as a precautionary principle it was a good idea to try to protect elderly more than young people.
The expected time of covid incubation is 4-5 days, up to 7 days in most cases. 2 weeks is enough to drastically reduce the hospital admittance with covid. It didn't happen, after 2 weeks it either went up or decreased just slightly. Clearly, the idea that the lockdown significantly reduces the spread was mistaken.
So your theory is that Covid spreads through some other mechanism than communicable activity? Perhaps people watching the same Netflix program or playing the same game on their phones within a mile of a 5G tower?
What do you mean by lockdowns didn't limit the spread significantly? Is this, "forced lockdowns only affected the 25% of people that weren't already quarantining voluntarily and thus had limited effect"? Are we also ignoring that forced lockdowns in one region likely helped convince people in other regions to self-quarantine?
There is zero doubt that people not congregating reduces the spread of a disease(within a non-immune partially infected population). It is unclear to me what point you are trying to make
After 2 weeks we should have expected steep decline. It didn't happen. Only a slight reduction could be observed. Clearly the effects were marginal. Case closed.
We should have looked for other measures immediately and discarded lockdowns at that point. But because authorities stubbornly stuck with lockdowns, it took unusually long time to realize that aerosol spread (and not from fomites) was more common.
Possibly other measures like increasing the punishment for failure to comply with the lockdown order? Wait, no way to know if that was the problem though because, "Case closed."
As mentioned above, it was noted that home based transmissions went up as lockdown went on indicating the virus was limited to who it could infect.
This makes lockdown require a lot more than 2 weeks but you could have accelerated it with a large testing program so people at home who were positive could isolate themselves and break the chain from burning thru family members.
I was playing video games and smelled smoke. I went to the kitchen and found the top of the stove was consumed with a big grease fire. I got a bit towel and smothered most of it, but then I got bored and went back to playing video games. I discovered some time later the fire had grown back again.
It was then I did my cost benefit analysis. Smothering a grease fire did not put it out. Some people get rich playing video games. If I stoped playing my video games, I could cost myself hundreds of millions of dollars. My benefit is only delaying the fire that would destroy the kitchen. Therefore as a rational person the only concusion is I should play more video games.
My hot take on 14 is that the fact that the discrimination seems to be concentrated in retail suggests that employers are less racist themselves than worried about racist customers.
> I realize I sound arrogant and annoying here, but I guess I’m just urging people to notice when there’s a big hole at the point in an argument where a cost-benefit analysis should be.
While I'm inclined to agree, doesn't this seemingly assume a utilitarian point of view which others may not share? A deontologist might simply conclude that any unnecessary death is a tragedy we should work to avoid. They might agree that we can take a utilitarian approach to decide in what order to tackle these tragedies, but not whether they qualify as a tragedy.
> How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?
You know what would be the most effective use of funds? Political reform. Get the money out of politics, fund elections using public money, and move towards more proportional representation (but not full PR).
Presumably effective altruism should be about moving the biggest lever to effect the most positive change, and there's no bigger lever than the federal government. $400 million is money that can move elections.
Is it? Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign, and he didn't get the nomination. He spent over $100 million in Florida going for Biden, but Florida went for Trump, and went for Trump at pretty much the amount people thought was plausible before Bloomberg spent anything. It seems to me that money in politics, if not entirely wasted, has an extremely unknown impact on results.
Meanwhile, if Bloomberg had spent $500 million on, say, mosquito nets, we can say with some certainty that many, many lives would have been saved. That's the whole point of effective altruism: to find things where we can say with a high level of certainty that $X gets us Y result, and then identifying the best out of those options in terms of dollars per utilon. Political spending is the opposite, a world where you can drop half a billion dollars and be unsure whether you got anything of value for your dollars.
Besides all that, what exactly would be the benefit of getting "money out of politics?" How many lives would it save? Why should I expect that "getting money out of politics" would improve the world more than, say, eradicating Polio or fighting Tuberculosis?
Bloomberg's focus was diffuse so of course the money whisked away into the aether. I'm saying such amounts of money could fund a single issue campaign that has populist support: election reform.
The "most effective" aspect of "effective altruism" doesn't necessarily entail investments with high certainty, but "great effect". This includes high certainty and moderate results, but could also include low to moderate certainty but great results.
> Why should I expect that "getting money out of politics" would improve the world more than, say, eradicating Polio or fighting Tuberculosis?
For all the reasons that has caused and continues to cause suffering: better representation at the federal level leading to better climate change efforts, decreasing the number of pointless wars, more effective policies for poverty and homelessness, better healthcare. These are all populist policies that captured politicians avoid with a ten foot pole.
So you're right that there's less certainty of total success, but the payoff for winning could be huge, and even partial success could have significant downstream effects for generations to come.
>better representation at the federal level leading to better climate change efforts, decreasing the number of pointless wars, more effective policies for poverty and homelessness, better healthcare. These are all populist policies that captured politicians avoid with a ten foot pole.
How certain are you that the election reforms you are championing here will actually lead to those results? Lets say we get money out of politics (somehow) and lets say you make representation in the US (one country of many) more representation: we add a few dozen senators, gerrymander all the states. Does it follow that we then get a solution for climate change? From one country getting more representational? This will reduce pointless wars? This will reduce poverty and homelessness? I'm not seeing the path from A to C here. Do you think the only reason the US federal government isn't doing these things already is because of money in politics and a lack of representation?
And perhaps Bloomberg's $500 million to get himself the nomination was "too diffuse" to matter (citation needed, but all grant it). But his $100 million in Florida was intensely focused on one outcome: electing Biden. And I can't say it had any noticeable impact whatsoever. Whereas if he spent that $100 million on mosquito nets, we're looking at a conservative estimate of 28,500 lives saved. That's 28,500 people with mothers and fathers, with families and lives and hopes and dreams saved from death. 28,500 people who will go on to work in their communities, produce things of value, contribute, and raise the next generation: among them will be entrepreneurs who will create jobs and wealth for their communities, bright people who may become engineers or scientists, and plenty of ordinary people who will enrich the lives of their communities in their own way. That's a lot better than the nothing Bloomberg got for his $100 million.
I'll put it to you straight, I don't think $400 million has much of a chance at getting money out of politics: for one thing, you'd need to overturn Citizen's United, and unless Supreme Court Justices are more bribable than I think $400 million will get you jack-squat in that department. And changing our system of representation to be more, well, representative will require changing the Constitution: how does $400 million get us the buy in of 2/3rds of the state legislatures? And if it can, then what stops the people who do like money in politics from spending $450 million on it?
> Do you think the only reason the US federal government isn't doing these things already is because of money in politics and a lack of representation?
The reason the US is not *more effective* on all of those issues and more is indeed due to money in politics and poor representation. I'm not even sure why this would be controversial. Why do all politicians who get elected leave multimillionaires even if they entered broke? The "revolving door" is a term for a reason [1].
> But his $100 million in Florida was intensely focused on one outcome: electing Biden. And I can't say it had any noticeable impact whatsoever.
"Electing Biden" is not a single issue. Biden had a platform which consists of dozens of issues, hundreds if you count his past record. That's not $100 million put towards a single issue.
> I'll put it to you straight, I don't think $400 million has much of a chance at getting money out of politics: for one thing, you'd need to overturn Citizen's United, and unless Supreme Court Justices are more bribable than I think $400 million will get you jack-squat in that department.
The court isn't strictly necessary irrelevant. Congress also does not need to overturn Citizen's United, and Congress can also decide how many justices sit on the court.
Furthermore, $400 million is the pool of money in the effective altruism pot as it stands. If this got any kind of traction at all, that number would easily and quickly triple. There's a compounding effect you're ignoring here.
Yes, big gambles have big risks, but also big rewards. I think the pandemic has been a game changer for swaying public opinion, and for opening up people's minds to different possibilities. If any time is ripe for sweeping change, it's now.
>The reason the US is not *more effective* on all of those issues and more is indeed due to money in politics and poor representation. I'm not even sure why this would be controversial.
I'm not even sure why you would be so sure. Citation needed, I guess? I think we just have very different priors vis a vis why Congress does some things and not others.
>The court isn't strictly necessary irrelevant. Congress also does not need to overturn Citizen's United, and Congress can also decide how many justices sit on the court.
Court packing is pretty unpopular: how are you going to overcome that?
>Furthermore, $400 million is the pool of money in the effective altruism pot as it stands. If this got any kind of traction at all, that number would easily and quickly triple. There's a compounding effect you're ignoring here.
I think I'm ignoring it because it doesn't exist? At this point you're basically saying that if a charitable giving organization chose to shift focus and become a political advocacy organization it would somehow triple donations? There's a lot of political advocacy organizations out there already with donor bases, what makes you think people would give EA more money if they changed their entire focus? It's far more likely the pool would shrink precipitously as their donor base is alienated. I mean, if tomorrow UNICEF decided that instead of focusing on helping children around the globe they were going to focus on electoral reform in one country that a lot of their donor base would decide to donate to a different organization that was still focused on helping children.
> I'm not even sure why you would be so sure. Citation needed, I guess?
I would think that all of the countries that serve their populations better, and the clear disconnect between the policies that Congress pursues vs. the positions that are actually popular among the people. You can see that now with Afghanistan: the media and political elites are decrying the pull-out, but Biden is doing what the people have wanted for at least 10 years.
> Court packing is pretty unpopular: how are you going to overcome that?
That was only one option I presented, a last resort. What has Congress' approval rating been for the last 20-30 or so years? If the people had a chance to elect a congress whose sole purpose was to make Congress functional and popular going forward, and court packing was the only obstruction, I think public sentiment would be clear on that point. There are legitimate concerns with that, but they could be addressed.
> At this point you're basically saying that if a charitable giving organization chose to shift focus and become a political advocacy organization it would somehow triple donations?
If the position were popular enough and the confidence in the organization were sufficient, sure.
> There's a lot of political advocacy organizations out there already with donor bases, what makes you think people would give EA more money if they changed their entire focus?
Are there political advocacy groups pushing for what I'm talking about? How effective are they?
> I mean, if tomorrow UNICEF decided that instead of focusing on helping children around the globe they were going to focus on electoral reform in one country that a lot of their donor base would decide to donate to a different organization that was still focused on helping children.
Sure, but effective altruism is rationalist-aligned. If this avenue were truly rational on a cost-benefit analysis, then I expect many people can see the logic behind it.
Not that I think I've quantified anything remotely well, I've merely sketched out the rough argument for this course. I doubt anything less than an accounting of the probabilities would actually convince you, but I'm not going to do that here. I will simply stand by my claim that it's entirely plausible that pushing for positive political change in this time of turmoil could yield better outcomes than individual pursuits in the long run.
Bloomberg isn't exactly an outlier here. Well funded campaigns routinely lose. If you want to talk about single issue campaigns rather than politicians, just look at Prop 16.
I'm a little dense, so is Nate Silver showing two people on opposite sides of an argument, each jumping right to a conclusion, neither doing any cost-benefit?
Over the past year I've adopted a heuristic. If you ask somebody "does X cause Y" and their answer is "there is no evidence that X causes Y" without any further context, then I assume some level of malice.
Why? Because a) they answered a different question than the one I asked; b) they didn't acknowledge that they did that; and c) they are acting-as-if they answered the question I asked, which they didn't, and they know they didn't, which means they believe they're deceiving me.
If they were sincere, they might say something like "Well at this time we don't have any evidence that X causes Y, but it's worth investigating". Or "Well at this time we don't have any evidence that X causes Y, but based on first principles it's reasonable to think it might". Or even "Well at this time we don't have any evidence that X causes Y, but based on first principles, it's reasonable to think it doesn't"
They might say: "Well we don't have any evidence that it does, so really, who knows". But overwhelmingly, in my experience at least, when you ask "does X cause Y" and someone says "there is no evidence that X causes Y", they are very strongly trying to make you think "X does not cause Y" without actual evidence of it.
Now I'm not being a stickler for evidence. In fact, another one of the heuristics I've come to believe in the last year is that evidence is way less useful and more prone to bias and manipulation than people think. It's more, like, a mismatch in the confidence level. If you ask a question and someone's answer is "there is no evidence for your hypothesis", then the honest disposition is to be incredibly uncertain about the question and every potential answer. But that's not what I see. What I see is, most of the time, "there is no evidence for your hypothesis" being said as if it's a confident statement that there will never be evidence for your hypothesis.
If this strikes you as too confrontational, or too obstinate, or otherwise unacceptably irrational, I have an alternative formulation for it, and I will use the object level example from (25)
Me: "Hey does wearing masks all the time fuck up childhood development?"
AAP: "There is no evidence that wearing face masks all the time fucks up childhood development?"
This is the heuristic alternative:
Me: "Ok, so, does wearing masks all the time _not_ fuck up children?"
The only honest answer to this question, assuming their previous answer was also honest, is "there is no evidence that wearing face masks all the time _doesn't_ fuck up children". And once you juxtapose those two non-answers together, they cancel out the connotative implication that "your hypothesis is wrong" and return you back to "we don't know so I guess make some guesses based on first principles and factor in heavy uncertainty"
Another another way of thinking about it: this is like a Watson selection task. If I want to know does X cause Y and someone answers "we have no evidence that X causes Y", that tells me nothing. The correct way to invalidate that hypothesis is not "we have no evidence" but rather "we have counter-evidence". It's to say "well actually here's a bunch of studies that show that X definitely doesn't cause Y". But very few people think in this instinctive falsification mode, and they get snowed.
It's a very good point. In fact, there is no evidence (or sometimes – not enough evidence) that X causes Y is a standard phrasing in medicine and it is supposed to tell that we simply have no evidence so it is unknown. However, it certainly pushes people to wrong conclusions. It just adds more to cognitive burden and unless you are very careful, it is easy to just to wrong conclusions even though the author didn't mean to.
There is virtually never "no evidence". There is almost always *some* evidence for both sides of any proposition worth debating. Possibly very weak evidence, worth dismissing in most practical cases. But mostly, people saying "no evidence" mean something along the lines of "no proof".
So the question is, do you need proof in order to act? Sometimes you do, e.g. if you are planning to punish someone for a crime in a rule of law society. But often it is reasonable to act on the basis of evidence short of proof. And everyone does this at least some of the time.
If you've identified something as a controversy where it would be reasonable to act without proof, then the person saying "there is no evidence" is trying to fool someone. Very possibly themselves.
What you need to prove in order to prohibit something is where this point intersects with the recent posts on the FDA. There is a push to make everything either mandatory or prohibited (see also the deep cuts: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/06/everything-not-obligatory-is-forbidden/), and it's easy to push the evidentiary requirements around when you're really motivated to make something mandatory or prohibited.
It brings to mind the old days and discussions of 'gay conversion therapy'. "There is no evidence that any conversion therapy works [across the general population, possibly with unwilling participants, to statistical standards]." That means it must be *prohibited*. Of course, compare to weight loss programs. Or alcoholism programs. Lots of people are fond of pointing out that these things mostly don't meet those statistical standards across broad populations... but approximately no one jumps to, "...so we must prohibit them!" After all, they didn't start out with a major political reason to really really want to prohibit those things....
This problem is exacerbated a hundred-fold by the fact that the standard way to announce "We did an experiment as to whether X causes Y, and the experiment didn't show that X causes Y" is to write "We found no evidence that X causes Y (p > 0.05)." The sane way that a normal person would express this is "We found evidence that X does not cause Y," but for some reason the scientific community is in love with p-values and Popperian nonsense. See https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/doctor-there-ar.html
I'm really surprised so many ppl are surprised or can't understand why these public health officials (and many policy peeps in other areas) avoid believing, often by not looking, cost-benefit analysis. If you took public health/policy cost-benefits seriously you'd upset and alienate your friends/peers/felloe partisans so you manage to figure out a way not to (and you aren't a sociopath so u can't just lie all the time).
I can't be the only one here who felt they had way less friends and was far more isolated than they wanted to be *because* I couldn't bring myself to believe the views that would make me acceptable to my peers and at other times tricked myself into ignoring evidence to retain social connections.
Fuck, I'm pretty sure 80% of philosophers are delibrately choosing not to think about trans-gender philosophy bc they in some sense realize/suspect coherence is incompatible with the list of statements they'd lose friends etc for endorsing[1]. And I wouldn't be surprised if any number of us here aren't busy doing the same thing about aspects of the role the sequences/Yudkowsky have in rationalism.
So yah of course ppl avoid doing C/B analysis across the board ...anyone who did would basically end up with the kind of views expressed here (in lvl of hereticality not necessarily content) and find themselves pushed out of both power and good graces of friends.
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[1]: No, I don't mean some crazy anti-trans view is right. I just mean that most philosophers at some level realize taking a close look at philosophy of gender is quite likely to lead you to a perfectly humane and sympathetic yet unacceptably heretical view like what I and I think Scott believe: that trans-men aren't men on the traditional usage/meaning of that word but that just means we should change the meaning (ppl > dictionaries). Or that any 'gender' not traditionally recognized by your society (perhaps and none of the above) is better understood as a strongly felt attitude about gender instead.
Cancel the claim about the sequences...yes I think they choose to project a kind of Messianic/salvation attitude about rationality rather than...you know...a rational one but I guess that's not a severe enough break ppl can't just be quite about it.
While it's true that pragmatic considerations like one's social standing can override truth-seeking, I think the surprise perhaps comes from thinking the experts are better people in general than the rest. One expects experts to not fall prey to lesser considerations like status.
China isn't "smashing" anything. Is Weibo down? Is Ixigua down? Is WeChat down? Is China's tech sector going to be a smaller percentage of the world tech sector in a decade? Over the past year or so, China has at last started to address real problems that exist in mainland society -a bloated education sector, a bloated property sector, declining population, low wages among large employers, etc. Some moves in this direction may be misguided, but one actually has to demonstrate that they are before presuming this. Many people in other countries would kill to have a government with such agility in setting priorities.
I don't know how reliable the PhD skepticism result is, but I can see a possible explanation, along the general lines of Dan Klein's work. He found that, when an issue was linked to group identification, the more scientifically competent someone was, the more likely to agree with his group's position, whether that meant believing in evolution or not believing. His explanation was that whether you believe in evolution has no significant effect on the world in general but a substantial effect on you, via your interaction with the people around you, making it in your interest to believe what they do. The more sophisticated your understanding, the better you are at talking yourself into what you want to believe.
Similarly here. If you have some reason, social or personal, to want to be skeptical of vaccines, it's easier to ignore the "all expert opinion says they are safe and effective" argument if you know you are in the top 2% of the population by education, hence just as smart as the purported expert opinion and so competent to reject it.
That, after all, is my attitude on issues where I reject the current orthodoxy such as the need for government or the effects of climate change.
Re: 9: This is great news for me, as I'd never heard about any of the insect apocalypse alarmism to begin with. I take this as slight evidence that alarmism that never rises to the level of me hearing about it can safely be ignored anyway, and alarmism that rises to the level of me hearing about it may be relevant.
>but then suggests the solution is affirmative action for poorer students, which seems worse than trying to identify and eliminate whatever biases favor the rich.
It's definitely worse than actually identifying and eliminating the biases, but may be much better than 'trying' to do so, especially if the people in charge of 'trying' have strong incentives to not succeed (like enhanced networking with rich and powerful families if the bias continues).
That's generally a justification for affirmative action - if a bias in a selection process still exists 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, it's probably actually hard to eliminate it for whatever reason, but we could just get the same outcome as eliminating it today for free by putting our thumb on the scale in an equal and opposite manner.
Fun antecedent: I went to college with Kaitlyn Bennet and we frequented a lot of the same parties because I was friends with some of her editing team through our degree. As a person she’s actually pretty nice outside of politics and though she comes off as “crazy gun girl” she’s really just an extreme libertarian who can turn off the whole persona when she’s not on camera. Seeing her name on the prediction (5) makes me think about other people who get typecast on the Internet and how and digital architects could further structure communication or their perfect in a way that helps people avoid falling into tribalistic assumptions (if they want to) through digital communication.
The third amendment argument against the eviction ban may have been intended as a joke, but if we're to read the third amendment literally, I think they have a point.
Nice to see Bagnold getting a mention ['There Are Two Types of Dune']. It necessarily skips past a massively important contribution he made that still echoes today, the formation of the Long Range Desert Group. This group was a small bunch of disparate and hardy souls whose mission was to carry out deep penetration, covert reconnaissance patrols and intelligence gathering missions from behind Italian lines in the N African desert in WWII. It also assisted the fledgling SAS, formed by Sir David Stirling, [the 'Phantom Major'] in their more piratical, action orientated behind-the-lines operations.
The SAS had an exchange Officer, Col. 'Charlie' Beckwith, who, thus inspired, formed 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, or Delta Force. And Delta Force, for the past twenty years, has obviously been in some very sandy places...
Regarding QAnon, I feel that one of the best cofounders to adjust for with something like that would be support for Donald Trump, since virtually every QAnon supporter also supports Trump, but not necessarily the other way around. A paywall prevents me to see what they actually adjusted for.
Something like homeopathy would be a much better choice for this type of study, since it's politically neutral. I wouldn't be surprised if there actually was a correlation with church attendance and belief in homeopathy, but at least I would trust a study on that more than this.
It's already been pointed out that Chesterton didn't actually say what's attributed to him here, but it seems to me to be trivially true nonetheless. Modern woke-liberalism is an *obvious* religion, for example; or a dysfunctional substitute for a religion if you prefer. New Age hippie crap, the Osho movement, Yud-worshipping rationalism for some of the people here, parts of the environmental activism subculture: all this shit is occupying a mental niche which doesn't disappear just because you remove the belief system that slotted into it, and I think the increasing frequency of generalized anxiety is basically just the product of leaving the niche empty. Most people can't manage without a faith, just as they can't really cope with liberty. This is one of the big flaws of any rationalizing project; just look at the French Revolution, for example. What a catastrophe.
Regarding the insect apocalypse article - when I see thing like this, my bias flagging sensors go up immediately. Sometimes appeal to authority and credentialism is so dang obvious, why do journalists bother?
The original "alarmist" is described as such: "Dave Goulson, a professor at the University of Sussex and one of the paper’s co-authors. Goulson was a relatively unknown English biology professor at the time, but rapidly became the public face of the crisis narrative."
The contra scientist is described as such: "Manu Saunders is a prominent entomologist, and recipient of the Office of Environment & Heritage/Ecological Society of Australia Award for Outstanding Science Outreach."
Re Vaccine hesitancy by education level: for someone in my social media feeds, the interesting thing was not the high hesitancy for PhDs, it was that Masters degrees have the lowest hesitancy. This person took that as a sign that people with Masters have learned high ego but have not gained the understanding of how much they don't understand [full disclosure: I have a Masters degree and two Pfizer shots]
My four month old is terrified of face masks. In every other respect he is the most easy-going baby ever, but if a person wearing a face mask gets too close he suddenly starts screaming.
Re 25. So we have different standards for different claims - for some, we require proof, for others, we require refutation. But isn't that just textbook Bayesian reasoning? If we assign a high prior to X, we start out believing it, and will go on believing until there's strong enough evidence to the contrary.
If that's the case, the problem is not people using a wrong (irrational) process, but rather assuming too extreme priors. I also think it would be hard to tie the prior, in an empirically significant way, to "what we want to believe" apart from the ingroup consensus - and ingroup consensus seems to be a sensible prior...
Throwing money around is a really good way to cheat basically any metric, and correcting for all the specific ways that metrics can be cheated is very hard. It's much more effective to just adjust for net worth (not income, which people rich enough to really be a problem here basically don't have anyway & which is at least somewhat associated with skill) than to try to adjust for anything else. This isn't much of a burden on the rich, because another thing money is really good at buying is options (and, well, insulation from any and all burdens aside from the ones generated in your own head).
This sounds familiar; I used to play the same game, but notably one could challenge a word and then try to draw a connection, Maybe we called it "Africa"?
Yeah, I briefly considered getting it, but I'm worried most people would interpret it as a political thing ("oh, weak liberals are terrified of anyone who doesn't wear a mask")
Thanks for explaining the reference. All I could come up with were those "I wear no pants" Dockers commercials from 10 years ago.
On a related note, I actually asked GPT-3 to generate the second act of the play, and the results were ..disturbing.
"The results were ...disturbing".
I do have to ask, what did you expect? Sounds like GPT-3 got it right!
I mean it isn't that bad. I just occasionally see a weird yellow sign on the walls and some bum that looks like a zombie appears to be following me when I walk outside.
Do you think that bum could be either a night-watchman at a church or even a church organist? Either is very bad!
Everyone who watched the first season of True Detective already has done their research on the Yellow King and Carcosa. :)
“Take off your mask.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yiSH35KgBbQ
@ 1:25
Is there a simple explanation for people who don't get the reference? What is the search term I should Google? (I assume "I wear no mask" isn't going to be helpful.)
The book is The King In Yellow. It's a cosmic horror story that involves a play that drives people insane.
There are a few quotes from the play scattered through the book (from the first act, which doesn't drive people insane), and the quote on the mask is one of them.
> It's a cosmic horror story that involves a play that drives people insane.
Oh, it does a little bit more than that :-)
The specific stories that involves the King in Yellow are "Repairer of Reputations" and "The Yellow Sign"
Solution: Quote some other reference from King in Yellow, trust that people who should know can make the inferential step.
R.e. diets, what if the following are true:
1) there are precisely two different kinds of metabolisms that humans can have. Call them A and B.
For people with an A metabolism, low glycemic index diets are totally correct, easy to maintain, and lead to healthy weight regulation, while if they try a high glycemic index diet, they'll constantly be hungry and not really lose much weight.
B is exactly the opposite: only high glycemic index diets work, while low glycemic index diets don't let them lose weight and leave them miserable.
2) literally nobody in the populace believes or suspects that 1) is true
In this case you should expect:
- some people will have tried the 'correct' diet for themselves and will talk it up to the moon
- many other people will try this diet and have it fail miserably
- anyone doing analysis on this would reach the conclusion "low glycemic diets don't work any better than high glycemic diets. For some reason some people seem to lose weight but we can't figure out why"
Does anyone else get the feeling like we are kind of living in this world?
The best 'general purpose advice ' is, i think, "have excellent self-knowledge", and yet i get the impression that most people run around with the idea that either:
- everything is determined by luck and so there's no bother trying. (this one seems really common)
- that there is something wrong with them, personally, that prevents them from accomplishing even simple goals like weight loss (This one seems very common too)
Has anyone else noticed this? It doesn't seem to me like 'most people are trying various strategies to accomplish their goals and failing because of biases or inaccuracies or goals beyond their level' - i get the impression most people feel more or less pushed through life by forces beyond their control, and that this is generally taken to be 'the standard state of affairs' for most people.
am i wrong?
> am i wrong?
No, it pops up in many spiritual texts, such as the gnostic Gospel of Truth:
25. Whoever lacks root also lacks fruit, but still he thinks to himself: "I have become, so I shall decease---For everything that (earlier) did not (yet) exist, (later) shall no (longer) exist." What therefore does the Father desire that such a person think about them self?: "I have been like the shadows and the phantoms of the night!" When the dawn shines upon him, this person ascertains that the terror which had seized him was nothing. They were thus unacquainted with the Father because the did not behold him. Hence there occurred terror and turmoil and weakness and doubt and division, with many deceptions and empty fictions at work thru these.
26. It was as if they were sunk in sleep and found themselves in troubled dreams--either fleeing somewhere, powerlessly pursuing others, or delivering blows in brawls, or themselves suffering blows, or falling from high place, or sailing thru the air without wings. Sometimes it even seems as if they are being murdered although no one pursues them, or as if they themselves are murdering their neighbors since they are sullied by their blood.
27. Then the moment comes when those who have endured all this awaken, no longer to see all those troubles--for they are naught. Such is the way of those who have cast off un-acquaintance like sleep and consider it to be nothing, neither considering its various events as real, but rather leaving it behind like a dream of the night. Recognizing the Father brings the dawn! This is what each one has done, sleeping in the time when he was unacquainted. And this is how, thus awakened, he comes to recognition.
Gurdjieff put it much more succinctly: he insisted that everyone is asleep, and very much not in some metaphoric way.
Akrasia seems very related to this, though I think the various spiritualities are pointing at something far more subtle and pervasive than that.
THANK YOU these kind of sources are exactly what i wanted to better understand
i still very much want to help other people wake up, but i'm wondering if this desire is itself a kind of being asleep
I'm just a dabbler. I brought up Gurdjieff, but there's something off about him. "Ye shall know them by their fruits": there are Gurdjieffian cults, and they sound nasty. I recommend reading the Bhagavad Gita, the Ashtavakra Gita, and Idries Shah's Learning How to Learn.
As though Hinduism doesn't go sour.
Well, the Bhagavad Gita is basically a praise of war. It does, of course, have other parts.
If you're going down that route I'd recommend "The Word" allegedly by the Buddha, or possibly "The Gateless Gate". Some of the Daoists had really original diet plans, based around "the toxic creates the anti-toxin".
All of these "traditional sources" have context that we don't really know, much less understand. Many of them have political subtexts that were a lot more central to their message than any dietary stuff. E.g. many of the Kosher laws are based around medieval Jews fearing that the folks they bought food from were scheming to poison them. The original rules in Deuteronomy were aimed at suppressing the cults of competing gods, several of which had their religious foods (either favored or forbidden).
And why are wafers in the Roman Catholic mass required to be made from wheat?
> Bhagavad Gita is basically a praise of war
No, this is off. In the broader context of the Mahabharata, it is made very clear that war is to be avoided, just not to the extreme of pacifism. Even in chapter 2 in the Gita itself, when the song of God properly starts, the exhortation to Arjuna is to bear the suffering of having to kill a good chunk of his family and respected mentors in battle by recognizing that suffering as a transient illusion, along with the claim that death is impossible ("Life cannot slay! Life is not slain!").
He is not enjoined to rejoice in the passions of battle, as a true "praise of war" would do.
Yes, having recently read it, the most that can be said along those lines is that it is a defense of the regrettable and tolerable necessity of war, and even that is closely tied to the context of a single specific war.
"And why are wafers in the Roman Catholic mass required to be made from wheat?"
It has to do with what is known as "valid matter".
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20040423_redemptionis-sacramentum_en.html#Chapter%20III
"1. The Matter of the Most Holy Eucharist
[48.] The bread used in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of decomposition. It follows therefore that bread made from another substance, even if it is grain, or if it is mixed with another substance different from wheat to such an extent that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, does not constitute valid matter for confecting the Sacrifice and the Eucharistic Sacrament. It is a grave abuse to introduce other substances, such as fruit or sugar or honey, into the bread for confecting the Eucharist. Hosts should obviously be made by those who are not only distinguished by their integrity, but also skilled in making them and furnished with suitable tools.
[49.] By reason of the sign, it is appropriate that at least some parts of the Eucharistic Bread coming from the fraction should be distributed to at least some of the faithful in Communion. “Small hosts are, however, in no way ruled out when the number of those receiving Holy Communion or other pastoral needs require it”, and indeed small hosts requiring no further fraction ought customarily to be used for the most part.
[50.] The wine that is used in the most sacred celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice must be natural, from the fruit of the grape, pure and incorrupt, not mixed with other substances. During the celebration itself, a small quantity of water is to be mixed with it. Great care should be taken so that the wine intended for the celebration of the Eucharist is well conserved and has not soured. It is altogether forbidden to use wine of doubtful authenticity or provenance, for the Church requires certainty regarding the conditions necessary for the validity of the sacraments. Nor are other drinks of any kind to be admitted for any reason, as they do not constitute valid matter."
The Idiot's Shorter Guide (by me, resident idiot) is that basically we are trying to stick to the conditions of the Last Supper, the Passover (maybe? there's a lot of discussion about was this an actual seder) meal with Christ and the Apostles where it is considered that the sacrament of the Eucharist was instituted.
Just as you can't mess around with the words of institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_of_Institution so you can't mess around with the items for the Eucharist. They have to be bread and wine, and that has to be as above: bread which is wheat bread and wine which is fermented grape juice. There has been a *lot* of discussion about "what constitutes bread" etc. and decisions about "no gluten-free hosts" regularly get some people hot under the collar: 'my child is coeliac, they can't receive the Host, this means they can't participate in the Mass!'. Missus, your child can receive the Blood instead (the consecrated Eucharistic wine). 'I'm not giving my child alcohol to drink!' It's barely a mouthful, even an eight year old should not get drunk on that.
This is also why I internally screamed when I saw things some American Protestant denominations produce for their versions of the Lord's Supper: individual 'serving size' crackers'n'juice. In handy hygienic disposable plastic containers.
We had some discussion of this in our (LDS) congregation. We're not too particular about the type of "bread" used; we've been using rice chex for the wheat-sensitive kids. There was some discussion about whether it should be "broken"; we're usually particular about breaking the bread by hand instead of using a wafer. But we use water to represent the blood; originally out of caution from some supposed conspiracy by enemies of the church to poison wine or something similar, but also to comply with the "no alcohol" rule.
Thanks for sharing the Catholic position. I always find it interesting to learn more about why things are done certain ways.
The diet hypothesis seem not likely. Were there any diets that were consistently high glycemic index pre industrial rev? Why would a low glycemic index diet innately be miserable for absorption reasons, as opposed to it being miserable because it has less sugar soybean oil fried muffins?
And most people’s idea of how and why they are fat and what they can do about it is totally fucked. Thanks advertising, schools, self help books!
For one example of high GI pre-industrial revolution diets, take medieval English peasants. Primarily bread, ale/beer, and pottage (basically porridge with e.g. peas and a little fat). Some eggs, a little bit of fruit and veg, occasional meat/fish. But bread, pottage, and beer/ale were the bulk of their calories, all pretty high glycemic index. AFAIK this was fairly typical in premodern Europe.
As noted in my other reply near here, whole wheat bread and whole grain porridge is “medium glycemic index”, instead of the “high” white bread. So they’d be intermediate, although beer is high index
I would expect most diets of agricultural communities to be fairly high glycemic index, since wheat and rice both have an index above 70. Do modern diets have enough sugar to be significantly above that?
Admittedly this is from the Wikipedia article, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index#Grouping it seems like the glycemic index of “wheat and rice” is not just one thing - unmilled grains have low glycemic indices, whole / brown milled grains medium, and then endosperm only / white grains having the >70 high index. So I’d expect them to be higher than huntergatherers but lower than moderns. (And their “whole grains” were much more whole than ours, with much harsher taste and more indigestible stuff per endosperm, likely low- selective breeding as we’ve done it in the past few hundred years is powerful)
I think the main issue with this concept is that if there's some hypothetical "glycemic metabolism gene" (or set of genes, more realistically, of course), you'd expect it to correlate with *something*, likely along racial lines.
Almost certainly, one race would be more likely to have the gene than others, since this seems to be just how genetics works generally. So you'd see results like "high glycemic diets are 50% more likely to be effective for Asians" and you could narrow results from there.
It seems a little unlikely that half the population 'has the gene' and the other half doesn't and these two halves just happen to perfectly cancel each other out in studies without showing up in meaningful subgroups.
IIRC, weight watchers said that there were three or four different metabolisms, and each had a different optimal diet. The only guide they gave was a set of different diet plans you could try marked to the type of metabolism that they were appropriate for. I didn't see any real evidence that their ideas had been run through an experiment, or where they came from, but one of the diets "sort of" works for me. (OTOH, I didn't have the motivation do really do the switch until I developed serious health problems. So...no sugar, almost no starches, extra fiber.)
" accomplishing even simple goals like weight loss"
Simple? For billions of years, back to our single celled ancestors, we've faced the ever present threat of starvation. Getting enough food was a constant struggle. As such we have any number of paths ensuring that we eat and that we're hungry. Fighting against billions of years of evolution is anything but easy.
on the one hand, i think this is a really good point.
but on the other hand, compare 'losing weight' to "starting a thriving, profitable business"
you could argue that we are much more evolutionarily inclined to work together in groups towards abstract goals, but it seems to me like there are more people who've started a business than lost weight
though maybe these two things are just in different categories, and it doesn't make senes to say one goal is 'simple' and another is 'complex' given that people are different, and what might be simple for one person might be really, really difficult for another
It's sort of like exercise. Some people are exercise non responders. Even under closely supervised conditions, where they are carefully observed, exercise doesn't result in any observable changes. At the other hand extreme you have exercise super responders. Under similar conditions they experience tremendous gains. It's likely diets work the same way.
I’m of the opinion most people can just “not put food in mouth” and then lose weight.
Temporarily, sure. But after dieting some peoples caloric needs drop by several hundred calories. You couldn’t stick to eating 700 less calories for the rest of your life.
But keep in mind much like exercise non-responders it varies considerable between people.
I knew a Borgia once. I thought she was the last of her name, with no brothers to pass it on; I'm somewhat heartened to hear that there are more branches out there.
Reassuring to think that scions of that fine upstanding family are still around - though the heritability indices for murder and incest are probably low
There's a Borgia saint, St. Francis Borgia, and really when you read his background he did very well to actually live according to his vows, both in secular and then in religious life - he was a duke, then resigned and after his wife died he became a Jesuit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Borgia,_4th_Duke_of_Gand%C3%ADa
" His father was Juan Borgia, 3rd Duke of Gandía, the son of Giovanni Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). His mother was Juana, daughter of Alonso de Aragón, Archbishop of Zaragoza, who, in turn, was the illegitimate son of King Ferdinand II of Aragon.
...His diplomatic abilities came into question after his failed attempt at arranging a marriage between Prince Philip of Spain and the Princess of Portugal, thus ending a hope of bringing these two countries together, and resulting in his retirement as duke, handing his title to his son, Carlos.
...IIn 1546 his wife Eleanor died, and Francis then decided to enter the newly formed Society of Jesus, after making adequate provisions for his children. He put his affairs in order circa 1551, renounced his titles in favour of his eldest son Carlos de Borja-Aragon y de Castro-Melo, and became a Jesuit priest. He helped in the establishment of what is now the Gregorian University in Rome.[4] Upon Francis’ return from a journey to Peru, Pope Julius III made known his intention to make him a cardinal.[3] To prevent this, Borgia decided, in agreement with St. Ignatius, to leave the city secretly and go to the Basque Country, where it was thought he would be safe from the papal desires.[5] He felt drawn to spend time in seclusion and prayer, but his administrative talents also made him a natural for other tasks. In time his friends persuaded him to accept the leadership role that nature and circumstances had destined him for: in 1554, he became the Jesuit commissary-general in Spain,[6] where he founded a dozen colleges.[4] After only two years, St. Francis was also given responsibility for missions in the East and West Indies.[3] In 1565, he was elected the third "Father General" or Superior General of the Society of Jesus, after the death in January 1565 of Diego Laynez, (Almazán, Spain, 1512 – January 1565).
His successes during the period 1565–1572 have caused historians to describe Francis as the greatest General after Saint Ignatius. He founded the Collegium Romanum, which was to become the Gregorian University, advised kings and popes, and closely supervised all the affairs of the rapidly expanding order."
American connections!
"Parishes are dedicated to St. Francis Borgia in Chicago, Illinois, Sturgis, Kentucky, Washington, Missouri, Blair, Nebraska, and Cedarburg, Wisconsin. ...The Jesuit-founded city of São Borja, in southern Brazil, is named after him.
Saint Francis Borgia Regional High School is located in Washington, Missouri."
Looks like he had really great PR - he was probably as lecherous and treacherous as the rest of 'em
Were he lecherous and treacherous there would be records of illegitimate children and nasty deeds. He had the opportunity to take advantage of secular life to live as luxuriously as he wished; a Spanish duke related to the royal family and with other relatives highly placed in the Church.
Like I said, PR to die for (like many Saints past and present)
Assuming everyone is bad is no wiser than assuming everyone is good.
Women can also give their last name to their offspring.
Re Cuomo, it's certainly true that the sexual harassment allegations were trumped-up. The moral I draw from the story is that if you run a 20-million-person state as your personal fief and abuse your staff until they quit, very few people will stick around you for more than a few minutes once it's clear you're toast. Sexual harassment was the solution to a coordination problem.
This, everyone hated him but he was too powerful for them to attack individually.
I hear a lot of people saying this, but I feel like there isn't enough consensus that, if true, it would be really bad. Sure, Cuomo deserved to go, but "if elites don't like someone, they make up false allegations as an excuse to get rid of them" is a really bad system of government!
I suspect it's more "if elites don't like someone they don't overly examine allegations against someone as an excuse to get rid of them".
The allegators were mostly mid-level staffers, not elites in any normal sense.
Yes, the elites were clearly crocodiles.
I think we have some clear examples of people weathering worse accusations (Trump, Kavenaugh). I think (if elites orchestrated this all to oust Cuomo) it’s probably closer to “Elites want to oust someone who is widely disliked for reasons that the elites can’t get behind, so they make up allegations so they can oust him for reasons that are consistent with their image.
I think there's a study to be written in who weathers accusations and why.
IMHO the only solution is to come out fighting, to never concede an inch (ie the Trump, Kavanaugh, Clinton strategy).
The question of interest to me is why Cuomo was willing to roll over, in a way that these three were not. Personality-wise he seems in the same camp, and the Democrats (admittedly a somewhat different part 25 years ago) were willing to support Clinton.
Which makes me wonder how much is Jacob's original point -- that most of the people who would be expected to support Cuomo have reason to hate him at a personal level. Maybe not enough to lie against him, or to take a dive for him; but certainly enough to remain silent when the sharks attack him.
In other words, this is all about personality and much less about ideology or principle; and anyone hoping to cash in on it via a repeat against someone who isn't so universally loathed will see the same outcome as the attacks against Justice Thomas.
Does Bork fit into the same mold? Could have weathered it except enough people remembered his Nixon role and were unwilling to forgive that? My guess is yes.
The resignation of Melissa DeRosa was a turning point. Cuomo is certainly stubborn and self-aggrandizing enough to fight this to the bitter end, but when his inner circle of aides started abandoning him, it was over and even he could recognize it.
Seems simple enough to me: Trump and Cavanaugh are Republicans, Clinton was in the 1990s. The Democratic establishment cannot tolerate credible allegations like this in 2021, and no politician can stay once he loses the support of his own party.
Justin Fairfax is still in office. If I recall correctly, it was around the same time as Al Franken, and the allegations were worse, the evidence was stronger, and the calls for resignation louder. For that matter, Biden has multiple allegations against him - but he hasn't been 25th'd yet.
I think the Franken/Fairfax split illustrates the real thing that decides whether someone gets forced out. Franken was in a safe district, so his replacement could reliably be expected to come from the same party. But Fairfax is in the swing state of Virginia, and the allegations surfaced at the same time as Northam's blackface scandal, so him resigning would have actually presented a threat to the balance of power - and he was allowed to remain. Realpolitik wins every time.
Virginia is to the left of Minnesota.
Counterpoint : Biden
"The question of interest to me is why Cuomo was willing to roll over, in a way that these three were not."
The choice was to jump rather than be pushed? He was going to run for a fourth term in 2022, but between the nursing homes affair and now these accusations, that would never fly. Even if he clung on to the bitter end, he gains nothing and only increases the ire against him. Falling on his sword means he can clear the way and, by appeasing those who want him gone, gives him a chance to still be involved somehow or somewhere in Democratic politics. He probably knows where some bodies are buried, so to speak, and has built up a network of connections that, while it didn't save him now, once the publicity has died down and after a cooling-off period so it will be safe to be seen in his vicinity once more, will remain useful.
Cuomo had more immediately problems. He was about to be impeached by the NY Legislature.
I don't think that's the system, It's more that Cuomo and his predecessors have set up a profoundly corrupt and undemocratic political system in New York State such that the only way to get rid of him was to make it clear to the Albany power brokers that the writing was on the wall.
In some sense, yes, before these allegations Cuomo was popular and so these allegations were magnified (I wouldn't say fabricated -- there is true and troubling stuff there, it's just a much less big deal than say Harvey Weinstein and wouldn't suffice to get most popular politicians expelled from office). But Cuomo's popularity was contingent on the political and media environment that he created! For instance, Cuomo is notorious for promising to support popular things and then blocking or slow-walking them -- marijuana legalization, congestion pricing, gay marriage, etc. -- while blaming it on other people with the connivance of his allies.
So I don't think you can say "there was a neutral media environment in which Cuomo was popular and then a biased/false media environment in which he was unpopular". The media is wrong about everything all the time and you can't separate the coverage that people receive from the power that they wield and the relationships that uphold it.
This is by no means a *good* system of government but I don't think that, conditioned on New York State working the way it does, forcing Cuomo out on these allegations makes it worse.
There was something about the Giuliani mythos which may have impacted Cuomo's trajectory also. After 9/11 when Giuliani was mayor and made his reputation standing up to disaster, so to speak, then when he was involved with the Trump administration I think he lost a lot of standing in some people's eyes. Then when Covid hit, here was another New Yorker, this time governor, who was standing up in a crisis. Mario Cuomo, his father and also former governor, had a lot of standing, so there was Giuliani mythos plus generational Cuomo mythos and people wanted a leader/savior.
But the progressive wing of the Democrats in addition to the DSA are making inroads in NY and state legislature seats in addition to Congressional seats have been at risk. Cuomo would be a liability to moderate Democrats trying to defend their seats, in a way that Kathy Hochul will not be, since apparently she is also a moderate Democrat.
I think he stayed as long as he did partly due to mythology and they cut him loose when a) the mythology dissolved (nursing home deaths, sexual harassment) and b) when the rest of the NY party had to consider what they'd lose if they supported him. I think you are right about the system there.
What is the true and troubling stuff in the Cuomo allegations? I'd agree the breast-touching allegation specifically would be troubling, but that seems really unlikely to be true to me. Everything else I've heard about seems like plain harmless banter spun to look like something worse. Maybe I missed something.
There's a lot of nonconsensual touching, and the stuff about getting the cute state trooper transferred to his detail so he could creep on her. I don't think anyone should go to jail for it or anything but if an upper manager at a large US company acted like that, they'd get reprimanded and potentially even fired, and with good reason.
If Cuomo had set up the governor's office such that people could get their concerns addressed by him and his staff without going public, maybe that would have been a better remedy and he would have gotten less handsy and apologized and it would be fine. But again this is why I don't think you can separate the sexual harassment allegations from Cuomo's whole deal. He built up this whole edifice to make it career suicide to criticize him, so the *only* way to get him was to go public and fight it out in the media.
All the nonconsensual touching I heard about (setting aside the hand-under-blouse breast-groping) were things like putting an arm around someone's waist in a picture, or kissing someone on the cheek as a greeting. I realize not everyone is on the same page about that stuff, but seriously, get a grip. We've gone way overboard characterizing such acts as "harassment". I'm not much one for kissing on the cheek either, but I just fucking go along with it and don't make a big deal of it when (a usually older) someone initiates it. It of course depends a lot on specifics (e.g., if the person explicitly asked them to stop), but I simply disagree that things like that are "good reason" to reprimand, and certainly fire, someone, in absence of these negative specifics. Yes, we all know that that's how it goes in large US companies. Doesn't mean it isn't stupid.
It's possible that some of the allegations do claim that they had previously asked him to stop - I don't think I've heard so but I could've missed it. But given how coordinated and dishonest other aspects of this appear to be, I'd be reluctant to take the word of these accusers on that too. Some people said some things. A lot of those things now appear untrue or intentionally trumped up. I'm inclined to disregard their claims and trust heavily in my prior which would be that he probably would've stopped if asked directly, but that he probably wasn't asked directly in the first place since most people do just go along with such things so as not to appear cold.
People go along (or went along) with such things with Andrew Cuomo so that he wouldn't destroy their careers and reputations, which he was perfectly willing to do whenever he felt slighted or threatened.
Some of the allegations you've brought up would indeed be troubling, had they occurred. I stand corrected on that point. It's the "true" part that I still think doesn't apply, or at least I think we don't have sufficient evidence evidence to make that claim without qualification.
It's worth remembering that the nursing home thing didn't just go away. There was an ongoing impeachment investigation when he resigned. According to this article they had already accesses 500k pages of documents.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cuomo-exit-isnt-stopping-push-for-answers-on-nursing-homes
My (not particularly well informed) take on Cuomo is that he was going down for COVID in nursing homes, but once the writing was on the wall, MeToo came in and stole the kill.
I don't think that this is particularly system, because I would prefer the public reason for ousting someone to be the same as the actual reason. But it worked this way because everyone involved (including Cuomo?) thinks that MeToo should have more wins.
I'm confused about the nursing home thing - although it was really bad, I think the period of creepy Cuomo idolization was after he made that decision - what was the process by which people who weren't against it at the time switched to being so against it that it brought him down?
Trump lost, so Cuomo was no longer needed as the most vocal and visible anti-Trump-on-COVID governor. They were never in favor of dead grandmas in nursing homes, but making too much noise about the issue was something evil Trump voters did. Good Democrats can’t be seen parroting Republican talking points in an election year.
But now it’s 2021 and Cuomo has outlived his usefulness.
Looking through the timeline here: https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2021/03/a-timeline-of-cuomos-handling-of-covid-19-in-nursing-homes/175185/
Cuomo's nursing home policy was in effect from March 25 - May 5. A lot of people thought it was stupid and Cuomo was pressured into reversing it.
That a lot of people died as a result of Cuomo's policy wasn't initially clear. The reported data didn't show that New York had disproportionately many nursing home deaths. During Fall / Winter, data irregularities in nursing home deaths were ironed out and the reported number increased from 6,600 to 15,000.
Cuomo didn't start going down until the evidence became public that his policies weren't just stupid - they actually killed thousands of people.
That Cuomo had likely killed a lot of seniors was definitely circulating in right wing sources much earlier. It just took until fall/winter (conveniently post election...) that the evidence became so overwhelming that Democrat friendly sources couldn’t reasonably continue ignoring it.
Cuomo leaving office for sexual harassment also keeps the nursing home issue out of the news, which possibly protects the other Democratic governors that implemented similar policies.
Cuomo also covered up the deaths.
The nursing home issue was mainly being raised by Republicans (who are a shrinking minority in the legislature and could not have mounted an impeachment on their own), and easy enough for Cuomo to deflect blame to the health department should it have become an issue of bipartisan concern.
There's no way to deflect blame for MeToo.
Well said. Plus the nursing home thing is not a culture war issue where everyone has to stand up and state their opinion.
> and easy enough for Cuomo to deflect blame to the health department should it have become an issue of bipartisan concern.
Really? How could Cuomo deflect blame for passing legislation that protected the corporations that run those homes from liability?
I don't think Cuomo was ever "going down" for the nursing homes thing. The nursing homes decision may have been dumb, but it was not corrupt and it was consistent with the panic at the time that hospitals would be overrun.
What got Cuomo is that he made enemies to his left. The most important of his accusers had a political motive for revenge. Alone, that may not have been enough. This got started at a time when Cuomo was being very critical of anti-police movements, strongly opposed increasing taxes, and was starting to reduce Covid restrictions while politicians in the city wanted him to keep them going. That gave the accusers some influential allies to Cuomo's left. Obviously the Republicans would go along with anything that got rid of Cuomo.
Finally, Letitia James, the AG, clearly has ambitions to run for Governor, but Cuomo was planning a run for a fourth term. The AG report is dramatically biased in its view of the evidence. She saw a way to get rid of her principal opponent and took it.
Cuomo has had enemies to his left for nearly his entire career. Zephyr Teachout and Cynthia Nixon both got a third of the primary vote against him in his re-election campaigns. (I don't believe there was a left campaign during his initial election - just the "rent is too damn high" guy.) I don't follow a lot of left communities, but I've always hated Cuomo for his "idiosyncratic" take on transit, which involves last-minute cancellations of good projects, to be substituted with attention-grabbing bad projects with his name on them.
Several people have pushed back against my statement that COVID in nursing homes was a big enough issue to big down Cuomo. I still think that Cuomo would still have resigned / been impeached / lost the next election without the sexual harassment allegations and would not have resigned / been impeached / lost the next election if his only scandal were the sexual harassment allegations.
From a purely legal standpoint, Cuomo did lie about the number of deaths that occurred in nursing homes, even after the DOJ requested the information. There is an obstruction of justice case that could be made here.
Democrats were starting to turn against Cuomo. On Feb 12, 14 Democratic state senators called for an end of his emergency powers. [1] One allegation had been made by that point, but the allegations weren't widespread until the end of February. [2] Of course, Republican criticism was more frequent, sooner, and more extreme.
Causing the deaths of thousands of your constituents is one of the worst things that you can do as a politician. Even in our highly polarized environment, scandals can cost about 10 percentage points (short term?) and being a terrible person can cost an additional 10 percentage points (long term). My source for these estimates is 538's analysis of Doug Jones's victory in Alabama. [3] Since New York is both less partisan [4] and more elastic [5] than Alabama, Cuomo could have lost to a Republican in 2022, especially if the national environment favored Republicans [6]. Even if Cuomo held on in New York, he would be a drag on anyone associated with him, which would encourage his party to turn against him.
Once the party did decide to turn against Cuomo, then they chose the reason why. Instead of making this "Who's the worst for COVID?" they instead fit it into the MeToo narrative. I don't think that this is a good system of government, simply because it is dishonest. But I don't it is as bad as a system where a small number of people can ruin anyone's career by making unsupported claims, which is Tracey's description of what happened.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/12/andrew-cuomo-new-york-nursing-home-covid-deaths-leaked-recording and https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/alessandra-biaggi/senator-biaggi-and-nys-senators-issue-joint-statement
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/timeline-accusations-york-gov-andrew-cuomo-calls-resignation/story?id=76207242
[3] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-shouldnt-assume-roy-moore-was-an-outlier/
[4] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-red-or-blue-is-your-state-your-congressional-district/
[5] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-the-house-districts-that-swing-the-most-and-least-with-the-national-mood/
[6] Midterms often favor the party out of power.
IDK, I read the report and if it is true the allegations seemed very well substantiated, with text message records and multiple witnesses. And TBH, if I were making up harassment claims I would probably go with something a little more explosive than stuff like "my boss told me he'd like to ride a motorcycle into the mountains with a woman" or "my boss asked me if I could fix him up with any of my friends". OTOH, I'm also quite sure that if Cuomo had more allies these allegations wouldn't have gone anywhere or been investigated.
The well-documented claims are trivial and most people would laugh them off if the media reported them verbatim instead of as generic "sexual harassment." The serious claims are not well-documented and seem unlikely to be true.
China isn't destroying its tech industry; it's destroying independent internet biz-to-consumer companies. It's still struggling to build an entire chip-fabrication ecosystem, and is clearly going to completely own opto-electronics in the near future (since approximately 100% of grad students in the US working in opto-electronics are from mainland China).
China's "tech smashing" is transparently easy to understand.
Recall that China recently banned for-profit tutoring, and teching kids under the age of six the school syllabus. China's leadership is worried about the country's low tottal fertility rate and the implications for population, and therefore China's power, in the second half of the century.
"Video games are spiritual opium": young men, get off the internet cafe screen and interact with women.
Likewise, the social media and fintech app curtailment are aimed at reducing shopping and other alternatives to making babies.
These policy announcements are not mysterious at all. China will do anything except the things that really make a difference: rasing the retirement age for urban residents, revoking the hukou system of residence permits, pensions, free healthcare (especially for children and mothers), and eliminating the gaokao.
TL;DR: "tech smashing" is just another strategic action in service of the policy, "increase fertility".
The cost benefit analysis thing (item 3) is HUGE.
After 50+ years of trying really hard to give people the benefit of the doubt, I think Scott's point "missing a developmental milestone" is correct.
It's not just public health people, and it's not just cost-benefit; it's everything everywhere.
It's an inability to even conceive of the fact that the world is imperfect and tradeoffs are always necessary.
For example you may, if you have had an especially good political education, be aware that after any proposal the immediate response should be "compared to what?"
But when were you ever presented with this in history class?
Black slaves treated abominably? Sure -- but compared to what? How were white laborers treated? What were death rates like for sailors on slaver ships?
Colonialism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? How was the local system treating women/gays/the poor/everyone before the colonials took over?
Capitalism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?
Ultimately I think there's an even more basic developmental flaw at the root of this which I call one-dimensional-thinking. This is a form of cognitive dissonance, an ability to maintain in the same mind the idea that something may be good along one dimension while simultaneously bad along a second dimension. Thus we get people apparently sincerely incapable of both appreciating the comedian part of Bill Cosby's life while also deploring the sexual behavior part.
Incapable of admitting even a single good thing in the presidency of Trump (or Obama or Clinton).
Incapable of seeing the past in all its (very high dimensional) variety.
And incapable of conceding that a policy they like (medical, political, ecological, ...) might have some downsides; or vice versa for a policy they don't like...
When you're incapable of even conceiving of the world in two dimensions, your problem is not that you don't know how to trade-off type I vs type-II errors, or how to perform a cost-benefit analysis; it's that you don't not believe these things even exist, and automatically assume anyone who raises them is an ideological enemy who is driven by the usual isms and hatreds.
The demon-haunted world is real; it's even more depressing and irrational than Sagan ever imagined; and it's where 90%+ of our fellow citizens live (including a goodly fraction of those who read this web site).
I don't know where I got it from, just that I got it from somewhere and it changed my thinking profoundly a decade or so ago: Saying things like "human life can't be calculated in money" might sound nice, but just means the calculation will be based on intuition instead. It doesn't mean there won't be a calculation. Doing the math, or reverse-engineering the math from your intuitions, exposes your hidden calculations, allowing them to be discussed, reworked, improved, and that is important even if a lot of people have a visceral moral reaction to it that renders them unable to.
A lot of it might be attributed to a non-utilitarian ethical framework, though - convincing someone that something makes utilitarian sense is futile if max utility isn't their goal. And the examples you give seem a bit disingenuous in that it's perfectly possible to judge something without lauding the "control group", on absolute terms, and especially in regards to history you're veering into "what if" territory quickly.
On the small scale, there's "are there any reasons to keep this book?" vs. "are there any reasons to get rid of this book?"
While I mostly agree with all this, I'm gonna push back on one of them
> Capitalism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?
This is myopic thinking. Nothing truly new could ever be brought about if this is the standard. Particularly in the political arena, where situations that call for approaches without precedent arise, as history shows.
It sounds like someone in 1774 in the US saying "the rule of England bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?"
The answer is "we need to make one up ourselves, a true cost-benefit analysis is impossible here."
Well, yes. If you have a detailed and realistic plan to compare something against then you are not engaging in the fallacy of "bad compared to I don't know what".
Sorry, but I want to push back against this, myself.
Item the first, what they were saying in 1774 was "we want to go back to the system we had twenty years ago, before Great Britain raised tariffs and tried to actually enforce laws against smuggling." They were very clear that they were demanding, not only 'their ancient rights as Englishmen', but the specific rights they had before Great Britain tried to make the colonies pay for themselves.
Item the second, when they started system-building (largely after the revolution), they didn't invent a new system from the ground up, they said, "Look at this set of systems: Ancient Rome, England, Switzerland. These are or were all super-successful. What elements of these systems can we add to what we were already doing in order to be able to survive without British protection?" What they were fundamentally doing was trying to copy elements that had worked well in the past, rather than invent a new future; there were very few actually new inventions (even the Constitution was, fundamentally, a matter of writing down a contract that people felt had been largely implicit before), and most of them were accidental, or a product of compromises between various groups who all wanted something tried-and-tested, but wanted different tried-and-tested things.
But America was completely the creation of a bunch of history geeks, which (speaking as a history geek) is one of the reasons why I expect we survived.
And is also why we have a Senate.
I assume the Corsican constitution was also referred to...
I don't think a cost-benefit analysis was performed that determined that shooting up the British in the Revolutionary War was the best course of action, or that the founding of America was the result of a sober consideration of the tradeoffs involved. Indeed, it seems impossible for a sedate intellectual analysis like that to reach the conclusion to go to war, any war, except perhaps a defensive one.
Sure, the Founding Fathers were not jumping off an airplane without a parachute, not really, but by the standards OP is pushing, they absolutely were.
I don't see what this has to do with my comment.
No, I don't think a cost-benefit analysis was performed. Men got angry at soldiers living in their houses, eating their food and groping their wives, so they started shooting. Partway through the shooting, they decided, "hey, we need an exit strategy that doesn't rely on our enemies cooperating," and they ended up starting the discussions that led to (first) the Articles of Confederation and (then) the Constitution.
But when they were doing their system-designing, they didn't start with the idea of 'we will build all anew according to the brilliant system our theorists derived from first principles.' They started with 'so now we will go back to what we were doing before THEY changed the rules on US, plus some historically-derived solutions to the problems this will cause.'
What needs pushing back against isn't the statement that they did a cost-benefit analysis, but they had a clear response to "the rule of England bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?" The answer was "Here 20-30 years ago!" and the question was how to achieve that without British cooperation, and their answers to that were based on solutions that had been tried successfully before by other countries.
The alternative we used--a system of checks and balances--had already been proposed by Montesquieu. But I don't think you can hold the American Revolution up as the gold standard for a morally justifiable revolution.
I am not saying Capitalism is perfect, far from it. I am attacking the WAY the arguments against Capitalism are structured...
Marx, for example, was perfectly willing to concede the many achievements and virtues of the bourgeoisie. It's his acolytes unwilling to concede these achievements that have my contempt.
To add to this, you seem to be demonstrating my point -- assuming that the goal of ANY statement is to make a point; whereas I see the goal of a statement is to understand the world.
If you're being intellectually honest, then how can you have opinions about these things if you don't know the context, don't know what the alternatives at the time were? Of course most people don't care about being intellectually honest...
Your OP is not purely descriptive, it has clearly normative, making-a-point aspects ("missing a developmental milestone", [this mode of thinking] is "a developmental flaw"). I don't disagree with the overarching point, and I don't see you as an enemy. My claim is that consideration of the tradeoffs is not possible in every decision-making context (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qocmVDu3BE for a blatant example of one such context).
> If you're being intellectually honest, then how can you have opinions about these things if you don't know the context, don't know what the alternatives at the time were?
You clearly do not think an understanding of the situation down to the elementary particles was needed before decisions could be made, so the point at which one decides enough analysis was performed to know the context is somewhat arbitrary.
I would be suspicious of an analysis that claimed slavery was not so bad, which would imply that the violent acts the Americans and British undertook to end slavery were excessive. Broadly, there are some positions that no amount of analysis or consideration of the tradeoffs could convince me to adopt, and I think the same is true of you.
E.g. you think there is an analysis that could convince you we should turn the world and everyone in it into hedonium? That we should all sterilize ourselves, as the antinatalists want? Does the presence of intellectual no-go zones like that mean we're intellectually dishonest?
Which of those "acolytes" do you mean?
It's "clap if you believe in fairies" writ large. Believe in yourself (or in something else) and the unwaveringness of your belief determines the success. It precludes analysis of any kind, because that takes energy away from believing. It is the plot of many Disney films and most Americans have seen a lot of Disney. I don't blame the Disney company entirely, it is amplifying a long-running cultural trend.
I think when political or social movements in the US exhibit this behavior, the political or social context has simply coalesced around the "Must Have Faith" framework encouraged by Disney and most organized religion. The millennarian left encourages it ("Here comes utopia! Or Jesus! Or something! Believe more!").
In this environment, analysis is betrayal, so yeah.
I see this "must have faith" dogma as a consequence of a prior belief, which we find all around the world, that what is "good" is intuitively obvious to everyone, and is context-insensitive (uses virtue or rule-based ethics). Analysis isn't necessary; in fact, it's evil, because just doing it proves you've rejected the good.
I didn't notice until I started reading fan-fiction that there are almost no stories published in print in the English language in which the challenge to the protagonist is to figure out what the best action is, rather than to choose the action that everybody already knows is more-virtuous (Huckleberry Finn is one example); and I can't at this moment think of any non-fan-fiction stories in which the author doesn't take a firm stand on which action is, "in fact", more virtuous.
The entire genre of fantasy seems today to be preaching the opposite message: that the law of karma works, and that choosing the "virtuous" action magically guarantees getting the highest-utility outcome without being utilitarian. (Randel Helms, in /Tolkien's World/ p. 79, gave the 3rd Law of Middle-Earth as "Moral and magical law have the force of physical law.")
That's why there was a (poorly worded) question about that in my survey on metaphysics.
I strongly agree that you can't impose the values of the present on the past, and that there has to be comparison of like with like (e.g. women getting paid less than men - is that for the same job with the same hours etc.?)
But when you come to saying things like "sure, black slaves were treated abominably - but compared to what?" then you really are inviting "well, compared to everyone else WHO WERE NOT BEING BOUGHT AND SOLD LIKE CATTLE".
Comparing black and white outcomes *today* does need the "compared to what?" caveat, e.g. the "black names on job applications" study where it's not comparing "is this based on class as well as race, i.e. these black names are considered lower-class or ghetto, whereas an application from 'John McWhorter' will go in the "for consideration" pile?"
But when you're talking about slavery, you can only compare it to "slavery is not permissible, you cannot own human beings" even if you treat your slaves nicely.
From "Martin Chuzzlewit":
"‘And may I ask,’ said Martin, glancing, but not with any displeasure, from Mark to the negro, ‘who this gentleman is? Another friend of yours?’
‘Why sir,’ returned Mark, taking him aside, and speaking confidentially in his ear, ‘he’s a man of colour, sir!’
‘Do you take me for a blind man,’ asked Martin, somewhat impatiently, ‘that you think it necessary to tell me that, when his face is the blackest that ever was seen?’
‘No, no; when I say a man of colour,’ returned Mark, ‘I mean that he’s been one of them as there’s picters of in the shops. A man and a brother, you know, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, favouring his master with a significant indication of the figure so often represented in tracts and cheap prints.
‘A slave!’ cried Martin, in a whisper.
‘Ah!’ said Mark in the same tone. ‘Nothing else. A slave. Why, when that there man was young—don’t look at him while I’m a-telling it—he was shot in the leg; gashed in the arm; scored in his live limbs, like crimped fish; beaten out of shape; had his neck galled with an iron collar, and wore iron rings upon his wrists and ankles. The marks are on him to this day. When I was having my dinner just now, he stripped off his coat, and took away my appetite.’
‘Is this true?’ asked Martin of his friend, who stood beside them.
‘I have no reason to doubt it,’ he answered, shaking his head ‘It very often is.’
‘Bless you,’ said Mark, ‘I know it is, from hearing his whole story. That master died; so did his second master from having his head cut open with a hatchet by another slave, who, when he’d done it, went and drowned himself; then he got a better one; in years and years he saved up a little money, and bought his freedom, which he got pretty cheap at last, on account of his strength being nearly gone, and he being ill. Then he come here. And now he’s a-saving up to treat himself, afore he dies, to one small purchase—it’s nothing to speak of. Only his own daughter; that’s all!’ cried Mr Tapley, becoming excited. ‘Liberty for ever! Hurrah! Hail, Columbia!’
‘Hush!’ cried Martin, clapping his hand upon his mouth; ‘and don’t be an idiot. What is he doing here?’
‘Waiting to take our luggage off upon a truck,’ said Mark. ‘He’d have come for it by-and-bye, but I engaged him for a very reasonable charge (out of my own pocket) to sit along with me and make me jolly; and I am jolly; and if I was rich enough to contract with him to wait upon me once a day, to be looked at, I’d never be anything else.’
The fact may cause a solemn impeachment of Mark’s veracity, but it must be admitted nevertheless, that there was that in his face and manner at the moment, which militated strongly against this emphatic declaration of his state of mind.
‘Lord love you, sir,’ he added, ‘they’re so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with ‘em. They’ve such a passion for Liberty, that they can’t help taking liberties with her. That’s what it’s owing to.’"
Again absolute refusal to see my point.
The issues I am trying to bring forward (in this particular case) include
- impressment (ie effective slavery of English sailors on ships)
- where did the slaves come from (ie slavery on the African continent by other Africans)
- the nature of other political relationships around the world (eg caste relationships in India)
etc etc
You are exhibiting PRECISELY the point I am bemoaning. Leaping into the fray with an insistence that the slavery of blacks by white was sui generis, based on zero knowledge of the way the world worked, across all societies and all times, up until very recently.
This is history not as an attempt to understand the world, but history as virtue signaling.
I think her point is simply "slavery was bad and needed to be stopped", not that it was a uniquely white evil. Don't see how taking in the broader context impinges on "we need to stop slavery".
<<
But when you come to saying things like "sure, black slaves were treated abominably - but compared to what?" then you really are inviting "well, compared to everyone else WHO WERE NOT BEING BOUGHT AND SOLD LIKE CATTLE".
>>
I stated the "compared to what" that I had in mind. That is not what she said, or what you said.
History is full of horrible things that we all agree are horrible. Content-free insistence that we all, yet again, ritually assert they were awful, is, in fact, exactly what virtue signaling is.
Your priority is the ritual invocation of "THIS PARTICULAR X was uniquely bad"
My priority is "I want to understand the world. This includes particular X, but it also includes a lot of other X-adjacent stuff."
If you cannot see the difference between these two stances after my five posts on the subject, well, that's proves my point.
5% of the population see history as something to be understood, 95% see it as a cudgel with which to beat their enemies.
I didn't say the Transatlantic slave trade was uniquely evil, just that it was bad enough that it needed to be stopped. You're putting words in both my and Deiseach's mouth. I don't see how "understanding the world" clashes with even the mere "SLAVERY BAD", or how "SLAVERY BAD" implies the Transatlantic slave trade was a unique evil.
Were I to mischaracterise you as you have mischaracterised me, I would put forward that you are a weak-chinned young man who tries to disguise said weak chin with a scrubby meggle ("goat's beard" in the Hiberno-English vernacular) with a smug expression of I AM VRY SMRT on your features.
But going on the assumption that you are not, in fact, a dick-head, let me assure you that I did not come down in the last shower and I am fully aware slavery existed in many nations, many races, and many, many years before ever the Triangle Trade occurred.
I could hardly have avoided becoming aware of this, what with St. Brigid being the daughter of a slave woman, or the Epistle of St. Paul to Philemon and the part regarding Onesimus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onesimus
I am also well aware that white people, yellow people, brown people, black people and red people have all been treated shittily by each other, by different tribes, and by stranger peoples. A Russian serf and an African-American slave of the 19th century might not have wanted to swop places, and they might have found very much in common in their respective stations in life.
I still maintain slavery is wrong. Absolutely, not relatively.
I avoided discussing colonialism for the good reason that, as an Irish person and our tangled history with Great Britain, I am full aware of my biases there.
How about we both agree not to have itchy trigger fingers when typing replies? And here's a song that may be about impressment, in at least one version, The Lowlands Of Holland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OoEvqJBl6E
Why do you feel that this is something that needs to be said?
How would you feel if you were engaged in a discussion of South East Asian history and I posted "by the way the Khmer Rouge were the most evil thing ever and your refusal to even condemn it in your discussion of opening a cable and wire factory in Vietnam shows that you are 'weak-chinned young man who tries to disguise said weak chin'."
Do you think a discussion of evolution is a great locus for you to tell everyone your opinions about meat-eating? How about interrupting a discussion of the latest IBM mainframe to tell us "you know what IBM did 70 years ago? Help the Nazi's that's what! How come you aren't condemining Nazi's in between talking about the details of cache structure and branch predictors?"
I am making a point about how little context people know, even about the issues they claim to be most important to them. You seem to feel that is a great occasion for insisting on telling me your ethics.
Let's recall: these ethics are not in doubt. I do not believe you will find a SINGLE PERSON on this page who thinks "you know what we should bring back -- slavery! that really gets an undeserved bad rap"
Every one of us know your opinion of slavery, because it is exactly the same as our opinions of slavery. AND YET you feel it important to make the ritual invocation, and you feel it important to criticize me for refusing to make the ritual invocation.
If that is not virtue signaling, I don't know what is.
And that's precisely my starting point. People who cannot think along more than one dimension about anything. Thus, eg, people who cannot think about cost-benefit tradeoffs because they simply cannot get past "dying is bad, mmkk", and even worse, won't allow people who can get past that to get on with rational analysis.
"I posted "by the way the Khmer Rouge were the most evil thing ever and your refusal to even condemn it in your discussion of opening a cable and wire factory in Vietnam shows that you are 'weak-chinned young man who tries to disguise said weak chin'."
You are so right! I forgot to include the "scraggly hair" in the description!
Now, it's valid to compare the Khmer Rouge to other movements, both contemporaneous and historical.
But, if in a history class about how on balance the Khmer Rouge were Not All That Good, someone stuck up their paw and went "But reeeelllly, was being dragged out and being shot in the head just because you wore glasses so bad, compared to what? Reeeeeelllly?", then sat back with a smirk on their gob that portrayed "beat me if you can, you can't, ha!"
Then I'm going to go "Yes. Yes, it was". And if that's virtue signalling, then let me signal my virtue with a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, followed by the kick line of the Radio City Rockettes, with the massed bands of the U.S. Armed Forces conducted by the ghost of John Philip Sousa accompanying the resurrected for this occasion Red Army Choir.
That you appear unable to distinguish "some examples are not as cutting as you imagine for example using slavery as 'compared to what is so bad about slavery'" from "I'm right and any difference of opinion on this is virtue signalling" just reinforces the point I am trying to make.
"For example you may, if you have had an especially good political education, be aware that after any proposal the immediate response should be "compared to what?"
But when were you ever presented with this in history class?
Black slaves treated abominably? Sure -- but compared to what? How were white laborers treated? What were death rates like for sailors on slaver ships?
Colonialism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? How was the local system treating women/gays/the poor/everyone before the colonials took over?
Capitalism bad? Sure -- but compared to what? What's the alternative system [please cite time and place] under which you'd prefer to be living?"
Then let me take a page out of your book and be guided by your examples.
Virtue signalling bad? Sure - but compared to what? All you've done so far is claim that any dissent from your examples as above is virtue signalling, and this is bad, because it means the people doing it are big ole poopy-heads who can't handle the truth people like you see, "This is a form of cognitive dissonance, an ability to maintain in the same mind the idea that something may be good along one dimension while simultaneously bad along a second dimension."
I am not asking for any ritual denunciations. I am asking you to put your money where your mouth is, and tell us all the dimension along which slavery - and I don't mean merely the institution of it a practiced in the United States - was good. You're the one who brought this up, and I wanted to point out that sometimes a person can shoot themselves in the foot by trying to defend the indefensible.
You said something like "After 50+ years of trying really hard to give people the benefit of the doubt", so the presumption I take away from that is that you are 50+ years of age. But if all you want to do is post a contrarian take like "X wasn't so bad, heh, I'm so daring and brave and stunning because I have the Big Brain that can conceive of concepts the normies could never handle!", then regardless of your chronological age - yes, you are the weak-chinned young man with the goatee and straggly hair sitting back in the lecture room smirking about how he has come up with a stumper (that is actually something irrelevantly trivial or so old it has whiskers) that nobody else has ever thought of.
If you want to engage people in "how about considering that something may have both good and bad points?", then don't lead off with something that everyone does agree is Not Good. And if you *do* lead off with it, then back it up, don't just make a blanket statement and bask in the euphoria of your superior intellect.
Me, I'm simple-minded, literal, and concrete: murder bad, rape bad, torture bad, slavery bad, bad things bad even if done for good reasons or in order that good may come. If that makes me dumber than you and inferior NPC type person, well - I shall just have to bear up under the crushing burden of your disapproval as best I may.
It's not that they can't conceive of such a world. It's that the mental strain of constantly lying about your beliefs knowing you were letting lots of ppl die bc, if you expressed the views your C/Bs screamed were hugely important you'd be out of power in a week.
Give most ppl a statusful job ensure they know they'll lose it if they have the wrong views (likely to be replaced w/ someone worse) they'll figure out a way to believe (in some sense) what they must to keep the job.
I beg you, please write to be read more easily by a wider spread of people. What is a C/B?
Cost-benefit probably.
> It's an inability to even conceive of the fact that the world is imperfect and tradeoffs are always necessary
I'd add that it is necessary to recognise that systems have a practical ceiling, they can realistically only get so good. Nothing ever has and ever will be perfect (capitalism being a perfect example, it's just less flawed than any other system it would seem)
You claim to be making a general point but then the examples you give are very specific and very much non-random.
This reminds me of something I've speculated about, about why people refuse to treat their opponent's beliefs as a real, empirically verifiable thing. My speculation was that people don't want to understand what their opponents are thinking, because that would imply (by their own rules) that they should sympathize with them and give them everything in the world. I don't know how much this is a cause versus effect of modern American hyperpartisanship, but today the partisan Left and partisan Right act like seeing things from the perspective of some marginalized group [racial minorities/rural white poor people] should lead to you prioritizing their suffering above all else and giving them everything you can to make up for their suffering.
If you take this view, that understanding is compassion or demands compassion, then 'refusing to treat other peoples's beliefs and behaviors as a real phenomenon' is perfectly understandable. It's the old 'arguments are soldiers' (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer), this time with understanding as treason, or at least sedition. The enemy cannot have any perspective to understand. If they did, then we wouldn't hate them as much (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences). That's a stab in the back of the war effort.
This goes doubly so when you treat everyone you do understand as a Utility Monster, like they're the only people whose suffering matters. It's the old Smithian tale of the loss of one's little finger versus the destruction of China (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7267664-let-us-suppose-that-the-great-empire-of-china-with), except you really do sacrifice the lives of millions for one little finger, because it's not *your* little finger. And that means you can hail yourself as a good and selfless person, because you saved the little finger of someone else (crucially, someone you liked and could see), rather than a monster who hurt millions of people they could not see.
I believe that psychological research has established that moral licensing is a thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing); people allow themselves to be evil in the name of good, because a good person isn't evil right? I think that inability to do cost-benefit analysis arises from something similar: an inability to see evil in good, the broader consequences of an isolated good action. Yes, it is good that public health officials value the health of children so highly they refuse to let them be vaccinated, when everyone else could be vaccinated instead. But the broader consequences are disastrous, even just to the children themselves. Even without selective empathy for some people over others, people just seem incapable of seeing the evil in good. Let alone the good in the evil of seeing things from your opponent's perspective and admitting that they have a perspective at all - selective empathy, when it is there, makes things so much worse.
TL;DR: It's not a demon haunted world. It's an angels and demons haunted world, where there is no good in evil nor evil in good. And you already know which side people see themselves on in this angels and demons divide. The holier-than-thou and self-moral-licensing attitudes of the past never went away, they just found new forms of 'good' and 'evil' to infest. And the most scorching righteous fury of all is reserved for those who undermine this entire schema by engaging in cost-benefit analysis and sympathy for the devil.
Yes, I think that's a good re-ordering of my points.
The scientifically interesting questions are
(a) Why is it so important to humans that everyone around them do things the same way, and think the same thoughts. I can't answer the why as to temporal ordering and causality, but I *suspect* it's ultimately tied into the success of language in our species.
For language to work, the speakers all have to be on more or less the same page as to the meaning of each element of language, and the usual evolutionary pressures and co-options might have grown the necessity (ie evolutionary benefit) of thinking and performing language the same way to generic thinking and performing.
Insofar as other primates possess rudimentary language (based much more on hand gestures than on vocalization) I'd be VERY curious as to how they handle differences. Does the "speech" of one chimpanzee tribe match that of a tribe far away?
If you teach one gorilla a particular version of ASL, and a different gorilla a somewhat different version, do you see anger and fighting between the two of them over the "right" way to say something?
(b) I think the above mostly gets at the root of your "Ideas are soldiers" point; is that ultimately the same phenomenon as my "one dimensional thinking" (ie people or concepts can only be rated on a line of good vs bad, they can't be rated as good in terms of X and bad in terms of Y) point? I honestly don't know. I can clear clear elements of similarity, but also differences.
(c) The most tragic aspect of all this is education has clearly had zero effect. The same people who have been taught through twelve years of school and four+ years of college that colonialists were bad for making zero attempt to understand the world view of the inhabitants of foreign countries gleefully engage in the exact same practice, with the exact same condemnation of those who are attempting to act as explainers and bridges, and with zero self-awareness of the identicality of their behavior.
This is very very depressing, and it makes me wonder if the project is, quite literally hopeless. There has never been a society, so exposed from birth onwards, to an insistence on at least superficial tolerance and diversity, and yet none of it seems to stick at anything beyond the shallowest skin-deep. All that is achieved is the construction of a different type of outgroup ala https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ .
I had previously seen the "Can I believe it"/"Must I believe it" quote about motivated reasoning attributed to Tom Gilovich, not EY for what it's worth.
Elizer Yudowsky might not have been the ONLY person to say that, but he did say it:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9agCMMd7k7Hy37aCx/contaminated-by-optimism
s/-Wayne Gretzky -Michael Scott/-Tom Gilovich -Eliezer Yudkowsky/
I'm probably being paranoid, but the "degrowth" movement genuinely scares me, not so much for what it is now but for what it could become.
The "rich countries sacrifice so that the poor can develop" is very noble, but if literally all you care about is preventing climate change, then actively sabotaging the development of poor countries, or even deliberately trying to lower their populations through war and famine seems like a more effective approach. I obviously think this would be evil, but the very alarmist rhetoric around climate change makes this seem worrying plausible in the near future.
The sentiment isn’t new, and the modern environmental movement just to me seems to have less of the sort of influence for something like degrowth than in the past. If all the things that could happen, the current environmental degrowth movement doesn’t seem likely to cause that
Well, if the environmentalists are right, it's not like much development of poor countries is possible: if they really try to develop the same as the First World, civilization would collapse due to severe environmental degradation.
If they're right.
Just go on reddit when any sort of news about the amazon is posted, and you will see very clearly this sentiment among the users there.
Moloch would never allow anyone to implement anything resembling degrowth
This. I'm not really worried about degrowth like, ever actually being seriously implemented. The less abstract calls for degrowth become, the more obviously unpopular they will be received. But this is why I'm worried about green technology and sustainability advocates getting sucked into the degrowth narrative, it could waste decades of time just like the anti-nuke movement did.
Good point, bad ideas are dangerous even if they're doomed to failure, because they distract from good ideas
Yes but I think this one is interesting because it goes beyond the general rule. There's a lurking battle of high-level generators of disagreement. A friend of mine who studied environmental science dichotomized his classmates across the following distinction: those who think we should colonize Mars, and those who don't.
I'm obviously in the "colonize Mars" camp. To those opposed, however, there's something instinctually wrong or aesthetically abhorrent about human civilization spreading across the cosmos. The metaphor of humans being like viruses jumping from host to host, while mildly charming to me, is (understandably) grotesque to many others, but to the degree where they really stand in opposition to it happening.
So I think you can't just tell degrowthers it won't work. I don't think their position comes from pragmatism, I think it's something deeper.
I think there may be a third camp: "Colonize Mars, but only after implementing Communism." This is what Asimov seemed to believe, judging from the Robot series.
What about a generalization of this, colonize Mars after we're actually ready to do it? I like the point that somebody made - judging by the propaganda hysteria, our most pressing current problem is apparently the climate change, which essentially boils down to us being unable to solve a problem with 0.01% of our atmosphere. Meanwhile, Mars happens to have a problem with 100% of its atmosphere.
after implementing communism, we will need to re-colonize and re-populate Earth first. Communism is cancer.
If the economic system were not capitalism it would be much easier to implement degrowth. A fully planned economy could expand and contract as needed.
However, 'degrowth' is often an important part of capitalist economy too. Attempts on the part of the capitalist to supress wages is a degrowth from the worker's point of view. So really we need to think about terminology and class when looking at an issue like 'degrowth'.
Probably reducing wages does reduce growth but it’s not degrowth.
Why's that?
Does lowering wages lower GDP per capita?
It does, right?
GDP is goods and services, wages are compensation for services, so by lowering wages you are lowering the total value of services being performed.
Example of why GDP is a kinda shitty metric, now that I think of it.
Yes. And slows the velocity of money.
Well, we have historical precedent for a Molochian approach to degrowth:
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2011/jan/26/genghis-khan-eco-warrior
Paywalled. The main idea is that killing people is degrowth?
Basically, although I was mostly joking.
The point is that people are fine to make sacrifices, as long as they're sacrificing other people.
I think there is a strawman argument that Kelsey makes a compelling case against, but I worry that the fundamentals of degrowth aren't really explored - and are important for us to actually consider. As someone who has spent years in the rationalist and EA circles, and a year exploring post growth, I offered a few perspectives to balance out Kelsey's on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/HiNaryan/status/1423368067917045760
Would love to continue the conversation with anyone who feels curious :)
Count me as curious, though I am somewhat pessimistic about this particular cause. You don't seem to have public DMs on though, or I'm just too much of a twitter noob.
Just enabled public DMs, feel free to message me! I also hope to write the Steelman of post growth for the EA forum sometime soon too!
Either England and the Republic of Ireland will sink by 2060, or they will escape the tyranny.
On a related note, I look forward to the triumph of the Alaskan Independence Party, and to Ohio's annexation of Wheeling.
Joke's on Ohio, if you ask me.
OT, but Evan Þ, this is your time to shine, commenting on the ÞALA.
Maybe if i start my political career now, I could be Alaska's first president.
As London is still pictured, it's probably safe to assume Englthas not somehow sunk around it
I can't figure out how northern California will become "YB".
My guess is that's Yerba Buena, the old name for San Francisco, and riffing off the various "split up California" projects - see eg https://www.library.ca.gov/collections/online-exhibits/splitting-ca/
I'm just annoyed they didn't go with JE. Long live the great State of Jefferson! All hail her Double Cross!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)#/media/File:Jefferson_state_flag.svg
Jefferson is a state designed to *exclude* San Francisco. The move of eastern Oregon into Idaho is part of that same project, but they'd also like bits of northern California (but not the Bay Area).
Oh certainly. I'm just sad that even in the imaginary future this chart posits, Siskiyou County is still in thrall to the "big city folk" down south.
By the by, I don't know if you meant for this "Related: “the metacontextual hyperamericas to which we have never not owed our allegiance”" to link elsewhere but currently it's going to the same tweet you linked above
This is confirmed by the spreadsheet (from the Twitter thread) that lists all the states' names and abbreviations.
https://t.co/BM3qAxBPh6
Might be connected to the Yerba Mate Wojak girl, the queen of the SJWs on Reddit, seem fitting for Calif
How come Northern Ireland gets to vote in the US election in 2060? There are sufficient Irish in America, and some Americans in Ireland, that we here in the Republic should also have a vote! Particularly if Scotland, Wales and Devon/Cornwall also have votes.
Either us and England sank beneath the waves (which is strange, because if we go, the North goes as well, we *are* one island) or there's something funny going on.
I figure most of the U.K. breaks away from the U.K., and then joins the U.S. for some reason, leaving only most of England.
I suspect some dodgy Brexit deal or similar foul play 🧐
Result either way - though I expect some upland areas will escape the deluge a la 'Book of Dave'
From the twitter thread below that image, I found this unreasonably amusing:
"The "red planet goes blue" jokes amused the (now very old) millenials on the late night shows for a solid five years after everyone else stopped finding them funny"
Also, I think I need a list of all the jokes I'm missing from that picture. I hadn't even noticed Alaska was missing until I scrolled down in the twitter thread and saw the about 5 billion people mention it (apparently it got traded for Siberia).
As significant parts of Great Britain seem to be part of USA, we need a new name, how about Airstrip One? Not very catchy I know
Florida appears to have been truncated, which I interpreted as being due to sea level rise.
Or South Florida gained independence. Or got conquered. In a world where Kashmir is a U.S. state, anything can happen.
bugs-bunny-saw.gif
The image of Baghdad from the post contradicts the map from the linked article (and the common sense too): the city cannot be densely populated inside and change into some vaguely drawn fields immediately outside of the gates. If anything, higher-value crops would be grown to supply the city (so orchards, not fields) and there should be plenty of buildings too, especially along the roads.
It the aim of the wall is protection then most sizeable buildings would be inside. You probably don’t want to be outside. There may have been some temporary buildings. Eventually over time a city or town extends its walls.
Farmers probably farm what they can on whatever soil is available.
I agree that *sizeable* buildings would be inside. I'm saying that the outside would not be flat but would contain orchards, palm groves, channels, huts etc and not only flat fields. The farmers would want to plant perishable high added value stuff as close as possible to sell to the city dwellers. The palm groves are explicitly mentioned in the article. See the map too, there is a lot of stuff around the walled city.
While I agree that there would be shanty towns and fields outside the walls, you wouldn't see orchards within bowshot of the walls, since orchards would provide cover to attackers. Any field close to the walls is getting burned come wartime, and that's kind of fine for annual crops but not for trees that take a decade before they start producing.
Right, but that would only be a relatively thin ring around the walls (one bow-shot being 50-100 yards generally and the diameter of the city being more than a mile)
As an example, this is 16th century Paris https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_de_Paris_vers_1550-2.jpg . The security situation wasn't good at all and still we see houses (especially along the roads), mills, churches, trees outside of the city walls.
See the ACOUP posts referenced below, but TL, DR: buildings are cheap and walking many miles to and from your field or orchard every day is an expensive waste of a farmer's time. Unless there is an enemy army marching over the horizon as you speak, farmers live and work and keep all their stuff in buildings as close to their fields as practical. So do the people who regularly trade with farmers. When, and only when, the enemy army approaches, they grab their highest-value stuff and retreat to the city.
Also, if you've got a city-sized market and labor force nearby, farmers farm what they can on soil they have extensively modified to maximize its productivity of high-value goods. This looks nothing at all like an empty field, or even a broad field of standing grain.
ACOUP has 2 posts complaining about The Lonely City as it appears in fantasy: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/lonely-cities/ This seems to a typical example, but portrayed as "historical".
In the original Conan the Barbarian stories, on two separate occasions, Conan encounters a Lonely City and reasonably assumes it must be abandoned. (Both times he's mistaken; they have a magical food source inside the city walls. Oddly, neither incident reminds him of the other.)
Barbarians were notoriously slow on the uptake
Conan's no dummy. I think it's probably a continuity error because the story that takes place later was written first.
Or the magical food has psychoactive properties that makes him forget stuff - most magical food does something like that
"The author wouldn't be lazy enough to recycle the same plot, so it must actually be abandoned this time."
(Apologies to the late Robert E. Howard, I actually did enjoy the Conon stories - pulpy, entertaining, and hilariously influential on later Fantasy, they probably had at least as much impact as Tolkien)
To be fair, the two stories do have different plots. What's going on inside the city is very different.
Thanks, this is why I love this community. One picture of a “lonely city” and here you are with this quite interesting and informative link.
Yeah, these are great posts. Being charitable, we can say that this depicts Al-Mansur's fantasy - or dream - which probably didn't include boring details. In any case no human being could have seen the city from that angle, Baghdad, unlike Minas Tirith, not having a huge mountain nearby.
The 'artist's impression' doesn't even *do* vaguely-drawn fields, it has the city (which is plainly beside a river) plonked down in a sandy-brown desert. Even if you don't include farmlands and pastures, there would be natural wild greenery in that environment as in this photograph:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baghdad_island_and_Tigris_river.jpg
The 1883 map included in the article shows, besides the Tigris, a network of canals, and before the city was even built, the location was selected in part for its climate:
"We are told, for instance, that when Mansur was hunting for his new capital, sailing up and down the Tigris to find a suitable site, he was initially advised of the favourable location and climate by a community of Nestorian monks who long predated Muslims in the area."
I agree that it's in part due to ignorance of what would actually lie on the outskirts of an ancient city, but also that probably it is in part unconscious "well it's in Iraq, that's the Middle East, sand and deserts, right?"
The article even says two gates were right by a canal!
I'm also confused by the dates, the link here says 'c. 800 AD', the source says 'Baghdad in the 10th century'
I can imagine a forced clear band around a walled city, for siege reasons.
Seems unlikely during that period though.
Even a forced clear band wouldn't go unused; it would be pasture.
I don't understand #23 (the PhDs and anti-vaxx attitudes thing). I can't read the table as Scott describes it. PhD's in January have neither the highest nor lowest numbers (and I'm not sure what the numbers are).
I can see that the numbers for the PhDs are changing less than the others but you're right on the other counts.
Microdosing and color blindness, several articles like this: https://www.psypost.org/2021/05/some-people-with-color-blindness-report-improved-color-vision-after-psychedelic-drug-use-60749
As a colorblind that took psychedelics, I saw no improvements at all (same results on colorblindness tests). We should be a bit wary of results like that as people that become suddenly not colorblind are going to be way more vocal than people that just stayed colorblind.
even if the effect is rare is it not still astounding? I was under the impression colour-blindness is permanent...
Related to the Russian Atlantis, I read this recently which suggests that propagating an imagined, more glorious national history is more common than you might expect: https://newlinesmag.com/essays/jesus-was-turkish-the-bizarre-resurgence-of-pseudo-turkology/
GREEKS ARE NOTT TURKS THEY ARE YUGOSLAV. DONT DISRESPECT ANCESTOR.
It's extremely common in smaller nations. Turkmen book Ruhnama says that Turkmens invented the wheel and metalworking, Kazakh scientists have proven that Adam was a Kazakh, Kirghiz are the most ancient people on Earth. And Russia was the first, greatest and only empire on Earth up until 18th century when it was devastated by a giant flood and the entire world history was falsified. Why would you *not* expect this kind of folk history be common?
Flood in 18th century? Pffft, amateurs. We in Ireland go right back to Noah's grand-daughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessair
About micro-dosing causing visual distortion in colorblind people, there's plenty of serotonin receptors in the retina (as well as in visual cortex), so it could interact with colorblindness, although I'm skeptical of such anecdata. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300908418303213 The retina is incredibly complicated, so I doubt anyone can provide an answer that's very scientifically constrained. Assuming the report is true, a way to make progress on this would be to compare the effect of microdosing on different kinds of colorblindness, but I doubt the effect is consistent enough to feasibly get enough statistical power to make real progress, given the rarity of different kinds of colorblindness.
I had the same thought when I read this. "Wait, which kind of colorblindness? There are many." Whenever I see something like that, where the imputed effect lumps a diverse population together without realizing it and then makes a blanket claim, I'm skeptical of the claim.
#10: I like that the author pointed out this instance scare-mongering going on at the Sierra Club. I think most people don't realize how unscrupulous non-profit organizations can be when it comes to fund-raising. They just think "oh, these people are doing something for the greater good; you can tell because the organization that employs them is a not for profit. That is good. I will give them money so I can feel good about myself."
#11: didn't they also put ship builders to death in the 1500s, because the emperor was worried about maritime merchants becoming a rival power center?
I’m a little suspicious of the idea that nothing’s happened to insects on the whole, given that compared to say 400 years ago we’ve totally wiped out many precious large swarming behaviors of insects, and turned much of their previous habitats into farmland monoculture (where some species thrive but not others) or single tree species or concrete. But short term, it makes sense not much has happened.
IRB approvals often suck, and presumptions of harm being arbitrary are generally dumb, but cotton masks have a presumption of being totally fine that is IMO entirely justified, because it’s a sheet of cotton. And n95s are also fine because it’s a sheet of plastic. It’s not like many medical professionals haven’t been wearing them this entire time. From the experimental studies I read, if you’re exercising heavily, you have to breathe a bit harder to push the air, but it’s only a bit harder and it doesn’t effect much. It is likely reasonable to subject life critical intravenous solution to a higher standard than a piece of plastic.
> cognitive distortions
Even if the data source was reasonable, phrases like “because I feel” and “everyone thinks” and “nobody but” are ... not ... indicative of any problems on the part of the writer of them. (From the supp info) https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/07/22/2102061118.DCSupplemental/pnas.2102061118.sapp.pdf Very odd study.
Re the monkey study on masks:
lol n= 15 fMRI
And yeah having infants never see faces is probably not ideal, but I suspect not really catastrophic (I’m sure you can find some culture somewhere that already does something like this, and I’m sure their kids can recognize faces and expressions just fine when they’re older. I’m reminded of one tribal culture that (it was reported) never talks to their youngest kids, and they just learn by observing secondary conversations, and they srill learn as well as other kids. I don’t know if or how often in Islamic cultures women (mothers? Wet nurses? Servants?) wear face veils in the home, but that’d be a comparison if some do.)
>I don’t know if or how often in Islamic cultures women (mothers? Wet nurses? Servants?) wear face veils in the home,
As far as I know they do not wear face veils unless there are guests, and these guests will be limited to the living room.
That's pretty much how pandemic-era face masks are used too.
>That's pretty much how pandemic-era face masks are used too.
Not really (in the context of infants seeing faces), because pre-school etc isn't really a thing there. But good luck using "strictly islamic cultures" as a control (we haven't even established strictly islamic cultures do "just fine" in any meaningful sense, and then good luck adjusting for confounders).
I think I'm confused about the dialectic now. The question is how much infants are affected by some reduction in the amount of time they spend seeing whole faces, because of either masking or veiling traditions. My thought was that most of the time, infants are inside the home, with only the family present, and during that time, both in pandemic cultures and traditional Islamic cultures, the infants would be seeing whole faces. The face coverings are only relevant for the hours of the day that the infant is outside the home, or in a public room while guests are present.
As far as I can tell nobody(*) is worried about infants seeing masked faces at home (because nobody(*) wears a mask at home); the question is whether them only seeing masked faces in daycare/preschool/wherever our culture sends infants during the day harms their development.
(*) usual disclaimers apply.
I wouldn't be so sure. Infant development is not an ansynchronous thing, where you just do #1, #2, #3 in that order and it doesn't matter how long it takes, so if #1 is delayed no big deal. Generally, infant psychological development is closely tied to physical development -- actual multiplication and differentiation of cells -- which is on a strict clock. It's entirely reasonable that if you miss some key stimulus at its scheduled point in time, development proceeds permanently along some different track, and the child never returns to the same track. Whether that is harmful or not is another question, and how harmful yet another.
I give you as an obvious example language acquisition. Babies are born with the ablility to distinguish phonemes from essentially all human languages, but lose this ability around their first birthday and retain the ability to distinguish among only those to which they have been exposed (i.e. the language their parents use to speak to them)[1]. This underlies the difficulties older children and adults have acquiring fluency in foreign langauges, and is one reason truly bilingual people have to be exposed to the 2nd language at a very young age.
---------------------
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1533
Scott brought this up in the last thread, with unclear conclusions - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2639924
I’m not really sure then. My instinct still leans towards “they’ll be fine”, especially given most kids won’t be around adults with masks 24:7, although I’m think there are some parents who are wearing masks 24:7 in their homes.
I'm definitely suspicious of anything published in Quillette that takes the form "look at these crazy liberals making such a big deal about X, when X isn't actually a problem at all!" They're often right that X is being overrated as a problem, but the Quillette schtick is usually equally an overreaction in the opposite direction - the truth is usually not that there is *zero* problem here, but rather that the problem just isn't quite as big as some people on the internet were saying (which we could probably all have realized if we put it like that).
Pushing back on the "exercise is only a bit harder", it depends greatly on the mask. If the layers can't hold their shape, the inner-most layer can get damp, at which point it tends to get sucked onto the airway, at which point you're trying to breathe through a damp piece of cloth the size of a quarter. There are better masks that don't have this problem, but expecting the typical antimasker to invest in a high-end performance mask is an amusing thought :)
The cheap masks I got at Walmart don't have this problem.
I can (anecdotally) say that there's a change in my lifetime in the behavior and population of monarch butterflies, as one example, and there was definitely a bee die-off recently. I think we tend to freak out too easily, but also not freak out enough to do anything sometimes.
For example, I keep meaning to maintain a patch of milkweed in my garden, and never get around to it.
My understanding is that the bee thing was a bit more complicated than media reports made it out to be. "Colony collapse disorder" meant that every winter, for several years, commercial honeybee colonies were having much greater population declines than they did in normal winters. But my understanding is that this was made up for by increased reproduction every summer. And it primarily seemed to affect commercial honeybees more than native bees. And it may also have stopped (or at least declined) in recent years. We still don't have a clear sense of what was causing it, which is definitely troubling, but it sounds like it was never the existential threat to bees that some reports made it seem like.
Re: cost-benefit analysis.
Agreeing with name99 who commented earlier, this is definitely not only public health people, I'd seen the exact kind of hole in argumentation with environmentalists and with anti-racists, and honestly I've seen it with edgy /pol/ dwellers too.
I have two interpretations for the cause, no idea which one is more suitable.
1. They feel that performing some sort of analysis or calculation is in itself immoral, unempathic to the victims and/or displaying disloyalty to the cause which is being thwarted or endangered. Like if upon hearing that some baby might have died your first impulse is to do a utility calculation and not become sad and enraged and whatever, something is wrong with you.
2. (perhaps more charitable/steelman-like) This occurs with people being so involved in a moral cause that even a (comparatively very small) damage to their cause, presumably a cost to extract a larger social benefit, to them seems like a massive disutility and that reverses the conclusions of the cost-benefit analysis.
You have good points. I think the part in common with all of it is the "steadfast belief guarantees results" part. People feel 1) because spending any energy on analysis takes away from the energy budget for believing (hence a betrayal). Very close to 2), except maybe independent of the cause. I think striving for "purity of belief" is a driving force behind a large number of US behaviors.
All this is deeply analyzed in Thomas Sowell's "A conflict of visions". The gist of the argument is that leftism is at its roots a belief that humanity is perfectible, which leads to a belief in solutions not tradeoffs.
If you start mentally labelling people as "solutionizers" vs "trade-off-izers" then you'll find the labels line up almost exactly with classical left/right divisions. I'm a big believer in Sowell's theories.
Not just perfectible, but perfectible by people like us.
I think it's a lot simpler than that. "Solutions-seeking" versus "trade-offs" sounds like a nice, easy division, but in reality, we seem to get mountains of skulls as a result of people who do trade-offs.
(We get them as a result of people seeking solutions as well, of course, because humans are all too prone to go "gotta break some eggs if you want to make the omelette").
And I think that's why people don't like trade-off arguments: because we start with "is it really worth spending $50,000 on a 'wonder drug' to give this dying person six more months of life that will be of miserable quality and death is still inevitable?" and we end up with "eh, who cares if seventeen hundred thousand peasants die, if they wanted to get medical treatment they should have become billionaires because you deserve the $50,000 wonder drug if you can pay for it".
Who are you thinking of when you say mountains of skulls? Most of the skull-mountain-makers I can think of in history were those who saw a shining utopia in the future, and all it required was some sort of (final) solution with not too much worrying about the costs of getting there.
Your final paragraph seems to be suggesting that healthcare should be entirely outside the normal world of cost-benefit analysis because if any is done at all, then the inexorable conclusion will be that lots of "peasants" die and that's unacceptable. In reality we use insurance to even out the peasants and the billionaires, so I don't really understand why you argue this slippery slope is a big deal.
Really, I feel like that's the basic problem with the public health community summed up in one paragraph: insisting that nobody should ever be unhealthy, regardless of cost, makes them feel morally superior and so they end up quite insanely. Other people look at the costs and say, actually, yeah, there are things that are theoretically possible to do to save one life that aren't worth doing.
Ironically there's a really simple solution for the peasants/billionaires problem. Everyone who feels that way can just purchase health insurance for their friendly local peasants, or contribute to their health costs in some other way. Bill Gates is a good example of a billionaire doing exactly that.
If you consider the great skull-pillers of the 1900's, the vast majority were profit seeing colonialists, not utopian dreamers.
The people pilling Skulls in any era is less determined by goals or idiology, and more determined by who has power, IMO.
Do you mean the 1800s? I don't think colonialism as conventionally defined had much impact in the 1900s (20th century).
By the 1900s, you had utopian dreamers like the Bolsheviks and the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge and the Maoists racking up some pretty impressive skull mountains.
The Irish Famine is a good example.
The word "perfectible" kind of gives away the game. One doesn't have to think that humans are perfectible to think improving societal conditions is good. In the US context I don't think you can call the right tradeoff-izers. These days they seem more nihilistic than anything else.
I think it's more about acceptance by their peers (or public if in public health). Excepting only *maybe* a community whose organizing principle is some kind of rationality thing (tho even there it's prob just a different effect) only a very small part of even elite members of the community will have seriously slogged through C/B analysis for the related issues.
But if you do honest C/B analysis some will be violently at odds both with intuitions and what ppl want to signal or even sound like their agreeing with the other side. And remember how we treat heretics relative to pagans.
In short building a social movement and feeling like you are part of that movement means u gotta either lie your ass off or find a psych mechanism that lets you feel good about being a member of that group even when it's screaming for something that fails C/B big-time. It's way easier to come up with a reason to ignore/disregard that C/B than it is to engage in the sociopathic level of deceit it would require to lie your way through.
Depending on who is talking, another option is 'they feel they are not experts on doing good cost-benefit analysis, it is their job to notice and draw attention to problems and a different expert's job to do cost-benefit analysis about those problems and propose policy.'
Of course, that's not a valid defense for many types of speakers and many types of claims, but I think it may apply much of the time.
Re the Chinese tech industry. The null hypothesis would be that it isn't any grand plan in either direction, but a self interested attempt to capture the money for the elites, regardless of the larger economic impact. Which tends to be the pattern in authoritarian countries whenever a new industry is successful. (To take a simpler example, someone discovers gold, digs a mine, and starts selling it, once that effort has already gone in its easy enough to move in your son/cousin/crony to take it over and give you a cut of the profits)
Not really. Where did the elites get the money from the closing down this kind of social media company and why these companies and not others.
They're destroying the companies, not expropriating them - expropriation in China has more commonly taken the form of corruption trials, I think.
I think social control is not a bad null hypothesis, but a planned economy visions is also very plausible, since that is a favourite of Communist regimes and maybe the CCP is forgetting why they shifted to communism-in-name-only
The thing about glycemic index is that it's oblivious to fructose, which is the likely main culprit in metabolic syndrome. So finding that GI is useless as an index is roughly as I would have expected.
Link to your fructose opinions?
I only recently learned that fructose, unlike every other kind of sugar, is almost exclusively metabolized by the liver, which may make it more of a problem https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/abundance-of-fructose-not-good-for-the-liver-heart
Pretty sure it's the other way around: *only* glucose can be metabolized directly by almost all cells, all the other monosaccharides are mostly converted first in the liver to something more useful.
Correct. From Harvard medical:
The human body handles glucose and fructose — the most abundant sugars in our diet — in different ways. Virtually every cell in the body can break down glucose for energy. About the only ones that can handle fructose are liver cells. What the liver does with fructose, especially when there is too much in the diet, has potentially dangerous consequences for the liver, the arteries, and the heart.
Healthline wrote a layman article with lots of references to studies comparing glucose with fructose:
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/sucrose-glucose-fructose#which-is-worst?
I got interested in this back in 2009 when I saw a viral youtube lecture by Professor Lustig at UCSF. He was a little bit fringe back then, but I think the science is moving towards his position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
This just in
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-uncovers-fructose-diet-contributes-obesity.html
A counter-argument to fructose or even simple carbs being a culprit - modern and primitive hunter-gatherers in Africa got between 10-20% of their calories from honey (Herman Pontzer talks about this in his research and in his book 'Burn' which is excellent).
On a more anecdotal level - many people who live in tropical climates consume substantial quantities of very sweet fruits throughout summer when they are in season (e.g. mangoes and jackfruits in my home state in India, Kerala) and have done so for a very long time, much before obesity was a problem.
The developmental milestones thing... reading this probably gave me the most profound insight since "OMG, when I instantiate a variable, I'm INSTANTIATING a VARIABLE", just more useful - you mean, other people don't understand these things?! Like, it's not that they just make fun of me, they haven't made it to these points? (yet?) also, about a dozen therapists, psychiatrists and people of similar ilk will be glad to hear that the effort they've put into me over the last 20 years hasn't been for nothing.
What do you mean by instantiating a variable?
I recently had an epiphany about programming, and the fact that (in Python) I am creating a THING in the memory of my computer when I declare a variable... it was basically an epiphany about the physicality of things happening inside of a computer. (I'm not using the correct terms here, but it was a massive insight for my small little world)
Your comment reminded me of this nice Quora answer by Anthony Curtis Adler: https://www.quora.com/My-stupid-professor-keeps-saying-that-strings-are-immutable-in-Python-but-I-don-t-agree-otherwise-how-could-we-1-slice-them-and-2-change-them-into-a-different-string/answer/Anthony-Curtis-Adler
People say Python doesn't have variables, but Python doesn't agree:
```
>>> x = 5
>>> def test():
... print(x)
... x = 4
...
>>> test()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 2, in test
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'x' referenced before assignment
```
"Part of the problem with education is that it tends to exacerbate these sorts of insecurities [fear of being stupid because of not knowing things' by abstracting away from the actual purpose of learning something, which is to be able to do something. Even thinking is a kind of handwork."
I've put it as "in school, people are rewarded for knowing things, not for learning them".
I'm doubtful that it's actually a developmental milestone, but it's definitely a way of thinking that a lot of people don't engage in.
I think very few college-educated people literally don't understand it, although it often feels that way! Most people who don't typically do cost/benefit analysis fall in one of two camps.
The first type rejects the framework, because of some other ethical framework they have.
The second type understands cost/benefit analysis *when pressed*, but it's just not something that comes naturally to them. They often get weirded out by probabilities and other quantitative estimates, but they become more accommodating if you use qualitative language. They all have done cost/benefit analysis at some point in their life, but in a qualitative way.
The problem with cost-benefit analyses is that they're a categorical error for anything involving ethics with many ethical framework. If you consider it fundamentally immoral to take away a person's right to not get vaccinated, any cost-benefit analysis about gun ownership is meaningless. If you think it's fundamentally immoral to put any child in a situation that kills them, any cost-benefit analysis about the rate of that happening (where the rate > 0) is a category error.
Of course the nice thing about consequentialist frameworks is that you can decide between two bad options because one will usually be better than the other.
If you consider it fundamentally immoral to take away a person's right to not get vaccinated, then that's fine, but your argument should be that it's fundamentally immoral. If you start talking about how it has a negligible impact, or bring up that unvaccinated people deserve what they get, or something else, then you're inviting the other party to respond in kind, which just ends up hiding the true point of disagreement.
Well put. I would also broaden this point and suggest that while some people have a well thought-out fundamental moral objection, that’s probably a minority.
I suspect a bigger group of people have an uncomfortable feeling which might be expressed as “I think it’s wrong to X”, but which is not part of any framework with axioms to which the phrase “categorical error” could be meaningfully applied.
I think a good cost-benefit analysis can be a way of helping people to shake out the inconsistencies in their belief systems (true for all levels of sophistication but particularly for such intuitive moralities), by exposing the tensions/inconsistencies and giving tools for prioritizing/resolving them.
At the margin this should help people to change their minds or be more sure that their mind is made in the right way, although away from the margin, of course there are many who would not change their values even when presented with a clear contradiction in their system.
The thing is that we can't progress as a society if we don't agree on things like that. For some people, taking away their right to not get vaccinated is fundamentally immoral. For me, taking away my right to go back to normal life is fundamentally immoral. So what do we do? Well, we have to see how much value we put into each of those things, and try to compromise.
Yes! We "try to compromise" in order to "progress as a society." But if compromise is not possible, as is often the case, does that imply regress? And who gets to adjudicate what/who is regressive and what price there will be to pay? In the end does it not all come down to the acquisition and exercise of power? That certainly seems to be one, if not the, primary lesson of human history - notions of moral right and social progress notwithstanding. How about this as a sort of meta-compromise, a golden one as it were: I don't exercise power - whether individually or collectively - against you and vice versa, with the understanding of course that we may simply not be able to compromise otherwise and will just need to go our separate ways.
>In the end does it not all come down to the acquisition and exercise of power?
Yes, and what's more, the real power resides not in those who carry swords, but those who get to preach in the temples after the war is over. It's they who establish what's moral and what's not. Their gods may be fictional, but the power of the "divinely inspired" words is most certainly not.
>the understanding of course that we may simply not be able to compromise otherwise and will just need to go our separate ways.
Well, this probably used to be the case until all the habitable space on Earth was claimed, so until we're able to disperse elsewhere this plan is on hold.
>until we're able to disperse elsewhere this plan is on hold.
In which case war and the establishment of new temples may be the order of the day.
> For me, taking away my right to go back to normal life is fundamentally immoral.
I'm more in the "let's compel more people" camp, but the other camp would say "the thing that is preventing us from getting back to normal isn't us, it's the people who insist on punishing you."
I initially thought this old post of Scott's had some bearing on your comment, but now I'm not sure, but it's a nice reread anyhow so whatever: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
But the statements we're talking about are usually in reference to public policy proposals, and public policy is definitely an ethical framework that centers cost-benefit analysis.
> If you think it's fundamentally immoral to put any child in a situation that kills them, any cost-benefit analysis about the rate of that happening (where the rate > 0) is a category error.
What frustrates me to no end is people who reason along these lines re: COVID, but then suddenly change their tune as soon as you propose banning cars or swimming pools.
I think what's going on is that most people will do some sort of rudimentary cost-benefit when you force them to. But, they round cost and benefits which are (in their opinion) small to zero, and then argue as if that rounding never happened and you want to kill children for fun
> Is it true that, as GK Chesterton claimed, people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything? IE that Christianity fills a useful religion-shaped-hole in people’s heads, and so non-religious people are easy prey for cults, conspiracy theories, etc? I hear this a lot, but here’s a study finding that church-goers were more likely to believe in QAnon, even after “adjusting for confounders” (remember, this is hard and doesn’t always work). The same article notes that “white evangelicals” are more likely to believe in vaccine-autism connections, moon landing fraud, etc - although I find this less convincing than I would if they just gave me the church attendance statistics without bringing race and denomination into it.
For starters, I don't think this bears much at all on Chesterton's claim -- a conspiracy theory is not a "religion", not even in the vague "God-shaped hole" sense of "a psychological construct that fills the same niche as Christianity/etc in devout believers". Qanon may be something like a cult, at least in the center of it, but the other "conspiracy theories" they cite (election fraud/vaccines/moon landing) are just single straightforward factual beliefs. Trying to get at the question of whether non-Christians or non-churchgoers are more likely to hold other "religion-equivalent psychological constructs" seems very hard, using anything like modern social science methodology, but this isn't a decent attempt.
That said, regarding this study in particular, I'm pretty sure they're just getting confounded by "broad political attitude" (and I don't believe their model successfully controlled for this). Note that Qanon, 2020 election fraud, and nefarious vaccines all currently have a heavy political valence. (And note also that their question about Qanon is a simple favorable/unfavorable, and can't get at whether the respondents are deeply involved in the more culty aspects or believe the weirder claims.) White Evangelicals are among the most heavily churchgoing demographics, and also quite right-aligned on the culture war axis. So I'm pretty sure all those answers are best interpreted as just "yay, Trump! boo, The Establishment/Deep State/whatever!" (Note that the most straightforwardly political theory, the election fraud one, has by far the strongest effect, and the least political one, moon landing hoax, has basically no effect.)
I would *really* like to see some sources on that Economist chart. It's very skimpy, to say the least, and they do some wibbling on the QAnon result: it's not "amongst white Evangelicals as a whole", it's "amongst people who had heard of QAnon, excluding 'don't knows'" and I'd interpret it as "White Evangelicals hold less unfavourable view of QAnon" rather than "White Evangelicals hold most favourable view of QAnon" - they have *negative* numbers at the top of their scale, which I am going to assume means "-80 is most unfavourable, 0 is neutral". By that score, people what never goes to church are -80 and white Evangelicals are -50 or thereabouts, so it's not clear what the heck they're measuring exactly. It's a "least least favourable" view rather than a "most favourable view".
Re: the microchips, autism and faked Moon landing (where at least white Evangelicals are close to the majority view on that one), I'd like to know what they asked and who they asked. Singling out white Evangelicals looks more like they want to go for the "well of course they're all redneck racists so they believe dumb conspiracy theories" angle.
Singling out white Evangelicals basically means they're singling out Trump supporters and this is really about politics instead of religion. Obviously Trump supporters are more likely to believe the conspiracy theory that paints Trump as a hero.
QAnon is a lot more religious-seeming than most conspiracy theories - most are just "the government lied about X and that's bad," but QAnon is very specifically "someday Real Soon Now, the government is going to reveal all the secret conspiracy's it's been working on to help people, cleanse the world of the satanic baby-eating elites, and usher in a new golden age." It's very messianic in its thinking - "just hold on and trust the plan, and things will eventually get better."
Also, if you're going to demand a rigorous definition of "god-shaped hole" from the study authors, you should probably demand the same of Mr. Chesterton - what sort of beliefs was he thinking of when he wrote that quote? What did he see as "filling the hole" for atheists, and would QAnon plausibly fit that definition?
Well, I googled it and it seems that GK Chesterton didn't really say that: https://www.chesterton.org/ceases-to-worship/
He did say some vaguely similar things, but the real answer might be that the claim we're studying is too poorly specified to examine in detail.
I don't think the study authors were thinking of Chesterton at all. Scott is the one who made that connection.
If you wanted to study whether religious people were generically more credulous, or something, that would require a whole different study design that avoided the political confound here. But that would still be a separate question from what Chesterton (seems to be) talking about.
As for Qanon's cult-like qualities, they arguably exist, but this study more or less filters them out. The great majority of people who have heard of Qanon aren't its 4chan-reading core audience. By asking only about favorable/unfavorable with respect to the signifier "Qanon", you filter out basically all the weird culty stuff and are left with the public understanding of the signifier -- which is almost purely "Trump good" plus "government bad". So all you're really doing is a roundabout way of asking people's opinion on Trump, and it's no surprise evangelicals are high there.
I don't think this is even a study, if I'm reading "Source: YouGov/The Economist" correctly, it's an opinion poll.
Yes, but in that case, why distinguish *white* Evangelicals? Black Evangelicals are also very religious, has anyone asked them their opinions on QAnon?
I am forced to agree that "The Economist" is using "white Evangelicals" as shorthand for "Trump voters" and the conclusion they want all us right-thinking people to draw is "Trump voters crazy loons, Orange Man Bad". This disappoints me, as I would have hoped for better reporting and less opinion-column posturing disguised as reportage from this publication.
I see it as perhaps mainly eshatalogical. Since believers already have faith in a future where all things are made right after life they wouldn't have created something like communism where the perfect society was envisioned as achievable on a timeline at a great enough cost
The woke movement seems comparable though thankfully they seem to envision far lower costs, however much things could turn out badly. The CRT classes in schools and corporations seem centered on repetition of magic spell like statements that will dissipate the white supremacy all around us by changing discourses in an evolution of post modern theory that language is the center of power
In practice this appears to mean they choose a simple "heaven on earth" magical solution to injustice rather than practical efforts to improve lives and this approach has enormous cultural power compared to equivalents among believers
Re. cost-benefit analysis ("a lot of people just never seem to consider it at all, and I’m starting to notice this more and more everywhere, kind of like a missing developmental milestone thing."):
I've spent the past 5 years studying the history of Western culture, and concluded a few years ago that a very large fraction of it can be described as a ~3,000-year-long battle between rationalists and empiricists. One of the key disagreements in this battle is about integers vs. real numbers. Western Rationalists owe most of their beliefs to Plato; and to them, only the integers are "Real" (by which they mean "unreal"), and they ought really be called "ordinals", because their primary purpose is not to /measure/ but to /order/ things (in order of their closeness to God).
In Western academia, all of the sciences but math are controlled by empiricists, and all of the humanities except economics, psychology, and linguistics are ruled by rationalists. Hence the science / humanities split, which is far wider than I think anybody else realizes, because both sides use the same words in their epistemologies (like "truth", "reality", "proof", and "knowledge"), but mean entirely different things by them. People in the humanities use these words with the same meaning they've used them for the past 2,500 years:
- Only eternal, transcendent, universal categories are "real". Races are real; you and I are not (except in Platonism, Christianity, and other rationalist religions in which individuals have distinct souls).
- Propositions are either knowledge about these eternal categories, or facts about temporal individuals deduced from eternal knowledge. All propositions are either True or False.
- A True proposition is absolutely, eternally, universally true, regardless of context.
- Knowledge consists of universally-quantified and eternally-true propositions about transcendent Forms which are either (A) divinely revealed, (B) proven (as in geometry) with 100% certainty, or (C) arbitrary cultural constructs taken as fiat. ("The sun will rise tomorrow" can't be knowledge based merely on the empirical observation that it's risen every day for at least several thousand years; this requires the deductive proof of universal laws governing its behavior. "Socrates is mortal", which doesn't appear in any ancient Greek texts AFAIK, isn't knowledge, but a fact about a temporal being which was deduced from knowledge of eternal truths.)
Scientists who venture into the humanities quickly notice their high insanity quotient, and learn to just not think about epistemology, since its importance to practicing science isn't obvious. People in the humanities rarely have any familiarity with the sciences, and are blissfully unaware that science has changed since the days of Aristotle. This is why we have post-modernism, which argues that Aristotelian metaphysics are unsatisfactory and then thinks it's refuted science. (In my metaphysics survey, 43% of respondents agreed that science claims to prove or disprove beliefs about the physical world with certainty. I haven't correlated this with Scott's data yet, but I expect this correlates strongly with majoring in humanities and/or stopping after getting a B.S..)
The humanities base their epistemology on Greek geometry. In ancient Greek geometry, there were no numbers. Nobody measured anything; lengths and areas weren't given numerically. (That's why Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem is much longer than most of the proofs we use today.) The humanities are part of the continuous, usually-dominant, rationalist school of epistemology, within which measurements are a kind of heresy. Measurements can be made only of earthly things, which are profane and misleading, and which true scholars should never pay attention to.
This applies /especially/ to measurements of value. This is why the rationalist tradition has always despised money, merchants, and utilitarianism, all the way back to Homer. (Odysseus was once accused of being a merchant; he indignantly replied that he was a pirate, which was much more respectable.) Rationalist moralities are based on some eternal ordering of categories or virtues, from the most-important to the least-important, where the most-important things have absolute priority over all less-important things, regardless of quantity or context. If the value of individual things can vary over time, then you would /have/ to use utilitarianism; no deontological or virtue-based system could work. (This is why Marx wanted a labor theory of value; as a Hegelian, he required that value be an essential property of a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time. It's also why, for most of Western history, merchants and businessmen were despised as parasites; they merely move things from place to place, or order around the people who "actually make things", while contributing nothing to a thing's value.)
That is, to a rationalist, you can't separate a thing's utility value or market value from its moral value, which must be an eternally-constant value inherited from its category rather than a product of its individual peculiarities and its circumstances.
A cost-benefit analysis, besides involving measurements of value, is premised on the belief that whether principle X takes priority over principle Y depends on the numeric quantities involved. Rationalists call that "relativism" and consider it evil. They're mentally incapable of distinguishing someone who considers numeric quantities while making a moral decision, from someone who has no morals at all. Their ontologies can't represent moral decisions as value trade-offs.
This is a super thoughtful comment and one that really gets to the heart of the difficulty of persuading people who have a sort of "folk epistemology" that draws a straight line from empirical science to transcendent categories; thus we end up with "believe the science" appeals to authority.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can really grok the absence of certainty without doing research/applied stats/ML work on your own. There's a huge need for some pedagogy that could introduce those concepts at an earlier age before certainty sets in.
The one point I would disagree with you is in the humanities; more often I think you're dealing with a group who doesn't have some conception of finding the capital-T truth, but rather making the case that things are contingently true under present circumstance (i.e. the Platonic Harvard may not discriminate against Asians, but the real one sure does). So while "race is a social construct" in the abstract, it can be essential over the course of single lifetime. The rough analogy are fixed costs in econ; fixed costs are fixed because they can't be changed *in the short run* - in the long run, anything is fair game.
Last but not least, the metaphysics questions were super interesting (and really well written) and I hope you will publish some general stats along with anything interesting that presents itself!
interesting, and totally agree that CBA and stats should be taught earlier in schools - even if an individual or culture does decide there are absolute values, sacred cows, taboos and hill to die on, at least they should be open about the decision-making process
> he required that value be an essential property of a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time
All the other stuff aside, doesn’t Marx have an orientation against essences? The German ideology, “all that is solid melts into air”, commodity fetishism, materialist, ...
Marx certainly thought that this was what he was doing in inverting Hegel's dialectic. I don't think he actually accomplished it but it was his aim.
People often make the mistake of believing Marx's own characterization of his beliefs. He said his system was materialist, and also that it was scientific. By "scientific" he meant that he could prophesize the future with 100% certainty, which is the opposite of "scientific", as science can be distinguished from religion in that science doesn't claim certainty.
By "materialist" he meant that he believed history was determined by "material conditions". But if you look at how he described "material conditions", you'll find he didn't want to measure things, but to talk about the essences of abstract classes, like "capitalist", "bourgeoisie", and "proletariat", which have eternal inherent natures, which determine a person's nature in exactly the same way Plato's Forms do. Also, like Plato's Forms, there are no transitions from one class to another in Marx's theory. Also, Marx never described the governing mechanisms of communism, and this is what essentialists do, because they don't believe in mechanisms. Like Aristotle, Marx thought that the nature of a government was strictly the sum of the nature of the Form of that government, plus the natures of the people comprising it. He never imagined that how they interacted with each other could make any difference.
Another obvious way in which Marxism is spiritualist / essentialist is in its historicism. Marx copy-pasted a lot of it from Hegel, including his certainty that revolutionary progress would move inevitably along the predestined path of History. But Hegel guaranteed that certainty by saying that the process was supervised by the World Spirit, which is just Hegel's term for God, to guarantee that things kept moving towards their predestined end. Marx said that in his system, as in Hegel's, change was also guaranteed to move inevitably towards a predestined end. This requires a World Spirit.
(There are a lot of other ways in which Marx misrepresented or misunderstood his own theory. For instance, his definition of "capitalism" describes feudalism, and is closer to "everything except capitalism" than to capitalism. Capitalism may be the only known economic system in which the owners of the means of production *don't* control them, and in which wage laborers are *not* kept by those owners at the bare minimum needed for survival, and in which social mobility between classes is high. Similarly, the introduction of money, and of a middle class, have just the opposite of the effects he claimed they did.)
I mean I could critique atomic theory by taking about the essence of atoms being false. I don’t think that’s a good one.
I generally agree that Marx made a lot of mistakes and his ideas aren’t that awesome. I think your assertions are a bit too stark and unsubtle though, but honestly I haven’t read Marx so I don’t really have much to work with.
Very valuable comment - I really want to know more about this old-school rationalist tradition and how it survived to the present day. I imagine Christianity was a big part of that.
I've often had the thought "Christianity contains [bad idea]" but never "Christianity carried [bad idea] from Plato all the way to my life in 2021."
Do you publish your writing anywhere?
Unless you derive conclusions from your observations, all empiricism is doing is counting a pile of rocks, then counting them again, and doing that over and over without any result being acceptable except "There are fifteen rocks. Second count, fifteen rocks. Nth count, fifteen rocks". Are you really going to dispute that the sun will rise in the morning because that's not an empirical observation, that is a rationalist deduction?
I think Mr. Getz is incorrect about his "science versus humanities" split, how it happened, who is lined up on either side, and what exactly he means by Rationalists versus Empiricists. "Scientists who venture into the humanities quickly notice their high insanity quotient" is just impertinence, and unless I am to assume that Mr. Getz has travelled here via time machine from the early 19th century, his valorisation of "science is simply the observable facts, that is all!" is outmoded because empiricism is a starting point and a tool but unless you do something with the observations and the facts that you have piled up, you are doing nothing more than Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill again and again and again.
Dragging in Christianity as a punching bag doesn't help, except perhaps to clarify that what was originally meant was nothing more than the old-fashioned "science versus religion" notion.
"Are you really going to dispute that the sun will rise in the morning because that's not an empirical observation, that is a rationalist deduction?"
Hume did. I'm still not sure the degree to which he was trolling, but it is important to recognize the moment when you transition from accumulating observations to boiling them down into a law because it's very easy to elide that distinction. I have been super into this lecture by Robert Sapolsky, the introduction to a freshman level human biology course he teaches at Stanford. I think it does a masterful job of introducing students to holding two difficult thoughts in their head at the same time, to wit:
1. You have to think using categories. The world is too complex and changes too quickly for you to avoid classifying events or objects as similar or different and thereby create ontologies.
2. Ultimately, the categories only exist in your mind. This is not to say that the categories don't describe something meaningful about the external world, nor is it to say that you can't share those categories with other humans, though you generally have to be very careful to make sure that you are working from a common definition. It's only to say that each of us inherits from our culture a set of ontologies, primarily through language, that filters our perceptions of the world at a preconscious level.
Biology is a weak area in my knowledge base, so I've really enjoyed these lectures. Sapolsky is very good at emphasizing and illustrating that for any given phenomenon in life, different specialties of biology will bring to bear a different set of tools, ranging in scale from the biophysics within individual cells to the ecology of the entire planet, and that none of these specialties gives you "the right answer". They're all useful but none of them possess the whole truth.
https://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA
>Are you really going to dispute that the sun will rise in the morning because that's not an empirical observation, that is a rationalist deduction?
Careful, I'm allergic to straw. Is "sun will rise tomorrow" a deduction? I'd thought it was the perfect example of an *induction* from previous empirical data.
I won't claim the humanities are infected by this school of thought, but I've definitely met individual people who are, so I'm interested in it for that reason.
And please understand, I don't take shots at religion just for the heck of it. My personal experience with the ideas op describes has been heavily mediated by Christianity (and has been negative), so I'm making a connection from their ideas to my own experiences.
I agree the presentation was pretty in-your-face, but you may be taking more offense at the tone than the content merits. Surely it's difficult to *really* dispute that attitudes in the hard sciences and its technological daughters are quite different from the so-called "softer" disciplines? And that a great deal of this revolves around the revolution from scholastic to empirical inquiry initiated in the 1600s (and interestingly largely as a result of the support of the Catholic Church for natural philosophy)?
I would have argued that the distinction is more in the role of experiment and measurement. To the modern empirical scientist, experiment and measurement are king. If we have a dozen excellent and apparently bulletproof logical arguments why an electron around a nucleus should not be stable (and we did, circa 1900, it was an absolute no-brainer) AND YET we do the experiment and find that it is stable, the empiricist says "well that's that, we trust the experiment and we reject the theory. Time for a better theory." In a scholastic tradition, we are far more inclined to believe the logic and dispute the measurement -- perhaps it was not done properly, perhaps it's the kind of river into which no man can step twice and we cannot *expect* to have repeatable measuremnts, perhaps there is some ineffable intervention (of God, say). Each of the latter is a common and well-accepted critique that can be offered from the scholastic side, and would be taken far more seriously by the scholastic than by the empiricist. Conversely, the fetishization (as it would be described) of experiment by the empiricist would baffle the scholastic: "Why do you waste your time attempting to prove what any idiot knows, from his mother wit, received wisdom, common sense, plain logic?"
And there is an excellent reason why the pre-eminence of logic and argument as the tools by which Truth is mined has remained in the humanities far more than in physics or chemistry: because the necessary experiments are far harder to do, so hard if we admitted only empirical discovery as an approach to truth we would have to settle for very slow progress indeed.
Exempli gratia, is diversity strength? Is it better to rear a child with oodles of affirmation and self-esteem, or does sparing the rod spoil the child? Are traditional (for some definition of that word) sex roles dysfunctional or not? These are all questions which *in principle* we could decide by experiment, but in practice the required conditions would be unbelievably expensive, take too long, or perhaps be unethical (considering informed consent). So we don't -- instead, we argue about them, and we tend to think the best and most persuasive argument is the key signpost for the way to the truth. (We may certainly adduce observational evidence, and plot nice graphs and such, but the plausibility of the argument is the core of our judgment of its truth, not the outcome of an experiment.)
I would also agree with you that the role of the Church in this split is ambiguous. On the one hand, the Church certainly has a very long tradition of deductive scholastic argument, and its easy fusion with neo-Platonic thought early in its history is a good example of this. But the Church also has a long history of being interested in natural knowledge per se -- praise God by understanding and appreciating His works and all that, not to mention the practical benefit of technology to the flock -- and therefore in sponsoring its acquisition.* Indeed, Christianity (and its parent Judaism) are almost unique in the degree to which they are pro-technology and pro-progress -- most other religions seem to me far more focused on acceptance of the status quo and bad luck, and in some cases are even somewhat anti-progress.
I'm inclined to think religious scholasticm and what remains of it in philosophy simply have a common root, which is the natural human tendency to believe the shadow-play in his or her own head more than external reality. We are *all* natural neo-Platonic scholastics, and genuine empiricism comes very hard -- we have to work at it, and only in cases where it has strong and immediate benefits can we sustain the effort. A carpenter will become empirical about how best to build a good chair, because direct necessity and benefit, and a society may become empirical about how best to build smartphones, for the same reason. But when the empiricism is very costly (how to rear the best children, how to pick mates, how to create justice for all) or the cost/benefits less directly felt (what is the best intervention in Afghanistan?) we revert to our natural belief in the really good argument as the royal road to truth.
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* There may also be a weird additional factor, which is that Christianity and Judaism ask us to believe in something apparently deeply contradictory: that the world is full of evil and misfortunate, as we can easily see, but also that it is all part of a Divide Plan which is through-and-through good, not the smallest detail of which could be altered without proving ultimately disastrous. We're asked to take the love of God *on faith* which means willy nilly we are required to curb some of our innate faith in our reasoning. If you practice each Sunday saying "well this makes no fucking sense to me, how God can allow such-and-such, but I guess there might be some reason that escapes my mortal mind" then you are somewhat better prepared, come Monday and in the context of something baffling about the natural world, to say "well this observation makes no fucking sense to me, but maybe there is some reason, unknown to me yet, why it is not a mistake." This practice of psychic flexibility might not happen as much with the older religious tradition, in which God (or the gods) are *not* omnipotent (or don't give a crap about people), and so the observation of evil and bad luck requires no rationalization.
> These are all questions which *in principle* we could decide by experiment.
Only if we all agree on the axioms of morality as well, which seems to be even less tractable.
"Harder" sciences also have the advantage of there no being much substantial dispute about how to interpret the results of experiments (although when they get sufficiently weird the philosophical quandaries do begin to arise, e.g. the interpretations of QM). Whereas, when the human condition itself becomes the object of study, it's always embedded in an established value system, through the lens of which the results are interpreted. The system itself isn't expected to be amended in the course of scientific inquiry, that is supposed to happen in the course of some mysterious holistic "moral progress" instead.
"This is why Marx wanted a labor theory of value; as a Hegelian, he required that value be an essential property of a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time."
Can you quote a passage from Marx where he argues anything like value is "an essential property a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time"?
Yeah, "Marx wanted an essentialist LTV" is something of a shibboleth for sloppy thinking about Marx. Marx distinguished perfectly well between several kinds of value, and he was arguably more flexible about exchange-value than classical economists, acknowledging that the amount of labour necessary to produce a thing depends on circumstances of the society in which it is being produced.
However, what I take to be Phil Gaetz's basic point - that 'empiricists' describe and 'rationalists' prescribe - is a good one. I just wish both stayed in their respective lanes a bit more reliably.
Perhaps it was implied in his zero-rating of the value provided by capitalists.
"Perhaps it was implied in his zero-rating of the value provided by capitalists."
Can you quote Marx where he says the value provided by capitalists is zero?
Even if Marx gave a zero-rating of the value provided by capitalists (assuming you can find a quote like this), that actually does not imply that _all_ value is an "essential property of a thing's nature, rather than something that could vary over time."
Ruh roh. Your username rings a bell :) Are you really going to die on this hill? Marx's entire philosophy was to encourage violent revolutions to eliminate the capitalist class, because he thought they were shameless exploiters of the working class:
"In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
Yes, because Marx was a vague and inconsistent thinker you can find other quotes where he 'damns with faint praise' the capitalist class by admitting that capitalism has created great progress, but in the next sentences he usually states that despite this small detail capitalism and by extension capitalists still need to be swept aside.
But I actually half agree with you that Marx didn't seem to totally subscribe to the essentialist value fallacy. He refers to the price of labour being set by competition in a bunch of places, for example. I've read somewhere that Osama bin Laden was someone who did subscribe to this worldview and argued that there was a kind of 'natural' price of oil dictated by its nature. On the other hand I never saw any direct quotes from him saying that either, so who knows, maybe this fallacy is only ever ascribed to people who don't actually believe it.
There is nothing faint about the praise expressed by the passage to which I suspect you're referring. ("The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground; what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?")
And there is nothing vague or inconsistent about acknowledging all those gains and yet concluding that the trade-off (optimising for extraction of workers' surplus labour in the way that e.g. the profit-apathetic feudal nobleman did not) is untenable. Trade-offs, after all, are what this whole subthread is about, no?
That's a very long-winded way of saying that you haven't yet found any such quote. If Marx argued that there was zero "value provided by capitalists" you should be able to find it quoted in his works. If you cannot do so, perhaps you are not being charitable to an outgroup thinker.
If Marx was a "vague" or "inconsistent" thinker then you should be able to find evidence of that too.
This is definitely an interpretation that some people have. Lyndon LaRouche made an entire cult/religion/political organization out of this, seeing the Rationalists as the heroes of history and the Empiricists as the villains (and I believe, destroyed the state Democratic parties of a few states in the 1970s, and made a friend of mine drop out of college and move in with the cult - and I recently read somewhere that the LaRouchies were getting China's Belt and Road project to invest in some infrastructure vaporware to dump the Congo River into Lake Chad).
#25 We got to watch this flip in real time regarding wearing masks. In March 2020, it was “we have no conclusive evidence that masks work to prevent COVID, therefore you should NOT wear a mask”. In May 2020, it was “we have no conclusive evidence that masks DON’T work, but it seems like they might, so you MUST wear a mask”.
The evidence didn’t really change from March to May, just the establishment consensus on what conclusion we ought to draw from the evidence. In both cases, openly disagreeing with this consensus was considered “anti-Science”.
❤️
I think part of the reason for the establishment consensus was a motivation to prevent regular people from buying the masks that were in short supply and arguably more necessary for health care workers. Once the shortage was over, that motivation disappeared, allowing the recommendation to switch.
I think one of the leaked Fauci emails has him saying masks don't work. It's a vague memory, though, so I could be wrong.
I don’t disagree, but that was not the logic presented at the time, and my point about “the Science” not actually changing remains true.
You may be right, but then that's hardly "following the science," is it? I thought we were supposed to be "following the science," or as Dr Steven Koonin puts it, The Science.
And if you are correct, it suggests something else rather disturbing about our so-called scientific and medical leadership. Suppose St Anthony and the rest made a decision to lie to the public about masks to ensure medical personnel had enough supplies (the man certainly is a persistent liar). So what did he expect to do when the moment came around when, you know, he was going to actually try to slow the spread of the disease? He's already declared the inefficacy of masks.
Either these people can't think two weeks in advance, or they are such consummate liars they can't be embarrassed. Or both.
I don’t disagree. Poorly executed.
No, that's what they made up afterwards to try and badly justify the sudden switch. But that was never their real concern and we know this in many ways:
1. This explanation is basically a conspiracy theory. Officials of many countries said masks don't work. Fauci etc are asserting that public health officials and health workers were all instantly and perfectly co-ordinated via some kind of hidden worldwide conspiracy, one that was dropped only once China ramped up mask production. A conspiracy on this enormous scale would have left behind some sort of documentary evidence, especially once the perpetrators aren't hiding it, but no such documents have emerged. Instead all documents obtained via FOIA requests state that officials did indeed believe masks were ineffective.
2. The original claims about masks being ineffective or at least there being no evidence of effectiveness match the contents of the scientific literature. If they really all believed masks are super effective, on what pre-2020 evidentiary basis were they concluding this?
3. Governments don't need to lie to their citizens to control mask distribution. Nearly all masks were being imported, and (surgical/N95) mask factories are easily identified. It would have been trivial to seize control of the mask supply if that was the real concern. Indeed lying about this is the most catastrophically stupid approach to stopping mask hoarding one can possibly come up with. If you actually believe this, you have to believe that at a stroke Fauci and other officials burned massive amounts of public health credibility to merely attempt to partially reduce the severity of a very short range tactical problem, when there were more direct alternatives available that would have preserved trust, and that nobody around him objected to this or thought it was insane.
Unfortunately the evidence here is really all quite consistent: Fauci and other public health officials are all massive liars and have been lying about nearly everything from the start. At the very beginning they were telling the truth until they suddenly realized that they had the world in the palm of their hand: they could say or do literally anything and people would accept it. Because they're all collectivist solution-izers that led to their prevailing ideology overriding what little commitment to science they previously had and the result was this about face.
What's really made me sad in the past 18 months is, frankly, the number of people who actually believe and support this noble lie stuff. Our society has truly grievous problems.
Well argued, you have given this a lot more thought and research than I have. Thanks.
Im not saying I know what did happen, but I do think this can happen without documented conspiracy or coordination. One “credible”/public person says it early and many others follow.
For encouraging mask wearing, sure, because public health has a huge bias towards "better safe than sorry". The other way around, not so much.
"This explanation is basically a conspiracy theory."
So instead you propose a conspiracy theory where they make people wear masks because ???
It's indeed the probable reason, but this in itself is a huuuge problem: it means that "scientific facts" are not informative facts at all, but just parts of propaganda, i.e. messages used to induce a particular behavior. The truth has no value in this context, the behavioral influence of the message that count. Mixing scientific truth with population control is imho the reason why science trust is eroding. Not that it is new, but this accelerated out of control lately in the West, it looks like there is some king of singularity coming....
not sure saying evidence didn't change is fair - maybe they didn't change regarding the efficacy of masks themselves, but consensus around things like aerosolization risk or asymptomatic transmission sure did and that would've changed the equation. Also the crisis got much much worse in scale and expected duration, so i can see how at some point the leadership just got desperate and was willing to try anything that _might_ work - bleach, masks, whatever.
Your last sentence kind of proves my point though - it’s not like there was some new, definitive study that masks would be really effective against COVID. In both March and May (and today) the evidence was pretty inconclusive.
But officials had to do something, so they flipped their standard from “NO, unless we have irrefutable evidence of efficacy” to “YES, unless there is irrefutable evidence of harm”. Both positions were presented to the public as pretty black and white, with the opposite position criticized as both an intellectual (anti-Science) and moral (selfish) failing.
This is exactly the type of inverted standard of evidence Scott points out in #25.
Incidentally, I don’t think “YES, unless there is irrefutable evidence of harm” is necessarily a bad position for the public health establishment to take regarding interventions in a pandemic. Frankly I wish they’d applied it more broadly to allow vaccine challenge trials and vaccine use for children. It’s the flip-flop, dishonesty, and moralizing that irks.
Zeynep Tukfeci did a very good job of laying out how this particular corner of "The Science" about aerosol transmission of pathogens was dusty, full of cobwebs and needed a good cleaning. I can't get too mad at Fauci and other American public health officials about their initial position on masks. One of the fixed points in their analysis had to be the vital priority of getting PPE to medical workers, since if too high a proportion of them got sick at any one time, the situation would have gotten dramatically worse. Given what we're seeing now in how the buying power of wealthy countries is distorting the distribution of vaccines to everyone's detriment, doing what they could to forestall a run on N95's (which, bear in mind, were to their minds at that time the only effective mask in any circumstance because the state of knowledge about aerosol transmission was so bad) was a bad call but understandable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airborne-transmission.html
What frustrates me is that, in general, we're not taking advantage of this experience to update our priors about general infection control measures. The degree to which the flu got absolutely crushed this past winter feels to me like Nature is jumping up and down saying "Hey, hey, look, this fruit is so low-hanging it's six inches off the goddamn ground, experiment more to see what you can get out of masks & hand-washing". The silver lining of this idiocy about banning mask mandates in schools is that it's setting up natural experiments this winter. I hope the CDC has the infrastructure in place to collect the data that comes off of them.
COVID wasn't stopped by any of these measures though, and SARS-CoV-2 is not different from influenza in any way that would matter for NPIs. So this idea seems inconsistent.
There's a much simpler explanation for why flu disappeared: it's being mis-identified as COVID. The symptoms of COVID are so vague it can be confused with more or less any heavy respiratory infection, so we rely entirely on the claimed precision of PCR testing to separate SARS-CoV-2 from other coronaviruses. Unfortunately there are lots of reasons to have grave doubts about the integrity of these tests and in particular that at least some of them aren't specific to SARS-CoV-2 at all.
For example, can you spot the critical error in this user guide for one make of PCR test? https://www.fda.gov/media/137116/download
I'll give a hint: check the table in the results interpretation section. If requested I'll follow up with the answer.
Flu tests have been performed just as much over the past year as they were in previous years, but far fewer of them have turned up positive. I don't think they've changed how they're doing the flu tests to magically turn positive results for flu into negative results.
This is an interesting point and I had not considered the relative difficulty of distinguishing SARS-CoV-2 from other coronaviruses. However, I don't immediately see its relevance to my point about general purpose infection control measures because we can test for flu directly.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kNhIuuCcmb22F42AwAWubGC8hSH3-Bx_
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/fluportaldashboard.html
That is a two order of magnitude difference in positive flu specimens reported to the CDC between the 2019-20 & 2020-21 seasons. Now, I admit I have not dug into the data to look at the denominator here. My naive assumption would be that a clinician would order both a COVID test and a flu test for a patient who presents with a heavy respiratory infection, but it's entirely possible that labs were so overloaded that they shifted nearly all available capacity to SARS-Cov-2.
Some proportion of that difference can be attributed to changes in behavior of patients who never came into a clinic in the first instance. Some proportion of that difference can be attributed to social isolation, which I do not want to maintain as a permanent state of affairs. Some proportion of that difference can be attributed to masks & handwashing. I would like to know the relative percentages. What can we keep with better habits and what do we have to give back to resume something like our pre-pandemic life?
Early on, even medical workers were being discouraged from wearing masks. It was only after the fact that people started making up the justification of avoiding shortages for their bad advice.
Even if we accept for the sake of argument that there was significantly less flu in the 2020-21 season, that alone does not provide knock-down evidence for the efficacy of masks. Huge swaths of the country conducted classes and work entirely online. This is entirely consistent with "masks do absolutely nothing, but preventing people from gathering in common buildings and physically interacting with each other on a daily basis stops all sorts of diseases."
22: You say PhDs were least likely to be against vaccines in January, but unless I'm completely misunderstanding that table, PhDs in January have a value of 23.1, which is lower than "high school" (35.0) and "some college" (27.3), but higher than "bachelor's" (15.4), "master's" (11.8), or "professional" (12.8). Explain?
No, you're right, I was misunderstanding, edited.
You now say "PhDs were one of the more pro-vaccine demographics", which still seems to me like a misleading way to describe a group that is ranked 4th out of 6 and noticeably bucks the trend of education otherwise being positively correlated with vaccine support.
Did you remember to purge your cached thoughts after discovering you had made a mistake?
I really love the Links posts!
2. Real estate - yes the up and coming folks with more money move out of their poorer houses and into fancier houses and if there are not enough fancy houses, then they can't do it. But in their wake as they leave their old poorer homes...it can lead to overall prices rising.
This group of people who are leaving their poor home because they now have too much money to live amongst the poorer folks are typically taking a lot of equity they've built up meaning they're selling for more than they bought their houses for 5-10 years ago. Often a big part of their upward house movement is fuelled by rising house prices. Meaning they'll vote for, support, and benefit from policies which see house prices rise. Certainly theri old home is 'freed up' in the sense that a chair you get up from is now free, but it is only a pedantic truth. Overall it has little bearing on their effect on the market other than to say most folks don't keep both homes to live in, they'll at least rent out the old home if they choose to retain ownership.
3. Cost Benefit 'missing' in action. I think this is often a form of rhetoric and manipulation and dark arts more so than it is missing. Even if the person using that style of rhetoric isn't consciously aware of it, people will tend to shy away from ideas which have a low probability of supporting their position or are too complex/nuanced to be useful in an argument. Scott might be falling into a 'good faith' assumption a bit too much in this case.
9. Insect Apocolypse...umm...I think sometimes smart people talk themselves into corners and end up missing what is obvious. Since the green revolution of turning war crime level chemicals into something we put on our food crops...then slowly ban them one by one over decades in a game of cat and mouse where getting caught means dying of cancer.
Anyhow...insecticides kill insects...I don't get how or why people are confused by this. Farmland soil managed in the 'conventional' way is devoid of insects to an insane degree - partly due to monocrop farming and large scale biome changes with habitat loss, but also due to these chemicals which do stick around for a long long time and do spread out across the land, waterways, and oceans. I'm simply incapable of looking at the dead body of the Butler with the Candlestick in the Library and saying...hmm this meta analysis says that Butler's almost never die to candlestick injuries.
re:RE - I agree there aren't many significant market participants who make money when prices go down and thus policies tend to favor current equity holders. Having said that, more inventory drives prices down and there's nothing pedantic or semantic about those effects.
re:farming - Farmers are doing a great job for consumers and the environment. We're lucky to have so many of them pursuing the agrarian way of life. There's a strong suspicion in that community where all these criticisms originate from and I share that skepticism when we seem to be literally inventing issues to give farmers a hard time about.
"Anyhow...insecticides kill insects...I don't get how or why people are confused by this."
well, in that case given that guns kill people (notwithstanding NRA claims), and number of guns has risen exponentially over last couple centuries, humans must be on the brink of extinction.
This is a surprisingly bad comparison to pesticides. You can't unload a pesticide and lock it in a safe once it's in the environment.
Am not comparing guns and pesticides, am making a comment how isolating one factor and drawing conclusions is not the way to go. Insecticides kill insects, but could other parts of human life be promoting their spread? E.g monocultures apparently encourage insect reproduction. I agree the overall effect is probably not good for insect numbers, but does that necessarily affect biodiversity? The original quip was far too simplistic.
On the insect apocalypse thing, the Quillette article seems to start with "we don't have good evidence that 75% is the amount that insect biomass has gone down over the past few decades" and then conclude "therefore, we should probably think there's no reason to be concerned about insects at all", with some moves in between about how confused people on Reddit have been about bees. I agree with the first part, but not the conclusion. (And yes, people on Reddit are very confused about bees.)
The link in the caption for “the metacontextual hyperamericas to which we have never not owed our allegiance” goes to the same place as the "source" link above. Is that intentional?
Sorry, fixed.
Well, now I'm aggravated: I only scored 85.63 on that Divergent Association Task.
It seems the Chesterton quote is not actually by Chesterton, but by a Belgian writer who wrote a study of Chesterton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Cammaerts
"When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything".
I appreciate the King In Yellow reference.
+1 I also came across this.
Always love your link collections. That artist rendition of Bagdad is stunning! (Sorry for brevity, post-second-jab, only one of my arms is working well today!)
One small bit of info for you: Non-US folks (and apparently even some US folks, judging by my living-in-Boston boyfriend) don't know what happened with Cuomo, and "all this" is an accordingly confusing summary. COVID-19 politics was my first guess, but only weakly. No biggie! Just letting you know for calibration purposes.
Thanks again!
If foreigners still haven't heard of Cuomo, I don't want to be the one to ruin what little respect they probably still have of us after everything else.
Between Giuliani and Cuomo, maybe this is just the Universe's way of balancing out "Big name Italian-American New York politicians whose reputations went from venerated to execrated"?
> That artist rendition of Bagdad is stunning!
Unfortunately, it is highly inaccurate. See the discussion upthread about "lonely cities".
I honestly wasn't even expecting accuracy, but thanks a lot for the heads-up! :)
14: A member of a discriminated group X needs a higher ability threshold to get through the hiring filter than a member of non-discriminated group Y. So among those that get hired, objective measures of job performance should be higher for group X than for group Y. That seems like the best way to measure discrimination -- if your Xs outperform Ys on average, then you're probably setting the bar too high for Xs or too low for Ys. So far I haven't seen any data showing blacks outperforming whites on objective measures of job performance -- all the studies I've ever heard of had the opposite result.
So why would the resume name-swapping test show discrimination when the job-performance test doesn't?
A perfectly rational Bayesian superintelligence with a goal of "hire the more qualified person for the job", when presented with two identical resumes, but one of them has the name "Steven" and the other has the name "Lakisha", will choose Steven, because the base rate of competence is higher for Stevens, and a degree D from college C is not infinitely strong evidence so it doesn't completely eliminate the relative effect of those priors. Throw affirmative action into the mix, and D becomes even weaker evidence in favor of Lakisha.
This is a good point. I was going to include a caveat about variance in the OP but I cut it out for simplicity.
In practice, applicant pools are sort of capped, because anyone who is grossly overqualified for the job would be applying to some other job.
How does this work if we're only hiring people between +1 and +1.5, and the bar is probabilistic with a 50% chance of admission at +1 and a 100% chance of admission at +1.5 (linear in-between)? I'd expect that reduces the average difference between X hires and Y hires.
This is a reasonable way to model discrimination, but not the only way. For example, you could have some racist firms that never hire blacks, and other completely-non-racist firms that hire them at the exact same rate as everyone else. i think you'd expect no difference in this case.
Can you link to the studies showing equal/worse job performance among blacks, I'm curious how that works and what the filters for those positions were.
https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.694
This meta-analysis of job performance found whites did slightly better on all metrics (corrected d between 0.12 and 0.61 depending on the metric in table 3) Objective metrics showed slightly larger differences than subjective metrics. It doesn't have details of the hiring processeses at the companies that the data came from.
https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2006-07101-003
This Meta-analysis' abstract claims an average d of 0.26 favoring whites, but I wasn't able to get the full paper on scihub.
These were the first two papers that came up on google scholar when I searched "meta analysis black white job performance subjective objective" with a >2000 date restriction, so I don't think I am cherrypicking, but I am not super confident about the state of the literature.
Your metric would only catch irrational discrimination, not rational discrimination (i.e. taking reversal to the mean into account). I would expect the former to be something the market would generally get rid of without any coercion, whereas the latter is presumably the reason antidiscrimination laws exist. If employers were acting rationally, they would require higher test scores (or whatever) from those belonging to lower-ability groups (which would be discriminatory), but this would not lead to employees belonging to those groups having higher average ability.
The real problem with the CV study is that it is based on class, not race. When I went hunting for the original study, it was based on names in Boston, and the "white" names were nice, middle-class ones such as Emily. The "black" names did resonate as 'lower class' the same way if you got applications from Thomas Campbell versus Earl Huston, you might pick Thomas over Earl.
So if the applications had been from Mickey McGlone versus D'Arius Jones, and McGlone got call-backs while Jones didn't, you can then say it's racism. Unless you just shrug and say "It's Boston, it's the Irish mafia in action".
https://wehavekids.com/baby-names/100-Southern-Baby-Names-for-Boys-and-Girls
Social science papers are always a case of see how the sausage is made, because you're awfully often buying a bread made of sawdust.
"A perfectly rational Bayesian superintelligence with a goal of "hire the more qualified person for the job", when presented with two identical resumes, but one of them has the name "Steven" and the other has the name "Lakisha", will choose Steven, because the base rate of competence is higher for Stevens, and a degree D from college C is not infinitely strong evidence so it doesn't completely eliminate the relative effect of those priors."
You don't need "infinitely strong evidence" to wash out a prior like this. A resume would usually be plenty to wash out the significance of a name.
If I want to know whether a given event at 5:30 pm will be rained on, then if I just know whether the event was in Denver or in Houston, I would guess the Houston one is more likely to be rained on. But if I also know that it was raining at 5 pm on the day in question, then the fact that one is in Denver and the other is in Houston will be basically washed out, since both cities tend to have storms that last some amount of time but often pass within half an hour.
It might be that Stevens are more likely to do well on the skill you're interested in than Lakishas, but if you know that the person did well on this skill for the past few years, then I don't see why you would expect the influence of the name to persist. (Unless you have some very detailed information about persistence of skills in people of different gender and race, as opposed to the general information about the rate of basic training in these skills that I assumed your prior was based on.)
Think of it in terms of test-retest reliability. If you take a random person p1 from a group with a mean of 0, and you test him and he scores +n, upon retest the score is expected to drop by r*n, for some r, 0<r<1. For IQ tests r would be around 0.2 iirc.
Now suppose you take another person p2 from a group with a mean of -1, and you test him and he scores +n, upon retest his score is expected to drop by r*(n+1).
Maybe if you give someone a sufficiently comprehensive battery of tests the test-retest reliability will be better so the difference will be smaller. As r approaches zero the difference between p1's expected retest and p2's expected retest approaches zero.
(But I don't think anything on anyone's resume is that reliable. Someone can cruise through college taking the easiest classes and get a 4.0, while someone else can volunteer to take the hardest classes and get a 4.0. Someone can get hired to work for company X for 3 years and get fired for incompetence, while someone else can be a superstar at company X for the same amount of time and then quit, but their resumes will look the same.)
For an example of your effect, when my sister went to Bolt (Berkeley law school), about 10% of the students were female. One year, of the six top students (two in each of the three years), five were women.
I am pleased to be able to claim responsibility for the addition to the Cox-Zucker page. I saw Jadagul's link to the memorial note from Cox, and added it to Wikipedia. Long live the amusingly vulgar!
I'm shocked that you could include item 4 but not link to one of the greatest Onion articles of all time: https://www.theonion.com/third-amendment-rights-group-celebrates-another-success-1819569379
Also, it would have been funnier if item 4 was listed one spot earlier as item 3.
Oooh, good point.
The US government violated the Third Amendment with regard to the Aleutians during WW2, but got away with it. https://paulddowling.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/our-forgotten-amendment-the-third/
No. 22 seems like a perfect example of the bell curve meme.
That is exactly the context where I first saw it. Twitter couldn't resist
I'd like to see a Bactrian version of that Bell-curve meme.
Apparently Cox and Zucker were graduate students all the way back in the early 70's. When I was a grad student myself I actually briefly studied Mordell-Weil groups of elliptic surfaces over the projective line but don't remember hearing of the Cox-Zucker machine. I was studying alongside at least one fellow grad student who I remember as being a bit of a "bro" (but ironic about it) who loved coming up with wordplay connecting mathematical names to obscene terms, so I'm sure if the Cox-Zucker machine had come up, I would remember someone making jokes about it.
When I was in math grad school and very immature (now a math professor and, um, well...) we used to have fun coming up with dirty sounding math terms. Sometimes you had to strain to do it. Sometimes it was painfully easy. My advisor spoke often (unironically) of the "going-down" theorem (which I still use a lot to this day). And one semester names of my four professors were Oh, Isaacs, Wainger, Ono. In that case the Universe just made it too easy.
I've heard the Going-Down Theorem snickered at quite a few times as well, and there's always the abbreviation of analytic germs as "anal germs" (which I think is listed in the index of a prominent graduate-level textbook although I can't remember which).
One of my students a few years ago posted on Facebook: "Doing real anal with my girlfriend in the library. Most people just don't understand how hard it is."
I have nothing add except that I saw this comment and thought: hey, another math PhD from UW-Madison!
11. I tend to lean towards Door #1 there, although with a degree of moralizing "We need real industry, not this social media crap!" sentiment among China's rather old leadership (Xi is no Joe Biden, but he's still 68 years).
James Palmer is one of the more interesting Twitter follows on China, and I remember him saying you got to beware of this kind of stuff. One of the top guys who later fell out of power got a lot of praise in his day for crushing corruption and organized crime . . . only it came out later that he was just wiping out rivals and putting HIS people in positions of power to exploit corruption and organized crime.
EDIT: Deleted my older comment. Not sure commenting on that was appropriate.
>although with a degree of moralizing "We need real industry, not this social media crap!" sentiment among China's rather old leadership (Xi is no Joe Biden, but he's still 68 years).
Could you explain to me the societal value-added of social media, beyond the "online phonebook"?
(Not the business model. I get that it's lucrative because you get data to target ads. But predatory ads are generally not positive-sum for society - they're just Molochian competition.)
Might the PhD vaccination thing be due to age, i.e. a random 30-year-old is much more likely than a random 80-year-old to have a PhD and less likely to be vaccinated?
Why would that be the case?
The number of PhDs has grown a lot over time, so we would expect some age effects. But so have bachelor's degrees and other graduate degrees. I don't think you could get this effect size from the PhDs relative to the other groups from age.
Which one do you mean? It's well know that the number of people doing PhDs has been growing over at least the past half century or so (except possibly very recently), and I'd expect that all other things being equal more elderly than young people have been vaccinated because the former have been eligible for longer.
Ah, I didn't know that. I couldn't see a reason why there would be more younger than older PhDs, but if there are just more people starting them than in the past, that checks out.
Very likely. In fact, the RR in vaccine hesitancy between PhDs and bachelor's holders shrinks from 2.4 to 1.2 after controls are applied. PhD also becomes less vaccine-hesitant than high school graduates (and also some college, IIRC). I can't say for sure that age is the control doing the heavy lifting here, but it seems most likely.
The other interesting takeaway is that Asians were only 20% as likely to be vaccine-hesitant as whites.
There's probably a bit. But there's probably also a major effect that PhD's are both selected and trained to have strange views on things and be very insistent on them. I knew HIV denialist professors in the early 2000's, but I don't believe I've ever encountered an HIV denialist elsewhere (though I guess Thabo Mbeki's government in South Africa might have some examples).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism
I mean, the problem that people don't consider cost-benefit analysese, don't consider tradeoffs, is common enough and well-known enough that there are names for special cases of it ("sacred values"), and that Eliezer wrote this old essay about it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided
As a general point, I believe that too many sacred values are a problem because they go into conflict with each other.
"Too many" might be "more than one".
I get the impression that a lot of people think that having more numerous sacred values means being more moral.
> IIUC it finds no overall gender discrimination (some industries/firms favor one gender over another, but it tends to cancel out).
While I get what you're saying here, calling that "no overall gender discrimination" seems a bit off. :P
#14 are there any studies which attempt to disentangle racial from class effects in these sorts of "fake CV" studies? What's the effect of a name like Billy-Bob or Bubba versus Bryce or Beauregard?
This is the perfect excuse to link the classic Key & Peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gODZzSOelss
I would rather hire Mark than Cletus, and I'm also pretty sure that has nothing to do with race. White-coded lower class names I've seen locally include Blade, Colton, Gunnar, Trista, Ruger, Trinity, and many others. I would be very interested in a study that reviewed those types of names in comparison to lower class associated black names and a control group of more standard names.
Yes. A study which used highly racially-coded surnames rather than given names so as to disentangle likely class signifiers found no evidence of discrimination. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504851.2015.1114571
I'm of two minds about the whole "reposting Xinhua" thing. I know Xinhua isn't very good at what they do, and we're mostly just laughing at them, but there's this niggling voice in the back of my head saying "making a practice of sharing hostile memetic weapons doesn't seem like a very good idea" (cf. "Meditations on Moloch", "Sort by Controversial").
(NB: I'm not *normally* a deplatformer. I think people have the right to have their opinions heard. I'm nervous about Xinhua - and I mean *nervous*, not "how dare you do this" - because what comes out of there isn't "opinion" so much as "propaganda", and because their endgame isn't to convince us to improve ourselves or be nice to them - as with most domestic propaganda - but to set the West against itself as a prelude to military attack.)
This is much more true of say a Chen Weihua tweet, as he’s actually funny in the way he intends to be. Even then though I still think one should share away, it’s gonna happen anyway and he’s sometimes right by accident, but you are doing a bit of what he wants. What Scott did probably doesn’t matter though, as all I did was laugh at how absurd it was without taking away even what their intended political message was.
I don't know anything about this outlet, but I was surprised to see they apparently source their political cartoons from DeviantArt.
Would you consider stopping linking to Vox articles? That site is like what you would tell a kid about to make them grok why lying is wrong. From the Orwellian motto down to the clickbait titles, it is a dumpster fire.
Before the 2016 election they straight up did an article on why pro lifers should vote for Hillary Clinton. https://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/10/25/13380272/donald-trump-pro-life-abortion
At the start of the CV crisis they they were all over the idea that closing borders to stop the coronvirus was evidence of bigotry, and how the real threat that we should be careful about was that the pandemic would be exploited to inflame xenophobia. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/4/21157825/coronavirus-pandemic-xenophobia-racism
It isn't just that they make mistakes. None of us are perfect. But honest mistakes are unpredictable, as likely to be wrong one way as another. Vox's mistakes are always in the same direction, always aimed at compelling obedience.
The crew at Vox strategically lies to people dumb enough to believe them in order to make them do what they want, and they do it in the name of 'explaining the news'. Until they own up to being an arm of the Democratic party, dedicated to getting their guys in power whether that means telling lies or telling the truth, they don't meet the smell test in terms of being worth reading.
The article he linked is by Kelsey Piper, who is someone who’s been a member of the rationalist community, so that makes that specifically different from Vox as a whole. Vox is pretty bad though, although I’d argue it is for different reasons than you do.
+1 - I generally can't bear reading Vox articles but Kelsey Piper's are usually much better. It's always good for me to have that contrast and then I add in the thought that maybe I read Piper's posts with more of an open mind as they have a 'Scott- approved' flavour. So, a periodic welcome dose of prejudice-revealing..
While I agree that Vox has a lot of its own biases, you are mischaracterising the article about pro-life and Hillary. The writer isn't urging fellow pro-lifers to vote for Hillary, he is saying that voting for Trump will do nothing, as Trump won't do anything about Roe vs. Wade (and probably won't even get elected anyway, see reference to 'imaginary first term'). Hillary is firmly in the Planned Parenthood camp, he says, but for all Trump's courting of pro-life vote he will in reality do nothing.
It doesn't say to vote for Hillary, in fact it doesn't say to vote for anyone but it does say "don't vote for Trump". Given that there are only two major candidates, that means either don't vote at all or vote for a third party option if your state offers one.
Vox and Quillette basically have equal and opposite biases, though as others have mentioned, Kelsey Piper and the whole "Future Perfect" team at Vox are quite different from the rest of the site.
Scott has addressed this take on Vox here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/23/some-groups-of-people-who-may-not-100-deserve-our-eternal-scorn/ and he's since additionally said some even more disparaging things on the old mistakes page. I'd say that's more than enough caution on his part, and would register hard disagree to the proposition that they (or anywhere else) be blacklisted.
"Would you consider stopping linking to Vox articles?"
This is only my opinion but if you want to support a helpful norm, I would suggest downplaying or ignoring the publication and focusing more on the writer. That is to say, you should take note of the reporters who are knowledgeable about their beats and who are the ones trying to make a career off of confirmation bias, who are the ones writing thoughtful, well-researched analysis and who are the one operating mainly as hacks and PR flacks. Support the former and ignore the latter.
The way that media works now is that young journalists start writing almost immediately in styles that flatter the audience of their target publication in hopes that they can one day get a job there. The result is that prestige media is full of bland, cookie-cutter versions of the same points of view. If young journalists knew that they could build larger audiences by doing good work, that could change the incentives enough to make a difference.
No. 22: See https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/coverage/adultvaxview/pubs-resources/sociodemographic-factors-covid19-vaccination.html#table-01 for contrary evidence.
I'm assuming that if your bucket is "above college graduate" you're dominated by masters, PhDs are a tiny drop in the bucket, and it doesn't really end up contradicting the poll's claim that MAs are into vaccines much more than PhDs. Or am I missing a finer breakdown somewhere?
No Babylon 5 watchers for #15? The show had a running joke with the character Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle) hitting on the character Talia Winters (Andrea Thompson). Later on, Doyle and Thompson actually got married, so in the end Talia was Garibaldi's wife.
Have this free round of applause for wonderful matching of historical trivia with SF trivia 😀
Rewatching Babylon 5 right now, but somehow I missed that. Thanks for catching it.
Creativity test is cool. But a few people I shared it with did it properly once and then instinctively did it to get as low a score as possible. This might mean that the earnest get more flattering results.
Re: hiring bias study. I took a look at the abstract but its approach isn't going to capture most of the bias that does exist, because it's only looking at CV callbacks. In many of the most biased sectors like tech, finance, politics, the arts etc interviews aren't allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis by looking at CVs. There is a strong preference towards people who are already known to the organization in some way, usually via referrals (all tech firms award large referral bonuses to employees), but also via head-hunting directly via technical forums and these days, just by going directly to universities. The giant pile of dodgy material labelled "submitted CVs" is looked at only as a last resort.
I would always be very skeptical of claims that hiring isn't gender or race biased, because so many companies proudly assert on their own websites that it is and so many people have stories of directly experiencing it. In particular, giving women a much easier time through the hiring process and targeting headhunters only at women is very widespread, to the extent that if the law were actually enforced many big firms would find themselves hauled before the courts as in most jurisdictions, there's no way their practices can be legal. But western culture has developed in a direction whereby bending the rules for women and racial minorities is OK, so de-facto discrimination against "white men" and "Asian men" is often not even perceived as such - or is, but is justified as the right kind of discrimination.
FYI link and text in first para is broken in the RSS feed. Probably you've already fixed it and feedly is still serving a cache but just in case figured I'd mention it.
> vaccine-autism connections, moon landing fraud, et
The cofounder here is obviously the "set of weird beliefs chosen". Say you have group A of which 1% believes conspiracy theory X, and group B of which 10% believes conspiracy theory Y, if you test only for conspiracy theory X of course you'll find that group A is more susceptible to conspiracy theories.
Pick a theory like "the experts know with high confidence how the trajectory of corona cases will evolve given mask wearing vs no mask wearing" or "russia colluded with Trump and facebook to manipulate the 2020 elections" or "the reason we can't have nice things is billionaires hogging all the cash" and see whether these results replicate.
I don't think Wales and Cornwall would vote Republican. Wales is pretty left-wing and always has been. Cornwall does vote Tory, but my subjective impression is that they're quite middle-class, socially liberal tories (i.e. Democrats).
Of course, by 2060 the Democrats and Republicans could have switched axes of opposition and even switched sides two or three times, but given that the American part of the map still looks pretty similar to how it does today, I don't think we're meant to assume that.
But the main thing I want to know is the backstory of how Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and London all ended up joining the USA but the rest of England didn't. :D
The British party system is substantially less advanced than the American. The working class votes less conservative, while the rich vote more conservative. So simply extrapolating the conservative-labour divide in Britain to the US parties wouldn't work.
In what sense less advanced?
I agree you can't extrapolate with certainty (and at the end of the day this is just a silly and fun thought experiment), but I do think the guy saying "Wales would vote Republican" has more work to do than the guy saying "Wales would vote Democrat".
It sounds like you're agreeing re Cornwall?
Wales is brexity though
An aside, because I think it's cool: The creativity test uses word vector distance (specifically GloVe vectors) as its measure of semantic distance. Word vectors were the hot thing in natural language processing before giant language models like BERT and GPT-3 took over, and the idea is pretty simple: Take a giant corpus of text, and count how often words occur in each other's company. Next, assign each word a vector, which you can think of as a point in space. Usually this will be very high-dimensional space, but you can imagine it as a big cube with lots of word-points floating around inside it like bubbles. (To quote the great Geoffrey Hinton: "To deal with a fourteen-dimensional space, visualize a three-dimensional space and then say the word 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it.")
Where does each word vector end up in this space? Simple: Near the vectors for words it co-occurs with. You can imagine each word being pulled towards the ones it frequently occurs with (like "university" and "professor") and away from the ones it very rarely occurs with (like "spoon" and "hydroelectric"). Fun properties emerge from this - even if two words don't co-occur with each other extremely frequently, they can end up in similar regions of space if they both share the same neighbours because of said neighbours' gravitational pull - perhaps "professor" and "lecturer" are rarely mentioned together, because someone is usually referred to as one or the other but not both, but they both share the same verbal surroundings and contexts, and that's going to pull their vectors closer together than their isolated co-occurrence might suggest.
Once we have our vectors, the measure of semantic distance used in that test falls out for free - we can just measure the distance (technically the angle, but that's an implementation detail) between two vectors and that tells us how 'similar' they are, where that similarity is essentially derived from their co-occurrence or context-similarity as described above. In other words, what you're really being asked for is a set of words that are are rarely if ever seen together, and that share completely different clusters of acquaintances as well.
As to cost-benefit analysis - a lot of people have more or less principled beliefs that engaging in cost-benefit analysis is morally sinful. They are crazy, but they're basically up front about what they think and their craziness is mostly limited to saying (as opposed to doing) crazy things.
But there's another large group of people who believe that engaging in cost-benefit analysis is scientifically invalid because it conflicts with (in general) the Precautionary Principle or (in medicine) the Hippocratic Oath, both of which specify that, if taking an action would have any costs of any kind, then taking that action is prohibited. Benefits are irrelevant.
It continually astounds me how many people are happy to loudly invoke the Precautionary Principle without realizing that it prohibits every course of action equally. And how many other people are willing to go along with it when that happens. People seem to have some natural defenses against arguments of the first type, that go "if we can stop one child from stubbing his toe, isn't that worth paying absolutely any price?". But those defenses apparently don't apply to arguments that go "as long as there are rocks outside, the Precautionary Principle tells us that we must never leave our homes". I don't understand the difference.
#21 I was recently thinking how creating a counter bias instead of removing the existing one leads to higher polarisation and conflicts. With reference to how something can be similtaniously overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/
Suppose we have two groups and one group has some priviledged way to succeed, inaccessible two the second. Trying to counterbalance it, we create a new way for a second group to succeed inaccessible to the first. This makes experience of both groups more unique as they now have more different insentives. Moreover, previously we had people in the second group who felt opresed due to not having the benifits of the first group. Now we can have people in both groups simultaniously feeling opressed by the other one. Their beliefs are justified by their experience, but the members of the other group can't understand it as they have the direct opposite experience. Political thinking makes everything worse. Every group want to shout louder about their oppression, treating every claim of the opposite group as an reactionary attempt to prevent their liberation.
> All these numbers seem lower than some other studies (eg here) and I haven’t looked into them enough to figure out why.
"Here" is a study from 2003. Is it not a reasonable null hypothesis that firms are less racist and less sexist on average now than they were in 2003?
I don't know if the Covid outbreak started as a lab leak, but China is sure as heck acting as though it was!
re 17: It's well established that people who believe in one kind of nonsense will tend towards belief in other kinds as well.
Calling Vsevolod Ivanov a "conspiracy theorist" is perhaps selling him a bit short. He was actually a very famous and popular (system aligned) author in the Soviet Union.
Looks like those are different Vsevolods. The one you're talking about Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov was a communist writer and died in 1963. The one mentioned in the post Vsevolod Borisovich Ivanov is still alive and you can commission a work from him if you speak Russian https://www.xn--80adaabjf0azyfbf5a.xn--p1acf/obo-mne
Regarding 19, visual disturbances in people with red green color blindness while microdosing:
All I could find on this is that several color blind individuals dropped out of Fadiman’s study because of visual ‘tracers’ that persisted for days after a microdose.
The tracers were similar to those seen with a full ‘tripping’ dose of LSD.
I couldn’t find any attempt at explanation.
Reddit post
“ MD'ing is not recommended if you ar red/green color blind. This is based of a study of 248 microdosing men. Five of the men dropped out of the study due to tracers and all had colorblindness..”
About the insects: What's the alternative narrative for the fact that windshields used to be full of dead gnats when I was a kid, and now that's not the case anymore? (People I asked confirmed that impression.) Did car aerodynamics change?
Wait did someone actually calculate 20, 30, 40 years ago how many bugs would smoosh on windshields per hour of driving? Or is this just people remembering what they think windshields were like when they were kids?
It's just people remembering what they think windshields were like when they were younger in general (not just when they were kids, also people remembering what it was like for them as drivers). Of course that's distorted memories etc. But I don't see a way around that. It would be fantastic to have a time machine that would enable us to actually count dead bugs, but I would guess at the time nobody thought that might be interesting. Though maybe some engineers did?
Well we still have old cars around. We can drive some classic cars 50 miles or so and compare to newer cars that drove the same route. If bug smooshes seem to be the same for both, that would hint that memory might be right. If classic cars have a lot more, then it is still possible there were more insects back in the day, but car smooshes by memory can't be trusted.
That's a very clever idea, possibly worth pursuing. My guess is that, yes, improvements in aerodynamics have resulted in substantially fewer smooshed bugs, but data trumps intuition and this would be pretty cheap data.
Though possibly not terribly valuable data, if all it does is confirm vague memories. Next we'd need a methodology for counting bug-smooshes on old car photos as a proxy for insect population, and that would be much trickier.
I don't recall that sort of data in this book https://www.amazon.com/dp/089815961X but it wouldn't be out of place... According to the Annals of Improbable Research (https://www.improbable.com/2017/08/27/estimated-insect-deaths-due-to-collisions-with-motor-vehicles/), there's a study titled "Road mortality potentially responsible for billions of pollinating insect deaths annually" (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10841-015-9808-z, no idea how to un-paywall, AIR only reproduces ~1page).
It's also possible windshield washer fluid got better at washing the gnats off?
AIR also links to a popular article (again, paywalled): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/08/26/windscreen-phenomenon-car-no-longer-covered-dead-insects/
Probably yes to aerodynamics. I don't drive any more, but the last car I had was a Honda Element, and it still accumulated plenty of insects.
What if gnats evolved to avoid highways?
Interesting, but it doesn't seem like a huge evolutionary advantage to me. Highways are a pretty small sliver when you look at all the land in use and there's a lot of bugs, a real lot of bugs.
13. I gotta say I like it. It's propaganda but it makes absolutly zero sense at all. Is the idea that the scientist (who one thinks studies dangerous viruses) would fooled into thinking a poisen apple is safe? Is the idea that if she participates in an investigation sincerely her words would be twisted and she would be taken advantage of? Who the hell is Kung Fo Panda? This requires a decade Marvel style cinematic arc to explain all these backstories.
25. OK but a caregiver would have access to a child for a few hours at most. Presumably parents at home would not mask around the child so dose is a pretty big question here.
The cost-benefit thing has been a real bugbear of mine over the last year and a half, as so many people I discuss Covid with don't seem to get it. They just seem to think you can compare countries directly in terms of Covid deaths per capita, and whichever country had the lowest Covid deaths per capita "wins". I've pointed out to people that one cost associated with lockdowns has been a drop in referrals for cancer treatment - many of the people I've pointed this out to seem legitimately shocked to hear it, as if nothing like it had ever even occurred to them before.
I wouldn't call myself "anti-lockdown", but a lot of the people taking part in the conversation about lockdowns don't yet seem capable to me of making a cost-benefit analysis - they seem stuck in a mindset of "anything which brings Covid cases and deaths down is an unalloyed good; anything which causes Covid cases and deaths to rise is an unqualified bad; anyone who expresses any scepticism about any measures taken to curb Covid is a selfish geronticidal maniac who'd step over his own mother's corpse for the chance of a pint in a pub with his friends".
The problem here is it feels as if it is just adding a bunch of speculation. We were told by some last year that lockdowns were causing a suicide spike. But now it seems the suicide rate was either flat or lower. School closures were supposed to harm children, yet a few days ago we got a lot of research that shows that probably isn't the case.
An anti-lockdown advocate can simply add endlessly to the cost column while poo pooing the benefit column by downplaying Covid deaths say by using flu as a proxy early on in the pandemic or doing the old 'but pre-existing conditions' gambit as they did later on.
A precautionary based mindset, which people like Taleb espouse, would first cost benefit the cost benefit concept and find it quite wanting. A cost-benefit analysis could not incorporate possibilities like a new varient starts making children as sick as it does adults. There is no law of nature against it. Cost benefit only works by straigtlining previous risks faced but that has a big back door, you assign stuff you never saw before a risk of zero. Hence Pearl Harbor could never have happened because no one ever did a surprise attack using planes launched from aircraft carriers. But it did.
Additionally a more mature cost benefit would suffer from trying to think of all possibilities. An intelligent admiral might very well have considered that new aircraft carrieres could open up the possibility of a sneak attack on battleships grouped together. But what about submarines following ships that are spread out and picking them off? How about modified airships with massive bomb capacity? How about sabatogue by agents inside the US, which was the original reason battleships were drawn together at Pearl Harbor? If you replayed WWII again and allowed both Japan and the US to change tactics as they pleased, even very well read historically minded people would almost certainly be shocked at the variations that could have played out.
I thought sabotage was the reason for storing the planes together and the battleships were just together because that's where the deep water was.
I think you're right. Although that is an odd response. If the planes were spread out sabatage would have been limited to whatever few planes the agents could get too, unless they thought there was a huge number of potential agents capable of attacking multiple locations at once.
Having them together makes them easier to watch over and unauthorized people more obvious.
I guess this leads me to the question of what was their larger vision? Did they think an attempt would be made to sabatage a handful of planes? If that's all that happened, so what? But then if Japan did have some agents blow up a few planes, that would be an act of war and things were already pretty tense.
So if they thought Japan was about to set off a war, one would think Japan would want something more for their first strike than a handful of planes getting damaged. That opens the question if Japan wanted to make a massive first strike to open a war, the only two ways to do it would be subs attacking the ships or planes attacking the ships. It seems if thi swas your thinking, then they should have had the planes flying as many patrols as possible to try to spot either subs or carriers on the open seas.
I know hindsight is 20/20 but it really seems like a screw up.
Lockdowns were not efficient even before we take into account any cost-benefit calculation. But let's assume that it was not immediately apparent. After first 2 weeks when they didn't perform as expected we definitely had to take cost-benefit into account but sadly was never done.
Notice the phase "as expected". This is exactly what is wrong with the cost-benefit mindset as opposed tothe precautionary mindset.
Is it a good idea to infect most of the population with a virus we know next to nothing about? No it is not. Yet cost-benefit advocates presume to declare yes it is because they can tell us closing schools for a bit will cause kids to become dumb for life, will cause people to become depressed and kill themselves, will cause 23,342 men to beat their wives on odd days of the month and 23,462 to beat their wives on even days.
Yet at no point do we ever hear abut the 'as expected' of ending lockdowns? How has that worked out compared to the 'as expected'?
The point is that lockdowns didn't limit the spread significantly and we realized it after first 2 weeks of lockdowns. Then it didn't matter anymore what the virus could do potentially because it made no difference. Although at that time from Diamond Princess we actually knew the age distribution of mortality and could have tried more targeted approach. I have no idea why it was never done. Maybe the project cost-benefit ratio was too low. But as a precautionary principle it was a good idea to try to protect elderly more than young people.
"The point is that lockdowns didn't limit the spread significantly and we realized it after first 2 weeks of lockdowns." Explain that please.
The expected time of covid incubation is 4-5 days, up to 7 days in most cases. 2 weeks is enough to drastically reduce the hospital admittance with covid. It didn't happen, after 2 weeks it either went up or decreased just slightly. Clearly, the idea that the lockdown significantly reduces the spread was mistaken.
An excellent example of "Do your own research" gone horribly wrong.
So your theory is that Covid spreads through some other mechanism than communicable activity? Perhaps people watching the same Netflix program or playing the same game on their phones within a mile of a 5G tower?
What do you mean by lockdowns didn't limit the spread significantly? Is this, "forced lockdowns only affected the 25% of people that weren't already quarantining voluntarily and thus had limited effect"? Are we also ignoring that forced lockdowns in one region likely helped convince people in other regions to self-quarantine?
There is zero doubt that people not congregating reduces the spread of a disease(within a non-immune partially infected population). It is unclear to me what point you are trying to make
After 2 weeks we should have expected steep decline. It didn't happen. Only a slight reduction could be observed. Clearly the effects were marginal. Case closed.
We should have looked for other measures immediately and discarded lockdowns at that point. But because authorities stubbornly stuck with lockdowns, it took unusually long time to realize that aerosol spread (and not from fomites) was more common.
Possibly other measures like increasing the punishment for failure to comply with the lockdown order? Wait, no way to know if that was the problem though because, "Case closed."
As mentioned above, it was noted that home based transmissions went up as lockdown went on indicating the virus was limited to who it could infect.
This makes lockdown require a lot more than 2 weeks but you could have accelerated it with a large testing program so people at home who were positive could isolate themselves and break the chain from burning thru family members.
I was playing video games and smelled smoke. I went to the kitchen and found the top of the stove was consumed with a big grease fire. I got a bit towel and smothered most of it, but then I got bored and went back to playing video games. I discovered some time later the fire had grown back again.
It was then I did my cost benefit analysis. Smothering a grease fire did not put it out. Some people get rich playing video games. If I stoped playing my video games, I could cost myself hundreds of millions of dollars. My benefit is only delaying the fire that would destroy the kitchen. Therefore as a rational person the only concusion is I should play more video games.
How do u end up with asymmetric body maps about where it's ok to touch?
Shaking right hands is normal. Left hands isn't.
Its downright sinister is what it is.
Ha!
In the 1970s, at least in the US, hippie types always did a left handed bent elbowed knuckles up hand clasp. We didn’t do it the way ‘the man’ did it.
Yeah I was one of them. :)
Who is the target audience for the Chinese propaganda?
Firstly, the managers of the people who make it. Secondly, the Chinese public. Thirdly, U.S. officials.
Your score is 90.32, higher than 96.75% of the people who have completed this task
room
trampoline 83
lion 82 86
nucleus 91 94 88
pear 93 84 75 89
peer 81 86 87 91 91
petard 111 86 97 102 97 103
room trampoline lion nucleus pear peer petard
sorry, just wanted to see if I could beat the score given... :) and brag i did...
Good job! I thought I'd get somewhere with words like "Exegesis" and "Goblin" but I only managed an 83.
I wonder if mixing words of Latin and German origin would help too?
My hot take on 14 is that the fact that the discrimination seems to be concentrated in retail suggests that employers are less racist themselves than worried about racist customers.
> I realize I sound arrogant and annoying here, but I guess I’m just urging people to notice when there’s a big hole at the point in an argument where a cost-benefit analysis should be.
While I'm inclined to agree, doesn't this seemingly assume a utilitarian point of view which others may not share? A deontologist might simply conclude that any unnecessary death is a tragedy we should work to avoid. They might agree that we can take a utilitarian approach to decide in what order to tackle these tragedies, but not whether they qualify as a tragedy.
> How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?
You know what would be the most effective use of funds? Political reform. Get the money out of politics, fund elections using public money, and move towards more proportional representation (but not full PR).
Presumably effective altruism should be about moving the biggest lever to effect the most positive change, and there's no bigger lever than the federal government. $400 million is money that can move elections.
>$400 million is money that can move elections.
Is it? Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign, and he didn't get the nomination. He spent over $100 million in Florida going for Biden, but Florida went for Trump, and went for Trump at pretty much the amount people thought was plausible before Bloomberg spent anything. It seems to me that money in politics, if not entirely wasted, has an extremely unknown impact on results.
Meanwhile, if Bloomberg had spent $500 million on, say, mosquito nets, we can say with some certainty that many, many lives would have been saved. That's the whole point of effective altruism: to find things where we can say with a high level of certainty that $X gets us Y result, and then identifying the best out of those options in terms of dollars per utilon. Political spending is the opposite, a world where you can drop half a billion dollars and be unsure whether you got anything of value for your dollars.
Besides all that, what exactly would be the benefit of getting "money out of politics?" How many lives would it save? Why should I expect that "getting money out of politics" would improve the world more than, say, eradicating Polio or fighting Tuberculosis?
Bloomberg's focus was diffuse so of course the money whisked away into the aether. I'm saying such amounts of money could fund a single issue campaign that has populist support: election reform.
The "most effective" aspect of "effective altruism" doesn't necessarily entail investments with high certainty, but "great effect". This includes high certainty and moderate results, but could also include low to moderate certainty but great results.
> Why should I expect that "getting money out of politics" would improve the world more than, say, eradicating Polio or fighting Tuberculosis?
For all the reasons that has caused and continues to cause suffering: better representation at the federal level leading to better climate change efforts, decreasing the number of pointless wars, more effective policies for poverty and homelessness, better healthcare. These are all populist policies that captured politicians avoid with a ten foot pole.
So you're right that there's less certainty of total success, but the payoff for winning could be huge, and even partial success could have significant downstream effects for generations to come.
>better representation at the federal level leading to better climate change efforts, decreasing the number of pointless wars, more effective policies for poverty and homelessness, better healthcare. These are all populist policies that captured politicians avoid with a ten foot pole.
How certain are you that the election reforms you are championing here will actually lead to those results? Lets say we get money out of politics (somehow) and lets say you make representation in the US (one country of many) more representation: we add a few dozen senators, gerrymander all the states. Does it follow that we then get a solution for climate change? From one country getting more representational? This will reduce pointless wars? This will reduce poverty and homelessness? I'm not seeing the path from A to C here. Do you think the only reason the US federal government isn't doing these things already is because of money in politics and a lack of representation?
And perhaps Bloomberg's $500 million to get himself the nomination was "too diffuse" to matter (citation needed, but all grant it). But his $100 million in Florida was intensely focused on one outcome: electing Biden. And I can't say it had any noticeable impact whatsoever. Whereas if he spent that $100 million on mosquito nets, we're looking at a conservative estimate of 28,500 lives saved. That's 28,500 people with mothers and fathers, with families and lives and hopes and dreams saved from death. 28,500 people who will go on to work in their communities, produce things of value, contribute, and raise the next generation: among them will be entrepreneurs who will create jobs and wealth for their communities, bright people who may become engineers or scientists, and plenty of ordinary people who will enrich the lives of their communities in their own way. That's a lot better than the nothing Bloomberg got for his $100 million.
I'll put it to you straight, I don't think $400 million has much of a chance at getting money out of politics: for one thing, you'd need to overturn Citizen's United, and unless Supreme Court Justices are more bribable than I think $400 million will get you jack-squat in that department. And changing our system of representation to be more, well, representative will require changing the Constitution: how does $400 million get us the buy in of 2/3rds of the state legislatures? And if it can, then what stops the people who do like money in politics from spending $450 million on it?
I'll stick with mosquito nets.
> Do you think the only reason the US federal government isn't doing these things already is because of money in politics and a lack of representation?
The reason the US is not *more effective* on all of those issues and more is indeed due to money in politics and poor representation. I'm not even sure why this would be controversial. Why do all politicians who get elected leave multimillionaires even if they entered broke? The "revolving door" is a term for a reason [1].
> But his $100 million in Florida was intensely focused on one outcome: electing Biden. And I can't say it had any noticeable impact whatsoever.
"Electing Biden" is not a single issue. Biden had a platform which consists of dozens of issues, hundreds if you count his past record. That's not $100 million put towards a single issue.
> I'll put it to you straight, I don't think $400 million has much of a chance at getting money out of politics: for one thing, you'd need to overturn Citizen's United, and unless Supreme Court Justices are more bribable than I think $400 million will get you jack-squat in that department.
The court isn't strictly necessary irrelevant. Congress also does not need to overturn Citizen's United, and Congress can also decide how many justices sit on the court.
Furthermore, $400 million is the pool of money in the effective altruism pot as it stands. If this got any kind of traction at all, that number would easily and quickly triple. There's a compounding effect you're ignoring here.
Yes, big gambles have big risks, but also big rewards. I think the pandemic has been a game changer for swaying public opinion, and for opening up people's minds to different possibilities. If any time is ripe for sweeping change, it's now.
[1] https://www.citizen.org/article/slowing-the-federal-revolving-door/
>The reason the US is not *more effective* on all of those issues and more is indeed due to money in politics and poor representation. I'm not even sure why this would be controversial.
I'm not even sure why you would be so sure. Citation needed, I guess? I think we just have very different priors vis a vis why Congress does some things and not others.
>The court isn't strictly necessary irrelevant. Congress also does not need to overturn Citizen's United, and Congress can also decide how many justices sit on the court.
Court packing is pretty unpopular: how are you going to overcome that?
>Furthermore, $400 million is the pool of money in the effective altruism pot as it stands. If this got any kind of traction at all, that number would easily and quickly triple. There's a compounding effect you're ignoring here.
I think I'm ignoring it because it doesn't exist? At this point you're basically saying that if a charitable giving organization chose to shift focus and become a political advocacy organization it would somehow triple donations? There's a lot of political advocacy organizations out there already with donor bases, what makes you think people would give EA more money if they changed their entire focus? It's far more likely the pool would shrink precipitously as their donor base is alienated. I mean, if tomorrow UNICEF decided that instead of focusing on helping children around the globe they were going to focus on electoral reform in one country that a lot of their donor base would decide to donate to a different organization that was still focused on helping children.
> I'm not even sure why you would be so sure. Citation needed, I guess?
I would think that all of the countries that serve their populations better, and the clear disconnect between the policies that Congress pursues vs. the positions that are actually popular among the people. You can see that now with Afghanistan: the media and political elites are decrying the pull-out, but Biden is doing what the people have wanted for at least 10 years.
> Court packing is pretty unpopular: how are you going to overcome that?
That was only one option I presented, a last resort. What has Congress' approval rating been for the last 20-30 or so years? If the people had a chance to elect a congress whose sole purpose was to make Congress functional and popular going forward, and court packing was the only obstruction, I think public sentiment would be clear on that point. There are legitimate concerns with that, but they could be addressed.
> At this point you're basically saying that if a charitable giving organization chose to shift focus and become a political advocacy organization it would somehow triple donations?
If the position were popular enough and the confidence in the organization were sufficient, sure.
> There's a lot of political advocacy organizations out there already with donor bases, what makes you think people would give EA more money if they changed their entire focus?
Are there political advocacy groups pushing for what I'm talking about? How effective are they?
> I mean, if tomorrow UNICEF decided that instead of focusing on helping children around the globe they were going to focus on electoral reform in one country that a lot of their donor base would decide to donate to a different organization that was still focused on helping children.
Sure, but effective altruism is rationalist-aligned. If this avenue were truly rational on a cost-benefit analysis, then I expect many people can see the logic behind it.
Not that I think I've quantified anything remotely well, I've merely sketched out the rough argument for this course. I doubt anything less than an accounting of the probabilities would actually convince you, but I'm not going to do that here. I will simply stand by my claim that it's entirely plausible that pushing for positive political change in this time of turmoil could yield better outcomes than individual pursuits in the long run.
Bloomberg isn't exactly an outlier here. Well funded campaigns routinely lose. If you want to talk about single issue campaigns rather than politicians, just look at Prop 16.
I'm not sure how Prop 16 is relevant. I'm talking about populist single-issue campaigns. Prop 16 was anything but popular.
I'm a little dense, so is Nate Silver showing two people on opposite sides of an argument, each jumping right to a conclusion, neither doing any cost-benefit?
25.
Over the past year I've adopted a heuristic. If you ask somebody "does X cause Y" and their answer is "there is no evidence that X causes Y" without any further context, then I assume some level of malice.
Why? Because a) they answered a different question than the one I asked; b) they didn't acknowledge that they did that; and c) they are acting-as-if they answered the question I asked, which they didn't, and they know they didn't, which means they believe they're deceiving me.
If they were sincere, they might say something like "Well at this time we don't have any evidence that X causes Y, but it's worth investigating". Or "Well at this time we don't have any evidence that X causes Y, but based on first principles it's reasonable to think it might". Or even "Well at this time we don't have any evidence that X causes Y, but based on first principles, it's reasonable to think it doesn't"
They might say: "Well we don't have any evidence that it does, so really, who knows". But overwhelmingly, in my experience at least, when you ask "does X cause Y" and someone says "there is no evidence that X causes Y", they are very strongly trying to make you think "X does not cause Y" without actual evidence of it.
Now I'm not being a stickler for evidence. In fact, another one of the heuristics I've come to believe in the last year is that evidence is way less useful and more prone to bias and manipulation than people think. It's more, like, a mismatch in the confidence level. If you ask a question and someone's answer is "there is no evidence for your hypothesis", then the honest disposition is to be incredibly uncertain about the question and every potential answer. But that's not what I see. What I see is, most of the time, "there is no evidence for your hypothesis" being said as if it's a confident statement that there will never be evidence for your hypothesis.
If this strikes you as too confrontational, or too obstinate, or otherwise unacceptably irrational, I have an alternative formulation for it, and I will use the object level example from (25)
Me: "Hey does wearing masks all the time fuck up childhood development?"
AAP: "There is no evidence that wearing face masks all the time fucks up childhood development?"
This is the heuristic alternative:
Me: "Ok, so, does wearing masks all the time _not_ fuck up children?"
The only honest answer to this question, assuming their previous answer was also honest, is "there is no evidence that wearing face masks all the time _doesn't_ fuck up children". And once you juxtapose those two non-answers together, they cancel out the connotative implication that "your hypothesis is wrong" and return you back to "we don't know so I guess make some guesses based on first principles and factor in heavy uncertainty"
Another another way of thinking about it: this is like a Watson selection task. If I want to know does X cause Y and someone answers "we have no evidence that X causes Y", that tells me nothing. The correct way to invalidate that hypothesis is not "we have no evidence" but rather "we have counter-evidence". It's to say "well actually here's a bunch of studies that show that X definitely doesn't cause Y". But very few people think in this instinctive falsification mode, and they get snowed.
It's a very good point. In fact, there is no evidence (or sometimes – not enough evidence) that X causes Y is a standard phrasing in medicine and it is supposed to tell that we simply have no evidence so it is unknown. However, it certainly pushes people to wrong conclusions. It just adds more to cognitive burden and unless you are very careful, it is easy to just to wrong conclusions even though the author didn't mean to.
As I replied above, "there is no evidence" is *also* a standard phrasing meaning "We did a bunch of studies and they came back negative." It's insane.
There is virtually never "no evidence". There is almost always *some* evidence for both sides of any proposition worth debating. Possibly very weak evidence, worth dismissing in most practical cases. But mostly, people saying "no evidence" mean something along the lines of "no proof".
So the question is, do you need proof in order to act? Sometimes you do, e.g. if you are planning to punish someone for a crime in a rule of law society. But often it is reasonable to act on the basis of evidence short of proof. And everyone does this at least some of the time.
If you've identified something as a controversy where it would be reasonable to act without proof, then the person saying "there is no evidence" is trying to fool someone. Very possibly themselves.
What you need to prove in order to prohibit something is where this point intersects with the recent posts on the FDA. There is a push to make everything either mandatory or prohibited (see also the deep cuts: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/06/everything-not-obligatory-is-forbidden/), and it's easy to push the evidentiary requirements around when you're really motivated to make something mandatory or prohibited.
It brings to mind the old days and discussions of 'gay conversion therapy'. "There is no evidence that any conversion therapy works [across the general population, possibly with unwilling participants, to statistical standards]." That means it must be *prohibited*. Of course, compare to weight loss programs. Or alcoholism programs. Lots of people are fond of pointing out that these things mostly don't meet those statistical standards across broad populations... but approximately no one jumps to, "...so we must prohibit them!" After all, they didn't start out with a major political reason to really really want to prohibit those things....
Is there no evidence or is there no "evidence"™?
This problem is exacerbated a hundred-fold by the fact that the standard way to announce "We did an experiment as to whether X causes Y, and the experiment didn't show that X causes Y" is to write "We found no evidence that X causes Y (p > 0.05)." The sane way that a normal person would express this is "We found evidence that X does not cause Y," but for some reason the scientific community is in love with p-values and Popperian nonsense. See https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/doctor-there-ar.html
4: Volokh has a pointed to a situation in WW2 where the government did flagranty violate the third amendment:
http://volokh.com/2011/10/18/a-historical-violation-of-the-third-amendment/
I'm really surprised so many ppl are surprised or can't understand why these public health officials (and many policy peeps in other areas) avoid believing, often by not looking, cost-benefit analysis. If you took public health/policy cost-benefits seriously you'd upset and alienate your friends/peers/felloe partisans so you manage to figure out a way not to (and you aren't a sociopath so u can't just lie all the time).
I can't be the only one here who felt they had way less friends and was far more isolated than they wanted to be *because* I couldn't bring myself to believe the views that would make me acceptable to my peers and at other times tricked myself into ignoring evidence to retain social connections.
Fuck, I'm pretty sure 80% of philosophers are delibrately choosing not to think about trans-gender philosophy bc they in some sense realize/suspect coherence is incompatible with the list of statements they'd lose friends etc for endorsing[1]. And I wouldn't be surprised if any number of us here aren't busy doing the same thing about aspects of the role the sequences/Yudkowsky have in rationalism.
So yah of course ppl avoid doing C/B analysis across the board ...anyone who did would basically end up with the kind of views expressed here (in lvl of hereticality not necessarily content) and find themselves pushed out of both power and good graces of friends.
---
[1]: No, I don't mean some crazy anti-trans view is right. I just mean that most philosophers at some level realize taking a close look at philosophy of gender is quite likely to lead you to a perfectly humane and sympathetic yet unacceptably heretical view like what I and I think Scott believe: that trans-men aren't men on the traditional usage/meaning of that word but that just means we should change the meaning (ppl > dictionaries). Or that any 'gender' not traditionally recognized by your society (perhaps and none of the above) is better understood as a strongly felt attitude about gender instead.
Cancel the claim about the sequences...yes I think they choose to project a kind of Messianic/salvation attitude about rationality rather than...you know...a rational one but I guess that's not a severe enough break ppl can't just be quite about it.
Which, ironically, was the rational action. for Yudkowsky to take in writing them but makes for a bad Bible for movement.
While it's true that pragmatic considerations like one's social standing can override truth-seeking, I think the surprise perhaps comes from thinking the experts are better people in general than the rest. One expects experts to not fall prey to lesser considerations like status.
"is smashing its tech industry"
China isn't "smashing" anything. Is Weibo down? Is Ixigua down? Is WeChat down? Is China's tech sector going to be a smaller percentage of the world tech sector in a decade? Over the past year or so, China has at last started to address real problems that exist in mainland society -a bloated education sector, a bloated property sector, declining population, low wages among large employers, etc. Some moves in this direction may be misguided, but one actually has to demonstrate that they are before presuming this. Many people in other countries would kill to have a government with such agility in setting priorities.
I don't know how reliable the PhD skepticism result is, but I can see a possible explanation, along the general lines of Dan Klein's work. He found that, when an issue was linked to group identification, the more scientifically competent someone was, the more likely to agree with his group's position, whether that meant believing in evolution or not believing. His explanation was that whether you believe in evolution has no significant effect on the world in general but a substantial effect on you, via your interaction with the people around you, making it in your interest to believe what they do. The more sophisticated your understanding, the better you are at talking yourself into what you want to believe.
Similarly here. If you have some reason, social or personal, to want to be skeptical of vaccines, it's easier to ignore the "all expert opinion says they are safe and effective" argument if you know you are in the top 2% of the population by education, hence just as smart as the purported expert opinion and so competent to reject it.
That, after all, is my attitude on issues where I reject the current orthodoxy such as the need for government or the effects of climate change.
Surely you mean Dan M Kahan.
http://www.culturalcognition.net/science-literacy-and-political/
Re: 9: This is great news for me, as I'd never heard about any of the insect apocalypse alarmism to begin with. I take this as slight evidence that alarmism that never rises to the level of me hearing about it can safely be ignored anyway, and alarmism that rises to the level of me hearing about it may be relevant.
>but then suggests the solution is affirmative action for poorer students, which seems worse than trying to identify and eliminate whatever biases favor the rich.
It's definitely worse than actually identifying and eliminating the biases, but may be much better than 'trying' to do so, especially if the people in charge of 'trying' have strong incentives to not succeed (like enhanced networking with rich and powerful families if the bias continues).
That's generally a justification for affirmative action - if a bias in a selection process still exists 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, it's probably actually hard to eliminate it for whatever reason, but we could just get the same outcome as eliminating it today for free by putting our thumb on the scale in an equal and opposite manner.
Fun antecedent: I went to college with Kaitlyn Bennet and we frequented a lot of the same parties because I was friends with some of her editing team through our degree. As a person she’s actually pretty nice outside of politics and though she comes off as “crazy gun girl” she’s really just an extreme libertarian who can turn off the whole persona when she’s not on camera. Seeing her name on the prediction (5) makes me think about other people who get typecast on the Internet and how and digital architects could further structure communication or their perfect in a way that helps people avoid falling into tribalistic assumptions (if they want to) through digital communication.
The third amendment argument against the eviction ban may have been intended as a joke, but if we're to read the third amendment literally, I think they have a point.
"Probably makes sense in the context of which problems are money-constrained vs. people-constrained and what the rest of the world is doing. "
Or more likely, the communities that have even heard of Effective Altruism are the ones that spend all their time worrying about AI risk.
What does "I wear no mask" on link 28 allude to? Is that a quote from somewhere?
Robert Chambers, "The King in Yellow"
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm
Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2.
Nice to see Bagnold getting a mention ['There Are Two Types of Dune']. It necessarily skips past a massively important contribution he made that still echoes today, the formation of the Long Range Desert Group. This group was a small bunch of disparate and hardy souls whose mission was to carry out deep penetration, covert reconnaissance patrols and intelligence gathering missions from behind Italian lines in the N African desert in WWII. It also assisted the fledgling SAS, formed by Sir David Stirling, [the 'Phantom Major'] in their more piratical, action orientated behind-the-lines operations.
The SAS had an exchange Officer, Col. 'Charlie' Beckwith, who, thus inspired, formed 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, or Delta Force. And Delta Force, for the past twenty years, has obviously been in some very sandy places...
Divergent association, straight-up results with words chosen over the course of about two minutes:
Hole
Cleanliness
Fruit
Xylophone
Theology
Orbit
Comedy
score of 89.56, percentile of 95.82
Word.
Nobody else has said it, so I might as well: those Russian Atlantis paintings are gorgeous. I'm going to steal them for an online D&D campaign.
RE: Divergent Aptitude Test, Shawn Presser asked people to find the *lowest* score instead of the highest. So far, 6.2 is the best.
https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1423906165801562116
Although, it would also be interesting to find the lowest score that wasn't a sequence of numbers.
Regarding QAnon, I feel that one of the best cofounders to adjust for with something like that would be support for Donald Trump, since virtually every QAnon supporter also supports Trump, but not necessarily the other way around. A paywall prevents me to see what they actually adjusted for.
Something like homeopathy would be a much better choice for this type of study, since it's politically neutral. I wouldn't be surprised if there actually was a correlation with church attendance and belief in homeopathy, but at least I would trust a study on that more than this.
It's already been pointed out that Chesterton didn't actually say what's attributed to him here, but it seems to me to be trivially true nonetheless. Modern woke-liberalism is an *obvious* religion, for example; or a dysfunctional substitute for a religion if you prefer. New Age hippie crap, the Osho movement, Yud-worshipping rationalism for some of the people here, parts of the environmental activism subculture: all this shit is occupying a mental niche which doesn't disappear just because you remove the belief system that slotted into it, and I think the increasing frequency of generalized anxiety is basically just the product of leaving the niche empty. Most people can't manage without a faith, just as they can't really cope with liberty. This is one of the big flaws of any rationalizing project; just look at the French Revolution, for example. What a catastrophe.
I'll bet the ability/inability to think about costs has a VERY gendered distribution
probably with the usual 1:4 ration
also
only the sith deal in absolutes
Regarding the insect apocalypse article - when I see thing like this, my bias flagging sensors go up immediately. Sometimes appeal to authority and credentialism is so dang obvious, why do journalists bother?
The original "alarmist" is described as such: "Dave Goulson, a professor at the University of Sussex and one of the paper’s co-authors. Goulson was a relatively unknown English biology professor at the time, but rapidly became the public face of the crisis narrative."
The contra scientist is described as such: "Manu Saunders is a prominent entomologist, and recipient of the Office of Environment & Heritage/Ecological Society of Australia Award for Outstanding Science Outreach."
Come on.
Re Vaccine hesitancy by education level: for someone in my social media feeds, the interesting thing was not the high hesitancy for PhDs, it was that Masters degrees have the lowest hesitancy. This person took that as a sign that people with Masters have learned high ego but have not gained the understanding of how much they don't understand [full disclosure: I have a Masters degree and two Pfizer shots]
Re: Infant caregivers wearing face masks
My four month old is terrified of face masks. In every other respect he is the most easy-going baby ever, but if a person wearing a face mask gets too close he suddenly starts screaming.
Re 25. So we have different standards for different claims - for some, we require proof, for others, we require refutation. But isn't that just textbook Bayesian reasoning? If we assign a high prior to X, we start out believing it, and will go on believing until there's strong enough evidence to the contrary.
If that's the case, the problem is not people using a wrong (irrational) process, but rather assuming too extreme priors. I also think it would be hard to tie the prior, in an empirically significant way, to "what we want to believe" apart from the ingroup consensus - and ingroup consensus seems to be a sensible prior...
Re: harvard,
Throwing money around is a really good way to cheat basically any metric, and correcting for all the specific ways that metrics can be cheated is very hard. It's much more effective to just adjust for net worth (not income, which people rich enough to really be a problem here basically don't have anyway & which is at least somewhat associated with skill) than to try to adjust for anything else. This isn't much of a burden on the rich, because another thing money is really good at buying is options (and, well, insulation from any and all burdens aside from the ones generated in your own head).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhong_Chenle