What is the social-proof v. popularity twitter ratio like? - is a question I've been asking myself. I have the world's most elite human capital followed twitter account (as a ratio of my total follows) because of my substack articles, but I really haven't posted much on twitter. At the moment the list of my X followers gets me into all the important parties, but that's a function of their being easy to find.
Assuming I decide to invest in getting more X followers through threads or whatever, how many followers does one need to equal having my followers?
Oh come on, it's actually quite impressive that he's gotten 355 followers and 3.2k subscribers in such a short amount of time, especially given his... rhetoric. It's not like those subscribers are just casual viewers either; it takes very, uh... spirited belief, to be able to appreciate his articles. And there's a chance that some of those people are very important people! And maybe some of those people have suddenly found themselves in positions of power due to recent events, if you catch my drift.
I've never heard of you but if any of these parties are scheduled for anywhere in Egypt this month, I'd be willing to consider making your acquaintance.
That really depends on how much mileage you can get out of your current connections. If I'm correctly guessing what those connections are... well, they're going to be far more valuable than any amount of money.
All the money in the world isn't going to protect you against an angry populace that wants you dead. It's always just better to be on the winning side.
It's pretty hard to have all the money in the world and not have other people on your side though, even if they're more opportunists than ideological allies.
That's a good point. The Bourbons and Romanovs both were institutionally impoverished before their respective revolutions. Russia had soldiers going unpaid. The Romanovs were personally tremendously wealthy, but their wealth was rather illiquid.
People act as if revolutions happen because the poor are oppressed. More often, they seem to happen because the middle classes are strong and the elites, by comparison, are poorly organized, suffer military losses and government incapacity, etc.
Perhaps that's a bit afield from what's being discussed.
If I recall my reading of Citizens correctly, the best among the French aristocracy - contra the usual narrative - were starting businesses and getting involved in decidedly middle class activities prior to the revolution.
One may see that the aristocracy was not exactly ascendant.
Ayako Fujitani, Steven Seagal's daughter with the Japanese woman, grew up to be an actress. She starred in "Gamera Guardian of the Universe" and it's two sequels ("Attack of the Legion" and "Revenge of Iris") in the Nineties. This trilogy among the greatest kaiju-eiga films ever made and I really recommend them. Since then she has starred in many other films, but I haven't seen any of those because Gamera isn't in them.
That is interesting, I have only seen the old Gamera films and the serialized ones that got cannibalized (by Sandy Frank or somebody like him) and ended up on MST3k. There has been some buzz in America around recent Godzilla films, but I never hear these newer Gamera films mentioned.
The trilogy of Gamera films that was made in the 1990s has epic plots and absolutely fantastic special effects. Watching them after seeing the old ones is like watching Christopher Nolan's Batman movies after seeing the Adam West Batman TV show. Amazon Prime Video is streaming them all.
There is also another Gamera movie, "Gamera the Brave," which was made in the 2000s and is targeted for a younger audience again, but still has impressive special effects. Netflix also released an animated Gamera TV series last year. It has a good storyline, but the animation is done in that creepy style where they try to make 3-D CGI models look like 2-D hand-drawn animation.
>I’d always thought that Christianity beat paganism because it was inherently more attractive. Yet the Mexican youth are turning away from the stodgy boring Catholic Church en masse to worship Santa Muerte. Why?
For what it's worth, the more stereotypically pagan elements within Catholicism, like saint veneration seem particularly popular in Latin America, where demand for saints to venerate exceeds the supply, leading to folk saints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_saint#Local_character.
The Catholic Church should be co-opting Santa Muerte rather than condemning her. Co-option of local beliefs and deities into Christianity was one of the reasons it became succesfull(This is not a gotcha against Christianity, its something I genuinly like about Catholic/Orthodox Churches).
Well, the only problem with that is the piddling little detail that it's heresy and possibly blasphemy but definitely occultism. "Santa Muerte" is not a saint, it's a personification of death and specifically invoked for bad purposes like murder. It's magic, not religion. Sure, folk religion teeters on that verge all the time, but there's a difference between "turning a prayer to a local saint into a charm" and "invoking a genuine demonic spirit to help you get away with literal murder and crime".
Yeah, I know Protestants think there's no difference there between Catholicism and witchcraft, but we do have *some* rules.
EDIT: Anyway, if you want to venerate skeletal figures, there are the Catacomb Saints:
And the commercialisation of Santa Muerte may in fact soften the image. That there are variants and that the "tarot, crystals, candles" set are getting in on the act means that the imagery and practice will probably move away from its roots in crime, the underworld, and remnants of pre-Christian beliefs and become something more rootless and commodified.
I do not mean to suggest that this is the church's doing, and nor do I have direct experience culturally - but can testify an Anglo living in a Mexican area 150 miles from the border could be forgiven for thinking that out of the richness, at least style-wise (which I've always been drawn to), that is Mexican/Spanish-Mexican heritage - the most significant thing, the thing that will last the most and that people are most desirous of sharing via commercialization, is - tediously - Dia de Los Muertos. (My local grocery store had an appropriately grotesque Dia de Los Muertos Barbie for sale.) Now without having enough interest in it to so much as watch "Coco", I realize Dia de Los Muertos has not the sinister element that Santa Muerte does. Still, the iconography seems to be a through-line, and the focus on death over life.
And it's perhaps not a coincidence that it's not uncommon even to see police cruisers with skulls decorating them. Everyone is driving around with skulls and roses.
Well, Day of the Dead is easy to cross-pollinate with Hallowe'en and the commercialised version of American Hallowe'en has now made its way across the Atlantic to replace the traditional Irish customs.
So if you want to sell Mexican heritage that makes the easiest impact and widest spread to a non-Mexican culture, anything that is "This is our version of thing you already celebrate" is the best pick. And Dia de Los Muertos Barbie sounds like the perfect hellscape result of commercial interest, cultural appropriation, rowing back on that appropriation by a new 'diverse, inclusive' form of appropriation, and the old reliable selling tat to kids.
I can't speak for the Mexican version, but traditional Hallowe'en was not so much about the focus on death *over* life, but rather death as *part* of life, particularly when it cross-pollinated with the Christian feasts of All Saints and All Souls Days. The dead are not gone (as much as you might think), they are there and still part of our family. Death is the inevitable end of life, we will all die one day. The dark of the year is the time for spirits and reflections on mortality. You can fear it, try to placate it - or accept it and celebrate it.
The American version was completely free of association with one's own dead. Had more of a harvest festival aspect perhaps. And a bit of a ritual allowing children more freedom one night a year.
I like there to be different customs. I used to love those "Christmas Around the World" type books, or those children's books about different countries (they never questioned the "nation" framework :-)) and what their celebrations are and their favorite foods and their "dress".
I might not love Day of the Dead stuff personally, on aesthetic grounds - but would appreciate it as an interesting custom and not think about it otherwise if it were not seemingly rising to pre-eminence, possibly over Christmas, eventually.
I've tried to read this comment like three times, and each time I fail to parse it. I can't tell what the object of the second sentence is, nor what "that" means in 'thinking that out of richness'. is it a referrant to what the person you're replying to thought? "you only think that out of richness" kind of thing? This is the way my brain keeps trying to parse it but it doesn't work
Ah, yes. The people who make it almost impossible to get a good deck of cards for playing French Tarot in this country.
I used to help run a traditional card gaming group, and the main host told me one day he wanted to change the name, or promote the event more. I told him that if we posted an event on Meetup titled "Tarot at the Botanical Gardens", we'd end up with a lot of very confused women with crystals.
>[...] It's magic, not religion. Sure, folk religion teeters on that verge all the time, but there's a difference between "turning a prayer to a local saint into a charm" and "invoking a genuine demonic spirit to help you get away with literal murder and crime".
I find the difference to be a purely practical one.
Sure, praying cost much less MP, but the results are unpredictable. I can never be sure what my deity of choice will do. Summons, albeit much more costly, have not once failed me.
You joke, Shinji, but there's a kernel of truth. Contra Christian copers, I claim that one of the contemporarily unacknowledged reasons Christianity beat paganism was that its god was a more effective prayer-answerer and miracle-deliverer than the older pantheon. Sadly, this is no longer the case, and if the local crossroads god or spirit of a folk hero or guardian of the dead answers prayers and provides real aid, why waste your time and attention?
(And I have found conjuration to provide somewhat unpredictable results compared to e.g. old hoodoo standbys or prayer to the deathless gods. FWIW.)
The Orthodox Church doesn't and never did co-opt local beliefs and deities, it's the same as it was 2000 years ago. Unlike the Catholic Church who "adapts to the modern times". Good luck with that
Ah, I see you have managed to avoid or be unaware of the Orthodox version of "it was all pagan anyway" that Catholicism has got; didn't you know that all the local Greek saints are just thinly-disguised Classical deities that the peasants and ordinary folk continued to worship under the noses of the clergy? 😁
"The legend of Barlaam and Josaphat was derived, via Arabic and Georgian versions, from the life story of Siddartha Gautama, known as the Buddha. The king-turned-monk Joasaphat (Arabic Yūdhasaf or Būdhasaf; Georgian Iodasaph) also gets his name from the Sanskrit Bodhisattva, the term traditionally used to refer to Gautama before his awakening. Barlaam and Ioasaph were placed in the Orthodox calendar of saints on 26 August, and in the Roman martyrology they were canonized (as "Barlaam and Josaphat") and assigned 27 November. The story was translated into Hebrew in the Middle Ages as Ben-HaMelekh ve HaNazir ("The King's Son and the Nazirite"). Thus the Buddhist story was turned into a Christian and Jewish legend."
"Barlaam and Josaphat were entered into the Greek Orthodox liturgical calendar on 26 August Julian (8 September Gregorian), and into liturgical calendar of the Slavic tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, on 19 November Julian (2 December Gregorian)."
Sorry, friend: like the Protestants, every sword you pick up to use against us Romans turns in your hand to attack your own beliefs.
I have no Barlaam or Josaphat in my Romanian calendar and this is from the link you gave:
Barlaam and Josaphat, also known as Bilawhar and Budhasaf, are Christian saints. Their life story was not based on the life of the Gautama Buddha,[1] who may have lived several centuries before Jesus. Their story tells of the conversion of Josaphat to Christianity.
Depending on which national church where, there are variant calendars in Orthodoxy. One calendar online gives me this:
"This month, on the thirtieth day, the commemoration of our venerable Isaac the Confessor, abbot of the Dalmatian Monastery in Constantinople.
...Also on this day, the memory of the holy martyr Natalie, who was killed by the sword.
Also on this day, the memory of the venerable Varlaam, who died peacefully.
Also on this day, the commemoration of the holy martyrs Romano and Teletie, who were killed by the sword, was celebrated.
Also on this day, the commemoration of the holy martyr Evplu, who died wrapped in ox hide and exposed to the scorching sun.
Through their holy prayers, O Lord, have mercy on us and save us. Amen."
Wikipedia gives me this:
"Varlaam is a variant of the saint's name Barlaam, used in the Orthodox churches due to the Byzantine sound shift from /b/ to /v/. A shortened form is Varlam."
Varlaam is the Romanian version of the name Barlaam. Not the same Barlaam as in the legend, but it's clear that even for the Romanians, the name was being used as a saint's name to give in christening.
So the greater point is that if you are trying to maintain the Orthodox "never co-opted local deities and beliefs", you're going to run up against the same questioning and the same secular correlations drawn up since Enlightenment times (and before). You can't escape it, except by work like that done by Tim O'Neill and others, about how the origins of the great Christian feasts were not pagan.
The Orthodox slide under the radar in the West because they're not known enough or big enough to be important. Catholicism is the main church that gets attacked, and then the various Protestant ones in turn. But because Catholicism is the biggest and most monolithic, as it were, a lot of people have an interest in "well actually those Christian festivals are really not Christian" type of work. If they knew about your Romanian Orthodox claims, they'd be happy to do the same demolition job on you.
So saying "oh well the Catholics were contaminated by heresy and secularism and paganism, but not us" is not going to work there. They don't care about the Great Schism, or even that the Protestants were making the same claims in regard to Catholicism, because it's Christianity in general (as the religion that influenced them and which they left or feel is trying to impose its morality on them) that they are fighting, so they're happy to go on about 'the saints are re-purposed gods and spirits' and the like.
"Folk Orthodoxy (Russian: народное православие, romanized: narodnoe pravoslavie; Bulgarian: народно православие, romanized: narodno pravoslavie; Serbian: народно православље, naradno pravoslavlje; Latvian: narodno pravoslavlje) refers to the folk religion and syncretic elements present in the Eastern Orthodox communities. It is a subgroup of folk Christianity, similar to Folk Catholicism. Peasants incorporated many pre-Christian (pagan) beliefs and observances, including coordinating feast days with agricultural life."
See the same thing about Hallowe'en, which superficially looks correct - until you realise that the geographical areas which celebrated Hallowe'en weren't converted to Christianity until a few centuries later, and the veneration of All Saints' Day had already been established before contact was made.
"Elements of dual faith inhere in several Christian cultures. One example is All Souls' Day and All Hallow's Eve (better known as Halloween). Halloween is an ancient Celtic pagan holiday commemorating ancestors, similar to the Christian feast-day All Saints' Day. A number of Christian cultures celebrate Carnival before Great Lent, which preserves pre-Christian customs, thus combining pagan and Christian customs."
Folk *traditions* were incorporated, or better said, kept as part of the overall celebration, but were never part of the religious practice and it's not true to say that 'the church took over Hallowe'en from the pagans so as to persuade the peasant to switch over'.
The degree of syncretism in Christianity and Islam is really vastly overrated- if you want to see a *genuinely* syncretic religious tradition that actually does co-opt local deities, Hinduism or Buddhism would be much closer to the mark.
European Christians today don't have any genuine, serious theological content inherited from Slavic or Nordic paganism, just like modern African Christians (in my experience, anyway), are really much closer to what a 17th or 18th century European Christian believed than to what their animist kin of a generation or two ago believed.
See also: Voodoo, where the Loa basically result from a syncretism of Catholic saint veneration and West African religions.
In a way, it is just the logical conclusion of saint veneration. If you believe that saints are supernatural entities with specific domains (like curing specific illnesses) who can be enticed to intercede in the natural world on your behalf in the natural world, then it is also reasonable to be on the lookout for other supernatural entities the church does not want you to know about.
By contrast, a strong monotheism where the only entity allowed to enact changes on the natural world is God, and the correct way to entice them is to pray to them directly is likely less vulnerable to that failure mode. Of course, a deist world view where even God does not meddle with the universe would be even safer, but would be also hamstrung in cultural evolution, as "you can make supernatural entities intervene on your behalf" likely has a huge mass appeal.
"By contrast, a strong monotheism where the only entity allowed to enact changes on the natural world is God, and the correct way to entice them is to pray to them directly is likely less vulnerable to that failure mode."
Ah, that explains why the staunchly Puritan New England was wracked by witchcraft crazes and fears of the Devil 😀
In such a condition, the failure mode is a form of Zoroastrianism or Manicheanism - God and the Devil as equals and opposites, where the Devil is just as strong and is more inclined to intervene or be accessible to mortals who can invoke demons to do for and give to them what God won't do for or give to them.
When you strip away the layers of saints etc . you have the stark God and Devil scenario, and unless your faith is very secure and you are very confident, it's easy to be haunted by fear of the enemy which goeth about like a roaring lion - God is far away but the Devil is all too eager to get involved with and mess up humans. Placating the powers of darkness is thus one temptation as to how to cope with that message.
> In such a condition, the failure mode is a form of Zoroastrianism or Manicheanism - God and the Devil as equals and opposites
That can be fixed easily by going naturalistic about the good/evil polarity.
You don't need a counterpart to the primordial being of God, to explain why evil happens; once you have a multiplicity of beings, then evolution and game theory dynamics alone is enough to make sure they develop the structures of good and evil, and explore the whole range of possibilities. No need for interventionist or battling supernatural powers for that.
"5 days later 13 bodies were found Strung up from bridges in West Virginia, Florida, and Tennessee. Each showed signs of torture, the women showing signs of the worst sexual abuse before being shot, and the men covered in hammer blows having finally died of brain trauma and fractured skulls."
Okay, so the Steven Segal lesson is: "Make a lot of money as a bad ass movie star for a few years and then you can do whatever you want forever and ever thereafter".
Obviously this is just anecdotal but I get the feeling that other "one-time bad ass movie stars" are generally having a fun go of it long after their glory days.
Comedy stars though....well, Robin Williams of course and... I don't know, is there any way to quantify this?
And does the action star actually have to have been fit at any given point, or can Saul Goodman marry the 19 princesses of Siam because of his silly beat-em-up-on-the-bus movie?
If only there were a system of interconnected computers that one could use to find out, quickly and easily, whether an extremely famous person had a terminal illness!
I would generalize that to "Make a lot of money for a few years and then you can do whatever you want forever and ever thereafter, if you can do basic money management."
Steven Seagal ostensibly had mob connections predating and to some degree causative of his movie stardom. I think his results probably don't generalize.
Vague impression I have is that the 1980s comedy scene was a very hard world from the perspective of drug use (akin the earlier 70s music scene), and if you were big in it, you went pretty hard. There's a tax to be paid for that lifestyle. Conversely, the big action stars seemed to avoid hard drugs, generally speaking, so they have aged somewhat better (and if you had problems with hard drugs, you probably never made it to being "big"-Jan Michael Vincent would be the example here, although not an action star per se).
Some in the 1980s comedy scene went hard with their drug use, many went less hard, a few didn't go at all. Like quite literally any other corner of show business (Source: family member was in that scene, wasn't big but knew the big ones personally pre- and post-fame). Would be absolutely shocked if the same weren't true of the 1980s action-movie scene.
For 23, I would say high-rise buildings for family are pretty common in Hanoi, Vietnam. This is one of the biggest real estate tycoon in Vietnam: https://vinhomes.vn/en. And they are all about high rise buildings for family.
The best apartment dwellings from a noise perspective tend to be conversions from outdated usages. Former warehouses converted into lofts or apartments, etc. You get heavy frame construction and/or thick masonry walls. I've known several couples over the years who lived in those with new children and everybody in the house slept like a baby.
An extreme example is, for some years a fellow pro-am musician I knew was living in what had been Chicago's main "film repository" (regional distribution hub for Hollywood product). It was built in the era of nitrate film reels having a high tendency to burst into flame. This Art Deco-style building, which some years back was converted into rather great apartments, has walls that were designed to contain the occasional exploding film canisters. We used to have rehearsals/songwriting sessions at his place, he on electric bass and me on electric piano, and he never once heard a complaint from anybody. He figured we could have had the whole group in there, drums and all, and been at most a distant rumble to any neighbors.
I am genuinely happy for you and the rest of the .000001% of US residents living in an extremely specific kind of adaptively reused building stock. However, I think you'll agree that this doesn't say much about the state of noise insulation in the overwhelming majority of multifamily dwellings in the US.
Didn't offer any opinions about the state of noise insulation in the overwhelming majority of multifamily dwellings in the US, and don't plan to. I will suggest that your pedantic exasperation doesn't add value to this or any other discussion.
I can't really say for sure. But in Vietnam, most of the wall are concrete, so they are very sound-proof. Like you cannot hear the noise between the living room and bedroom. But when I lived in Japan, it was rare to find house that have concrete walls. They were usually drywall and wood. So noise was a big problem.
I'm not convinced that the counterfactual world where there is no sports gambling is notably better. If you ban sports gambling, you still have a large population of humans with addictive personalities who still get addicted to things and still waste their money on things that are probably bad for them.
If you want to address the problem, I think you need to address the root of it, which is that we have a notable population of people with addiction problems and available treatments/therapies have limited effect, and as a society we don't have better outlets available for people to get addicted to.
Banning sports betting, IMO, is just another paternalistic regulation that doesn't actually address the underlying problem.
Counterpoint: we had all those people with latent addiction problems before, but it didn't become a problem until we put casinos in everyone's pockets and let companies with giant war chests buy advertising blitzes. Putting up barriers to easily addictive behavors seems to cut down on those addictive behavors, much like how putting up barriers to impulsive suicides cuts down on impulsive suicides.
Another point: we have all these incredibly sophisticated computers in our pockets, all of them feeding utterly amoral companies with masses of data to use against us. Perhaps "paternalistic regulations" are needed just to level the playing field.
While a reasonable hypothesis, I would want some incredibly strong evidence of efficacy before taking away people's freedom to choose what content they consume.
To be convinced enough to consider taking away freedom of choice I think I would want to see two very similar jurisdictions compared over a 10 year period after one jurisdiction put up the barriers you mentioned and the other didn't (and otherwise remain similar to each other), and I would want to see a very large effect size, on the order of 30% or more difference in some significant metric chosen in advance of the experiment.
I recognize that proving such regulations are actually effective is incredibly hard, which is why I generally just default to "give people the freedom to make mistakes" because I know that gathering the data necessary to convince me that limiting freedom is acceptable is unrealistically difficult. 😖
The reason I would want to see something like the above is because I have seen *way* too many good intentioned regulations end up being completely ineffective at solving the underlying problem they set out to solve, and often they cause more harm as side effects than good. So even just trying out a regulation comes with non-trivial costs, not to mention complexity of everyone staying up to date on all of the current regulations so they don't end up in prison or fined due to not being aware.
I think when we protect people from the consequences of their own mistakes, it greatly slows down and sometimes halts the rate we as individuals/society/species learn from those mistakes.
I have made a *lot* of mistakes in my life, and most of my learning comes from the consequences of those failures. Not everyone will learn as quickly, but learning does occur when you (or someone you know) suffer the consequences of those failures, and I think is generally a bad idea to interfere with that learning process.
Since I don't care about being cancelled, I'll openly state that yes, I am okay with people suffering all of the consequences of their own choices, including the really bad/sad ones. This is the trade for allowing humans to fully explore the choice landscape, including choices that many of us probably agree are obviously bad choices. Essentially, I'm not sufficiently confident that I know for certain what is best for humanity, so I prefer to keep the search space as wide open as possible, and allow people to make what I consider to be very bad life choices.
That being said, I am *also* okay with people having local/voluntary support groups/charities to address these problems. I don't think we should stop people from helping each other, I just don't think we should be nationalizing such assistance.
What you stated in your first paragraph is a good point, and I think somewhat core to why people who start going a little bit libertarian tend to end up going all the way eventually. The inverse is also true for people who dip their toe into socialism, you kinda have to go all the way. Trying to play in the middle where the state exercises partial control over people's lives is a slippery slope in both directions, as the introduction of regulations often requires the introduction of more regulations to deal with the problems created, and the removal of regulations requires the removal of more regulations to remove the problems that the regulation was patching up.
Which jurisdictions, exactly, do you want to see used for this comparison? In order to compare one with regulations to one without, you need to let somebody use the regulations in the first place.
I'm generally a fan of testing proposed regulations on a small scale for an extended period of time before trying to scale up to larger populations. In an ideal world, we would first test regulations at a local level, then county/province, then state, then national. Each step verifying that the regulation achieved metrics agreed on in advance of implementation, when compared to some similar jurisdiction.
What I dislike is jumping straight to regulating things at the national level without strong evidence that the proposed solution actually works.
Drifting offtopic, but over and over again I encounter a pattern:
* I read newspaper reports about some policy being trialled at a local level
* a few months later I read newspaper reports about how everyone involved loved the new policy and the trial was a resounding success on all metrics
* everyone involved goes back to doing things the old way
* nothing ever happens about the policy until eventually the whole pattern repeats - may be a long or short amount of time, but in any case no sooner than the next election cycle
I've seen this pattern with things like homelessness / unemployment initiatives, four-day working weeks etc.
Meanwhile other proposals are pushed over and over with no trial or evidence that they make things better more than worse or indeed at all, until eventually the resistance doesn't resist quite hard enough and the proposal rolls out nationwide; cf. various Internet censorship /surveillance "protect the children" acts coming into force in assorted jurisdictions over the next few months.
Why does this keep happening? How do we make things actually scale up when the trial outcome suggests they should, instead of everyone involved just quietly pretending the trial never happened?
As it is, I have come to believe that the only way we can ever see actual nationwide change is to roll out the proposal nationwide - as quickly as possible, so the rollout can complete within one election cycle - then hope the next administration rolls it back if it turns out to have been a terrible idea. This is terrible and I wish it were otherwise, but that seems to be the price of being able to change anything at all in the world we live in.
>To be convinced enough to consider taking away freedom of choice I think I would want to see two very similar jurisdictions compared over a 10 year period after one jurisdiction put up the barriers you mentioned and the other didn't (and otherwise remain similar to each other), and I would want to see a very large effect size, on the order of 30% or more difference in some significant metric chosen in advance of the experiment.
Well...good luck with that. In the real world, you're going to have to be content with what we actually have, which is a comparison between the welfare of gambling addicts in the world pre-ubiquitous-online-gambling and the welfare of gambling addicts in the world post-ubiquitous-online-gambling. Yes, there are confounders, yes, they will have to be accounted for. Doesn't seem insurmountable.
Incidentally, "taking away people's freedom to choose what content they consume" sounds more like a description of the government banning an edgy Twitter account than the government forbidding online casinos from accepting cash bets on sporting events. Is there a reason you worded it that way?
I think it is important to differentiate between paternalistic regulations (victimless crimes) and regulations that prevent direct harm to others. Gambling is a victimless crime, so it is the government taking away freedom of choice from people without giving any direct protection to other people within society. Same as laws against drug use and basically every regulation one might label as paternalistic.
While one can argue that victimless crimes have downstream consequences on others in society (e.g., a drug user that resorts to theft to feed their drug habit), I think we should address the actual crime with a victim rather than reducing the freedom of choice of everyone in society because some people make bad choices that lead to more bad choices that are then crimes with victims.
I also worry that if we allow people to use the argument of "drug users resort to theft to get their fix, so we should ban drug use" as a valid argument for introducing victimless crime regulations to protect the broader society, clever people will be able to find a path between anything they dislike and some downstream consequence. For example:
People are allowed to freely engage in employment and sometimes people make bad choices and take jobs with horrible bosses. They then end up with a lot of pent up rage and take that out violently on other members of society. We should not allow people to choose their own employment in order to protect society from bad decisions made by a subset of the population when selecting a job.
> it didn't become a problem until we put casinos in everyone's pockets and let companies with giant war chests buy advertising blitzes.
Maybe unpopular opinion but: I've been thinking more and more that targeted digital advertising (and other forms of adversary algorithmic feeds) are just too socially deleterious and should probably be banned globally.
It's just too easy for ruthless companies to target your weaknesses in a way that side steps our social mechanisms of collective validation. Since the messages are tailored to you, and shown privately, you don't get to see your friends or wider society criticizing or dismissing or doubting them.
I feel like we should search for better solutions than just "ban X". Perhaps future generations will become inoculated to advertising, or perhaps we can figure out ways to inoculate people against advertising at a young age (e.g., parents teaching their children how to spot advertisements, and how to recognize that those advertisements are designed to exploit you).
Historically, the solution to problems was parents teaching children how to deal with insults from the world, and I feel like these days we are too quick to just kick the can to government to fix our problems.
Advertising itself is fine, we've had it for a few generations and we can deal with it, as long as it's *public*. Companies put their reputation in line for the ads they show us, and it can absolutely backfire if they're seen as excessively manipulative or whatever. That mechanism works fine as long as ads are publicly visible, on the street or on screens, but we all see them. They have the power of their dark psychologists and manipulation experts, but we have the power of numbers and social coherence among the lay public. It more or less balances out.
This all breaks down when they are allowed to first track our behavior and weaknesses, and then target us individually using fine-grained criteria. At that point the power differential becomes unbridgeable, so I don't think there's any other solution than a collective decision to use government power. It's not about asking the govt to fix our problems, as if they were some weird entity out there with its own agendas; it's about us together using what's left of our democratic powers to coordinate fixing them through the mechanisms of government.
It's fine to ban entire business models when they are deemed deletorious to society in ways that cannot be fixed. I think it's time to start recognizing that most of Meta's model is unfixable in this way.
I would say you're making too much of advertising. I don't think I was much less likely to ignore advertising on the interwebs in the olden days of untargeted ads than I am now. These weaknesses you're speaking of...I don't think most people actually have them.
It's weird. I feel like targeted advertising has relatively little negative impact on me and I'm capable of dealing with it critically or just ignoring everything which is not subject to the social review you allude to. But it seems like there are a significant number of people who are deeply impacted by targeted ads. And I wonder what the difference between us is, that gives us such radically different life experiences. From what you say, you seem to rely a lot on social criticism and you're much less critical when that criticism is absent and also don't actively seek such social review if you need it, i.e. "Bob, what do you think of this ad. I'm thinking of buying the product...") That summary is probably at least a little off base, but where do you think it falls short?
OK it's a bit off-topic and late, but let me explain myself a bit. I'm certainly not worried about Joe Rando buying an extra toaster he doesn't really need. I'm worried about the impact of targeted messages of many kinds: pushing addictive things like gambling or get-rich-quick schemes while targeting those who are most likely to be vulnerable to those messages. Pushing culty and crazy ideas that the wider population would laugh at, specifically at those who are likely to fall for them. It's yet another way in which community is lost; in a well-functioning society we're all together part of the wider culture's immune system, which is part of the feedback loop where new ideas are tried out, "out there" stuff gets initial traction, but then things that turn out to be bad ideas are naturally weeded out.
But when anyone with money or clout can push their chosen messages at targeted groups without the rest of society even noticing, the salutary feedback loop is no longer there, and you get what we're seeing more and more of since the algorithmic feed took off: craziness spinning out of control, fueled by a mix of large-system effects among the larger well-meaning population, to which you can certainly add a whole lot of hostile actors and foreign powers who have everything to win by weakening Western countries, and whom we have just handed an easy and cheap way to sow discord.
And the generic tool that is allowing these things to happen is the algorithmic feed. Social media feeds present themselves as a combination of ads and "organic" content, but both of them are hostile algorithmic feeds, optimized against the user's best interest, and that can be manipulated for shockingly low money.
I think this is right. As gambling crept back into repute as a way to enrich state coffers, prelude to the lottery it was salivating for, my state legalized pari-mutuel racing in the 80s, and I recall going to a track with my parents. I was looking forward to it. Somehow the result was super-boring. There weren't many people there. Anyway, my father wasn't especially interested in horses*, outside of Dick Francis novels anyway - he'd just gone along with some friends in investing in a quarter horse. (That was his kind of betting, and I'm sure it turned out much like his investment in something rather pathetically called "Club Dallas" lol.)
Anyway, the track just gave off this vibe of utter loser-dom which was uncomfortable in that perspective-shaking way for a kid dragged along to something with her parents.
The lameness of it served as a kind of barrier, I imagine, and the track went out of business - as, basically, did the even lamer greyhound racing track in another city. Which remains, to this day, a giant dystopian hole in the urban fabric.
*Though as a child in that urban/semi-rural fringe, he liked to find a horse or a cow and lead it home with him, my grandmother then discovering it tied up in the yard.**
**He once went on a week-long winter hunting trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness - as someone who had scarcely ever sat a horse since childhood, I imagine - on horseback, and I believe he didn't much enjoy it. I'm pretty sure it would have been the greatest week of my life, horses or no.
If sports gambling had been observed to lead addictive personalities away from more self-destructive forms of behavior (like, leading to fewer opioid overdoses), you'd have a point, but it hasn't. As it stands, it's just an additional very low-threshold, legal way of ruining one's life on top of many less-convenient, less-legal ways.
Also, refusing to tackle a specific problem using well-understood steps because that wouldn't fix the broader underlying issue that no one has an idea how to fix (let alone fix without intrusive paternalistic measures) is not very helpful.
I would argue that gambling isn't a "specific problem". There are plenty of people in the world who engage in casual gambling (e.g., poker with friends once a week, or a trip to Las Vegas once a year) without deleterious negative effects and many times there are positive effects (socialization, stress release, entertainment, etc.). IIUC, the proposal here is to take away some types of gambling from everyone because a subset of people have a problem (addiction) that we don't know how to solve.
I'm generally quite wary of removing a freedom from an entire population because a small subpopulation doesn't do well with that freedom of choice. This feels like one of those situations where we recognize a problem (addiction), we don't have a good solution, so we are left implementing solutions we know have negative externalities so we can at least say we tried to do something. I would rather live in a society where some degenerate gamblers ruin their own lives because they don't do well with free choice, than a society where freedom of choice is removed to protect a handful of people from themselves.
It is also worth mentioning that there are *many* ways to gamble besides sports betting, including lotteries (which are run by the same governments that ban sports betting), many mobile games, uninformed stock trading, etc. and many of these alternatives are just as predatory. However, taking away people's ability to trade stocks has even greater negative externalities, so at best we are just redirecting from sports to something else.
Zvi's post is specifically about basically unrestricted access to sports gambling, which was illegal not so long ago, was made legal by specific legislation, and had measurable negative impact, as explained in the post. I don't see the big issue with making something that was illegal ten years ago illegal again.
Also, sure, there are many forms of gambling, and many of them are more or less harmful. But there is a qualitative difference in having to travel to a specific place and going to a specific building in order to gamble vs. just betting anywhere, anytime, with one click. IMO, it is the duty of society to find the right level of gatekeeping for vices like this, and "but Freedom! Freedom, I tell you!" is a lazy way of shirking that responsibility.
(BTW, I'm not convinced that everyone should have the right to "trade" in stocks - meaning, opportunistic buying and selling at the drop of a hat, rather than long-term investment - including people who have never heard of the efficient market hypothesis.)
Every single one of Zvi's arguments would apply to legal prediction markets, despite his afterthought-like three-sentence paragraph saying "no, prediction markets are different (but I offer no rationale why)".
Does this mean that opening prediction markets was followed by an observable spike in bad outcomes? Because that seems to be the crux of his argument. He didn't oppose sports betting before taking in that data.
Prediction markets don't currently have enough of an audience to make a measurable spike in anything. But if prediction markets were widely used, there's no reason to expect different social effects. Sports gambling is literally a prediction market on sports.
Prediction market bets don't lend themselves to the impulsive short time horizons or spectator excitement aspects of sports betting. There's no shared culture that has been exploited for prediction markets like there is for sports betting, except maybe around election results, but aside from the presidential election every four years nobody cares.
The people who oppose legalized prediction markets make exactly this argument. The fact that they're illegal prevents them from being part of popular culture.
If you want legal prediction markets, you need to accept that a sportsbetting-like culture will grow up around it. You don't get to choose "this is only going to be for policy wonks and bay area technologists".
Sports gambling piggybacks on a popular, commonplace social activity (watching sports)
I'm not sure prediction markets do so, except for predicting election results, and elections are a heck of a lot less common than sporting events.
That said, I do not share the general fondness here for prediction markets, and wouldn't at all mind if they (or just gambling on election results) were banned too.
> IMO, it is the duty of society to find the right level of gatekeeping for vices like this, and "but Freedom! Freedom, I tell you!" is a lazy way of shirking that responsibility.
My belief in maximizing liberty isn't because I'm too lazy to formulate an argument against paternalism, but rather because we can look at history and see that paternalism often causes more harm than good, governments often exploit their population rather than protect it (see lotteries run by states while they simultaneously ban gambling), and in general more liberal societies tend to make more progress (something I like) than more paternalistic societies.
Also, as I mentioned in the OP I'm not convinced that this specific solution actually solves the real problem, which is that some people struggle to function in modern society.
I don't know about that. Lotteries and scratch tickets are pretty bad. Of course, you can't buy those tickets from an app that sends you push notifications every hour (afaik, yet)
That's probably only due to many years of lobbying and dirty tricks from the tobacco industry. If tobacco was arriving now for the first time into the wider world, but we still knew all we currently know about its negative effects on health and highly addictive nature (e.g b/c some small third world country had a full cigarette culture), it would probably be made illegal in a jiffy.
Yes, I have no doubt you are right about tobacco being made illegal immediately if it were to come up now. But gambling hasn’t just come up now, it has been around for a long time. This is a bump in availability and marketing.
Note that Zvi is specifically not at all proposing banning sports gambling altogether - They're saying that the reduced friction increases compulsive behaviour, which vice versa means more friction may be good.
And as someone with a problem with compulsive-addictive behaviour - although at least not as destructively as gambling, namely gaming and extreme reading habits - I couldn't agree more. People don't spring into existence already addicted, they become addicted through easy access to addictive goods, and some people have a personality type that makes it easier to get addicted to certain things. Even worse, this is more a difference of degree than kind - somebody who might have had no trouble resisting addictive gambling when he has to go to a physical casino may have great trouble when it's always available on a phone.
You're line of argument is imo equivalent to saying that, instead of helping people with nut allergy to avoid nuts, we should just give them better nuts.
What is being proposed isn't "help people with nut allergies avoid nuts", it is "make it so no one is allowed to eat nuts". We should not restrict the freedom of all members of society because a small fraction struggle to manage that particular freedom well.
I’m not sure that’s a fair analogy. Sports betting would still exist, it just couldn’t be done as casually. Even when you buy a case of beer there’s friction in the form of an ID check and extra taxes and laws about where exactly you can drink it and what you’re allowed to do while you’re lit.
No, if you want to phrase it more negatively you could say this is like "make nuts more cumbersome to get for everyone". But sports betting will continue to exist just fine.
I understand your concern, and I'm strongly against outlawing almost anything, but imo you underestimate the value of appropriate friction. There's an extremely wide range of convenience for different things, and moving generally destructive things to high-friction is not at all like making it illegal.
There's also some great country-based initiatives mentioned in the comments to Zvi's article where you can sign up by your own volition and they make it so that you can't gamble anymore. This wouldn't give any trouble to responsible gamblers (or even irresponsible gamblers who just don't sign up). Imo there's many things you can try that disproportionally help people with addiction but minimally impact people without.
I think it's worth recognizing here that the companies involved in the types of sports betting discussed here will outright kick people off their sites if they seem too canny and effective with their betting. So it's kind of like if some portion of people have nut allergies which cause them to pass out insensate but not die, and companies are taking advantage of that to specifically serve nuts to those people to make them pass out and rob them, and they have no interest in serving nuts to the rest of the population. Should their freedom to preserve their business model of serving nuts specifically to allergic people so they can rob them be preserved because some people are able to eat nuts safely?
I *would* like to see a solution to what feels a lot like fraud, where betting establishments don't let people win (essentially). But I feel like solving that is unlikely to address the addiction side of the problem in a meaningful way.
I agree that we as a society still struggle to address the root cause of addictive behaviors.
Regarding the broken bone analogy, I think banning gambling is akin to telling everyone they aren't allowed to ride bicycles anymore because some subset of people break bones when riding them. I know there are some helicopter parents out there who would support this, but I don't think it is a good solution to implement society wide restrictions because a subset of the population struggle to be effective in an unrestricted society.
That doesn't apply here. The question isn't banning gambling, it's about banning specific types of gambling that are particularly likely to suck in addicts. There's no bicycle analogy because there's no such thing as being addiucted to bicycles. Furthermore, bicycle manufacturers don't make most of their money from customers who break bones by orders of magnitude more than regular customers.
Modern sports gambling isn't "spend $2000 on the World Series, your team lost, now you can't go on vacation."
It's "spend $5 on whether the next pitch is a ball or strike, repeated 100x a night, 7 nights a week" and if you are any good at it they close your account.
I do feel like the whole "close your account if you are good" feels like it is getting close to fraud, but I'm not sure exactly how to address it using existing laws. I don't think banning sports gambling altogether, or all online sports betting, is the right solution though as it is too much of a blunt solution to a pretty narrow problem.
I recognize that solving the "looks like fraud" problem doesn't address the addiction problem, but perhaps the solution will help dissuade people from participating in the first place if such policies were more clear and widely known.
I agree that it's a problem if winning at sports betting gets you banned. However, I'm not sure how many Americans (in the modern age of online betting) are making actual profits on betting, or were just trying to wring every drop out of all the promos, special offers, etc. offered by various companies. There's a fantasy that a whole bunch of us are smart enough the beat the bookies at their own game, but realistically, that's just not very likely. If the companies lose too much, the odds they offer just get worse and worse for the player.
I'm almost always sympathetic to libertarian arguments, so I don't necessarily want to see things banned just because some people can't use them responsibly. But I think there's a lot that could be done short of banning online sports betting--you could ban all the sports betting TV commercials, for one.
I've dabbled in sports betting, but at this point I rarely bother. Besides, even if I did make any money, it would probably be a tax nightmare. I'd happily trade away legal online sports betting if we could get legal online poker back.
What is the social-proof v. popularity twitter ratio like? - is a question I've been asking myself. I have the world's most elite human capital followed twitter account (as a ratio of my total follows) because of my substack articles, but I really haven't posted much on twitter. At the moment the list of my X followers gets me into all the important parties, but that's a function of their being easy to find.
Assuming I decide to invest in getting more X followers through threads or whatever, how many followers does one need to equal having my followers?
Oh come on, it's actually quite impressive that he's gotten 355 followers and 3.2k subscribers in such a short amount of time, especially given his... rhetoric. It's not like those subscribers are just casual viewers either; it takes very, uh... spirited belief, to be able to appreciate his articles. And there's a chance that some of those people are very important people! And maybe some of those people have suddenly found themselves in positions of power due to recent events, if you catch my drift.
I've never heard of you but if any of these parties are scheduled for anywhere in Egypt this month, I'd be willing to consider making your acquaintance.
That really depends on how much mileage you can get out of your current connections. If I'm correctly guessing what those connections are... well, they're going to be far more valuable than any amount of money.
Clearly not true for *any* amount of money. At some level of money, you become one of the people everyone wants a connection with.
All the money in the world isn't going to protect you against an angry populace that wants you dead. It's always just better to be on the winning side.
It's pretty hard to have all the money in the world and not have other people on your side though, even if they're more opportunists than ideological allies.
That's a good point. The Bourbons and Romanovs both were institutionally impoverished before their respective revolutions. Russia had soldiers going unpaid. The Romanovs were personally tremendously wealthy, but their wealth was rather illiquid.
People act as if revolutions happen because the poor are oppressed. More often, they seem to happen because the middle classes are strong and the elites, by comparison, are poorly organized, suffer military losses and government incapacity, etc.
Perhaps that's a bit afield from what's being discussed.
No, that's actually very relevant to current events. Thank you for the context.
If I recall my reading of Citizens correctly, the best among the French aristocracy - contra the usual narrative - were starting businesses and getting involved in decidedly middle class activities prior to the revolution.
One may see that the aristocracy was not exactly ascendant.
Ayako Fujitani, Steven Seagal's daughter with the Japanese woman, grew up to be an actress. She starred in "Gamera Guardian of the Universe" and it's two sequels ("Attack of the Legion" and "Revenge of Iris") in the Nineties. This trilogy among the greatest kaiju-eiga films ever made and I really recommend them. Since then she has starred in many other films, but I haven't seen any of those because Gamera isn't in them.
That is interesting, I have only seen the old Gamera films and the serialized ones that got cannibalized (by Sandy Frank or somebody like him) and ended up on MST3k. There has been some buzz in America around recent Godzilla films, but I never hear these newer Gamera films mentioned.
The trilogy of Gamera films that was made in the 1990s has epic plots and absolutely fantastic special effects. Watching them after seeing the old ones is like watching Christopher Nolan's Batman movies after seeing the Adam West Batman TV show. Amazon Prime Video is streaming them all.
There is also another Gamera movie, "Gamera the Brave," which was made in the 2000s and is targeted for a younger audience again, but still has impressive special effects. Netflix also released an animated Gamera TV series last year. It has a good storyline, but the animation is done in that creepy style where they try to make 3-D CGI models look like 2-D hand-drawn animation.
55.
>I’d always thought that Christianity beat paganism because it was inherently more attractive. Yet the Mexican youth are turning away from the stodgy boring Catholic Church en masse to worship Santa Muerte. Why?
For what it's worth, the more stereotypically pagan elements within Catholicism, like saint veneration seem particularly popular in Latin America, where demand for saints to venerate exceeds the supply, leading to folk saints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_saint#Local_character.
The Catholic Church should be co-opting Santa Muerte rather than condemning her. Co-option of local beliefs and deities into Christianity was one of the reasons it became succesfull(This is not a gotcha against Christianity, its something I genuinly like about Catholic/Orthodox Churches).
Possibly part of the issue is the decline in trust in the church as an institution. So they can't really absorb it if it exists to be an alternative
co-option was THE default before monotheistic religions, so this explains nothing.
Well, the only problem with that is the piddling little detail that it's heresy and possibly blasphemy but definitely occultism. "Santa Muerte" is not a saint, it's a personification of death and specifically invoked for bad purposes like murder. It's magic, not religion. Sure, folk religion teeters on that verge all the time, but there's a difference between "turning a prayer to a local saint into a charm" and "invoking a genuine demonic spirit to help you get away with literal murder and crime".
Yeah, I know Protestants think there's no difference there between Catholicism and witchcraft, but we do have *some* rules.
EDIT: Anyway, if you want to venerate skeletal figures, there are the Catacomb Saints:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_saints
And the commercialisation of Santa Muerte may in fact soften the image. That there are variants and that the "tarot, crystals, candles" set are getting in on the act means that the imagery and practice will probably move away from its roots in crime, the underworld, and remnants of pre-Christian beliefs and become something more rootless and commodified.
I do not mean to suggest that this is the church's doing, and nor do I have direct experience culturally - but can testify an Anglo living in a Mexican area 150 miles from the border could be forgiven for thinking that out of the richness, at least style-wise (which I've always been drawn to), that is Mexican/Spanish-Mexican heritage - the most significant thing, the thing that will last the most and that people are most desirous of sharing via commercialization, is - tediously - Dia de Los Muertos. (My local grocery store had an appropriately grotesque Dia de Los Muertos Barbie for sale.) Now without having enough interest in it to so much as watch "Coco", I realize Dia de Los Muertos has not the sinister element that Santa Muerte does. Still, the iconography seems to be a through-line, and the focus on death over life.
And it's perhaps not a coincidence that it's not uncommon even to see police cruisers with skulls decorating them. Everyone is driving around with skulls and roses.
Well, Day of the Dead is easy to cross-pollinate with Hallowe'en and the commercialised version of American Hallowe'en has now made its way across the Atlantic to replace the traditional Irish customs.
So if you want to sell Mexican heritage that makes the easiest impact and widest spread to a non-Mexican culture, anything that is "This is our version of thing you already celebrate" is the best pick. And Dia de Los Muertos Barbie sounds like the perfect hellscape result of commercial interest, cultural appropriation, rowing back on that appropriation by a new 'diverse, inclusive' form of appropriation, and the old reliable selling tat to kids.
I can't speak for the Mexican version, but traditional Hallowe'en was not so much about the focus on death *over* life, but rather death as *part* of life, particularly when it cross-pollinated with the Christian feasts of All Saints and All Souls Days. The dead are not gone (as much as you might think), they are there and still part of our family. Death is the inevitable end of life, we will all die one day. The dark of the year is the time for spirits and reflections on mortality. You can fear it, try to placate it - or accept it and celebrate it.
The American version was completely free of association with one's own dead. Had more of a harvest festival aspect perhaps. And a bit of a ritual allowing children more freedom one night a year.
I like there to be different customs. I used to love those "Christmas Around the World" type books, or those children's books about different countries (they never questioned the "nation" framework :-)) and what their celebrations are and their favorite foods and their "dress".
I might not love Day of the Dead stuff personally, on aesthetic grounds - but would appreciate it as an interesting custom and not think about it otherwise if it were not seemingly rising to pre-eminence, possibly over Christmas, eventually.
>seemingly rising to pre-eminence, possibly over Christmas, eventually.
Why, at this rate, Dia de los Muertos is poised to overtake Christmas in the West in a mere--what--five or six hundred years!
It's just Dia de Muertos.
Interesting. My city has a "Dia de Los Muertos" museum - but what do a million Mexicans know.
I've tried to read this comment like three times, and each time I fail to parse it. I can't tell what the object of the second sentence is, nor what "that" means in 'thinking that out of richness'. is it a referrant to what the person you're replying to thought? "you only think that out of richness" kind of thing? This is the way my brain keeps trying to parse it but it doesn't work
figured this feedback might be useful
Oh, that seems like a waste of your time - am I controlling your mind at a distance?
Try maybe making another account, under another name?
ETA: oh yes, apologies!
> the "tarot, crystals, candles" set
Ah, yes. The people who make it almost impossible to get a good deck of cards for playing French Tarot in this country.
I used to help run a traditional card gaming group, and the main host told me one day he wanted to change the name, or promote the event more. I told him that if we posted an event on Meetup titled "Tarot at the Botanical Gardens", we'd end up with a lot of very confused women with crystals.
>[...] It's magic, not religion. Sure, folk religion teeters on that verge all the time, but there's a difference between "turning a prayer to a local saint into a charm" and "invoking a genuine demonic spirit to help you get away with literal murder and crime".
I find the difference to be a purely practical one.
Sure, praying cost much less MP, but the results are unpredictable. I can never be sure what my deity of choice will do. Summons, albeit much more costly, have not once failed me.
You joke, Shinji, but there's a kernel of truth. Contra Christian copers, I claim that one of the contemporarily unacknowledged reasons Christianity beat paganism was that its god was a more effective prayer-answerer and miracle-deliverer than the older pantheon. Sadly, this is no longer the case, and if the local crossroads god or spirit of a folk hero or guardian of the dead answers prayers and provides real aid, why waste your time and attention?
(And I have found conjuration to provide somewhat unpredictable results compared to e.g. old hoodoo standbys or prayer to the deathless gods. FWIW.)
The Orthodox Church doesn't and never did co-opt local beliefs and deities, it's the same as it was 2000 years ago. Unlike the Catholic Church who "adapts to the modern times". Good luck with that
Ah, I see you have managed to avoid or be unaware of the Orthodox version of "it was all pagan anyway" that Catholicism has got; didn't you know that all the local Greek saints are just thinly-disguised Classical deities that the peasants and ordinary folk continued to worship under the noses of the clergy? 😁
"The legend of Barlaam and Josaphat was derived, via Arabic and Georgian versions, from the life story of Siddartha Gautama, known as the Buddha. The king-turned-monk Joasaphat (Arabic Yūdhasaf or Būdhasaf; Georgian Iodasaph) also gets his name from the Sanskrit Bodhisattva, the term traditionally used to refer to Gautama before his awakening. Barlaam and Ioasaph were placed in the Orthodox calendar of saints on 26 August, and in the Roman martyrology they were canonized (as "Barlaam and Josaphat") and assigned 27 November. The story was translated into Hebrew in the Middle Ages as Ben-HaMelekh ve HaNazir ("The King's Son and the Nazirite"). Thus the Buddhist story was turned into a Christian and Jewish legend."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlaam_and_Josaphat
"Barlaam and Josaphat were entered into the Greek Orthodox liturgical calendar on 26 August Julian (8 September Gregorian), and into liturgical calendar of the Slavic tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, on 19 November Julian (2 December Gregorian)."
Sorry, friend: like the Protestants, every sword you pick up to use against us Romans turns in your hand to attack your own beliefs.
I have no Barlaam or Josaphat in my Romanian calendar and this is from the link you gave:
Barlaam and Josaphat, also known as Bilawhar and Budhasaf, are Christian saints. Their life story was not based on the life of the Gautama Buddha,[1] who may have lived several centuries before Jesus. Their story tells of the conversion of Josaphat to Christianity.
Depending on which national church where, there are variant calendars in Orthodoxy. One calendar online gives me this:
"This month, on the thirtieth day, the commemoration of our venerable Isaac the Confessor, abbot of the Dalmatian Monastery in Constantinople.
...Also on this day, the memory of the holy martyr Natalie, who was killed by the sword.
Also on this day, the memory of the venerable Varlaam, who died peacefully.
Also on this day, the commemoration of the holy martyrs Romano and Teletie, who were killed by the sword, was celebrated.
Also on this day, the commemoration of the holy martyr Evplu, who died wrapped in ox hide and exposed to the scorching sun.
Through their holy prayers, O Lord, have mercy on us and save us. Amen."
Wikipedia gives me this:
"Varlaam is a variant of the saint's name Barlaam, used in the Orthodox churches due to the Byzantine sound shift from /b/ to /v/. A shortened form is Varlam."
Varlaam is the Romanian version of the name Barlaam. Not the same Barlaam as in the legend, but it's clear that even for the Romanians, the name was being used as a saint's name to give in christening.
So the greater point is that if you are trying to maintain the Orthodox "never co-opted local deities and beliefs", you're going to run up against the same questioning and the same secular correlations drawn up since Enlightenment times (and before). You can't escape it, except by work like that done by Tim O'Neill and others, about how the origins of the great Christian feasts were not pagan.
The Orthodox slide under the radar in the West because they're not known enough or big enough to be important. Catholicism is the main church that gets attacked, and then the various Protestant ones in turn. But because Catholicism is the biggest and most monolithic, as it were, a lot of people have an interest in "well actually those Christian festivals are really not Christian" type of work. If they knew about your Romanian Orthodox claims, they'd be happy to do the same demolition job on you.
So saying "oh well the Catholics were contaminated by heresy and secularism and paganism, but not us" is not going to work there. They don't care about the Great Schism, or even that the Protestants were making the same claims in regard to Catholicism, because it's Christianity in general (as the religion that influenced them and which they left or feel is trying to impose its morality on them) that they are fighting, so they're happy to go on about 'the saints are re-purposed gods and spirits' and the like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_Orthodoxy
"Folk Orthodoxy (Russian: народное православие, romanized: narodnoe pravoslavie; Bulgarian: народно православие, romanized: narodno pravoslavie; Serbian: народно православље, naradno pravoslavlje; Latvian: narodno pravoslavlje) refers to the folk religion and syncretic elements present in the Eastern Orthodox communities. It is a subgroup of folk Christianity, similar to Folk Catholicism. Peasants incorporated many pre-Christian (pagan) beliefs and observances, including coordinating feast days with agricultural life."
See the same thing about Hallowe'en, which superficially looks correct - until you realise that the geographical areas which celebrated Hallowe'en weren't converted to Christianity until a few centuries later, and the veneration of All Saints' Day had already been established before contact was made.
"Elements of dual faith inhere in several Christian cultures. One example is All Souls' Day and All Hallow's Eve (better known as Halloween). Halloween is an ancient Celtic pagan holiday commemorating ancestors, similar to the Christian feast-day All Saints' Day. A number of Christian cultures celebrate Carnival before Great Lent, which preserves pre-Christian customs, thus combining pagan and Christian customs."
Folk *traditions* were incorporated, or better said, kept as part of the overall celebration, but were never part of the religious practice and it's not true to say that 'the church took over Hallowe'en from the pagans so as to persuade the peasant to switch over'.
When I toured in Bulgaria I saw famous ancient Orthodox monasteries where the icons included the "pre-Christian" saints Orpheus and Pythagoras.
There's nothing like that in my Romanian calendar and neither in the Bulgarian one, I'm sure.
The degree of syncretism in Christianity and Islam is really vastly overrated- if you want to see a *genuinely* syncretic religious tradition that actually does co-opt local deities, Hinduism or Buddhism would be much closer to the mark.
European Christians today don't have any genuine, serious theological content inherited from Slavic or Nordic paganism, just like modern African Christians (in my experience, anyway), are really much closer to what a 17th or 18th century European Christian believed than to what their animist kin of a generation or two ago believed.
See also: Voodoo, where the Loa basically result from a syncretism of Catholic saint veneration and West African religions.
In a way, it is just the logical conclusion of saint veneration. If you believe that saints are supernatural entities with specific domains (like curing specific illnesses) who can be enticed to intercede in the natural world on your behalf in the natural world, then it is also reasonable to be on the lookout for other supernatural entities the church does not want you to know about.
By contrast, a strong monotheism where the only entity allowed to enact changes on the natural world is God, and the correct way to entice them is to pray to them directly is likely less vulnerable to that failure mode. Of course, a deist world view where even God does not meddle with the universe would be even safer, but would be also hamstrung in cultural evolution, as "you can make supernatural entities intervene on your behalf" likely has a huge mass appeal.
"By contrast, a strong monotheism where the only entity allowed to enact changes on the natural world is God, and the correct way to entice them is to pray to them directly is likely less vulnerable to that failure mode."
Ah, that explains why the staunchly Puritan New England was wracked by witchcraft crazes and fears of the Devil 😀
In such a condition, the failure mode is a form of Zoroastrianism or Manicheanism - God and the Devil as equals and opposites, where the Devil is just as strong and is more inclined to intervene or be accessible to mortals who can invoke demons to do for and give to them what God won't do for or give to them.
When you strip away the layers of saints etc . you have the stark God and Devil scenario, and unless your faith is very secure and you are very confident, it's easy to be haunted by fear of the enemy which goeth about like a roaring lion - God is far away but the Devil is all too eager to get involved with and mess up humans. Placating the powers of darkness is thus one temptation as to how to cope with that message.
> In such a condition, the failure mode is a form of Zoroastrianism or Manicheanism - God and the Devil as equals and opposites
That can be fixed easily by going naturalistic about the good/evil polarity.
You don't need a counterpart to the primordial being of God, to explain why evil happens; once you have a multiplicity of beings, then evolution and game theory dynamics alone is enough to make sure they develop the structures of good and evil, and explore the whole range of possibilities. No need for interventionist or battling supernatural powers for that.
why are Zoroastrianism and Manichaeanism 'failure modes'?
I thought this article was very informative:
https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/reaper-drones-over-houston
"5 days later 13 bodies were found Strung up from bridges in West Virginia, Florida, and Tennessee. Each showed signs of torture, the women showing signs of the worst sexual abuse before being shot, and the men covered in hammer blows having finally died of brain trauma and fractured skulls."
Sorry, the terrible formating and bad spellling made me. Lose attention as I could no longer. Keep reading the borken sentences all jumpbled up.
Seems to be a left-wing version of that website which 'reports' courtmartials and trials of Democrats and their executions.
> I can’t believe this is our first “secretly controlled” accusation and it’s not even something cool.
While the rationalists are at it, how about they secretly control Friendster & Myspace too.
Okay, so the Steven Segal lesson is: "Make a lot of money as a bad ass movie star for a few years and then you can do whatever you want forever and ever thereafter".
Obviously this is just anecdotal but I get the feeling that other "one-time bad ass movie stars" are generally having a fun go of it long after their glory days.
Comedy stars though....well, Robin Williams of course and... I don't know, is there any way to quantify this?
And does the action star actually have to have been fit at any given point, or can Saul Goodman marry the 19 princesses of Siam because of his silly beat-em-up-on-the-bus movie?
Robin Williams had a terminal illness.
Everybody does. Care to elaborate?
Robin Williams had advanced Lewy Body Dementia, which would have left him ~5 years of declining mental function.
If only there were a system of interconnected computers that one could use to find out, quickly and easily, whether an extremely famous person had a terminal illness!
Alternatively, I had already heard from his wife's publicist and remained skeptical of her convenient get-out-of-guilt card but preferred to...
oh, why am I talking to you. You're just another unoriginal midwit who thinks she's clever enough to critique.
Think again.
You are very, very confused. I don't know what else to say.
I would generalize that to "Make a lot of money for a few years and then you can do whatever you want forever and ever thereafter, if you can do basic money management."
Steven Seagal ostensibly had mob connections predating and to some degree causative of his movie stardom. I think his results probably don't generalize.
Vague impression I have is that the 1980s comedy scene was a very hard world from the perspective of drug use (akin the earlier 70s music scene), and if you were big in it, you went pretty hard. There's a tax to be paid for that lifestyle. Conversely, the big action stars seemed to avoid hard drugs, generally speaking, so they have aged somewhat better (and if you had problems with hard drugs, you probably never made it to being "big"-Jan Michael Vincent would be the example here, although not an action star per se).
Some in the 1980s comedy scene went hard with their drug use, many went less hard, a few didn't go at all. Like quite literally any other corner of show business (Source: family member was in that scene, wasn't big but knew the big ones personally pre- and post-fame). Would be absolutely shocked if the same weren't true of the 1980s action-movie scene.
For 23, I would say high-rise buildings for family are pretty common in Hanoi, Vietnam. This is one of the biggest real estate tycoon in Vietnam: https://vinhomes.vn/en. And they are all about high rise buildings for family.
To add to this: most newly built apartment buildings (at least in Europe?) very sound-proof. You will definitely not hear your neighbors crying baby.
Maybe in Europe; I wouldn't know. It is absolutely not true of the US.
The best apartment dwellings from a noise perspective tend to be conversions from outdated usages. Former warehouses converted into lofts or apartments, etc. You get heavy frame construction and/or thick masonry walls. I've known several couples over the years who lived in those with new children and everybody in the house slept like a baby.
An extreme example is, for some years a fellow pro-am musician I knew was living in what had been Chicago's main "film repository" (regional distribution hub for Hollywood product). It was built in the era of nitrate film reels having a high tendency to burst into flame. This Art Deco-style building, which some years back was converted into rather great apartments, has walls that were designed to contain the occasional exploding film canisters. We used to have rehearsals/songwriting sessions at his place, he on electric bass and me on electric piano, and he never once heard a complaint from anybody. He figured we could have had the whole group in there, drums and all, and been at most a distant rumble to any neighbors.
I am genuinely happy for you and the rest of the .000001% of US residents living in an extremely specific kind of adaptively reused building stock. However, I think you'll agree that this doesn't say much about the state of noise insulation in the overwhelming majority of multifamily dwellings in the US.
Didn't offer any opinions about the state of noise insulation in the overwhelming majority of multifamily dwellings in the US, and don't plan to. I will suggest that your pedantic exasperation doesn't add value to this or any other discussion.
I can't really say for sure. But in Vietnam, most of the wall are concrete, so they are very sound-proof. Like you cannot hear the noise between the living room and bedroom. But when I lived in Japan, it was rare to find house that have concrete walls. They were usually drywall and wood. So noise was a big problem.
I feel obligated to pont out here that Eliezer Yudkowsky warned us against unending chains of takfir: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JKxxFseBWz8SHkTgt/tolerate-tolerance :)
I'm not convinced that the counterfactual world where there is no sports gambling is notably better. If you ban sports gambling, you still have a large population of humans with addictive personalities who still get addicted to things and still waste their money on things that are probably bad for them.
If you want to address the problem, I think you need to address the root of it, which is that we have a notable population of people with addiction problems and available treatments/therapies have limited effect, and as a society we don't have better outlets available for people to get addicted to.
Banning sports betting, IMO, is just another paternalistic regulation that doesn't actually address the underlying problem.
Counterpoint: we had all those people with latent addiction problems before, but it didn't become a problem until we put casinos in everyone's pockets and let companies with giant war chests buy advertising blitzes. Putting up barriers to easily addictive behavors seems to cut down on those addictive behavors, much like how putting up barriers to impulsive suicides cuts down on impulsive suicides.
Another point: we have all these incredibly sophisticated computers in our pockets, all of them feeding utterly amoral companies with masses of data to use against us. Perhaps "paternalistic regulations" are needed just to level the playing field.
While a reasonable hypothesis, I would want some incredibly strong evidence of efficacy before taking away people's freedom to choose what content they consume.
To be convinced enough to consider taking away freedom of choice I think I would want to see two very similar jurisdictions compared over a 10 year period after one jurisdiction put up the barriers you mentioned and the other didn't (and otherwise remain similar to each other), and I would want to see a very large effect size, on the order of 30% or more difference in some significant metric chosen in advance of the experiment.
I recognize that proving such regulations are actually effective is incredibly hard, which is why I generally just default to "give people the freedom to make mistakes" because I know that gathering the data necessary to convince me that limiting freedom is acceptable is unrealistically difficult. 😖
The reason I would want to see something like the above is because I have seen *way* too many good intentioned regulations end up being completely ineffective at solving the underlying problem they set out to solve, and often they cause more harm as side effects than good. So even just trying out a regulation comes with non-trivial costs, not to mention complexity of everyone staying up to date on all of the current regulations so they don't end up in prison or fined due to not being aware.
No.
I think when we protect people from the consequences of their own mistakes, it greatly slows down and sometimes halts the rate we as individuals/society/species learn from those mistakes.
I have made a *lot* of mistakes in my life, and most of my learning comes from the consequences of those failures. Not everyone will learn as quickly, but learning does occur when you (or someone you know) suffer the consequences of those failures, and I think is generally a bad idea to interfere with that learning process.
Since I don't care about being cancelled, I'll openly state that yes, I am okay with people suffering all of the consequences of their own choices, including the really bad/sad ones. This is the trade for allowing humans to fully explore the choice landscape, including choices that many of us probably agree are obviously bad choices. Essentially, I'm not sufficiently confident that I know for certain what is best for humanity, so I prefer to keep the search space as wide open as possible, and allow people to make what I consider to be very bad life choices.
That being said, I am *also* okay with people having local/voluntary support groups/charities to address these problems. I don't think we should stop people from helping each other, I just don't think we should be nationalizing such assistance.
What you stated in your first paragraph is a good point, and I think somewhat core to why people who start going a little bit libertarian tend to end up going all the way eventually. The inverse is also true for people who dip their toe into socialism, you kinda have to go all the way. Trying to play in the middle where the state exercises partial control over people's lives is a slippery slope in both directions, as the introduction of regulations often requires the introduction of more regulations to deal with the problems created, and the removal of regulations requires the removal of more regulations to remove the problems that the regulation was patching up.
Which jurisdictions, exactly, do you want to see used for this comparison? In order to compare one with regulations to one without, you need to let somebody use the regulations in the first place.
I'm generally a fan of testing proposed regulations on a small scale for an extended period of time before trying to scale up to larger populations. In an ideal world, we would first test regulations at a local level, then county/province, then state, then national. Each step verifying that the regulation achieved metrics agreed on in advance of implementation, when compared to some similar jurisdiction.
What I dislike is jumping straight to regulating things at the national level without strong evidence that the proposed solution actually works.
Drifting offtopic, but over and over again I encounter a pattern:
* I read newspaper reports about some policy being trialled at a local level
* a few months later I read newspaper reports about how everyone involved loved the new policy and the trial was a resounding success on all metrics
* everyone involved goes back to doing things the old way
* nothing ever happens about the policy until eventually the whole pattern repeats - may be a long or short amount of time, but in any case no sooner than the next election cycle
I've seen this pattern with things like homelessness / unemployment initiatives, four-day working weeks etc.
Meanwhile other proposals are pushed over and over with no trial or evidence that they make things better more than worse or indeed at all, until eventually the resistance doesn't resist quite hard enough and the proposal rolls out nationwide; cf. various Internet censorship /surveillance "protect the children" acts coming into force in assorted jurisdictions over the next few months.
Why does this keep happening? How do we make things actually scale up when the trial outcome suggests they should, instead of everyone involved just quietly pretending the trial never happened?
As it is, I have come to believe that the only way we can ever see actual nationwide change is to roll out the proposal nationwide - as quickly as possible, so the rollout can complete within one election cycle - then hope the next administration rolls it back if it turns out to have been a terrible idea. This is terrible and I wish it were otherwise, but that seems to be the price of being able to change anything at all in the world we live in.
Could you give a specific example?
>To be convinced enough to consider taking away freedom of choice I think I would want to see two very similar jurisdictions compared over a 10 year period after one jurisdiction put up the barriers you mentioned and the other didn't (and otherwise remain similar to each other), and I would want to see a very large effect size, on the order of 30% or more difference in some significant metric chosen in advance of the experiment.
Well...good luck with that. In the real world, you're going to have to be content with what we actually have, which is a comparison between the welfare of gambling addicts in the world pre-ubiquitous-online-gambling and the welfare of gambling addicts in the world post-ubiquitous-online-gambling. Yes, there are confounders, yes, they will have to be accounted for. Doesn't seem insurmountable.
Incidentally, "taking away people's freedom to choose what content they consume" sounds more like a description of the government banning an edgy Twitter account than the government forbidding online casinos from accepting cash bets on sporting events. Is there a reason you worded it that way?
I think it is important to differentiate between paternalistic regulations (victimless crimes) and regulations that prevent direct harm to others. Gambling is a victimless crime, so it is the government taking away freedom of choice from people without giving any direct protection to other people within society. Same as laws against drug use and basically every regulation one might label as paternalistic.
While one can argue that victimless crimes have downstream consequences on others in society (e.g., a drug user that resorts to theft to feed their drug habit), I think we should address the actual crime with a victim rather than reducing the freedom of choice of everyone in society because some people make bad choices that lead to more bad choices that are then crimes with victims.
I also worry that if we allow people to use the argument of "drug users resort to theft to get their fix, so we should ban drug use" as a valid argument for introducing victimless crime regulations to protect the broader society, clever people will be able to find a path between anything they dislike and some downstream consequence. For example:
People are allowed to freely engage in employment and sometimes people make bad choices and take jobs with horrible bosses. They then end up with a lot of pent up rage and take that out violently on other members of society. We should not allow people to choose their own employment in order to protect society from bad decisions made by a subset of the population when selecting a job.
> it didn't become a problem until we put casinos in everyone's pockets and let companies with giant war chests buy advertising blitzes.
Maybe unpopular opinion but: I've been thinking more and more that targeted digital advertising (and other forms of adversary algorithmic feeds) are just too socially deleterious and should probably be banned globally.
It's just too easy for ruthless companies to target your weaknesses in a way that side steps our social mechanisms of collective validation. Since the messages are tailored to you, and shown privately, you don't get to see your friends or wider society criticizing or dismissing or doubting them.
I feel like we should search for better solutions than just "ban X". Perhaps future generations will become inoculated to advertising, or perhaps we can figure out ways to inoculate people against advertising at a young age (e.g., parents teaching their children how to spot advertisements, and how to recognize that those advertisements are designed to exploit you).
Historically, the solution to problems was parents teaching children how to deal with insults from the world, and I feel like these days we are too quick to just kick the can to government to fix our problems.
Advertising itself is fine, we've had it for a few generations and we can deal with it, as long as it's *public*. Companies put their reputation in line for the ads they show us, and it can absolutely backfire if they're seen as excessively manipulative or whatever. That mechanism works fine as long as ads are publicly visible, on the street or on screens, but we all see them. They have the power of their dark psychologists and manipulation experts, but we have the power of numbers and social coherence among the lay public. It more or less balances out.
This all breaks down when they are allowed to first track our behavior and weaknesses, and then target us individually using fine-grained criteria. At that point the power differential becomes unbridgeable, so I don't think there's any other solution than a collective decision to use government power. It's not about asking the govt to fix our problems, as if they were some weird entity out there with its own agendas; it's about us together using what's left of our democratic powers to coordinate fixing them through the mechanisms of government.
It's fine to ban entire business models when they are deemed deletorious to society in ways that cannot be fixed. I think it's time to start recognizing that most of Meta's model is unfixable in this way.
I would say you're making too much of advertising. I don't think I was much less likely to ignore advertising on the interwebs in the olden days of untargeted ads than I am now. These weaknesses you're speaking of...I don't think most people actually have them.
It's weird. I feel like targeted advertising has relatively little negative impact on me and I'm capable of dealing with it critically or just ignoring everything which is not subject to the social review you allude to. But it seems like there are a significant number of people who are deeply impacted by targeted ads. And I wonder what the difference between us is, that gives us such radically different life experiences. From what you say, you seem to rely a lot on social criticism and you're much less critical when that criticism is absent and also don't actively seek such social review if you need it, i.e. "Bob, what do you think of this ad. I'm thinking of buying the product...") That summary is probably at least a little off base, but where do you think it falls short?
OK it's a bit off-topic and late, but let me explain myself a bit. I'm certainly not worried about Joe Rando buying an extra toaster he doesn't really need. I'm worried about the impact of targeted messages of many kinds: pushing addictive things like gambling or get-rich-quick schemes while targeting those who are most likely to be vulnerable to those messages. Pushing culty and crazy ideas that the wider population would laugh at, specifically at those who are likely to fall for them. It's yet another way in which community is lost; in a well-functioning society we're all together part of the wider culture's immune system, which is part of the feedback loop where new ideas are tried out, "out there" stuff gets initial traction, but then things that turn out to be bad ideas are naturally weeded out.
But when anyone with money or clout can push their chosen messages at targeted groups without the rest of society even noticing, the salutary feedback loop is no longer there, and you get what we're seeing more and more of since the algorithmic feed took off: craziness spinning out of control, fueled by a mix of large-system effects among the larger well-meaning population, to which you can certainly add a whole lot of hostile actors and foreign powers who have everything to win by weakening Western countries, and whom we have just handed an easy and cheap way to sow discord.
And the generic tool that is allowing these things to happen is the algorithmic feed. Social media feeds present themselves as a combination of ads and "organic" content, but both of them are hostile algorithmic feeds, optimized against the user's best interest, and that can be manipulated for shockingly low money.
I think this is right. As gambling crept back into repute as a way to enrich state coffers, prelude to the lottery it was salivating for, my state legalized pari-mutuel racing in the 80s, and I recall going to a track with my parents. I was looking forward to it. Somehow the result was super-boring. There weren't many people there. Anyway, my father wasn't especially interested in horses*, outside of Dick Francis novels anyway - he'd just gone along with some friends in investing in a quarter horse. (That was his kind of betting, and I'm sure it turned out much like his investment in something rather pathetically called "Club Dallas" lol.)
Anyway, the track just gave off this vibe of utter loser-dom which was uncomfortable in that perspective-shaking way for a kid dragged along to something with her parents.
The lameness of it served as a kind of barrier, I imagine, and the track went out of business - as, basically, did the even lamer greyhound racing track in another city. Which remains, to this day, a giant dystopian hole in the urban fabric.
*Though as a child in that urban/semi-rural fringe, he liked to find a horse or a cow and lead it home with him, my grandmother then discovering it tied up in the yard.**
**He once went on a week-long winter hunting trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness - as someone who had scarcely ever sat a horse since childhood, I imagine - on horseback, and I believe he didn't much enjoy it. I'm pretty sure it would have been the greatest week of my life, horses or no.
If sports gambling had been observed to lead addictive personalities away from more self-destructive forms of behavior (like, leading to fewer opioid overdoses), you'd have a point, but it hasn't. As it stands, it's just an additional very low-threshold, legal way of ruining one's life on top of many less-convenient, less-legal ways.
Also, refusing to tackle a specific problem using well-understood steps because that wouldn't fix the broader underlying issue that no one has an idea how to fix (let alone fix without intrusive paternalistic measures) is not very helpful.
I would argue that gambling isn't a "specific problem". There are plenty of people in the world who engage in casual gambling (e.g., poker with friends once a week, or a trip to Las Vegas once a year) without deleterious negative effects and many times there are positive effects (socialization, stress release, entertainment, etc.). IIUC, the proposal here is to take away some types of gambling from everyone because a subset of people have a problem (addiction) that we don't know how to solve.
I'm generally quite wary of removing a freedom from an entire population because a small subpopulation doesn't do well with that freedom of choice. This feels like one of those situations where we recognize a problem (addiction), we don't have a good solution, so we are left implementing solutions we know have negative externalities so we can at least say we tried to do something. I would rather live in a society where some degenerate gamblers ruin their own lives because they don't do well with free choice, than a society where freedom of choice is removed to protect a handful of people from themselves.
It is also worth mentioning that there are *many* ways to gamble besides sports betting, including lotteries (which are run by the same governments that ban sports betting), many mobile games, uninformed stock trading, etc. and many of these alternatives are just as predatory. However, taking away people's ability to trade stocks has even greater negative externalities, so at best we are just redirecting from sports to something else.
Zvi's post is specifically about basically unrestricted access to sports gambling, which was illegal not so long ago, was made legal by specific legislation, and had measurable negative impact, as explained in the post. I don't see the big issue with making something that was illegal ten years ago illegal again.
Also, sure, there are many forms of gambling, and many of them are more or less harmful. But there is a qualitative difference in having to travel to a specific place and going to a specific building in order to gamble vs. just betting anywhere, anytime, with one click. IMO, it is the duty of society to find the right level of gatekeeping for vices like this, and "but Freedom! Freedom, I tell you!" is a lazy way of shirking that responsibility.
(BTW, I'm not convinced that everyone should have the right to "trade" in stocks - meaning, opportunistic buying and selling at the drop of a hat, rather than long-term investment - including people who have never heard of the efficient market hypothesis.)
Every single one of Zvi's arguments would apply to legal prediction markets, despite his afterthought-like three-sentence paragraph saying "no, prediction markets are different (but I offer no rationale why)".
Does this mean that opening prediction markets was followed by an observable spike in bad outcomes? Because that seems to be the crux of his argument. He didn't oppose sports betting before taking in that data.
Prediction markets don't currently have enough of an audience to make a measurable spike in anything. But if prediction markets were widely used, there's no reason to expect different social effects. Sports gambling is literally a prediction market on sports.
Prediction market bets don't lend themselves to the impulsive short time horizons or spectator excitement aspects of sports betting. There's no shared culture that has been exploited for prediction markets like there is for sports betting, except maybe around election results, but aside from the presidential election every four years nobody cares.
The people who oppose legalized prediction markets make exactly this argument. The fact that they're illegal prevents them from being part of popular culture.
If you want legal prediction markets, you need to accept that a sportsbetting-like culture will grow up around it. You don't get to choose "this is only going to be for policy wonks and bay area technologists".
If the prediction market apps come up with high-iteration dopamine-style markets like 'will the next pitch be a ball or a strike?' then sure.
Prediction markets are closer to day trading. That's not great but doesn't seem to drive bankruptcies.
WallStreetBets has entered the chat.
Sports gambling piggybacks on a popular, commonplace social activity (watching sports)
I'm not sure prediction markets do so, except for predicting election results, and elections are a heck of a lot less common than sporting events.
That said, I do not share the general fondness here for prediction markets, and wouldn't at all mind if they (or just gambling on election results) were banned too.
> IMO, it is the duty of society to find the right level of gatekeeping for vices like this, and "but Freedom! Freedom, I tell you!" is a lazy way of shirking that responsibility.
My belief in maximizing liberty isn't because I'm too lazy to formulate an argument against paternalism, but rather because we can look at history and see that paternalism often causes more harm than good, governments often exploit their population rather than protect it (see lotteries run by states while they simultaneously ban gambling), and in general more liberal societies tend to make more progress (something I like) than more paternalistic societies.
Also, as I mentioned in the OP I'm not convinced that this specific solution actually solves the real problem, which is that some people struggle to function in modern society.
>see lotteries run by states while they simultaneously ban gambling
Lotteries are significantly less exploitative than the kind of gambling in question here.
I don't know about that. Lotteries and scratch tickets are pretty bad. Of course, you can't buy those tickets from an app that sends you push notifications every hour (afaik, yet)
>"IMO, it is the duty of society…"
Rebuttal: "There's no such thing as society." -Margaret Thatcher
Also: "F*** you I won't do what you tell me." -Rage Against The Machine
Perhaps the way cigarettes are handled would be instructive. They aren’t illegal but advertising them and displaying them has rules.
That's probably only due to many years of lobbying and dirty tricks from the tobacco industry. If tobacco was arriving now for the first time into the wider world, but we still knew all we currently know about its negative effects on health and highly addictive nature (e.g b/c some small third world country had a full cigarette culture), it would probably be made illegal in a jiffy.
Yes, I have no doubt you are right about tobacco being made illegal immediately if it were to come up now. But gambling hasn’t just come up now, it has been around for a long time. This is a bump in availability and marketing.
Note that Zvi is specifically not at all proposing banning sports gambling altogether - They're saying that the reduced friction increases compulsive behaviour, which vice versa means more friction may be good.
And as someone with a problem with compulsive-addictive behaviour - although at least not as destructively as gambling, namely gaming and extreme reading habits - I couldn't agree more. People don't spring into existence already addicted, they become addicted through easy access to addictive goods, and some people have a personality type that makes it easier to get addicted to certain things. Even worse, this is more a difference of degree than kind - somebody who might have had no trouble resisting addictive gambling when he has to go to a physical casino may have great trouble when it's always available on a phone.
You're line of argument is imo equivalent to saying that, instead of helping people with nut allergy to avoid nuts, we should just give them better nuts.
What is being proposed isn't "help people with nut allergies avoid nuts", it is "make it so no one is allowed to eat nuts". We should not restrict the freedom of all members of society because a small fraction struggle to manage that particular freedom well.
I’m not sure that’s a fair analogy. Sports betting would still exist, it just couldn’t be done as casually. Even when you buy a case of beer there’s friction in the form of an ID check and extra taxes and laws about where exactly you can drink it and what you’re allowed to do while you’re lit.
No, if you want to phrase it more negatively you could say this is like "make nuts more cumbersome to get for everyone". But sports betting will continue to exist just fine.
I understand your concern, and I'm strongly against outlawing almost anything, but imo you underestimate the value of appropriate friction. There's an extremely wide range of convenience for different things, and moving generally destructive things to high-friction is not at all like making it illegal.
There's also some great country-based initiatives mentioned in the comments to Zvi's article where you can sign up by your own volition and they make it so that you can't gamble anymore. This wouldn't give any trouble to responsible gamblers (or even irresponsible gamblers who just don't sign up). Imo there's many things you can try that disproportionally help people with addiction but minimally impact people without.
I think it's worth recognizing here that the companies involved in the types of sports betting discussed here will outright kick people off their sites if they seem too canny and effective with their betting. So it's kind of like if some portion of people have nut allergies which cause them to pass out insensate but not die, and companies are taking advantage of that to specifically serve nuts to those people to make them pass out and rob them, and they have no interest in serving nuts to the rest of the population. Should their freedom to preserve their business model of serving nuts specifically to allergic people so they can rob them be preserved because some people are able to eat nuts safely?
I *would* like to see a solution to what feels a lot like fraud, where betting establishments don't let people win (essentially). But I feel like solving that is unlikely to address the addiction side of the problem in a meaningful way.
This doesn't help if we have no idea how to address the root problem, and I don't think we have any idea.
If the root problem of broken bones is getting injured, we can do some things to make injury less likely, but it still makes sense to se bones.
I agree that we as a society still struggle to address the root cause of addictive behaviors.
Regarding the broken bone analogy, I think banning gambling is akin to telling everyone they aren't allowed to ride bicycles anymore because some subset of people break bones when riding them. I know there are some helicopter parents out there who would support this, but I don't think it is a good solution to implement society wide restrictions because a subset of the population struggle to be effective in an unrestricted society.
That doesn't apply here. The question isn't banning gambling, it's about banning specific types of gambling that are particularly likely to suck in addicts. There's no bicycle analogy because there's no such thing as being addiucted to bicycles. Furthermore, bicycle manufacturers don't make most of their money from customers who break bones by orders of magnitude more than regular customers.
Modern sports gambling isn't "spend $2000 on the World Series, your team lost, now you can't go on vacation."
It's "spend $5 on whether the next pitch is a ball or strike, repeated 100x a night, 7 nights a week" and if you are any good at it they close your account.
Online poker seems like a charity by comparison.
I do feel like the whole "close your account if you are good" feels like it is getting close to fraud, but I'm not sure exactly how to address it using existing laws. I don't think banning sports gambling altogether, or all online sports betting, is the right solution though as it is too much of a blunt solution to a pretty narrow problem.
I recognize that solving the "looks like fraud" problem doesn't address the addiction problem, but perhaps the solution will help dissuade people from participating in the first place if such policies were more clear and widely known.
I agree that it's a problem if winning at sports betting gets you banned. However, I'm not sure how many Americans (in the modern age of online betting) are making actual profits on betting, or were just trying to wring every drop out of all the promos, special offers, etc. offered by various companies. There's a fantasy that a whole bunch of us are smart enough the beat the bookies at their own game, but realistically, that's just not very likely. If the companies lose too much, the odds they offer just get worse and worse for the player.
I'm almost always sympathetic to libertarian arguments, so I don't necessarily want to see things banned just because some people can't use them responsibly. But I think there's a lot that could be done short of banning online sports betting--you could ban all the sports betting TV commercials, for one.
I've dabbled in sports betting, but at this point I rarely bother. Besides, even if I did make any money, it would probably be a tax nightmare. I'd happily trade away legal online sports betting if we could get legal online poker back.