People died of coronavirus. I agree the lockdown didn't pass a cost/benefit analysis. But if you want more lockdowns by all means continue the "it's just the flu bro" idiocy.
"If someone can find an Irish doctor or lawyer in British literature pre 1980, I’d be all ears. (Not Anglo Irish)."
Challenge accepted! 😁
(1) E. Nesbit, 1887, "Man Size in Marble" (we can quibble over whether Dr. Kelly is Anglo-Irish or Irish Catholic, but by the view of the author as for most Brits, there isn't a visible difference):
But my push met with a more vigorous resistance than I had expected. My arms were caught just above the elbow and held as in a vice, and the raw-boned Irish doctor actually shook me.
"Would ye?" he cried, in his own unmistakable accents--"would ye, then?"
"Let me go, you fool," I gasped. "The marble figures have gone from the church; I tell you they've gone."
He broke into a ringing laugh. "I'll have to give ye a draught to-morrow, I see. Ye've bin smoking too much and listening to old wives' tales."
"I tell you, I've seen the bare slabs."
"Well, come back with me. I'm going up to old Palmer's--his daughter's ill; we'll look in at the church and let me see the bare slabs."
"You go, if you like," I said, a little less frantic for his laughter; "I'm going home to my wife."
"Rubbish, man," said he; "d'ye think I'll permit of that? Are ye to go saying all yer life that ye've seen solid marble endowed with vitality, and me to go all me life saying ye were a coward? No, sir--ye shan't do ut."
(2) There is the Irish curate in Charlotte Bronte's "Shirley" of 1849 but he's a Protestant, so that might count as Anglo-Irish, however he is portrayed with the 'national character' of the Southern Irish (as one might expect from the daughter of Prunty from Co. Down?)
"When Malone's raillery became rather too offensive, which it soon did, they joined, in an attempt to turn the tables on him by asking him how many boys had shouted "Irish Peter!" after him as he came along the road that day (Malone's name was Peter Malone----the Rev. Peter Augustus Malone); requesting to be informed whether it was the mode in Ireland for clergymen to carry loaded pistols in their pockets, and a shillelah in their hands, when they made pastoral visits; inquiring the signification of such words as vele, firrum, hellum, storrum (so Mr. Malone invariably pronounced veil, firm, helm, storm), and employing such other methods of retaliation as the innate refinement of their minds suggested.
This, of course, would not do. Malone, being neither good-natured nor phlegmatic, was presently in a towering passion. He vociferated, gesticulated; Donne and Sweeting laughed. He reviled them as Saxons and snobs at the very top pitch of his high Celtic voice; they taunted him with being the native of a conquered land. He menaced rebellion in the name of his "counthry," vented bitter hatred against English rule; they spoke of rags, beggary, and pestilence. The little parlour was in an uproar; you would have thought a duel must follow such virulent abuse; it seemed a wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Gale did not take alarm at the noise, and send for a constable to keep the peace."
I agree with your conclusion but not with any of the above commentary about crossbows being too lethal. I just think they have an unwritten agreement about “no projectile weapons”.
Modern body armor and helmets stop bullets which have by far more penetration power than any muscle powered weapon. A composite shield would absolutely stop any bolt.
I don't think I believe any of this, and I would really like to know what the picture shows without the third-hand 'the Chinese are re-inventing maces'". I wonder if this is more a ceremonial or mascot type situation?
Regiments of the British army may engage in this kind of practice, but it doesn't mean they are reverting to cavalry charges and swords for modern warfare:
What do you mean, "also the clockmakers"? Their motto ["time is the commander/ruler of things"] is focused on their work and completely ignores God. Arguably it rejects the importance of God, though you'd have to be reading into it to get there. They easily pass the test of "we talk about clocks, not the Pope".
The guilds lived in a one-party state with Church and State proudly merged. They had to recite Church/State slogans. Also lots of them were sincere Christians.
American Associations for the Advancement of Grant Money live off the federal bureaucracy, which is monopolized by the D party and forces them to recite D party slogans. Also lots of academics really believe this kitsch.
I am unable to find any evidence that the bet was ever "off"? Am I missing something?
It looks like Rootclaim was working towards coming to terms around the time Kirsch cancelled the open call for bets, but negotiation on terms continued unhindered during this time.
Perhaps there is some other information on this I haven't seen and that isn't linked in your article?
Is Steve saying the debate is only on if someone else puts up an additional $500,000?
Or is he saying the will be a debate, either way, but other people can also bet against him?
The key question isn't the facts of the debate, it's who the judges will be. The contract mentions a "picker" of judges. In the earlier conversation it was suggested that might be [John] Ioannidis. Do we know if that's still the case? Do we know how likely he is to choose impartial people?
Also, what do we know about the escrow process and how safe that is?
Looking over Steve's list of bets, I only see one that I think could actually be resolved with a simple experiment, not a panel of judges, so I suppose that's the only one I'd be willing to wager against.
Re #17, while HUAC was reoriented from Fascists to Communists, McCarthy, a Senator, wasn't responsible. His famous "list" of infiltrators came a couple years after HUAC had investigated Alger Hiss.
Worth noting the builders remedy manifold market only has 5 trades right now (2 of which are mine). Might want to wait to see what it settles on once this article makes it popular.
I think they’re going to need to come up with a more compelling name than “vat meat” or even “cultured meat”... yet they’ll have to invoke the lab aspect if they want to get people to eat endangered species’ meat.
Would help if I read the article... agree that’s the most compelling! I think Impossible and Beyond have paved the way a little.
It will be really interesting to see what happens with the alternative species. I would bet it ends up being seen as a fancy, liberals-only option due to “traditional” recipes being cooked with the classic meats.
The trick would be getting the "Not feeling enough like a MAN!?!? You should be eating the HEART OF A LION for breakfast!" influencers on board without provoking the Blue Tribe into deciding that cultured meat was therefore outgroup-coded and Problematic. On the other hand, the Red Tribe probably consume meat disproportionately, so if you have to pick one tribe to convert to cultured meat they'd be the one to go for.
It's like the flip side of gas stoves. It's becoming a Red Tribe thing which is funny because it's mostly blue staters that actually have access to gas networks. If you're going to turn one group off to gas cooking, it should be democrats.
'Cruelty-free meat' seems like a good starting point, though only for the initial push looking for niche audiences.
I imagine the goal is to eventually get it cheaper than growing livestock, at which point you just call it 'meat' and let it compete on price and quality rather than branding.
I am not convinced. This reads like someone in the 1950's talking about how much complexity and vacuum tubes were needed to build even the simplest computers. It's a combination of "current ways of doing this are slow and hard" with "I can't see a better way". And no of course you can't see the way. Someone from 20 years in the future may well be able to say "it's simple, just repolymerize the lignates ..." The arguments presented seem the typical "I can't see how to do X, therefore X can't be done" type thinking that appears. The problem is that their impossibility proof is never watertight. There are often little edge cases and tricks. And so the entire field gets built around some loophole. Like maybe the thermodynamics of energy seem airtight. But actually, if you genetically engineer the cells to be photosynthetic, expose them to sunlight, and then get the cells to rip up that extra DNA on a chemical signal, then you can get around the energy constraints.
By that logic, you could just as easily argue that it is not "impossible" to build Dyson spheres and turn the solar system into computronium either. Doesn't mean it is going to happen in our lifetimes, let alone that it is something right around the corner worth making important decisions about.
For practical purposes, "there is no known or foreseeable way to do this and the obstacles look pretty fundamental" is about as good as you're going to get.
Firstly, I wouldn't be surprised if a dyson sphere got built within a year of ASI. Whether or not that's in our lifetimes depends on the state of AI alignment.
For technologies like this, the expected state is one of "we don't know how to do this", whether or not that tech turns out to happen. And I don't think the obstacles are that "fundamental". On the contrary, the whole system is complicated and loaded with workarounds.
The report linked to by the article you sent seems loaded with fundamental assumptions that could easily be broken. For a start, it's looking at large bioreactor volumes. Bread factories don't make bread in one giant loaf tin. The scaling laws don't work that way. Instead they have a production line covered in lots of small loaf tins.
The paper just assumed aseptic growth conditions, instead of say using the animal's immune system by adding some cultured white blood cells.
Basically I don't regard the paper as strong evidence one way or the other. They showed a particular set of designs won't be economic under a particular set of assumptions. So sure, if a solution is found, then it will probably involve something somewhere that breaks one of his assumptions.
This may be the strongest evidence we are going to get, but is still isn't strong.
It is very hard to prove a technology impossible by listing techniques that won't work.
I would guess that "artisan meat" becomes, in the developed world anyway, ranchers' collective counter branding. "Artisan" is a marketing tag typically used to distinguish away from mass-produced (e.g. "grown in a lab") and towards "a skilled human being personally created this" (e.g. "meet the ranch family who carefully tend their herd of grass-fed cattle....").
Yeah, in the long run, definitely. But in the short run you get limited-availability expensive vat-grown meat that was carefully designed to look, smell and taste a certain way, which matches an intuitive meaning of artisanal, if not a literal one.
Sort of like I expect the meaning of "a self-driving car" to flip from the "car that drives itself" to "you have to drive it yourself", once most cars become autonomous.
It might attract the exact wrong crowd. I suspect there's a disproportionately high proportion of vegetarians / vegans , or at least those already cutting down on meat or making some effort towards more ethically sourced meat already in those to who "artisinal" would appeal as marketing, meaning there's much less room for gains. Ideally you'd want to appeal to the portion of population eating the most meat.
You're misunderstanding the purpose of a marketing framing for an existing product.
For an existing product that is trying to _defend_ its market share (e.g. beef and pork and chicken from farmed animals), the marketing label isn't about attracting a new crowd. Rather it is about defending/empowering the product's existing customers. The goal is to make them feel better about continuing to consume the product that they know and are comfortable with. (With in this case a side benefit of pre-empting "artisinal" from being deployed by the competition in the opposite way.)
But this *is* a new product: it isn't being sold anywhere yet, so there's no market to defend. Any customers are by definition, new customers, and you're going to want to look for them among those already consuming the product you're substituting for.
At the upcoming meeting of the American Philosophical Association, one of the papers is titled “Is Eating Cultured Human Meat Cannibalism?” Who says these A_A meetings aren’t addressing the pressing questions of the times?
And veradicators for our legal system! Credit to Piper for pointing out in *Little Fuzzy* that a truth machine wouldn't solve as many legal issues as one might hope, and in *Space Viking* that they would be eagerly adopted by tyrants.
The milk products that are currently on the market (e.g.: https://braverobot.co/pages/process) seem to be going with phrases like "animal-free milk protein."
I guess "animal-free meat" might be an eye-catching phrase, but I'm not sure it's really enough to distinguish the stuff from the other animal-free "meats" and "milks" on the shelf (the ones made with mashed-up beans and stuff).
When I was a kid there was an urban legend that McDonalds food didn’t contain any actual animals. Instead the stuff in your nuggets was carved off a huge block of disembodied solid flesh suspended in a tank of water. They called it “Animal 57”, which is what I instinctively call all these cultured meat products in my head.
I should make a list of all the things that were expected to gross me out in 1993 but which now have my complete personal buy-in. It would be an interesting way to chart cultural change.
Intimidation, and the idea that melee feels much more in the right spirit than crossbows under anti-gun regs. Also, crossbows aren't great unless massed and at that point you are killing thousands of enemy troops.
Nah, the whole thing is barbaric and backwards. If something isn't worth fighting to the death for, by any means, it's not worth fighting for. Sign a damn peace treaty, don't send your citizens into a melee to get permanently injured or killed for purely symbolic reasons. And if you think people who "do violence" with modern weapons don't "live with it and its consequences", I would suggest going to your nearest VA and expressing that opinion. I'm sure it'll go over well.
Also, I'm not sure how modern chainmail/sharkmail fares against modern crossbows, but I could plausibly imagine that crossbows are just not effective anymore.
I would imagine mail, modern or not (and by my reckoning modern mail is no better than historical), fares pretty poorly. Consider this Arrows vs Armor video featuring authentic armor and warbows: https://youtu.be/ds-Ev5msyzo?t=2267
Even the mail aventail (neck and throat protection intended as primary defense) featuring dense, heavy, inflexible, mail weave, isn't quite a proof against English longbow arrows - sometimes it stops them and sometimes it does not - and crossbows made with modern techniques could pack quite a bit bigger punch than a 160 pound draw weight longbow. Here's an arrow hitting the less robust mail on the side of the torso (probably still more robust than e.g. shark mail), goes straight through: https://youtu.be/ds-Ev5msyzo?t=1590
I would imagine there are some mutually agreed-upon taboos and unwritten rules limiting the sides from directly escalating to use of 16th century style plate armor and the most lethal weapons you can come up with within the constraints, so choice of weapons is a function of what works, yes (otherwise they'd have stuck to fisticuffs), but also escalation management, and showing off with impressive but less lethal weapons (for one thing, even as far as melee weapons go, the humble spear probably is more effective than the Wolf's Fangs mace).
Mail is bad, but modern armour should be a lot better. This video has arrows failing to penetrate modern armour (starting around 4:40). Admittedly it's not a crossbow, but it's also pretty darn close range.
If the enemy can be covered in modern body armour, then the lack of edged weapons makes sense. Cutting through fancy armour is damn near impossible, but getting smacked in the head with an enormous mace is going to hurt even with a helmet.
Brett Deveraux has some useful information in his post "punching through some armor myths" (google should find that). Otherwise, the youtube channel Shadiversity (no "diversity" intended here, it's "Shad's university") has some reconstructions and experiments.
Given the energy carried by a gun bullet is much, much higher than what you'd get from any crossbow that's not a siege ballista, and modern armor can sometimes stop a bullet, Kevlar and the like are looking pretty good here - they're also designed to offer some protection against an attacker with a knife, so they should help against a cut with a sword too.
The video appears to show arrows penetrating mail, but not plate armor. I think modern armor, designed to resist firearms (which outclass human-powered projectiles), would fare better than mail.
Modern crossbows have very little in common with the old versions. They are used in spec-ops in some countries, and are just ridiculously more powered, smaller, precise and lethal than medieval hand cranked stuff you might imagine.
I'm sure, but shark mail is also very good compared to old chainmail, and while there's no such thing as a truly bulletproof vest there might be truly crossbow proof. Just not sure.
Crossbows are probably more-effective now than in the old days, because they're better, and most people don't wear armor now. I've often wondered why no revolutionary groups in countries with strict gun control use bows as weapons. They're SO much easier than guns and bullets to make at home, and aren't as much outclassed by rifles in urban environments as they would be elsewhere.
Maybe for the same reason NBA players don't shoot free-throws underhand aka granny style, even though it's more or less proven to be more effective: it would just look kinda goofy, and both revolutionaries and professional athletes are very concerned about public perception.
I dunno, you could definitely spin "our side fights with bows" to your advantage in the PR fight - either "we're modern-day Robin Hoods" (Robins Hood?) or "we kill silently and with no warning".
By now I wouldn't even be surprised if they have a truce where all ranged weapons should be removed from the contested are by their range or 50 km, whichever is smaller…
Not an expert, but like many here I read ACOUP, and one thing I've taken away is that modern people wrongly assume pre-modern ranged weapons tactically function similar to modern guns.
By my understanding, mostly just much lower lethality. Well equipped and disciplined heavy infantry can hold position or advance against arrow fire in a way that would be completely suicidal against guns.
Yup. Heavy infantry can walk through arrow fire and expect to come out the other side in formation and capable of fighting.
Ranged weapons in the pre-gunpowder era were effectively battle-shaping rather than war winning weapons. Even in the most talked-about cases like Agincourt, the fact is that the battle was still decided by clash of arms rather than the fire itself being enough to push an opponent off the field.
It should also be noted that this was true (although to a lesser and lesser extent as time went on) all the way up until the invention of cartridge breech loaders. Which is why the cult of the bayonet (which seems so ridiculous now) held on for as long as it did. The fact that technology now allowed massed fire alone to fend off a determined advance was something that the Western world only fully realised in 1914.
Maybe true, I don't know much about modern crossbows. But modern body armor has also gotten a lot better, so it's hard to know how that would go when nobody has used crossbows at scale in hundreds of years.
Their effectiveness at long range (at which they lost most of their energy) are often much over-rated. An arrow at 10m is gonna kill (or badly wound) you, at 150m, even tho it can technically reach you, is unlikely not penetrate armor or shield, and if it does (or hit an unarmored part), may well be a tolerable wound.
Another difference between bows and guns (or crossbows) that movies often get wrong is when the camera shows archers aiming it's implied that they keep their bows drawn for several minutes before the enemy gets in range. With warbows especially, drawing back takes effort, so you wouldn't want to just hold the string and wait. Instead you'd nock the arrow but stay relaxed, and only draw when it's time to actually fire.
I feel like those maces were chosen for intimidation. If they really get into the "we're here to kill people" mindset, they're going to drop the no guns rule.
There's both a specific agreement and also quite a bit of cultural norming around how the Line of Control conflict is conducted.
“Neither side shall open fire, cause bio-degradation, use hazardous chemicals, conduct blast operations or hunt with guns and explosives within two kilometres from the LAC” - from the 1996 agreement between the two countries. This has been interpreted to include projectile weapons more advanced than rocks.
If you read the statements of people on both sides of the conflict, it's clear that they've developed a set of norms around what is considered acceptable on both sides, with actual killing seemingly somewhat "out of bounds" in the minds of the participants, while "beating the absolute hell out of the other guy" seems to be expected and honorable.
Thanks, this explains a lot. Neither side wants to use a gun substitute, and developing massed infantry tactics for, e.g. using spears and shields would be a pointless escalation.
So they're essentially going around in full gear trench raiding each other with blunt weapons.
Probably has more to do with setting the stopping point for the arms race at the level of close quarter combat. Introducing projectile weapons, or "fires" in military terminology, would be an escalation from status quo and demand a tit-for-tat response.
Regarding #47--the polled question concerns satisfaction derived from a social cause. Wokeness isn't in itself a social cause, but more like a new religion.
Wokeness has long struck me as grounded in wanting to feel like one of the world's righteous, specifically "secular white people desperately seeking righteousness." This is my anecdotal hypothesis, from living and working deep in the heart of "blue" America throughout the gradual rise of that particular ideology, that those who've enthusiastically embraced the worldview which we are calling "woke" overwhelmingly fit the above description. Secular liberals who grew up in secular households are, at least in my own circles, much less likely to be bought into it. The people I know who are now woke evangelists often turn out to have grown up accompanying their parents or grandparents to church but they either never developed a belief in God or lost that belief as young adults.
That is so far as I yet know an analysis based only on anecdata. I would like to see some rigorous surveying which tests it. Are Americans who strongly agree with a half-dozen woke-consensus statements disproportionately (a) nonreligious and (b) from childhoods/families in which religious faith was a consistent belief and practice prior to their own generation. (Or the flip side: is it a correct observation at scale that secular liberals who grew up in secular households are much less likely to know be woke evangelists than people fitting the above categorization?)
Yeah, I'm not surprised at all by the finding there. It's been very obvious to me that the "good parts" of wokeness are very similar to the "good parts" of Christianity (love thy neighbor), there's similar radical elements (camel through the eye of the needle, he who is least among you, etc), and the failure modes of wokeness are very congruent to the failure modes of e.g. Evangelicalism.
It only makes sense that religious liberals (already those naturally susceptible to religious-type fervor by the low base rates of religiosity among liberals) would be more involved in similar political movements.
#13 seems mostly false or at least highly misleading. They identified 160 cancer trials which recieved in total ~$5 billion in federal funding. They then assess these trials as saving 14 million DALYs. Dividing one by the other gives $326 / DALY. But the federal funding is not the only cost for the drugs saving these lives. An honest assessment would have to include the private funding for the trials as well as the drug development costs.
Hmm, I don't know if it's misleading, so much as that causal reasoning around money is naturally confusing. I think it depends whether the private funding was downstream of the federal funding or not. For example, suppose that for every $326 the government invests, it becomes clear that some new drug will be a blockbuster that makes a lot of money, and private companies take it the rest of the way. In that case, the government investing $326 really will *cause* one more DALY, and the government should keep investing $326 increments until that stops being true.
If the government was 1% of trial funding, and private charitable foundations were 99%, and the government's contribution wasn't necessary, and the private foundations would have just funded 99% as many trials without them, then I agree this is bad logic.
I think it's even more complicated than that. In particular, that private money wasn't going to be wasted so we presumably have to consider the social value of whatever it was diverted from funding .. indeed, I don't see how this is at all even sorta measuring the delta DALYs versus a world in which these studies weren't done.
But that's kinda besides the point because on top of publication bias the cancer study delibrately limited it's examination to studies showing a statistically significant effect which is basically only counting the costs of the winners.
If the federal funding being measured was for basic research then that might be the case (although still dubious). In this case it looks like the funding is specifically for phase III trials which feels like it definitely would have been funded anyways.
That seems unlikely. Sure, no doubt some of them would have been funded but phase 3 trials are very expensive and without the prospective availability of government money to help fund these trials it seems quite plausible that in some cases it wouldn't have made economic sense to test the compound or potentially to fund the earlier stage development at all. I think it's more accurate to say this paper really tells us nothing about would have happened absent this funding.
Besides, since they seem to have only looked at statistically significant results it's cherry picking winners.
To get some perspective, I thought it might be useful to look at some of the trials and see what they did. One might as well look at the best-performing ones.
The study claims 14.2 million life years gained, but from Figure 1, it sure looks like most of those gained are due to only a small number of trials, with the top 4 contributing about 20%.
But which ones are the top performing? From Figure 1 it looks like the top two happened before 1983. Only three trials listed in the Supplement occurred before that date and had life years calculated:
"Previously untreated patients with multiple myeloma were entered on a randomized clinical trial to determine whether the use of alternating combination chemotherapy, including vincristine, doxorubicin, alkylating agents, and prednisone (160 patients) was more effective than conventional chemotherapy with melphalan and prednisone (77 patients), and whether the addition of the immunomodulating agent levamisole to maintenance chemotherapy enhanced the survival of patients achieving remission. The treatment groups were well matched for all major factors. The more aggressive chemotherapy was more effective at inducing remission, with a significantly higher proportion of patients achieving at least 75% tumor mass regression (53% with alternating combinations versus 32% with melphalan-prednisone, p = 0.002). Furthermore, the median survival was increased to 43 months with alternating combination chemotherapy as compared to 23 months with melphalan-prednisone (p = 0.004). After six to 12 months of induction therapy, 84 patients achieving remission were rerandomized to receive maintenance chemotherapy alone or with the addition of levamisole. The survival from the start of maintenance therapy was longer in patients receiving the added levamisole than with chemotherapy alone (p = 0.01). These findings support the use of aggressive multiagent chemotherapy for remission induction in patients with advanced-stage multiple myeloma."
Take a good look at the inclusion criteria of the cited paper to understand why this is implausible as a whole:
They only included in the analysis the trials which were POSITIVE in favor of the experimental treatment (first paragraph of the DATA in the Methods section).
So this paper basically says that the federal cancer funding *when funding positive trials* lead to $326 per DALY.
At the very least, it shouldn't be compared to the $50k/DALY tor EAs $100/DALY which (presumably) include all the downstream costs of the actual intervention.
They don't need to be superb to occasionally score a big win, though. And in this case, private industry is the one running with the ball.
In any case the history is complicated. While I agree with the libertarian position that government capital allocation is likely to end up as a bloated mess as a result of various sorts of capture, it's not as if it has some consistent track record of failure. Vannevar Bush wrote a decent book ('Pieces of the Action') about the birth of US federal science policy during WWII. It certainly seemed to have achieved its near term goals, like the Manhattan Project.
Also, is it accounting for differences in per-treatement costs? If $1m in research discovers a new drug that saves 10M DALYs, the research provides $100 per DALY only if providing the drug itself costs nothing. If there's a per-person cost to providing the treatment, that needs to be included in the cost per DALY. There are some situations where this wouldn't apply (eg. replacing an existing treatment with a more effective one that costs the same), but a lot of new treatments are going to involve additional costs.
There's definitely a problem with the calculations. The conventional wisdom is that clinical trials cost around $100M per drug, with a 90% failure rate. The cited paper cites 162 trials, so we'd expect that to cost $16G, assuming that they somehow knew in advance that those drugs would be successful. OTOH, in the typical case, 162 successful trials requires 1,600 total trials, at a cost of around $160G. The paper cites about $5G of federal investment, but of course the price of treating the patients when the drug is in production has to pay back the presumably $155G of private investment. So the total cost, adding tax-funded federal R&D, and however the patient care is paid for, comes to 32 times the stated $326/QALY, or about $10k/QALY. But I would add that it seems the threshold for national health systems paying for a treatment is the GDP/capita/year, which for the US is $70k. So this isn't the pinnacle of E.A. but it's still well worth spending taxpayer money on.
I'm not entirely sure I follow your next section, but I don't think we can assume that the cost of drugs to patients is simply recouping R&D costs. FDA-aproved anti-cancer drugs have extremely high profit margins, and there's really no theoretical limit to how high those profits can go. There are many, many antineoplastics that improve overall survival but whose cost to payors is far above your figure of $10k/QALY. And this gives the whole game away. I am untterly unwilling to believe the paper Scott links. If the individual drugs developed by these trials are all very expensive, the research cannot be highly cost-effective.
To take an example, the drug pembrolizumab is now combined with two other chemotherapy agents in the intial treatment of non-small cell lung cancer. In this setting, it is given every three weeks until it stops working. According to the 5-year update of KEYNOTE-189 (Annals of Oncology 2022), this takes a median time of 9 months. This is approximately 13 doses. A generally accepted cost figure is $10k/dose, for a total cost of $130k. The KEYNOTE-189 study also found an 11.4-month median survival benefit, for a total of $136k per life-year gained. This is before adjusting for quality. Pembro is well-tolerated, but the decrement to quality of life is not zero. So we can confidently say the cost/QALY is greater than $136k. Mind you, this drug in this setting is considered a pretty big success by almost any oncologist in the developed world. $136k/QALY is of marginal value at best.
And again, this is one of the MORE cost-effective oncology drug products to debut in the last few decades. These days EVERY new drug costs well north of $100k/year, and many of them have little to no survival advantage over the next best alternative. That same drug pembrolizumab is used in a wide variety of other cancers, mostly with less success but the same cost schedule. In small cell lung cancer, for example, my calculation is that it costs between $300k and $600k/QALY. This is because you take it for months before you know whether it's working, and it doesn't work for most people. So you end up having to give many, many doses to lengthen one person's life.
Regarding #5, Erik Berenson, if anyone can scientifically refute his latest critique I'd appreciate it. The way he writes is trustworthy, to me, but I would appreciate someone from this community checking his logic and primary sources before questioning the efficacy of the flu and covid vaccine to the extent he does.
OK, I read his article. Here are responses to some of his main points:
-"Flu shots are placebos masquerading as public policy.” I did not look up the studies he cites, but did look up data on flu shot effectiveness, which is something I’d looked up a couple months ago. I’d looked at 2 other articles back then, today looked at a 3rd one. All say that initial protection against hospitalization is 40 to 50%, and it wanes at rate of about 8 or 9% per month. (https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/73/4/726/6104243) That’s clearly way better than nothing. Based on something Berenson says later in his post, the papers saying flu shots are no better than placebo may be arguing that the protection found in those getting flu shots is not a result of the flu shots, but merely a consequence of the fact that those who get flu shots are richer and healthier. But here have been RCTs (randomized control trials) of flue shots. When flu shots were initially approved it was surely on the basis of data from randomized control trials that demonstrated they *were* better than placebo. I don’t see any reason to think that’s changed. It’s quite unlikely anyone these days is going to do a randomized control trial of flu shots vs. placebo, because it is regarded as an established fact that flu shots are protective, so it’s kind of unfair to stick a bunch of people with a placebo at this point. But it's not needed. We had the RCT's.
-Covid vax initially gives good immunity -- good protection against infection -- however that disappears in a few months. That’s true. However, it is not important. The point of the covid vaccines is to protect us against severe illness, not to protect us against infection. I’m sure that Berenson grasps this. However, many people do not. I am *constantly* seeing people on Twitter posting despairingly (or triumphantly, depending on what camp they are in) that vaccination doesn’t do much to protect against infection. I think it’s because a lot of people do not grasp the importance of the difference between being protected against infection and being protected against severe illness. Infection is no big deal: 80% of infections in those 20 and younger are asymptomatic. Even in the elderly 35% are. The big deal is getting seriously *sick* when you are infected, and what matters is whether the vax reduces the likelihood of severe illness.
Note that in the first part of the article, Berenson writes: “We now have two years of real-world data on the mRNAs, based on billions of doses. “Putting side effects aside, they work extremely well against Covid - for about four months after the second dose. After that, their effectiveness rapidly wanes. It falls to zero against coronavirus infection and transmission within a few months.” That’s a very misleading sentence, and he has to know that. There are 2 kinds of effectiveness: Effectiveness against infection, and effectiveness against severe illness. He writes a sentence about “effectiveness” without specifying which kind of effectiveness he’s talking about, and he has to know how confused the public is about the 2 kinds of effectiveness. That’s just sleazy.
-Finally Berenson gets to vaccine effectiveness against severe illness, and he declares that “What about after they stop working against infection? What about now? In truth, no one knows.” There actually have been many studies of effectiveness against severe illness. I have read many of them, and every single one finds that vaccination greatly reduces the chance of hospitalization and death. Here are a few that asses the effect of the bivalent booster:
There are also a multitude of studies of the effects of earlier vaccinations, and all show the same result: Vaccination greatly reduces the chance of hospitalization and death.
Berenson discounts the data on the vaccine’s effectiveness on 2 grounds: First, he says all of these studies look at people who elected to get the shot, and of course that population is different from the population that elects not to — they are healthier and wealthier. And it’s true that all the studies I just cited were epidemiological data :They looked at what people did — vax or no vax — then at how they fared. However, at least 2 of them employed a statistical technique called regression to control for the differences in the 2 groups. The way regression works is that you use information about age, race, gender and other diagnoses to predict how likely someone is to be hospitalized for covid. Then, you use that information to mathematically “equalize” the groups, so that the difference you see between the vaxed and unvaxed groups reflects the effect of the vax, not of other differences.
A second problem with Berenson’s claim that all our data comes from real life, where vaxed people are healthier than unvaxed, is that it is not true. Both the original vaccine and the bivalent booster were tested in clinical trials, which did use randomized groups: The group who got the vax and the group who got the placebo were on average exactly the same in age, wealth, health, race distribution, gender distribution, etc. The clinical trials demonstrated that the vaccines worked better than the placebos. Which Berenson knows, or course.
Berenson’s other grounds for claiming that nobody knows whether the vaccines are effective against severe illness is that the results of tests of effectiveness against illness are confounded by the vaccines effectiveness against infection: If people are well-protected against infection for the first couple of months, then obviously they are well-protected against severe illness simply because they are unlikely to become ill. However, there have in fact been studies of the effectiveness of the vaccines against severe illness that follow subjects past the immunity honeymoon. Here’s one that found that effectiveness against severe illness was 95% right after vaccination, and 80% 7 months out.
Vaccination also has been shown to teach other components of the immune system — things other than the fast-waning antibodies — to fight covid.
“Functional memory B cell responses, including those specific for the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), and Delta (B.1.617.2) variants, were also efficiently generated by mRNA vaccination and continued to *increase in frequency between 3 and 6 months post-vaccination. Notably, most memory B cells induced by mRNA vaccines were capable of cross-binding variants of concern, and B cell receptor sequencing revealed significantly more hypermutation in these RBD variant-binding clones compared to clones that exclusively bound wild-type RBD. Moreover, the percent of variant cross-binding memory B cells was higher in vaccinees than individuals who recovered from mild COVID-19. mRNA vaccination also generated antigen-specific CD8+ T cells and durable memory CD4+ T cells in most individuals, with early CD4+ T cell responses correlating with humoral immunity at later timepoints.”
Where is the evidence that at this stage of the pandemic, when the circulating variant is Omicron XBB.1.5, that the vaccines still protect against severe illness after more than several months? I know that they were extremely effective against the original strain for the first few months after injection. We're not at that stage anymore.
The first 4 links I gave above are all to data about effectiveness against severe illness of bivalent vaccine. It did not start being given til about 9/1/22
, and latest dates I saw on the studies I cited was late November. As of mid-Jan. about 40% of US cases were XBB, so dunno how much XBB was around during periods covered by studies. I also cited one UK study in the batch. Don't know how much XBB they had during period they studied -- if more that would be stronger direct evidence regarding XBB. There is also indirect evidence of effectiveness against novel varients: Original vax + later bivalent booster gives a broader kind of immune memory, lodged in b and t cells, so that people are more likely to be able to make antibodies even to something that looks kind of different from what they've encountered so far via infection or vax. That info is way too complex to summarize here, and I also do not have a deep understanding of it. Smart skeptical people on medical Twitter whom I trust and who have far deeper knowledge than I do believe that people with original vax plus bivalent booster are in a pretty good position.
While I totally agree that Alex Berenson's analysis about vaccine harms is completely off, the quoted studies are not very convincing. They might be true for covid naive persons but now that most people have got infected with covid their effectiveness is probably insignificant.
CDC doesn't inspire confidence. They are still against allowing unvaccinated non-citizens to enter the US. Their reputation is so low that it is no wonder that people like Alex Berenson are making so much money from their followers.
Just look at mask mandates that are completely useless and still demanded by some of these institutions.
We agree on most things. I get it that the difference between vaxed and unvaxed hardly matters now -- pretty much all of the unvaxed have had covid, and many of the vaxed as well, so now most of the country is immunized. Graphs and postings by fair-minded people have been quite clear about that for the last year at least. If you look at the graphs, being vaxed made a huge difference initially, and has made less and less as time has passed. It still makes some difference, though, but I'm sure almost all of that difference is a result of differing death rates of vaxed vs. unvaxed older people, and especially of truly elderly people.
The risk for the young has always been small, even without a vaccination. At this point a booster for anyone under 50 seems pointless to me unless they have some special risk factor. As for forcing the public to mask, I agree that it simply does not work. I have no doubt at all that a good quality mask greatly reduces the chance of contracting covid, but that's like saying not drinking is good for your health and makes you less like to be in an auto accident. The latter is true, but Prohibition does not work. People don't comply. Same with mask mandates.
And you couldn't possibly despise the CDC more than I do.
There are a couple places where we part company. Why do you think my quoted studies are not very convincing? And which ones do you mean? The first batch of 4 quoted studies seems to me like good evidence that the bivalent vax reduced hospitalization and death. The difference is likely almost all in the differing death rates of bivalent boosted vs. unboosted aged 65+, so studies don’t demonstrate that everybody should get a damn bivalent booster. But that isn’t what I was trying to discredit. I was rebutting his claim that “the shot doesn’t work”. Clearly it’s doing something. Then later we get to Berenson’s other objections: (1)The shots only work because they give immunity, briefly. They don’t help your body fight off covid, they just keep you from getting it so duh, of course you don’t die of it if you don’t get it. I dug up a study of date rates 7 months out. Still lower for the vaxed. Later I found a better study showing the same, but that one seems like pretty good evidence for me. (The one I found later is forthe entire US. It’s from a post by epidemiologist Jatelyn Jetelina and it’s here: https://i.imgur.com/gZXuEcw.png. Note that in the study the people who had the primary series, most probably having gotten the shot quite a while before, were still doing better than the unvaxed. This seems to me like quite good evidence that what people get from a vax is *more than* just temporary immunity.)
Berenson second : (2) All the studies of vax effectiveness are epidemiological studies, and the finding that vaxed die less than unvaxed is just a reflection of the difference between the 2 groups in wealth, healthcare, education etc. I point out that the studies used a statistical technique for controlling for these differences. Using regression to separate out the differences due to SES from difference in vax status isn’t hocus pocus bullshit, it’s a valid statistical technique.
So I don’t see why what I wrote and cited is not convincing. Remember that I’m not trying to make a case that everyone should get vaxed or boosted. I’m just refuting Berenson. And all the stuff I’m pointing out he’s smart enough to know perfectly well himself. He just knows his audience isn’t.
The other place where we part company a bit, is when you say the CDC sux, so no wonder people listen to Berenson. Yeah, well there’s a second reason people listen to Berenson: He’s out there doing his best to get their attention and to convince them. How about exuding a little disapproval for this asshole? Your failure to blast him is actually the least forgiving of the 3 remarks I got about Berenson on here. One person said, he’s making lots of money by lying — I *probably* wouldn’t do that in his place. (Probably? You’d consider it?) Somebody else said look what he’s been through — the NY Times ditched him unfairly [at some point in past — I don’t know the story] ”This was a NYT reporter with a strong career, who got kicked off of Twitter and the powers that be tried to silence. That he went overboard (in a way that was personally financially advantageous to him) is not commendable, but also not surprising and I have trouble condemning what he's doing now.” WTF? A problem condemning hiem? If he mailed head lice eggs to the NYT, or wrote a tell-all book about them, even a dishonest one, I’d still think he was kind of a jerk, but I wouldn’t think he’s awful. But giving misinformation last year, when getting vaxed still made a significant difference, really did contribute to more deaths. And what he’s doing now is also just evil. Pro-vax and anti-vax people hate each other and he’s keeping that going. What do you think is going to happen if some illness starts spreading that is way more dangerous than Covid ever was? And it’s not that unlikely, you know? We’re encroaching more and more on wildlife habitats, and so are at increased danger from animal pathogens. And then there’s antibiotic resistance. If some godawful thing with a 4% death rate for yougn people starts speading, the country will stay divided, people will not listen to the CDC et al, and things will go very badly. As I said, the CDC is an asshole, so people would mistrust it anyhow. But people like Berenson make their distrust far worse by claiming that some of the official truths that really are true are lies, and giving then the sense there’s an alternative leader: him.
And do you know about some of the people who used their smarts to help, and didn’t make a cent from what they did? There’s Aaron the Mask Nerd, an engineer who tested a bunch of masks and made YouTube of videos of his tests, explaining how masks work in the process. And Richard Corsi, air quality engineer, who developed an easy, cheap way to improvise a high-quality air purifier. Like Berenson and like most people, they too have been probably been treated badly by an employer, a teacher or a parent. Instead of protesting by getting rich off of lies, they protested against people being harmed by by spreading helpful information.
Alex Berenson made some wrong predictions early in the pandemic but he was banned from twitter saying that vaccines do not stop the spread of covid infection. This is not evil. The way he said it was inflammatory (saying these are not vaccines, as if the terminology matters) but it still was not evil. The proper response would be to agree with him – yes, that's right, the vaccines do not stop the spread of infection but they still can reduce disease harm. Our original message was wrong but because the vax group demonised him, he became a hero and that is equality the fault of the group who demonised him.
I looked what wikipedia says about him and there was a phrase that most experts disagree that covid vaccines have 50 times more adverse reactions than flu jabs. To me it again seems that "experts" are wrong. Not only my personal experience but the experience of most of my peers complain that they had strong reactions from covid vaccines whereas no reaction or very little reaction from other vaccines. What I understand is that in medicines we always have a wide safety margins, so 50 times more (actually the adverse reaction severity cannot be expressed in linear numbers) adverse reactions is still within permissible limits. Apparently covid vaccine efficiency was low therefore the manufacturers increased the dose to the maximum possible. And yet again by denying this we are pouring water on Berenson's story. He is wrong to exaggerate but people who deny things are equally bad. Not evil but bad.
The worst people in all this story are those who implemented vaccine mandates. They threw back our progress in vaccine coverage by 20 years at least. They are also not evil but really bad. I would say that targeting Berenson is like dunking on a 7′ hoop – easy target but it will only make him more money. Now, do that with implementers of vaccine mandates and you will have my respects.
It's quite possible that the studies have no funding bias or any other biases; and that those whose immune systems are at a low ebb for a variety of reasons are helped by the shot; and that those who are aged and going to die of the next unfamiliar bug that comes along are saved for a year.
But the main reason that the majority of people who don't want the jab don't want it is because of the potential harm. Most people don't get very ill with COVID if they are in good health. Therefore they have little to gain, and a lot to lose.
There are no long-term studies for obvious reasons. There is abundant evidence of enormous and unprecedented harm caused by these shots.
Re: Berenson - I find his antivax stuff mediocre at best, but it's making him bank, so I kind of get it. His take on the media, however, I have found quite perceptive and interesting. The only place I heard it was the Grant William podcast (paywall), but he's probably said the same things elsewhere.
I read Berenson for a few months when he got on Substack. Some genuinely insightful stuff, but mostly on items where he pointed out potential flaws in the reasoning of others. Lots of establishment types made really bad decisions during the pandemic, and he was one of the first that was fighting that fight and pointing out the problems with the standard narratives. His own reasoning was often flawed as well, and he let implications taken to extremes cover a lot of ground in his arguments. I stopped reading it when I felt like I had heard enough of his takes to understand it, but got tired of lazy arguments that felt like "10% more people died in this study!" without controlling for factors like age or why they were in this study.
In his case he was *right* often enough while being told by all the *really important people* that he was as wrong as possible that his internal alignment mechanism broke. Maybe that's what happens with all conspiracy theorists. Having identified one or more truths that general society/the elites identify as lies, they no longer have a filter to keep good information in and bad information out.
But don’t you think losing your internal alignment under those circumstances is a sign of lack of inner strength and integrity? Yeah it’s disorienting, but hardly something like torture and brainwashing, which we really can’t reasonably expect anybody to hold up under After
all, that sort of thing happens to many people with novel or contrarian ideas, and not all
of them start
Pandering to the crowd that originally cheered their ideas. A version of it happened to Scott, and he didn’t lose track of who he is. If a 16 year old girl has a YouTube makeup video go viral I can understand her getting very confused about who and exactly how special she is. But a grown man? It’s lame.
I guess I agree that it's "lame" - which is why I stopped reading his page. I hope for better from people, but I find it difficult to be upset at them for having a less-than-ideal reaction to the kind of massive societal pressure put on them. This was a NYT reporter with a strong career, who got kicked off of Twitter and the powers that be tried to silence. It's amazing that he fought back, and praiseworthy that he continued to speak out even when billions or trillions of dollars worth of companies and governments tried to shut down the truth. That he went overboard (in a way that was personally financially advantageous to him) is not commendable, but also not surprising and I have trouble condemning what he's doing now.
Exactly this. The best way to counteract him would be to provide clear and easy to understand data about things that are going on. And yet, not many can do that. For example, what's going on with excess mortality right now?
Personally I am not very concerned about the current excess mortality because it is only moderately high, we don't understand well the reasons and I wasn't particularly concerned about excess mortality from covid because I considered this inevitable when a new virus could bring the mortality back to the level of 1980s (bad but not catastrophic).
But people who made this covid mortality such an issue that they introduced lockdowns, closed schools, prohibited travel and even going to the beach, need to explain why they are not concerned now. It is very upsetting to them but they will not respond to this but instead will only criticise Berenson for his exaggeration in vaccine harms.
But what do you mean when you say about Berenson’s anti-vax posts that you kind of get it? If you’d said you get it I wouldn’t have given it a second thought — it’s easy to understand somebody’s liking money. But is there some complication that brings on the “kind of”?
> Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent.
It would be very interesting to see how this claim fits with the seemingly opposite claims in Vinay Prassad's book Malignant. Obviously, one possibility is that one or the other party is simply wrong. I'm wondering if there is a more subtle possibility where they are somehow talking about different (but compatible) things.
My money is on this paper just being wrong. I was unaware of this paper until reading this Substack post. It deserves a full refutation, which I am writing up and will post here when completed.
But in brief, this paper makes no sense at all. How can they claim credit for the ENTIRE survival benefit of a drug? The cost of running the phase 3 is not the entire cost of bringing the product to market. Not even close. If hundreds of people work to manufacture a custom tailored suit, the guy why does the final fitting and makes the last few adjustments can't calculate his productivity by dividing the time it took him to do that by the cost of the suit. That's basically what they're doing here.
The vice justice idea isnt very well considered. Let me list just a few issues:
First, this just shifts who does the assassinating. It doesn't eliminate the incentives. If you want to affect the court balance you now assassinate an old justice on your side who has a young (or at least healthier) vice justice. But fine maybe that's less likely.
But it also creates some really nasty procedural problems. Say Roberts dies from a fall down the stairs in his home. Some republicans in Congress allege (as they are incentivized to do) it was actually his wife who pushed him. The DA investigates the case. What happens in the mean time? Does Biden get to appoint a justice in the year the DA spends investigating? Does that mean the DA has the power to remove that new justice by filling charges? What if they offer the wife a slap on the wrist in exchange for a confession? She might want the vice-justice to be appointed and agree. Or just think a small fine is worth avoiding the risk of trial (the DA/DOJ's political preferences might mean they play along). If you require a conviction what happens if they accept a plea?
Ok you say the vice-justice only takes over if the assassin is convicted. Fuck, now the assassin has a *quite strong* case that any jury who might convict him is invalid because they have interests in the outcome (eg whether abortion becomes legal, including for them, depends on their vote). Shit, who hears the appeal on that majorly important issue of law? SCOTUS? Which one?
What even counts as assassination? Is it any charge or murder? What if the justice is in one of those states with 3rd degree murder or with a weird definition of 2nd degree murder. Or overseas? Maybe you say it's federal law. But that's a huge problem bc if the murder didn't happen on us federal land (or other circs) the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction and it can't take on advisory cases. Who is the opposed party?
It would be a mess. And this doesn't even get into what happens with assisted suicide or a train crash where it's ruled to be some kind of murder on the grounds of delibrate indifference to safety. It adds more problems than it solves.
That is sound reasoning for why making it a law (or worse, an Amendment) would be a bad idea. The hypothetical "pact between the two major parties" (please hold your laughter till the end) would be more robust to that kind of thing: would a reasonable man consider it an assassination?
It works better if paired with the proposals floating around to appoint justices to fixed terms (most commonly, staggered 18-year terms so a seat falls vacant every two years). Fixed terms eliminates the need to limit the accession of vice-justices based on cause of death, since you could simply have the vice-justice serve out the balance of the original justice's term regardless of cause of death (or disability, resignation, or impeachment removal), just like the vice president serves out the rest of the president's term.
I'd also change the proposal so there's two or three vice justices (so there's spares, since 18 years is a long time), appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate at the same time as the main justice. And instead of sitting around waiting for the justice to die, the vice justices could "ride circuit" (serving as appeals court judges) like SCOTUS justices used to until the early 20th century, or they could act as permanent senior clerks for their respective justices, or both.
I agree with this but rather than creating a whole new position of vice-justice and worry about the incentives drift in a justice's views might create (eg consider Souter's shift to the left) how about we just let each justice designate another article 3 federal judge as their replacement in case of death? Once you have fixed 18 year terms there aren't really any issues with the replacement idea and this avoids exacerbating problems with senate confirmation etc while ensuring the backup is qualified and isn't twiddling their thumbs.
If it's a full position you'd have to have senate confirmation (don't want justice death to let the prez evade that) but since it would be both rarely used but symbolically important I fear it would frequently either be used by the president to appease the base with extreme canidates or held up by a senate for political reasons.
However, I think there are other problems with the fixed term idea. In particular, I think it's important that during the election there isn't any certainty the president will have some number of appointments. Because planning for someone's death is a little ghastly and it's uncertain it means the canidates can push off pressure to commit to certain appointments. I fear that with a fixed term the pressure to commit to using your appointment for some specific extreme judge to satisfy your base (the moderates tend to be less aware of these issues) would be too great.
That's why I still think it's probably better to skip this idea as a matter of law. However, it might be a nice idea for the parties to make a public political commitment to appointing a judge designated by the assassinated justice in case that happens thereby leaving the grey cases to the political process.
"it's important that during the election there isn't any certainty the president will have some number of appointments."
Completely agree. I support fixed nonrepeatable terms for SCOTUS justices, provided that:
(a) the term length is an odd number of years, and
(b) the term re-sets upon departure of a justice.
So if the term is say 15 years, then whenever a justice dies or retires the replacement is being appointed to a fresh single 15 year term. Hence it is always difficult to predict in advance how many justices a given president is likely to get to appoint, which is a good thing. We also stop having an open seat on the Court be viewed as a 40-year "lock-it-in" opportunity for a particular political party or ideology, which is an even better thing.
And I'd like the same concepts to be applied to service in the federal courts generally, for the same reasons. Something like a lifetime cap of 31 years' service as a federal judge across all levels of federal court including the SCOTUS.
But isn't the obvious move for presidents to all appoint justices young enough to serve out the full 15 (and the existence of a term limit will make retiring earlier less common)? That makes it predictable again.
From a theoretical POV we could solve it by saying that each justice serves ten years and then has some percent chance of involuntary retirement each subsequent year. However, I'm doubtful that such a probabilistic system would be very well recieved by the public.
I've been meaning to write this up, but the right thing to do is to give each justice a 4*9 = 36 year term, which passes on to the vice-justice (who can then name another vice justice) if the justice dies, and let each president nominate exactly one justice per term (and they _keep_ that nominating power even if they leave office without being able to get someone through the senate).
(I'm happy to answer questions about edge cases but please don't frame it the edge case as a dealbreaker just because I haven't written up what to do above unless you've thought in depth about how to fix it and there really isn't anything that could be done)
What about rather than letting the president choose the vice-justice let the justice do it themselves and change it so if their views evolve (Souter) they can change who they pick.
Also this avoids the problem of the fact that a president out of office won't necessarily have the negotiating position to get anything through the Senate and concerns that, knowing this, they might nominate someone to cause difficulties for their rival in the office now.
Tho personally I still think it's a mistake to make the appointments predictable as it will force presidential candidates to commit to extreme choices especially during the primaries.
So why isn't letting the justice themselves designate a replacement (must be an existing federal judge so senate has already confirmed and no new confirmation will be required) in case of death or retirement strictly superior? Especially if they file that name in secret with the court and retain the ability to switch it?
I think that adding the clause “if the vice-justice is already a federal judge no confirmation is needed” is a good idea, I’ll have to think about edge cases though.
I definitely intended for the justice to be able to nominate and change their vice-justice, sorry if that was unclear.
Ohh, I see, I misunderstood the bit about the president keeping the power. I dunno if it would be good to do with the president but when it's the justice doing it their incentives are pretty much always to pick whoever they think is most likely to agree with them (the person who already made it through confirmation) so I think it would be a clear win.
Now that I understand your idea about letting the president keep the power, I don't necessarily think that's great. You already noted the issue with encouraging holding out but also they won't necessarily have the institutional power at that point and be out of the loop and I fear it might just be essentially passing power to the future senate majorities of their party (not totally but to a degree).
Also, I think it would basically mean lots of ex-presidents end up on the court (come-on Obama was a constitutional law prof of course he's jump at being on the court). I agree it might be better than the current system but I suspect we can do better.
I suggest letting the court itself confirm a nomination if no confirmation occurs after a year. The pressure on them to appear non-partisan would give the president an ability to appoint well-credentialed moderates.
Regarding presidents keeping the nominating power: is the idea that they keep that nomination in reserve until the Senate aligns with them? This will make the justices more extreme.
Edge cases are fun! President A ends his term without nominating. His vice-president B later becomes president. B is impeached and removed from office. A dies. B presumably loses his nominating power from his presidency, but does he still have it from his time as A's vice-president? If so, can B choose person C to transfer this power to without Senate approval?
If Senate approval is required to nominate an heir to nominating power, consider the following: A is president, and ends term without nominating. His vice-president B dies. Senate does not approve his nomination for "retired vice-president." A dies. Does D, the Speaker of the House at the end of A's presidency get this power? Do you need to keep track of the entire line of succession?
I agree it will make justices more extreme than the pre-Garland norms but I honestly think it will be less extreme than the norms we’re quickly heading towards.
The operationalization I was imagining was that each president would hold the power of their nomination until they died or were impeached. If they were impeached or died in office, that nomination would pass to the whoever filled the presidency. After they left office, they could pass on that power to any individual, including via a will on death, who could continue to nominate whoever they wanted but still requiring senate confirmation. Any Justice could nominate their successor, or leave it blank and pass on the power to nominate their successor to anyone they wanted.
“Power to nominate” would just be an abstract property that could be transferred using normal property law. This would be mostly unabusable, though, because the senate would still have to confirm the nominee, either from someone who inherited the right from the president, or from a justice who died before nominating a successor.
Re: gay soccer players isn't an obvious explanation that a combination of homophobia, fear or homophobia and desire to fit it with what is seen as high status by those you want to date all discourage young gay men from going into soccer. Or that either the sex or the homophobia distracts them at a key stage in their career?
This was my thought as well. It struck me as a bit of a juvenile argument that the only possible reason for gay men not participating in sports at the same rate as their straight peers would be some trait related to their gayness, rather than the explicit homophobia that pervades much male social interaction, especially among youth.
But you'd need to think football was really exceptionally homophobic for the numbers to be that low.
In general, professional athletes are hyper selected for genetic traits, and my impression is that being gay and being interested in sports (especially team sports) both have significant biological components. So my prior lines up with Scott's.
Not sure that Scott shares your priors. He is curious and not sure this far-right blogger got it right. Fact: German pro-soccer has the same situation ( the one coming out after retirement: Thomas Hitzelsperger ). BUT: There are many gay non-pro soccer-players in Germany. Having gay-only teams. Which leaves ample room for the more lefty theory: if at 12 you are the only "am I gay?!"boy in a youth team of Bayern München, in a locker-room full of kinda homo-critical rough boys - you may rather change your sport than do a coming-out. There ARE many sport with a high rate of gay athletes. Just not team-sports.
English football is famously bigoted in all sorts of ways - that’s the sport that gave us hooligans where they even had to ban spectators at some games. If there are differences between football in England and in other countries, that would reinforce this interpretation.
Czech international Jakub Jankto just came out as gay. In local press it's described as an unique act of bravery in this sport. Reuters describes him as "the highest profile current male footballer to publicly come out as gay". Let's see how Czech fans react.
It seems to me that this would be worth looking into. I don’t know the details, but at least, a few decades ago, England football fans were considered the most destructive in Europe.
As far as I can tell the NFL and NBA have had exactly one openly gay active player each. The MLB has had zero. With that in mind the English football numbers don't strike me as terribly surprising.
The NFL & NBA seem more highly monopolized, so I would expect them to have fewer players. On the other hand, I'm ignorant of the actual numbers for them vs the English Premier League.
It's common knowledge that back in the late 20th century English football hooligans were exceptionally violent, more violent than in other European countries; however, I sometimes across English people online who complain that today English football fan are among the best behaved in Europe, but they can hardly get rid of the bad reputation they gained in the past.
Elite female athletes in most places are disproportionately gay. Probably have disproportionate testosterone/etc. would be my guess. Makes them better athletes, and makes them more into chicks.
In general, there's a sharp negative correlation between what percentage of a sport's women athletes and men athletes are homosexuals. For example, in the WNBA, currently 20% of the women basketball players are publicly out lesbians.
In the history of the NBA, in contrast only two players, both big men, have ever come out as gay. Former commissioner David Stern said in 2016 that he knew of two players in the history of the NBA -- Magic Johnson and an unnamed dead player -- who were HIV positive.
Modern slam-dunking basketball is a highly masculine sport -- that's a huge part of its appeal -- so it's hardly surprising that it appeals more to straight men than to gay men and more to lesbian women than to straight women.
In contrast, figure skating is a lovely feminine dance-like sport, so it appeals most to straight women and gay men. In the later 20th Century, many prominent male figure skaters battled HIV infections.
Golf is an interesting test case because it doesn't seem stereotypically macho. Pro golfers tend to be people who didn't much like team sports. Yet, participation is highly skewed by sexual orientation with lots of lesbians and few gays.
The number of gay acquaintances and friends I have who played organized sports well in high school or earlier is very high, and gay sports leagues in big cities can sometimes be hyper-competitive. But very few of these guys went on to play in college, and none professionally, not because they couldn’t (well, pro is a high bar, maybe none of them were that good, but a lot of them were good enough for college) but because the whole environment was absolutely miserable for them. The fact that there might be the reward of a sympathetic media portrayal years and years later (when your day-to-day is awful and fully of homophobia) is hardly much motivation.
A few years ago, a video game called Valorant was released that is incredibly similar to another game called Counterstrike. There are a ton of major differences between these two games; but the gameplay is essentially the same. Despite the gameplay being nearly identical, there is a staggering difference in the communities in regards to homophobia and sexism; which is greatly reflected in its player-base.
I've encountered more women playing Valorant in 1000 hours of gameplay than I did in over 3000 of Counter-Strike gameplay. A lot of factors probably contribute to this, but principally it's a result of the game moderation being performed by Riot; resulting in bans being handed out to racists/homophobes/sexists/etc; (compared to Valve's totally hands off approach).
You might site a few other reasons for this, such as age demographics(Valorant skews younger), or Counter-Strike's military aesthetic(definitely draws in more machismo), but I think the game moderation lends itself to a virtuous cycle where players feel less threatened for just being themselves.
Even still, women commonly report being harassed when using voice comms; especially in lower ranks where players skew younger and dumber. It's also my experience that lower rank games are more homophobic. Simply put, many players aren't making it past these ranks because they don't want to rise in a community that disrespects them. The prize at the end isn't worth it.
As an aside; I think straight people don't realize that coming out of the closet, even after retiring or in a good political climate, can be very difficult if you've lived a long time in the closet.
People get very good at hiding themselves from others, and it becomes so second nature that coming out doesn't even seem like a priority. I didn't really grok how much being closeted was effecting me until I came out. Why risk relationships with friends/family/ex-teammates/etc; if you don't have to, and don't grok the burden of it in the first place?
Yeah, especially given that the athletes in the article would have been in middleschool/highschool 15-50 years ago (including the stat on retired players).
Interesting thought. So, should we expect more exotic distributions (either very few gay people or very many gay people) in jobs for which people have to decide at a very young age? You can't suddenly decide with 18 that you want to go into sports, but you can still decide to become a lawyer or a programmer.
What other jobs are there where you have to make a strong commitment in your mid-teens or earlier? Musicians? What else?
Additional consideration: the pool of young promising players that will go pro is very much self selected / class segregated. Basically: who starts to play all the time with other boys to pass the time? is homophobia more rampant there, to the point that a gay person trying to play would be bullied by everyone? Is there a strong desire of the gay community to escape from the estates (american: projects) and football is one of the things that get cut off in the process?
The average professional football player will have started out in a club academy at ages under 10; it's quite different from American sports where schools and universities take on a significant burden of producing professional players. I don't think it is realistic that kids of such young ages, almost certainly pre-puberty, are opting not to play football because of worries around sexual identity. The latter idea is more feasible
Kids may not worry about "sexual identity" as a political concept, but they very much are attuned to social norms and the probability of bullying. If you differ from the norm in any way, you tend top be picked on more or less violently: you choose your tribe accordingly...
You're probably correct, but this does assume that even a young child who may not have any awareness of their sexuality will already be subconsciously displaying behaviours similar to that sexuality. In such a case, we're probably going back to Sailer's original point that there is likely a genetic factor in play, since I couldn't imagine a young child would have picked up "gay" behaviours or the equivalent through socialization
I think it's more the case that gay kids stop playing soccer once they reach an age where they become aware of their sexuality. I.e., they should be just as likely to play soccer as any other 10-year, but then much more likely to drop out during their teenage years when bullying/homophobia/discomfort sharing showers with other boys/etc become material issues. Anecdotal of course, but I knew 2 kids growing up that fit exactly that pattern.
I find it unlikely that, on average, 10 year old boys who grow up to be gay are just as sports-crazed as 10 year old boys who grow up to be straight. I've known one exception and Nate Silver is another. But in general, there is a pretty high correlation between adult sexual orientation and pre-sexual interests and affects. E.g., a large percentage of lesbians were tomboys, while a large percentage of gay men didn't have as much conventional boyish interest in sports when they were 10 year olds.
This has all been when well documented in social science for generations.
Doesn't have to be genetic. See Greg Cochran's pathogenic theory. But sex-atypical behavior/interests in children is significantly predictive of homosexuality later in life.
Yeah I am always struck that the most "born gay" guy I know describes hiding during recess a kindergartener and 1st grader, not because he was afraid of bullying, but just because he disliked outdoor play so much. That really isn't normal behavior for a 6 year old.
I think the issue is that Sailer sees a difference in groups and asks "is there any reason not to assume it's mostly genetic?" and then goes on to explore genetic potential explanations if he can't find any reason not to.
But in this case, most of us can find plenty of other explanations that don't require any genetic cause, and don't see the need to go down the genetic rabbit hole.
I don't think that's actually accurate. When has he said he thinks anything related to homosexuality is genetic at all? And one of his most notorious claims was that New Orleans' "Let the good times roll" culture was bad for blacks, a cultural rather than genetic argument. Nowadays he's arguing that we've successfully gotten hispanic Americans to drive more safely over time, and that the current spike (which obviously was not timed to any change in genetics) in both homicides & traffic fatalities among black Americans should be a sign that we need to be similarly encouraging them to improve rather than treating them as eternally passive objects helpless in the face of white supremacy and with no agency of their own.
I've always been agnostic on the cause of male homosexuality. It's difficult (but perhaps not impossible) to construct a model in which exclusive male homosexuality is due to genetic heredity since you'd probably run out of genes for it due to the Darwinian process.
Instead, I've focused on collecting a lot of data and examples of correlates of sexual orientation, such as favorite sports. As you can see in this discussion, I know a lot more empirically on the topic than people who subscribe to the conventional wisdom about homophobia, subscribing to which tends to make them averse to learning about real world patterns because knowleged raises ... doubts.
For example, I'm guessing you aren't a huge sports fan who knows a ton of sports facts, are you? As a little boy, were you obsessed with learning data about sports? (For example, I can vaguely recall Brooks Robinson's 1964 batting average (.317, IIRC) from a book on baseball heroes I read in 1965 when I was 6.) Or did thinking about sports always seem kind of unappealing to you compared to thinking about other subjects?
Granted, the correlation between a boyhood interest in thinking hard about sports facts and adult sexual orientation isn't 1.0: e.g., Nate Silver is an outstanding baseball stats analyst. But, it's pretty high.
I actually do think the point about team vs individual sports weigh a bit more in favor of explaining it via homophobia (or a more generic punishment of being out-of-step). But I don't actually know how prevalent gay men are in the more individual sports. One might think that sprinting, weightlifting & boxing are an even more amplified version of some of the masculine traits relied upon for various team sports popular with men, but we really only pay attention to the first two during the Olympics and boxing seems to have plummeted in popularity well before my time.
They do start training with 10, but usually not in a club academy. Especially not soccer players who are already retired, for whom this was 20+ years ago.
Even if they start soccer training at the age of 10 or younger, it suffices if gay boys at the age of 14 start feeling uncomfortable among other nude boys in the shower. They might just drop out at this point.
By the way, there has been a massive shift in the last 10-20 years. Before that, it was socially unacceptable to refuse to shower after practice with the other boys. Nowadays, it's completely normal that boys opt out from that.
A way of cross-referencing this would be to look at other habitually bullied groups of young boys and see if their prevalence is also very low in pro football. Has anyone thought to ask players if they ever played a regular game of DnD?
Let me guess - you’re straight. Most gay people recognize that even before we understood anything about sexual orientation, there are social situations we felt uncomfortable with as children because of things that we later recognize as either internalized or external homophobia or awkwardness connected to sexuality.
Hmm well check your bias, I mean yeah there are twinks, but also bears. The two gay men I knew well at the UU church could have broken me in half. Buff! But total teddy bears.
There's not much correlation between physical type and sexual orientation among men (there is among women). But there is quite a bit of correlation with interests. Do these burly gay men watch ESPN SportsCenter religiously every night? I knew one who did, but he tended to be an exception and found it hard to find other gay men to talk to about sports.
Not to mention that English football is famous for its hooliganism, so that it could well be one of the most toxic feeling atmospheres for young gay people.
Sure, but the young hetero males love the hooliganism. My team against your team. Will the number of men going in person to watch this years super bowl be below the national average for being gay? I wouldn't be at all surprised if the percentage of hetero-men who like to watch aggressive team sports, is larger than the national average. Sure this could be a society thing, but it could also be a 'how we're wired' thing.
You answered another commentator with "let me guess - your strait" becuase it was obvious to you that they were operating off generic tropes about homosexuality rather than lived experience.
In the same vein. Let me guess your not from the UK.
I'm not saying hooliganism doesn't exist but it's exists far more in foreign peoples opinions about the UK than it does to average kids playing football
Went looking for the gay/ sports comments: Sure lots of possible explanations, but this plays right into my new favorite meme; Humans self-domesticated themselves. This has all sorts of spandrels, (trait's dragged along with selection for less violence.) One of them is sexuality. Domesticated animals have more sex and diversity in sex. (needs citation.) Anyway I could totally believe there is some genetic component that somehow connects aggressive, (semi-violent) team sports and sexuality. This would be most easily seen at the tail end of the distribution. I think there are maybe one or two gay American football players. That's a really small percentage.
No no the obvious explanation is that men have an innate need to touch other men, and gay men get this through sex, but straight men need to play sports instead. 🧐
More seriously though, this is an interesting question, but it’s the same problem as “why are men like X and women are like Y?” The known sociological aspects are too large a confounder to be able to figure out any unknown biological aspects at this time.
I’m generally against overanalogizing between gender and sexuality. Gender is extremely correlated to a specific genetic expression that we understand very well. Studies looking for a link between genes and sexuality are all very 🤷♂️
I just mean that in both cases we know that there are huge “nurture” effects, and that makes it hard to confidently isolate “nature” effects. It could be that for gender 100% of differences are nature and for sexuality, 100% of differences are nurture, but it would be really hard to be confident about that as long as sexism and homophobia still exist.
Yes this should be a main theory to test, but the author isn't exactly a neutral source.
some data that would help to answer this better is to compare to other countries' pro soccer environments as well as data on age cohorts to see where the drop off is in gay players (this would be pretty hard to accurately collect though).
Yeah, so the self domestication idea would maybe say something like this... The evolutionary pathway to less violence, involves scrambling of the sexual response, men become more female. (And maybe female gets more male? IDK) There is also a tendency to stay younger and more playful, with less aggression selection. It's complicated.
*I need to add that "the goodness paradox" identifies two types of violence, within group and against the other (not in your group) and we've only been selected for less within group violence. Love thy neighbor, but kill that other tribe over there.
And women's golf and tennis. E.g., among the All-Time Greats, Serena is straight but Billie-Jean King and Martina Navratilova are lesbians.
Other sports aren't so tilted toward lesbians: e.g., in America volleyball gets more tall pretty straight girls while basketball gets more tall homely lesbian girls.
I have a vague impression that women's golf is less lesbian than in the past.
Not counting the huge number of South Korean lady golfers as opaque for me to guess about, the last time I went to an LPGA tournament, a lot of the American women golfers looked like the attractive and athletic daughters of business executives and athletes, daughters who have a really good relationship with their dads: e.g., a lot seemed to have their fathers caddying for them. These silver-haired alpha males carrying the bag probably would have devoted themselves to their son's sports careers in the past, but with smaller family sizes and more emphasis on female sports today, they are now more likely to push their daughters into their favorite sports, such as golf.
OK are you interested in pushing peoples buttons? Or in having a conversation with them? It seems like the former. (pretty straight and homely lesbian seems totally unnecessary.) I guess I'm done.
This is my own uninformed speculation. Note: If you can't think in terms of overlapping bell curves, this is going to seem nuts. Just keep in mind that if I say group X is more inclined to Z than group Y, I'm talking about averages--two bell curves, with X's mean shifted to the right of Y's group.
a. Men tend to be more visually driven than women in term of attraction. You can see this in terms of men being overall more focused on physical attractiveness vs other attributes of potential mates vs women, men consuming a lot more visual porn (whereas women tend to consume more written porn), etc.
b. Straight men and lesbians tend to be less focused on their own physical attractiveness than straight women and gay men. This might just be cultural, but it sure seems to be true in US culture.
These two fit together pretty well, to my mind. Straight women and gay men are trying to appeal to potential mates who are on average pretty visually focused, and so they tend to worry about their appearance a lot. Lesbians and straight men are trying to appeal to potetial mates who are on average less visually focused, so they tend to worry about their appearance less.
For example, golf isn't a good sport for keeping the pounds off, which is one reason it appeals more to straight men and lesbians than to gay men and straight women, who tend to be more interested in types of exercise that are better for their appearance than golf.
Softball is another lesbian favorite that's not ideal for losing weight.
Well that could be part of it. I am struck by two things on the topic. 1) that youth sports was a bastion of homophobia deep into the 90s and early 00s in a way that it was not for say racism. Lots of casual homophobia, almost no casual racism. I would imagine that drives out a lot of potential gay players (of which there are probably few to start with).
2) The gay men I know come in a few main "categories". More effeminate/artisty types who generally HATE sports and were younger brothers to highly traditionally successful older brothers. Then there are your more manly rough and tumble "bears", but also not super into athletics, generally something academic/cultural. Then there are your fitness and fashion obsessives, and only among them are there many athletes or people interested in team sports.
Anyway, I do not think there just is much overlap between "type of person who becomes professional athlete", and "type of person who ends up gay". In particular to the extent homosexuality is environmental (at least some), the exact early athletic and social/romantic success which being an elite athlete conveys would work against some of the common vectors for homosexuality.
Certainly some portion of gay people are "born gay", but some portion are not.
on 1) why does a culture have to be racist and homophobic at the same time? Team sports were deeply racists for a long long time, but that war was fought (and largely won) in the 50s and 60s. Although many would say the relative lack of black NFL coaches or quarterbacks, for example, shows there is still racism (in the NHL it is definitely true).
on 2) do you really think starting off with "this group of people only come in two types" is a way to refute bigotry against that group?
Hmm as a hetero-male who played a lot of team sports in my younger days. If some guy was good I'd want him on my team. Then again hetero-male seems to describe all the guys I played with. Why do you reject some genetic piece to this puzzle?
Thats not what its about though. If you are a closeted gay player and your team mates have a culture that is not welcoming to gays you are either not going to come out or going to stop playing.
>Why do you reject some genetic piece to this puzzle?
I dont, but i think there are pretty clear cultural explanations that need to be handled first. I also havent seen any evidence of genes related to homosexuality impacting interest in sports or impacting athletic ability.
Hmm OK I'm just not sure the culture is before the nature. Women are much more interesting in doing people things, and guys are into things. So more male engineers and more women in nursing and teaching kids. I don't see why sports and sexual orientation can't follow the same trend. I'm also guessing the culture (in team sports) is better now. My sons got a friend who is playing sports at the college level, I can ask him the next time I see him...(if I remember) My guess is he'll have the same opinion as me, if the guy is good I want him on my team, and we'll try to be a sensitive as young men can be... which is in general not all that sensitive. But if we embrace him as a teammate maybe that will be enough.
My goal wasn’t “refuting bigotry”, it was getting at the truth. And I used the facts at had at hand…my personal experiences.
As for the NFL points, those are just silly. Blacks aren’t underrepresented as coaches or QBs compared to the general population. There is no problem to solve. They are overrepresented at positions that demand extreme athleticism, because blacks are disproportionately extremely good athletes. Why should the percentage of black coaches match the racial breakdown of people interested in football strategy and not the racial breakdown of people who can run very quickly at “x” SD above average?
It’s just people looking for shot to be mad about.
Ditto hockey, which is not any more racist than any other walk of life. Sure people say worse shot to each other, I don’t know if you have noticed, but they also punch each other and try to hurt each other. Indexed to the environment it is the racism is pretty non-existent. Yes there are incidents, there are also incidents in accounting, or retail.
Black NFL head coaches are underrepresented relative to the number of NFL players that are black. This is such an established fact that the NFL has a rule that teams have to interview at least one black candidate for head coach openings (though this isn't really a solution. Brian Flores has a lawsuit with allegations of sham interviews).
Black quarterbacks were, until very recently, pigeonholed into being running quarterbacks.
>Black NFL head coaches are underrepresented relative to the number of NFL players that are black. This is such an established fact that the NFL has a rule that teams have to interview at least one black candidate for head coach openings (though this isn't really a solution. Brian Flores has a lawsuit with allegations of sham interviews).
Why would coaches reflect the demographics of players and not the demographics or football players at all levels (which are much more white). Or the demographics of people who are super into football (which basically just match male demographics).
>Black quarterbacks were, until very recently, pigeonholed into being running quarterbacks.
Or that was where their skill set was? not every difference between racial outcome sis racism. Is it also racism that holds back South Asian sprinters and marathoners, or Scandinavia gymnasts?
Warren Moon was a very successful black passing QB 30 years ago. Most of the black QBS good enough to get into the NFL since that time were disproportionately excellent runner sand so used in that way. there are a few outliers like Leftwich, but if you look, he was mostly used exactly for his actual skills, not for his "assumed skills".
But whatever it is clear you are just drinking the traditional narrative Kool-Aid and not actually spending any time critically thinking about these issues, so have a nice day.
I read all that, in the end it was a positive story. We are changing. I'm reminded of Grant Fuhr who played for my Sabres ~1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Fuhr. Read about the Transit Valley Country Club. Things get better.
If homophobia is to blame for the dearth of gay men in team sports, why do female sports, especially team sports, tend to be disproportionately lesbian? Heterophobia? I think homophobia and heterophobia are at best secondary effects. The real cause is probably that lesbians are, on average, more masculine (physically and psychologically) than straight women, while gay men are less masculine than straight men. The mean differences don't have to be large for differences at the extreme (i.e. elite sports) to be large.
I would think because sports are coded male and so is being lesbian, so homophobia would be a big issue in men's sports, and would likely be a non-issue in women's sports. As you note, you don't need much of an effect size of getting people do participate a little bit less or a little bit more to have a huge effect at the elite level.
It's quite plausible that there is some genetic factor. But the original claim seemed to be that no one could think of any possible explanation *other* than genetics (because no one comes out after being done with their career either) and that just seems wrong.
> As you note, you don't need much of an effect size of getting people do participate a little bit less or a little bit more to have a huge effect at the elite level.
I'm not sure about this. I think you might be confusing mean with variance.
To use some example numbers, say you have 1000 people, and you're looking to make a league out of the top 10% of them. For simplicity, we'll say 100 of the people are gay and 20% of them leave due to homophobia. Now 80 out of 980 potential league candidates are gay. The league should end up with 8.2% (80/980) of its members being gay, compared to 10% if there were no homophobia. Numbers also work out the same if they drop out after being selected. It's proportional. X% dropping out due to homophobia just means X% fewer in the league.
And most of the evidence suggests that gay men are underrepresented in major sports not by 20% but by 80% or 90%.
The most straightforward explanation is that gay men tend to prefer arts to sports. A gay Lionel Messi, with his incredible eye-foot coordination, would be a professional dancer instead of a soccer player.
For example, around 1990 I can recall hearing on the news in Chicago that the city's first gay sports bar was opening up. Chicago had a huge number of gay bars, but until then no sports bars for gay men. The entrepreneur was interviewed and said he was confident that in a city like Chicago, with its huge gay population, there were enough gay men who liked watching sports on TV while flirting with other men who like watching the game to make his bar successful. (I never heard whether he turned out to be right or not.)
What gay men really like to do is dance (as do straight women). For example, the circuit party circuit is so popular among gay men that it helped spread monkeypox last year.
In contrast, there are now only about 20 lesbian bars still open in the entire United States. Nowadays, they can flirt online. So they don't have much reason to get together anymore because, like straight men, lesbians aren't all that enthusiastic about dancing.
Huh again you have opinions that come across as biased. Got any data for the dance comment. I'm a hetero guy who loves dancing, of the other men I know who like dancing none of them are gay. The people I know who like dancing are mostly those who are good at it. And yeah in general more women will get up and dance with me.
The stereotypical professional male dancer is a gay man. However, little if any systematic research has investigated the validity of this stereotype, much less the reasons why male sexual orientation would be associated with interest in dance. We interviewed 136 professional dancers about the prevalence of homosexuality among dancers, the dancers' own sexual development, and relationships between dancers of different sexual orientations. Dancers estimated that over half of male dancers are gay, but that only a small minority of female dancers are lesbian. Gay men recalled more intense early interest in dance compared to heterosexual men and women, and were more feminine as boys than were heterosexual men. Gay men's homosexual feelings typically preceded their dance experience, and only one gay man felt that his dance experiences may have influenced his sexual orientation. Heterosexual men voiced some mild complaints about gay male dancers, but these were balanced by positive sentiments.
Anything that makes you a little bit less interested at an early age will compound because of the multiple layers of selection and practice that go on.
You have a model in which little boys who grow up to be gay want just as much to be football stars as little boys who grow up to be straight, but society chips away at their progress and self-esteem.
Do you also have a model in which little boys who will grow up to be straight want to be Broadway musical stars just as much as little boys who will grow up to be gay, but the forces of heterophobia keep putting them down?
Do little girls who grow up to be lesbians want just as much to play the princess in a Disney Broadway musical, while little girls who grow up to be straight want just as much as the future lesbians to be professional golfers but the heterophobia of the golf world dissuades them while the homophobia of Broadway dissuades the future lesbians?
In some ways this is an Occam's Razor worldview: people of every sex and orientation are absolutely homogeneous except for their sex and orientation and the only thing that causes the patterns of disparity in interests is pervasive discrimination.
On the other hand, you could also call it Occam's Butterknife, since it's averse to noticing factual patterns of difference because knowing more about empirical reality leads to doubts about your Conventional Wisdom.
I don't think that's what Cornelius meant when they said, "The mean differences don't have to be large for differences at the extreme (i.e. elite sports) to be large."
I'll posit an opposite effect: the people who are the most talented and passionate at soccer are the least likely to leave for any reason. Meaning homophobia should have a smaller effect at the elite level.
Soccer is also very homosocial, and that may include attitudes towards homosexuality as a protective element: being close with your team-mates is not because you're sexually attracted to them.
It's also a working-class sport in its origins, so things like communal baths were carried over from manual working practices and domestic life, and the relative lack of money and expectations on the part of both players and managers for fancy facilities:
Arsenal was unusual in the 1930s for the luxury of its facilities due to the manager, Herbert Chapman, taking the opportunity to advertise that this club had big ambitions and was a serious enterprise:
"The construction of the East Stand went enormously over budget, finally costing a cool £130,000, mainly due to the eye catching cream facade, with Arsenal Stadium etched onto the front in brilliant blood red, with cannon beneath. No expense was spared on the stand, which also held the dressing rooms, the club offices, the main entrance, as well as the quite unheard of idea to house match day entertainment facilities, such as a restaurant and cocktail bar which kept the likes of Buster Keaton coming back in the 1930s. The Arsenal crest was omnipresent; embossed onto napkins in the restaurant, the Arsenal A in its hexagonal framing formed the door handle and of course, was etched into the marble floors. (Which were not actually marble, but terrazzo.) As a piece of corporate branding, it echoed through the ages and never dated. The entrance was flanked by art deco lamp standards and approached by steep steps. To add even further to the sense of grandeur, Arsenal deployed a commissionaire at the entrance that doffed his cap at players from both the home and away sides upon their ascent into the building. On the inside, the terrazzo floors were overlooked ominously by the bronze bust of Herbert Chapman, carved by top contemporary sculptor Jacob Epstein. Likewise the dressing rooms cemented the palatial standards, with heated floors and marble baths in both dressing rooms. Luxury that was unheard of in depression era England. Middlesbrough striker from the 30s Wilf Minion marvelled, “The dressing rooms were beautiful with marble baths and heated floors. It said so much for the Arsenal that they catered for your every need. They had the class to treat opponents as equals.”
Also, because homophobia (at least in the modern west) just isn't as hostile to lesbians. Add to this the underlying difference in the ways men and women behave (especially in locker rooms) and i don't think the difference is that surprising.
I remember back in middle school boys being routinely taunted by other boys about being gay and their manliness challenged with regard to it especially in sports. I never saw girls doing anything similar at even close to the same level of intensity (at worst maybe someone would be called a lesbian as a kind of version of you're weird and different not an issue itself).
Also, I guess I'm not sure I'm understanding how your explanation works. Sure, in some ways gay guys are less masculine and lesbians more (most obviously in the wanting to fuck girls aspect). I even agree this may cause them to exaggerate, or at least be less averse to, sex atypical behavior and this may push gay men to feel less pressure to be traditionally masculine by pushing to succeed at sports and lesbians to be marginally more likely to focus on sports than other women. However, I don't think this really differs from my original explanation except perhaps in degree (it's a reaction to feeling less pressure to succeed at the std cultural expectations or more to differentiate).
But if you mean it's some kind of physical effect of gay men being more feminine in physique or something then I don't really see the evidence or relation to being more feminine in certain social aspects (and who u want to screw).
I mean when thd social pressure goes the other way (eg how buff/fit one is) the relationship goes the other way (gay men tend to be more buff and spend more time working out than straight guys..bc of obv incentives).
Here's the opening to my 1994 article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" in "National Review:"
A warm Saturday afternoon in late May brings all of Chicago to the lakefront. In the Wrigleyville section of Lincoln Park, softball teams with names like “We Are Everywhere” and “The 10 Percenters” compete with an intensity that could shame the Cubs. Girded for battle with sliding pads, batting gloves, and taped ankles, the short-haired women slash extra-base hits, turn the double play, and hit the cutoff woman with a practiced efficiency that arouses admiring shouts from the women spectators.
Meanwhile, on a grassy lakeside bluff a few blocks to the south, the men of the New Town neighborhood bask, golden, in the sun. If ever a rogue urge to strike a ball with a stick is felt by any of the elegantly sprawled multitude, it is quickly subdued. This absence of athletic strife is certainly not the result of any lack of muscle tone: many have clearly spent the dark months in thrall to SoloFlex and StairMaster. But now, the sun is shining and the men are content for their sculpted bodies to be rather than to do.
What are we to make of all this? What does it say about human nature that so many enthusiasms of the average lesbian and the average gay man diverge so strikingly? What broader lessons about current social issues can we learn from this contrariness of their tendencies, this dissimilarity of lesbian and gay passions that has been dimly observable in many cultures and ages, but that now in the wide open, self-fulfillment obsessed America of the 1990s is unmistakable?
Possibly because sports is a culture that lets lesbians get together outside of a 'gay ghetto' and find like-minded others? And that weightlifting seems to be more masculine than feminine; if a gay man wants to get fit and buff for personal aesthetic preference and to attract other men, he hits the gym. If a lesbian wants to get fit and buff, she engages in sports like field hockey or tennis or whatever.
I think there may be a lot of work being done by historical attitudes, as well; the stereotype for the 'mannish' games mistress must have been there for a reason. Women who didn't have traditionally feminine interests were able to engage in socially sanctioned activities like sports, even if there was the concurrent attitude about not wanting to be too unfeminine. You're not interested in guys, you are interested in girls, and maybe you're also butch - sports is an acceptable way to indulge in all that.
The individuals who make it all the way to play professional sports tend to be really interested in their sport for its own sake. To them, it's not just a big cover story for their social/sexual ambitions. Instead, they really do like hitting a ball with a stick or whatever it is their sport requires.
For example, the ultra-effeminate retired American male figure skater Johnny Weir really and truly knows a huge amount about figure skating, which whatever you think of his tendency to dress up like, say, Princess Leia on camera, makes him an outstandingly insightful TV broadcast analyst of his sport.
Similarly, retired NFL quarterback Tony Romo turned broadcaster can often predict the next play because he is obsessed with football. (Although he may be presently even more obsessed with golf: he wants to win the US Amateur golf championship.)
Could we socially construct a world in which little Johnny Weir grows up to be a star quarterback and dedicated golfer, and in which little Tony Romo grows up to be a star figure skater?
Perhaps, but it would have to be totalitarian beyond the nightmares of Huxley, Orwell, and Vonnegut.
Oh sure, professional sports people are devoted to their sports, that's why they put themselves through so much to succeed.
But if you're a 'masculine' woman in the 20th century, being a sporty type is a socially acceptable way of building muscles and hanging out around other women and not being involved with traditionally 'feminine' hobbies or occupations. The perpetually single Miss Jones who teaches gym classes at the local girls' school and spends all her time with gal-pals is perhaps a little eccentric, but any intimations about her sexual orientation can be ignored or not discussed, because there's a social role for her to fit in.
It's when Miss Jones cuts her hair short and wears 'male' attire and goes in for body-building and showing off her muscles by lying around in the sun (like the gay men in the example) that rouses comment and gossip. Miss Jones who has short hair and a suntan and muscles from playing sports in the open air is another matter, because sports are healthy and character-building and involve team spirit and co-operation and other good things, so that's different. Some of those women are certainly going to be interested in sports at a professional level as well.
The WNBA’s lesbian culture broke my spirit: Candice Wiggins
A top American player has revealed the “harmful” bullying she suffered for being one of the few heterosexual players in the WNBA.
Mark W. Sanchez
2 min read
March 5, 2021 - 10:23AM
Candice Wiggins was a college basketball star, the third pick of the 2008 WNBA draft and a 2011 champion. And at the mountaintop of her basketball career, her sexuality marred the moment.
There is a “very, very harmful” culture running throughout the WNBA, she says, which saw her get bullied during her eight-year career because she is heterosexual.
Ironically, Candice Wiggins' dad Alan Wiggins was one of two Major League Baseball players known to have died of AIDS. The other, Glenn Burke, was gay, while Alan Wiggins was a heroin user.
AIDS deaths are the best empirical data points we have for how common were male homosexuals in 1970s-1980s professions like figure skater or baseball players.
But AIDS deaths tended to be caused by the Four H's: homosexuals, hemophiliacs and others needing transfusions (like tennis great Arthur Ashe and Isaac Asimov), Haitians, and heroin junkies. So each data point needs investigation.
Of the two big league baseball players who died of AIDS, Glenn Burke was a homosexual and Alan Wiggins was a heroin user.
Not likely. Lots of today's professional athletes are born after 2000, for one thing. The stigma isn't there for them in the same way. Seems unlikely that NO ONE comes out and into all the accolades and celebration.
There are just a select few out of the thousands of current and former NFL and NBA players who have come out. Contrast with the WNBA and other women's sports, where players have complained about the oppressive culture and expectation of lesbianism and other explanations start to make more sense.
First, different cultures change at different rates and both the lockeroom culture of sports itself and those most likely to go into it tend to be lagging. And doesn't the second half of your claim push against your first. That claim seems to document a cultural difference in attitudes to homosexuality in female lockerrooms from the wider world making it hard to claim that there can't be a similar difference in the other direction for men.
>First, different cultures change at different rates and both the lockeroom culture of sports itself and those most likely to go into it tend to be lagging.
Sure, but homophobia has been actively verboten much longer than they've been adults (in the US). There are still some homophobes and stigma, but you're positing a huge amount to explain why only 1 to 2 total out of thousands of players have come out of the closet despite the other incentives. The simpler explanation that rates of homosexuality are just less common in male athletes in team sports. Base rates can differ. Do you think that fashion design or figure skating is actually proportional and that there are a lot of straight male fashion designers and skaters that are afraid to come out as heterosexual?
Meanwhile...
The lesbian WNBA culture is downstream of the other factors that make the 2-5% of women who are lesbians the majority (or close to) of WNBA players. How else could that culture become dominant in the first place?
If Lionel Messi had been gay, he'd probably be a famous dancer instead of a famous soccer player.
Back in the 1970s-80s, one of the top Broadway tap dancers was Tommy Tune, who is 6'6". People always asked him why, with his superb coordination, he wasn't a basketball player. He said he always liked dancing more. To him, he said, a Broadway dressing room full of chorus boys getting ready for the big show was where he liked to be. It was his locker room, he said.
It's not as if the effeminate Tommy Tune had wanted to be a slam-dunking basketball star only to have homophobia derail his sports career. He was ecstatic that he was a star song and dance man on Broadway, exactly what he'd always wanted to be.
You don't need homophobic stigma to make gay teenagers uncomfortable with being on sports teams. Anything that makes people uncomfortable about being naked around people of the same sex will drive those people away from sports - and if men's locker room behavior and women's locker room behavior are different enough, then it's very plausible that this behavior would be a complete explanation for the differences. (It's also very plausible that there are other factors, but the original post seemed to be claiming that there couldn't be *any* behavioral factor and it had to be about a connection to actual athletic ability.)
Locker room behavior could be a complete explanation? You have a lot of improbability to explain, especially positing hugely opposite effects in male and female athletes just-so.
I personally think interest and personality are the big differentiating factors rather than general athleticism.
Any monocausal factor has just as much of a just-so story behind it, whether biological or social. Both of these are useful null hypotheses - not so that we actually believe that one of them fully explains it, but rather that if someone claims to have a better explanation, they need to do at least *some* work to *show* that it performs better than one or both of these.
"Getting naked in the locker room exerts a huge effect on men and women's decision to play and succeed in pro sports, and this effect is reversed in men and women" doesn't seem remotely as plausible as "people with different sexual orientations have different interests at large that play into pursuit of hobbies and profession", but I don't feel like doing any more work to explain why.
Showering with your team is not a big part of golf culture. It's an individual sport. Most players drive to the golf course in the clothes they'll wear when they are playing. All you have to do in the locker room is change your shoes.
And yet, golf is highly popular among lesbians and vanishingly rare among gay men.
Why? My best guess is that the urge to hit a ball with a stick is largely a masculine urge. And golf seems to be a sort of white collar hunting for bourgeois guys and lesbians who are a little too genteel for blood sports: you wander around a complex landscape holding a weapon and occasionally taking careful aim. Your hope is to shoot a birdie, but not literally.
We have objective data on the prevalence of male homosexuality in different sports from the HIV rates in the 1980s and early 1990s.
For example, men's figure skating was notoriously ravaged by AIDS, with, among quite a few others, both men's gold medalists at 1970s Olympics dying of AIDS. In men's diving, the most famous American diver of all time, Greg Louganis, was HIV positive but, fortunately, didn't die.
Both figure skating and diving are dance-like sports appealing to less masculine males. Not surprisingly, quite a few famous male dancers died of AIDS: e.g., Rudolf Nureyev, Robert Joffrey, Alvin Ailey, and Michael Bennett ("A Chorus Line").
In contrast, I've never heard of professional golfer who was HIV positive or who appeared to die of AIDS. This is striking because golf isn't a macho contact team sport, but instead is a country club individual non-contact sport like tennis or diving.
But golf appeals far more to homosexual women than to homosexual men. For example, the Dinah Shore LPGA championship in Palm Springs each spring is known as the national lesbian spring break because of the thousands of lesbians who fly in for it. In contrast, gay men who are dedicated golfers are very rare. I've scoured lists of entertain celebrities who golf. Remarkably few gay men are on those lists: singer Johnny Mathis is one.
Among basketball players, the great Magic Johnson was HIV positive, which he asserted he must have caught heterosexually. Years later, the L.A. Times sports editor admitted that the newspaper was close to running an investigative report documenting that Magic was playing for both teams. But then he announced his HIV status, so they spiked the story rather than prove the popular man saint a liar.
NBA commissioner David Stern said in 2016 that he knew of one other NBA player besides Magic who contracted HIV.
Huh, OK I'm going to say golf is a group game. It's not a team game, but it's still a group game and so somehow closer to a team sport. (I never liked golf, the bags were too heavy for me.)
Elite football/soccer players don't just require excellent genetics and work ethic, they also have to make the choice to dedicate themselves to football almost full-time from from their early teens if not earlier (e.g. academy players at age 10 or so). So both actual homophobia and perceived/potential homophobia are very big reasons for someone with talent to choose not to go down an elite pathway in favour of playing less seriously or pursuing another sport.
There are more gay American football players than soccer players it seems, so I'm not sure homophobia of the sort you're describing fits.
However, soccer is an international sport, one where football players move to play for other countries, or where teams travel to other countries to play, and not all countries are all that friendly towards gay people. It's still illegal in Qatar, for instance, which hosted the recent world cup. So there's danger to being openly gay in this sport if you're playing at that level.
American football, like basketball, draws heavily from men at the far right edge of the size bell curve. Assuming sexual orientation is uncorrelated with height and weight, then gays are more likely to be found among the largest athletes rather than among the average size guys who love the sport most ardently. For example, the first out of the closet NBA player, John Amaechi, was 6'10 and 270. He got paid millions because of his body but he never liked basketball.
In contrast, soccer players can be of most any size so the competition is especially fierce. And the basic genetic skill -- agile feet -- is also ideal for becoming a professional dancer. So the average height straight guys with great footwork who want to win go into soccer and the average height gay guys with great footwork go into dance. Everybody is happy.
Sounds way too speculative, because you're assuming gay people would be just as happy dancing as playing soccer of they grew up in a soccer obsessed culture, and I don't see why that should follow. Seems much more likely that most gay people playing soccer are just keeping their sexual orientation secret because it would either place their life in danger, or at the very least threaten their international career.
Don’t want to blanket defend the AEA but it does seem at least possible to me that there’s not much juice left to squeeze from inflation and other traditional economic topics (or at least that the juice has become harder to squeeze). It’s worth noting that “woke” economics has produced useful work like Chetty’s very clever research on economic mobility by zip code (and the disproportionate effect it has on men). As far as I can tell, global warming therapy has just produced a bunch of very sad teens and large insurance bills.
Do you think that racism and global warming have nothing to do with economics?
I'm a labor economist. Differences in earnings by gender and race are substantial and persistent. Who should study or understand that other than labor economists? Why would the people who try to understand earnings and unemployment ignore key determinants of earnings and unemployment?
"Externalities" and regulation of externalities have been central to discussions of economics for pretty much the whole history of the field. Why wouldn't economists be involved in talking about how to manage the externalities produced by carbon emissions? Does it seem wise for scholarly discussion of environmental issues to not involve people who do cost-benefit analysis, or who think about incentives?
Economists typically try to answer factual questions about social questions, particularly those around the production and distribution of goods and services. There are striking, persistent racial differences in occupations, earnings, asset ownership, neighborhood and health (among other things). If those differences reduce to class differences, they do so in a way that is not observable in data--it's pretty much impossible to explain racial differences in income, education, health, wealth, incarceration, occupation, etc. with observed differences in family background (as an example: https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/race/).
You might be of the opinion that these racial differences aren't interesting or aren't worth understanding. I am of the opinion that they are interesting and are worth understanding, and that careful, quantitative, analytical research can help shed light on these differences, and so some of my work focuses on understanding them.
Yeah, especially for a conference paper; if economics is anything like psychology, conferences are mostly places for low-level people (grad students, post-docs, associate professors) to trot out whatever they were doing personally in their office with no funding, so that they can add it as a line on their CV.
If you have something important and new to add to the discussion of inflation or GDP, you're probably a big established researcher or institute, and you're probably going directly to a prestigious journal.
In the hard sciences, you would publish in a journal and then go to the conference to give your work additional exposure. (And also for the fun of going to a conference.)
Work that is eventually published in a journal (small or large) is very often presented at conferences when it is in the early stages. Preliminary results, discussions about new methodologies, etc.
Not a single paper that has come out of my lab in the 6 years I have been working here hasn't had some part of it presented at a conference before publication, including the nearly ten papers we expect to publish this year.
Economists hardly ever present published work at conferences. The idea is that the conference is a chance to get pushback and critique that improves the work.
I think one difference is that our work is rarely either clearly correct or clearly incorrect, so we spend much more time, both in our papers and in the discussion of the papers, defending the findings rather than exploring implications of the findings.
Yes, especially the AEA annual meeting. Historically, job interviews happen at the conference, so the people who can give talks are people who aren't interviewing or being interviewed--usually grad students and junior researchers.
The big-name people with huge papers also present them at conferences, but typically at more specialized, invite-only conferences or at seminar talks at other universities.
There's plenty of incremental work to do on inflation, but most of it's not super interesting because we basically understand how inflation works. We don't understand long-run economic growth at all, so the work there is going to be either very low-value or revolutionary.
Yeah, in general I would think that long-established topics are going to continue at a steady low pace with only tiny changes in response to external events, while topics that haven’t been traditional will be very sensitive to contemporary issues and will have booms and busts. It might be worth comparing the number of talks on economic implications of viruses and public health from 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, to see if there was a gigantic rise and then a pretty big fall.
Thank you for this. As an economist who focuses on "woke" subjects this really annoyed me--racial and gender inequality is a subject worthy of study within economics, and the economists who give talks on these subjects are doing economics in the talks! It's not the same thing as psychiatrists talking about climate change. Same with climate change--environmental econ is a real subject, and we should want economists thinking about regulation to reduce climate change, economic consequences of climate change, etc.
>racial and gender inequality is a subject worthy of study within economics
I think most sane people don't disagree with this at all. The problem is the perception (that seems at least a bit fair) that this is just about all academia is interested in anymore. I always love to tell jokes about how the bookstore at the local college bookstore has hundred's and hundreds of book on each of "Native American studies, and Africans American studies, and women's studies, and about 40 books on "physics". on the one hand physics classes generally assign fewer books, and there aren't as many kids in physics, and there is less need for different perspectives in physics because there is typically one correct perspective.
On the other hand it is in a broad sense pretty instructive about what the function and focus of the institution actually is despite it being a crass joke. It pumps out activists at a much higher rate than it pumps out physicists.
One factor here is that pretty much any humanities professor who wants to get tenure has to publish a book. So there's going to be a pretty tremendous volume of books published on the type of things humanities professors talk about that get read very infrequently. I assume physicists are similar to economists in focusing on writing papers that get read infrequently instead.
That said, I think this perception is somewhat reasonable when it comes to academia as a whole. A job as a professor is very attractive if you are, in your soul, an activist. Professors earn a comfortable salary, get to spend time talking to young people, and can't be fired. And so a decent chunk of the output from academia is activism clothed in academic language.
When it comes to economics specifically, I certainly think there are economists who are primarily activists (though fwiw plenty of these people are conservative or libertarian activists), but I really don't think the field is unduly focused on race and gender. Since 2016, the American Economic Review has published 5 articles under the topic "Labor Market Discrimination." It's published 24 articles under the topic "Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles" since 2021.
I don't object to economists studying any damn thing they please, and publishing it anywhere that wants to publish it. I *do* object to them doing it on my dime, if they're getting grants that pay for it from the government, because I want better value for my tax dime, and figuring out how to rein in inflation is worth 100x another untestable hypothesis on why people acting in groups sometimes act like jerks.
Economists working on questions that touch on race, gender, and climate usually try to formulate testable hypotheses and then test them. Of the work presented at the AEA, I'd guess that about 90% is quantitative and empirical, and probably 90% of that uses experimental or quasi-experimental methods. Most of the discussion of this work at a conference like the AEA is about whether the methods used effectively answered the question, how the answers might be confounded or biased, and how to refine the approach to address that bias.
We're also mostly not talking about questions like "why does racism exist?'--we're talking about questions like "how do teacher's unions affect the academic performance of children, and how does this vary by the race or gender of the children?" Or "How much of the gender wage gap emerges with parenthood?"
In general, the methods that economists use to answer these types of questions can be a lot more rigorous than the methods economists use to study inflation because we have better data and see more variation in policy across individuals. The flimsiest evidence and most untestable hypotheses in economics tend to be on macroeconomics questions.
As I said, do whatever you like on your own dime, or somebody else's. More power to you! But if it's costing me tax dollars, then I don't want to support it.
The problem with your argument is that it's egoistic…if other people don't like to support research in areas you believe to be important, where does that leave us as a society?
The same argument can be applied by people who don't want border enforcement or the police: Why should I have to pay taxes to support activities I don't agree with?...
Sorry--I've probably already commented to much about this, but it's also worth noting that the way he counted topics was almost sure to exaggerate the role of "woke" subjects. Most sessions have 3 or 4 papers, and are organized thematically. All of the papers on inflation and economic growth, or close to it, will end up in sessions that are 100% about inflation and economic growth. Meanwhile a session on minimum wages that includes one paper that estimates the effect of minimum wages on Black workers becomes a "Race" session.
Also, long-term economic growth is arguably the single most important question in economics, but a lot of the meaningful incremental work on long-term growth is microeconomic analysis of specific growth drivers--for instance, work on patents and innovation, work on the growth of education, work on labor force participation, firm formation, etc. There was a ton of work on all of these subjects presented at the ASSA meeting (I'm not going to count sessions because I need to go back to wasting my life doing "wokeonomics" research). A lot of it even touches on race and gender, since expanding economic opportunities for women and minorities arguably drove growth in the mid-20th century (http://klenow.com/HHJK.pdf).
5. Alex Berenson is not, I think, related to the Berenson sisters who were models and actresses. Marisa is still alive. her sister died on 9/11 as a passenger in one of the airplanes.
Reading the selection criteria for the cancer funding effectiveness article says they limited the studies they looked at to those that found statistically significant results. Isn't that basically just looking at the successful trials and then only counting their costs?
18. Mars. Not thinking we should go to Mars with our current technology is not the same as thinking we should never go.
Chemical powered rockets just won't cut it. The trip to Mars is just too long and too difficult. We need to be able to build fusion powered rockets that can make the trip in weeks or months not years and can mover real tonnages of supplies.
And there's not much point in going there until it's feasible to establish a self-sufficient colony (which is either singularity or centuries away, regardless of whatever Musk says), other than the usual rah-rah flag-planting.
Agreed and I don't see the value in demonstrating that we can land humans on mars, and return them, under very very difficult constraints using less-than-ideal technology. So what?
Beyond capacity for space travel, which has a long way to go, I think there's other low-hanging fruit that can be accomplished with AI and remote control.
Going there is just half the battle. I think a stronger point against “colonize Mars today!” is that basically everywhere on Mars is much harder to live on than anywhere on earth (outside of like “literally inside an active volcano”). Earth after a nuclear war or a major meteor strike or any reasonably plausible version of climate change would still be more hospitable than Mars in a lot of ways. And there is already lots of earth we don’t live on.
If Mars was a place you could literally walk to, there still wouldn’t be a lot of reason to go live / work there except curiosity (and supporting tourism from the curious I guess).
Mars has one thing going for it : A literal century of sexy propaganda.
If it was a place you could walk to, it wouldn't have that. But it's unattainable, it features in mythology, Scifi worships it even more than the romans do. And what do engineering types that work on colonization and human expansion mostly read ?
Hell, for all my "Meh" attitude towards Mars, The Expanse still made me want to see the first human footprint on it before I die. When that happens, I will probably cry my face off.
From a rational perspective, Mars is perhaps 7th or 8th down the list of attractive Free Real Estate in space. It doesn't have any atmosphere to speak of unlike Venus or Saturn's Titan, it doesn't have the gargantuan oceans of Jupter's Europa, it's not our closest companian like our Moon, it's not choke-full of water or metals like the asteroids. No magnetosphere too.
From pictures sent back by landers, Mars *looks* habitable, certainly more than Venus or the Moon. I think you're all underestimating the appearance of an atmosphere. Yes, Venus has an atmosphere but it's one full of sulphuric acid and crushing atmospheric pressure - by contrast, a dusty pink atmosphere just feels a lot more tolerable and survivable. It looks like deserts on Earth, and people manage to live in those:
I agree that it would be terribly difficult to set up any kind of functioning colony without a constant stream of supporting supplies sent from Earth for a long time, and I imagine the political will to spend billions (trillions?) on that would soon wane as people on Earth complained about wasting money that could go to poverty or curing disease or what have you. So if a colony didn't manage to get on its feet pretty quickly, then it would be more a scientific curiosity than real functional "this is how you live on another planet" and the colonists, if any, would be faced with "back to Earth or die on Mars".
I think the visual appearance is a little misleading, though. Mars's atmosphere is so thin it doesn't do a lot of the things you want from an atmosphere -- it can't protect against small meteorites, you still need a pressure suit, it doesn't sufficiently moderate the day-night temperatures swings, and of course it doesn't provide rain or even interesting weather, just annoying dust storms that can't push you over but that block seeing for days (or weeks). Combined with the lack of a magnetosphere meaning too much radiation reaches the surface, you still need to live underground and venture out only with caution and good protection -- so not that dissimilar to the Moon.
Even worse lately is that the Martian soil appears (at least in places we've sampled) stuffed full of perchlorates, which are inimitable to life as we know it from bacteria on up, which mean "The Martian" scenerio where you can grow stuff in the soil once you provide water and bacteria, is off the table. You need to leach all the toxic crap out of the soil first, which is a massive undertaking (needing megatons of water that is going to end up poisonous, for starters).
All in all, Mars is like the Solar System's cruellest tease. It looks deceptively like home, but it has almost none of home's advantages except for gravity, and factoring in the reduced shipping time/costs and increased ability for tourism and some kind of useful science or engineering applications, it would probably be more plausible to put colonies on the Moon.
Why are you spoiling my remaining Golden Age SF fantasies with crude and mean facts? 😁
All that's left for me are planetary romances among the dried up canal beds and the ruins of the ancient Martian kingdoms, and the lush jungles of steaming Venus! Ah, well, I'll just have to suffer for the sake of beauty!
Yeah I know. I so want Barsoom to exist, or the Sea of Morning Opals. It's disappointments like this -- that we're all freaking alone in this System! -- that make me doubt the Creator exists, or at any rate was stone-cold sober during Creation.
I hold out hope that there is an exotic plan as follows: in a billion years, life will no longer be possible at all on the inner planets, because the Sun will be too bright. But then the *outer* planets may come into their own. Full of water and all kinds of useful small organic chemicals, Ganymede, Europa, and Titan are like ova in the deep freeze, just waiting for a warming Sun to bring them to life. It would be awesome if there is a plan for life to continue (or more precisely start again) if we don't ever manage to make it out into the universe.
Meh we just need to be less precious about human lives. Just send people and supplies up, and keep sending them. A couple billion dollars worth a year. Some people will die, probably most of them,. That is fine, literally everyone dies.
The struggles of the people up there in novel environments with novel problems will have real scientific benefits. The getting people onto another celestial body and up to a self sustaining level ASAP also have very real civilizational benefits.
Sure we could explore the whole galaxy with robots. That would be more efficient. It would also be more efficient for everyone to jsut murder themselves and cull humanity back to 100,000 people, would solve a huge number of our problems. There is more to life than efficiency.
I doubt there would be any shortage of volunteers even with low survival odds. We got tons and tons of people, billions. Even if only 1/100,000 wants to go, you got more candidates than you know what to do with.
People do, for some reason, keep climbing up Mt. Everest despite the odds of dying while doing so. If you threw fame and an actual benefit to humanity into the pool I'm sure there would be people who would tolerate even larger dangers.
Remember you are posting this on a site where at least some people are very enthused about solving death , see Bostrom and his dragon. So you are a horrible dragon-tyrant loving monster! 😁
Oh I think if we solve death suddenly all sorts of calculations and policy questions are going to get wildly wildly different.
Would you drive, would you leave the house? Losing say 40 additional years, so of them likely in steep decline is a much lower cost to a random car accident than losing 100 or 1,000. I would think people would get much more conservative about their risk tolerance.
Mars is depressing. I've seen the photos. It's just a barren gritty freezing cold rock with a dull pink sky to which nothing ever happens except it sometimes gets dusty. Mars is one of the most boring places in the Solar System.
It's interesting if you're a geologist, sure. And if the risk and cost (and time) were low, I'd be as interested in visiting Mars as anybody else. But I would never want to live there.
If you're talking about the portions of Utah that look like Mars, yes those are boring. I mean, they're interesting to visit once or twice, but I also would not want to live there. I like green growing things far too much. The Grand Canyon isn't entirely a fair comparison, as it has a lively and interesting ecosystem in addition to being a great big crack in the Earth. If it were *only* the latter, then no I wouldn't find it that interesting either.
I mean, I'm not a geologist. Rocks and soil and erosion and so forth just aren't that interesting or entertaining[1]. Life, on the other hand, in all its riotous variations in form and behavior, is endlessly entertaining, because it's always changing[2]. To top via inorganic dynamics what Earth has to offer in organic is a tall order. Maybe the moons of Jupiter would count. But not Mars.
[2] In principle geology is, too, but on a verrrry long time scale. If I lived a billion years, then watching the advance and retreat of the glaciers, plate tectonics, mountain building and so on might well be fascinating.
I think you are underestimating the number of people who do (or would if they had the resources) devote themselves to say mountain climbing or spelunking. Humans like exploration and like treading new areas. I am guessing that would be a huge draw and value to colonists.
Not at all. I love climbing mountains myself, have been up tons of peaks over 10k feet, and it's one reason I live where I do.
But you could not get me to move to the Atacama because I could hike the Andes a lot more easily, and for that matter the Sierras are beautiful in no small part because of the life that covers them, and the hydrological cycle that brings rain, snow, streams, et cetera. Barren rocks that never change are just not that interesting, it's one reason I have no desire to climb Everest. (That and the ~10-20% chance of dying ha ha.)
I agree people like to explore, and sooner or later people will set foot on Mars, if we don't destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or weaponized tribalism first, because it's what we do. But I thought we were talking not about exploration but living there, and that I can't see. People in principle could go live in Antarctica now, and explore all its various unknown crevices in the ice sheet. They could move to the remoter parts of Siberia, many of which are still pretty unexplored. But they mostly don't. I think exploration is one thing, but living there is another.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting people who want to live on Mars should't go for it. By all means! But I'm very dubious about that ending up a (voluntary) goal for a sufficiently large number of human beings to make it a thriving sister planet. For that matter, it's hard for me to see how any humans born and reared on Mars would not long to emigrate to Earth, the same way people born and reared on the shittier parts of Earth want to move to the nice bits. Even if the parents preserve the stalwart pioneering spirit, how do you prevent the restless kids from wanting to leave the family...cave...for the bright lights of the big city (Earth)?
I think we’re closer than most. Once Starship is flying I think the appropriate next step is some kind of refueling base on the moon. Then maybe you even attach some kind of additional engine to the ship. Gives us a chance to figure out how to set up extra terrestrial industry. Haven’t thought that part through yet but we have another launch pad out there to leapfrog from and having something you can point to in the night sky as a city on the Moon that maybe politicians and celebrities can even visit would be a good selling point to keep money flowing.
Every sentence you write leaves out at least a decade in expensive efforts.
"Once Starship flies", it would need an in-orbit refueling mechanism to go anywhere outside of LEO. That is not trivial.
Then it would have to be able to land on rough terrain, and take off again without the benefit of a complete overhaul.
As for the refueling base on the moon, can you tell us where the raw materials and the energy for that fuel are supposed to come from? Also, who is supposed to operate that base, and how are they supplied?
And we haven't even started discussing the problems of getting people, supplies, plants and livestock to Mars alive. Have you watched some of the Mars videos by "Common Sense Sceptic" on youtube to get some idea of the challenges?
Even there from what I know about Artemis, they just haven’t imagined something to fully use starships capacity yet. The first thing they should launch is something to build starship a lunar landing pad. Then the base can follow.
Totally agree, and I think there's an element of "wouldn't be fair to the other lander teams to require 100t to the surface." My point was that refilling Starship isn't some outlandish pie-in-the-sky notion, it's literally scheduled to happen in the next year or two, and according to NASA, SpaceX is hitting (or beating) their milestones.
Yeah when I look at what they’re doing it’s all hyper plausible. And if you have something that big and that safe (because you can just launch it over and over) eventually you get Joe Rogan podcasting ion the moon (a funny example) and that really changes the public perception of space and thus funding.
It may not be outlandish, but it's known to be difficult, it hasn't been done before, and it's not really possible to test outside of zero-G conditions.
Seeing how Spaceship has not even attempted to reach LEO a year after the date by which Musk promised to put a man on Mars, I am sceptical with respect to schedules.
In order to build Starship a lunar landing pad, this "first thing" would have to land on the Moon. NASA currently has zero things that can land on the moon, at all. NASA can't really afford to build a thing that can land on the Moon with any substantial payload. They blew almost all their lunar-exploration money on SLS and Orion and Gateway.
The only reason NASA has any chance of landing on the Moon in the next five years is that SpaceX was already building a thing that wasn't originally designed to land on the Moon but could be adapted to do so for less than the cost of a new-build lunar lander. So NASA can land Starship on the moon, or it can land nothing on the moon. Those are the choices.
In the current paradigm, yes. Once Joe Rogan is podcasting with Eddie Bravo in space and all his flat Earther friends have to pretend it was all a joke and they never really believed the Earth was flat and the public becomes much more interested in space that shifts. Cancel SLS and all other programs and rebuild them around Starship. If you’re making an obsolete rocket today you can retool and reskill to make space industry equipment. I bet in ten years we have some kind of lunar landing pad and some semi permanent presence on the moon of about twenty people. Then rapid expansion from there.
Mars is quite literally the worst of all possible worlds:
- It is far away enough so that the trip itself would probably be lethal.
- It has enough of a gravity well and atmosphere to be a pain to take off from, but not enough to allow you to go outside without a pressure suit or protect you from radiation
- It's too far for abundant solar, and has no resources worth talking about that might make it attractive for mining.
If you want somewhere close by, choose the moon. If you want somewhere with an atmosphere, choose Venus (floating colonies ftw). If you want abundant energy, choose Mercury or Venus. If you want exotic resources, choose Mercury, the moon, asteroids etc.
All in all, I highly advise anyone wanting to set up a Mars colony to instead set up a city in an arctic desert instead.
A gravity well is a plus not a minus for living there. Doesn't make a good base for other space stuff, but that isn't the point. The atmosphere is irrelevant, anywhere we want to go has no functional atmosphere.
Humans and other animals and I think also many plants need gravity to develop properly, and also for long-term health. On Mars, you've got gravity for free. Only 1/3 Earth gravity, but that may still be enough to let fetuses and babies and children develop normally. Also, lots of other stuff works a lot better with gravity than without it.
Just being on the Martian surface blocks about half the radiation from space. Putting some dirt over your inflated kevlar dome (or whatever habitat you build) can give you more radiation shielding. That's free/cheap on Mars.
You can get spin gravity in orbit, and bring radiation shielding material to protect your orbital colony from elsewhere, but those both cost resources for something you got for free on Mars. That's at least one argument for Mars over an orbital habitat for long-term colonization. I have no idea how this all balances out, but it's sure not obvious to me that it ends up with orbital habitats being better.
I think the most long term serious concern remains contamination.
Say we actually do find life on mars. What do we do at that point? The calculus shifts from "we will never be sure if the lifeforms are native of mars or come from earth" to "we could introduce invasive specie that could potentially drive to extinction some of the only non-terrestrial lifeform we know of" and all of this just to satisfy a human whim.
In that case there would be a meaningful argument that mars should be sealed off forever, as a nature riserve.
Well, either Martian life is entirely unlike Earth's, or panspermia is real. Either one would be interesting, but only the latter is complicated by contamination. And even then...we can tell somewhat by the DNA how long ago species diverged on Earth. It doesn't seem entirely unlikely that if life had been diverging on Mars and Earth for a billion years that we couldn't tell. That is, it seems pretty likely we could tell the difference between bacteria left here when Joe Astronaut carelessly took a dump behind a rock because the hab was too far, and ancient bacteria that had evolved on Mars on their own for a billion years, even if the ultimate origin of both species were the same interstellar infection.
Yeah I’m in your camp. We would probably be able to tell from the sequencing and I’m not willing to hold off human colonization because of maybe bacteria.
I fully agree with your comment about the fact that we would probably discriminate contamination from native martian lifeforms.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t address my concern which is that, in the presence of native martian forms of life, we should refrain from colonization in order to not outcompete them with invasive terrestrial bacteria.
I don't see human expansion on other planets to be that important to risk extinction of native life
I appreciate your appreciation and I don’t mean to sound snide but there’s a poem called “Do I Dare to Eat a Peach” about finding the will to disturb the universe. We may never know if there are bacteria or not without going and we can’t risk never going because there might be. It puts us almost in a paradox and if there is bacteria then it has no value other than the specific reverence we as humans might come to hold for it. I would revere Martian life. I would just not think it had land rights or concern about land rights.
Chemical rockets can do it, it just requires abandoning the idea of being as fuel efficient as possible. By simply overbuilding the rocket's fuel tanks you can half the trip time. You would never do this for robots but the trade off is worth when the cargo is humans.
>In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
If human meat farms became very popular, would they serve as an incubator for new diseases, like current meat markets and factory farms but without the moderating factor of having to jump species?
I'm sure the current/first production facilities will be very sterile, but I wonder what that will look like if vat meat really does replace factory farming livestock and operates on the same scale as a global commodity.
>“I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”.
Is 'getting beaten up by the jocks for being gay' a psychosocial trait?
I get that major sports teams have their players wear rainbow jerseys as a PR stunt sometimes these days, and I'm sure we all have impressions of very progressive and accepting schools as something that exists; but I would not be surprised if middle school and highschool sports and locker rooms still had a lot of cultural homophobia ten to forty years ago (when it would have been relevant to producing current and retired soccer players)
> Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices.
Presumably the FDA has reasons for reclassifying those specific devices and not others (selection bias), so not much evidence for a general rule I would think. Would be interesting to know the same stats for cases where they moved something from less to more regulated (if that's a thing that happens).
>But it also claims autism genes increase linguistic ability but have no effect on math - doesn’t that contradict common sense? What am I missing?
Perhaps it has something to do with autistic women often being extremely chatty as a compensatory mechanism (dominating conversations to keep them in topics they understand and feel safe discussing rather than letting them drift into vague scary social stuff).
Or perhaps it just has to do with mildly autistic people generically becoming very focused on specific interests and ideas, in a way that often makes them read about those things a lot, such that they simply read more than the average person.
>Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD?
I feel like there's a bias at play here with how well-established a field of study is, exacerbated by the type of people who present at conferences rather than publishing in major journals.
ADHD is pretty heavily studied at this point, I don't know how much you are going to add to the literature as a grad student or post-doc with near-zero budget, or even a junior professor trying to crank out things for you CV to put before the tenure committee, which in my experience is most of who presents at APA conferences. I think to add something new to the ADHD literature you sort of need a giant controlled study at this point, and the institutions that can afford that publish to major journals directly.
Whereas with a trendy new topic based on broad social issues, anyone can publish a case study or media analysis or w/e and have something novel to say. Not something useful, perhaps, but at least something they can say with a straight face is a new idea that hasn't been tested 10,000 times already.
Same for inflation and GDP growth, I would think.
>Psychologist Russell Warne looks into the evidence and finds that no, Irish IQ has probably been pretty stable during that time, though some of this depends on the definition of “IQ” and “stability”
Of course, the anti-'biodiversity' side can just look at this and say 'Oh, so the entire field can be wrongly convinced that an entire ethnic group had very low IQ, based on shoddy testing and reporting methods? Ok, that works for us too.'
It's because Japan's economy has an unusual concentration of unique features. For example, chronically low exports, surprisingly high savings rates keeping domestic demand unusually low, the real estate market being so unusual (such as houses making a bad store of value), etc. Singapore and South Korea don't share these features.
Yes. It looks like Italy stagnated for a few years in the 1990s but then entered growth again for a decade and then stagnated a bit, while Japan has been stagnant for the whole 30 years.
Yeah, there's something very weird about that! Maybe this wasn't the right source for me to check?
In any case, I've heard people mention Japan's economy stagnating since the early '90s on many occasions, and I haven't heard them saying the same thing about European economies (even when Italy was one of the PIIGS they were trying to blame the Euro crisis on around 2010).
You probably want to look at "constant-price" GDP instead. Italy's been stagnant since the introduction of the Euro. Not as long as Japan, but a pretty long time.
The traditional macroeconomist's story for Japan being special is that it was the only non-Western nation to have its own industrial revolution before WW2. Japan made its own miracle, and they did it early.
Robert Lucas hints at that here; in another essay he notes that aside from Hong Kong, no country has ever had what he considers an "industrial revolution" while colonized. The colonizers had to leave before the economy had at least a chance to grow quickly. [So near-necessary, but nowhere close to sufficient.]
> 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and McCarthy only used it against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.”
He also invented the Business Plot. That's still widely believed on the American left as a real thing. There is no evidence for it but it continues on as a conspiracy theory. Which is honestly depressing to me. Some Soviet agent made up fake news a century ago and there are still people posting it to the front page of Reddit to this day talking as evidence about how nothing's changed and the business community is a threat to democracy. Which was probably exactly its purpose a century ago.
The evidence for the Business Plot is the congressional testimony by Smedley Butler.Say what you will about him but he was certainly not 'some soviet agent'. It could be a misunderstanding, but since WW2 in my country there have been at least three similar 'plots' where high-ranking executives or prominent members of the military reached out to prominent politicians or popular figures if they're up for a coup. It's not that far fetched.
Smedley Butler was a political activist who had a record of exaggerating his claims. Likewise, his testimony (which implies a bunch of conservative conspirators approached a known far leftist to lead a coup) has multiple verifiably untrue details. Nevertheless it was pushed by Samuel Dickstein and his allies in the media both of which were (or at least included) paid Soviet agents.
As for whether it's that farfetched: You do not get to claim something made up is directionally accurate to defend it. Sen. McCarthy was directionally accurate that the government and Hollywood had many Communist agents in it. But that doesn't mean going up there and making stuff up for the newspapers was justified. I can't speak to your country (which you haven't mentioned by name) and my point is not that the business community never does anything wrong. But the Business Plot specifically was a fabrication.
Smedley Butler was the most decorated Marine in history at the time he died. What did he make up? 'Uh, I actually won three Medals of Honor instead of two?'
You are the person who called him a 'Soviet agent', which is just absurd.
I'm in the Netherlands, and referring to the plans of an assassination to kill Koos Voorrik over the Linggadjati accords and get rid of the Beel coalition, the '49 plan to dismantle the transfer of Indonesia by assassinating premier Drees, and the '65 request if foreign minister/later head of NATO wanted to work with a stay behind group coup and make him the new Dutch leader, as he wrote in his '92 autobiography.
I did not call Smedley Butler a Soviet agent. I called Samuel Dickstein a Soviet agent. Which he was. He was also the person who made up the Business Plot. Butler was called to testify by him which is where Butler's initial testimony comes from. It was not a spontaneous going to the press by Butler (though Dickstein sometimes used that narrative).
Also, Butler's decorations do not change the fact he made up stories. Especially once he had his pacifist political awakening. It's a complete non-sequitur to say he was a decorated soldier. Or do I get to claim that Colin Powell's decorations mean you can't question the honesty of his claims about Iraq?
As for the Netherlands, I'm not as familiar with the politics there. But I'm having trouble figuring out your source. Voorik and Drees both died before 1992 so they presumably didn't write autobiographies from beyond the grave. Also, I note none of the people you're talking about are businesspeople. They're all politicians.
The source is Butler. Dickstein didn't instruct Butler to give his testimony, and was only a paid agent for the Soviets years after the Business Plot affair came up. Before that Dickstein tried to climb up in politics by targeting anarchists and socialists.
Also when he gave his testimony about the business plot Butler was not yet a pacifist. He led a group of veterans to DC in PROTEST of FDR. War Is A Racket is 1935, Business Plot is 1933. You seriously have no idea what you 're talking about.
When I said Luns was approached for a coup, as he said in his biography, I obviously meant in the biography of Luns. That's one of the three. Here's a secondary source for the first one in English: https://ejlw.eu/article/view/31479/28825 . If your point is 'yeah non-business people approach politicians and high-ranking military people all the time for coups but they are never businessmen so that's why Butler is unbelievable and a liar' I don't know man.
Butler testified in front of Dickstein's committee which Dickstein then edited and handed to the press. This is the source of the Business Plot accusations which were ultimately not born out by further investigation. HUAC was always a politically motivated body and never a terribly reliable one.
Likewise, while Dickstein didn't become a PAID agent until 1937 he had ties to the Soviet Union virtually his entire life. He was born in the Russian Empire, after all, and always had sympathies for that sort of politics and ties to it. So your statement is technically correct but misleading.
And while War is a Racket was published in 1935 Butler became a pacifist (by his own account) in 1931 or 32. Before the Business Plot. In fact the Business Plot came in a period where Butler was making all kinds of wild accusations culminating in his 1935 book. And the idea that protesting FDR is incompatible with being a pacifist is... just historically misinformed. Pacifists suspected FDR of conspiring to get the US into a war.
My point, which you're refusing to acknowledge, is that this SPECIFIC incident was fabricated. And that it continues to live on in left wing circles because they don't have a good American example so they're going with a fabricated one. Not that it never happens anywhere. It happened in Spain, for example, most famously with CEDA. As for the Dutch example you're being too vague for me to be sure what you're talking about. (The site you linked is broken for me.)
McCarthy did accuse Hollywood of being full of Communists. Though he was not directly involved in HUAC or the black lists which actually went after some of them as far as I know.
> 34: Etirabys: In 1910, Argentina was the 7th richest country in the world. Starting around 1930, it flatlined harder than anyone had ever flatlined before, until now it is only about average for South America, itself a relatively mediocre region. Why? Etirabys brings up fifty years of incessant coups and countercoups centered upon Juan Peron and his opponents. @moritheil clarifies two additional points: first, "though the Peronists are often described as proto-fascist, First Lady Eva would in modern terms be called a social justice warrior . . . Argentina discovered identity politics decades before the US did". This is probably not the sentence you want to read about your country’s governing party if you’re hoping for economic growth. Second, during the period involved, Argentina accepted an extraordinary number of immigrants, especially from Italy (60% of Argentines are now of at least partial Italian descent), reaching percent-immigrant levels more than double the US at its peak. Those immigrants were an awkward combination of Jews and other refugees fleeing Europe just before World War II, and defeated Nazis fleeing Europe just after World War II. These conflicts created the fertile soil for the identity politics half of Peronism. Garrett Jones says that his new book on immigration has a chapter on this. Related quote: “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.
The Peronists were not proto-fascists. They were just straight up fascists. You can read Peron's writings where he talks about how his movement is directly inspired by Mussolini but also how he has some disagreements with Mussolini. Argentina also objected to the Nuremburg trials and Peron's initial coup was backed by the Axis. Peron had multiple supporters who went to Italy for fascist training.
Italian fascism (and its offshoots) tended to be anti-racist because loyalty to the state and the collective social enterprise was supposed to come above narrow, backward ethnic concerns. You had things like minority fascist organizations under the broader umbrella of the party. For example, Italy had a Jewish fascist organization and more for several other minorities. It also was the first major Italian political party to have a women's organization. Needless to say, Hitler did not agree with any of this. But Eva Peron's position was very within the ideology.
But yes, fascist economics do not work.
Also, Argentina's immigrant population decreased throughout the period. The peak of their immigrant population was the late 19th century. But it was decreasing from a gigantic amount, possibly more than 90%.
They admired the "third way" but Peronism is something else. The coup of Peron was against another military regime, and he brought back democracy. As a matter of fact, I don't even understand why this article was linked, since is written by someone who reads a couple of Wikipedia articles in a plane on an incredibly complex optic and it's full of inaccuracies and simplifications that don't add to understand it
I just want to clarify that usually I find these links very good, so it surprises me that there is one of such a lower quality. Or maybe it's because I know something about the topic
That's always a worrying sign for me - when a pundit seems cogent and insightful right up until he begins talking about something that you're an expert on...
Peronism was its own ideology but it was directly descended from fascism and considered itself related to fascism until the late 1940s. As I said, the coups against the conservative regime was backed by the Axis. One of their planks was to keep Argentina out of the Allies (which they did) and they sheltered Nazi and Fascist refugees.
Peron supported a military coup against an (admittedly quite corrupt and oligarchic) democratically elected government. And then a military coup against the people he'd previously supported a year later. So yes, Peronism helped overthrow democracy. Peron himself said he thought democracy was a cover for plutocracy.
He then won elections which the military regime heavily slanted in his favor and allowed him to do all kinds of dubious things like using dictatorial powers to force banks to pay people to vote for him. He maintained military support and did things like arrest his opponents or drove his opposition out of the country. The elections were also not clean after he got into power. He and his wife also stole a lot of money. And he continued to align himself with dictators. There's a reason why when democracy was re-established he was banned from running.
I agree Argentine politics is complicated. But so are all politics.
I don't want to enter an endless discussion, but even not being a Peronist myself, I am forced to defend him on this. To call the Castillo government "democratically elected" is wrong, since the coup of 29 created a regime without free elections, and the reasons for which he was banned from elections have to do with the restoration of that regime. As much as I disapprove of his methods (my grandfather was in part a victim of his government), in the grand scheme of things it is unfair to call Peron antidemocratic, given that his coup was against a non-democratic regime and the next 4 (!) we're all related with the proscription of peronism
I'm sorry your grandfather was a victim of a dictatorship.
The Castillo administration was elected under a regime of corruption and fraud but it was not installed by coup like the government that came after it. You said it was a military regime but it wasn't the way Peron was. It was an oligarchy of business and landowning elites. So while it was less democratic than Yrigoyen it was more democratic than Ramirez or Peron. Who were, again, literal fascists who were quite open about opposing democracy and many of whom had even backed the previous coup a decade ago. Further, they did not work to restore democracy or step down from power.
I understand the instinct certainly and the oligarchy of the Concordancia is not a government I really want to defend. But Peron was not a democrat and his rule was a net decrease in rights and democratic institutions. He even wrote against democracy ideologically calling it a cover for plutocracy and rule by conservative business and land elites. He didn't say the Argentine oligarchs were that. He said that was how it was and how it always would be.
I feel like we are on the same side, we are having a byzantine discussion on whether the Castillo admin was "democratic", and a real one about whether the Perón admin was "dictatorial". I think there is no real difference between a military gov, and a gov that was established by a military government, proscribes the major party of the country, has elections heavily rigged and overseen by thugs and the police repressing people illegally. Peron was indeed no fan of democracy, but by saying that "his rule was a net decrease in rights and democratic institutions" is just weird in the context of Argentinian history, where you have a period of heavy repression, then he takes power and ends up having elections and with the constitution of 49 (which includes so many rights that only in 94 they were fully reestablished). At the same time I recognize that he violated that very constitution that he established in many ways.
I think we may have a problem of definition and measure of democracy in these intermediate situations; P. expelled and imprisoned dissidents from the military and the bureaucracy, but at the same time gave the vote to women. How do we interpret these facts is sort of a Rorschach test.
I agree dropping the word "democracy" will probably be a net gain in clarity. Both certainly claimed to be democracies and yet neither were really democratic.
The Argentine oligarchy ruled through competitive elections that had, since the coup a decade earlier, been systematically biased in favor of particular types of candidates and with backstops to prevent socialists, communists, or fascists from winning. Peron established single party rule. It's the difference between the Jim Crow South and Fascist Italy. Neither is really democratic (sorry, can't think of a better way to phrase this). But there's still notable differences and one is definitely less so even if both involve the systematic exclusion of large groups of people. In particular, it's relevant that ending Jim Crow could be done through existing institutions while single party states generally have to collapse first.
As for the '49 Constitution, those rights were never real (as you note). Like in many dictatorships the constitution sounds very nice but is just a piece of paper.
That said, I do think you have a point we roughly agree on. Latin American fascists like Peron or Vargas realized two things that other fascists resisted in other parts of the world. Firstly, that women and minorities could have widespread fascist sympathies with relatively minor tweaks to their platform. And secondly, that fascism's natural base of support was sufficient to build fascism without establishing a fully totalitarian state. (Peron said this, actually.) Both these were elements of some Italian fascist thinkers but they were more fully embraced in Latin American than Europe (or, say, the Middle East/Asia). And they were correct about this which is why the descendants of these parties tend to be less opposed to democracy. They feel they can win and implement their goals within a democratic framework.
Vargas is perhaps the better example here: he was forced to re-establish an actual democracy and then was able to win in clean elections. (And like Peron he gave women the right to vote because he expected he could win most of them.) There was a subsequent coup and he committed suicide. But the point that he could win popular elections still stands.
At the same time, saying that Vargas was pro-democracy (like Peron) is wrong. He was willing to instrumentally participate to serve his political goals. But given untrammeled power neither established a democratic state or moved toward it.
> 44: Related: El Salvador's murder rate has fallen from 103 (highest in the world) to 7.8 (lower than US), giving its (Bitcoin-obsessed) president an approval rating of 87%, highest in the western hemisphere. How did he do it? Originally people suspected a truce with gangs, but that truce broke down and now he’s just trying mass incarceration at unprecedented scale, up to 2% of the population. See article for case somewhat against, first comment for case somewhat for. I would like to see a better analysis of how he was able to muster the state capacity to do this, and whether other gang-ridden countries aren’t doing it because of civil rights concerns, because they’re in the pocket of the gangs, or just because it’s too hard.
The President is left wing. He's managed to convince a majority of the El Salvadorean left that crime is a social justice issue, effectively. And the El Salvadorean right was, as you might expect, already tough on crime. This has required marginalizing some farther left elements and burning a lot of political capital in heavily arming the police, making it easier to arrest and prosecute people, expanding policies like occupying areas or random searches, etc. It's also involved ignoring several civil rights organizations. (These people claimed it was outreach efforts or a truce because, to be frank, it fit their narrative better.)
The other thing is that the US is bankrolling this. But that's not particularly unique. It's only a few hundred million dollars and the US has given similar amounts to other countries.
This is a wider trend in Latin America, by the way. AMLO's "abrazos no balazos" has turned into using the military against the cartels. (This militarization of the police is becoming more common too.) Personally I think it's partly due to increased Chinese influence. Communist far leftism might be, to some extent, crowding out anarchist far leftism. And XJP Thought is not interested in abolishing the carceral state or the state in general.
Yes, it's not a bad point. He talks a lot about feminism and about how women can't be equal in a society where their husbands and boyfriends can murder them, for example. But it still gets him attacked as not really a leftist.
I also see estimates that come in a bit lower but none less than $200B.
None of them seem to include the costs of having federal/state/local criminal courts and prosecutors, which I would guess might add another few billion to the total.
So saying that we spend something like $1,000 per year per US adult fighting crime, would be in the right general vicinity.
El Salvador is a small country, has around the total population of Missouri. But even so, in order to match US spending per capita on fighting crime El Salvador would need to be spending a lot more than "a few hundred million dollars" per year.
He is formerly from a left-wing party but none of his policies seem particularly left-wing and his current party is a broad-tent party in ideological terms.
Yeah, this sounds like the whole "he doesn't agree with me so he's not a real leftist" thing. Burkele and his New Ideas party are and remain left wing populists. They've moderated on the populism thing somewhat but they still have a commitment to diversity, women and minorities, and a "social economy" (meaning increasing welfare and government spending). Their main right wing position is the anti-crime thing which they couch in explicitly left wing talking points.
The main opposition, the Nationalists, are conservatives. But they've been cooperating on crime because they tend to agree with his initiatives there. Whether this means he's a sell out who's betrayed the left or that his anti-corruption, anti-crime measures are bipartisanly popular is a point of view I suppose.
Seems like when the far left actually has to run a country, they become extremely tough on crime. Soviet Union and China come to mind as well in addition to Nicaragua. After all a gang can't tolerate other gangs in its territory.
It seems very strange that you specifically designate far-left governments as 'gangs', while the previous right-wing ARENA governments from El Salvador have been flagged for widespread corruption.
This is going to sound terrible, but I work in biological research and I strongly suspect that funding anything as well-studied as cancer has long gone past the point of diminishing returns. There are lots of reasons to fund it but "most lives saved per dollar" cannot be one of them.
There are occasional breakthroughs obviously, and cancer research has given us a lot of insight into how cells work in general, but given how expensive research is and how specific new treatments are, I really doubt that on the margin more cancer research is providing many QUALYs.
This is mostly just based on vibes and assumptions because I'm not sure how I'd prove it either way, but saying this is against my interests so I think you can trust me.
Is there a disproportionately large lesbian population within female professional sports (particularly directly competitive sports like soccer/football/hockey/basketball/lacrosse/etc.)?
In that case, the seemingly "obvious" hypothesis would be that one can be "mentally" (intentionally hand waving over definition of this) male or female while being physically the opposite. Men like competitive sports more than women do. Men like to have sex with women. Someone who is "mentally" a man will therefore like competitive sports and sex with women, regardless of their physical gender. Inversely, someone who is "mentally" a woman will be disinterested in competitive sports and will like to have sex with men, regardless of their physical gender.
The obvious hypothesis is that increased testosterone (and/or related) hormone levels is correlated both with aptitude / interest in sports and also sexual interest in women.
This honestly seems like it should be the null hypothesis. Someone would have to find a really glaring flaw with it before I'd be willing to consider some other explanation.
Another equally plausible null hypothesis is that more "manly" behavior is associated enough with sports that young gay men are driven out of sports and young gay women are attracted to it. I definitely wouldn't want to assume that one of these effects explains 100% of the observations, but if someone needed a specific reason before investigating one, I would definitely think that the other hypothesis is plenty to go on.
Most sports have something to do with war or hunting: e.g., American football is an explicit war game involving violently conquering terrain. It's so manly that even in 2023 American colleges and high schools don't have female football teams.
Your hypothesis has some assumptions baked into it. If there weren't any other influence that made (some) gay men more feminine and (some) gay women more masculine, what benefit would gay women get from being drawn to men's sports? They want to attract women, so being around men doesn't help them find mates directly, and the women they want to attract are not attracted to men either, and hence less likely to be watch male-dominated sports.
I don't think being more similar to one sex along one mental dimension makes one "mentally" male or female. There are too many traits males & females differ on.
I have a suspicion that there exists a reasonably large set of attributes that are all strongly correlated and straight women + gay men tend to end up on one side and straight men + gay women tend to end up on the other side. Desire to have sex with men/women is one such attribute, based on this tiny bit of data perhaps desire to play competitive sports is another. There perhaps is another one related to speech and mannerisms (the stuff that makes "gaydar" a thing).
Teasing out which of these are because of social pressures and which are because of some sort of genetic thing is of course quite difficult, but I hypothesize that a sufficiently interesting set exists.
The speech angle is interesting, because I recall from Judith Harris that children take on the accents of their peers, and the peers of children that grow up to be gay aren't going to systematically differ in the way a racial/ethnic/class group clustering would. Slate has done a number of pieces on it over the years:
One thing to note though: there is a stereotypical way for gay males to speak, but not lesbians. Female & male homosexuality do not seem to be mirrors for each other. Obligate homosexuality seems more common in males, bisexuality in women. Homophobia was historically mostly directed toward males, but the big recent increase in identification has been among bisexual women (most of whom, if they have a long-term partner, are with a man).
Just eyeballing: I looked at the Wikipedia list for "LGBT mixed martial arts fighters" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:LGBT_mixed_martial_artists ). Two trans women, 35 women, no men. If I count correctly, 23 of the women fought in the UFC; the UFC site gives the total number of women who ever fought there as 257. So the estimate would be that at least 9% of the women in the UFC are gay/ bi (there may be a lot more closet cases, or fighters who did not get a wikipedia entry). Does that point to a "disproportionately large lesbian population"? I think yes.
> If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another ...)
Isn't this a fully general argument against doing anything (or, at least, anything long-term) ? It sounds like an extremely high-risk, high-reward play, similar to the one made by the followers of Harold Camping.
I think Harold Camping wanted you to donate all of your money to his radio station. Ai safety researchers, on the other hand, tend to say they already have all of their funding gaps filled and additional money isn't going to help anything
Many of Camping's followers ran up huge credit card debts (and/or cashed in their savings) for things like expensive vacations; the ones who donated money to Camping were in the minority (AFAIK). These were people who honestly thought that the world was going to end in a year, so why bother about anything after that ?
#34: I dove into Mori's twitter thread and would like to raise some complications. Let me disclose my bias at the top in that I was motivated to do this mostly because "Argentina's downfall was caused by idpol and immigrants" to be a bit too convenient for right-wing political aims. Linking to each tweet would look uggo since you can't format links in comments, so I'll refer to them by placement in the thread.
Tweets 2-3: Mori references the "resource curse" as a potential explanation for Argentina's economic problems, which is a common poli-sci concept that holds that economies reliant on extractive industries tend to be more fragile and do worse in the long-term because they are beholden to international commodity prices beyond their control. This isn't a perfect concept, but it largely holds water. Mori says this is insufficient to explain Argentina's downfall, and I agree, but then she holds up Saudi Arabia as a counterexample, which I find to be lacking. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia benefit from the pricing power of OPEC, which helps mitigate the resource curse as these states can artificially reduce the supply of their primary export, thereby inflating prices and stabilizing their economy. Argentina's primary exports during its heyday were agricultural products, and could not benefit from an international cartel such as OPEC because 1) oil is geographically locked in a way that agriculture is not, 2) agriculture is subject to external shocks such as drought and disease that make it a less reliable resource, and 3) such international agreements weren't really on the table in the late 19th century. All this is to say that I think the resource curse problem is a bit more prominent in Argentina's economic history than Mori is giving it credit for, and that Saudi Arabia is really not a good counterexample for the point she is making.
Tweet 6: Mori glosses over Yrigoyen as a "radical," which he certainly was, but I want to point out that Argentine politics was already kinda offbeat before Perón. Yrigoyen's party, the Radical Civic Union, drew much of their political power from the middle class and focused on reforming Argentine institutions toward becoming more democratic, rather than advocating for any kind of class struggle. His economic reforms were left-wing but pretty similar in content to FDR's New Deal policies. The Radical Civic Union still exists as a political party today, and is aligned with the anti-Peronists. It's a bizarre country.
Tweet 7-9: Mori's characterization of the Perons is basically correct, in that Juan Peron started off as a pretty standard caudillo type and Eva drove the party toward a social justice message that resonated with much of the populace and afforded their regime a lot of goodwill from the public. Mori then moves on without establishing any kind of causal link between this and Argentina's economic collapse. The mere presence of a powerful ideology in a failing country does not mean that that particular ideology caused that country to fail. In my opinion, the failing of Peron's first regime can be mostly attributed to that ancient weakness of charismatic autocrats: the military never cared for him, and took him out as soon as they thought they could. If anyone has a serious thesis on why Eva Peron's social justice messaging caused the economic or political decline of Argentina, I would welcome discussion on that point.
Tweet 12-13: Mori paints the fact that Argentina was accepting immigrants from varied backgrounds as a reason for economic decline by way of cultural incompatibility. I would like to remind everyone that before the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the USA had basically no restrictions on immigration, and we didn't develop a full quota system until 1924. This made a lot of people very nervous, but all signs indicate that the US economy did pretty well during that period anyway.
Tweet 14: Mori makes a separate point here about the scale of immigration. Her figures for both the US and Argentina appear to be correct. I will quibble with the part about "descendants" making up over 60% of the population of Argentina today--I imagine a vast majority of Americans can also trace their lineage at least in part to Ellis Island-era immigration, but I can't imagine how that would be captured statistically. Again, Mori doesn't make an explicit causal link, and given that there's a pretty low n for "countries to which large numbers of disparate European ethnic groups flocked during the 19th and 20th centuries", I'm not really comfortable making an explicit connection between Argentina's high immigration levels and its economic decline.
Tweet 15: This summation seems to come out of the blue to me. The implication that Peronism's social-justice element combined with the immigrant makeup of the country led to political instability that tanked the economy is a feasible thesis, but not really strongly supported in her argument nor in my understanding of Argentine history. Political upheavals in Argentina were between the political elite and the military almost exclusively–there is very little mass movement politics in Argentina's history. Rather, entrenched politicians and the military have used popular movements as pretext to act in their self interest. This is a finer distinction, but I think an important one, especially when comparing Argentina to other Latin American countries like Cuba or Mexico, which also had flourishing small-l liberal governments in the early 20th century that imploded in one way or another.
I did fire this off pretty quickly, so let me know if I said something super idiotic! I have spent a decent amount of time studying Argentina and I like to take the opportunity to talk about it when it comes up. Fascinating place with really idiosyncratic politics.
"Many historians blame the closing of international markets after the Wall Street Crash — that was certainly a factor — but there was another cause: European immigration stopped. Instead, there was migration of Mestizos and Amerindians, both from the country to the city and from neighboring Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. These new arrivals were prolific and ringed the main cities — Buenos Aires, Rosario, Cordoba, Mendoza — with belts of poverty." - https://www.amren.com/features/2017/04/argentina-a-mirror-of-your-future-buenos-aires-latin-america/
I agree with the article’s assessment of the current state of migrants in Argentina—I saw much of that firsthand when I lived in Buenos Aires for a little while. I think that’s more a symptom of Peronist governments using migrants as political assets rather than anything inherent regarding the origin of the migrants, and the article seems to be making a structural, rather than cultural, argument as well. Definitely a problem in 🇦🇷 but I’m not really seeing a causal link to its economic downfall.
My understanding is that Italian immigration differed for the US vs Argentina. Half of all Italian immigrants to the US returned home, whereas in Argentina they generally stayed. One explanation I've heard is that the similarity of the Spanish & Italian languages made it easier for them to move into more middle-class jobs.
Thanks for this. I also found some of what was said before to be remarkably superficial. In particular: the role of communal or identity-based conflict between descendants of different groups of immigrants in Argentina is conspicuous for its insignificance, come to think of it (it's not the sort of thing that even comes to one mind). Maybe, in the 70s, some people who were torturers anyhow put special relish into torturing people they were going to physically take apart anyhow whenever the victims had last names that the torturers didn't like - but that's about it.
There may be deeper points to be made about family structure and how it survives for more than a generation after immigration, in fact well after other things are gone (wonder what Emmanuel Todd would say about Argentina?) but that doesn't give any sort of obvious or easy explanation to the Argentinian decline.
Which, again, was a decline from a GDP per capita that was based mostly in agricultural production on land that was owned by a few families. Argentina never industrialized to the extent that Brazil or Mexico did - let alone to the extent of examples elsewhere.
Thanks for this take. I just wanted to add that there are theoretically at least a couple of other explanations of the "resource curse":
1. Leaders who have income from resources have little incentive to increase their income in the long term through economic development and the resulting increase in the tax base;
2. Leaders can more readily use patronage to stay in power, rather than providing public goods.
I think that in general you are right. However, I think that there is an argument for the immigration argument, although indirect, and not with the dates that the link states (1930, that's too late). Argentina is a country that still today relies on agricultural exports, and it's the most productive sector. As long as the immigration was favoring that sector, the country became richer. Once the process of occupying the land with farmers was finished (~1890), every immigrant that arrived could only engross the cities population, which could be absorbed by industry only in a certain measure. By the 30s, the state begins to intervene to promote the industry. In purely economical terms, the country oscillates between policies to favor industrialization and against, and between welfare policies and lack of them.
If Argentina would have had policies against immigrants, population would have remained low and the country would have a agricultural / pastoralist economy; this is actually a vision that some people had around 1860/1870, notably José Hernandez, against the vision of Sarmiento, who wanted to develop the country like Britain.
DIE ZEIT: Mr. Hitzlsperger, you asked for an interview, why?
Thomas Hitzlsperger: I'm coming out about my homosexuality. I would like to advance a public discussion - the discussion about homosexuality among professional athletes. The topic always gets stuck in clichés - professional athletes are seen as perfectly "disciplined," "tough" and "hyper-masculine." Homosexuals, on the other hand, are seen as "bitchy," "soft," "sensitive." Of course, this doesn't fit. A homosexual professional athlete? Contradictions are built up here that have annoyed me time and again in my professional career. These contradictions are sold as sensations at the regulars' tables. I was also annoyed by the fact that it is precisely those with the least expertise who talk the loudest about the subject.
ZEIT: So why do you want to speak now? Has someone threatened to out you?
Hitzlsperger: That would not be a threat for me. What's the point? As a professional, I was a public figure that any sociopath could rub up against without much thought. In soccer, you can be accused of anything: "manic-depressive," "homosexual," "gambling sick," "bankrupt. But most common at the moment is "homosexual," especially with the gleefully denunciatory rating "gay."
ZEIT: You consider the term "gay" to be denunciatory?
Hitzlsperger: Yes, that is how it is usually used.
ZEIT: But why are you only speaking out now?
Hitzlsperger: I had to end my career as a professional soccer player - too many injuries. So now I have time for this commitment. What's more, I feel that now is a good time to do it. The Sochi Olympics are coming up, and I think critical voices are needed against the campaigns against homosexuals by several governments.
Gay English footballer: the only one I know of (as a not-particular-follower of the game, so there may well be others) is Justin Fashanu, who came out after he'd stopped playing. Played professionally for a number of years, sadly committed suicide after an alleged assault on a 17 year old boy (Fashanu said it was consensual).
Re: 33, to my best knowledge, "there are differences in IQ testing taking ability" is the explanation most people were suggesting when pointing out the Irish IQ rise. So 33 is then irrelevant to the point why it gets discussed: the explanation does not explain away the argument that any other widely reported IQ could be vulnerable to similar artifacts, especially the studies that find that some population groups have several SD higher or lower IQ than other groups.
I'm not sure 3. is that trivial. You seem to gloss over it as "people don't know where they're supposed to write their answers" or something, but some upbringings/cultural environments could plausibly make people uniquely bad at weird IQ test puzzles even though their cognition works perfectly well for intellectual tasks people actually encounter in the real world.
Except those places are precisely those where the people do not do 'perfectly well' on cognitively demanding tasks. I mean, African countries and their often abject dysfunction are basically the exact kind of thing one would expect from people genuinely lacking in intelligence.
And even in the US, IQ is equally predictive of things influenced by cognitive for all races. If it weren't, we should expect to see blacks radically overperform in life relative to their IQ and asians/jews underperform.
I first time I ever saw and tried some progressive matrices, which are supposedly culturally neutral, I did very badly. Because the patterns I was supposed to use were exactly the sort of meaningless ‘wheels within wheels’ patterns that I had always been mocked for spotting, or people would assume I was joking if I thought it was the reasoning intended, and that I had learned I should ignore because it would not be what someone would expect me to spot and use: I should look for something more meaningful, or abstemious. And when you take a test, you are supposed to guess what the person setting the test intends.
When I looked at some answers and explanations, and learnt that I was actually supposed to use the “this thing moves that way while that thing moves this way” pattern, I was furious! And then I could do them.
When people give these IQ tests to various groups, especially in different countries, do they give them a thorough practice test first, and go through the thinking used in those practice questions?
I'm curious if you could you detect #3 by looking at the right tail. Is there an IQ threshhold where you could figure out how to take the test without the cultural background, and is it low enough that there would be a decent n above it?
I've argued that IQ testing saw a Flynn Effect of rising raw scores because IQ testers tended to anticipate the future world that was evolving remarkably well.
For example, the first American IQ test was the 1916 Stanford-Binet test developed at Stanford U. by Lewis Terman. His son Fred Terman became Dean of Engineering at Stanford, was the faculty advisor of Hewlett & Packard, and more or less developed the Silicon Valley model of Stanford faculty working with start-ups.
In contrast, the government of the Republic of Ireland was long suspicious of the modern world and favored farmers and priests rather than Collison Brothers. Did that depress IQ scores until recently? We don't have a lot of pure IQ scores for nations from this century, but we do have a lot of PISA and TIMSS achievement test scores and Ireland does fine on those.
Similarly the government of Israel didn't want Israeli Jews to invent Google, it wanted Jews to stop being nerds and start being farmers and soldiers like in a normal country. Israel now has a tech sector but the state continues to subsidize non-tech groups like the Ultra-Orthodox and West Bank settlers. Israel's IQ and PISA scores are less than scintillating, perhaps for the same reason that Ireland's scores used to be not too spectacular: because the state and society didn't want them to be.
"In contrast, the government of the Republic of Ireland was long suspicious of the modern world and favored farmers and priests rather than Collison Brothers."
Oooh, we're getting into argument territory here. I suppose the archetype of the conservative Catholic leadership would be De Valera, yet he was educated as a teacher of mathematics and influential in developing the Dubin Institute for Advanced Studies, which managed to attract people like Dirac and Schrodinger to lecture for at least a short period:
I think what is being missed here is the sheer *poverty* in Ireland. It's easy to be dismissive of "farmers and priests" but we had no native large-scale industries for several reasons, including deliberate suppression of Irish industry by British interests (see Dean Swift and 'burn everything British but their coal') and then during the first decades of independence we were engaged in a ruinous (but equally ruinous if not engaged in) trade war with Britain:
Part of the explanations put forward for the alleged IQ gap was "all the smart people emigrated". That's only partially true; *everybody* emigrated. From the Famine period up to the 80s and indeed the Celtic Tiger period, people left because they had to go. Nowadays it may be more that people emigrate because they want a better life, but they're still going - see your example of the Collinson brothers, who are gone to the US because Silicon Valley is where you go for the investors and to make it big. They're not still living in Tipperary and raising up the local Irish level of intellect and entrepreneurship (and indeed, trying to get entrepreneurs and native industry has been a constant concern and struggle of Irish governments, see the drive in the 70s to encourage native entrepreneurs as satirised in this weekly comedy programme of the time, starting at 28:35:
I would definitely recommend a course of "Hall's Pictorial Weekly" as a crash-course in what Ireland of that dim and distant time was like, as distinct from today's happy and thriving modern state).
(Yes, I may be slightly sarcastic about our modern country and the state of it. The younger people on here like Nolan Eoghan can better comment on this than a dinosaur like me).
We are heavily dependent on coaxing in multinationals to set up here and promote employment. Whether our pharmaceutical industry and the Dublin Silicon Docks are ever going to see higher and higher IQs due to what the magical effect of having Big Tech in situ is supposed to have on the local population.
"the same reason that Ireland's scores used to be not too spectacular: because the state and society didn't want them to be"
That is not true. The state did not decide "we want pious peasants and all the smart people can leave for London or New York", everyone was leaving for England and the US (and later Canada and Australia) because of lack of economic opportunity. Or what is the reason for the hollowing-out in the US of places like the Rust Belt? Did the American state decide it only wanted pious peasants, and all the manufacturing jobs and high tech industries could decamp to China and India, those bastions of urbane non-peasant non-pious cosmopolities?
Dev gets pilloried for the "comely maidens" speech, but when you're living in a small rural town and seeing "everything is in Dublin", then it looks a lot better in regards to "hey, maybe having surviving and indeed thriving rural communities so the country isn't lop-sided and people have to leave or perish isn't a bad thing":
"The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved. One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day. So, later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers. We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought."
Yeah, it's a pipe dream and was even at the time. But what do you put in place, all of you wondering why smart people aren't having kids, the morons are reproducing apace, and why the problem of collapsing fertility (see the comments about Iran above)?
Thanks. I presume the long-running poverty of Ireland relative to Scotland had a lot to do with Scotland being strong enough to get reasonably decent treatment by England, while England kicked around Ireland.
Ireland was the punching bag where the dark side of England's rather mild history played out off screen. For example, there were two English civil wars in the 1600s. Did the winner dispossess the English property of the losers, like the winners in the Zimbabwean independence war started dispossessing the losing farmers around 2000? Nah, that would be un-English and lead to future strife. Within England the two civil wars were resolved relatively amicably.
But how to reward the winning soldiers? Oh, that's easy: send them over to Ireland to put down the rebels, and then they can keep the Irish rebels' land.
Scotland is an interesting case because there are so many similarities with Ireland, and then the divergences.
I think one important difference is that during the Reformation, the Protestants won control in Scotland. The king then became king of England as well, due to Elizabeth dying without heirs, and this ended the border wars between Scotland and England. Scotland was finally incorporated into what became the United Kingdom and on somewhat more equal terms than Ireland. Big difference between "able to take a train north to cross the border" and "having to sail across the sea to get there".
The Glorious Revolution was the final hurrah of the independence movement in Ireland and Scotland, and it wasn't even that, but rather wanting a king more tolerant towards Catholicism. But the Proper Protestant King was imported, the Stuart line died out, and whatever about the romantic view in later eras of Bonnie Prince Charlie, that rebellion was crushed by the Hanoverians.
The Victorians could be sentimental about kilts and shortbread, because the Jacobites were no longer a threat. By comparison, the Fenians were carrying out bombing campaigns contemporaneously.
Black people do not do uniformly worse on IQ tests than whites. There is significant variation in relative performance between sub-tests, while the rank-order difficulty of questions is very similar. E.g. blacks might do worse than whites on all sub-tests, but the gaps are biggest for asy pattern completion. But whites tend to do worse on pattern completion than other sub-tests. This would mean black underformance on pattern completion relative to whites would have to be 'cultural', somehow, whereas white underperformance on pattern completion relative to other sub-tests isn't. 'Black people genuinely have lower g-loaded IQ
And if what you're saying is true, we should expect IQ tests to radically underpredict black performance on literacy/numeracy tets, SAT scores, academic acheivement, and life outcomes generally, while radically overpredicting these things for ashkenazi jews and east-asians. This is not the case. IQ is more or less equivalently good at predicting these things for all races.
And in the case of 'cultural' aspects not related to test taking generally but the content of the questions (see: endless egalitarian refrences to an SAT question one year that depended on knowing the definition of the word 'regata'), IQ questions and sub-tests deemed to be more 'culturally' loaded (e.g. things involving volcabulary) are actaully those which show the smallest gaps between blacks and whites. The more related to abstract reasoning a question is, the bigger the gaps. And it seems very weird to suggest white people are better at something abstract that they never do in any other context (e.g. visual pattern completion) because they're..more familiar with it?
#7 is kind of surprising to me. Rule number one for lottery winners: Make sure your name is not publicized anywhere. Be very very selective to whom you mention the winnings
I've heard that about 50% of large lottery winners (multi-million) go bankrupt within 5 years. This does not seem to be limited to those who are known and announced, but I don't know how this was tracked.
It appears to be the same problem that professional athletes run into, where they make a lot of money fast, but then end up wasting it. My guess is the mind can't handle such a vastly increased wealth when it's sudden, and we mentally adjust to a higher income, even if it's not an ongoing income but instead a one-time infusion. If this is accurate, it makes sense that both known and unknown lottery winners would have the same problem.
Do you have a source for that stat? I am not sure how they would accurately track it if the winner is anonymous. There are some states that don't allow anonymous winners so i guess you could compare the two sets, but the data points would be so small it would be hard to come to any conclusion.
The people who win and remain anonymous are definitely not the same people who win and put their name out there. Not to mention, people who play the lottery skew poor.
In the linked story, almost every problem listed is because people knew he had won the lottery.
I saw that years ago and don't remember where from. In doing some Googling now, I'm seeing ranges from 30-70% that go bankrupt, with differing theories. And there is some difference according to at least one news story/study regarding whether they were anonymous.
When a huge lottery prize is bought in an upscale suburb, we often never hear the names of the lucky winner. Instead, a lawyer shows up about a week later announcing he's representing a newly formed corporation and the money will be collected by the shell company in a way conducive to optimal tax planning. I suspect these winners, whoever they are, do pretty well in life.
I think it serves a function to prevent corruption of the lottery winning. E.g. the McDonalds company used to have a Monopoly-themed contest that was essentially a lottery, and it turns out the firm that ran it for them was corrupt and steered most of the major prizes to pre-selected winners. Officially announcing lottery winners' names makes it harder to get away with that sort of shenanigan because journalists or other outsiders could identify connections between the winners.
That said if I won a big prize I'd refuse the photo, and if that was mandatory I'd spend months before taking it growing out my hair and beard, wear dark glasses with colored contacts, and dress uncharacteristically. And then after a few years I'd change my name, which wouldn't stop determined stalkers but might help against "internet randos".
If you Google “MrBeast blind" on YouTube like I did to find that clip, the top three videos are all about the backlash to his efforts.
I tried this on my normal account, and in an private browsing window. The original Mr.Beast video was the top hit for both. Also, the second hit is for somebody defending him. The controversy exists, otherwise there wouldn't need to be a video defending him, but I suspect Scott's specific version of Youtube is exaggerating it.
I'm now also getting the video first, although the remainder of the top five are "Let's talk about the Mr. Beast drama" "Hasan Piker RAGES at Mr. Beast", "Mr. Beast curing the blind is bad" and "Mr. Beast video broke the law".
This is on the same computer, same browser as I used last time, and I don't think I watched any YouTube between then and now, so I wonder if it's a change in the search rankings.
I almost never search on Youtube, so at great personal risk to my future youtube search result quality, I tried it. The original video was first, then one of the negative ones. After that, videos about the controversy (meta). Of the top 20, 2 positive, 4 negative, 8 meta, 4 other mrbeast, and 2 other.
If youtube presents a video to you and you DON'T watch it, they take that as a sign. So just viewing the results of a search will have an impact, not to mention its no just your behavior that impacts the results but everyone else's, especially the people it thinks you are most similar to.
It's totally plausible that youtube has linked the behavior of some of your readers to you and so any readers who went and looked up these videos impacted the search results you now get.
My top 4 are split 2 and 2 pos/neg, and then 15 of the next 20 videos are backlash to the backlash reactions. (So positive, but referencing the negative.)
All these videos have pretty high views so everyone is doing well on this topic, it seems.
It’s weird to say “MrBeast isn’t a billionaire so rage at billionaires doesn’t explain rage at him” - but isn’t he a top-5 YouTuber, which is basically the same social position?
I mean in the relevant way for this discussion, which is about occupying a social position where anything you do that attracts attention gets a certain amount of rage response from people.
I think it’s only because Steve Sailer is such a famous racist and supporter of this site that he gets any attention here. I wish Scott was a bit more critical of these takes that basically say “why aren’t the gays playing football? Must be something about how wussy they are, since homophobia ended decades ago in the sport of the hooligans”.
Andrew Gelman would disagree with you, as he found Sailer's measurement of years-married for white women to be one of the most highly correlated ones for geographical variation in partisan vote share. As would Steve Pinker regarding Sailer's "Cousin Marriage Conundrum". But in this case the musings aren't actually Sailer's at all, but instead one of his commenters.
Because he has interesting and possibly correct things to say sometimes? And unlike moron ideological robots most places, we don't only overlook the failings of ideologically problematic people on the left, but also on the right (if they have something to add occasionally).
I think the relevant thing is whether the behavior of 10-12 year old boys on soccer teams is driving away the people who might eventually turn out to be gay. Plenty of us found team sports settings (and related settings) uncomfortable for reasons that later turned out to be clearly related to our sexuality even long before we were aware of our sexuality. It doesn't seem at all surprising to me that this would be a much more powerful force than racism.
I think you are putting 2 and 2 together and getting 3.5. Kids are indeed attentive to assholish behaviour, I hate football too because I was bad at it when I was a kid (and still now lol), and that would make my peers in school not choose me when time came to form teams, which embarrassed me and further fed into my repulsion for the sport (ensuring I wouldn't try it in other less assholish settings, further stabilizing the loop).
The moment you go off the rails I think is when you postulate that the "Gay" modifier to "Kids" adds anything above the grade of noise. I'm sure there are plenty of groups that are also under-represented in football, say Autists, or Scifi readers. But none of those have the sweet sweet attention capital of a culture war identity.
Maybe the gay identity has a convoluted genetic/social ties to Autism, or maybe there is just no mystery here because gays are a hell of a small group and professional footballers are a hell of a small group and when you get 2 hell-small groups then their interesection is even more hell-smaller.
To the extent that you were chased away from football, being gay had nothing to do with it. You could have always denied it, and if you were a good player (by the standards of your age) then the coach would slam down on your bullies hard enough soon enough. Being gay or the social markers associated with it is just further blood in the water, but its absence (keeping all else constant) wouldn't have made any difference.
And for what it's worth, I think there is no such thing as a "Gay Kid". Kids are neither gay or straight (except in the potential sense), you're neither one or the other until you know what sex is and form a sufficiently clear picture of what it entails, typically starting at 13. Even then, you remain volatile (and, dare I say, suggestible and easily-moldable) till 17 or so.
I agree that it would be not at all surprising to note that professional athletes who were geeks in middle school and high school might be just as rare as professional athletes who are gay. I'm not sure how this supports the original claim that the only possible explanation is a genetic factor, rather than a social one.
> To the extent that you were chased away from football, being gay had nothing to do with it. You could have always denied it, and if you were a good player (by the standards of your age) then the coach would slam down on your bullies hard enough soon enough.
This is missing the point on the claimed mechanism. The claim isn't only that people are bullied for being gay - it's that sports involve a lot of locker room contact and joint showering that create a different kind of complexity for pubescent gay people than for straight people, and that this factor also turns a lot of gay men away from team sports.
(I'm happy to accept the terminological correction about "gay kids". But I don't accept the claim that later sexual orientation is "suggestible" or "easily-moldable" in the teenage years, because that makes it sound like someone knows a way to systematically change it in one direction or another. Nevertheless, you're right that there may well be a substantial population that undergoes some relevant changes in this age range.)
>I'm not sure how this supports the original claim that the only possible explanation is a genetic factor, rather than a social one.
More like supports my general skepticism that is a special mystery that needs explanation at all, rather than a question almost entirely motivated by culture war instincts.
>it's that sports involve a lot of locker room contact and joint showering that create a different kind of complexity for pubescent gay people than for straight people
Hmm, so your propsed mechanism here is something akin to how girl cliques often bully straight shy men ? They make a big deal of the man's secret desire for them, and use it as a starting point to bully and make fun of him. The nerd, lacking credible evidence to deny that he *is* sexually interested in the clique's members, but also lacking the social capital to go ahead and own it, is forced to endure their constant humiliation. You're saying the straight teammates can play the role of a girl clique to a gay outsider ?
This is an interesting way of looking at things, but it would predict that gays would also have difficulties in (e.g.) gyms, which often involve constant nudity and showering together. Is your explanation of this that gym culture don't require the same commitment from childhood that football does, and thus gays can enter it when they are more mature and confident enough to bully back ?
> because that makes it sound like someone knows a way to systematically change it in one direction or another
That's a common conclusion to jump to, but it need not be. For instance, Social Class is a quite literally a social construct, but Communism has been trying to change/eradicate it for 150+ years with mostly no lasting success. Similar thing with States and Anarchism.
I'm indeed extremly skeptic that someone can consciously engineer their sexual orientation or that of others. There is no sticks harsher than the death penalty and the extreme ostracization that being gay entails in lots of social milieus, and there is no carrots more desirable than how most male socialization schemes make women and girls to be (on top of the natural effects) most anywhere. If the gay identity can survive that, it can survive almost anything. The effects I'm talking about is much more subconscious, unreplicable, and gradual in magnitude.
How do the 10 to 12 year old homophobes know that the 10 to 12 year old future gay man is gay? At that age, most boys belong to the he-man girl-hater club, so how can they tell?
Are you implying that most 10-12 year old future gay men tend to have effeminate mannerisms that lead to bullying?
But what percentage of effeminate little boys really want "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women" on the athletic field? Maybe they find that kind of thinking, which is so helpful in winning at sports, unappealing to effeminate little boys?
So, maybe they prefer arts to sports? In turn, little boys who think Conan is awesome pursue victory in sports.
Nothing I said in this particular point depends on homophobia or effeminacy. It just depends on 10 to 12 year old future gay men finding something uncomfortable or awkward about locker room situations, driven by nudity around other boys and possibly some aspects of behavior that enhance the awkwardness for future gay men. This awkwardness could then drive them away. (e.g., if boys taunt each other whenever someone has a noticeable boner, and the future gay men find themselves more often having boners, then they might be driven away by perfectly neutral behavior. And if they find their own thoughts about the other boys distracting, that may drive them away even without any behavioral element.)
Bigoted hooligans can be a factor in the choice of coming out. Mohammed Salah didn't have the option of not coming out as Muslim so it's not a fair comparison.
Steve Sailer is more intelligent, thoughtful and good faith than a majority of left-wing commenters here.
And I mean, your comment proves it. Calling him "racist" isn't good faith, because that word is mostly used as a slur rather than a genuinely descriptive label, and he never called them wussy, he suggests that there is a genetic-based self-selection effect taking place, which is a perfectly reasonable suggested answer for a question like this.
Look at any of the comments he leaves here. Much more effect and insight than a majority of the commenters who like to shout people down as "racist".
IDK about that...IMO the right-wing commenters here are overrepresented and give this site a bad name in certain quarters...I like Scott Alexander and his output, and thus don't want it to be associated with the "alt-right" in the popular mind.
"Why does Steve Sailer know so many facts about sports that he can bring up to point out that my theory isn't very strong? It can't be because he's been thinking hard about the subject for a third of a century and therefore is more likely to have come to true insights than I have. Instead, it must be because he's a BAD PERSON and therefore should be shut up."
Counterpoint : Wikipedia is bland and without an authorial voice. It's super popular so you're not adding anything new by linking to it as anybody who googles the topic will likely bump straight into it as the first result. It also has the opposite bias of the one you're complaining about, directly through the kind of editors who tend to take interest in such articles and indirectly because it priortizes mainstream sources and news outlets and reports them uncritically.
#10 New Zealand just had its first rugby player for the national team come out as gay just the other day. He is no longer active in the sport it seems. There have been 1207 All Blacks (name for the national team) in total, to give you an idea of the ratio.
I'm not really sympathetic to the concern that our visiting Mars would contaminate it. First of all, it seems very unlikely on priors that there's life on Mars because if abiogenesis was so easy that it happened on *two* planets in the same star system, then there would be life everywhere and we would definitely have seen aliens. For our observations of the universe to make sense, abiogenesis has to be pretty hard.
Now, you could maybe be interested in investigating a panspermia hypothesis, but then I think there are enough alternative celestial bodies you can examine; Venus? Titan?
Panspermia's the issue, yeah. Abiogenesis you can check even if Mars is somewhat contaminated, since it's ludicrously unlikely that nonhomologous life would match the biochemistry of Earthly life.
Venus is useless for panspermia checking, for the same reason that we don't worry as much about probes contaminating it: Earth-homologous life cannot survive there outside a sealed environment. Not even in the atmosphere, because of the sulphuric acid. It's unlikely even fossils remain, because of the resurfacing events.
Titan is useful, but if you're talking about Earth->X panspermia Titan gets a much-smaller proportion of Earthly impact ejecta than Mars does, and much slower (i.e. more time to get sterilised by space radiation); it's also much colder. And throwing away one chance to check because there's a single-digit number of other chances (at least for subaerial life) is just mind-bogglingly dumb - throwing one away because there are hundreds of others, that's fine, which is why I'm not super-fussed about colonising the Moon, or Ceres, or any other airless rock. Mars, though, I'd rather we didn't contaminate.
I wrote a thing arguing for biogenisis on Mars a few years ago. Basically, life arose really quickly on Earth but all the other steps of life, photosynthesis, mitochondria, multiple differentiated cells, took much longer. So we shouldn't necessarily expect simple chemosynthetic life to be that rare.
Or, alternately, life takes ages to get to LUCA as well, but panspermia's a thing and those ages happened elsewhere - this would also predict life on Mars, though.
What makes you think we'd know if the average number of species per star like us was as high as 1? Space is really, really big, as Douglas Adams observed. It's certainly beyond us now. It's not implausible that it will always be beyond us, simply because our lives are too short.
Re: gay football players. A simple google search tells me about Justin Fashanu, an English football pro who had his coming-out during his active career, in 1990.
where it lists, FWIW, one currently active English footballer that is openly gay.
So if that blog post claims that "the English media is really, really obsessed with finding a gay male soccer player willing to come out and has been for about ten years.", there is some big misunderstanding here somewhere.
I agree that there is a stigma against admitting or even discussing male homosexuality in football, and probably any team sport at the pro level. But that blog post in particular seems to have failed spectacularly in its research.
The post talks about the premier league, which Fashanu and Daniels never played in. I think thats what the author meant but could have been phrased better.
It does seem weird that only one ex-PL player has publicly come out after retirement, considering the denominator of 3000+ players since 1992. This is not counting the entire professional english football system, plus spain/germany/italy/portugal/netherlands and many other countries with robust football leagues.
Apparently so, but I'll still count that as failure, because the author equates the Premier League, consisting of only 20 teams, with not only English football, but team sports in general. This seems to be the Streetlight Effect bias, because the Premier League is probably the only place where you could find comprehensive data about its players in English football, but the PL, as does any other top professional league, has its own incentives which makes its players not representative of its respective sports scene.
Obvious confounders are the money and the publicity that come with playing at the highest pro level, so becoming "increasingly sympathetic to your theory that whatever psycholocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too" seems to be at least an overreaction (or confirmation bias) when other explanations are available.
And if it does turn out to be a psychological explanation after all, then "a deeply homophobic culture in football strongly selects against homosexual players engaging in it and accordingly fewer of them reach the highest level" still seems much simpler and with the same predicitive power than some common cause that makes one heterosexual and also causes them to be interested in team sports.
I can't judge the veracity of the author's claim that "England is perhaps the world’s most gay-friendly place and anyone coming out is guaranteed a sympathetic media portrayal.", but even if it was true, it could well indicate that the oposite is true on the ground, i.e. on the actual football fields where people grow up and experience everyday homophobia, as described in the wiki article on homosexuality in English football.
Overall, I would interpret that blog post, even though a lot of effort seems to have gone into it, as a broader argument against a supposedly homophilic/heterophobic (media) establishment and an attempt to make homosexuality into a genetic issue, i.e. one that could be "cured" with eugenics. If unz.com is a far-right website, then that blog post is in exactly the right place.
These days, you'll find detailed information about every club and player easily down to the bottom of the Football league pyramid, which is 92 teams.
And, given the popularity of Football Manager (an incredibly detailed simulation of Football Management), you will likely have no trouble finding a whole trove of information for even lower leagues. I haven't played for a while, but I don't doubt there are mods that will enable leagues as low as the Isthmian league, while still having accurate data for every single club and player, even semi-pro and amateur.
The topic is sexual orientation of football players. Information in this context means information about their personal life, whether they're married, have kids, and so on, used as circumstantial evidence about their sexual orientation. Do you mean to tell me those data are also included in player databases?
I would be very surprised if a lot of player databases did not track that kind of thing. I don't think the core Football Manager database has space for [Relationship], [Sexuality], [Kids], etc., but it seems like exactly the kind of thing you could add through a mod, with all the information tracked by the various FM obsessives
>"England is perhaps the world’s most gay-friendly place and anyone coming out is guaranteed a sympathetic media portrayal."
As an Englishman, I am pretty confident that the first half of this claim is wrong (although we're more gay-friendly than most places) and that the second half is technically correct but comes with the important "but outside the media they'll also encounter a lot of bigotry" caveat that you suggest.
I would tentatively guess New Zealand, the Netherlands, much of Scandinavia, perhaps Canada and probably other chunks of north-west Europe. I have low-to-medium confidence that any one of those is, but high confidence that at least some of them are.
Who says homosexuality is genetic? Unz has also supported Greg Cochran (though Greg himself has nothing good to say about Unz), who derides any such genetic theory in favor of a pathogenic one.
It's the left who falsely believe that homosexuality is innate. The right are the ones constantly having to point to heritability studies that show the heritability of homosexuality is very low.
And what exactly does this mean?
> into a genetic issue, i.e. one that could be "cured" with eugenics.
What the hell? All aspects of human behavior are heritable to some degree. We have to deny this in order to not be supporters of 'eugenics'?
Either a trait is heritable or it isn't. The fact you don't like genetic explanations for things is ideological problem, not a scientifc issue.
* giving the average benefit rather than the marginal benefit; presumably there are diminishing returns where the more promising research happens first
* looking at past research, including times when there was much less funding available than there is now
* treating federal funding as the only input, ignoring counterfactuals, and ignoring all other costs. Their equation is (benefits of using innovations) / (amount of federal funding). It would be more accurate to try to estimate something like:
(share of innovation due to federal funding) * (benefits of using innovations - costs of using innovations) / (amount of federal funding)
The Chinese & Indian militaries beating each other with sticks at the Line of Actual Control is a big part of Neal Stephenson's latest novel (the rest being "what if Elon was Texan and decided to unilaterally solve climate change")
Ah! I always wondered how much of that thread of the book is fictional (i.e. yet another instance of NS predicting the future), and how much was inspired by real event. I remember not finding much about sticks and stone combat on the Himalayas at least on the English internet.
The Himalayan Line of Actual Control is a real thing, as is the Indian and Chinese militaries setting about each other with clubs and rocks in the snow to try and shift it a bit.
Unless you've lived in the UK, it's easy to miss just how deeply intertwined homophobia and football are in this country. I became aware of my sexuality in the early 2000s, and I was made to play football at school. Homophobia was so much more prevalent and accepted within the context of football than anywhere else, even within the context of an already homophobic society. Boys who didn't like football were sissies or f*gs or queers or gayboys, even to the teachers. My overwhelming impression of football as a gay child was that this is a sport for people who hate me. Of course gay men are wildly underrepresented within the professional footballing world. Fun anecdote: one of the boys who enjoyed using homophobic slurs the most is now a professional referee who's worked at international tournaments. He clearly felt at home within the sport
Yeah this was a weirdly bad take for Scott to just look at so uncritically. English football is a famously hooligan-dominated culture, and one might suspect this carries over to attitudes about sexual minorities.
#18 The standard alternative to colonising Mars is to instead mine asteroids or other low gravity objects (possibly the moon) and convert the material into O'Neill Cylinders (giant rotating space stations). They have major advantages over Mars, such as tunable gravity, very easy access to zero-g (the interesting part of space), don't have to live in caves, can be close to the sun for cheap solar power, can build more to match demand, can be short travel distance to Earth, etc. This is what Bezos wants to do with Blue Origin.
Downsides are it would take longer to get started as there are more engineering challenges to overcome. Musk is much further along and has all the hype so far.
I'm all for this. Colonising space will never happen unless you can make space better than Earth in at least some ways. Mars will never be better than Earth, but a well-designed luxury space station (as in the movie Elysium) could be.
I feel like everybody's for one or the other. All these have obvious engineering synergies, and it's not like "money" is the restricting parameter for this type of initiatives. Why not both, and have some redundancy?
On the surface maybe. But at this scale (civilization level undertakings I mean), money become again a concept that can be circumvented. Just as in times of war you tend not to fret too much about whether you can "afford" to buy a tank that was already built by some company for example.
I really feel like money is really two different things at two different scales (yeah, let's reinvent macro/micro economics). At an individual level it's very much a way to attribute resources efficiently, a delocalized / parrallelized planification engine. But at the scale of large "states" (US, EU, China), it's another beast entirely, which is not even really well defined at all! I think you can trace back most of the monetary policies in the world back to the personal convictions and norms of a few dozen people! These have been translated into numbers, institutions, theories with limited prediction power, and the stock market as a shamanic entity. But it still boils down to: punish taboos culturally defined (too much debt! not enough spending! too much spending!), and these very much ebb and flow.
Gedankenexperiment: if suddenly a large, civilization ending event came by, would the world just shrug and die because solving it would "cost" more "money" than we have in the world and it would just not make fiscal sense to do it?
Gist: Money is a collective norm, extremely useful at the individual level as a replacement for debt as a means of transactioon; at the national level it is more a type of relative power measurement subject to Goodharts law, with upstream mechanics potentially subject to reinvention / suspension when cultural norms among the stakeholders shifts.
then again, you may have said that because, as a set of civilization, we would be dumb enough to let the entirely circumventable problem of money drive us to extinction, which is a real possibility I admit...
Money is not an "entirely circumventable problem"; it is the solution to the otherwise insurmountable problem, "We don't know whether we even have enough of the right sort of stuff to do this, and what opportunities we'd foreclose if we did". Nothing else works nearly as well as money for getting the right stuff in the right place to get the job done.
But it only works if you play by the rules, one of which is "don't try to circumvent monetary limitations by e.g. printing more money".
so many words, trying to deny that scarcity is a thing. No, the US does not live in a magical unconstrained reality because they can print more dollars.
Many words indeed, mister lacedemonian. And I'm not from the US ;).
While scarcity is a thing, so is artificial scarcity (induced by the systems of govenance we choose) and the distribution of it is malleable. "Printing dollars" is part of it (even if in practice, private banks just lend and so create new money on the expectation that the returns will cover its own creation. growth as a ponzi scheme.). And some resources are not quantified by money, but gatekept by it anyway, except in times of shifting norms about the reach of government power! (like workforce allocation: driven by market during time of peace. forced mobilization / reassignment of research etc in times of war).
And, tongue in cheek, we have lived the pas 10 years in what economists called an "era of magic money". Power begets power, and the coyote does not have to look down...
Money is just a ledger of transactions. The fundamental limits of reality are what matter, not the ledger (although if the ledger is artificially constrained, we may well transact less than we could or should).
Sure, if we HAD to do it, we probably could with available resources.
But there’s no obvious return on the investment beyond “man it would be cool to play Expanse with everybody”, and plenty of more pressing issues locally.
The 0.3g gravity environment could be better than Earth for certain things - unpowered flight once the atmosphere is thickened, sports, etc. It's also much better than Earth at being a different planet, which is inherently attractive for some.
Of course it is, and now already. It's the subject of a century-worth of fantasies that captured the imagination of hundreds of millions, Earth isn't. It's also a new land : No states, No established social, cultural or economic structures, a completely blank slate.
Your reasoning would have us believe that people would never colonize faraway lands unless it's immediately (and materially) better than what they have at the moment, but that's demonstrably false if you took a look at the history of colonization on Earth.
We should hedge our bets as it's likely one of the two approaches may be feasibly accomplished far, far later than the other. Conceiving means for long-term survival in space, such as O'Neill Cylinders, may be a necessary precursor to long-distance space travel - and space travel itself is still in infant stages. On the other hand maybe terraforming will be figured out before all of that. I wonder what those working closer to the metal would speculate will happen first. Some time ago I'd have guessed asteroid mining, except that it's redundant given the extensive precious metals we still have on Earth now.
The potential for Cis-Luna O'Neill Cylinders and other orbital infrastructure is why I generally favour the 'Moon First' school of solar colonization. Using the moon as an industrial node for the development of Near-Earth orbitals seems far more immediately useful than Martian colonies, which are too distant from Earth to facilitate the regular shipment of material or manpower.
What can we do on Mars (or the Moon) that we can't do more cheaply on Earth? Unless we have a real economic benefit to setting up (very expensive) colonies on other worlds, I just can't see it happening any time soon. The only parallel in history is the colonisation of the americas - which was driven by gold, land and resources. But colonising Mars will not bring a flood of cheap resources back to Earth.
A strong push factor could do it. I've always though the biggest driver for space colonization would be if we figured out medical immortality or at least very significant life extension. On top of the increased population pressure (for at least a few decades), I could see a number of rich societies encouraging space colonies as a way to avoid dislodging the now immortal occupants of political/social/cultural positions of power (which happens nowadays because people retire and die over time).
Long-term survival benefit is clearer, the economic one is not for a long spell. It's difficult to ascertain exactly when humanity should start thinking seriously about getting off this rock. Most projections suggest we at least have many millions of years, but other things can happen before then, however unlikely (or more likely, if self-inflected).
I’m not even sure the long term survival benefit is there, unless you’re talking “after the sun burns out” kind of long term.
Almost any disaster on earth is still easier to survive on earth than on Mars. Building a meteor or nuclear war or climate change proof colony on Earth is still easier than on Mars (from a practical perspective- maybe it would be politically easier to do it on Mars).
“All of the oxygen, water, and solar radiation shielding you need are already in your current gravity well” is just an absolutely massive head start that Mars can’t overcome.
Projection for Earth being uninhabitable would be before the sun burns out, but at any rate it's a certainty. It will be impossible to survive on Earth eventually.
Needn't put stake into Mars specifically, just space colonization.
Colonizing the asteroid belt could bring a flood of cheap resources to Earth. Building space habitats gives you access to a lot of cheap solar energy. What you get from Mars, which is at the bottom of a gravity well, is not so clear.
I was thinking of rare elements. With no significant gravity well to get out of and free sunlight for a solar sail, I wouldn't think the cost would be large.
Also, of course, since you are starting with resources already out of Earth's gravity well, asteroid mining would be useful for building space habitats.
Like what? Gold? Platinum group? I suppose there might be some massive high-grade deposit of these somewhere in the asteroid belt, if there happened to be a planet that broke up. Heavy elements like that are only concentrated if you have a nice density gradient in a big body, since they are a priori very rare. And then we have to imagine that the core of the planet gets somehow exposed by some violent event in the past, so that we can just pickaxe the gold out of the surface. Maybe it has happened, but maybe not. Maybe the asteroid belt is just all silicates (which are worthless) or iron and nickel, which are already pretty cheap down here.
I'm not sure even if we found a mess of heavy elements that it would be especially worthwhile. Most heavy elements aren't super useful industrially. They all have niche uses, to be sure, mostly as catalysts, but the most useful structural metals are light metals like Al, Ti, Fe, and even with respect to catalysts these days it's more about what clever ligands you attach to the metal than about the metal itself.
Most of our expensive industrially useful elements aren't so much a priori rare as they are exceedingly annoying to separate from their chemical surroundings, e.g. Ti is moderately common in the Earth's crust, and Al very common, but prying them away from O is taxing. The rare earth elements are not actually rare, but are so chemically similar that it is a real chore separating them from each other, and from related elements. This isn't going to be any easier in space, all the reactive metals are still likely to be oxidized in the asteroid belt. Maybe out past Jupiter the Solar System is sufficintly reducing that you could find metals in native form.
It's not the gravity well of either the source or the destination that is at issue, it's that of the Sun. Just to move something from the orbital radius of the Earth to that of the middle of the asteroid belt, or vice versa, you need to add or substract ~1.5 km/s to its velocity around the Sun. So the energy you need is 1/2 m (that velocity) squared, for whatever m you want to move, before we even consider gravity wells (or the cost to refine or package). That's a lot of energy. Generating energy is always expensive. (I'm not sure how a solar sail helps, by definition that can only change your radial velocity with respect to the Sun, and it's tangential velocity change that is needed here, because you need to change your orbital radius. It would be great if we could tack in space, but unfortunately there's nothing into which you can stick your centerboard.)
Yes, I agree you could use them to build the structural parts of space habitats, but I actually don't think that helps much with cost or feasibility. The biggest problem in our neck of the Solar System, if you want to build stuff in space, is volatiles: you need water, O2, carbon in some form or other (CH4 or CO2 will both do), and reduced nitrogen (NH3 or NO2 at a pinch), because this is what life needs to thrive. You can certainly strive to build closed ecosystems that recycle very very efficiently -- but you need a big mass for your initial supply, and leaks are inevitable in space. The problem is, the only source of these we know is Earth. This is one reason people get excited about ice on the Moon, it would be a big help -- the limitation on building Moon colonies is not really so much structural building material, you can do a lot with local rock, but rather supplying it with air, water, CO2 and reduced nitrogen (if you want to grow plants), of all of which the Moon is utterly destitute.
That depends on the cost of delta-V; I wouldn't rule out just plain steel when we have the right transportation infrastructure in place. But for now, definitely platinum-group elements, and possibly cobalt. Mars might have readily available lithium, but it would take more delta-V to get it to Earth.
Anything that can only be manufactured in microgravity, can only come from space and will be cheaper if it uses extraterrestrial materials. That will probably also be true of anything that requires a great deal of energy to manufacture, once we get a decent solar-cell factory in space.
Also, if you're going to be doing *anything* in space, you're going to need rocket fuel. Which is cheap if you want it at Cape Canaveral for launching things *to* space, but if you need rocket fuel for maneuvering *in* space, you've either got to pay 9+ km/s of delta-V to deliver it from Earth or 2-3 km/s to deliver it from the Moon or a convenient asteroid.
Well, you could rely on nuclear or solar electric power, then all you need is something ionizable you can fire out the back -- plus a lot of patience, as these are not high thrust mechanisms, to say the least.
But there's no way I believe the economic case for Pt and its ilk, or Co. They just aren't that valuable, and I don't believe even if they were lying in pure refined ingots on the surface of the Moon that they could economically compete with mining and extraction (not to mention recycling) technologies we already have.
I dunno, I would say a major part of the early colonization of the Americas was driven by dissent, and wanting to GTFO out of some country in Europe for reasons of being persecuted there.
The upfront costs are probably a lot higher for those. You can build up a Mars colony with a trickle of immigrants plus local resources, but a reasonably sized space habitat requires that you have far more infrastructure in space to build it before you can even have anyone live in it. It's like if you had to build cities entirely in one go versus building them up neighborhood-by-neighborhood.
That could change, obviously, if we have AI plus good robotics to do all the assembly in space work for us.
Insert your favorite "why not both?" meme here. Anyone building the infrastructure to colonize Mars in an economically plausible manner, will have incidentally built the infrastructure to allow other people to colonize the Moon, the asteroids, etc, at relatively low marginal cost. And humanity is famously diverse; no matter how certain *you* are that one path is best, every other path will have a long line of people for whom that is their first choice.
Including the Saganite path for which the answer is to just stay on Earth and explore the universe with telescopes and robots; I'm pretty sure that's what Ceglowski prefers. But the rest of us are either going to remain stuck on Earth, or we're going to colonize pretty much the entire Solar system.
I'm not certain that orbital habitats present larger engineering problems than mars. Constructing them is on the level of building your average cargo ship. Everything else--life support, mainly--is roughly the same, just everything isn't covered in dust and if your air conditioner control board breaks you can get the replacement in a week instead of three months.
All of which are available either on Luna (accessible by mass driver) or asteroids (mass driver or lassoed). Once you get to the point where moving enough industrial capacity for a self-sustaining colony to Mars is possible, acquiring resources outside of a gravity well will have been possible for a long time.
We should also note that the main bottleneck isn't access to raw materials, but access to a sufficiently advanced industrial base capable of producing components and technology for life support systems. The main mission critical goal--keeping your crew alive--relies on contingency planning for any failure relative to your expected emergency resupply time, and that's a much, much, bigger pile of spare parts when your resupply time is months instead of weeks. So you want to keep the logistical chain as short as possible.
People died of coronavirus. I agree the lockdown didn't pass a cost/benefit analysis. But if you want more lockdowns by all means continue the "it's just the flu bro" idiocy.
"If someone can find an Irish doctor or lawyer in British literature pre 1980, I’d be all ears. (Not Anglo Irish)."
Challenge accepted! 😁
(1) E. Nesbit, 1887, "Man Size in Marble" (we can quibble over whether Dr. Kelly is Anglo-Irish or Irish Catholic, but by the view of the author as for most Brits, there isn't a visible difference):
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602511h.html
But my push met with a more vigorous resistance than I had expected. My arms were caught just above the elbow and held as in a vice, and the raw-boned Irish doctor actually shook me.
"Would ye?" he cried, in his own unmistakable accents--"would ye, then?"
"Let me go, you fool," I gasped. "The marble figures have gone from the church; I tell you they've gone."
He broke into a ringing laugh. "I'll have to give ye a draught to-morrow, I see. Ye've bin smoking too much and listening to old wives' tales."
"I tell you, I've seen the bare slabs."
"Well, come back with me. I'm going up to old Palmer's--his daughter's ill; we'll look in at the church and let me see the bare slabs."
"You go, if you like," I said, a little less frantic for his laughter; "I'm going home to my wife."
"Rubbish, man," said he; "d'ye think I'll permit of that? Are ye to go saying all yer life that ye've seen solid marble endowed with vitality, and me to go all me life saying ye were a coward? No, sir--ye shan't do ut."
(2) There is the Irish curate in Charlotte Bronte's "Shirley" of 1849 but he's a Protestant, so that might count as Anglo-Irish, however he is portrayed with the 'national character' of the Southern Irish (as one might expect from the daughter of Prunty from Co. Down?)
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30486/pg30486-images.html#I
"When Malone's raillery became rather too offensive, which it soon did, they joined, in an attempt to turn the tables on him by asking him how many boys had shouted "Irish Peter!" after him as he came along the road that day (Malone's name was Peter Malone----the Rev. Peter Augustus Malone); requesting to be informed whether it was the mode in Ireland for clergymen to carry loaded pistols in their pockets, and a shillelah in their hands, when they made pastoral visits; inquiring the signification of such words as vele, firrum, hellum, storrum (so Mr. Malone invariably pronounced veil, firm, helm, storm), and employing such other methods of retaliation as the innate refinement of their minds suggested.
This, of course, would not do. Malone, being neither good-natured nor phlegmatic, was presently in a towering passion. He vociferated, gesticulated; Donne and Sweeting laughed. He reviled them as Saxons and snobs at the very top pitch of his high Celtic voice; they taunted him with being the native of a conquered land. He menaced rebellion in the name of his "counthry," vented bitter hatred against English rule; they spoke of rags, beggary, and pestilence. The little parlour was in an uproar; you would have thought a duel must follow such virulent abuse; it seemed a wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Gale did not take alarm at the noise, and send for a constable to keep the peace."
I agree with your conclusion but not with any of the above commentary about crossbows being too lethal. I just think they have an unwritten agreement about “no projectile weapons”.
Modern body armor and helmets stop bullets which have by far more penetration power than any muscle powered weapon. A composite shield would absolutely stop any bolt.
I don't think I believe any of this, and I would really like to know what the picture shows without the third-hand 'the Chinese are re-inventing maces'". I wonder if this is more a ceremonial or mascot type situation?
Regiments of the British army may engage in this kind of practice, but it doesn't mean they are reverting to cavalry charges and swords for modern warfare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tHRm8GS8R0
What do you mean, "also the clockmakers"? Their motto ["time is the commander/ruler of things"] is focused on their work and completely ignores God. Arguably it rejects the importance of God, though you'd have to be reading into it to get there. They easily pass the test of "we talk about clocks, not the Pope".
The guilds lived in a one-party state with Church and State proudly merged. They had to recite Church/State slogans. Also lots of them were sincere Christians.
American Associations for the Advancement of Grant Money live off the federal bureaucracy, which is monopolized by the D party and forces them to recite D party slogans. Also lots of academics really believe this kitsch.
I followed your link and saw that they did indeed spell “all” with one “l”, but in the ACX context I immediately read that as A.I. worship.
The rootclaim-Kirsch debate is still on. See here: https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/saar-wilf-founder-of-rootclaim-has
Thanks, I've updated to include that.
Incidentally, I'm up for $1K on the Rootclaim side if anyone wants to get a collection together
I am unable to find any evidence that the bet was ever "off"? Am I missing something?
It looks like Rootclaim was working towards coming to terms around the time Kirsch cancelled the open call for bets, but negotiation on terms continued unhindered during this time.
Perhaps there is some other information on this I haven't seen and that isn't linked in your article?
Looks like Steve changed the title - this was the article where he looked like he was backing out https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/the-chairman-of-rootclaim-wanted
This looks like fun. Made some markets on it:
https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-steve-kirsch-win-their-bet-wit
https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/if-steve-kirsch-loses-their-bet-wit
https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-the-steve-kirschrootclaim-bet
Is Steve saying the debate is only on if someone else puts up an additional $500,000?
Or is he saying the will be a debate, either way, but other people can also bet against him?
The key question isn't the facts of the debate, it's who the judges will be. The contract mentions a "picker" of judges. In the earlier conversation it was suggested that might be [John] Ioannidis. Do we know if that's still the case? Do we know how likely he is to choose impartial people?
Also, what do we know about the escrow process and how safe that is?
Looking over Steve's list of bets, I only see one that I think could actually be resolved with a simple experiment, not a panel of judges, so I suppose that's the only one I'd be willing to wager against.
Re #17, while HUAC was reoriented from Fascists to Communists, McCarthy, a Senator, wasn't responsible. His famous "list" of infiltrators came a couple years after HUAC had investigated Alger Hiss.
Worth noting the builders remedy manifold market only has 5 trades right now (2 of which are mine). Might want to wait to see what it settles on once this article makes it popular.
Market: https://manifold.markets/Hedgehog/how-many-housing-units-will-be-buil?r=RGFuU3RveWVsbA
Sign up and trade on it: https://manifold.markets/?referrer=DanStoyell
I think they’re going to need to come up with a more compelling name than “vat meat” or even “cultured meat”... yet they’ll have to invoke the lab aspect if they want to get people to eat endangered species’ meat.
It looks from the article like maybe they're going for "cultivated meat", which is probably fine.
Would help if I read the article... agree that’s the most compelling! I think Impossible and Beyond have paved the way a little.
It will be really interesting to see what happens with the alternative species. I would bet it ends up being seen as a fancy, liberals-only option due to “traditional” recipes being cooked with the classic meats.
Sustainable hunting seems way less problematic ethically than farming.
I can absolutely see Manly Conservative Grilling Culture going for lion steaks.
Yeah this is Tesla Roadster level marketing brilliance. Ignore the actual benefits of your product and invent some new way to satisfy ego drive.
The trick would be getting the "Not feeling enough like a MAN!?!? You should be eating the HEART OF A LION for breakfast!" influencers on board without provoking the Blue Tribe into deciding that cultured meat was therefore outgroup-coded and Problematic. On the other hand, the Red Tribe probably consume meat disproportionately, so if you have to pick one tribe to convert to cultured meat they'd be the one to go for.
It's like the flip side of gas stoves. It's becoming a Red Tribe thing which is funny because it's mostly blue staters that actually have access to gas networks. If you're going to turn one group off to gas cooking, it should be democrats.
The advice to advertisers was "Sell the sizzle, not the steak".
'Cruelty-free meat' seems like a good starting point, though only for the initial push looking for niche audiences.
I imagine the goal is to eventually get it cheaper than growing livestock, at which point you just call it 'meat' and let it compete on price and quality rather than branding.
I like “cruelty-free meat”! And great point on pricing, I hadn’t thought of that.
The risk is that traditional meat producers will sue because “cruelty-free meat” can imply its actual traditional meat and not synthetic. Some of that is already happening: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommytobin/2019/07/30/meat-alternative-label-restrictions-lead-to-lawsuits/?sh=74d217b37b82
Legal defence: "Meat" is the Old-English word for food in general.
I think it'll be a lot harder for them to object to calling it meat when it's actually made of animal cells.
I assure you that that will not dissuade them in the least. https://reason.com/2018/04/14/special-interest-groups-want-to-slaughte/
Something like "No Kill Meat" feels more to the point and less judgemental to me.
> I imagine the goal is to eventually get it cheaper than growing livestock
That's not going to be possible for the foreseeable future, unless you cheat by making livestock 10x expensive. Nature is hard to beat.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
I am not convinced. This reads like someone in the 1950's talking about how much complexity and vacuum tubes were needed to build even the simplest computers. It's a combination of "current ways of doing this are slow and hard" with "I can't see a better way". And no of course you can't see the way. Someone from 20 years in the future may well be able to say "it's simple, just repolymerize the lignates ..." The arguments presented seem the typical "I can't see how to do X, therefore X can't be done" type thinking that appears. The problem is that their impossibility proof is never watertight. There are often little edge cases and tricks. And so the entire field gets built around some loophole. Like maybe the thermodynamics of energy seem airtight. But actually, if you genetically engineer the cells to be photosynthetic, expose them to sunlight, and then get the cells to rip up that extra DNA on a chemical signal, then you can get around the energy constraints.
By that logic, you could just as easily argue that it is not "impossible" to build Dyson spheres and turn the solar system into computronium either. Doesn't mean it is going to happen in our lifetimes, let alone that it is something right around the corner worth making important decisions about.
For practical purposes, "there is no known or foreseeable way to do this and the obstacles look pretty fundamental" is about as good as you're going to get.
Firstly, I wouldn't be surprised if a dyson sphere got built within a year of ASI. Whether or not that's in our lifetimes depends on the state of AI alignment.
For technologies like this, the expected state is one of "we don't know how to do this", whether or not that tech turns out to happen. And I don't think the obstacles are that "fundamental". On the contrary, the whole system is complicated and loaded with workarounds.
The report linked to by the article you sent seems loaded with fundamental assumptions that could easily be broken. For a start, it's looking at large bioreactor volumes. Bread factories don't make bread in one giant loaf tin. The scaling laws don't work that way. Instead they have a production line covered in lots of small loaf tins.
The paper just assumed aseptic growth conditions, instead of say using the animal's immune system by adding some cultured white blood cells.
Basically I don't regard the paper as strong evidence one way or the other. They showed a particular set of designs won't be economic under a particular set of assumptions. So sure, if a solution is found, then it will probably involve something somewhere that breaks one of his assumptions.
This may be the strongest evidence we are going to get, but is still isn't strong.
It is very hard to prove a technology impossible by listing techniques that won't work.
"Artisan meat" might attract the right crowd.
I would guess that "artisan meat" becomes, in the developed world anyway, ranchers' collective counter branding. "Artisan" is a marketing tag typically used to distinguish away from mass-produced (e.g. "grown in a lab") and towards "a skilled human being personally created this" (e.g. "meet the ranch family who carefully tend their herd of grass-fed cattle....").
Yeah, in the long run, definitely. But in the short run you get limited-availability expensive vat-grown meat that was carefully designed to look, smell and taste a certain way, which matches an intuitive meaning of artisanal, if not a literal one.
Sort of like I expect the meaning of "a self-driving car" to flip from the "car that drives itself" to "you have to drive it yourself", once most cars become autonomous.
You mean…an automobile?
return to the roots of the term, hah.
It might attract the exact wrong crowd. I suspect there's a disproportionately high proportion of vegetarians / vegans , or at least those already cutting down on meat or making some effort towards more ethically sourced meat already in those to who "artisinal" would appeal as marketing, meaning there's much less room for gains. Ideally you'd want to appeal to the portion of population eating the most meat.
You're misunderstanding the purpose of a marketing framing for an existing product.
For an existing product that is trying to _defend_ its market share (e.g. beef and pork and chicken from farmed animals), the marketing label isn't about attracting a new crowd. Rather it is about defending/empowering the product's existing customers. The goal is to make them feel better about continuing to consume the product that they know and are comfortable with. (With in this case a side benefit of pre-empting "artisinal" from being deployed by the competition in the opposite way.)
But this *is* a new product: it isn't being sold anywhere yet, so there's no market to defend. Any customers are by definition, new customers, and you're going to want to look for them among those already consuming the product you're substituting for.
What? You're making no sense there.
At the upcoming meeting of the American Philosophical Association, one of the papers is titled “Is Eating Cultured Human Meat Cannibalism?” Who says these A_A meetings aren’t addressing the pressing questions of the times?
I wonder if anybody there would be based enough to point out that it's an instance of The Worst Argument In The World.
"Yes, but it's the good kind of cannibalism."
Somebody could go meta and ask about Eating Cultured Cannibal Balls.
'Carniculture' worked for H Beam Piper's Space Vikings. Now for antigravity, hyperspace and collapsium.
And veradicators for our legal system! Credit to Piper for pointing out in *Little Fuzzy* that a truth machine wouldn't solve as many legal issues as one might hope, and in *Space Viking* that they would be eagerly adopted by tyrants.
Cultured meat - because we're not barbarians.
The milk products that are currently on the market (e.g.: https://braverobot.co/pages/process) seem to be going with phrases like "animal-free milk protein."
I guess "animal-free meat" might be an eye-catching phrase, but I'm not sure it's really enough to distinguish the stuff from the other animal-free "meats" and "milks" on the shelf (the ones made with mashed-up beans and stuff).
When I was a kid there was an urban legend that McDonalds food didn’t contain any actual animals. Instead the stuff in your nuggets was carved off a huge block of disembodied solid flesh suspended in a tank of water. They called it “Animal 57”, which is what I instinctively call all these cultured meat products in my head.
I should make a list of all the things that were expected to gross me out in 1993 but which now have my complete personal buy-in. It would be an interesting way to chart cultural change.
https://www.eater.com/2019/9/5/20849803/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-doublemeat-beyond-meat-fast-food-trend
I suppose Tub o' Cells wouldn't go over well.
"Why not crossbows?"
Intimidation, and the idea that melee feels much more in the right spirit than crossbows under anti-gun regs. Also, crossbows aren't great unless massed and at that point you are killing thousands of enemy troops.
They're on to something with the maces. I'm all for it. If you're going to do violence, then do it firsthand. Live with it and its consequences.
Nah, the whole thing is barbaric and backwards. If something isn't worth fighting to the death for, by any means, it's not worth fighting for. Sign a damn peace treaty, don't send your citizens into a melee to get permanently injured or killed for purely symbolic reasons. And if you think people who "do violence" with modern weapons don't "live with it and its consequences", I would suggest going to your nearest VA and expressing that opinion. I'm sure it'll go over well.
Also, I'm not sure how modern chainmail/sharkmail fares against modern crossbows, but I could plausibly imagine that crossbows are just not effective anymore.
I would imagine mail, modern or not (and by my reckoning modern mail is no better than historical), fares pretty poorly. Consider this Arrows vs Armor video featuring authentic armor and warbows: https://youtu.be/ds-Ev5msyzo?t=2267
Even the mail aventail (neck and throat protection intended as primary defense) featuring dense, heavy, inflexible, mail weave, isn't quite a proof against English longbow arrows - sometimes it stops them and sometimes it does not - and crossbows made with modern techniques could pack quite a bit bigger punch than a 160 pound draw weight longbow. Here's an arrow hitting the less robust mail on the side of the torso (probably still more robust than e.g. shark mail), goes straight through: https://youtu.be/ds-Ev5msyzo?t=1590
I would imagine there are some mutually agreed-upon taboos and unwritten rules limiting the sides from directly escalating to use of 16th century style plate armor and the most lethal weapons you can come up with within the constraints, so choice of weapons is a function of what works, yes (otherwise they'd have stuck to fisticuffs), but also escalation management, and showing off with impressive but less lethal weapons (for one thing, even as far as melee weapons go, the humble spear probably is more effective than the Wolf's Fangs mace).
Mail is bad, but modern armour should be a lot better. This video has arrows failing to penetrate modern armour (starting around 4:40). Admittedly it's not a crossbow, but it's also pretty darn close range.
If the enemy can be covered in modern body armour, then the lack of edged weapons makes sense. Cutting through fancy armour is damn near impossible, but getting smacked in the head with an enormous mace is going to hurt even with a helmet.
I believe that's why the War Hammer (sometimes called Raven's Beak, Bec de Corbin) was a thing in the era of armored knights.
Link?
Brett Deveraux has some useful information in his post "punching through some armor myths" (google should find that). Otherwise, the youtube channel Shadiversity (no "diversity" intended here, it's "Shad's university") has some reconstructions and experiments.
Given the energy carried by a gun bullet is much, much higher than what you'd get from any crossbow that's not a siege ballista, and modern armor can sometimes stop a bullet, Kevlar and the like are looking pretty good here - they're also designed to offer some protection against an attacker with a knife, so they should help against a cut with a sword too.
Which video is this? At 4:40 they are talking about plate mail.
The video appears to show arrows penetrating mail, but not plate armor. I think modern armor, designed to resist firearms (which outclass human-powered projectiles), would fare better than mail.
Modern crossbows have very little in common with the old versions. They are used in spec-ops in some countries, and are just ridiculously more powered, smaller, precise and lethal than medieval hand cranked stuff you might imagine.
I'm sure, but shark mail is also very good compared to old chainmail, and while there's no such thing as a truly bulletproof vest there might be truly crossbow proof. Just not sure.
Chainmail, I recall reading once, was good for stopping slashing weapons. It didn't do well against pointy, stabbing weapons like spears or arrows.
It is my understanding that a bulletproof vest & stabproof vest work very differently, and one can't substitute for the other.
Probably so, but I don't think either one works like medieval chainmail did.
YouTube has some decent channels that do practical experiments on that sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/@tods_workshop
Crossbows are probably more-effective now than in the old days, because they're better, and most people don't wear armor now. I've often wondered why no revolutionary groups in countries with strict gun control use bows as weapons. They're SO much easier than guns and bullets to make at home, and aren't as much outclassed by rifles in urban environments as they would be elsewhere.
Maybe for the same reason NBA players don't shoot free-throws underhand aka granny style, even though it's more or less proven to be more effective: it would just look kinda goofy, and both revolutionaries and professional athletes are very concerned about public perception.
I dunno, you could definitely spin "our side fights with bows" to your advantage in the PR fight - either "we're modern-day Robin Hoods" (Robins Hood?) or "we kill silently and with no warning".
Because it's easier to make a simple musket than either a bow or crossbow.
Source: my adolescence
By now I wouldn't even be surprised if they have a truce where all ranged weapons should be removed from the contested are by their range or 50 km, whichever is smaller…
Not an expert, but like many here I read ACOUP, and one thing I've taken away is that modern people wrongly assume pre-modern ranged weapons tactically function similar to modern guns.
What were the main differences?
By my understanding, mostly just much lower lethality. Well equipped and disciplined heavy infantry can hold position or advance against arrow fire in a way that would be completely suicidal against guns.
Yup. Heavy infantry can walk through arrow fire and expect to come out the other side in formation and capable of fighting.
Ranged weapons in the pre-gunpowder era were effectively battle-shaping rather than war winning weapons. Even in the most talked-about cases like Agincourt, the fact is that the battle was still decided by clash of arms rather than the fire itself being enough to push an opponent off the field.
It should also be noted that this was true (although to a lesser and lesser extent as time went on) all the way up until the invention of cartridge breech loaders. Which is why the cult of the bayonet (which seems so ridiculous now) held on for as long as it did. The fact that technology now allowed massed fire alone to fend off a determined advance was something that the Western world only fully realised in 1914.
Not sure if that's true against modern crossbows. I suspect they've gotten a lot better.
Maybe true, I don't know much about modern crossbows. But modern body armor has also gotten a lot better, so it's hard to know how that would go when nobody has used crossbows at scale in hundreds of years.
Their effectiveness at long range (at which they lost most of their energy) are often much over-rated. An arrow at 10m is gonna kill (or badly wound) you, at 150m, even tho it can technically reach you, is unlikely not penetrate armor or shield, and if it does (or hit an unarmored part), may well be a tolerable wound.
Here's the blog they're talking about: https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-and-kiting/
And more on armor: https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-some-armor-myths/
Another difference between bows and guns (or crossbows) that movies often get wrong is when the camera shows archers aiming it's implied that they keep their bows drawn for several minutes before the enemy gets in range. With warbows especially, drawing back takes effort, so you wouldn't want to just hold the string and wait. Instead you'd nock the arrow but stay relaxed, and only draw when it's time to actually fire.
I feel like those maces were chosen for intimidation. If they really get into the "we're here to kill people" mindset, they're going to drop the no guns rule.
Dozens of soldiers were killed there in 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0Bb0DT9hg4&ab_channel=NDTV
Better source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53089037
There's both a specific agreement and also quite a bit of cultural norming around how the Line of Control conflict is conducted.
“Neither side shall open fire, cause bio-degradation, use hazardous chemicals, conduct blast operations or hunt with guns and explosives within two kilometres from the LAC” - from the 1996 agreement between the two countries. This has been interpreted to include projectile weapons more advanced than rocks.
If you read the statements of people on both sides of the conflict, it's clear that they've developed a set of norms around what is considered acceptable on both sides, with actual killing seemingly somewhat "out of bounds" in the minds of the participants, while "beating the absolute hell out of the other guy" seems to be expected and honorable.
Depending on how you want to interpret it, "neither side shall open fire" may prohibit crossbows.
That was my thought.
Thanks, this explains a lot. Neither side wants to use a gun substitute, and developing massed infantry tactics for, e.g. using spears and shields would be a pointless escalation.
So they're essentially going around in full gear trench raiding each other with blunt weapons.
Makes sense. Thanks.
Probably has more to do with setting the stopping point for the arms race at the level of close quarter combat. Introducing projectile weapons, or "fires" in military terminology, would be an escalation from status quo and demand a tit-for-tat response.
Regarding #47--the polled question concerns satisfaction derived from a social cause. Wokeness isn't in itself a social cause, but more like a new religion.
I think they're thinking of "social causes" like "fighting for transgender rights", and classifying people who derive satisfaction from them as woke.
Yea seems like a classification error.
Wokeness has long struck me as grounded in wanting to feel like one of the world's righteous, specifically "secular white people desperately seeking righteousness." This is my anecdotal hypothesis, from living and working deep in the heart of "blue" America throughout the gradual rise of that particular ideology, that those who've enthusiastically embraced the worldview which we are calling "woke" overwhelmingly fit the above description. Secular liberals who grew up in secular households are, at least in my own circles, much less likely to be bought into it. The people I know who are now woke evangelists often turn out to have grown up accompanying their parents or grandparents to church but they either never developed a belief in God or lost that belief as young adults.
That is so far as I yet know an analysis based only on anecdata. I would like to see some rigorous surveying which tests it. Are Americans who strongly agree with a half-dozen woke-consensus statements disproportionately (a) nonreligious and (b) from childhoods/families in which religious faith was a consistent belief and practice prior to their own generation. (Or the flip side: is it a correct observation at scale that secular liberals who grew up in secular households are much less likely to know be woke evangelists than people fitting the above categorization?)
I also think that there are just a ton of ways to read that data. It is interesting and stops some superficial theories, but not much more than that.
Yeah, I'm not surprised at all by the finding there. It's been very obvious to me that the "good parts" of wokeness are very similar to the "good parts" of Christianity (love thy neighbor), there's similar radical elements (camel through the eye of the needle, he who is least among you, etc), and the failure modes of wokeness are very congruent to the failure modes of e.g. Evangelicalism.
It only makes sense that religious liberals (already those naturally susceptible to religious-type fervor by the low base rates of religiosity among liberals) would be more involved in similar political movements.
#13 seems mostly false or at least highly misleading. They identified 160 cancer trials which recieved in total ~$5 billion in federal funding. They then assess these trials as saving 14 million DALYs. Dividing one by the other gives $326 / DALY. But the federal funding is not the only cost for the drugs saving these lives. An honest assessment would have to include the private funding for the trials as well as the drug development costs.
Hmm, I don't know if it's misleading, so much as that causal reasoning around money is naturally confusing. I think it depends whether the private funding was downstream of the federal funding or not. For example, suppose that for every $326 the government invests, it becomes clear that some new drug will be a blockbuster that makes a lot of money, and private companies take it the rest of the way. In that case, the government investing $326 really will *cause* one more DALY, and the government should keep investing $326 increments until that stops being true.
If the government was 1% of trial funding, and private charitable foundations were 99%, and the government's contribution wasn't necessary, and the private foundations would have just funded 99% as many trials without them, then I agree this is bad logic.
I think it's even more complicated than that. In particular, that private money wasn't going to be wasted so we presumably have to consider the social value of whatever it was diverted from funding .. indeed, I don't see how this is at all even sorta measuring the delta DALYs versus a world in which these studies weren't done.
But that's kinda besides the point because on top of publication bias the cancer study delibrately limited it's examination to studies showing a statistically significant effect which is basically only counting the costs of the winners.
If the federal funding being measured was for basic research then that might be the case (although still dubious). In this case it looks like the funding is specifically for phase III trials which feels like it definitely would have been funded anyways.
That seems unlikely. Sure, no doubt some of them would have been funded but phase 3 trials are very expensive and without the prospective availability of government money to help fund these trials it seems quite plausible that in some cases it wouldn't have made economic sense to test the compound or potentially to fund the earlier stage development at all. I think it's more accurate to say this paper really tells us nothing about would have happened absent this funding.
Besides, since they seem to have only looked at statistically significant results it's cherry picking winners.
That's fair, the money spent obviously has some impact, but likely no more impact than a subsidy at any other point in the process.
It looks like about 50-70% of drugs fail phase III trials. So that reduces the effectiveness by another factor of 2-3
To get some perspective, I thought it might be useful to look at some of the trials and see what they did. One might as well look at the best-performing ones.
The study claims 14.2 million life years gained, but from Figure 1, it sure looks like most of those gained are due to only a small number of trials, with the top 4 contributing about 20%.
The trials that met the criteria are listed in the Supplement: https://ascopubs.org/doi/suppl/10.1200/JCO.22.01826/suppl_file/DS_JCO.22.01826.pdf
But which ones are the top performing? From Figure 1 it looks like the top two happened before 1983. Only three trials listed in the Supplement occurred before that date and had life years calculated:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7015139/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7046900/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6366141/
Here’s one of the abstracts:
"Previously untreated patients with multiple myeloma were entered on a randomized clinical trial to determine whether the use of alternating combination chemotherapy, including vincristine, doxorubicin, alkylating agents, and prednisone (160 patients) was more effective than conventional chemotherapy with melphalan and prednisone (77 patients), and whether the addition of the immunomodulating agent levamisole to maintenance chemotherapy enhanced the survival of patients achieving remission. The treatment groups were well matched for all major factors. The more aggressive chemotherapy was more effective at inducing remission, with a significantly higher proportion of patients achieving at least 75% tumor mass regression (53% with alternating combinations versus 32% with melphalan-prednisone, p = 0.002). Furthermore, the median survival was increased to 43 months with alternating combination chemotherapy as compared to 23 months with melphalan-prednisone (p = 0.004). After six to 12 months of induction therapy, 84 patients achieving remission were rerandomized to receive maintenance chemotherapy alone or with the addition of levamisole. The survival from the start of maintenance therapy was longer in patients receiving the added levamisole than with chemotherapy alone (p = 0.01). These findings support the use of aggressive multiagent chemotherapy for remission induction in patients with advanced-stage multiple myeloma."
Take a good look at the inclusion criteria of the cited paper to understand why this is implausible as a whole:
They only included in the analysis the trials which were POSITIVE in favor of the experimental treatment (first paragraph of the DATA in the Methods section).
So this paper basically says that the federal cancer funding *when funding positive trials* lead to $326 per DALY.
At the very least, it shouldn't be compared to the $50k/DALY tor EAs $100/DALY which (presumably) include all the downstream costs of the actual intervention.
https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-cancer-become-a-significant-ca
The implications of this are also implausible -- that the USG is a superb capital allocator for R and D.
They don't need to be superb to occasionally score a big win, though. And in this case, private industry is the one running with the ball.
In any case the history is complicated. While I agree with the libertarian position that government capital allocation is likely to end up as a bloated mess as a result of various sorts of capture, it's not as if it has some consistent track record of failure. Vannevar Bush wrote a decent book ('Pieces of the Action') about the birth of US federal science policy during WWII. It certainly seemed to have achieved its near term goals, like the Manhattan Project.
Also, is it accounting for differences in per-treatement costs? If $1m in research discovers a new drug that saves 10M DALYs, the research provides $100 per DALY only if providing the drug itself costs nothing. If there's a per-person cost to providing the treatment, that needs to be included in the cost per DALY. There are some situations where this wouldn't apply (eg. replacing an existing treatment with a more effective one that costs the same), but a lot of new treatments are going to involve additional costs.
There's definitely a problem with the calculations. The conventional wisdom is that clinical trials cost around $100M per drug, with a 90% failure rate. The cited paper cites 162 trials, so we'd expect that to cost $16G, assuming that they somehow knew in advance that those drugs would be successful. OTOH, in the typical case, 162 successful trials requires 1,600 total trials, at a cost of around $160G. The paper cites about $5G of federal investment, but of course the price of treating the patients when the drug is in production has to pay back the presumably $155G of private investment. So the total cost, adding tax-funded federal R&D, and however the patient care is paid for, comes to 32 times the stated $326/QALY, or about $10k/QALY. But I would add that it seems the threshold for national health systems paying for a treatment is the GDP/capita/year, which for the US is $70k. So this isn't the pinnacle of E.A. but it's still well worth spending taxpayer money on.
I agree with the spirit of your adjustments but not the specifics.
The failure rate of phase 3 trials is far below 90%. It is certainly that high for early-phase reasearch, but not phase 3. This article suggests 60%. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6226120/)
I'm not entirely sure I follow your next section, but I don't think we can assume that the cost of drugs to patients is simply recouping R&D costs. FDA-aproved anti-cancer drugs have extremely high profit margins, and there's really no theoretical limit to how high those profits can go. There are many, many antineoplastics that improve overall survival but whose cost to payors is far above your figure of $10k/QALY. And this gives the whole game away. I am untterly unwilling to believe the paper Scott links. If the individual drugs developed by these trials are all very expensive, the research cannot be highly cost-effective.
To take an example, the drug pembrolizumab is now combined with two other chemotherapy agents in the intial treatment of non-small cell lung cancer. In this setting, it is given every three weeks until it stops working. According to the 5-year update of KEYNOTE-189 (Annals of Oncology 2022), this takes a median time of 9 months. This is approximately 13 doses. A generally accepted cost figure is $10k/dose, for a total cost of $130k. The KEYNOTE-189 study also found an 11.4-month median survival benefit, for a total of $136k per life-year gained. This is before adjusting for quality. Pembro is well-tolerated, but the decrement to quality of life is not zero. So we can confidently say the cost/QALY is greater than $136k. Mind you, this drug in this setting is considered a pretty big success by almost any oncologist in the developed world. $136k/QALY is of marginal value at best.
And again, this is one of the MORE cost-effective oncology drug products to debut in the last few decades. These days EVERY new drug costs well north of $100k/year, and many of them have little to no survival advantage over the next best alternative. That same drug pembrolizumab is used in a wide variety of other cancers, mostly with less success but the same cost schedule. In small cell lung cancer, for example, my calculation is that it costs between $300k and $600k/QALY. This is because you take it for months before you know whether it's working, and it doesn't work for most people. So you end up having to give many, many doses to lengthen one person's life.
Regarding #5, Erik Berenson, if anyone can scientifically refute his latest critique I'd appreciate it. The way he writes is trustworthy, to me, but I would appreciate someone from this community checking his logic and primary sources before questioning the efficacy of the flu and covid vaccine to the extent he does.
Don't you mean Alex instead of Erik?
OK, I read his article. Here are responses to some of his main points:
-"Flu shots are placebos masquerading as public policy.” I did not look up the studies he cites, but did look up data on flu shot effectiveness, which is something I’d looked up a couple months ago. I’d looked at 2 other articles back then, today looked at a 3rd one. All say that initial protection against hospitalization is 40 to 50%, and it wanes at rate of about 8 or 9% per month. (https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/73/4/726/6104243) That’s clearly way better than nothing. Based on something Berenson says later in his post, the papers saying flu shots are no better than placebo may be arguing that the protection found in those getting flu shots is not a result of the flu shots, but merely a consequence of the fact that those who get flu shots are richer and healthier. But here have been RCTs (randomized control trials) of flue shots. When flu shots were initially approved it was surely on the basis of data from randomized control trials that demonstrated they *were* better than placebo. I don’t see any reason to think that’s changed. It’s quite unlikely anyone these days is going to do a randomized control trial of flu shots vs. placebo, because it is regarded as an established fact that flu shots are protective, so it’s kind of unfair to stick a bunch of people with a placebo at this point. But it's not needed. We had the RCT's.
-Covid vax initially gives good immunity -- good protection against infection -- however that disappears in a few months. That’s true. However, it is not important. The point of the covid vaccines is to protect us against severe illness, not to protect us against infection. I’m sure that Berenson grasps this. However, many people do not. I am *constantly* seeing people on Twitter posting despairingly (or triumphantly, depending on what camp they are in) that vaccination doesn’t do much to protect against infection. I think it’s because a lot of people do not grasp the importance of the difference between being protected against infection and being protected against severe illness. Infection is no big deal: 80% of infections in those 20 and younger are asymptomatic. Even in the elderly 35% are. The big deal is getting seriously *sick* when you are infected, and what matters is whether the vax reduces the likelihood of severe illness.
Note that in the first part of the article, Berenson writes: “We now have two years of real-world data on the mRNAs, based on billions of doses. “Putting side effects aside, they work extremely well against Covid - for about four months after the second dose. After that, their effectiveness rapidly wanes. It falls to zero against coronavirus infection and transmission within a few months.” That’s a very misleading sentence, and he has to know that. There are 2 kinds of effectiveness: Effectiveness against infection, and effectiveness against severe illness. He writes a sentence about “effectiveness” without specifying which kind of effectiveness he’s talking about, and he has to know how confused the public is about the 2 kinds of effectiveness. That’s just sleazy.
-Finally Berenson gets to vaccine effectiveness against severe illness, and he declares that “What about after they stop working against infection? What about now? In truth, no one knows.” There actually have been many studies of effectiveness against severe illness. I have read many of them, and every single one finds that vaccination greatly reduces the chance of hospitalization and death. Here are a few that asses the effect of the bivalent booster:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm715152e2.htm?s_cid=mm715152e2_w
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2215471
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm715152e1.htm?s_cid=mm715152e1_w
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1134074/vaccine-surveillance-report-week-48-2022.pdf
There are also a multitude of studies of the effects of earlier vaccinations, and all show the same result: Vaccination greatly reduces the chance of hospitalization and death.
Berenson discounts the data on the vaccine’s effectiveness on 2 grounds: First, he says all of these studies look at people who elected to get the shot, and of course that population is different from the population that elects not to — they are healthier and wealthier. And it’s true that all the studies I just cited were epidemiological data :They looked at what people did — vax or no vax — then at how they fared. However, at least 2 of them employed a statistical technique called regression to control for the differences in the 2 groups. The way regression works is that you use information about age, race, gender and other diagnoses to predict how likely someone is to be hospitalized for covid. Then, you use that information to mathematically “equalize” the groups, so that the difference you see between the vaxed and unvaxed groups reflects the effect of the vax, not of other differences.
A second problem with Berenson’s claim that all our data comes from real life, where vaxed people are healthier than unvaxed, is that it is not true. Both the original vaccine and the bivalent booster were tested in clinical trials, which did use randomized groups: The group who got the vax and the group who got the placebo were on average exactly the same in age, wealth, health, race distribution, gender distribution, etc. The clinical trials demonstrated that the vaccines worked better than the placebos. Which Berenson knows, or course.
Berenson’s other grounds for claiming that nobody knows whether the vaccines are effective against severe illness is that the results of tests of effectiveness against illness are confounded by the vaccines effectiveness against infection: If people are well-protected against infection for the first couple of months, then obviously they are well-protected against severe illness simply because they are unlikely to become ill. However, there have in fact been studies of the effectiveness of the vaccines against severe illness that follow subjects past the immunity honeymoon. Here’s one that found that effectiveness against severe illness was 95% right after vaccination, and 80% 7 months out.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2117128
Vaccination also has been shown to teach other components of the immune system — things other than the fast-waning antibodies — to fight covid.
“Functional memory B cell responses, including those specific for the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), and Delta (B.1.617.2) variants, were also efficiently generated by mRNA vaccination and continued to *increase in frequency between 3 and 6 months post-vaccination. Notably, most memory B cells induced by mRNA vaccines were capable of cross-binding variants of concern, and B cell receptor sequencing revealed significantly more hypermutation in these RBD variant-binding clones compared to clones that exclusively bound wild-type RBD. Moreover, the percent of variant cross-binding memory B cells was higher in vaccinees than individuals who recovered from mild COVID-19. mRNA vaccination also generated antigen-specific CD8+ T cells and durable memory CD4+ T cells in most individuals, with early CD4+ T cell responses correlating with humoral immunity at later timepoints.”
From https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.23.457229v1
Where is the evidence that at this stage of the pandemic, when the circulating variant is Omicron XBB.1.5, that the vaccines still protect against severe illness after more than several months? I know that they were extremely effective against the original strain for the first few months after injection. We're not at that stage anymore.
The first 4 links I gave above are all to data about effectiveness against severe illness of bivalent vaccine. It did not start being given til about 9/1/22
, and latest dates I saw on the studies I cited was late November. As of mid-Jan. about 40% of US cases were XBB, so dunno how much XBB was around during periods covered by studies. I also cited one UK study in the batch. Don't know how much XBB they had during period they studied -- if more that would be stronger direct evidence regarding XBB. There is also indirect evidence of effectiveness against novel varients: Original vax + later bivalent booster gives a broader kind of immune memory, lodged in b and t cells, so that people are more likely to be able to make antibodies even to something that looks kind of different from what they've encountered so far via infection or vax. That info is way too complex to summarize here, and I also do not have a deep understanding of it. Smart skeptical people on medical Twitter whom I trust and who have far deeper knowledge than I do believe that people with original vax plus bivalent booster are in a pretty good position.
While I totally agree that Alex Berenson's analysis about vaccine harms is completely off, the quoted studies are not very convincing. They might be true for covid naive persons but now that most people have got infected with covid their effectiveness is probably insignificant.
CDC doesn't inspire confidence. They are still against allowing unvaccinated non-citizens to enter the US. Their reputation is so low that it is no wonder that people like Alex Berenson are making so much money from their followers.
Just look at mask mandates that are completely useless and still demanded by some of these institutions.
We agree on most things. I get it that the difference between vaxed and unvaxed hardly matters now -- pretty much all of the unvaxed have had covid, and many of the vaxed as well, so now most of the country is immunized. Graphs and postings by fair-minded people have been quite clear about that for the last year at least. If you look at the graphs, being vaxed made a huge difference initially, and has made less and less as time has passed. It still makes some difference, though, but I'm sure almost all of that difference is a result of differing death rates of vaxed vs. unvaxed older people, and especially of truly elderly people.
The risk for the young has always been small, even without a vaccination. At this point a booster for anyone under 50 seems pointless to me unless they have some special risk factor. As for forcing the public to mask, I agree that it simply does not work. I have no doubt at all that a good quality mask greatly reduces the chance of contracting covid, but that's like saying not drinking is good for your health and makes you less like to be in an auto accident. The latter is true, but Prohibition does not work. People don't comply. Same with mask mandates.
And you couldn't possibly despise the CDC more than I do.
There are a couple places where we part company. Why do you think my quoted studies are not very convincing? And which ones do you mean? The first batch of 4 quoted studies seems to me like good evidence that the bivalent vax reduced hospitalization and death. The difference is likely almost all in the differing death rates of bivalent boosted vs. unboosted aged 65+, so studies don’t demonstrate that everybody should get a damn bivalent booster. But that isn’t what I was trying to discredit. I was rebutting his claim that “the shot doesn’t work”. Clearly it’s doing something. Then later we get to Berenson’s other objections: (1)The shots only work because they give immunity, briefly. They don’t help your body fight off covid, they just keep you from getting it so duh, of course you don’t die of it if you don’t get it. I dug up a study of date rates 7 months out. Still lower for the vaxed. Later I found a better study showing the same, but that one seems like pretty good evidence for me. (The one I found later is forthe entire US. It’s from a post by epidemiologist Jatelyn Jetelina and it’s here: https://i.imgur.com/gZXuEcw.png. Note that in the study the people who had the primary series, most probably having gotten the shot quite a while before, were still doing better than the unvaxed. This seems to me like quite good evidence that what people get from a vax is *more than* just temporary immunity.)
Berenson second : (2) All the studies of vax effectiveness are epidemiological studies, and the finding that vaxed die less than unvaxed is just a reflection of the difference between the 2 groups in wealth, healthcare, education etc. I point out that the studies used a statistical technique for controlling for these differences. Using regression to separate out the differences due to SES from difference in vax status isn’t hocus pocus bullshit, it’s a valid statistical technique.
So I don’t see why what I wrote and cited is not convincing. Remember that I’m not trying to make a case that everyone should get vaxed or boosted. I’m just refuting Berenson. And all the stuff I’m pointing out he’s smart enough to know perfectly well himself. He just knows his audience isn’t.
The other place where we part company a bit, is when you say the CDC sux, so no wonder people listen to Berenson. Yeah, well there’s a second reason people listen to Berenson: He’s out there doing his best to get their attention and to convince them. How about exuding a little disapproval for this asshole? Your failure to blast him is actually the least forgiving of the 3 remarks I got about Berenson on here. One person said, he’s making lots of money by lying — I *probably* wouldn’t do that in his place. (Probably? You’d consider it?) Somebody else said look what he’s been through — the NY Times ditched him unfairly [at some point in past — I don’t know the story] ”This was a NYT reporter with a strong career, who got kicked off of Twitter and the powers that be tried to silence. That he went overboard (in a way that was personally financially advantageous to him) is not commendable, but also not surprising and I have trouble condemning what he's doing now.” WTF? A problem condemning hiem? If he mailed head lice eggs to the NYT, or wrote a tell-all book about them, even a dishonest one, I’d still think he was kind of a jerk, but I wouldn’t think he’s awful. But giving misinformation last year, when getting vaxed still made a significant difference, really did contribute to more deaths. And what he’s doing now is also just evil. Pro-vax and anti-vax people hate each other and he’s keeping that going. What do you think is going to happen if some illness starts spreading that is way more dangerous than Covid ever was? And it’s not that unlikely, you know? We’re encroaching more and more on wildlife habitats, and so are at increased danger from animal pathogens. And then there’s antibiotic resistance. If some godawful thing with a 4% death rate for yougn people starts speading, the country will stay divided, people will not listen to the CDC et al, and things will go very badly. As I said, the CDC is an asshole, so people would mistrust it anyhow. But people like Berenson make their distrust far worse by claiming that some of the official truths that really are true are lies, and giving then the sense there’s an alternative leader: him.
And do you know about some of the people who used their smarts to help, and didn’t make a cent from what they did? There’s Aaron the Mask Nerd, an engineer who tested a bunch of masks and made YouTube of videos of his tests, explaining how masks work in the process. And Richard Corsi, air quality engineer, who developed an easy, cheap way to improvise a high-quality air purifier. Like Berenson and like most people, they too have been probably been treated badly by an employer, a teacher or a parent. Instead of protesting by getting rich off of lies, they protested against people being harmed by by spreading helpful information.
Alex Berenson made some wrong predictions early in the pandemic but he was banned from twitter saying that vaccines do not stop the spread of covid infection. This is not evil. The way he said it was inflammatory (saying these are not vaccines, as if the terminology matters) but it still was not evil. The proper response would be to agree with him – yes, that's right, the vaccines do not stop the spread of infection but they still can reduce disease harm. Our original message was wrong but because the vax group demonised him, he became a hero and that is equality the fault of the group who demonised him.
I looked what wikipedia says about him and there was a phrase that most experts disagree that covid vaccines have 50 times more adverse reactions than flu jabs. To me it again seems that "experts" are wrong. Not only my personal experience but the experience of most of my peers complain that they had strong reactions from covid vaccines whereas no reaction or very little reaction from other vaccines. What I understand is that in medicines we always have a wide safety margins, so 50 times more (actually the adverse reaction severity cannot be expressed in linear numbers) adverse reactions is still within permissible limits. Apparently covid vaccine efficiency was low therefore the manufacturers increased the dose to the maximum possible. And yet again by denying this we are pouring water on Berenson's story. He is wrong to exaggerate but people who deny things are equally bad. Not evil but bad.
The worst people in all this story are those who implemented vaccine mandates. They threw back our progress in vaccine coverage by 20 years at least. They are also not evil but really bad. I would say that targeting Berenson is like dunking on a 7′ hoop – easy target but it will only make him more money. Now, do that with implementers of vaccine mandates and you will have my respects.
It's quite possible that the studies have no funding bias or any other biases; and that those whose immune systems are at a low ebb for a variety of reasons are helped by the shot; and that those who are aged and going to die of the next unfamiliar bug that comes along are saved for a year.
But the main reason that the majority of people who don't want the jab don't want it is because of the potential harm. Most people don't get very ill with COVID if they are in good health. Therefore they have little to gain, and a lot to lose.
There are no long-term studies for obvious reasons. There is abundant evidence of enormous and unprecedented harm caused by these shots.
I cited 7 studies to support my statements. How about you cite some to support yours.
Good question. I'm on holiday with people at the moment, with just a phone, poor reception and little time; but I'll try and have a look in a week.
Presumably the only assertion of mine that needs citations is the "evidence of ... harm."
Most of the evidence is necessarily anecdotal, since you're not going to get funding. But I'll give it some thought.
A good place to start to get a feel is the "howbad" website. (HowBad IsMyBatch).
Max Read! Great blog, it’s full of good stuff.
Re: Berenson - I find his antivax stuff mediocre at best, but it's making him bank, so I kind of get it. His take on the media, however, I have found quite perceptive and interesting. The only place I heard it was the Grant William podcast (paywall), but he's probably said the same things elsewhere.
I read Berenson for a few months when he got on Substack. Some genuinely insightful stuff, but mostly on items where he pointed out potential flaws in the reasoning of others. Lots of establishment types made really bad decisions during the pandemic, and he was one of the first that was fighting that fight and pointing out the problems with the standard narratives. His own reasoning was often flawed as well, and he let implications taken to extremes cover a lot of ground in his arguments. I stopped reading it when I felt like I had heard enough of his takes to understand it, but got tired of lazy arguments that felt like "10% more people died in this study!" without controlling for factors like age or why they were in this study.
In his case he was *right* often enough while being told by all the *really important people* that he was as wrong as possible that his internal alignment mechanism broke. Maybe that's what happens with all conspiracy theorists. Having identified one or more truths that general society/the elites identify as lies, they no longer have a filter to keep good information in and bad information out.
But don’t you think losing your internal alignment under those circumstances is a sign of lack of inner strength and integrity? Yeah it’s disorienting, but hardly something like torture and brainwashing, which we really can’t reasonably expect anybody to hold up under After
all, that sort of thing happens to many people with novel or contrarian ideas, and not all
of them start
Pandering to the crowd that originally cheered their ideas. A version of it happened to Scott, and he didn’t lose track of who he is. If a 16 year old girl has a YouTube makeup video go viral I can understand her getting very confused about who and exactly how special she is. But a grown man? It’s lame.
I guess I agree that it's "lame" - which is why I stopped reading his page. I hope for better from people, but I find it difficult to be upset at them for having a less-than-ideal reaction to the kind of massive societal pressure put on them. This was a NYT reporter with a strong career, who got kicked off of Twitter and the powers that be tried to silence. It's amazing that he fought back, and praiseworthy that he continued to speak out even when billions or trillions of dollars worth of companies and governments tried to shut down the truth. That he went overboard (in a way that was personally financially advantageous to him) is not commendable, but also not surprising and I have trouble condemning what he's doing now.
Exactly this. The best way to counteract him would be to provide clear and easy to understand data about things that are going on. And yet, not many can do that. For example, what's going on with excess mortality right now?
Personally I am not very concerned about the current excess mortality because it is only moderately high, we don't understand well the reasons and I wasn't particularly concerned about excess mortality from covid because I considered this inevitable when a new virus could bring the mortality back to the level of 1980s (bad but not catastrophic).
But people who made this covid mortality such an issue that they introduced lockdowns, closed schools, prohibited travel and even going to the beach, need to explain why they are not concerned now. It is very upsetting to them but they will not respond to this but instead will only criticise Berenson for his exaggeration in vaccine harms.
But what do you mean when you say about Berenson’s anti-vax posts that you kind of get it? If you’d said you get it I wouldn’t have given it a second thought — it’s easy to understand somebody’s liking money. But is there some complication that brings on the “kind of”?
"Kind of" implies that I wouldn't necessarily make the same choice in his position, but I understand why he would.
> Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent.
It would be very interesting to see how this claim fits with the seemingly opposite claims in Vinay Prassad's book Malignant. Obviously, one possibility is that one or the other party is simply wrong. I'm wondering if there is a more subtle possibility where they are somehow talking about different (but compatible) things.
https://www.amazon.ca/Malignant-Policy-Evidence-People-Cancer/dp/1421437635
My money is on this paper just being wrong. I was unaware of this paper until reading this Substack post. It deserves a full refutation, which I am writing up and will post here when completed.
But in brief, this paper makes no sense at all. How can they claim credit for the ENTIRE survival benefit of a drug? The cost of running the phase 3 is not the entire cost of bringing the product to market. Not even close. If hundreds of people work to manufacture a custom tailored suit, the guy why does the final fitting and makes the last few adjustments can't calculate his productivity by dividing the time it took him to do that by the cost of the suit. That's basically what they're doing here.
I'll be very interested in your write up. The analysis does indeed sound fishy.
The vice justice idea isnt very well considered. Let me list just a few issues:
First, this just shifts who does the assassinating. It doesn't eliminate the incentives. If you want to affect the court balance you now assassinate an old justice on your side who has a young (or at least healthier) vice justice. But fine maybe that's less likely.
But it also creates some really nasty procedural problems. Say Roberts dies from a fall down the stairs in his home. Some republicans in Congress allege (as they are incentivized to do) it was actually his wife who pushed him. The DA investigates the case. What happens in the mean time? Does Biden get to appoint a justice in the year the DA spends investigating? Does that mean the DA has the power to remove that new justice by filling charges? What if they offer the wife a slap on the wrist in exchange for a confession? She might want the vice-justice to be appointed and agree. Or just think a small fine is worth avoiding the risk of trial (the DA/DOJ's political preferences might mean they play along). If you require a conviction what happens if they accept a plea?
Ok you say the vice-justice only takes over if the assassin is convicted. Fuck, now the assassin has a *quite strong* case that any jury who might convict him is invalid because they have interests in the outcome (eg whether abortion becomes legal, including for them, depends on their vote). Shit, who hears the appeal on that majorly important issue of law? SCOTUS? Which one?
What even counts as assassination? Is it any charge or murder? What if the justice is in one of those states with 3rd degree murder or with a weird definition of 2nd degree murder. Or overseas? Maybe you say it's federal law. But that's a huge problem bc if the murder didn't happen on us federal land (or other circs) the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction and it can't take on advisory cases. Who is the opposed party?
It would be a mess. And this doesn't even get into what happens with assisted suicide or a train crash where it's ruled to be some kind of murder on the grounds of delibrate indifference to safety. It adds more problems than it solves.
That is sound reasoning for why making it a law (or worse, an Amendment) would be a bad idea. The hypothetical "pact between the two major parties" (please hold your laughter till the end) would be more robust to that kind of thing: would a reasonable man consider it an assassination?
Yes, I totally agree a political pact would be a good idea.
Leave the decision of homicide up to the coroner. And it's in the interest of the judge to pick a replacement who isn't that much younger.
It works better if paired with the proposals floating around to appoint justices to fixed terms (most commonly, staggered 18-year terms so a seat falls vacant every two years). Fixed terms eliminates the need to limit the accession of vice-justices based on cause of death, since you could simply have the vice-justice serve out the balance of the original justice's term regardless of cause of death (or disability, resignation, or impeachment removal), just like the vice president serves out the rest of the president's term.
I'd also change the proposal so there's two or three vice justices (so there's spares, since 18 years is a long time), appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate at the same time as the main justice. And instead of sitting around waiting for the justice to die, the vice justices could "ride circuit" (serving as appeals court judges) like SCOTUS justices used to until the early 20th century, or they could act as permanent senior clerks for their respective justices, or both.
I agree with this but rather than creating a whole new position of vice-justice and worry about the incentives drift in a justice's views might create (eg consider Souter's shift to the left) how about we just let each justice designate another article 3 federal judge as their replacement in case of death? Once you have fixed 18 year terms there aren't really any issues with the replacement idea and this avoids exacerbating problems with senate confirmation etc while ensuring the backup is qualified and isn't twiddling their thumbs.
If it's a full position you'd have to have senate confirmation (don't want justice death to let the prez evade that) but since it would be both rarely used but symbolically important I fear it would frequently either be used by the president to appease the base with extreme canidates or held up by a senate for political reasons.
However, I think there are other problems with the fixed term idea. In particular, I think it's important that during the election there isn't any certainty the president will have some number of appointments. Because planning for someone's death is a little ghastly and it's uncertain it means the canidates can push off pressure to commit to certain appointments. I fear that with a fixed term the pressure to commit to using your appointment for some specific extreme judge to satisfy your base (the moderates tend to be less aware of these issues) would be too great.
That's why I still think it's probably better to skip this idea as a matter of law. However, it might be a nice idea for the parties to make a public political commitment to appointing a judge designated by the assassinated justice in case that happens thereby leaving the grey cases to the political process.
"it's important that during the election there isn't any certainty the president will have some number of appointments."
Completely agree. I support fixed nonrepeatable terms for SCOTUS justices, provided that:
(a) the term length is an odd number of years, and
(b) the term re-sets upon departure of a justice.
So if the term is say 15 years, then whenever a justice dies or retires the replacement is being appointed to a fresh single 15 year term. Hence it is always difficult to predict in advance how many justices a given president is likely to get to appoint, which is a good thing. We also stop having an open seat on the Court be viewed as a 40-year "lock-it-in" opportunity for a particular political party or ideology, which is an even better thing.
And I'd like the same concepts to be applied to service in the federal courts generally, for the same reasons. Something like a lifetime cap of 31 years' service as a federal judge across all levels of federal court including the SCOTUS.
But isn't the obvious move for presidents to all appoint justices young enough to serve out the full 15 (and the existence of a term limit will make retiring earlier less common)? That makes it predictable again.
From a theoretical POV we could solve it by saying that each justice serves ten years and then has some percent chance of involuntary retirement each subsequent year. However, I'm doubtful that such a probabilistic system would be very well recieved by the public.
I've been meaning to write this up, but the right thing to do is to give each justice a 4*9 = 36 year term, which passes on to the vice-justice (who can then name another vice justice) if the justice dies, and let each president nominate exactly one justice per term (and they _keep_ that nominating power even if they leave office without being able to get someone through the senate).
(I'm happy to answer questions about edge cases but please don't frame it the edge case as a dealbreaker just because I haven't written up what to do above unless you've thought in depth about how to fix it and there really isn't anything that could be done)
What about rather than letting the president choose the vice-justice let the justice do it themselves and change it so if their views evolve (Souter) they can change who they pick.
Also this avoids the problem of the fact that a president out of office won't necessarily have the negotiating position to get anything through the Senate and concerns that, knowing this, they might nominate someone to cause difficulties for their rival in the office now.
Tho personally I still think it's a mistake to make the appointments predictable as it will force presidential candidates to commit to extreme choices especially during the primaries.
Yeah, I think letting naming a vice justice be deferrable until needed is ideal.
I think it would make justices more extreme compared to pre-garland norms, but I think the equilibrium we’re moving towards will be much worse.
So why isn't letting the justice themselves designate a replacement (must be an existing federal judge so senate has already confirmed and no new confirmation will be required) in case of death or retirement strictly superior? Especially if they file that name in secret with the court and retain the ability to switch it?
I think that adding the clause “if the vice-justice is already a federal judge no confirmation is needed” is a good idea, I’ll have to think about edge cases though.
I definitely intended for the justice to be able to nominate and change their vice-justice, sorry if that was unclear.
Ohh, I see, I misunderstood the bit about the president keeping the power. I dunno if it would be good to do with the president but when it's the justice doing it their incentives are pretty much always to pick whoever they think is most likely to agree with them (the person who already made it through confirmation) so I think it would be a clear win.
Now that I understand your idea about letting the president keep the power, I don't necessarily think that's great. You already noted the issue with encouraging holding out but also they won't necessarily have the institutional power at that point and be out of the loop and I fear it might just be essentially passing power to the future senate majorities of their party (not totally but to a degree).
Also, I think it would basically mean lots of ex-presidents end up on the court (come-on Obama was a constitutional law prof of course he's jump at being on the court). I agree it might be better than the current system but I suspect we can do better.
I suggest letting the court itself confirm a nomination if no confirmation occurs after a year. The pressure on them to appear non-partisan would give the president an ability to appoint well-credentialed moderates.
Regarding presidents keeping the nominating power: is the idea that they keep that nomination in reserve until the Senate aligns with them? This will make the justices more extreme.
Edge cases are fun! President A ends his term without nominating. His vice-president B later becomes president. B is impeached and removed from office. A dies. B presumably loses his nominating power from his presidency, but does he still have it from his time as A's vice-president? If so, can B choose person C to transfer this power to without Senate approval?
If Senate approval is required to nominate an heir to nominating power, consider the following: A is president, and ends term without nominating. His vice-president B dies. Senate does not approve his nomination for "retired vice-president." A dies. Does D, the Speaker of the House at the end of A's presidency get this power? Do you need to keep track of the entire line of succession?
I agree it will make justices more extreme than the pre-Garland norms but I honestly think it will be less extreme than the norms we’re quickly heading towards.
The operationalization I was imagining was that each president would hold the power of their nomination until they died or were impeached. If they were impeached or died in office, that nomination would pass to the whoever filled the presidency. After they left office, they could pass on that power to any individual, including via a will on death, who could continue to nominate whoever they wanted but still requiring senate confirmation. Any Justice could nominate their successor, or leave it blank and pass on the power to nominate their successor to anyone they wanted.
“Power to nominate” would just be an abstract property that could be transferred using normal property law. This would be mostly unabusable, though, because the senate would still have to confirm the nominee, either from someone who inherited the right from the president, or from a justice who died before nominating a successor.
At this point, I'm wondering if Scott ever sleeps or seeps.
If you prick him, does he not seep?
Re: gay soccer players isn't an obvious explanation that a combination of homophobia, fear or homophobia and desire to fit it with what is seen as high status by those you want to date all discourage young gay men from going into soccer. Or that either the sex or the homophobia distracts them at a key stage in their career?
This was my thought as well. It struck me as a bit of a juvenile argument that the only possible reason for gay men not participating in sports at the same rate as their straight peers would be some trait related to their gayness, rather than the explicit homophobia that pervades much male social interaction, especially among youth.
Yeah, that does sound a bit stereotypical.
But you'd need to think football was really exceptionally homophobic for the numbers to be that low.
In general, professional athletes are hyper selected for genetic traits, and my impression is that being gay and being interested in sports (especially team sports) both have significant biological components. So my prior lines up with Scott's.
Not sure that Scott shares your priors. He is curious and not sure this far-right blogger got it right. Fact: German pro-soccer has the same situation ( the one coming out after retirement: Thomas Hitzelsperger ). BUT: There are many gay non-pro soccer-players in Germany. Having gay-only teams. Which leaves ample room for the more lefty theory: if at 12 you are the only "am I gay?!"boy in a youth team of Bayern München, in a locker-room full of kinda homo-critical rough boys - you may rather change your sport than do a coming-out. There ARE many sport with a high rate of gay athletes. Just not team-sports.
English football is famously bigoted in all sorts of ways - that’s the sport that gave us hooligans where they even had to ban spectators at some games. If there are differences between football in England and in other countries, that would reinforce this interpretation.
Are there differences between football in England and in other countries in this respect?
Czech international Jakub Jankto just came out as gay. In local press it's described as an unique act of bravery in this sport. Reuters describes him as "the highest profile current male footballer to publicly come out as gay". Let's see how Czech fans react.
It seems to me that this would be worth looking into. I don’t know the details, but at least, a few decades ago, England football fans were considered the most destructive in Europe.
I looked into American sports out of curiosity.
As far as I can tell the NFL and NBA have had exactly one openly gay active player each. The MLB has had zero. With that in mind the English football numbers don't strike me as terribly surprising.
The NFL & NBA seem more highly monopolized, so I would expect them to have fewer players. On the other hand, I'm ignorant of the actual numbers for them vs the English Premier League.
It's common knowledge that back in the late 20th century English football hooligans were exceptionally violent, more violent than in other European countries; however, I sometimes across English people online who complain that today English football fan are among the best behaved in Europe, but they can hardly get rid of the bad reputation they gained in the past.
As an interesting data point, female professional handball players (in Norway at least) appear to be disproportionately gay.
Elite female athletes in most places are disproportionately gay. Probably have disproportionate testosterone/etc. would be my guess. Makes them better athletes, and makes them more into chicks.
In general, there's a sharp negative correlation between what percentage of a sport's women athletes and men athletes are homosexuals. For example, in the WNBA, currently 20% of the women basketball players are publicly out lesbians.
In the history of the NBA, in contrast only two players, both big men, have ever come out as gay. Former commissioner David Stern said in 2016 that he knew of two players in the history of the NBA -- Magic Johnson and an unnamed dead player -- who were HIV positive.
Modern slam-dunking basketball is a highly masculine sport -- that's a huge part of its appeal -- so it's hardly surprising that it appeals more to straight men than to gay men and more to lesbian women than to straight women.
In contrast, figure skating is a lovely feminine dance-like sport, so it appeals most to straight women and gay men. In the later 20th Century, many prominent male figure skaters battled HIV infections.
Golf is an interesting test case because it doesn't seem stereotypically macho. Pro golfers tend to be people who didn't much like team sports. Yet, participation is highly skewed by sexual orientation with lots of lesbians and few gays.
The number of gay acquaintances and friends I have who played organized sports well in high school or earlier is very high, and gay sports leagues in big cities can sometimes be hyper-competitive. But very few of these guys went on to play in college, and none professionally, not because they couldn’t (well, pro is a high bar, maybe none of them were that good, but a lot of them were good enough for college) but because the whole environment was absolutely miserable for them. The fact that there might be the reward of a sympathetic media portrayal years and years later (when your day-to-day is awful and fully of homophobia) is hardly much motivation.
Yeah I think self selection is a large factor.
A few years ago, a video game called Valorant was released that is incredibly similar to another game called Counterstrike. There are a ton of major differences between these two games; but the gameplay is essentially the same. Despite the gameplay being nearly identical, there is a staggering difference in the communities in regards to homophobia and sexism; which is greatly reflected in its player-base.
I've encountered more women playing Valorant in 1000 hours of gameplay than I did in over 3000 of Counter-Strike gameplay. A lot of factors probably contribute to this, but principally it's a result of the game moderation being performed by Riot; resulting in bans being handed out to racists/homophobes/sexists/etc; (compared to Valve's totally hands off approach).
You might site a few other reasons for this, such as age demographics(Valorant skews younger), or Counter-Strike's military aesthetic(definitely draws in more machismo), but I think the game moderation lends itself to a virtuous cycle where players feel less threatened for just being themselves.
Even still, women commonly report being harassed when using voice comms; especially in lower ranks where players skew younger and dumber. It's also my experience that lower rank games are more homophobic. Simply put, many players aren't making it past these ranks because they don't want to rise in a community that disrespects them. The prize at the end isn't worth it.
As an aside; I think straight people don't realize that coming out of the closet, even after retiring or in a good political climate, can be very difficult if you've lived a long time in the closet.
People get very good at hiding themselves from others, and it becomes so second nature that coming out doesn't even seem like a priority. I didn't really grok how much being closeted was effecting me until I came out. Why risk relationships with friends/family/ex-teammates/etc; if you don't have to, and don't grok the burden of it in the first place?
If nothing else, the facile nature of this explanation should encourage us to look further.
Yeah, especially given that the athletes in the article would have been in middleschool/highschool 15-50 years ago (including the stat on retired players).
Interesting thought. So, should we expect more exotic distributions (either very few gay people or very many gay people) in jobs for which people have to decide at a very young age? You can't suddenly decide with 18 that you want to go into sports, but you can still decide to become a lawyer or a programmer.
What other jobs are there where you have to make a strong commitment in your mid-teens or earlier? Musicians? What else?
Acting (in holywood, anyway, most start around then)
Additional consideration: the pool of young promising players that will go pro is very much self selected / class segregated. Basically: who starts to play all the time with other boys to pass the time? is homophobia more rampant there, to the point that a gay person trying to play would be bullied by everyone? Is there a strong desire of the gay community to escape from the estates (american: projects) and football is one of the things that get cut off in the process?
The average professional football player will have started out in a club academy at ages under 10; it's quite different from American sports where schools and universities take on a significant burden of producing professional players. I don't think it is realistic that kids of such young ages, almost certainly pre-puberty, are opting not to play football because of worries around sexual identity. The latter idea is more feasible
Kids may not worry about "sexual identity" as a political concept, but they very much are attuned to social norms and the probability of bullying. If you differ from the norm in any way, you tend top be picked on more or less violently: you choose your tribe accordingly...
You're probably correct, but this does assume that even a young child who may not have any awareness of their sexuality will already be subconsciously displaying behaviours similar to that sexuality. In such a case, we're probably going back to Sailer's original point that there is likely a genetic factor in play, since I couldn't imagine a young child would have picked up "gay" behaviours or the equivalent through socialization
I think it's more the case that gay kids stop playing soccer once they reach an age where they become aware of their sexuality. I.e., they should be just as likely to play soccer as any other 10-year, but then much more likely to drop out during their teenage years when bullying/homophobia/discomfort sharing showers with other boys/etc become material issues. Anecdotal of course, but I knew 2 kids growing up that fit exactly that pattern.
I find it unlikely that, on average, 10 year old boys who grow up to be gay are just as sports-crazed as 10 year old boys who grow up to be straight. I've known one exception and Nate Silver is another. But in general, there is a pretty high correlation between adult sexual orientation and pre-sexual interests and affects. E.g., a large percentage of lesbians were tomboys, while a large percentage of gay men didn't have as much conventional boyish interest in sports when they were 10 year olds.
This has all been when well documented in social science for generations.
Doesn't have to be genetic. See Greg Cochran's pathogenic theory. But sex-atypical behavior/interests in children is significantly predictive of homosexuality later in life.
Yeah I am always struck that the most "born gay" guy I know describes hiding during recess a kindergartener and 1st grader, not because he was afraid of bullying, but just because he disliked outdoor play so much. That really isn't normal behavior for a 6 year old.
I think the issue is that Sailer sees a difference in groups and asks "is there any reason not to assume it's mostly genetic?" and then goes on to explore genetic potential explanations if he can't find any reason not to.
But in this case, most of us can find plenty of other explanations that don't require any genetic cause, and don't see the need to go down the genetic rabbit hole.
I don't think that's actually accurate. When has he said he thinks anything related to homosexuality is genetic at all? And one of his most notorious claims was that New Orleans' "Let the good times roll" culture was bad for blacks, a cultural rather than genetic argument. Nowadays he's arguing that we've successfully gotten hispanic Americans to drive more safely over time, and that the current spike (which obviously was not timed to any change in genetics) in both homicides & traffic fatalities among black Americans should be a sign that we need to be similarly encouraging them to improve rather than treating them as eternally passive objects helpless in the face of white supremacy and with no agency of their own.
I've always been agnostic on the cause of male homosexuality. It's difficult (but perhaps not impossible) to construct a model in which exclusive male homosexuality is due to genetic heredity since you'd probably run out of genes for it due to the Darwinian process.
Instead, I've focused on collecting a lot of data and examples of correlates of sexual orientation, such as favorite sports. As you can see in this discussion, I know a lot more empirically on the topic than people who subscribe to the conventional wisdom about homophobia, subscribing to which tends to make them averse to learning about real world patterns because knowleged raises ... doubts.
For example, I'm guessing you aren't a huge sports fan who knows a ton of sports facts, are you? As a little boy, were you obsessed with learning data about sports? (For example, I can vaguely recall Brooks Robinson's 1964 batting average (.317, IIRC) from a book on baseball heroes I read in 1965 when I was 6.) Or did thinking about sports always seem kind of unappealing to you compared to thinking about other subjects?
Granted, the correlation between a boyhood interest in thinking hard about sports facts and adult sexual orientation isn't 1.0: e.g., Nate Silver is an outstanding baseball stats analyst. But, it's pretty high.
I actually do think the point about team vs individual sports weigh a bit more in favor of explaining it via homophobia (or a more generic punishment of being out-of-step). But I don't actually know how prevalent gay men are in the more individual sports. One might think that sprinting, weightlifting & boxing are an even more amplified version of some of the masculine traits relied upon for various team sports popular with men, but we really only pay attention to the first two during the Olympics and boxing seems to have plummeted in popularity well before my time.
They do start training with 10, but usually not in a club academy. Especially not soccer players who are already retired, for whom this was 20+ years ago.
Even if they start soccer training at the age of 10 or younger, it suffices if gay boys at the age of 14 start feeling uncomfortable among other nude boys in the shower. They might just drop out at this point.
By the way, there has been a massive shift in the last 10-20 years. Before that, it was socially unacceptable to refuse to shower after practice with the other boys. Nowadays, it's completely normal that boys opt out from that.
A way of cross-referencing this would be to look at other habitually bullied groups of young boys and see if their prevalence is also very low in pro football. Has anyone thought to ask players if they ever played a regular game of DnD?
Let me guess - you’re straight. Most gay people recognize that even before we understood anything about sexual orientation, there are social situations we felt uncomfortable with as children because of things that we later recognize as either internalized or external homophobia or awkwardness connected to sexuality.
Let me guess -- you were below average in sports obsession when you were a little boy.
Most sports appeal most to masculine personalities. Gay men tended to have been fairly effeminate boys not all that interested in rough sports.
Hmm well check your bias, I mean yeah there are twinks, but also bears. The two gay men I knew well at the UU church could have broken me in half. Buff! But total teddy bears.
There's not much correlation between physical type and sexual orientation among men (there is among women). But there is quite a bit of correlation with interests. Do these burly gay men watch ESPN SportsCenter religiously every night? I knew one who did, but he tended to be an exception and found it hard to find other gay men to talk to about sports.
Not to mention that English football is famous for its hooliganism, so that it could well be one of the most toxic feeling atmospheres for young gay people.
Sure, but the young hetero males love the hooliganism. My team against your team. Will the number of men going in person to watch this years super bowl be below the national average for being gay? I wouldn't be at all surprised if the percentage of hetero-men who like to watch aggressive team sports, is larger than the national average. Sure this could be a society thing, but it could also be a 'how we're wired' thing.
You answered another commentator with "let me guess - your strait" becuase it was obvious to you that they were operating off generic tropes about homosexuality rather than lived experience.
In the same vein. Let me guess your not from the UK.
I'm not saying hooliganism doesn't exist but it's exists far more in foreign peoples opinions about the UK than it does to average kids playing football
Good catch on me contesting one part of someone's lived experience while ignoring relevant gaps in my own lived experience.
Went looking for the gay/ sports comments: Sure lots of possible explanations, but this plays right into my new favorite meme; Humans self-domesticated themselves. This has all sorts of spandrels, (trait's dragged along with selection for less violence.) One of them is sexuality. Domesticated animals have more sex and diversity in sex. (needs citation.) Anyway I could totally believe there is some genetic component that somehow connects aggressive, (semi-violent) team sports and sexuality. This would be most easily seen at the tail end of the distribution. I think there are maybe one or two gay American football players. That's a really small percentage.
Right, most sports originated as tests of manliness, as preparation for war and hunt.
No no the obvious explanation is that men have an innate need to touch other men, and gay men get this through sex, but straight men need to play sports instead. 🧐
More seriously though, this is an interesting question, but it’s the same problem as “why are men like X and women are like Y?” The known sociological aspects are too large a confounder to be able to figure out any unknown biological aspects at this time.
I’m generally against overanalogizing between gender and sexuality. Gender is extremely correlated to a specific genetic expression that we understand very well. Studies looking for a link between genes and sexuality are all very 🤷♂️
I just mean that in both cases we know that there are huge “nurture” effects, and that makes it hard to confidently isolate “nature” effects. It could be that for gender 100% of differences are nature and for sexuality, 100% of differences are nurture, but it would be really hard to be confident about that as long as sexism and homophobia still exist.
Makes sense!
> Gender is extremely correlated to a specific genetic expression that we understand very well
Sex, not gender.
The vast majority of people are cis.
Gender, not gender identity. Gender is a social construct imposed by society:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison
Clothing relates to gender, but will vary from society to society without any genes playing any role in such variation.
Yes this should be a main theory to test, but the author isn't exactly a neutral source.
some data that would help to answer this better is to compare to other countries' pro soccer environments as well as data on age cohorts to see where the drop off is in gay players (this would be pretty hard to accurately collect though).
Yeah, sexuality studies really rely on subjects self-reporting, which can be inaccurate for all kinds of reasons.
In the case of Sailer's post, it's worth noting that he's actually just copy-pasting from one of his commenters.
Re the source: Yeah, sure, but just because it's Trump doesn't mean it's a stupid idea. Maybe Sailer (sp) is the only person who can say it.
Here is an additional data point to fit into these theories:
In women's soccer lesbians are hugely over-represented. Probably a majority, though I don't have real data to back that up.
Also, the WNBA.
Yeah, so the self domestication idea would maybe say something like this... The evolutionary pathway to less violence, involves scrambling of the sexual response, men become more female. (And maybe female gets more male? IDK) There is also a tendency to stay younger and more playful, with less aggression selection. It's complicated.
*I need to add that "the goodness paradox" identifies two types of violence, within group and against the other (not in your group) and we've only been selected for less within group violence. Love thy neighbor, but kill that other tribe over there.
And women's golf and tennis. E.g., among the All-Time Greats, Serena is straight but Billie-Jean King and Martina Navratilova are lesbians.
Other sports aren't so tilted toward lesbians: e.g., in America volleyball gets more tall pretty straight girls while basketball gets more tall homely lesbian girls.
I have a vague impression that women's golf is less lesbian than in the past.
Not counting the huge number of South Korean lady golfers as opaque for me to guess about, the last time I went to an LPGA tournament, a lot of the American women golfers looked like the attractive and athletic daughters of business executives and athletes, daughters who have a really good relationship with their dads: e.g., a lot seemed to have their fathers caddying for them. These silver-haired alpha males carrying the bag probably would have devoted themselves to their son's sports careers in the past, but with smaller family sizes and more emphasis on female sports today, they are now more likely to push their daughters into their favorite sports, such as golf.
OK are you interested in pushing peoples buttons? Or in having a conversation with them? It seems like the former. (pretty straight and homely lesbian seems totally unnecessary.) I guess I'm done.
This is my own uninformed speculation. Note: If you can't think in terms of overlapping bell curves, this is going to seem nuts. Just keep in mind that if I say group X is more inclined to Z than group Y, I'm talking about averages--two bell curves, with X's mean shifted to the right of Y's group.
a. Men tend to be more visually driven than women in term of attraction. You can see this in terms of men being overall more focused on physical attractiveness vs other attributes of potential mates vs women, men consuming a lot more visual porn (whereas women tend to consume more written porn), etc.
b. Straight men and lesbians tend to be less focused on their own physical attractiveness than straight women and gay men. This might just be cultural, but it sure seems to be true in US culture.
These two fit together pretty well, to my mind. Straight women and gay men are trying to appeal to potential mates who are on average pretty visually focused, and so they tend to worry about their appearance a lot. Lesbians and straight men are trying to appeal to potetial mates who are on average less visually focused, so they tend to worry about their appearance less.
Right.
For example, golf isn't a good sport for keeping the pounds off, which is one reason it appeals more to straight men and lesbians than to gay men and straight women, who tend to be more interested in types of exercise that are better for their appearance than golf.
Softball is another lesbian favorite that's not ideal for losing weight.
Well that could be part of it. I am struck by two things on the topic. 1) that youth sports was a bastion of homophobia deep into the 90s and early 00s in a way that it was not for say racism. Lots of casual homophobia, almost no casual racism. I would imagine that drives out a lot of potential gay players (of which there are probably few to start with).
2) The gay men I know come in a few main "categories". More effeminate/artisty types who generally HATE sports and were younger brothers to highly traditionally successful older brothers. Then there are your more manly rough and tumble "bears", but also not super into athletics, generally something academic/cultural. Then there are your fitness and fashion obsessives, and only among them are there many athletes or people interested in team sports.
Anyway, I do not think there just is much overlap between "type of person who becomes professional athlete", and "type of person who ends up gay". In particular to the extent homosexuality is environmental (at least some), the exact early athletic and social/romantic success which being an elite athlete conveys would work against some of the common vectors for homosexuality.
Certainly some portion of gay people are "born gay", but some portion are not.
Have you read "The goodness paradox"? It's not a new idea.
on 1) why does a culture have to be racist and homophobic at the same time? Team sports were deeply racists for a long long time, but that war was fought (and largely won) in the 50s and 60s. Although many would say the relative lack of black NFL coaches or quarterbacks, for example, shows there is still racism (in the NHL it is definitely true).
on 2) do you really think starting off with "this group of people only come in two types" is a way to refute bigotry against that group?
Also, to 1) there is racism in soccer, maybe just not among the players. Hockey has similar issues with racism and homophobia
Hmm as a hetero-male who played a lot of team sports in my younger days. If some guy was good I'd want him on my team. Then again hetero-male seems to describe all the guys I played with. Why do you reject some genetic piece to this puzzle?
Oops, thanks I'm going to edit my comments so that it reads correctly
>If some guy was good I'd want him on my team.
Thats not what its about though. If you are a closeted gay player and your team mates have a culture that is not welcoming to gays you are either not going to come out or going to stop playing.
>Why do you reject some genetic piece to this puzzle?
I dont, but i think there are pretty clear cultural explanations that need to be handled first. I also havent seen any evidence of genes related to homosexuality impacting interest in sports or impacting athletic ability.
Hmm OK I'm just not sure the culture is before the nature. Women are much more interesting in doing people things, and guys are into things. So more male engineers and more women in nursing and teaching kids. I don't see why sports and sexual orientation can't follow the same trend. I'm also guessing the culture (in team sports) is better now. My sons got a friend who is playing sports at the college level, I can ask him the next time I see him...(if I remember) My guess is he'll have the same opinion as me, if the guy is good I want him on my team, and we'll try to be a sensitive as young men can be... which is in general not all that sensitive. But if we embrace him as a teammate maybe that will be enough.
My goal wasn’t “refuting bigotry”, it was getting at the truth. And I used the facts at had at hand…my personal experiences.
As for the NFL points, those are just silly. Blacks aren’t underrepresented as coaches or QBs compared to the general population. There is no problem to solve. They are overrepresented at positions that demand extreme athleticism, because blacks are disproportionately extremely good athletes. Why should the percentage of black coaches match the racial breakdown of people interested in football strategy and not the racial breakdown of people who can run very quickly at “x” SD above average?
It’s just people looking for shot to be mad about.
Ditto hockey, which is not any more racist than any other walk of life. Sure people say worse shot to each other, I don’t know if you have noticed, but they also punch each other and try to hurt each other. Indexed to the environment it is the racism is pretty non-existent. Yes there are incidents, there are also incidents in accounting, or retail.
Black NFL head coaches are underrepresented relative to the number of NFL players that are black. This is such an established fact that the NFL has a rule that teams have to interview at least one black candidate for head coach openings (though this isn't really a solution. Brian Flores has a lawsuit with allegations of sham interviews).
Black quarterbacks were, until very recently, pigeonholed into being running quarterbacks.
You can read more about racism in hockey from the players themselves: https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/34738789/players-want-nhl-increase-diversity-anti-racism-efforts
Its hardly "non-existent". We should be against racism or bigotry anywhere it takes place, whether its happening at a "normal" level or not.
>Black NFL head coaches are underrepresented relative to the number of NFL players that are black. This is such an established fact that the NFL has a rule that teams have to interview at least one black candidate for head coach openings (though this isn't really a solution. Brian Flores has a lawsuit with allegations of sham interviews).
Why would coaches reflect the demographics of players and not the demographics or football players at all levels (which are much more white). Or the demographics of people who are super into football (which basically just match male demographics).
>Black quarterbacks were, until very recently, pigeonholed into being running quarterbacks.
Or that was where their skill set was? not every difference between racial outcome sis racism. Is it also racism that holds back South Asian sprinters and marathoners, or Scandinavia gymnasts?
Warren Moon was a very successful black passing QB 30 years ago. Most of the black QBS good enough to get into the NFL since that time were disproportionately excellent runner sand so used in that way. there are a few outliers like Leftwich, but if you look, he was mostly used exactly for his actual skills, not for his "assumed skills".
But whatever it is clear you are just drinking the traditional narrative Kool-Aid and not actually spending any time critically thinking about these issues, so have a nice day.
As direct support of this, here is an article (one of many many many) about the problem of homophobia in hockey (both North American and European): https://www.sportsnet.ca/nhl/longform/hockeys-homophobic-language-problem-putting-kids-lives-risk/
I read all that, in the end it was a positive story. We are changing. I'm reminded of Grant Fuhr who played for my Sabres ~1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Fuhr. Read about the Transit Valley Country Club. Things get better.
If homophobia is to blame for the dearth of gay men in team sports, why do female sports, especially team sports, tend to be disproportionately lesbian? Heterophobia? I think homophobia and heterophobia are at best secondary effects. The real cause is probably that lesbians are, on average, more masculine (physically and psychologically) than straight women, while gay men are less masculine than straight men. The mean differences don't have to be large for differences at the extreme (i.e. elite sports) to be large.
I would think because sports are coded male and so is being lesbian, so homophobia would be a big issue in men's sports, and would likely be a non-issue in women's sports. As you note, you don't need much of an effect size of getting people do participate a little bit less or a little bit more to have a huge effect at the elite level.
It's quite plausible that there is some genetic factor. But the original claim seemed to be that no one could think of any possible explanation *other* than genetics (because no one comes out after being done with their career either) and that just seems wrong.
> As you note, you don't need much of an effect size of getting people do participate a little bit less or a little bit more to have a huge effect at the elite level.
I'm not sure about this. I think you might be confusing mean with variance.
To use some example numbers, say you have 1000 people, and you're looking to make a league out of the top 10% of them. For simplicity, we'll say 100 of the people are gay and 20% of them leave due to homophobia. Now 80 out of 980 potential league candidates are gay. The league should end up with 8.2% (80/980) of its members being gay, compared to 10% if there were no homophobia. Numbers also work out the same if they drop out after being selected. It's proportional. X% dropping out due to homophobia just means X% fewer in the league.
And most of the evidence suggests that gay men are underrepresented in major sports not by 20% but by 80% or 90%.
The most straightforward explanation is that gay men tend to prefer arts to sports. A gay Lionel Messi, with his incredible eye-foot coordination, would be a professional dancer instead of a soccer player.
For example, around 1990 I can recall hearing on the news in Chicago that the city's first gay sports bar was opening up. Chicago had a huge number of gay bars, but until then no sports bars for gay men. The entrepreneur was interviewed and said he was confident that in a city like Chicago, with its huge gay population, there were enough gay men who liked watching sports on TV while flirting with other men who like watching the game to make his bar successful. (I never heard whether he turned out to be right or not.)
What gay men really like to do is dance (as do straight women). For example, the circuit party circuit is so popular among gay men that it helped spread monkeypox last year.
In contrast, there are now only about 20 lesbian bars still open in the entire United States. Nowadays, they can flirt online. So they don't have much reason to get together anymore because, like straight men, lesbians aren't all that enthusiastic about dancing.
Huh again you have opinions that come across as biased. Got any data for the dance comment. I'm a hetero guy who loves dancing, of the other men I know who like dancing none of them are gay. The people I know who like dancing are mostly those who are good at it. And yeah in general more women will get up and dance with me.
"of the other men I know who like dancing none of them are gay"
This means little; the great majority of men are straight.
Sexual orientation and professional dance
J. Michael Bailey*, Michael Oberschneider
Abstract
The stereotypical professional male dancer is a gay man. However, little if any systematic research has investigated the validity of this stereotype, much less the reasons why male sexual orientation would be associated with interest in dance. We interviewed 136 professional dancers about the prevalence of homosexuality among dancers, the dancers' own sexual development, and relationships between dancers of different sexual orientations. Dancers estimated that over half of male dancers are gay, but that only a small minority of female dancers are lesbian. Gay men recalled more intense early interest in dance compared to heterosexual men and women, and were more feminine as boys than were heterosexual men. Gay men's homosexual feelings typically preceded their dance experience, and only one gay man felt that his dance experiences may have influenced his sexual orientation. Heterosexual men voiced some mild complaints about gay male dancers, but these were balanced by positive sentiments.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)433-444
Number of pages12
JournalArchives of Sexual Behavior
Volume26
Issue number4
StatePublished - 1997
Anything that makes you a little bit less interested at an early age will compound because of the multiple layers of selection and practice that go on.
You have a model in which little boys who grow up to be gay want just as much to be football stars as little boys who grow up to be straight, but society chips away at their progress and self-esteem.
Do you also have a model in which little boys who will grow up to be straight want to be Broadway musical stars just as much as little boys who will grow up to be gay, but the forces of heterophobia keep putting them down?
Do little girls who grow up to be lesbians want just as much to play the princess in a Disney Broadway musical, while little girls who grow up to be straight want just as much as the future lesbians to be professional golfers but the heterophobia of the golf world dissuades them while the homophobia of Broadway dissuades the future lesbians?
In some ways this is an Occam's Razor worldview: people of every sex and orientation are absolutely homogeneous except for their sex and orientation and the only thing that causes the patterns of disparity in interests is pervasive discrimination.
On the other hand, you could also call it Occam's Butterknife, since it's averse to noticing factual patterns of difference because knowing more about empirical reality leads to doubts about your Conventional Wisdom.
I don't think that's what Cornelius meant when they said, "The mean differences don't have to be large for differences at the extreme (i.e. elite sports) to be large."
I'll posit an opposite effect: the people who are the most talented and passionate at soccer are the least likely to leave for any reason. Meaning homophobia should have a smaller effect at the elite level.
Soccer is also very homosocial, and that may include attitudes towards homosexuality as a protective element: being close with your team-mates is not because you're sexually attracted to them.
It's also a working-class sport in its origins, so things like communal baths were carried over from manual working practices and domestic life, and the relative lack of money and expectations on the part of both players and managers for fancy facilities:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/gallery/2014/apr/09/memory-lane-football-communal-bath-pictures-gallery
Arsenal was unusual in the 1930s for the luxury of its facilities due to the manager, Herbert Chapman, taking the opportunity to advertise that this club had big ambitions and was a serious enterprise:
https://arsenal.vitalfootball.co.uk/the-marble-halls/
"The construction of the East Stand went enormously over budget, finally costing a cool £130,000, mainly due to the eye catching cream facade, with Arsenal Stadium etched onto the front in brilliant blood red, with cannon beneath. No expense was spared on the stand, which also held the dressing rooms, the club offices, the main entrance, as well as the quite unheard of idea to house match day entertainment facilities, such as a restaurant and cocktail bar which kept the likes of Buster Keaton coming back in the 1930s. The Arsenal crest was omnipresent; embossed onto napkins in the restaurant, the Arsenal A in its hexagonal framing formed the door handle and of course, was etched into the marble floors. (Which were not actually marble, but terrazzo.) As a piece of corporate branding, it echoed through the ages and never dated. The entrance was flanked by art deco lamp standards and approached by steep steps. To add even further to the sense of grandeur, Arsenal deployed a commissionaire at the entrance that doffed his cap at players from both the home and away sides upon their ascent into the building. On the inside, the terrazzo floors were overlooked ominously by the bronze bust of Herbert Chapman, carved by top contemporary sculptor Jacob Epstein. Likewise the dressing rooms cemented the palatial standards, with heated floors and marble baths in both dressing rooms. Luxury that was unheard of in depression era England. Middlesbrough striker from the 30s Wilf Minion marvelled, “The dressing rooms were beautiful with marble baths and heated floors. It said so much for the Arsenal that they catered for your every need. They had the class to treat opponents as equals.”
https://www.gettyimages.dk/detail/news-photo/the-marble-halls-arsenal-stadium-highbury-before-the-news-photo/1220543882
As for the homosocial element, people like to compile "bromance" videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_pkMt9tg6o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjHFOKniTfA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LuVsKBL1Y
Also, because homophobia (at least in the modern west) just isn't as hostile to lesbians. Add to this the underlying difference in the ways men and women behave (especially in locker rooms) and i don't think the difference is that surprising.
I remember back in middle school boys being routinely taunted by other boys about being gay and their manliness challenged with regard to it especially in sports. I never saw girls doing anything similar at even close to the same level of intensity (at worst maybe someone would be called a lesbian as a kind of version of you're weird and different not an issue itself).
Also, I guess I'm not sure I'm understanding how your explanation works. Sure, in some ways gay guys are less masculine and lesbians more (most obviously in the wanting to fuck girls aspect). I even agree this may cause them to exaggerate, or at least be less averse to, sex atypical behavior and this may push gay men to feel less pressure to be traditionally masculine by pushing to succeed at sports and lesbians to be marginally more likely to focus on sports than other women. However, I don't think this really differs from my original explanation except perhaps in degree (it's a reaction to feeling less pressure to succeed at the std cultural expectations or more to differentiate).
But if you mean it's some kind of physical effect of gay men being more feminine in physique or something then I don't really see the evidence or relation to being more feminine in certain social aspects (and who u want to screw).
I mean when thd social pressure goes the other way (eg how buff/fit one is) the relationship goes the other way (gay men tend to be more buff and spend more time working out than straight guys..bc of obv incentives).
Here's the opening to my 1994 article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" in "National Review:"
A warm Saturday afternoon in late May brings all of Chicago to the lakefront. In the Wrigleyville section of Lincoln Park, softball teams with names like “We Are Everywhere” and “The 10 Percenters” compete with an intensity that could shame the Cubs. Girded for battle with sliding pads, batting gloves, and taped ankles, the short-haired women slash extra-base hits, turn the double play, and hit the cutoff woman with a practiced efficiency that arouses admiring shouts from the women spectators.
Meanwhile, on a grassy lakeside bluff a few blocks to the south, the men of the New Town neighborhood bask, golden, in the sun. If ever a rogue urge to strike a ball with a stick is felt by any of the elegantly sprawled multitude, it is quickly subdued. This absence of athletic strife is certainly not the result of any lack of muscle tone: many have clearly spent the dark months in thrall to SoloFlex and StairMaster. But now, the sun is shining and the men are content for their sculpted bodies to be rather than to do.
What are we to make of all this? What does it say about human nature that so many enthusiasms of the average lesbian and the average gay man diverge so strikingly? What broader lessons about current social issues can we learn from this contrariness of their tendencies, this dissimilarity of lesbian and gay passions that has been dimly observable in many cultures and ages, but that now in the wide open, self-fulfillment obsessed America of the 1990s is unmistakable?
Possibly because sports is a culture that lets lesbians get together outside of a 'gay ghetto' and find like-minded others? And that weightlifting seems to be more masculine than feminine; if a gay man wants to get fit and buff for personal aesthetic preference and to attract other men, he hits the gym. If a lesbian wants to get fit and buff, she engages in sports like field hockey or tennis or whatever.
I think there may be a lot of work being done by historical attitudes, as well; the stereotype for the 'mannish' games mistress must have been there for a reason. Women who didn't have traditionally feminine interests were able to engage in socially sanctioned activities like sports, even if there was the concurrent attitude about not wanting to be too unfeminine. You're not interested in guys, you are interested in girls, and maybe you're also butch - sports is an acceptable way to indulge in all that.
The individuals who make it all the way to play professional sports tend to be really interested in their sport for its own sake. To them, it's not just a big cover story for their social/sexual ambitions. Instead, they really do like hitting a ball with a stick or whatever it is their sport requires.
For example, the ultra-effeminate retired American male figure skater Johnny Weir really and truly knows a huge amount about figure skating, which whatever you think of his tendency to dress up like, say, Princess Leia on camera, makes him an outstandingly insightful TV broadcast analyst of his sport.
Similarly, retired NFL quarterback Tony Romo turned broadcaster can often predict the next play because he is obsessed with football. (Although he may be presently even more obsessed with golf: he wants to win the US Amateur golf championship.)
Could we socially construct a world in which little Johnny Weir grows up to be a star quarterback and dedicated golfer, and in which little Tony Romo grows up to be a star figure skater?
Perhaps, but it would have to be totalitarian beyond the nightmares of Huxley, Orwell, and Vonnegut.
Oh sure, professional sports people are devoted to their sports, that's why they put themselves through so much to succeed.
But if you're a 'masculine' woman in the 20th century, being a sporty type is a socially acceptable way of building muscles and hanging out around other women and not being involved with traditionally 'feminine' hobbies or occupations. The perpetually single Miss Jones who teaches gym classes at the local girls' school and spends all her time with gal-pals is perhaps a little eccentric, but any intimations about her sexual orientation can be ignored or not discussed, because there's a social role for her to fit in.
It's when Miss Jones cuts her hair short and wears 'male' attire and goes in for body-building and showing off her muscles by lying around in the sun (like the gay men in the example) that rouses comment and gossip. Miss Jones who has short hair and a suntan and muscles from playing sports in the open air is another matter, because sports are healthy and character-building and involve team spirit and co-operation and other good things, so that's different. Some of those women are certainly going to be interested in sports at a professional level as well.
It's just a suggestion, anyway.
The WNBA is pretty notorious for heterophobia:
The WNBA’s lesbian culture broke my spirit: Candice Wiggins
A top American player has revealed the “harmful” bullying she suffered for being one of the few heterosexual players in the WNBA.
Mark W. Sanchez
2 min read
March 5, 2021 - 10:23AM
Candice Wiggins was a college basketball star, the third pick of the 2008 WNBA draft and a 2011 champion. And at the mountaintop of her basketball career, her sexuality marred the moment.
There is a “very, very harmful” culture running throughout the WNBA, she says, which saw her get bullied during her eight-year career because she is heterosexual.
Ironically, Candice Wiggins' dad Alan Wiggins was one of two Major League Baseball players known to have died of AIDS. The other, Glenn Burke, was gay, while Alan Wiggins was a heroin user.
How is that ironic? It seems orthogonal. Both heroin and heterosexual start with "h"?
AIDS deaths are the best empirical data points we have for how common were male homosexuals in 1970s-1980s professions like figure skater or baseball players.
But AIDS deaths tended to be caused by the Four H's: homosexuals, hemophiliacs and others needing transfusions (like tennis great Arthur Ashe and Isaac Asimov), Haitians, and heroin junkies. So each data point needs investigation.
Of the two big league baseball players who died of AIDS, Glenn Burke was a homosexual and Alan Wiggins was a heroin user.
Not likely. Lots of today's professional athletes are born after 2000, for one thing. The stigma isn't there for them in the same way. Seems unlikely that NO ONE comes out and into all the accolades and celebration.
There are just a select few out of the thousands of current and former NFL and NBA players who have come out. Contrast with the WNBA and other women's sports, where players have complained about the oppressive culture and expectation of lesbianism and other explanations start to make more sense.
First, different cultures change at different rates and both the lockeroom culture of sports itself and those most likely to go into it tend to be lagging. And doesn't the second half of your claim push against your first. That claim seems to document a cultural difference in attitudes to homosexuality in female lockerrooms from the wider world making it hard to claim that there can't be a similar difference in the other direction for men.
>First, different cultures change at different rates and both the lockeroom culture of sports itself and those most likely to go into it tend to be lagging.
Sure, but homophobia has been actively verboten much longer than they've been adults (in the US). There are still some homophobes and stigma, but you're positing a huge amount to explain why only 1 to 2 total out of thousands of players have come out of the closet despite the other incentives. The simpler explanation that rates of homosexuality are just less common in male athletes in team sports. Base rates can differ. Do you think that fashion design or figure skating is actually proportional and that there are a lot of straight male fashion designers and skaters that are afraid to come out as heterosexual?
Meanwhile...
The lesbian WNBA culture is downstream of the other factors that make the 2-5% of women who are lesbians the majority (or close to) of WNBA players. How else could that culture become dominant in the first place?
If Lionel Messi had been gay, he'd probably be a famous dancer instead of a famous soccer player.
Back in the 1970s-80s, one of the top Broadway tap dancers was Tommy Tune, who is 6'6". People always asked him why, with his superb coordination, he wasn't a basketball player. He said he always liked dancing more. To him, he said, a Broadway dressing room full of chorus boys getting ready for the big show was where he liked to be. It was his locker room, he said.
It's not as if the effeminate Tommy Tune had wanted to be a slam-dunking basketball star only to have homophobia derail his sports career. He was ecstatic that he was a star song and dance man on Broadway, exactly what he'd always wanted to be.
You don't need homophobic stigma to make gay teenagers uncomfortable with being on sports teams. Anything that makes people uncomfortable about being naked around people of the same sex will drive those people away from sports - and if men's locker room behavior and women's locker room behavior are different enough, then it's very plausible that this behavior would be a complete explanation for the differences. (It's also very plausible that there are other factors, but the original post seemed to be claiming that there couldn't be *any* behavioral factor and it had to be about a connection to actual athletic ability.)
Locker room behavior could be a complete explanation? You have a lot of improbability to explain, especially positing hugely opposite effects in male and female athletes just-so.
I personally think interest and personality are the big differentiating factors rather than general athleticism.
Any monocausal factor has just as much of a just-so story behind it, whether biological or social. Both of these are useful null hypotheses - not so that we actually believe that one of them fully explains it, but rather that if someone claims to have a better explanation, they need to do at least *some* work to *show* that it performs better than one or both of these.
"Getting naked in the locker room exerts a huge effect on men and women's decision to play and succeed in pro sports, and this effect is reversed in men and women" doesn't seem remotely as plausible as "people with different sexual orientations have different interests at large that play into pursuit of hobbies and profession", but I don't feel like doing any more work to explain why.
What about golf?
Showering with your team is not a big part of golf culture. It's an individual sport. Most players drive to the golf course in the clothes they'll wear when they are playing. All you have to do in the locker room is change your shoes.
And yet, golf is highly popular among lesbians and vanishingly rare among gay men.
Why? My best guess is that the urge to hit a ball with a stick is largely a masculine urge. And golf seems to be a sort of white collar hunting for bourgeois guys and lesbians who are a little too genteel for blood sports: you wander around a complex landscape holding a weapon and occasionally taking careful aim. Your hope is to shoot a birdie, but not literally.
We have objective data on the prevalence of male homosexuality in different sports from the HIV rates in the 1980s and early 1990s.
For example, men's figure skating was notoriously ravaged by AIDS, with, among quite a few others, both men's gold medalists at 1970s Olympics dying of AIDS. In men's diving, the most famous American diver of all time, Greg Louganis, was HIV positive but, fortunately, didn't die.
Both figure skating and diving are dance-like sports appealing to less masculine males. Not surprisingly, quite a few famous male dancers died of AIDS: e.g., Rudolf Nureyev, Robert Joffrey, Alvin Ailey, and Michael Bennett ("A Chorus Line").
In contrast, I've never heard of professional golfer who was HIV positive or who appeared to die of AIDS. This is striking because golf isn't a macho contact team sport, but instead is a country club individual non-contact sport like tennis or diving.
But golf appeals far more to homosexual women than to homosexual men. For example, the Dinah Shore LPGA championship in Palm Springs each spring is known as the national lesbian spring break because of the thousands of lesbians who fly in for it. In contrast, gay men who are dedicated golfers are very rare. I've scoured lists of entertain celebrities who golf. Remarkably few gay men are on those lists: singer Johnny Mathis is one.
Among basketball players, the great Magic Johnson was HIV positive, which he asserted he must have caught heterosexually. Years later, the L.A. Times sports editor admitted that the newspaper was close to running an investigative report documenting that Magic was playing for both teams. But then he announced his HIV status, so they spiked the story rather than prove the popular man saint a liar.
NBA commissioner David Stern said in 2016 that he knew of one other NBA player besides Magic who contracted HIV.
Huh, OK I'm going to say golf is a group game. It's not a team game, but it's still a group game and so somehow closer to a team sport. (I never liked golf, the bags were too heavy for me.)
Elite football/soccer players don't just require excellent genetics and work ethic, they also have to make the choice to dedicate themselves to football almost full-time from from their early teens if not earlier (e.g. academy players at age 10 or so). So both actual homophobia and perceived/potential homophobia are very big reasons for someone with talent to choose not to go down an elite pathway in favour of playing less seriously or pursuing another sport.
There are more gay American football players than soccer players it seems, so I'm not sure homophobia of the sort you're describing fits.
However, soccer is an international sport, one where football players move to play for other countries, or where teams travel to other countries to play, and not all countries are all that friendly towards gay people. It's still illegal in Qatar, for instance, which hosted the recent world cup. So there's danger to being openly gay in this sport if you're playing at that level.
I don't know of any gay American footballers. At least in the NFL.
https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/carl-nassib-1st-gay-active-nfl-player/story?id=78409716
Thanks. That's a nice story and about what I'd expect.
American football, like basketball, draws heavily from men at the far right edge of the size bell curve. Assuming sexual orientation is uncorrelated with height and weight, then gays are more likely to be found among the largest athletes rather than among the average size guys who love the sport most ardently. For example, the first out of the closet NBA player, John Amaechi, was 6'10 and 270. He got paid millions because of his body but he never liked basketball.
In contrast, soccer players can be of most any size so the competition is especially fierce. And the basic genetic skill -- agile feet -- is also ideal for becoming a professional dancer. So the average height straight guys with great footwork who want to win go into soccer and the average height gay guys with great footwork go into dance. Everybody is happy.
Sounds way too speculative, because you're assuming gay people would be just as happy dancing as playing soccer of they grew up in a soccer obsessed culture, and I don't see why that should follow. Seems much more likely that most gay people playing soccer are just keeping their sexual orientation secret because it would either place their life in danger, or at the very least threaten their international career.
Don’t want to blanket defend the AEA but it does seem at least possible to me that there’s not much juice left to squeeze from inflation and other traditional economic topics (or at least that the juice has become harder to squeeze). It’s worth noting that “woke” economics has produced useful work like Chetty’s very clever research on economic mobility by zip code (and the disproportionate effect it has on men). As far as I can tell, global warming therapy has just produced a bunch of very sad teens and large insurance bills.
Do you think that racism and global warming have nothing to do with economics?
I'm a labor economist. Differences in earnings by gender and race are substantial and persistent. Who should study or understand that other than labor economists? Why would the people who try to understand earnings and unemployment ignore key determinants of earnings and unemployment?
"Externalities" and regulation of externalities have been central to discussions of economics for pretty much the whole history of the field. Why wouldn't economists be involved in talking about how to manage the externalities produced by carbon emissions? Does it seem wise for scholarly discussion of environmental issues to not involve people who do cost-benefit analysis, or who think about incentives?
Economists typically try to answer factual questions about social questions, particularly those around the production and distribution of goods and services. There are striking, persistent racial differences in occupations, earnings, asset ownership, neighborhood and health (among other things). If those differences reduce to class differences, they do so in a way that is not observable in data--it's pretty much impossible to explain racial differences in income, education, health, wealth, incarceration, occupation, etc. with observed differences in family background (as an example: https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/race/).
You might be of the opinion that these racial differences aren't interesting or aren't worth understanding. I am of the opinion that they are interesting and are worth understanding, and that careful, quantitative, analytical research can help shed light on these differences, and so some of my work focuses on understanding them.
Yeah, especially for a conference paper; if economics is anything like psychology, conferences are mostly places for low-level people (grad students, post-docs, associate professors) to trot out whatever they were doing personally in their office with no funding, so that they can add it as a line on their CV.
If you have something important and new to add to the discussion of inflation or GDP, you're probably a big established researcher or institute, and you're probably going directly to a prestigious journal.
In the hard sciences, you would publish in a journal and then go to the conference to give your work additional exposure. (And also for the fun of going to a conference.)
Work that is eventually published in a journal (small or large) is very often presented at conferences when it is in the early stages. Preliminary results, discussions about new methodologies, etc.
Not a single paper that has come out of my lab in the 6 years I have been working here hasn't had some part of it presented at a conference before publication, including the nearly ten papers we expect to publish this year.
Economists hardly ever present published work at conferences. The idea is that the conference is a chance to get pushback and critique that improves the work.
I think one difference is that our work is rarely either clearly correct or clearly incorrect, so we spend much more time, both in our papers and in the discussion of the papers, defending the findings rather than exploring implications of the findings.
Yes, especially the AEA annual meeting. Historically, job interviews happen at the conference, so the people who can give talks are people who aren't interviewing or being interviewed--usually grad students and junior researchers.
The big-name people with huge papers also present them at conferences, but typically at more specialized, invite-only conferences or at seminar talks at other universities.
There's plenty of incremental work to do on inflation, but most of it's not super interesting because we basically understand how inflation works. We don't understand long-run economic growth at all, so the work there is going to be either very low-value or revolutionary.
Yeah, in general I would think that long-established topics are going to continue at a steady low pace with only tiny changes in response to external events, while topics that haven’t been traditional will be very sensitive to contemporary issues and will have booms and busts. It might be worth comparing the number of talks on economic implications of viruses and public health from 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, to see if there was a gigantic rise and then a pretty big fall.
Thank you for this. As an economist who focuses on "woke" subjects this really annoyed me--racial and gender inequality is a subject worthy of study within economics, and the economists who give talks on these subjects are doing economics in the talks! It's not the same thing as psychiatrists talking about climate change. Same with climate change--environmental econ is a real subject, and we should want economists thinking about regulation to reduce climate change, economic consequences of climate change, etc.
>racial and gender inequality is a subject worthy of study within economics
I think most sane people don't disagree with this at all. The problem is the perception (that seems at least a bit fair) that this is just about all academia is interested in anymore. I always love to tell jokes about how the bookstore at the local college bookstore has hundred's and hundreds of book on each of "Native American studies, and Africans American studies, and women's studies, and about 40 books on "physics". on the one hand physics classes generally assign fewer books, and there aren't as many kids in physics, and there is less need for different perspectives in physics because there is typically one correct perspective.
On the other hand it is in a broad sense pretty instructive about what the function and focus of the institution actually is despite it being a crass joke. It pumps out activists at a much higher rate than it pumps out physicists.
One factor here is that pretty much any humanities professor who wants to get tenure has to publish a book. So there's going to be a pretty tremendous volume of books published on the type of things humanities professors talk about that get read very infrequently. I assume physicists are similar to economists in focusing on writing papers that get read infrequently instead.
That said, I think this perception is somewhat reasonable when it comes to academia as a whole. A job as a professor is very attractive if you are, in your soul, an activist. Professors earn a comfortable salary, get to spend time talking to young people, and can't be fired. And so a decent chunk of the output from academia is activism clothed in academic language.
When it comes to economics specifically, I certainly think there are economists who are primarily activists (though fwiw plenty of these people are conservative or libertarian activists), but I really don't think the field is unduly focused on race and gender. Since 2016, the American Economic Review has published 5 articles under the topic "Labor Market Discrimination." It's published 24 articles under the topic "Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles" since 2021.
Thanks for the sane response :)
Likewise :)
I don't object to economists studying any damn thing they please, and publishing it anywhere that wants to publish it. I *do* object to them doing it on my dime, if they're getting grants that pay for it from the government, because I want better value for my tax dime, and figuring out how to rein in inflation is worth 100x another untestable hypothesis on why people acting in groups sometimes act like jerks.
Economists working on questions that touch on race, gender, and climate usually try to formulate testable hypotheses and then test them. Of the work presented at the AEA, I'd guess that about 90% is quantitative and empirical, and probably 90% of that uses experimental or quasi-experimental methods. Most of the discussion of this work at a conference like the AEA is about whether the methods used effectively answered the question, how the answers might be confounded or biased, and how to refine the approach to address that bias.
We're also mostly not talking about questions like "why does racism exist?'--we're talking about questions like "how do teacher's unions affect the academic performance of children, and how does this vary by the race or gender of the children?" Or "How much of the gender wage gap emerges with parenthood?"
In general, the methods that economists use to answer these types of questions can be a lot more rigorous than the methods economists use to study inflation because we have better data and see more variation in policy across individuals. The flimsiest evidence and most untestable hypotheses in economics tend to be on macroeconomics questions.
As I said, do whatever you like on your own dime, or somebody else's. More power to you! But if it's costing me tax dollars, then I don't want to support it.
The problem with your argument is that it's egoistic…if other people don't like to support research in areas you believe to be important, where does that leave us as a society?
The same argument can be applied by people who don't want border enforcement or the police: Why should I have to pay taxes to support activities I don't agree with?...
This was my first thought as well.
I believe there are still lots of econ papers written on traditional econ topics.
Since we're also discussing a Sailer post in this thread, here's his take on Chetty:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/chetty-charles-murray-was-right-in-coming-apart/
Related to that, here is economist Scott Sumner on racial segregation as an explanation for poverty in a contemporary American city:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/a-socialist-worker-organization-analyzes-madison-wisconsin/
Sorry--I've probably already commented to much about this, but it's also worth noting that the way he counted topics was almost sure to exaggerate the role of "woke" subjects. Most sessions have 3 or 4 papers, and are organized thematically. All of the papers on inflation and economic growth, or close to it, will end up in sessions that are 100% about inflation and economic growth. Meanwhile a session on minimum wages that includes one paper that estimates the effect of minimum wages on Black workers becomes a "Race" session.
Also, long-term economic growth is arguably the single most important question in economics, but a lot of the meaningful incremental work on long-term growth is microeconomic analysis of specific growth drivers--for instance, work on patents and innovation, work on the growth of education, work on labor force participation, firm formation, etc. There was a ton of work on all of these subjects presented at the ASSA meeting (I'm not going to count sessions because I need to go back to wasting my life doing "wokeonomics" research). A lot of it even touches on race and gender, since expanding economic opportunities for women and minorities arguably drove growth in the mid-20th century (http://klenow.com/HHJK.pdf).
5. Alex Berenson is not, I think, related to the Berenson sisters who were models and actresses. Marisa is still alive. her sister died on 9/11 as a passenger in one of the airplanes.
17. Joe McCarthy was not a member of HUAC because he was a Senator. And besides HUAC was active in the 40s, McCarthy in the 50s.
HUAC was a standing committee of the House from 1945-1975.
" he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and McCarthy only used it against communists later on."
HUAC was a house committee so Nixon not McCarthy, who was a senator.
And Nixon actually caught a significant communist agent, at least if you accept the usual, but not unanimous, verdict on Alger Hiss.
Reading the selection criteria for the cancer funding effectiveness article says they limited the studies they looked at to those that found statistically significant results. Isn't that basically just looking at the successful trials and then only counting their costs?
18. Mars. Not thinking we should go to Mars with our current technology is not the same as thinking we should never go.
Chemical powered rockets just won't cut it. The trip to Mars is just too long and too difficult. We need to be able to build fusion powered rockets that can make the trip in weeks or months not years and can mover real tonnages of supplies.
And there's not much point in going there until it's feasible to establish a self-sufficient colony (which is either singularity or centuries away, regardless of whatever Musk says), other than the usual rah-rah flag-planting.
Give me $50billion a year and we will have a self sufficient colony in 50 years. That is 3% of the federal budget.
Even if it's true, you won't persuade the man that it's worth 3% of the federal budget for 50 years, which is part of my point.
Its more a response to the criticism it isn't currently technically feasible. Which is complete bullshit.
Agreed and I don't see the value in demonstrating that we can land humans on mars, and return them, under very very difficult constraints using less-than-ideal technology. So what?
Beyond capacity for space travel, which has a long way to go, I think there's other low-hanging fruit that can be accomplished with AI and remote control.
Going there is just half the battle. I think a stronger point against “colonize Mars today!” is that basically everywhere on Mars is much harder to live on than anywhere on earth (outside of like “literally inside an active volcano”). Earth after a nuclear war or a major meteor strike or any reasonably plausible version of climate change would still be more hospitable than Mars in a lot of ways. And there is already lots of earth we don’t live on.
If Mars was a place you could literally walk to, there still wouldn’t be a lot of reason to go live / work there except curiosity (and supporting tourism from the curious I guess).
Mars has one thing going for it : A literal century of sexy propaganda.
If it was a place you could walk to, it wouldn't have that. But it's unattainable, it features in mythology, Scifi worships it even more than the romans do. And what do engineering types that work on colonization and human expansion mostly read ?
Hell, for all my "Meh" attitude towards Mars, The Expanse still made me want to see the first human footprint on it before I die. When that happens, I will probably cry my face off.
From a rational perspective, Mars is perhaps 7th or 8th down the list of attractive Free Real Estate in space. It doesn't have any atmosphere to speak of unlike Venus or Saturn's Titan, it doesn't have the gargantuan oceans of Jupter's Europa, it's not our closest companian like our Moon, it's not choke-full of water or metals like the asteroids. No magnetosphere too.
From pictures sent back by landers, Mars *looks* habitable, certainly more than Venus or the Moon. I think you're all underestimating the appearance of an atmosphere. Yes, Venus has an atmosphere but it's one full of sulphuric acid and crushing atmospheric pressure - by contrast, a dusty pink atmosphere just feels a lot more tolerable and survivable. It looks like deserts on Earth, and people manage to live in those:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/1038/mars-poster-version-c/
I agree that it would be terribly difficult to set up any kind of functioning colony without a constant stream of supporting supplies sent from Earth for a long time, and I imagine the political will to spend billions (trillions?) on that would soon wane as people on Earth complained about wasting money that could go to poverty or curing disease or what have you. So if a colony didn't manage to get on its feet pretty quickly, then it would be more a scientific curiosity than real functional "this is how you live on another planet" and the colonists, if any, would be faced with "back to Earth or die on Mars".
I think the visual appearance is a little misleading, though. Mars's atmosphere is so thin it doesn't do a lot of the things you want from an atmosphere -- it can't protect against small meteorites, you still need a pressure suit, it doesn't sufficiently moderate the day-night temperatures swings, and of course it doesn't provide rain or even interesting weather, just annoying dust storms that can't push you over but that block seeing for days (or weeks). Combined with the lack of a magnetosphere meaning too much radiation reaches the surface, you still need to live underground and venture out only with caution and good protection -- so not that dissimilar to the Moon.
Even worse lately is that the Martian soil appears (at least in places we've sampled) stuffed full of perchlorates, which are inimitable to life as we know it from bacteria on up, which mean "The Martian" scenerio where you can grow stuff in the soil once you provide water and bacteria, is off the table. You need to leach all the toxic crap out of the soil first, which is a massive undertaking (needing megatons of water that is going to end up poisonous, for starters).
All in all, Mars is like the Solar System's cruellest tease. It looks deceptively like home, but it has almost none of home's advantages except for gravity, and factoring in the reduced shipping time/costs and increased ability for tourism and some kind of useful science or engineering applications, it would probably be more plausible to put colonies on the Moon.
Why are you spoiling my remaining Golden Age SF fantasies with crude and mean facts? 😁
All that's left for me are planetary romances among the dried up canal beds and the ruins of the ancient Martian kingdoms, and the lush jungles of steaming Venus! Ah, well, I'll just have to suffer for the sake of beauty!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Smith
Yeah I know. I so want Barsoom to exist, or the Sea of Morning Opals. It's disappointments like this -- that we're all freaking alone in this System! -- that make me doubt the Creator exists, or at any rate was stone-cold sober during Creation.
I hold out hope that there is an exotic plan as follows: in a billion years, life will no longer be possible at all on the inner planets, because the Sun will be too bright. But then the *outer* planets may come into their own. Full of water and all kinds of useful small organic chemicals, Ganymede, Europa, and Titan are like ova in the deep freeze, just waiting for a warming Sun to bring them to life. It would be awesome if there is a plan for life to continue (or more precisely start again) if we don't ever manage to make it out into the universe.
Screw sexy propoganda. We should go to Venus to see the dinosaurs.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them
If you did
Elton John -- Rocket Man
Meh we just need to be less precious about human lives. Just send people and supplies up, and keep sending them. A couple billion dollars worth a year. Some people will die, probably most of them,. That is fine, literally everyone dies.
The struggles of the people up there in novel environments with novel problems will have real scientific benefits. The getting people onto another celestial body and up to a self sustaining level ASAP also have very real civilizational benefits.
Sure we could explore the whole galaxy with robots. That would be more efficient. It would also be more efficient for everyone to jsut murder themselves and cull humanity back to 100,000 people, would solve a huge number of our problems. There is more to life than efficiency.
>There is more to life than efficiency.
The people you'd hypothetically like to send to Mars might share this view.
I doubt there would be any shortage of volunteers even with low survival odds. We got tons and tons of people, billions. Even if only 1/100,000 wants to go, you got more candidates than you know what to do with.
People do, for some reason, keep climbing up Mt. Everest despite the odds of dying while doing so. If you threw fame and an actual benefit to humanity into the pool I'm sure there would be people who would tolerate even larger dangers.
I assume that you'd be the first to board?
I don’t know about first, I got young kids, but I would go at some point for sure. You only live once.
"That is fine, literally everyone dies."
Remember you are posting this on a site where at least some people are very enthused about solving death , see Bostrom and his dragon. So you are a horrible dragon-tyrant loving monster! 😁
Oh I think if we solve death suddenly all sorts of calculations and policy questions are going to get wildly wildly different.
Would you drive, would you leave the house? Losing say 40 additional years, so of them likely in steep decline is a much lower cost to a random car accident than losing 100 or 1,000. I would think people would get much more conservative about their risk tolerance.
Mars is depressing. I've seen the photos. It's just a barren gritty freezing cold rock with a dull pink sky to which nothing ever happens except it sometimes gets dusty. Mars is one of the most boring places in the Solar System.
Totally disagree, the landscape in some areas is almost certainly amazing. We have mostly been landing at very flat boring areas.
Is Utah boring? The Grand Canyon?
It's interesting if you're a geologist, sure. And if the risk and cost (and time) were low, I'd be as interested in visiting Mars as anybody else. But I would never want to live there.
If you're talking about the portions of Utah that look like Mars, yes those are boring. I mean, they're interesting to visit once or twice, but I also would not want to live there. I like green growing things far too much. The Grand Canyon isn't entirely a fair comparison, as it has a lively and interesting ecosystem in addition to being a great big crack in the Earth. If it were *only* the latter, then no I wouldn't find it that interesting either.
I mean, I'm not a geologist. Rocks and soil and erosion and so forth just aren't that interesting or entertaining[1]. Life, on the other hand, in all its riotous variations in form and behavior, is endlessly entertaining, because it's always changing[2]. To top via inorganic dynamics what Earth has to offer in organic is a tall order. Maybe the moons of Jupiter would count. But not Mars.
-----------
[1] Oblig S. Harris cartoon (2nd from the bottom at left): http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/gallery/chemistry/galchem2b.php
[2] In principle geology is, too, but on a verrrry long time scale. If I lived a billion years, then watching the advance and retreat of the glaciers, plate tectonics, mountain building and so on might well be fascinating.
I think you are underestimating the number of people who do (or would if they had the resources) devote themselves to say mountain climbing or spelunking. Humans like exploration and like treading new areas. I am guessing that would be a huge draw and value to colonists.
Not at all. I love climbing mountains myself, have been up tons of peaks over 10k feet, and it's one reason I live where I do.
But you could not get me to move to the Atacama because I could hike the Andes a lot more easily, and for that matter the Sierras are beautiful in no small part because of the life that covers them, and the hydrological cycle that brings rain, snow, streams, et cetera. Barren rocks that never change are just not that interesting, it's one reason I have no desire to climb Everest. (That and the ~10-20% chance of dying ha ha.)
I agree people like to explore, and sooner or later people will set foot on Mars, if we don't destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or weaponized tribalism first, because it's what we do. But I thought we were talking not about exploration but living there, and that I can't see. People in principle could go live in Antarctica now, and explore all its various unknown crevices in the ice sheet. They could move to the remoter parts of Siberia, many of which are still pretty unexplored. But they mostly don't. I think exploration is one thing, but living there is another.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting people who want to live on Mars should't go for it. By all means! But I'm very dubious about that ending up a (voluntary) goal for a sufficiently large number of human beings to make it a thriving sister planet. For that matter, it's hard for me to see how any humans born and reared on Mars would not long to emigrate to Earth, the same way people born and reared on the shittier parts of Earth want to move to the nice bits. Even if the parents preserve the stalwart pioneering spirit, how do you prevent the restless kids from wanting to leave the family...cave...for the bright lights of the big city (Earth)?
I think we’re closer than most. Once Starship is flying I think the appropriate next step is some kind of refueling base on the moon. Then maybe you even attach some kind of additional engine to the ship. Gives us a chance to figure out how to set up extra terrestrial industry. Haven’t thought that part through yet but we have another launch pad out there to leapfrog from and having something you can point to in the night sky as a city on the Moon that maybe politicians and celebrities can even visit would be a good selling point to keep money flowing.
Every sentence you write leaves out at least a decade in expensive efforts.
"Once Starship flies", it would need an in-orbit refueling mechanism to go anywhere outside of LEO. That is not trivial.
Then it would have to be able to land on rough terrain, and take off again without the benefit of a complete overhaul.
As for the refueling base on the moon, can you tell us where the raw materials and the energy for that fuel are supposed to come from? Also, who is supposed to operate that base, and how are they supplied?
And we haven't even started discussing the problems of getting people, supplies, plants and livestock to Mars alive. Have you watched some of the Mars videos by "Common Sense Sceptic" on youtube to get some idea of the challenges?
Don’t think it will be easy, no. Just think it’s worth doing.
NASA is already counting on Starship's orbital refilling, as part of the Artemis mission plan, within *this* decade.
Even there from what I know about Artemis, they just haven’t imagined something to fully use starships capacity yet. The first thing they should launch is something to build starship a lunar landing pad. Then the base can follow.
Totally agree, and I think there's an element of "wouldn't be fair to the other lander teams to require 100t to the surface." My point was that refilling Starship isn't some outlandish pie-in-the-sky notion, it's literally scheduled to happen in the next year or two, and according to NASA, SpaceX is hitting (or beating) their milestones.
Yeah when I look at what they’re doing it’s all hyper plausible. And if you have something that big and that safe (because you can just launch it over and over) eventually you get Joe Rogan podcasting ion the moon (a funny example) and that really changes the public perception of space and thus funding.
It may not be outlandish, but it's known to be difficult, it hasn't been done before, and it's not really possible to test outside of zero-G conditions.
Seeing how Spaceship has not even attempted to reach LEO a year after the date by which Musk promised to put a man on Mars, I am sceptical with respect to schedules.
In order to build Starship a lunar landing pad, this "first thing" would have to land on the Moon. NASA currently has zero things that can land on the moon, at all. NASA can't really afford to build a thing that can land on the Moon with any substantial payload. They blew almost all their lunar-exploration money on SLS and Orion and Gateway.
The only reason NASA has any chance of landing on the Moon in the next five years is that SpaceX was already building a thing that wasn't originally designed to land on the Moon but could be adapted to do so for less than the cost of a new-build lunar lander. So NASA can land Starship on the moon, or it can land nothing on the moon. Those are the choices.
In the current paradigm, yes. Once Joe Rogan is podcasting with Eddie Bravo in space and all his flat Earther friends have to pretend it was all a joke and they never really believed the Earth was flat and the public becomes much more interested in space that shifts. Cancel SLS and all other programs and rebuild them around Starship. If you’re making an obsolete rocket today you can retool and reskill to make space industry equipment. I bet in ten years we have some kind of lunar landing pad and some semi permanent presence on the moon of about twenty people. Then rapid expansion from there.
Mars is quite literally the worst of all possible worlds:
- It is far away enough so that the trip itself would probably be lethal.
- It has enough of a gravity well and atmosphere to be a pain to take off from, but not enough to allow you to go outside without a pressure suit or protect you from radiation
- It's too far for abundant solar, and has no resources worth talking about that might make it attractive for mining.
If you want somewhere close by, choose the moon. If you want somewhere with an atmosphere, choose Venus (floating colonies ftw). If you want abundant energy, choose Mercury or Venus. If you want exotic resources, choose Mercury, the moon, asteroids etc.
All in all, I highly advise anyone wanting to set up a Mars colony to instead set up a city in an arctic desert instead.
Trip unlikely to be lethal.
A gravity well is a plus not a minus for living there. Doesn't make a good base for other space stuff, but that isn't the point. The atmosphere is irrelevant, anywhere we want to go has no functional atmosphere.
Humans and other animals and I think also many plants need gravity to develop properly, and also for long-term health. On Mars, you've got gravity for free. Only 1/3 Earth gravity, but that may still be enough to let fetuses and babies and children develop normally. Also, lots of other stuff works a lot better with gravity than without it.
Just being on the Martian surface blocks about half the radiation from space. Putting some dirt over your inflated kevlar dome (or whatever habitat you build) can give you more radiation shielding. That's free/cheap on Mars.
You can get spin gravity in orbit, and bring radiation shielding material to protect your orbital colony from elsewhere, but those both cost resources for something you got for free on Mars. That's at least one argument for Mars over an orbital habitat for long-term colonization. I have no idea how this all balances out, but it's sure not obvious to me that it ends up with orbital habitats being better.
Two of your three claims are false, and you haven't bothered to support any of them even a little bit.
I think the most long term serious concern remains contamination.
Say we actually do find life on mars. What do we do at that point? The calculus shifts from "we will never be sure if the lifeforms are native of mars or come from earth" to "we could introduce invasive specie that could potentially drive to extinction some of the only non-terrestrial lifeform we know of" and all of this just to satisfy a human whim.
In that case there would be a meaningful argument that mars should be sealed off forever, as a nature riserve.
Well, either Martian life is entirely unlike Earth's, or panspermia is real. Either one would be interesting, but only the latter is complicated by contamination. And even then...we can tell somewhat by the DNA how long ago species diverged on Earth. It doesn't seem entirely unlikely that if life had been diverging on Mars and Earth for a billion years that we couldn't tell. That is, it seems pretty likely we could tell the difference between bacteria left here when Joe Astronaut carelessly took a dump behind a rock because the hab was too far, and ancient bacteria that had evolved on Mars on their own for a billion years, even if the ultimate origin of both species were the same interstellar infection.
Yeah I’m in your camp. We would probably be able to tell from the sequencing and I’m not willing to hold off human colonization because of maybe bacteria.
I fully agree with your comment about the fact that we would probably discriminate contamination from native martian lifeforms.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t address my concern which is that, in the presence of native martian forms of life, we should refrain from colonization in order to not outcompete them with invasive terrestrial bacteria.
I don't see human expansion on other planets to be that important to risk extinction of native life
I appreciate your appreciation and I don’t mean to sound snide but there’s a poem called “Do I Dare to Eat a Peach” about finding the will to disturb the universe. We may never know if there are bacteria or not without going and we can’t risk never going because there might be. It puts us almost in a paradox and if there is bacteria then it has no value other than the specific reverence we as humans might come to hold for it. I would revere Martian life. I would just not think it had land rights or concern about land rights.
Chemical rockets can do it, it just requires abandoning the idea of being as fuel efficient as possible. By simply overbuilding the rocket's fuel tanks you can half the trip time. You would never do this for robots but the trade off is worth when the cargo is humans.
>In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
If human meat farms became very popular, would they serve as an incubator for new diseases, like current meat markets and factory farms but without the moderating factor of having to jump species?
I'm sure the current/first production facilities will be very sterile, but I wonder what that will look like if vat meat really does replace factory farming livestock and operates on the same scale as a global commodity.
>“I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”.
Is 'getting beaten up by the jocks for being gay' a psychosocial trait?
I get that major sports teams have their players wear rainbow jerseys as a PR stunt sometimes these days, and I'm sure we all have impressions of very progressive and accepting schools as something that exists; but I would not be surprised if middle school and highschool sports and locker rooms still had a lot of cultural homophobia ten to forty years ago (when it would have been relevant to producing current and retired soccer players)
> Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices.
Presumably the FDA has reasons for reclassifying those specific devices and not others (selection bias), so not much evidence for a general rule I would think. Would be interesting to know the same stats for cases where they moved something from less to more regulated (if that's a thing that happens).
>But it also claims autism genes increase linguistic ability but have no effect on math - doesn’t that contradict common sense? What am I missing?
Perhaps it has something to do with autistic women often being extremely chatty as a compensatory mechanism (dominating conversations to keep them in topics they understand and feel safe discussing rather than letting them drift into vague scary social stuff).
Or perhaps it just has to do with mildly autistic people generically becoming very focused on specific interests and ideas, in a way that often makes them read about those things a lot, such that they simply read more than the average person.
>Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD?
I feel like there's a bias at play here with how well-established a field of study is, exacerbated by the type of people who present at conferences rather than publishing in major journals.
ADHD is pretty heavily studied at this point, I don't know how much you are going to add to the literature as a grad student or post-doc with near-zero budget, or even a junior professor trying to crank out things for you CV to put before the tenure committee, which in my experience is most of who presents at APA conferences. I think to add something new to the ADHD literature you sort of need a giant controlled study at this point, and the institutions that can afford that publish to major journals directly.
Whereas with a trendy new topic based on broad social issues, anyone can publish a case study or media analysis or w/e and have something novel to say. Not something useful, perhaps, but at least something they can say with a straight face is a new idea that hasn't been tested 10,000 times already.
Same for inflation and GDP growth, I would think.
>Psychologist Russell Warne looks into the evidence and finds that no, Irish IQ has probably been pretty stable during that time, though some of this depends on the definition of “IQ” and “stability”
Of course, the anti-'biodiversity' side can just look at this and say 'Oh, so the entire field can be wrongly convinced that an entire ethnic group had very low IQ, based on shoddy testing and reporting methods? Ok, that works for us too.'
The lack of circulatory, respiratory, and organ systems seems like a major barrier to diseases developing in meat cultivation factories.
One of the big problems with cultivated meat right now is the lack of immune systems making it hard to stop bacteria from colonizing the vats.
Truly, spoken like someone who's never had to do cell culture.
34. “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.
South Korea is an even more spectacular example than Japan. Singapore is another. Maybe "developed, developing, East Asian, and Argentina”.
I would have guessed Japan was special not because it developed quickly, but because it went into a unique kind of semi-stagnation in the 90s.
It's because Japan's economy has an unusual concentration of unique features. For example, chronically low exports, surprisingly high savings rates keeping domestic demand unusually low, the real estate market being so unusual (such as houses making a bad store of value), etc. Singapore and South Korea don't share these features.
Is Japan that different than say Italy?
Yes. It looks like Italy stagnated for a few years in the 1990s but then entered growth again for a decade and then stagnated a bit, while Japan has been stagnant for the whole 30 years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/gdp-gross-domestic-product
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ITA/italy/gdp-gross-domestic-product
Something weird is going on. That lists Italy's GDP as doubling between 2000 and 2008. Yet the annual growth rates are below 2%.
Euro vs USD?
Yeah, there's something very weird about that! Maybe this wasn't the right source for me to check?
In any case, I've heard people mention Japan's economy stagnating since the early '90s on many occasions, and I haven't heard them saying the same thing about European economies (even when Italy was one of the PIIGS they were trying to blame the Euro crisis on around 2010).
You probably want to look at "constant-price" GDP instead. Italy's been stagnant since the introduction of the Euro. Not as long as Japan, but a pretty long time.
Not the case if you measure in PPP: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=JP
Interesting!
The traditional macroeconomist's story for Japan being special is that it was the only non-Western nation to have its own industrial revolution before WW2. Japan made its own miracle, and they did it early.
Robert Lucas hints at that here; in another essay he notes that aside from Hong Kong, no country has ever had what he considers an "industrial revolution" while colonized. The colonizers had to leave before the economy had at least a chance to grow quickly. [So near-necessary, but nowhere close to sufficient.]
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2004/the-industrial-revolution-past-and-future
Regarding the CBT meta-analysis, I've plotted some of the results in this post: https://cremieux.substack.com/i/100782605/the-dodo-bird-verdict-is-not-yet-extinct
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-022-02827-3
Epigenetic findings might have been severely limited by technological constraints.
> 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and McCarthy only used it against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.”
He also invented the Business Plot. That's still widely believed on the American left as a real thing. There is no evidence for it but it continues on as a conspiracy theory. Which is honestly depressing to me. Some Soviet agent made up fake news a century ago and there are still people posting it to the front page of Reddit to this day talking as evidence about how nothing's changed and the business community is a threat to democracy. Which was probably exactly its purpose a century ago.
The evidence for the Business Plot is the congressional testimony by Smedley Butler.Say what you will about him but he was certainly not 'some soviet agent'. It could be a misunderstanding, but since WW2 in my country there have been at least three similar 'plots' where high-ranking executives or prominent members of the military reached out to prominent politicians or popular figures if they're up for a coup. It's not that far fetched.
Smedley Butler was a political activist who had a record of exaggerating his claims. Likewise, his testimony (which implies a bunch of conservative conspirators approached a known far leftist to lead a coup) has multiple verifiably untrue details. Nevertheless it was pushed by Samuel Dickstein and his allies in the media both of which were (or at least included) paid Soviet agents.
As for whether it's that farfetched: You do not get to claim something made up is directionally accurate to defend it. Sen. McCarthy was directionally accurate that the government and Hollywood had many Communist agents in it. But that doesn't mean going up there and making stuff up for the newspapers was justified. I can't speak to your country (which you haven't mentioned by name) and my point is not that the business community never does anything wrong. But the Business Plot specifically was a fabrication.
Smedley Butler was the most decorated Marine in history at the time he died. What did he make up? 'Uh, I actually won three Medals of Honor instead of two?'
You are the person who called him a 'Soviet agent', which is just absurd.
I'm in the Netherlands, and referring to the plans of an assassination to kill Koos Voorrik over the Linggadjati accords and get rid of the Beel coalition, the '49 plan to dismantle the transfer of Indonesia by assassinating premier Drees, and the '65 request if foreign minister/later head of NATO wanted to work with a stay behind group coup and make him the new Dutch leader, as he wrote in his '92 autobiography.
I did not call Smedley Butler a Soviet agent. I called Samuel Dickstein a Soviet agent. Which he was. He was also the person who made up the Business Plot. Butler was called to testify by him which is where Butler's initial testimony comes from. It was not a spontaneous going to the press by Butler (though Dickstein sometimes used that narrative).
Also, Butler's decorations do not change the fact he made up stories. Especially once he had his pacifist political awakening. It's a complete non-sequitur to say he was a decorated soldier. Or do I get to claim that Colin Powell's decorations mean you can't question the honesty of his claims about Iraq?
As for the Netherlands, I'm not as familiar with the politics there. But I'm having trouble figuring out your source. Voorik and Drees both died before 1992 so they presumably didn't write autobiographies from beyond the grave. Also, I note none of the people you're talking about are businesspeople. They're all politicians.
The source is Butler. Dickstein didn't instruct Butler to give his testimony, and was only a paid agent for the Soviets years after the Business Plot affair came up. Before that Dickstein tried to climb up in politics by targeting anarchists and socialists.
Also when he gave his testimony about the business plot Butler was not yet a pacifist. He led a group of veterans to DC in PROTEST of FDR. War Is A Racket is 1935, Business Plot is 1933. You seriously have no idea what you 're talking about.
When I said Luns was approached for a coup, as he said in his biography, I obviously meant in the biography of Luns. That's one of the three. Here's a secondary source for the first one in English: https://ejlw.eu/article/view/31479/28825 . If your point is 'yeah non-business people approach politicians and high-ranking military people all the time for coups but they are never businessmen so that's why Butler is unbelievable and a liar' I don't know man.
Butler testified in front of Dickstein's committee which Dickstein then edited and handed to the press. This is the source of the Business Plot accusations which were ultimately not born out by further investigation. HUAC was always a politically motivated body and never a terribly reliable one.
Likewise, while Dickstein didn't become a PAID agent until 1937 he had ties to the Soviet Union virtually his entire life. He was born in the Russian Empire, after all, and always had sympathies for that sort of politics and ties to it. So your statement is technically correct but misleading.
And while War is a Racket was published in 1935 Butler became a pacifist (by his own account) in 1931 or 32. Before the Business Plot. In fact the Business Plot came in a period where Butler was making all kinds of wild accusations culminating in his 1935 book. And the idea that protesting FDR is incompatible with being a pacifist is... just historically misinformed. Pacifists suspected FDR of conspiring to get the US into a war.
My point, which you're refusing to acknowledge, is that this SPECIFIC incident was fabricated. And that it continues to live on in left wing circles because they don't have a good American example so they're going with a fabricated one. Not that it never happens anywhere. It happened in Spain, for example, most famously with CEDA. As for the Dutch example you're being too vague for me to be sure what you're talking about. (The site you linked is broken for me.)
McCarthy's purview was government, not Hollywood.
McCarthy did accuse Hollywood of being full of Communists. Though he was not directly involved in HUAC or the black lists which actually went after some of them as far as I know.
Regarding the "Business Plot", there was a recent movie about it, but it was neither successful nor particularly faithful to Smedley Butler's claims:
https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/amsterdam-movie-true-story-real-history-business-plot.html
> 34: Etirabys: In 1910, Argentina was the 7th richest country in the world. Starting around 1930, it flatlined harder than anyone had ever flatlined before, until now it is only about average for South America, itself a relatively mediocre region. Why? Etirabys brings up fifty years of incessant coups and countercoups centered upon Juan Peron and his opponents. @moritheil clarifies two additional points: first, "though the Peronists are often described as proto-fascist, First Lady Eva would in modern terms be called a social justice warrior . . . Argentina discovered identity politics decades before the US did". This is probably not the sentence you want to read about your country’s governing party if you’re hoping for economic growth. Second, during the period involved, Argentina accepted an extraordinary number of immigrants, especially from Italy (60% of Argentines are now of at least partial Italian descent), reaching percent-immigrant levels more than double the US at its peak. Those immigrants were an awkward combination of Jews and other refugees fleeing Europe just before World War II, and defeated Nazis fleeing Europe just after World War II. These conflicts created the fertile soil for the identity politics half of Peronism. Garrett Jones says that his new book on immigration has a chapter on this. Related quote: “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.
The Peronists were not proto-fascists. They were just straight up fascists. You can read Peron's writings where he talks about how his movement is directly inspired by Mussolini but also how he has some disagreements with Mussolini. Argentina also objected to the Nuremburg trials and Peron's initial coup was backed by the Axis. Peron had multiple supporters who went to Italy for fascist training.
Italian fascism (and its offshoots) tended to be anti-racist because loyalty to the state and the collective social enterprise was supposed to come above narrow, backward ethnic concerns. You had things like minority fascist organizations under the broader umbrella of the party. For example, Italy had a Jewish fascist organization and more for several other minorities. It also was the first major Italian political party to have a women's organization. Needless to say, Hitler did not agree with any of this. But Eva Peron's position was very within the ideology.
But yes, fascist economics do not work.
Also, Argentina's immigrant population decreased throughout the period. The peak of their immigrant population was the late 19th century. But it was decreasing from a gigantic amount, possibly more than 90%.
> The Peronists were not proto-fascists. They were just straight up fascists
They weren't fascists in the way the term is used nowadays, but then again neither was Mussolini.
Well yes. No Peronist ever disagreed with me on the internet. Therefore they weren't fascists in the way the term is used nowadays.
I've fought with a lot of peronist on the internet. I thereby declare them fascists.
If anyone gets to qualify as a fascist, it's Mussolini. Anyone that wouldn't include him as one just shouldn't be listened to on that topic.
They admired the "third way" but Peronism is something else. The coup of Peron was against another military regime, and he brought back democracy. As a matter of fact, I don't even understand why this article was linked, since is written by someone who reads a couple of Wikipedia articles in a plane on an incredibly complex optic and it's full of inaccuracies and simplifications that don't add to understand it
I just want to clarify that usually I find these links very good, so it surprises me that there is one of such a lower quality. Or maybe it's because I know something about the topic
That's always a worrying sign for me - when a pundit seems cogent and insightful right up until he begins talking about something that you're an expert on...
some classic Gell-Mann amnesia. Finding a lot of that with these links
Peronism was its own ideology but it was directly descended from fascism and considered itself related to fascism until the late 1940s. As I said, the coups against the conservative regime was backed by the Axis. One of their planks was to keep Argentina out of the Allies (which they did) and they sheltered Nazi and Fascist refugees.
Peron supported a military coup against an (admittedly quite corrupt and oligarchic) democratically elected government. And then a military coup against the people he'd previously supported a year later. So yes, Peronism helped overthrow democracy. Peron himself said he thought democracy was a cover for plutocracy.
He then won elections which the military regime heavily slanted in his favor and allowed him to do all kinds of dubious things like using dictatorial powers to force banks to pay people to vote for him. He maintained military support and did things like arrest his opponents or drove his opposition out of the country. The elections were also not clean after he got into power. He and his wife also stole a lot of money. And he continued to align himself with dictators. There's a reason why when democracy was re-established he was banned from running.
I agree Argentine politics is complicated. But so are all politics.
I don't want to enter an endless discussion, but even not being a Peronist myself, I am forced to defend him on this. To call the Castillo government "democratically elected" is wrong, since the coup of 29 created a regime without free elections, and the reasons for which he was banned from elections have to do with the restoration of that regime. As much as I disapprove of his methods (my grandfather was in part a victim of his government), in the grand scheme of things it is unfair to call Peron antidemocratic, given that his coup was against a non-democratic regime and the next 4 (!) we're all related with the proscription of peronism
I'm sorry your grandfather was a victim of a dictatorship.
The Castillo administration was elected under a regime of corruption and fraud but it was not installed by coup like the government that came after it. You said it was a military regime but it wasn't the way Peron was. It was an oligarchy of business and landowning elites. So while it was less democratic than Yrigoyen it was more democratic than Ramirez or Peron. Who were, again, literal fascists who were quite open about opposing democracy and many of whom had even backed the previous coup a decade ago. Further, they did not work to restore democracy or step down from power.
I understand the instinct certainly and the oligarchy of the Concordancia is not a government I really want to defend. But Peron was not a democrat and his rule was a net decrease in rights and democratic institutions. He even wrote against democracy ideologically calling it a cover for plutocracy and rule by conservative business and land elites. He didn't say the Argentine oligarchs were that. He said that was how it was and how it always would be.
I feel like we are on the same side, we are having a byzantine discussion on whether the Castillo admin was "democratic", and a real one about whether the Perón admin was "dictatorial". I think there is no real difference between a military gov, and a gov that was established by a military government, proscribes the major party of the country, has elections heavily rigged and overseen by thugs and the police repressing people illegally. Peron was indeed no fan of democracy, but by saying that "his rule was a net decrease in rights and democratic institutions" is just weird in the context of Argentinian history, where you have a period of heavy repression, then he takes power and ends up having elections and with the constitution of 49 (which includes so many rights that only in 94 they were fully reestablished). At the same time I recognize that he violated that very constitution that he established in many ways.
I think we may have a problem of definition and measure of democracy in these intermediate situations; P. expelled and imprisoned dissidents from the military and the bureaucracy, but at the same time gave the vote to women. How do we interpret these facts is sort of a Rorschach test.
I agree dropping the word "democracy" will probably be a net gain in clarity. Both certainly claimed to be democracies and yet neither were really democratic.
The Argentine oligarchy ruled through competitive elections that had, since the coup a decade earlier, been systematically biased in favor of particular types of candidates and with backstops to prevent socialists, communists, or fascists from winning. Peron established single party rule. It's the difference between the Jim Crow South and Fascist Italy. Neither is really democratic (sorry, can't think of a better way to phrase this). But there's still notable differences and one is definitely less so even if both involve the systematic exclusion of large groups of people. In particular, it's relevant that ending Jim Crow could be done through existing institutions while single party states generally have to collapse first.
As for the '49 Constitution, those rights were never real (as you note). Like in many dictatorships the constitution sounds very nice but is just a piece of paper.
That said, I do think you have a point we roughly agree on. Latin American fascists like Peron or Vargas realized two things that other fascists resisted in other parts of the world. Firstly, that women and minorities could have widespread fascist sympathies with relatively minor tweaks to their platform. And secondly, that fascism's natural base of support was sufficient to build fascism without establishing a fully totalitarian state. (Peron said this, actually.) Both these were elements of some Italian fascist thinkers but they were more fully embraced in Latin American than Europe (or, say, the Middle East/Asia). And they were correct about this which is why the descendants of these parties tend to be less opposed to democracy. They feel they can win and implement their goals within a democratic framework.
Vargas is perhaps the better example here: he was forced to re-establish an actual democracy and then was able to win in clean elections. (And like Peron he gave women the right to vote because he expected he could win most of them.) There was a subsequent coup and he committed suicide. But the point that he could win popular elections still stands.
At the same time, saying that Vargas was pro-democracy (like Peron) is wrong. He was willing to instrumentally participate to serve his political goals. But given untrammeled power neither established a democratic state or moved toward it.
> 44: Related: El Salvador's murder rate has fallen from 103 (highest in the world) to 7.8 (lower than US), giving its (Bitcoin-obsessed) president an approval rating of 87%, highest in the western hemisphere. How did he do it? Originally people suspected a truce with gangs, but that truce broke down and now he’s just trying mass incarceration at unprecedented scale, up to 2% of the population. See article for case somewhat against, first comment for case somewhat for. I would like to see a better analysis of how he was able to muster the state capacity to do this, and whether other gang-ridden countries aren’t doing it because of civil rights concerns, because they’re in the pocket of the gangs, or just because it’s too hard.
The President is left wing. He's managed to convince a majority of the El Salvadorean left that crime is a social justice issue, effectively. And the El Salvadorean right was, as you might expect, already tough on crime. This has required marginalizing some farther left elements and burning a lot of political capital in heavily arming the police, making it easier to arrest and prosecute people, expanding policies like occupying areas or random searches, etc. It's also involved ignoring several civil rights organizations. (These people claimed it was outreach efforts or a truce because, to be frank, it fit their narrative better.)
The other thing is that the US is bankrolling this. But that's not particularly unique. It's only a few hundred million dollars and the US has given similar amounts to other countries.
This is a wider trend in Latin America, by the way. AMLO's "abrazos no balazos" has turned into using the military against the cartels. (This militarization of the police is becoming more common too.) Personally I think it's partly due to increased Chinese influence. Communist far leftism might be, to some extent, crowding out anarchist far leftism. And XJP Thought is not interested in abolishing the carceral state or the state in general.
Yes, it's not a bad point. He talks a lot about feminism and about how women can't be equal in a society where their husbands and boyfriends can murder them, for example. But it still gets him attacked as not really a leftist.
> The other thing is that the US is bankrolling this
Shit man, if only the US would devote similar resources to fighting crime in the US.
I think in the US it's more a matter of laws and will than money though.
The U.S. currently spends somewhere in the $250B/year ballpark on policing and incarceration. Here is a high-end estimate of $277B:
https://stephensemler.substack.com/p/how-much-did-the-us-spend-on-police
I also see estimates that come in a bit lower but none less than $200B.
None of them seem to include the costs of having federal/state/local criminal courts and prosecutors, which I would guess might add another few billion to the total.
So saying that we spend something like $1,000 per year per US adult fighting crime, would be in the right general vicinity.
El Salvador is a small country, has around the total population of Missouri. But even so, in order to match US spending per capita on fighting crime El Salvador would need to be spending a lot more than "a few hundred million dollars" per year.
He is formerly from a left-wing party but none of his policies seem particularly left-wing and his current party is a broad-tent party in ideological terms.
Yeah, this sounds like the whole "he doesn't agree with me so he's not a real leftist" thing. Burkele and his New Ideas party are and remain left wing populists. They've moderated on the populism thing somewhat but they still have a commitment to diversity, women and minorities, and a "social economy" (meaning increasing welfare and government spending). Their main right wing position is the anti-crime thing which they couch in explicitly left wing talking points.
The main opposition, the Nationalists, are conservatives. But they've been cooperating on crime because they tend to agree with his initiatives there. Whether this means he's a sell out who's betrayed the left or that his anti-corruption, anti-crime measures are bipartisanly popular is a point of view I suppose.
Seems like when the far left actually has to run a country, they become extremely tough on crime. Soviet Union and China come to mind as well in addition to Nicaragua. After all a gang can't tolerate other gangs in its territory.
It seems very strange that you specifically designate far-left governments as 'gangs', while the previous right-wing ARENA governments from El Salvador have been flagged for widespread corruption.
This is going to sound terrible, but I work in biological research and I strongly suspect that funding anything as well-studied as cancer has long gone past the point of diminishing returns. There are lots of reasons to fund it but "most lives saved per dollar" cannot be one of them.
There are occasional breakthroughs obviously, and cancer research has given us a lot of insight into how cells work in general, but given how expensive research is and how specific new treatments are, I really doubt that on the margin more cancer research is providing many QUALYs.
This is mostly just based on vibes and assumptions because I'm not sure how I'd prove it either way, but saying this is against my interests so I think you can trust me.
Related note: even conditional on cancer research having been highly effective, I'd guess that marginal cancer research is not highly effective.
This is what makes me sceptical on any dollar return on dollar spent on researches. It's like someone trying to scam me to buy at the top.
Is there a disproportionately large lesbian population within female professional sports (particularly directly competitive sports like soccer/football/hockey/basketball/lacrosse/etc.)?
Yes.
In that case, the seemingly "obvious" hypothesis would be that one can be "mentally" (intentionally hand waving over definition of this) male or female while being physically the opposite. Men like competitive sports more than women do. Men like to have sex with women. Someone who is "mentally" a man will therefore like competitive sports and sex with women, regardless of their physical gender. Inversely, someone who is "mentally" a woman will be disinterested in competitive sports and will like to have sex with men, regardless of their physical gender.
The obvious hypothesis is that increased testosterone (and/or related) hormone levels is correlated both with aptitude / interest in sports and also sexual interest in women.
This honestly seems like it should be the null hypothesis. Someone would have to find a really glaring flaw with it before I'd be willing to consider some other explanation.
Another equally plausible null hypothesis is that more "manly" behavior is associated enough with sports that young gay men are driven out of sports and young gay women are attracted to it. I definitely wouldn't want to assume that one of these effects explains 100% of the observations, but if someone needed a specific reason before investigating one, I would definitely think that the other hypothesis is plenty to go on.
Most sports have something to do with war or hunting: e.g., American football is an explicit war game involving violently conquering terrain. It's so manly that even in 2023 American colleges and high schools don't have female football teams.
Your hypothesis has some assumptions baked into it. If there weren't any other influence that made (some) gay men more feminine and (some) gay women more masculine, what benefit would gay women get from being drawn to men's sports? They want to attract women, so being around men doesn't help them find mates directly, and the women they want to attract are not attracted to men either, and hence less likely to be watch male-dominated sports.
I don't think being more similar to one sex along one mental dimension makes one "mentally" male or female. There are too many traits males & females differ on.
I have a suspicion that there exists a reasonably large set of attributes that are all strongly correlated and straight women + gay men tend to end up on one side and straight men + gay women tend to end up on the other side. Desire to have sex with men/women is one such attribute, based on this tiny bit of data perhaps desire to play competitive sports is another. There perhaps is another one related to speech and mannerisms (the stuff that makes "gaydar" a thing).
Teasing out which of these are because of social pressures and which are because of some sort of genetic thing is of course quite difficult, but I hypothesize that a sufficiently interesting set exists.
The speech angle is interesting, because I recall from Judith Harris that children take on the accents of their peers, and the peers of children that grow up to be gay aren't going to systematically differ in the way a racial/ethnic/class group clustering would. Slate has done a number of pieces on it over the years:
https://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2014/12/lexicon_valley_speech_scientist_benjamin_munson_on_the_stereotypical_gay.html
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/do-i-sound-gay-david-thorpes-documentary-on-the-gay-voice-reviewed.html
One thing to note though: there is a stereotypical way for gay males to speak, but not lesbians. Female & male homosexuality do not seem to be mirrors for each other. Obligate homosexuality seems more common in males, bisexuality in women. Homophobia was historically mostly directed toward males, but the big recent increase in identification has been among bisexual women (most of whom, if they have a long-term partner, are with a man).
Just eyeballing: I looked at the Wikipedia list for "LGBT mixed martial arts fighters" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:LGBT_mixed_martial_artists ). Two trans women, 35 women, no men. If I count correctly, 23 of the women fought in the UFC; the UFC site gives the total number of women who ever fought there as 257. So the estimate would be that at least 9% of the women in the UFC are gay/ bi (there may be a lot more closet cases, or fighters who did not get a wikipedia entry). Does that point to a "disproportionately large lesbian population"? I think yes.
> If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another ...)
Isn't this a fully general argument against doing anything (or, at least, anything long-term) ? It sounds like an extremely high-risk, high-reward play, similar to the one made by the followers of Harold Camping.
I think Harold Camping wanted you to donate all of your money to his radio station. Ai safety researchers, on the other hand, tend to say they already have all of their funding gaps filled and additional money isn't going to help anything
Many of Camping's followers ran up huge credit card debts (and/or cashed in their savings) for things like expensive vacations; the ones who donated money to Camping were in the minority (AFAIK). These were people who honestly thought that the world was going to end in a year, so why bother about anything after that ?
ah yeah, i could see that
That, and it’s begging the question about why we haven’t gone to Mars yet - I don’t think it’s because “humans lack the intelligence to do so”.
#34: I dove into Mori's twitter thread and would like to raise some complications. Let me disclose my bias at the top in that I was motivated to do this mostly because "Argentina's downfall was caused by idpol and immigrants" to be a bit too convenient for right-wing political aims. Linking to each tweet would look uggo since you can't format links in comments, so I'll refer to them by placement in the thread.
Tweets 2-3: Mori references the "resource curse" as a potential explanation for Argentina's economic problems, which is a common poli-sci concept that holds that economies reliant on extractive industries tend to be more fragile and do worse in the long-term because they are beholden to international commodity prices beyond their control. This isn't a perfect concept, but it largely holds water. Mori says this is insufficient to explain Argentina's downfall, and I agree, but then she holds up Saudi Arabia as a counterexample, which I find to be lacking. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia benefit from the pricing power of OPEC, which helps mitigate the resource curse as these states can artificially reduce the supply of their primary export, thereby inflating prices and stabilizing their economy. Argentina's primary exports during its heyday were agricultural products, and could not benefit from an international cartel such as OPEC because 1) oil is geographically locked in a way that agriculture is not, 2) agriculture is subject to external shocks such as drought and disease that make it a less reliable resource, and 3) such international agreements weren't really on the table in the late 19th century. All this is to say that I think the resource curse problem is a bit more prominent in Argentina's economic history than Mori is giving it credit for, and that Saudi Arabia is really not a good counterexample for the point she is making.
Tweet 6: Mori glosses over Yrigoyen as a "radical," which he certainly was, but I want to point out that Argentine politics was already kinda offbeat before Perón. Yrigoyen's party, the Radical Civic Union, drew much of their political power from the middle class and focused on reforming Argentine institutions toward becoming more democratic, rather than advocating for any kind of class struggle. His economic reforms were left-wing but pretty similar in content to FDR's New Deal policies. The Radical Civic Union still exists as a political party today, and is aligned with the anti-Peronists. It's a bizarre country.
Tweet 7-9: Mori's characterization of the Perons is basically correct, in that Juan Peron started off as a pretty standard caudillo type and Eva drove the party toward a social justice message that resonated with much of the populace and afforded their regime a lot of goodwill from the public. Mori then moves on without establishing any kind of causal link between this and Argentina's economic collapse. The mere presence of a powerful ideology in a failing country does not mean that that particular ideology caused that country to fail. In my opinion, the failing of Peron's first regime can be mostly attributed to that ancient weakness of charismatic autocrats: the military never cared for him, and took him out as soon as they thought they could. If anyone has a serious thesis on why Eva Peron's social justice messaging caused the economic or political decline of Argentina, I would welcome discussion on that point.
Tweet 12-13: Mori paints the fact that Argentina was accepting immigrants from varied backgrounds as a reason for economic decline by way of cultural incompatibility. I would like to remind everyone that before the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the USA had basically no restrictions on immigration, and we didn't develop a full quota system until 1924. This made a lot of people very nervous, but all signs indicate that the US economy did pretty well during that period anyway.
Tweet 14: Mori makes a separate point here about the scale of immigration. Her figures for both the US and Argentina appear to be correct. I will quibble with the part about "descendants" making up over 60% of the population of Argentina today--I imagine a vast majority of Americans can also trace their lineage at least in part to Ellis Island-era immigration, but I can't imagine how that would be captured statistically. Again, Mori doesn't make an explicit causal link, and given that there's a pretty low n for "countries to which large numbers of disparate European ethnic groups flocked during the 19th and 20th centuries", I'm not really comfortable making an explicit connection between Argentina's high immigration levels and its economic decline.
Tweet 15: This summation seems to come out of the blue to me. The implication that Peronism's social-justice element combined with the immigrant makeup of the country led to political instability that tanked the economy is a feasible thesis, but not really strongly supported in her argument nor in my understanding of Argentine history. Political upheavals in Argentina were between the political elite and the military almost exclusively–there is very little mass movement politics in Argentina's history. Rather, entrenched politicians and the military have used popular movements as pretext to act in their self interest. This is a finer distinction, but I think an important one, especially when comparing Argentina to other Latin American countries like Cuba or Mexico, which also had flourishing small-l liberal governments in the early 20th century that imploded in one way or another.
I did fire this off pretty quickly, so let me know if I said something super idiotic! I have spent a decent amount of time studying Argentina and I like to take the opportunity to talk about it when it comes up. Fascinating place with really idiosyncratic politics.
What do you think about this take?
"Many historians blame the closing of international markets after the Wall Street Crash — that was certainly a factor — but there was another cause: European immigration stopped. Instead, there was migration of Mestizos and Amerindians, both from the country to the city and from neighboring Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. These new arrivals were prolific and ringed the main cities — Buenos Aires, Rosario, Cordoba, Mendoza — with belts of poverty." - https://www.amren.com/features/2017/04/argentina-a-mirror-of-your-future-buenos-aires-latin-america/
I agree with the article’s assessment of the current state of migrants in Argentina—I saw much of that firsthand when I lived in Buenos Aires for a little while. I think that’s more a symptom of Peronist governments using migrants as political assets rather than anything inherent regarding the origin of the migrants, and the article seems to be making a structural, rather than cultural, argument as well. Definitely a problem in 🇦🇷 but I’m not really seeing a causal link to its economic downfall.
Argentina seems seems about as developed as Chile and Uruguay, so is it a downfall or just regression to the mean of similar countries?
My understanding is that Italian immigration differed for the US vs Argentina. Half of all Italian immigrants to the US returned home, whereas in Argentina they generally stayed. One explanation I've heard is that the similarity of the Spanish & Italian languages made it easier for them to move into more middle-class jobs.
Thanks for this. I also found some of what was said before to be remarkably superficial. In particular: the role of communal or identity-based conflict between descendants of different groups of immigrants in Argentina is conspicuous for its insignificance, come to think of it (it's not the sort of thing that even comes to one mind). Maybe, in the 70s, some people who were torturers anyhow put special relish into torturing people they were going to physically take apart anyhow whenever the victims had last names that the torturers didn't like - but that's about it.
There may be deeper points to be made about family structure and how it survives for more than a generation after immigration, in fact well after other things are gone (wonder what Emmanuel Todd would say about Argentina?) but that doesn't give any sort of obvious or easy explanation to the Argentinian decline.
Which, again, was a decline from a GDP per capita that was based mostly in agricultural production on land that was owned by a few families. Argentina never industrialized to the extent that Brazil or Mexico did - let alone to the extent of examples elsewhere.
Thanks for this take. I just wanted to add that there are theoretically at least a couple of other explanations of the "resource curse":
1. Leaders who have income from resources have little incentive to increase their income in the long term through economic development and the resulting increase in the tax base;
2. Leaders can more readily use patronage to stay in power, rather than providing public goods.
That being said, IIRC the evidence re the resource curse is somewhat mixed. FWIW, there is a (surprisingly) ungated 2015 article entitled "What Have We Learned From the Resource Curse" here: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052213-040359
I think that in general you are right. However, I think that there is an argument for the immigration argument, although indirect, and not with the dates that the link states (1930, that's too late). Argentina is a country that still today relies on agricultural exports, and it's the most productive sector. As long as the immigration was favoring that sector, the country became richer. Once the process of occupying the land with farmers was finished (~1890), every immigrant that arrived could only engross the cities population, which could be absorbed by industry only in a certain measure. By the 30s, the state begins to intervene to promote the industry. In purely economical terms, the country oscillates between policies to favor industrialization and against, and between welfare policies and lack of them.
If Argentina would have had policies against immigrants, population would have remained low and the country would have a agricultural / pastoralist economy; this is actually a vision that some people had around 1860/1870, notably José Hernandez, against the vision of Sarmiento, who wanted to develop the country like Britain.
> isn’t beta rhythm was the one related to focus
Typo
Re 10: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hitzlsperger
(Translation courtesy to deepl:)
DIE ZEIT: Mr. Hitzlsperger, you asked for an interview, why?
Thomas Hitzlsperger: I'm coming out about my homosexuality. I would like to advance a public discussion - the discussion about homosexuality among professional athletes. The topic always gets stuck in clichés - professional athletes are seen as perfectly "disciplined," "tough" and "hyper-masculine." Homosexuals, on the other hand, are seen as "bitchy," "soft," "sensitive." Of course, this doesn't fit. A homosexual professional athlete? Contradictions are built up here that have annoyed me time and again in my professional career. These contradictions are sold as sensations at the regulars' tables. I was also annoyed by the fact that it is precisely those with the least expertise who talk the loudest about the subject.
ZEIT: So why do you want to speak now? Has someone threatened to out you?
Hitzlsperger: That would not be a threat for me. What's the point? As a professional, I was a public figure that any sociopath could rub up against without much thought. In soccer, you can be accused of anything: "manic-depressive," "homosexual," "gambling sick," "bankrupt. But most common at the moment is "homosexual," especially with the gleefully denunciatory rating "gay."
ZEIT: You consider the term "gay" to be denunciatory?
Hitzlsperger: Yes, that is how it is usually used.
ZEIT: But why are you only speaking out now?
Hitzlsperger: I had to end my career as a professional soccer player - too many injuries. So now I have time for this commitment. What's more, I feel that now is a good time to do it. The Sochi Olympics are coming up, and I think critical voices are needed against the campaigns against homosexuals by several governments.
...
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version), from: https://www.zeit.de/2014/03/homosexualitaet-profifussball-thomas-hitzlsperger/komplettansicht
Wiki also offers this list of openly homosexual professional athletes worldwide ... I wouldn't expect it to be complete (!) : https://www.homowiki.de/Liste_offen_homosexueller_Profisportler#Geoutete_M.C3.A4nner
Gay English footballer: the only one I know of (as a not-particular-follower of the game, so there may well be others) is Justin Fashanu, who came out after he'd stopped playing. Played professionally for a number of years, sadly committed suicide after an alleged assault on a 17 year old boy (Fashanu said it was consensual).
Re: 33, to my best knowledge, "there are differences in IQ testing taking ability" is the explanation most people were suggesting when pointing out the Irish IQ rise. So 33 is then irrelevant to the point why it gets discussed: the explanation does not explain away the argument that any other widely reported IQ could be vulnerable to similar artifacts, especially the studies that find that some population groups have several SD higher or lower IQ than other groups.
I think there are a few levels of this debate:
1. It's completely fixed
2. It's because of improved nutrition, health, and (deep, significant) education
3. It's literally just because people don't know how to fill in the bubbles on an IQ test sheet (or something similarly trivial).
It looks like Warne is saying that it is sometimes 3 (although I think this was only one of his examples), but probably not 2.
I'm not sure 3. is that trivial. You seem to gloss over it as "people don't know where they're supposed to write their answers" or something, but some upbringings/cultural environments could plausibly make people uniquely bad at weird IQ test puzzles even though their cognition works perfectly well for intellectual tasks people actually encounter in the real world.
Except those places are precisely those where the people do not do 'perfectly well' on cognitively demanding tasks. I mean, African countries and their often abject dysfunction are basically the exact kind of thing one would expect from people genuinely lacking in intelligence.
And even in the US, IQ is equally predictive of things influenced by cognitive for all races. If it weren't, we should expect to see blacks radically overperform in life relative to their IQ and asians/jews underperform.
I first time I ever saw and tried some progressive matrices, which are supposedly culturally neutral, I did very badly. Because the patterns I was supposed to use were exactly the sort of meaningless ‘wheels within wheels’ patterns that I had always been mocked for spotting, or people would assume I was joking if I thought it was the reasoning intended, and that I had learned I should ignore because it would not be what someone would expect me to spot and use: I should look for something more meaningful, or abstemious. And when you take a test, you are supposed to guess what the person setting the test intends.
When I looked at some answers and explanations, and learnt that I was actually supposed to use the “this thing moves that way while that thing moves this way” pattern, I was furious! And then I could do them.
When people give these IQ tests to various groups, especially in different countries, do they give them a thorough practice test first, and go through the thinking used in those practice questions?
I'm curious if you could you detect #3 by looking at the right tail. Is there an IQ threshhold where you could figure out how to take the test without the cultural background, and is it low enough that there would be a decent n above it?
I've argued that IQ testing saw a Flynn Effect of rising raw scores because IQ testers tended to anticipate the future world that was evolving remarkably well.
For example, the first American IQ test was the 1916 Stanford-Binet test developed at Stanford U. by Lewis Terman. His son Fred Terman became Dean of Engineering at Stanford, was the faculty advisor of Hewlett & Packard, and more or less developed the Silicon Valley model of Stanford faculty working with start-ups.
In contrast, the government of the Republic of Ireland was long suspicious of the modern world and favored farmers and priests rather than Collison Brothers. Did that depress IQ scores until recently? We don't have a lot of pure IQ scores for nations from this century, but we do have a lot of PISA and TIMSS achievement test scores and Ireland does fine on those.
Similarly the government of Israel didn't want Israeli Jews to invent Google, it wanted Jews to stop being nerds and start being farmers and soldiers like in a normal country. Israel now has a tech sector but the state continues to subsidize non-tech groups like the Ultra-Orthodox and West Bank settlers. Israel's IQ and PISA scores are less than scintillating, perhaps for the same reason that Ireland's scores used to be not too spectacular: because the state and society didn't want them to be.
"In contrast, the government of the Republic of Ireland was long suspicious of the modern world and favored farmers and priests rather than Collison Brothers."
Oooh, we're getting into argument territory here. I suppose the archetype of the conservative Catholic leadership would be De Valera, yet he was educated as a teacher of mathematics and influential in developing the Dubin Institute for Advanced Studies, which managed to attract people like Dirac and Schrodinger to lecture for at least a short period:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/how-dev-was-nearly-lost-to-science-1.664583
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Institute_for_Advanced_Studies
I think what is being missed here is the sheer *poverty* in Ireland. It's easy to be dismissive of "farmers and priests" but we had no native large-scale industries for several reasons, including deliberate suppression of Irish industry by British interests (see Dean Swift and 'burn everything British but their coal') and then during the first decades of independence we were engaged in a ruinous (but equally ruinous if not engaged in) trade war with Britain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_trade_war
Part of the explanations put forward for the alleged IQ gap was "all the smart people emigrated". That's only partially true; *everybody* emigrated. From the Famine period up to the 80s and indeed the Celtic Tiger period, people left because they had to go. Nowadays it may be more that people emigrate because they want a better life, but they're still going - see your example of the Collinson brothers, who are gone to the US because Silicon Valley is where you go for the investors and to make it big. They're not still living in Tipperary and raising up the local Irish level of intellect and entrepreneurship (and indeed, trying to get entrepreneurs and native industry has been a constant concern and struggle of Irish governments, see the drive in the 70s to encourage native entrepreneurs as satirised in this weekly comedy programme of the time, starting at 28:35:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlpgC7NLei8
I would definitely recommend a course of "Hall's Pictorial Weekly" as a crash-course in what Ireland of that dim and distant time was like, as distinct from today's happy and thriving modern state).
(Yes, I may be slightly sarcastic about our modern country and the state of it. The younger people on here like Nolan Eoghan can better comment on this than a dinosaur like me).
We are heavily dependent on coaxing in multinationals to set up here and promote employment. Whether our pharmaceutical industry and the Dublin Silicon Docks are ever going to see higher and higher IQs due to what the magical effect of having Big Tech in situ is supposed to have on the local population.
"the same reason that Ireland's scores used to be not too spectacular: because the state and society didn't want them to be"
That is not true. The state did not decide "we want pious peasants and all the smart people can leave for London or New York", everyone was leaving for England and the US (and later Canada and Australia) because of lack of economic opportunity. Or what is the reason for the hollowing-out in the US of places like the Rust Belt? Did the American state decide it only wanted pious peasants, and all the manufacturing jobs and high tech industries could decamp to China and India, those bastions of urbane non-peasant non-pious cosmopolities?
Dev gets pilloried for the "comely maidens" speech, but when you're living in a small rural town and seeing "everything is in Dublin", then it looks a lot better in regards to "hey, maybe having surviving and indeed thriving rural communities so the country isn't lop-sided and people have to leave or perish isn't a bad thing":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ireland_That_We_Dreamed_Of
"The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved. One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day. So, later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers. We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought."
Yeah, it's a pipe dream and was even at the time. But what do you put in place, all of you wondering why smart people aren't having kids, the morons are reproducing apace, and why the problem of collapsing fertility (see the comments about Iran above)?
Thanks. I presume the long-running poverty of Ireland relative to Scotland had a lot to do with Scotland being strong enough to get reasonably decent treatment by England, while England kicked around Ireland.
Ireland was the punching bag where the dark side of England's rather mild history played out off screen. For example, there were two English civil wars in the 1600s. Did the winner dispossess the English property of the losers, like the winners in the Zimbabwean independence war started dispossessing the losing farmers around 2000? Nah, that would be un-English and lead to future strife. Within England the two civil wars were resolved relatively amicably.
But how to reward the winning soldiers? Oh, that's easy: send them over to Ireland to put down the rebels, and then they can keep the Irish rebels' land.
Scotland is an interesting case because there are so many similarities with Ireland, and then the divergences.
I think one important difference is that during the Reformation, the Protestants won control in Scotland. The king then became king of England as well, due to Elizabeth dying without heirs, and this ended the border wars between Scotland and England. Scotland was finally incorporated into what became the United Kingdom and on somewhat more equal terms than Ireland. Big difference between "able to take a train north to cross the border" and "having to sail across the sea to get there".
The Glorious Revolution was the final hurrah of the independence movement in Ireland and Scotland, and it wasn't even that, but rather wanting a king more tolerant towards Catholicism. But the Proper Protestant King was imported, the Stuart line died out, and whatever about the romantic view in later eras of Bonnie Prince Charlie, that rebellion was crushed by the Hanoverians.
The Victorians could be sentimental about kilts and shortbread, because the Jacobites were no longer a threat. By comparison, the Fenians were carrying out bombing campaigns contemporaneously.
This has been throroughly investigated in west.
Black people do not do uniformly worse on IQ tests than whites. There is significant variation in relative performance between sub-tests, while the rank-order difficulty of questions is very similar. E.g. blacks might do worse than whites on all sub-tests, but the gaps are biggest for asy pattern completion. But whites tend to do worse on pattern completion than other sub-tests. This would mean black underformance on pattern completion relative to whites would have to be 'cultural', somehow, whereas white underperformance on pattern completion relative to other sub-tests isn't. 'Black people genuinely have lower g-loaded IQ
And if what you're saying is true, we should expect IQ tests to radically underpredict black performance on literacy/numeracy tets, SAT scores, academic acheivement, and life outcomes generally, while radically overpredicting these things for ashkenazi jews and east-asians. This is not the case. IQ is more or less equivalently good at predicting these things for all races.
And in the case of 'cultural' aspects not related to test taking generally but the content of the questions (see: endless egalitarian refrences to an SAT question one year that depended on knowing the definition of the word 'regata'), IQ questions and sub-tests deemed to be more 'culturally' loaded (e.g. things involving volcabulary) are actaully those which show the smallest gaps between blacks and whites. The more related to abstract reasoning a question is, the bigger the gaps. And it seems very weird to suggest white people are better at something abstract that they never do in any other context (e.g. visual pattern completion) because they're..more familiar with it?
#7 is kind of surprising to me. Rule number one for lottery winners: Make sure your name is not publicized anywhere. Be very very selective to whom you mention the winnings
I've heard that about 50% of large lottery winners (multi-million) go bankrupt within 5 years. This does not seem to be limited to those who are known and announced, but I don't know how this was tracked.
It appears to be the same problem that professional athletes run into, where they make a lot of money fast, but then end up wasting it. My guess is the mind can't handle such a vastly increased wealth when it's sudden, and we mentally adjust to a higher income, even if it's not an ongoing income but instead a one-time infusion. If this is accurate, it makes sense that both known and unknown lottery winners would have the same problem.
Do you have a source for that stat? I am not sure how they would accurately track it if the winner is anonymous. There are some states that don't allow anonymous winners so i guess you could compare the two sets, but the data points would be so small it would be hard to come to any conclusion.
The people who win and remain anonymous are definitely not the same people who win and put their name out there. Not to mention, people who play the lottery skew poor.
In the linked story, almost every problem listed is because people knew he had won the lottery.
I saw that years ago and don't remember where from. In doing some Googling now, I'm seeing ranges from 30-70% that go bankrupt, with differing theories. And there is some difference according to at least one news story/study regarding whether they were anonymous.
When a huge lottery prize is bought in an upscale suburb, we often never hear the names of the lucky winner. Instead, a lawyer shows up about a week later announcing he's representing a newly formed corporation and the money will be collected by the shell company in a way conducive to optimal tax planning. I suspect these winners, whoever they are, do pretty well in life.
Exactly. I suspect huge selection bias in all these stories of winners who go bankrupt or die of overdose.
Most states don't allow lottery winners to stay anonymous.
This is bad. Around here, staying quiet is the first thing the lottery company tells it's winners
I think it serves a function to prevent corruption of the lottery winning. E.g. the McDonalds company used to have a Monopoly-themed contest that was essentially a lottery, and it turns out the firm that ran it for them was corrupt and steered most of the major prizes to pre-selected winners. Officially announcing lottery winners' names makes it harder to get away with that sort of shenanigan because journalists or other outsiders could identify connections between the winners.
That said if I won a big prize I'd refuse the photo, and if that was mandatory I'd spend months before taking it growing out my hair and beard, wear dark glasses with colored contacts, and dress uncharacteristically. And then after a few years I'd change my name, which wouldn't stop determined stalkers but might help against "internet randos".
This is unfortunate. Over here, lotteries are so heavily regulated that fraud is a non issue
> 10 seems to overlook the most famous English gay footballer, Justin Fashanu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fashanu who was widely bullied and died by suicide
An interesting comparison is with women’s football where the proportion who are openly gay is remarkably high https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/06/17/england-womens-lgbtq-euro-2022/
Discussed in another comment:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february-2023/comment/12636346
Fashanu committed suicide after being accused of a crime which he claimed he could not expect a fair trial for.
Regarding Carl Sagan's second wife, you wrote:
> His second wife *was the woman who designed* the Pioneer plaque
A more accurate phrasing seems to be:
> His second wife *had the opportunity to draw* the Pioneer plaque.
They got married in 1968; Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the plaque which she drew the final version of prior to the 1972 launch.
See pictures and captions here: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/pioneer-carries-message-across-stars
(The first and third wife both had notable accomplishments prior to marrying Sagan, the second not so much.)
If you Google “MrBeast blind" on YouTube like I did to find that clip, the top three videos are all about the backlash to his efforts.
I tried this on my normal account, and in an private browsing window. The original Mr.Beast video was the top hit for both. Also, the second hit is for somebody defending him. The controversy exists, otherwise there wouldn't need to be a video defending him, but I suspect Scott's specific version of Youtube is exaggerating it.
I'm now also getting the video first, although the remainder of the top five are "Let's talk about the Mr. Beast drama" "Hasan Piker RAGES at Mr. Beast", "Mr. Beast curing the blind is bad" and "Mr. Beast video broke the law".
This is on the same computer, same browser as I used last time, and I don't think I watched any YouTube between then and now, so I wonder if it's a change in the search rankings.
I don't know hopefully other people will weigh in with what they get.
I got the exact same three videos as Scott
I almost never search on Youtube, so at great personal risk to my future youtube search result quality, I tried it. The original video was first, then one of the negative ones. After that, videos about the controversy (meta). Of the top 20, 2 positive, 4 negative, 8 meta, 4 other mrbeast, and 2 other.
If youtube presents a video to you and you DON'T watch it, they take that as a sign. So just viewing the results of a search will have an impact, not to mention its no just your behavior that impacts the results but everyone else's, especially the people it thinks you are most similar to.
It's totally plausible that youtube has linked the behavior of some of your readers to you and so any readers who went and looked up these videos impacted the search results you now get.
My top 4 are split 2 and 2 pos/neg, and then 15 of the next 20 videos are backlash to the backlash reactions. (So positive, but referencing the negative.)
All these videos have pretty high views so everyone is doing well on this topic, it seems.
It’s weird to say “MrBeast isn’t a billionaire so rage at billionaires doesn’t explain rage at him” - but isn’t he a top-5 YouTuber, which is basically the same social position?
I mean in the relevant way for this discussion, which is about occupying a social position where anything you do that attracts attention gets a certain amount of rage response from people.
Culturally, definitely. And whenever anyone says something like "rage at billionaires" they always mean cultural billionaires not just financial ones.
Regarding #1
This was the premise of a great, really old Arthur C Clarke short story called "Food of the gods".
He saw this coming half a century ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_English_football is perhaps a better link than the one to a far right site.
I think it’s only because Steve Sailer is such a famous racist and supporter of this site that he gets any attention here. I wish Scott was a bit more critical of these takes that basically say “why aren’t the gays playing football? Must be something about how wussy they are, since homophobia ended decades ago in the sport of the hooligans”.
Totally agree, not sure why we should listen to Sailer's musings on this topic (or any topic).
Andrew Gelman would disagree with you, as he found Sailer's measurement of years-married for white women to be one of the most highly correlated ones for geographical variation in partisan vote share. As would Steve Pinker regarding Sailer's "Cousin Marriage Conundrum". But in this case the musings aren't actually Sailer's at all, but instead one of his commenters.
Steve Sailer is more intelligent, thoughtful and good faith than a majority of left-wing commenters here.
Sturgeon's Law says that 99% of everything is crap, so perhaps that's a pointless standard to judge him by.
What would be a better standard? The degree of adherence to latest woke sensibilities?
People of his own class (professional bloggers) rather than ordinary commenters would be a start.
As a thread on ACX grows longer, the probability someone will complain that ACX isn't a left-wing echo chamber approaches 1.
Because he has interesting and possibly correct things to say sometimes? And unlike moron ideological robots most places, we don't only overlook the failings of ideologically problematic people on the left, but also on the right (if they have something to add occasionally).
He says something different than the completely replaceable Redditor types you find on all internet communities.
Repeatedly bringing up hooligans on this topic seems more ridiculous to me than postulating gays can't play football because they are pussies. Are gays less sympathetic to hooligans than Arab Muslims ? How can someone like Mo Salah (and plenty others https://www.thenationalnews.com/sport/football/mohamed-salah-to-mido-top-30-arab-footballers-in-premier-league-history-ranked-1.1144554) succeed if the bigoted hooligans are such a determinative factor ?
I think the relevant thing is whether the behavior of 10-12 year old boys on soccer teams is driving away the people who might eventually turn out to be gay. Plenty of us found team sports settings (and related settings) uncomfortable for reasons that later turned out to be clearly related to our sexuality even long before we were aware of our sexuality. It doesn't seem at all surprising to me that this would be a much more powerful force than racism.
I think you are putting 2 and 2 together and getting 3.5. Kids are indeed attentive to assholish behaviour, I hate football too because I was bad at it when I was a kid (and still now lol), and that would make my peers in school not choose me when time came to form teams, which embarrassed me and further fed into my repulsion for the sport (ensuring I wouldn't try it in other less assholish settings, further stabilizing the loop).
The moment you go off the rails I think is when you postulate that the "Gay" modifier to "Kids" adds anything above the grade of noise. I'm sure there are plenty of groups that are also under-represented in football, say Autists, or Scifi readers. But none of those have the sweet sweet attention capital of a culture war identity.
Maybe the gay identity has a convoluted genetic/social ties to Autism, or maybe there is just no mystery here because gays are a hell of a small group and professional footballers are a hell of a small group and when you get 2 hell-small groups then their interesection is even more hell-smaller.
To the extent that you were chased away from football, being gay had nothing to do with it. You could have always denied it, and if you were a good player (by the standards of your age) then the coach would slam down on your bullies hard enough soon enough. Being gay or the social markers associated with it is just further blood in the water, but its absence (keeping all else constant) wouldn't have made any difference.
And for what it's worth, I think there is no such thing as a "Gay Kid". Kids are neither gay or straight (except in the potential sense), you're neither one or the other until you know what sex is and form a sufficiently clear picture of what it entails, typically starting at 13. Even then, you remain volatile (and, dare I say, suggestible and easily-moldable) till 17 or so.
I agree that it would be not at all surprising to note that professional athletes who were geeks in middle school and high school might be just as rare as professional athletes who are gay. I'm not sure how this supports the original claim that the only possible explanation is a genetic factor, rather than a social one.
> To the extent that you were chased away from football, being gay had nothing to do with it. You could have always denied it, and if you were a good player (by the standards of your age) then the coach would slam down on your bullies hard enough soon enough.
This is missing the point on the claimed mechanism. The claim isn't only that people are bullied for being gay - it's that sports involve a lot of locker room contact and joint showering that create a different kind of complexity for pubescent gay people than for straight people, and that this factor also turns a lot of gay men away from team sports.
(I'm happy to accept the terminological correction about "gay kids". But I don't accept the claim that later sexual orientation is "suggestible" or "easily-moldable" in the teenage years, because that makes it sound like someone knows a way to systematically change it in one direction or another. Nevertheless, you're right that there may well be a substantial population that undergoes some relevant changes in this age range.)
>I'm not sure how this supports the original claim that the only possible explanation is a genetic factor, rather than a social one.
More like supports my general skepticism that is a special mystery that needs explanation at all, rather than a question almost entirely motivated by culture war instincts.
>it's that sports involve a lot of locker room contact and joint showering that create a different kind of complexity for pubescent gay people than for straight people
Hmm, so your propsed mechanism here is something akin to how girl cliques often bully straight shy men ? They make a big deal of the man's secret desire for them, and use it as a starting point to bully and make fun of him. The nerd, lacking credible evidence to deny that he *is* sexually interested in the clique's members, but also lacking the social capital to go ahead and own it, is forced to endure their constant humiliation. You're saying the straight teammates can play the role of a girl clique to a gay outsider ?
This is an interesting way of looking at things, but it would predict that gays would also have difficulties in (e.g.) gyms, which often involve constant nudity and showering together. Is your explanation of this that gym culture don't require the same commitment from childhood that football does, and thus gays can enter it when they are more mature and confident enough to bully back ?
> because that makes it sound like someone knows a way to systematically change it in one direction or another
That's a common conclusion to jump to, but it need not be. For instance, Social Class is a quite literally a social construct, but Communism has been trying to change/eradicate it for 150+ years with mostly no lasting success. Similar thing with States and Anarchism.
I'm indeed extremly skeptic that someone can consciously engineer their sexual orientation or that of others. There is no sticks harsher than the death penalty and the extreme ostracization that being gay entails in lots of social milieus, and there is no carrots more desirable than how most male socialization schemes make women and girls to be (on top of the natural effects) most anywhere. If the gay identity can survive that, it can survive almost anything. The effects I'm talking about is much more subconscious, unreplicable, and gradual in magnitude.
How do the 10 to 12 year old homophobes know that the 10 to 12 year old future gay man is gay? At that age, most boys belong to the he-man girl-hater club, so how can they tell?
Are you implying that most 10-12 year old future gay men tend to have effeminate mannerisms that lead to bullying?
But what percentage of effeminate little boys really want "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women" on the athletic field? Maybe they find that kind of thinking, which is so helpful in winning at sports, unappealing to effeminate little boys?
So, maybe they prefer arts to sports? In turn, little boys who think Conan is awesome pursue victory in sports.
Nothing I said in this particular point depends on homophobia or effeminacy. It just depends on 10 to 12 year old future gay men finding something uncomfortable or awkward about locker room situations, driven by nudity around other boys and possibly some aspects of behavior that enhance the awkwardness for future gay men. This awkwardness could then drive them away. (e.g., if boys taunt each other whenever someone has a noticeable boner, and the future gay men find themselves more often having boners, then they might be driven away by perfectly neutral behavior. And if they find their own thoughts about the other boys distracting, that may drive them away even without any behavioral element.)
OK, this is about gay boys having erections in the shower around other naked boys, which the other boys might not appreciate.
Bigoted hooligans can be a factor in the choice of coming out. Mohammed Salah didn't have the option of not coming out as Muslim so it's not a fair comparison.
Steve Sailer is more intelligent, thoughtful and good faith than a majority of left-wing commenters here.
And I mean, your comment proves it. Calling him "racist" isn't good faith, because that word is mostly used as a slur rather than a genuinely descriptive label, and he never called them wussy, he suggests that there is a genetic-based self-selection effect taking place, which is a perfectly reasonable suggested answer for a question like this.
Look at any of the comments he leaves here. Much more effect and insight than a majority of the commenters who like to shout people down as "racist".
IDK about that...IMO the right-wing commenters here are overrepresented and give this site a bad name in certain quarters...I like Scott Alexander and his output, and thus don't want it to be associated with the "alt-right" in the popular mind.
"Why does Steve Sailer know so many facts about sports that he can bring up to point out that my theory isn't very strong? It can't be because he's been thinking hard about the subject for a third of a century and therefore is more likely to have come to true insights than I have. Instead, it must be because he's a BAD PERSON and therefore should be shut up."
I note that you are attacking the tone rather than the argument.
Counterpoint : Wikipedia is bland and without an authorial voice. It's super popular so you're not adding anything new by linking to it as anybody who googles the topic will likely bump straight into it as the first result. It also has the opposite bias of the one you're complaining about, directly through the kind of editors who tend to take interest in such articles and indirectly because it priortizes mainstream sources and news outlets and reports them uncritically.
>directly through the kind of editors who tend to take interest in such articles
I mean, there *are* people on the other side who would take interest in them. It's just that they get banned.
Would you object to a far-left site?
It's so laughable when the left claim to be good faith when they're ideologues to a literally religious degree.
#10 New Zealand just had its first rugby player for the national team come out as gay just the other day. He is no longer active in the sport it seems. There have been 1207 All Blacks (name for the national team) in total, to give you an idea of the ratio.
I'm not really sympathetic to the concern that our visiting Mars would contaminate it. First of all, it seems very unlikely on priors that there's life on Mars because if abiogenesis was so easy that it happened on *two* planets in the same star system, then there would be life everywhere and we would definitely have seen aliens. For our observations of the universe to make sense, abiogenesis has to be pretty hard.
Now, you could maybe be interested in investigating a panspermia hypothesis, but then I think there are enough alternative celestial bodies you can examine; Venus? Titan?
Panspermia's the issue, yeah. Abiogenesis you can check even if Mars is somewhat contaminated, since it's ludicrously unlikely that nonhomologous life would match the biochemistry of Earthly life.
Venus is useless for panspermia checking, for the same reason that we don't worry as much about probes contaminating it: Earth-homologous life cannot survive there outside a sealed environment. Not even in the atmosphere, because of the sulphuric acid. It's unlikely even fossils remain, because of the resurfacing events.
Titan is useful, but if you're talking about Earth->X panspermia Titan gets a much-smaller proportion of Earthly impact ejecta than Mars does, and much slower (i.e. more time to get sterilised by space radiation); it's also much colder. And throwing away one chance to check because there's a single-digit number of other chances (at least for subaerial life) is just mind-bogglingly dumb - throwing one away because there are hundreds of others, that's fine, which is why I'm not super-fussed about colonising the Moon, or Ceres, or any other airless rock. Mars, though, I'd rather we didn't contaminate.
I wrote a thing arguing for biogenisis on Mars a few years ago. Basically, life arose really quickly on Earth but all the other steps of life, photosynthesis, mitochondria, multiple differentiated cells, took much longer. So we shouldn't necessarily expect simple chemosynthetic life to be that rare.
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-likely-is-it-that-there-was-life-on.html
>Basically, life arose really quickly on Earth
Or, alternately, life takes ages to get to LUCA as well, but panspermia's a thing and those ages happened elsewhere - this would also predict life on Mars, though.
What makes you think we'd know if the average number of species per star like us was as high as 1? Space is really, really big, as Douglas Adams observed. It's certainly beyond us now. It's not implausible that it will always be beyond us, simply because our lives are too short.
Life could be very common, while intelligent tool-making life could still be very uncommon.
Re: gay football players. A simple google search tells me about Justin Fashanu, an English football pro who had his coming-out during his active career, in 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fashanu
That article helpfully leads to another:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_English_football
where it lists, FWIW, one currently active English footballer that is openly gay.
So if that blog post claims that "the English media is really, really obsessed with finding a gay male soccer player willing to come out and has been for about ten years.", there is some big misunderstanding here somewhere.
I agree that there is a stigma against admitting or even discussing male homosexuality in football, and probably any team sport at the pro level. But that blog post in particular seems to have failed spectacularly in its research.
The post talks about the premier league, which Fashanu and Daniels never played in. I think thats what the author meant but could have been phrased better.
It does seem weird that only one ex-PL player has publicly come out after retirement, considering the denominator of 3000+ players since 1992. This is not counting the entire professional english football system, plus spain/germany/italy/portugal/netherlands and many other countries with robust football leagues.
This wiki lists a few more players internationally, but the list of women players is way larger despite women’s football having way fewer professional players: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_association_football
Apparently so, but I'll still count that as failure, because the author equates the Premier League, consisting of only 20 teams, with not only English football, but team sports in general. This seems to be the Streetlight Effect bias, because the Premier League is probably the only place where you could find comprehensive data about its players in English football, but the PL, as does any other top professional league, has its own incentives which makes its players not representative of its respective sports scene.
Obvious confounders are the money and the publicity that come with playing at the highest pro level, so becoming "increasingly sympathetic to your theory that whatever psycholocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too" seems to be at least an overreaction (or confirmation bias) when other explanations are available.
And if it does turn out to be a psychological explanation after all, then "a deeply homophobic culture in football strongly selects against homosexual players engaging in it and accordingly fewer of them reach the highest level" still seems much simpler and with the same predicitive power than some common cause that makes one heterosexual and also causes them to be interested in team sports.
I can't judge the veracity of the author's claim that "England is perhaps the world’s most gay-friendly place and anyone coming out is guaranteed a sympathetic media portrayal.", but even if it was true, it could well indicate that the oposite is true on the ground, i.e. on the actual football fields where people grow up and experience everyday homophobia, as described in the wiki article on homosexuality in English football.
Overall, I would interpret that blog post, even though a lot of effort seems to have gone into it, as a broader argument against a supposedly homophilic/heterophobic (media) establishment and an attempt to make homosexuality into a genetic issue, i.e. one that could be "cured" with eugenics. If unz.com is a far-right website, then that blog post is in exactly the right place.
These days, you'll find detailed information about every club and player easily down to the bottom of the Football league pyramid, which is 92 teams.
And, given the popularity of Football Manager (an incredibly detailed simulation of Football Management), you will likely have no trouble finding a whole trove of information for even lower leagues. I haven't played for a while, but I don't doubt there are mods that will enable leagues as low as the Isthmian league, while still having accurate data for every single club and player, even semi-pro and amateur.
The topic is sexual orientation of football players. Information in this context means information about their personal life, whether they're married, have kids, and so on, used as circumstantial evidence about their sexual orientation. Do you mean to tell me those data are also included in player databases?
I would be very surprised if a lot of player databases did not track that kind of thing. I don't think the core Football Manager database has space for [Relationship], [Sexuality], [Kids], etc., but it seems like exactly the kind of thing you could add through a mod, with all the information tracked by the various FM obsessives
>"England is perhaps the world’s most gay-friendly place and anyone coming out is guaranteed a sympathetic media portrayal."
As an Englishman, I am pretty confident that the first half of this claim is wrong (although we're more gay-friendly than most places) and that the second half is technically correct but comes with the important "but outside the media they'll also encounter a lot of bigotry" caveat that you suggest.
Which places are more gay-friendly?
I would tentatively guess New Zealand, the Netherlands, much of Scandinavia, perhaps Canada and probably other chunks of north-west Europe. I have low-to-medium confidence that any one of those is, but high confidence that at least some of them are.
That actually does line up with this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_same-sex_marriage
Who says homosexuality is genetic? Unz has also supported Greg Cochran (though Greg himself has nothing good to say about Unz), who derides any such genetic theory in favor of a pathogenic one.
It's the left who falsely believe that homosexuality is innate. The right are the ones constantly having to point to heritability studies that show the heritability of homosexuality is very low.
And what exactly does this mean?
> into a genetic issue, i.e. one that could be "cured" with eugenics.
What the hell? All aspects of human behavior are heritable to some degree. We have to deny this in order to not be supporters of 'eugenics'?
Either a trait is heritable or it isn't. The fact you don't like genetic explanations for things is ideological problem, not a scientifc issue.
13 The cancer research estimate is:
* giving the average benefit rather than the marginal benefit; presumably there are diminishing returns where the more promising research happens first
* looking at past research, including times when there was much less funding available than there is now
* treating federal funding as the only input, ignoring counterfactuals, and ignoring all other costs. Their equation is (benefits of using innovations) / (amount of federal funding). It would be more accurate to try to estimate something like:
(share of innovation due to federal funding) * (benefits of using innovations - costs of using innovations) / (amount of federal funding)
The Chinese & Indian militaries beating each other with sticks at the Line of Actual Control is a big part of Neal Stephenson's latest novel (the rest being "what if Elon was Texan and decided to unilaterally solve climate change")
Also reminds me of the societies in Dune forgoing guns/lasers because of shield technology.
Ah! I always wondered how much of that thread of the book is fictional (i.e. yet another instance of NS predicting the future), and how much was inspired by real event. I remember not finding much about sticks and stone combat on the Himalayas at least on the English internet.
The Himalayan Line of Actual Control is a real thing, as is the Indian and Chinese militaries setting about each other with clubs and rocks in the snow to try and shift it a bit.
Unless you've lived in the UK, it's easy to miss just how deeply intertwined homophobia and football are in this country. I became aware of my sexuality in the early 2000s, and I was made to play football at school. Homophobia was so much more prevalent and accepted within the context of football than anywhere else, even within the context of an already homophobic society. Boys who didn't like football were sissies or f*gs or queers or gayboys, even to the teachers. My overwhelming impression of football as a gay child was that this is a sport for people who hate me. Of course gay men are wildly underrepresented within the professional footballing world. Fun anecdote: one of the boys who enjoyed using homophobic slurs the most is now a professional referee who's worked at international tournaments. He clearly felt at home within the sport
Yeah this was a weirdly bad take for Scott to just look at so uncritically. English football is a famously hooligan-dominated culture, and one might suspect this carries over to attitudes about sexual minorities.
#18 The standard alternative to colonising Mars is to instead mine asteroids or other low gravity objects (possibly the moon) and convert the material into O'Neill Cylinders (giant rotating space stations). They have major advantages over Mars, such as tunable gravity, very easy access to zero-g (the interesting part of space), don't have to live in caves, can be close to the sun for cheap solar power, can build more to match demand, can be short travel distance to Earth, etc. This is what Bezos wants to do with Blue Origin.
Downsides are it would take longer to get started as there are more engineering challenges to overcome. Musk is much further along and has all the hype so far.
I'm all for this. Colonising space will never happen unless you can make space better than Earth in at least some ways. Mars will never be better than Earth, but a well-designed luxury space station (as in the movie Elysium) could be.
I feel like everybody's for one or the other. All these have obvious engineering synergies, and it's not like "money" is the restricting parameter for this type of initiatives. Why not both, and have some redundancy?
money is very much, extremely so, the limiting factor.
On the surface maybe. But at this scale (civilization level undertakings I mean), money become again a concept that can be circumvented. Just as in times of war you tend not to fret too much about whether you can "afford" to buy a tank that was already built by some company for example.
I really feel like money is really two different things at two different scales (yeah, let's reinvent macro/micro economics). At an individual level it's very much a way to attribute resources efficiently, a delocalized / parrallelized planification engine. But at the scale of large "states" (US, EU, China), it's another beast entirely, which is not even really well defined at all! I think you can trace back most of the monetary policies in the world back to the personal convictions and norms of a few dozen people! These have been translated into numbers, institutions, theories with limited prediction power, and the stock market as a shamanic entity. But it still boils down to: punish taboos culturally defined (too much debt! not enough spending! too much spending!), and these very much ebb and flow.
Gedankenexperiment: if suddenly a large, civilization ending event came by, would the world just shrug and die because solving it would "cost" more "money" than we have in the world and it would just not make fiscal sense to do it?
Gist: Money is a collective norm, extremely useful at the individual level as a replacement for debt as a means of transactioon; at the national level it is more a type of relative power measurement subject to Goodharts law, with upstream mechanics potentially subject to reinvention / suspension when cultural norms among the stakeholders shifts.
then again, you may have said that because, as a set of civilization, we would be dumb enough to let the entirely circumventable problem of money drive us to extinction, which is a real possibility I admit...
Money is not an "entirely circumventable problem"; it is the solution to the otherwise insurmountable problem, "We don't know whether we even have enough of the right sort of stuff to do this, and what opportunities we'd foreclose if we did". Nothing else works nearly as well as money for getting the right stuff in the right place to get the job done.
But it only works if you play by the rules, one of which is "don't try to circumvent monetary limitations by e.g. printing more money".
so many words, trying to deny that scarcity is a thing. No, the US does not live in a magical unconstrained reality because they can print more dollars.
Many words indeed, mister lacedemonian. And I'm not from the US ;).
While scarcity is a thing, so is artificial scarcity (induced by the systems of govenance we choose) and the distribution of it is malleable. "Printing dollars" is part of it (even if in practice, private banks just lend and so create new money on the expectation that the returns will cover its own creation. growth as a ponzi scheme.). And some resources are not quantified by money, but gatekept by it anyway, except in times of shifting norms about the reach of government power! (like workforce allocation: driven by market during time of peace. forced mobilization / reassignment of research etc in times of war).
And, tongue in cheek, we have lived the pas 10 years in what economists called an "era of magic money". Power begets power, and the coyote does not have to look down...
Money is just a ledger of transactions. The fundamental limits of reality are what matter, not the ledger (although if the ledger is artificially constrained, we may well transact less than we could or should).
Sure, if we HAD to do it, we probably could with available resources.
But there’s no obvious return on the investment beyond “man it would be cool to play Expanse with everybody”, and plenty of more pressing issues locally.
The 0.3g gravity environment could be better than Earth for certain things - unpowered flight once the atmosphere is thickened, sports, etc. It's also much better than Earth at being a different planet, which is inherently attractive for some.
>Mars will never be better than Earth
Of course it is, and now already. It's the subject of a century-worth of fantasies that captured the imagination of hundreds of millions, Earth isn't. It's also a new land : No states, No established social, cultural or economic structures, a completely blank slate.
Your reasoning would have us believe that people would never colonize faraway lands unless it's immediately (and materially) better than what they have at the moment, but that's demonstrably false if you took a look at the history of colonization on Earth.
We should hedge our bets as it's likely one of the two approaches may be feasibly accomplished far, far later than the other. Conceiving means for long-term survival in space, such as O'Neill Cylinders, may be a necessary precursor to long-distance space travel - and space travel itself is still in infant stages. On the other hand maybe terraforming will be figured out before all of that. I wonder what those working closer to the metal would speculate will happen first. Some time ago I'd have guessed asteroid mining, except that it's redundant given the extensive precious metals we still have on Earth now.
The potential for Cis-Luna O'Neill Cylinders and other orbital infrastructure is why I generally favour the 'Moon First' school of solar colonization. Using the moon as an industrial node for the development of Near-Earth orbitals seems far more immediately useful than Martian colonies, which are too distant from Earth to facilitate the regular shipment of material or manpower.
What can we do on Mars (or the Moon) that we can't do more cheaply on Earth? Unless we have a real economic benefit to setting up (very expensive) colonies on other worlds, I just can't see it happening any time soon. The only parallel in history is the colonisation of the americas - which was driven by gold, land and resources. But colonising Mars will not bring a flood of cheap resources back to Earth.
A strong push factor could do it. I've always though the biggest driver for space colonization would be if we figured out medical immortality or at least very significant life extension. On top of the increased population pressure (for at least a few decades), I could see a number of rich societies encouraging space colonies as a way to avoid dislodging the now immortal occupants of political/social/cultural positions of power (which happens nowadays because people retire and die over time).
Long-term survival benefit is clearer, the economic one is not for a long spell. It's difficult to ascertain exactly when humanity should start thinking seriously about getting off this rock. Most projections suggest we at least have many millions of years, but other things can happen before then, however unlikely (or more likely, if self-inflected).
I’m not even sure the long term survival benefit is there, unless you’re talking “after the sun burns out” kind of long term.
Almost any disaster on earth is still easier to survive on earth than on Mars. Building a meteor or nuclear war or climate change proof colony on Earth is still easier than on Mars (from a practical perspective- maybe it would be politically easier to do it on Mars).
“All of the oxygen, water, and solar radiation shielding you need are already in your current gravity well” is just an absolutely massive head start that Mars can’t overcome.
Projection for Earth being uninhabitable would be before the sun burns out, but at any rate it's a certainty. It will be impossible to survive on Earth eventually.
Needn't put stake into Mars specifically, just space colonization.
Well before. The slowly increasing luminosity of the Sun is expected to put a stop to photosynthesis on the Earth in ~600 million years.
Colonizing the asteroid belt could bring a flood of cheap resources to Earth. Building space habitats gives you access to a lot of cheap solar energy. What you get from Mars, which is at the bottom of a gravity well, is not so clear.
What's in the asteroid belt that would be worth the cost of the delta V required to transport?
I was thinking of rare elements. With no significant gravity well to get out of and free sunlight for a solar sail, I wouldn't think the cost would be large.
Also, of course, since you are starting with resources already out of Earth's gravity well, asteroid mining would be useful for building space habitats.
Like what? Gold? Platinum group? I suppose there might be some massive high-grade deposit of these somewhere in the asteroid belt, if there happened to be a planet that broke up. Heavy elements like that are only concentrated if you have a nice density gradient in a big body, since they are a priori very rare. And then we have to imagine that the core of the planet gets somehow exposed by some violent event in the past, so that we can just pickaxe the gold out of the surface. Maybe it has happened, but maybe not. Maybe the asteroid belt is just all silicates (which are worthless) or iron and nickel, which are already pretty cheap down here.
I'm not sure even if we found a mess of heavy elements that it would be especially worthwhile. Most heavy elements aren't super useful industrially. They all have niche uses, to be sure, mostly as catalysts, but the most useful structural metals are light metals like Al, Ti, Fe, and even with respect to catalysts these days it's more about what clever ligands you attach to the metal than about the metal itself.
Most of our expensive industrially useful elements aren't so much a priori rare as they are exceedingly annoying to separate from their chemical surroundings, e.g. Ti is moderately common in the Earth's crust, and Al very common, but prying them away from O is taxing. The rare earth elements are not actually rare, but are so chemically similar that it is a real chore separating them from each other, and from related elements. This isn't going to be any easier in space, all the reactive metals are still likely to be oxidized in the asteroid belt. Maybe out past Jupiter the Solar System is sufficintly reducing that you could find metals in native form.
It's not the gravity well of either the source or the destination that is at issue, it's that of the Sun. Just to move something from the orbital radius of the Earth to that of the middle of the asteroid belt, or vice versa, you need to add or substract ~1.5 km/s to its velocity around the Sun. So the energy you need is 1/2 m (that velocity) squared, for whatever m you want to move, before we even consider gravity wells (or the cost to refine or package). That's a lot of energy. Generating energy is always expensive. (I'm not sure how a solar sail helps, by definition that can only change your radial velocity with respect to the Sun, and it's tangential velocity change that is needed here, because you need to change your orbital radius. It would be great if we could tack in space, but unfortunately there's nothing into which you can stick your centerboard.)
Yes, I agree you could use them to build the structural parts of space habitats, but I actually don't think that helps much with cost or feasibility. The biggest problem in our neck of the Solar System, if you want to build stuff in space, is volatiles: you need water, O2, carbon in some form or other (CH4 or CO2 will both do), and reduced nitrogen (NH3 or NO2 at a pinch), because this is what life needs to thrive. You can certainly strive to build closed ecosystems that recycle very very efficiently -- but you need a big mass for your initial supply, and leaks are inevitable in space. The problem is, the only source of these we know is Earth. This is one reason people get excited about ice on the Moon, it would be a big help -- the limitation on building Moon colonies is not really so much structural building material, you can do a lot with local rock, but rather supplying it with air, water, CO2 and reduced nitrogen (if you want to grow plants), of all of which the Moon is utterly destitute.
That depends on the cost of delta-V; I wouldn't rule out just plain steel when we have the right transportation infrastructure in place. But for now, definitely platinum-group elements, and possibly cobalt. Mars might have readily available lithium, but it would take more delta-V to get it to Earth.
Anything that can only be manufactured in microgravity, can only come from space and will be cheaper if it uses extraterrestrial materials. That will probably also be true of anything that requires a great deal of energy to manufacture, once we get a decent solar-cell factory in space.
Also, if you're going to be doing *anything* in space, you're going to need rocket fuel. Which is cheap if you want it at Cape Canaveral for launching things *to* space, but if you need rocket fuel for maneuvering *in* space, you've either got to pay 9+ km/s of delta-V to deliver it from Earth or 2-3 km/s to deliver it from the Moon or a convenient asteroid.
Well, you could rely on nuclear or solar electric power, then all you need is something ionizable you can fire out the back -- plus a lot of patience, as these are not high thrust mechanisms, to say the least.
But there's no way I believe the economic case for Pt and its ilk, or Co. They just aren't that valuable, and I don't believe even if they were lying in pure refined ingots on the surface of the Moon that they could economically compete with mining and extraction (not to mention recycling) technologies we already have.
I dunno, I would say a major part of the early colonization of the Americas was driven by dissent, and wanting to GTFO out of some country in Europe for reasons of being persecuted there.
The upfront costs are probably a lot higher for those. You can build up a Mars colony with a trickle of immigrants plus local resources, but a reasonably sized space habitat requires that you have far more infrastructure in space to build it before you can even have anyone live in it. It's like if you had to build cities entirely in one go versus building them up neighborhood-by-neighborhood.
That could change, obviously, if we have AI plus good robotics to do all the assembly in space work for us.
Insert your favorite "why not both?" meme here. Anyone building the infrastructure to colonize Mars in an economically plausible manner, will have incidentally built the infrastructure to allow other people to colonize the Moon, the asteroids, etc, at relatively low marginal cost. And humanity is famously diverse; no matter how certain *you* are that one path is best, every other path will have a long line of people for whom that is their first choice.
Including the Saganite path for which the answer is to just stay on Earth and explore the universe with telescopes and robots; I'm pretty sure that's what Ceglowski prefers. But the rest of us are either going to remain stuck on Earth, or we're going to colonize pretty much the entire Solar system.
I'm not certain that orbital habitats present larger engineering problems than mars. Constructing them is on the level of building your average cargo ship. Everything else--life support, mainly--is roughly the same, just everything isn't covered in dust and if your air conditioner control board breaks you can get the replacement in a week instead of three months.
There are resources on Mars that aren't available in orbit, though. CO2, various kinds of dirt, water/ice, trace minerals, etc.
All of which are available either on Luna (accessible by mass driver) or asteroids (mass driver or lassoed). Once you get to the point where moving enough industrial capacity for a self-sustaining colony to Mars is possible, acquiring resources outside of a gravity well will have been possible for a long time.
We should also note that the main bottleneck isn't access to raw materials, but access to a sufficiently advanced industrial base capable of producing components and technology for life support systems. The main mission critical goal--keeping your crew alive--relies on contingency planning for any failure relative to your expected emergency resupply time, and that's a much, much, bigger pile of spare parts when your resupply time is months instead of weeks. So you want to keep the logistical chain as short as possible.
On the level of building your average cargo ship - in the middle of the