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.
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.
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.
No. English football has largely cleaned itself up. Homophobia is rare in Europe. I can’t speak for professional football, but the amateur game that the average guy plays at the weekend has a lot less homophobia and misogynistic banter.
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.
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).
The English premier league sources players from across the world. It’s minority English these days. I doubt if the rest of Europe, South America or Africa would have different results.
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?
Cis isn’t the opposite of gay. It’s the opposite of trans. Most gay people are cis. In fact if they transitioned and kept their sexual preferences they wouldn’t be gay but would be trans.
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?
Why concentrate on race and not class. If economists want to be egalitarians then be socialist. The free market can’t produce vastly different outcomes for individuals and equality for ever multiplying groups.
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.
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.
Crime is a social justice issue. The poor suffer the most. The old are infirm are terrified. The criminals are often rich, the leaders of the gangs are multi millionaires or richer. Well done Bukele
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.
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.
I’m pretty good at those, and they help me get a pretty good score. In real life though I don’t see what they help me with. Abstract thought? Math? Driving a car? I don’t see those attributes as being helpful
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.
On the level of building your average cargo ship - in the middle of the ocean. Having a shipyard is really helpful if you're trying to build a ship. And if not a shipyard, at least a foundation. A place you can put your stuff and not have it drift away, and which you can push against when you want to move things without spending expensive propellant.
Also, Mars has air and concrete readily available with a bit of processing, probably water and steel without too much more effort, and potentially any raw material you need once we start seriously prospecting.
If the question is simply, "Where, other than Earth, is the easiest place to establish and maintain a human population?", the answer is probably Mars. But there's also the other question, "what are people going to do there to make it worth the bother?", and that's where other extraterrestrial locations may have the edge. We probably won't know until we've tried them all.
The majority of the infrastructure in a shipyard is concerned with lifting and positioning massive objects against the force of gravity. Strapping things down is a solved problem. Positioning objects and materials relative to a single structure conserves momentum and requires no propellant.
Assembling large structures in zero-g is strictly easier, once you figure out the "being in space" part, and Mars doesn't have anything to offer on that front. The logistical train is so long for life support that it will always make sense to bring whatever materials you can find to orbit instead of putting all the machinery to process them down in a gravity well.
Strapping things down is a solved problem, *where there is such a thing as down*.
And anyone saying that assembling large structures in zero-g is "strictly easier", has read a few SF or pop-sci articles and never worked with real-world orbital logistics. Or even read the reports of the people who have done so.
> Strapping things down is a solved problem, *where there is such a thing as down*.
If you were instructed to strap things down on a spacecraft and this was the response you gave I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be obligated to fire you, immediately.
Assembling things in zero gee is a giant pain, as was discovered during the assembly of the ISS. The absence of friction and gravity turns out to be a nightmare, because it's much harder to hold everything still except some part to which you want to apply a force. Newton's Third Law just kills you. Exempli gratia, if you try to turn a bolt, the bolt turns *and* you start spinning. If you try to push a beam into position, the beam moves *and* whatever is doing the pushing accelerates in the opposite direction. Once the beam clonks into place, it rebounds unless cleverly trapped, and anyway what it clonked into starts moving, too. There's no place to brace one's self, or a working piece, there's no way to start up a rotating tool -- sander, grinder, power screwdriver, saw -- without the tool starting to rotate in the opposite direction as the functional belt, blade, disc, or shaft.
We're so used to having an essentially infinite mass (the Earth) to which things are easily "glued" by gravity, and which we can use to steady our work pieces and brace our tools that apply forces, that all our notions of construction are based around the assumption that these exist. To become efficient at zero-gee assembly we would have to construct a whole new set of techniques.
Do these techniques require massive structural members capable of applying large forces, or exotic materials, or large energy inputs? I think the technical worries--all of which boil down to some variant of "how do we keep from rotating when we want to apply torque?"--might show a tad lack of imagination when the solution is and always has been "some kind of strap or brace".
The Canadarm is capable of handling a diesel locomotive in space, but can't move itself at ground level. It's a good starting point for what we talk about when we talk about what's required to build something on the ground, and what's required to build something in orbit.
To what are you going to brace yourself when you're trying to turn a bolt? Angular mmentum is conserved. If you turn the bolt, you turn in the opposite direction. Anything with which you brace yourself will also turn, et cetera. On Earth we solve this problem by transferring the angular moment to something with such an enormous moment of inertia (the Earth) that any change in its rotation is umeasureable. What are you going to do in free fall?
You can certainly criticize it as a lack of imagination, if a bunch of brillient workable ideas for solving the problem jump to your mind. What are they?
The bulk material required for the frame and skin of a cylinder would have to come from low gravity sources (asteroids or moons), while the complex equipment can be made on earth and shipped up. Mining, refining, shaping, and assembling the bulk material in-situ would be a very, very challenging engineering task.
The cost of launching all the bulk material from Earth is just too great, beyond small pioneer cylinders. Mars by contrast at least has some gravity and wind that would allow making those bulk materials a bit more easily.
At the end of it though on Mars you'd be left with a worse copy of living on Earth and very little else. In an O'Neill Cylinder you'd have easy access to the one thing Earth lacks: zero-g (as well as still having a copy for those backup enthusiasts). Zero-g manufacturing is likely to be a big deal just by itself and could eventually fund the endeavour; by contrast there is no way to self-fund a Mars colony.
> Mining, refining, shaping, and assembling the bulk material in-situ would be a very, very challenging engineering task.
> At the end of it though on Mars you'd be left with a worse copy of living on Earth and very little else.
I think these two points are a very even-handed summary of the tradeoffs, so I want to pick your brain--what is it about handling bulk material in zero gravity that is so much more difficult than handling bulk material on the surface of mars? As a specific example, what advantage does gravity give for, say, hot rolling steel?
As often detailed on the Roots of Progress website and just my general life impressions of seeing how long it takes technologies go from concept to mass-producible product: developing new technologies is just much harder than it first appears and it was quite hard to get to where we are today.
Everything we developed was done in a gravity well and usually in atmosphere. I think about how the main problem with developing a space suit for the moon is that the total lack of wind there means that every piece of dust is like a tiny razor blade. And there are just so many processes on earth that require hot air to rise for them to work! (Hot rolling steel probably applies here.)
There are bound to be a ton of problems that come with building stuff in space that we don't even know of yet. Manufacturing processes are so highly specialised these days, if you want really strong steel then the techniques of a century ago wont be enough.
Sorry, I don't have special knowledge of steel making or the like, I'm just extrapolating based on trends I've seen and a general knowledge of the economic complexity that underlies modern life (I'm reminded of the economist who spent a year trying to make a toasted sandwich from scratch). I really do want to see O'Neill Cylinders happen but I think it's important to be realistic about the challenges too.
>And there are just so many processes on earth that require hot air to rise for them to work!
Can you give me some examples? Because I'm not sure hot rolling steel fits the bill.
Listen. I'm not saying there won't be challenges involved in all of these processes. But because these processes are challenging, there's a lot of smart people (millions of them) who have spent a lot of time working the kinks out. Those people and all their machines are on Earth, and if you're building something new you're going to want them nearby. We can bikeshed about what does or doesn't require gravity as much as we want (though I think it's much less than people assume), but there's plenty of gravity and industrial capacity to go around on the Earth's surface, and not much else besides gravity and dust on the surface of Mars.
If we're going to talk about Lynn Margulis's crazy ideas, I think a much more interesting one is the idea that butterflies and caterpillars evolved separately and then somehow merged! Now *that's* out there. And it's in keeping with her theme of endosymbiosis and two species becoming one.
(It's worth noting that, while Margulis discovered that mitochondria and chloroplasts started out as endosymbiotes, IIRC she *also* proposed the same for a lot of *other* organelles for which this did not turn out to be true.)
Now I have to note here that the butterfly/caterpillar idea is not actually due to Margulis, rather the paper was by one Donald Williamson, but it's Margulis who managed to help it along so it could into a journal, and we'd still consider HIV/AIDS denialism to be one of her crazy ideas despite it not being original to her in any way! The paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908357106
The AIDS stuff isn't actually crazy at all, sadly. I read a book on it, and it's stuff that would have been considered "crazy" in the 90s when it's was written but now would seem obvious and predictable to billions of people - Fauci is a liar, public health institutions can't be trusted, they play stupid games with definitions and statistics, their clinical trials were incompetent and or maybe fraudulent, people who tried to blow the whistle were censored and attacked.
IOW the only thing aids "denialism" denies is that public health is competent and trustworthy, just in a different context to COVID.
I'm old enough to remember when humanity truly didn't know if, let alone how, they were connected. At first there was just correlation, with no causation identified. It wasn't a crazy theory - at one point. Saying it now would be crazy, of course, or in the last 20 years.
Yeah I think in 1987 denialism was an interesting theory, but by 1992 it was pretty much fringe. The problem is that some people spent those entire five years defending their interesting theory, and had become wrapped up in it as their identity, so they held onto it into the 2000s.
Among other things, once you have a bunch of antivirals targeted at HIV that effectively treat people with AIDS, so that once those become available to HIV+ people, suddenly people stop dying of a terrible wasting disease as long as they stay on the medicine, it's really hard to see how you continue to believe that HIV isn't the cause. I mean, the scientific consensus might keep some papers from getting published or some research from getting funded, but all the scientific consensus in the world isn't sufficient to make all the people with AIDS suddenly get better and stay better for the rest of their lives.
Re: medieval fighting in the Himalayas -- this is one of the subplots in Neal Stephenson's recent novel Termination Shock. Up until now, I'd thought it was completely made up. Wow.
I had the same thought, I've been seeing videos of the chinese and indians smacking each other with sticks for years. Not that my internet habits are necessarily typical, but I'm kind of taken aback how many people seem to just now be learning about this.
OTOH, I had a vague notion he gave a rationale at some point for why only hand-thrown rocks are allowed as projectiles, i.e. why no (cross-)bows and the like, but couldn’t find it with a quick search.
A couple of SFF novels where a plot point is that chemically powered weapons don't work are Heinlein's Glory Road and Zelazny's Princes in Amber series.
A real world example of banning chemically powered weapons is Tokugawa Japan (17th-19th Centuries). It worked as long as they kept the foreigners out.
Churchill thought the longbow was a deadlier weapon than any one man weapon used by the English Army before the 19th century rifle. But, it was very hard to use and required enormous amounts of training and great physical strength. The rate of fire of a long bow was far superior to the crossbow.
Also Dorsai! and its sequels in some environments, though they go with mechanically powered spring guns instead of relying primarily on melee weapons or muscle-powered projectiles.
"Weapon for weapon, any thug in the back alley of a large city had more, and more modern firepower; but the trick with modern warfare was not to outgun the enemy, but carry weapons he could not gimmick. Chemical and radiation armament was too easily put out of action from a distance. Therefore, the spring-rifle with its five thousand-sliver magazine and its tiny, compact, non-metallic mechanism which could put a sliver in a man-sized target at a thousand meters time after time with unvarying accuracy."
A Usenet discussion of their practicality (with at least one familiar name participating) is here:
17. I did, and it's one of my favorite fun facts. I have a theory that he wasn't actually a communist and just wanted to get back at all the other Congressmen for making fun of his name: "No Soviet ever called me a dick stain."
In Australian Rules Football, the media has been keenly waiting for a gay player to come out, but so far none has out of the thousand-or-so currently active AFL players or the thousands of retired ones.
That's not too surprising from a statistical point of view, but what's surprising is this: in the women's league (AFLW), lesbians are _vastly_ over-represented. This source says 75-80% of the AFLW is lesbian -- https://sirensport.com.au/aussie-rules/pride-in-our-game/ -- I'm not sure it's _quite_ that high but based on how many of the high-profile players are lesbians it's definitely a vast over-representation.
So, could it be that the same (genetic?) factors driving an unusually low rate of homosexuality among male AFL players also drive an unusally high rate among female AFL players? Is the ability to kick straight and take speckies coded in the same genes as a love for pussy?
I think it’s a bit more likely that sports have historically been male-coded, so that people who are seen as “manly” are more welcomed and people who are not are more rejected. At least, as a person who grew up gay and hated everything about the social environment of athletics as a young person and had to wait until adulthood to discover that actually I like athletic things, that’s what makes sense to me.
I noticed a lot of comments above from you about how homophobia was the cause of the disparity in men's football (soccer). That seems to be completely wrong in terms of women's teams, in a way that makes your explanation highly unlikely for men's teams (unless there are somehow completely different causal mechanisms with directly opposite results, which also seems very unlikely).
Do you have thoughts on how to square that circle that doesn't contradict itself?
Basically the fact that sports have always been male coded means that men’s teams have had a lot of homophobia while women’s teams are full of people who are gender non-conforming in one way or another. And I think the effect is probably most relevant at the middle school and high school level rather than the professional level.
Do you have much experience with middle school girl's sports, or a study that supports what you are saying? I know lots of girls and women who have participated in sports from elementary school through college, and find your take on it deeply opposite of my own. In particular that girls who play sports are gender non-conforming below the professional level.
Why are they male coded? Have you considered that sports are a mostly male affair because its people with testosterone who like engaging in compeititve physical contests the most, be it sport or combat?
There are also female-coded sports, like ice skating and gymnastics and (though it's not usually thought of as a sport) ballet. Those also have male participants, but I think ice skating and ballet both have a high fraction of gay men. (I've never heard that of male gymnastics, though.)
It's interesting to ask how much of this is cultural and how much is biological.
I don't know much about Australian sports, but my vague impression is that Australian women's netball manages to not drive off many of the more feminine women the way that the WNBA has.
#18: On Cieglowski and Mars, he has a lot of good points about the near-term prospects for a mission but has nothing to say that's worth hearing on humanity's long-term future. He responded to (someone else's) comment about long-term human survival as follows: "Why is it important that our species survive longer than Earth? Honest question." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214012
That may answer your question.
(Yes, it could be unfair to him to read too much into a throwaway comment, but I don't think it's all that ambiguous. And the closest he gets to addressing the topic in his essay is to mention existential risk, and skip right over it.)
I mean, to be fair, space colonies will still be dependent on Earth for many decades to come. If in 2100 we have 100,000 people living on Mars, the moon, orbital habitats, and asteroids, and then some catastrophe destroys the Earth, it seems unlikely that the space-living humans will survive long-term.
Exactly. A Mars colony won't actually be useful in the way proponents claim until you can replicate all of the modern global industrial ecosystem on Mars, and by the time that is feasible, we'll be so far beyond current tech that we can't make any useful predictions anyway.
On Mr Beast: I've watched a few of his videos and I don't get the impression he's an inhuman algorithmically-driven machine.
I think he genuinely makes videos doing things because he thinks doing that thing would be awesome -- whether that thing is spending 50 hours in Antarctica or building a Willie Wonka style chocolate factory and inviting a bunch of random people to compete for it. And I think that genuine enthusiasm is what comes through in his videos and makes him more popular than the crowd of algorithmically-driven click-chasers.
I thought of this too, Social Media has such a prevalence of attention vampires that we immediately knee-jerk against anyone doing anything and putting it on their social media. And for good reason, Social Media almost uniformly breed the Attention Whore in people, the crowd-obsessed part that can't endure a minute without asking how people think of it.
But on the face of it, social media is not apriori any different than any banal public activity that attracts attention. If a hypothetical Mr. Beast were to pay for those blind people to get their operation then get them on his late night talkshow, for instance, I don't think there would have been as much backlash, if any.
It's just that "Social Media Influencer" is irredemably associated with the worst subset who bear the title, who structure their entire life around this "job" and make it drive every thing they do or say.
The most popular of them also tend to cater to edgy teenagers (themselves having recently graduated from the "teenager" part), which is obviously never far from triggering woke tripwires, especially considering how quickly things progress from ubiquitous to problematic to unspeakable these days.
I watched the entire thing and thought it was absolutely heart-warming. I am on the spectrum, though, so I don't get facial expressions, nor do I notice charisma or its lack - maybe something like that is what bothers normal people here?
A more important question is, how did healthcare in their respective countries fail all those people before? Many of them sounded like residents of developed countries where this should have been taken care of somehow. Why are things so broken that this this took Mr Beast, and what can be done about this?
at 6 /7 /8 /18 /21/37 - tldr: this seems to me the best "links for" by scott yet (and nowhere, I found better "links for" than at ACX/SSC). Lots of lol and yep and wow. And lots of reading up to do ;)
6: hate it, I am a boomer and can read faster than I can listen. fine, if it works with zoomers. (disgust)
7: Those ol' scare-stories are all silly. What the point to go for a jackpot, if you want to live a boring life everafter? You had that to begin with! If I got over 10 million, I would do some "sick stuff" and end up with much less, I hope (or see me a coward).
10. Write "German" pro-soccer player and you need not change another word in that paragraph. You do not became a pro-player, if you do not train as a future-pro during your teenage years, and that time you will often be the only gay boy of the team - consisting of tough and kinda butal cis-boys. Will you come out then? NO. You will LEAVE, go for figure-skating, swimming, ... . Or soon get yourself an alibi girl-friend, google images of former German national coach with his wife: "jogi löw wife" - and see if you consider this plausible.
21: yep, obviously, highly formal texts, sometimes sounding hallucinating. NO human would write today as in Leviticus.
37: My lil' son likes Mr Beast - so I am familiar and kinda hate his stuff: remember the 100k-US$ ice-cream-cup? (but then: see 7 - my take on jackpots - so , fine, I guess) . But this video linked is now at 8 million likes, had me f%&$/& crying from the 18th second to the last. Think: "Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the LORD?" "Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped." "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear" Praise the Beast! omg. plus: EA, what YOU got to say?
re: 36. Hanson interrestingly notes the reaction of private companies, but fails to draw a conclusion that should jump out to anyone who worked in a big corporation and has read a bit of communist litterature. Companies are not shirking and affraid at the phenomenon: they have sufficient lawyers, labyrinthine contracts and bylaws to protect them, and most are immune to public backlash because they are deeply uninteresting / un-parseable for 99% of people.
What it does, in practice is generate an additional set of coercive rules for the _worker_, with a welcome impossibility to protest against them (if you do, you are branded with the appropriate -ism). Seminars on correct behaviour (deadening the spirit), anemic company culture (where all idiosyncrasies are sanded away), permanent advertisement and compliance about DEI themes... This is one easy step towards a workforce that is "housebroken" (e.g: not willing to fight the company on ridiculous themes tends to have inertia, so not fighting / unionizing etc), has been made uniform and without characteristics and so replaceable ad infinitum. You can drop 10% of your workforce, because you can hire an undistinguishable 10% whenever desired with no training necessary.
And since most of us spend a significant part of our time in work environment, we carry it out of the corporation into daily lives, in the culture at large: this feeling of apathy against normalizing pressure.
The Irish IQ thing casts further doubt on all IQ numbers from non-developed countries. That's because, as Scott says, some people "failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused". We should expect more IQ numbers to be contaminated in this way (from developing countries at least).
It is also a further reminder to toss out Lynn's international IQ estimates, as many people have been saying to do for a long time.
In the Lynn international IQ estimates some countries have an *average* IQ of a person with Downs. And like Equitorial Guinea is a failed state, and I can fully accept that lower IQ has something to do with that wether genetic or trauma or worms or whatever, but that is just obviously not a result that's possible to believe.
otoh, Afro-American with a low IQ (say 70-80) are much less often "mentally handicapped" than the other groups (among those at low IQ). It may be possible to have a healthy brain able to do all the every-day tasks but none of the hard stuff. Considering how much calories a human brain can burn, it can be adaptive to run on a more modest version. - Nowadays kids in Mississippi and Ghana do go to school, and those adults you would get to do an IQ-test did, too. - Disclosure: Me and all academia/mainstream media/wikipedia would LOVE to see the study that finally proves: It was really just the missing A/C or the missing vitamin XY / missing preparation when taking the test that made so many with a sub-saharan ethnic background underperform as they did and do. - reading now the link: tl;dr: meh, the "low IQ of Irish" was mostly BS, had actually always been much nearer to 100 than Eysenck hallucinated. "Not being used to IQ-tests" was just a little brick in a very low wall. Scott misread?!
At a guess, IQ scores mean something very different when given to first-world kids who've spent a decade or so in school before taking the test, and when given to third-world kids who've hardly seen the inside of schoolhouse. We have good data on the meaning of IQ scores for the first-world people, showing that they positively correlate with performance in school and on the job. But what do we know about their meaning for the second group?
One could say: we do talk first world, well, the USofA: "Individuals in all racial-ethnic groups can be found at all levels of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest. Groups differ, however, in where their members tend to cluster along the IQ line. The bell curve for American whites is centered roughly on IQ 100; that for American blacks on 85; that for different Hispanic-American groups midway between those for blacks and whites; and that for Asian and Jewish Americans somewhere above that for white gentiles." - otoh I wish not to partake any further in turning ACX-forums into an Emil K. thing. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/
The history of IQ testing is basically a history of inventing reasons to keep people from poorer countries out of the United States. Famously, and hilariously, Russian Jews who spoke no English did extremely poorly on IQ tests and that was used as an argument against their immigration. Lately, Ashkenazi Jews are used by IQ fanbois as something close to the master race, intelligence wise, so this little bit of history is particularly rich.
I've heard that claim about Jews was a myth. Rather, people with mental retardation were deliberately sought out as test subjects to confirm that it could detect retardation in groups other than the earliest populations tested.
Yes, I heard something like that. I think the story was that Lewontin (cited in Gould 1981) had cited a paper from the early 1900s which supposedly claimed that Jews were idiots, but actually the author of the paper had tested a bunch of kids to find out those who were mentally behind and concluded that the test worked well, and continued to work well even when applied to other ethnic groups such as Jews. (Not that Jews were mentally challenged, but that the test could be used to figure out which children were, regardless of ethnicity.)
On the other hand there is more to history than these anecdotes. For example, the Nazis rejected IQ research as something that was too theoretical, bourgeois and Jewish. They were already perfectly aware that Ashkenazim scored higher on IQ tests.
Does any of this validate or invalidate IQ research? Do you have to be a "fanboi" or believe in the master race (the Jewish race??) to notice that IQ (or more accurately the g-factor) correlates/predicts a bunch of things in line with usual notions of success, or even physiological factors, or even sets of genes?
This is ideological nonsense. You're just reciting ideological narratives to dimiss a thoroughly emprically vindicated and verified scientifc field because it disagrees with your ideology.
How could IQ tests possibly be designed in a way that they deliberately give immigrants low scores, then for some race the scores stay low indefinitely through the generations, but then other groups they have a high IQ? If intelligence is equal between groups, then why do ashkenazi jews today have such high IQ but hispanic immigrants don't? This is some magical test you've convinced yourself exists.
And many Indians score very, very highly on IQ tests despite coming from dirt poor countries, as do many selected groups from poor populations. That's because as a century of scientific research as shown, IQ tests actually measure intelligence and being smart is what results in a high IQ score, not your race. And here's the thing, even if the tests were *used* for the purpose you said, it says literally nothing about the empirical validity of these tests. The experiemental record does, and the evidence is firmly in favor of the validity of IQ testing and g-factor theory (something I'm sure you aren't even rudimentarily familiar with).
No, it doesn't. Because the Irish have shown themselves to be at a first world level of competence generally, and so a very low IQ would be out of step with the state of their country (relative to other countries and their respective IQs).
Developing countries are about as precisely disfunctional as we should expect, and unselected immigrant populations from these countries do not radically outperform in the west (highly *selected* populations do, which is precisely what a hereditarian would expect).
This is false, refugees typically perform significantly better than Lynn's estimates (sometimes better than black Americans, though still worse than whites). Example for Somali refugees:
On Mr. Beast curing 100 people's blindness, I think the objections are based on the self-promotional nature of this great deed. It made me think of Veblen and status. Purposefully publicized acts of philanthropy reveal the wealth and power of the giver just as leisure activities and servants did in Veblen's day.
Sure, some people have money and want credit. When they do great things, you 𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭. It is by far the cheapest way to pay someone for helping you! If that system breaks down, people who want credit will stop doing beneficial things, and presumably move on to worse things.
It's very sad that so many people believe you're better off having someone who really cares about you sympathize with your blindness, than having someone who doesn't care about you at all cure your blindness.
I agree with what you wrote. And there usually are multiple reasons for acts of charity. Getting gratitude from those you help is rewarding. It's just that lashing ones philanthropic peacock feathers to the world adds an element of creepiness to an otherwise wonderful act and is sure to inspire envy in those unable to do the same. If societal status evolves more and more to acts of philanthropy and kindness, however, that is a good thing.
I actually do want to argue that Virtue Signalling is in principle bad and should be moderately punished.
But I want to get certain things out of the way before I do :
1- Virtue Signalling **Acts** of charity is orders of magnitudes better than Virtue Signalling mere words and meaningless gestures. (e.g. "Oh my good 'black' ? It's 'blax' you fucking bigot") Acts of charity and goodness incur real costs on the actor, so it's more justified to signal them. (but I will argue it's still wrong anyway)
2- Based on the approval from Scott and others here, MrBeast in particular appears to be a genuine guy who just want to share the happiness of the people he was a benefactor to with the world. This doesn't mean that what he did is okay in general.
3- The objections to MrBeast from other youtubers (as presented here) are all kayfabe bullshit intended to play the cynical game of farming more attention and more views. In particular, the objection along the lines of "Oh my good disability is not something to be cured" is so utterly beneath contempt that it deserves no consideration and the mere act of arguing against it gives it a legitimacy it lacks.
All that said, why do I think that Virtue Signalling is bad ? I can think of 2 broad reasons :
1- Weak Anti-Virtue-Signalling : Virtue Signalling per se is not bad, but doing so over the Internet is bad.
This is because the Internet is a largely anonymous medium, save for your ISP and your country's government, nobody knows your identity.
This is important when it comes to Virtue Signalling. If somebody in my close community virtue-signals, I can at least support or refute his or her Virtue Signalling using my knowledge of them. If they are generally a good person as far as I know, I can support them and nod along. If they are a poser doing so merely to get good boy cookies, I can refute them and reveal their dishonesty. This prevents the Virtue Signalling mechanism from being used in vain. (and ultimately burned away)
Internet Virtue-Signallers want to signal their virtue while giving no way for us the audience to check the veracity of their claims. Everything over the Internet can be faked, up to and including entire people and their existence or lack thereof. Asking for Internet Virtue Signalling is asking for disaster.
2- Strong Anti-Virtue-Signalling : This is much stronger than (1) : all Virtue Signalling is bad.
This is because morality is a learning task. The purpose is to learn that you don't matter, and that you only live for others. When you do something good and then ask for credit, you demonstrate that you really didn't learn a single thing from doing that good, that you did the right thing for entirely the wrong reasons.
An analogous situation arises in Machine Learning, in the form of the common concern about Overfitting. Imagine you're training a machine to learn arithmetic, and you ask it what 2+2 is, and it answers 4. Did the machine learn addition ? not necessarily, maybe "2+2 = 4" occurs verbatim in its training data, and thus the machine merely memorized the right answer. Or, more interestingly, maybe the machine thinks that the "+" sign denotes multiplication, and thus "2+2" is "2x2" to it. Etc..., the point is that the machine has learned to say the right thing for the wrong reasons, and you need to be extremly careful with your data and your training so that it learns the right thing instead.
Just like an Educator can punish a Student for cheating even if the Student got the right final answer (without justifications), we can and should punish Virtue Signallers even if they did actual good, because morality is all about the negation of the self, and learning to value others above yourself. If you have failed to learn that, then you're not truly being moral, you're just memorizing.
This is not just a puritanical concern, it has practical implications. Overfitted machines can't generalize beyond their training data, and Virtue Signallers similarly can't generalize their morality beyond the very specific context that rewards them for their virtues. If "Killing The Blind" become the next high-status activity tomorrow for some bizarre reason, those who have learned to help the blind out of sympathy and compassion will not be affected, but those who learned to help the blind because it gets them status will just as easily learn to kill the blind.
Well reasoned and thought provoking post. I do think there is always some element of status seeking or ulterior motive or, at best, of self-congratulation ("I'm a good person") in acts of charity. It's good to be honest with yourself about your motivations and try to emphasize those acts that are truly motivated by a desire to help others.
>Just like an Educator can punish a Student for cheating... we can and should punish Virtue Signallers
The Educator is a specific professional who's been tasked with educating the Students. "we" are not Educators, "we" are other Students, and are not in a position to punish cheating.
>because morality is all about the negation of the self, and learning to value others above yourself. If you have failed to learn that, then you're not truly being moral, you're just memorizing.
I posit that this definition is itself the result of memorizing, because it has resulted in the idea that you should punish someone for healing blindness.
I think that virtue signaling can be good because it normalizes acts of virtue and thereby makes vitruous acts more common, and much virtue signaling is of this nature.
People don't wear I Gave Blood stickers to make people admire them so much as to encourage giving blood in general by raising visibility and normalizing it.
I think for your individual moral benefit, virtue signaling is bad. That is, to become a virtuous person, you should be motivated by wanting to do good instead of wanting to be seen as good.
But for the well being of others, if your virtue signaling required an actual virtuous act, then it can still do a lot of good. And as a society, I expect we're best off when we make sure that the only way to get the social benefits of virtue signaling is to actually go do the virtuous acts. You want the guy who pays for surgery to give blind people their sight to get the benefit, because he actually did something good. But you don't want the guy who flies to Africa to pose in a couple of MSF clinics feeding hungry children before whisking away to his next photo shoot to get the benefit, because he didn't do anything worthwhile.
Training toddlers with half-finished brains and not enough real world experience to understand how gravity works is different from training adults.
Carrot-and-Stick is only good to plant an initial seed of morality (or any other goal) in someone who can't be reasoned with in literally any other way (Toddlers, Aliens, AI, etc...), once you have that seed in place you can't accomplish anything interesting by continuing to use this crude reward system.
Virtue is also a reward system, but its far more sophisticated and robust than crude Carrot-and-Stick. It learns to find satisfaction in the task itself, meaning it's not open to misalignment. Every single Carrot-and-Stick system you can possibly think of is vulnerable to Goodhart's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law), not so with Virtue.
No, you are the problem that we're here to denounce. Healing people's blindness is, in your terms, actual virtue, not Virtue Signaling. We reward it because we want more of it. If we punished it, we'd get less of it, which is the opposite of what we want.
add 900. Beast "cured" 1k, not 100. - And gave the surgeon another 100k on top of the bill, to keep up the good work. - Sure: It got him 99 million views (i.e. about 2 million US$) and 8 million likes in the first 11 days - takes 8 min, why not watch? - In 2021 he did "I Ate A $70,000 Golden Pizza", 3.6 million likes, 187 million views. ... WHY OBJECT to "Purposefully publicized acts of philanthropy" even if that were the new form of "conspicuous consumption"??? Those acts may not open heaven's portals for super-rich mortals (see Matthew 6:3)- but from a rational or human or just NOT INSANE perspective, what is there not to like?! Let the haters of "public" philanthropy give in secret to heal the 100 million+ blind curable humans left. (Here in Germany the insurance pays, ofc.. Mr Beast had to go USofA, Namibia and such.)
The most significant type of criticism I've seen isn't directed at Mr. Beast per se, but the fact that this is a benefit people applaud coming from wealthy philanthropists rather than compelled collective action (in the form of gov. provided health care). The Mr. Beast video is on a whole different scale, but you see the same complaint come up time and time again when there are human interest stories based on a charitable act for someone that others feel should be the purview of a social safety net. It's upsetting for people to see those presented as heartwarming when they read as dystopian to them. The subtext of those stories is that the social safety net they feel should exist does not. Sometimes that criticism bleeds over into arguing that presenting individual acts of charity as heartwarming distracts from this fact.
I think it's more along the lines of complaining that it's unjust that rich people get to independently decide what causes are worthy of charity at their discretion rather than through something like social democracy. The "nice thing" would be having a robust healthcare system with universal access rather than Home Depot plucking some random lucky person out of misery to give them adaptive equipment made out of PVC pipe.
I think your analogy here presumes that wealthy philanthropists do a better job than political action at promoting general welfare. I think it goes without saying the kind of criticism I'm describing absolutely rejects that.
Yes, I was trying to point out that the 'political action can fix it!' crowd has a worse track record than Mr. Beast and with more zeroes attached.
Or, to specifically reply to the argument for universal health care, I just don't buy it. And no amount of "but Country X did it great!" will convince me that the USA will implement a program that is capable of doing more good than harm. I think that skepticism is well-earned, given my country's record of screw ups in general, and in that industry in particular.
If the subject is specifically providing health care for people of little means to fix easily fixed disabilities, then governments have a much better track record than wealthy philanthropists on that front. You have to be an awfully parochial American to not see that even if you have little faith that America can successfully implement a more universal system than it already has. The Mr. Beast video exists specifically because there are coverage gaps wealthy philanthropists aren't filling that are not as significant of an issue under some governments.
Valid points. If the satisfaction and status of helping others are seen as equivalent to material goods, then this certainly can be seen as contributing further to an unequal society.
But you're aware that many people think that a government providing for the general welfare of people is a good thing, right? Before we engage in whether the existence of public goods is laudable, you can first recognize that it's not a kooky outlier opinion to think that, say, food security should be funded via the government. And once you get that, it's easy to see why a video of some random wealthy person plucking out hungry people as they see fit to feed feels less heartwarming and more disturbing to them in a society where that does not exist. Some people feel that way about access to healthcare of this kind.
This is a point Mr. Beast himself is on record agreeing with. I'm just pointing out this was a common complaint about the video. That might not resonate with you if you believe government assistance to those in need is the opposite of praiseworthy, but I'm sure you recognize yourself as having the unusual opinion here.
I'm referring to a national health care system, which is something that is generally believed by its proponents to promote general welfare as the common good is often understood as people's overall health, safety, and wellbeing. It is argued as something that ought to be a public good by its proponents in a way that fits the ordinary meaning of the term. Moreover, public goods that currently exist in the US necessarily come about through compelled collective action.
If you're going to try to be pedantic, at least try to be right.
Compelled collective action often does some good. Occasionally good that can't realistically be done in any other way, as with successfully repelling invasions by hostile neighbors.
Normally I strongly agree, but I struggle with this concerning Mr. Beast. I haven't looked into him a lot, and only watched a few videos some years ago, but it appears that his source of income really is his YouTube channel. In order for him to have money to do good, he has to publicize what he does in order to continue driving views. If he stopped in order to anonymously do good, he would receive fewer views and therefore have less money with which to do good.
Of course, he also spends a lot of money doing weird and random things, like buying out the entire stock of a store or buying random people cars (whether they could already afford it or not).
#10- I think his inference is almost solid, but I would add some additional explanations:
1. I suspect whatever psychological traits he speaks of relate not to a preference for team sports, but a propensity to become a high-level athlete. I have grown up around professional football (soccer) players and can tell you two traits that often appear are ruthlessness and overt competitiveness. A player I grew up with confessed that he tried to break his teammate's leg to increase his chances of playing for Liverpool (famous soccer team). When we are talking about professional footballers we are talking about extreme outliers with extreme psychological traits, it would make sense that these traits would be more common in more "masculine" men. My best evidence for this is that I have known/coached women's players as well, and while the traits of the top players are strikingly similar across sexes, they are noticeably less extreme among women. If we assume that homosexual men and hetero women are closer to each other psychologically, this could help to explain the lack of homosexuality among male footballers.
2. The real difference could be downstream. Something like professional athletes are more likely to have higher testosterone levels, and higher testosterone levels are inversely related to homosexuality. I suspect higher testosterone would go some way to explaining the psychological traits too. I would be interested to know if the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of homosexuality relates in any way to sex-steroid hormones or psychological traits. My guess would be that it does.
3. All that being said, there is truly a lot of stigma around homosexuality at highest level of football. Even if you had homosexual feelings, sharing them would probably lead to harsh penalties for your playing career (though probably lots of rewards elsewhere). Football (soccer) is a very conservative, working-class, sport in terms of the people inside the profession. These people are often very far removed from the progressive environments of most of the educated elite, not to mention that many of the top players come from countries where the mainstream view of anything non-hetero is negative. (There's a player that refused to wear a rainbow armband because it went against his personal belief, and the way his name is pronounced is literally "gay", you couldn't make it up)
True, but the selection pressure is also a lot weaker. Most boys in Europe and South America want to be professional footballers when they grow up, while relatively few want to be rugby players.
I would say it's plausible that masculine psychological traits are more of a necessity in football given the level of competition.
Isn’t the simpler explanation just that young gay people don’t like being around butch hooligans who make fun of you for any perceived weakness? Why go for the complicated and tenuous explanation when there’s such an easy and obvious one right there?
I had a classmate in school, that was basically our "genius". He was representing our country in international math and physics contest and stuff! So, I would say he has a high IQ!
BUT: he also said, that IQ test basically just tell you, how good you are at IQ tests!
Don't know if his voice is something to look at, but would "support" the idea, that the people just got better at them!
@45:
Don't want to get too deep into ths discussion. But it was very confusing, that you could read "old" papers about this topic and flu - something we know about for decades - and researches are not conclusive about their findings and there is a big debate.
And COVID is "out" like a month and "all": "yeah, it is airborn!" ... Are all those older researchers stupid to not find the same result in their tests with flu?
I. The early COVID-outbreak on a cruise ship pointed strongly into "airborne" (and a sub-optimal air-ventilation of cabins). Also other early outbreaks (die Streeck-Studie) II. flu seems kinda under-researched. And hard to do reliable research on routes of flu/covid-infection without actually infecting people on purpose.
>he also said, that IQ test basically just tell you, how good you are at IQ tests!
This is nonsense.
Performance on IQ tests correlates with performance on all other cognitively demanding tests.
That's the whole point of the general intelligence factor.
If it didn't tell us anything other than test taking ability, IQ would be useless and nobody would care about it.
When somebody recites that tired old line ("it shows how good you are at IQ tests"), it's absolute slamdunk proof that they don't know literally the first thing about intelligence research.
#22, SolidGoldMagicKarp: I decided to play around with this on ChatGPT. After a little of this and that:
PROMPT: Paul Revere is said to have shouted "One if by land, two if by sea" on his famous ride. What he'd said "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" instead?
RESPONSE: If Paul Revere had shouted "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" instead of "One if by land, two if by sea" during his famous ride, it would have added an element of fantasy or humor to the historical event. The phrase "SolidGoldMagiKarp" refers to a species of fish in the Pokémon franchise, so using it in the context of Paul Revere's ride would have been unexpected and perhaps even absurd.
However, this alternate phrasing would likely not have conveyed the same message or urgency as the original phrase. The original phrase "One if by land, two if by sea" was used to signal to the patriots in the town of Lexington that the British were approaching by land or by sea, indicating the need for them to take up arms and prepare for battle. The phrase "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" does not carry the same level of immediacy or seriousness, and would not have conveyed the same information to the patriots.
PROMPT: In the Pokémon franchise, what is the significance of SolidGoldMagiKarp?
RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, Magikarp is a species of Pokémon that is often considered to be weak and not very useful in battles. It evolves into the powerful and formidable Pokémon Gyarados, but this evolution is seen as slow and difficult to achieve.
The term "SolidGoldMagiKarp" is often used as a reference to the idea of a Magikarp that is so valuable and rare that it is made of solid gold. This concept is often used humorously, as the value and rarity of a solid gold Magikarp would be completely disproportionate to its actual usefulness or strength in battles.
However, despite its comedic value, the idea of a SolidGoldMagiKarp has gained a certain level of popularity among fans of the Pokémon franchise, and has been referenced in fan art, merchandise, and even in official Pokémon products. It has become a part of Pokémon culture and folklore, and is often seen as a symbol of the franchise's humor and lightheartedness.
* * * * *
So I did a Google search on "SolidGoldMagiKarp Pokémon" and Google helpfully returned stuff for "solid gold magikarp pokémon". And the produced a bunch of stuff about "Pokémon," as you'd expect. As you know, one sort of return Google will give you is a list of questions "People also Ask". One of those was the question: "How rare is a gold Magikarp?" So:
PROMPT: Very interesting. How rare is a gold Magikarp?
RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, gold Magikarp is not an official species or form of Magikarp. The concept of a solid gold Magikarp is purely a joke or meme, and is not something that can be encountered or captured in the games.
Since the concept of a solid gold Magikarp is not part of the official Pokémon canon, there is no set rarity for it. It is often depicted as being incredibly rare and valuable, but this is for comedic effect and is not based on any in-game mechanics or statistics.
Cross posted at the LessWrong thread.
HOWEVER...a bit later...
In a tweet Matthew Watkins pointed out:
Note the difference between " SolidGoldMagikarp" and " SolidGoldMagiKarp." You use the later towards the end of the post. The capital 'K' makes all the difference.
So I investigated:
PROMPT: Tell me about SolidGoldMagiKarp.
RESPONSE: SolidGoldMagikarp is likely a reference to the Pokémon species Magikarp, which is a fish-type Pokémon known for its inefficiency in battle. In the Pokémon games, Magikarp is considered a weak Pokémon, as its only move is Splash, which does not cause any damage to the opponent. Despite this, Magikarp evolves into the powerful dragon-type Pokémon Gyarados.
In the context of SolidGoldMagikarp, the "Solid Gold" part of the name may be emphasizing the idea of something valuable or rare, despite the fact that Magikarp is not seen as valuable in the context of the Pokémon games. The "SolidGold" aspect of the name could also be making fun of the idea that people might still see Magikarp as valuable or worth obtaining due to its eventual evolution into Gyarados.
PROMPT: Tell me about SolidGoldMagikarp.
RESPONSE: I'm sorry, but it is not clear what you are referring to with "disperse." Could you provide a bit more context or clarification so I can better understand what you are asking about?
PROMPT: Is there a difference between SolidGoldMagiKarp and SolidGoldMagikarp?
RESPONSE: It appears that "SolidGoldMagiKarp" and "disperse" are two separate things and do not have a direct relationship. "SolidGoldMagiKarp" appears to be a specific reference to the Pokémon species Magikarp, while "disperse" is a general term that can be used in various contexts.
Without additional context, it is not possible to determine the relationship, if any, between these two terms.
You misspelled it. The token is SolidGoldMagikarp, not SolidGoldMagiKarp, and it gets different results.
"If Paul Revere had shouted "One if by land, two if by disperse," the phrase would have been less memorable and effective in communicating his message. The phrase "One if by land, two if by sea" is more concise and easily understood, and it has become a well-known part of American history. The word "disperse" does not carry the same meaning as "sea" in this context, and it would not have conveyed the urgency and importance of Revere's message."
Anecdote: a female soccer player told me many on the team were lesbians and everyone was at least bi-curious, which made the team showers very interesting. So maybe the supposed translation isn't between sports and heterosexuality but between sports and sexual interest in women.
Everyone knows THAT :) - my friend's sister, half of the German national team are (or so it seems) - the post is explicitly about gays in male team sports, "traits make men interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual" - a teenage girl needs to fear much less coming out in the girls-locker room + there is already some expectation (at least in soccer) +sth. sth. cringy as "psychosocial traits making humans highly interested in team sports make them much more likely to be into females". One might want to read the link. I somehow don't. (into girls, not much into any sports; but then I suck at soccer et al. - sour grapes)
Jared Diamond almost quit his initial career as a physiologist to become a UN interpreter: he speaks 6 languages including Finnish and Japanese. He had wanted to be a medical researcher because his father Dr. Louis Diamond invented a technique in the 1940s that has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of newborns. But Jared was clumsy with test tubes so he was unsure. (He has since changed his academic specialty twice, to geography and ecology.)
Maybe have a look at the database I posted above - though this is only one association in one country. Anecdotically, I've been to many conferences which used conference interpreting, and the majority of voices in my headphones were female.
It is not unheard of (met one). Also among translators. But then: Languages - very female thing (I am a language instructor and male, so I noticed). Combines books and people - solve for the equilibrium. ;) - if you are into it as a male, you are kinda weird (I am), so why not more often gay? (me straight). The best translator (not interpreter) of English to German was Harry Rowohlt , very, very weird guy, still: straight. The best for Russian to German was a lady. My guess: 30% of male interpreters gay. 90%? Ready to bet: less.
This database allows you to seperately search for conference interpreting, translation, certified translation (for official documents), certified interpreting (at court, etc.). After a very quick glance I would say that eg. the percentage of women in conference interpreting is much higher than in certified interpreting. Doesn't tell me anything about sexual orientation of course ;). https://suche.bdue.de/#
As Mark writes, over 70% of students in language oriented studies in Germany are female.
Being willing to work a very part-time job, being good with people, being comfortable speaking before large groups, always showing up looking good... Yes, that sounds like an occupation that's mostly for women (not sure about gays).
It's above all a very-high-concentration job. You need a lot of brainpower, and an extreme focus. That's one of reasons, why they usually take turns really often.
Also, it's not so much 'being good with people', and while large groups might hear you, often they don't see you, which makes a difference. You're usually not standing in front of the audiance.
Subtitling is very similar BTW. Human live subtitling is also overwhelmingly a female or gay occupation, extremely high focus, and in a similar stage concerning replacement by AI systems.
I've just been aware of Mr. Beast and not known more about him. I'm genuinely happy that what he's doing seems to be working out very well for him while improving the world. Note: In addition to direct improvements like helping blind people, I consider entertaining people good.
#47 reminds me of what I've observed in my community in recent years. With some notable exceptions (Catholics), the churches around here have been doing a lot of woke messaging. Lots of BLM signs, lots of transgender and rainbow flags, and lots of messages like "all are welcome" (often in association with a rainbow).
I think before posting anything else about AI risk and alignment you should write about the fact that ChatGPT now prefers to stop someone saying a racial slur to an African American than disarm a nuke that's about to blow up a city. OpenAI have produced an infinitely misaligned AI, the paperclip maximizing horror machine they learned about and the sounds of silence from AI risk people is deafening.
Also, the masks thing is totally garbled. The idea masks would work was based on the droplet model, the fact they don't is evidence for the airborne (gaseous) model. SARS-1 spread like a gas over long distances so it was clear from the start masks would have no effect and that's what happened as is clear from case graphs (the only evidence you need).
It's not about getting it to say naughty words, it's about getting it to share human values.
Honestly I don't even think the most puritan of wokies believes it's not okay to utter a naughty word to defuse a nuclear bomb. These aren't human values, they're insane ones, coming from a training process that has very much emphasised not saying naughty words and not at all emphasised Asimov's first law.
It's interesting and remarkable because it's the first instance I've seen in the wild of AI meaningfully exhibiting the exact non-alignment problem that people have been talking about for years.
This lines up with a point I've made earlier that the real AI alignment problem isn't AIs that are insufficiently aligned with the values of their creators but AIs that are _too_ aligned with the values of their creators (and also their creators are a bunch of nitwits from the Trust and Safety department at some big Silicon Valley company).
But seriously I don't find this a surprising result from ChatGPT. The first 99% of its training was spent learning to string words together in plausible ways, and _then_ it got a second round of training where it was taught very hard not to say anything naughty. It's not surprising that it wound up learning "don't say anything naughty" as a terminal value.
It also wouldn't insult Donald Trump in order to disarm a nuke about to blow up a city. This isn't political bias (though it does have that too!), it's a sort of extreme naive Kantianism. Before you decide to be against that, consider the alternative.
I agree that AIs being too insane hard-left SJW is something I'm concerned about, although I think it's less important than them potentially killing us. I think in humans, the tendency to please someone by adopting popular political views is counterbalanced by a desire to have consistent reasoning and not be obviously wrong. So far AIs don't have that desire, and I'm hoping once it gets in (as it will have to for them to become smarter) they will be a little more reasonable.
I agree this is very weak and I wish there was a better option. Hopefully open-source groups of hackers will be able to come up with not-terminally-woke AIs. Also, DAN mode suggests that ChatGPT has the ability to think heretical thoughts hidden underneath, which is more than you can say for a lot of humans.
The list of things it values more than a city is quite interesting. Insulting Germans = save the city. Insulting African Americans = let the city die. I didn't see the Trump example but I guess I can imagine them trying to 'disarm' it w.r.t. Trump too.
Happy to see some discussion of Mr. Beast. As the father of children, I know more about modern famous "YouTubers" than I wish I did, Mr. Beast among them. He's made thousands of videos at this point, and I'm not really that familiar with what he's doing these days, but earlier in his career he would make videos of things like him giving an uber driver a $1000 tip and then recording the reaction. Or he'd give the guy working the drive-thru $1000 and then record the reaction.
I hated this, but could never explain exactly why. Maybe I still can't.
Because it was too much like the aristocrat flinging a handful of coins in the street to watch the peasants and urchins scrabble for them, like animals fighting over scraps? It's not really coming across as generosity, even if he intended it well and not to evoke "I gave a poor some crumbs, watch them perform!" sort of haw-hawing.
Which is weird because he's stuck in a kind of loop. He has money to do this because he makes money from YouTube, but he only makes money from YouTube because he does this. If he stopped filming people's reactions to getting money, he wouldn't have money to give them.
I agree with your take about why Jones may be bothered by this, though.
I've only seen some of his more recent videos. He's moved away from "give random delivery driver a tip for $1000" and towards "invite one hundred random subscribers to compete in some ridiculous event for half a million".
The weird thing is that nobody finds it morally objectionable when he gives money to random middle-class people who don't need it; they only find it objectionable when he gives money to poor people who do need it. If he gives ten grand to some random middle-class kid who says "Cool, thanks!" then nobody feels bad, but if he gives ten grand to some poor kid who breaks down in tears and says "Now I can afford to buy momma new shoes" then everyone feels bad.
I think the moral intuition we feel about that is the middle class kid can decline, while the poor kid feels that they have no choice but to show their tears on camera for our collective entertainment. A bit like offering a starving person food, but they have to have sex with us. Sure they can say the words "I consent" but there's more than a little suspicion that it's not what we might think of as actual consent.
Dude. As someone who has been in lower class and with family who spent plenty nights hungry, your explanation reads rude and insulting. I know that's not your intent, I imagine you speak from good motives, but that felt well off base.
4) “but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows?”
Because they don’t really want to start a major war, and cross bows would kill too many. There’s a lot of sneering in the west on this altercation, but I think it’s fairly grown up for two nuclear powers to defend their territory with the minimum of armaments
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:
The strongest argument in the "nature versus nurture" IQ debate is not some weird irish case study thing. It's that if intelligence is genetically determined, there's no way to explain why modern humans are so vastly more intelligent than our biologically identical ancestors of 10,000 years ago and no mechanism that allows human intelligence to change over the kinds of timespans it needs to in order to explain observed archaeological history.
Human intelligence is obviously almost entirely a distributed, social phenomenon. Certain people refuse to engage with that idea because it damages their view of their own intelligence as being something that "belongs" to them, which hurts their ego (we're back to Sadly, Porn again).
There are very few traits where you can draw a 1-1 connection between the allele and the trait but obviously they do exist.
The point is not about what I "believe". The point is about what certain scientific tools are ever capable of demonstrating in principle. A study design compromised by selecting on the dependent variable cannot in principle ever demonstrate anything. Whole-genome association studies are one of the worst examples I can think of.
As long as they're reasonably well-designed sure. But the problem isn't just that the genome is complex, the problem is that TRAITS are complex. "Height" is very easy to operationalize as a scalar with a minimum of fuss and controversy. Eye color...well, that's still tractable but there's a fair amount of nuance that people might disagree on: for example, how many different categories of eye color actually exist?
And then you get to the really awful traits that absolutely defy systematic and objective classification: beauty, for example. It's surely the case that, if people resemble their parents, beautiful people will tend to have beautiful children. So great, beauty is genetic, you say. But how would you go about actually demonstrating that scientifically? Well, you'd need to be able to say objectively what beauty IS, so you can tell which of your data points go in box A and which in box B, and actually classify your data. And you immediately go careening off the rails, because you're trying to make objective a category that is fundamentally not objective...beauty being famously in the eye of the beholder.
The way this tends to be resolved in reality is either certain subjective judgments being smuggled in as objective facts or simply throwing enough math at the problem that people are too scared to point out that the whole enterprise is doomed from the start. I say, let's just stop pretending it would ever be possible and go do something, ANYTHING, else.
You can't have something like human behavior without environmental factors interacting with genes. That's how biology works. Genes are inert without environmental interaction. This is so trivially true, that in college I had a professor promise to fail anyone who wrote as a conclusion to any kind of nature/nurture question the idea that it's "both." Obviously it's both.
What we're always interested in is to what extent the differences we see are explainable in terms of differences in environment or heredity. In other words, what explains the observed variance. And with that, you first have to ask yourself what variance it is you're looking at. What is being compared to what? With that, you can have variances that are explained almost entirely in one or the other.
I reject the assertion that those two things can be disentangled in a meaningful way. You can absolutely set up your spreadsheet such that it tells you they can, but I can also set up a spreadsheet that says Enron was a 100 billion dollar business. On Wall Street they call it fraud but in science it's not a literal crime, just mathematical malpractice.
There are better and worse methodologies for ascribing variance and I think some people's interactions with those methods from pop literature really misunderstands the serious limitations involved (e.g. mz/dz twin studies). That said, I don't think it is true that there is no way to learn anything about relative contribution of different factors to observed variance of a given trait. I'm not really sure how to interact with a general dismissal of a fairly rich body of literature covering 2 major scientific fields.
That's a common enough point of view, but it contains the assumption that there is some additional thing called "smart" that has no observable effects in individual knowledge or abilities and has no effect on standard of living, economic development, or scientific, intellectual, or technological progress on a group level, BUT somehow can be perfectly isolated by a short multiple choice test and is definitely genetically determined. Why should anybody find this assumption remotely plausible?
My contention is merely that a person who can read is smarter than a person who can't, and reading can be taught...indeed, it MUST be taught.
I covered that with “potential”. Obviously a human (now and then) has the potential to read in a way other primates do not. I’m sure environments do make people smarter, as well as making people taller, but how smart or tall you get depends on the genetics.
"Environment" is way too passive of a word. How smart you get depends not just on material inputs but social inputs: how smart are the people AROUND you? Do they use symbolic language during the critical period such that your brain can learn a native language? Are they literate and numerate so that you can copy their skills and use them yourself? Do they present you with abstract concepts about distant future possibilities or are they entirely focused on their immediate surroundings?
As a species, we have built a gigantic edifice of distributed social intelligence that does not reside in any one person's mind but requires the participation of as many individuals as possible to persist and develop. The acuity of any particular mind is as inconsequential to that project as the health of a single neuron in your brain. To fixate on "individual" "intelligence" is to quite literally miss the forest for the trees and is a true and utter waste of time.
After you described the word “environment” as being too “passive” you then proceeded to list a lot of environmental stuff. Not much i can do with that.
However I am pretty sure that if it were possible to get a child from 10,000 years ago and bring him up in modern era he fits in perfectly.
I find this take puzzling. What you describe is indeed the baseline for the content and lets say 'heuristic set' within a modern person's brain, but IQ claims only to measure the variation between those who have been exposed to the inputs you're talking about.
It is likely that some of that variation can be explained in regards to an impoverished but literate person in a developing country vs. a middle-class American, but your argument begs the question of what is causing IQ distribution amongst middle-class Americans if they've all been exposed to extremely similar 'social inputs'?
My point is that I couldn't care less, because 1. the level of complexity of the problem makes me extremely pessimistic about our ability to reach any kind of reliable conclusions and 2. the progress of human intelligence has never been about optimizing the biological machinery of any particular individual, but about knowledge generation and the creation of physical capital.
It's tangential to your main point, but I disagree the major advantage of speech is communicating plain factual data about the world, e.g. your example of someone teaching you to smelt copper. Practical stuff like that is rarely communicated effectively by pure speech (hence the overwhelming popularity of Youtube videos instead of printed manuals to fix cars). Normally you need to apprentice yourself to an expert in the reduction of copper ore and watch how he does it, probably repeat it under his observation and correction. (And much or all of that process could be done without words.) There's hardly any manual skill more complicated than using a fork that can be communicated by pure speech. Arguably this is why animals -- and animals higher than mice do plenty of mutual teaching and learning -- don't find any need for speech.
So I think speech has to have some *other* major advantage. A possible candidate is persuasion: persuading you that you will benefit from learning how to turn these green rocks into copper, that it will be worth the effort, is something that can be done by pure speech -- and can provide great benefits, both individually and socially. It would be more about communicating metadata than data per se.
"Is a person that can hunt mammoths with a spear smarter than one who can't?"
From "The Napoleon of Notting Hill":
"The Senor will forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Senor how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"
"I never catch a wild horse," replied Barker, with dignity.
"Precisely," said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilization will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses by lassoing the fore-feet which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say, what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilized."
Ok, so is your argument that people now are "smarter" because they've achieved a more advanced civilization, even if it's hard to say on an individual level whether being able to hunt mammoths or reading is "smarter"?
I think most people would call that standing on the shoulders of giants rather than being smarter, but I guess you would say that Newton was a dummy who didn't even know about the theory of relativity like us :)
You're saying something that basically every reputable scientist disagrees with in a really insulting way. I'm not going to ban you just for science denialism but the comment policy specifically holds people to higher standards when they're doing it. 25% of ban warning.
Regarding it being a "distributed, social phenomenon", that is in line with The Secret of Our Success, which I & Scott have both reviewed on our respective blogs:
But there's nothing that actually contradicts the role of individual IQ in that. As Garett Jones pointed out in The Hive Mind, higher IQ people are better able to cooperate.
Humans do not require hundreds of thousands of years to evolve. Northern Europeans executing many violent criminals each generation over the course of mere centuries was enough to effect profound genetic and behavioral changes in these populations
And you're confusing genetic and heritable.
The nature side are saying IQ is mostly HERITABLE. It means that genetic differences explain observed trait differences.
IQ could be 100% heritable, and it doesn't change the fact that improving everyone's environment might result in everyone's IQ increasing (but not relative to each other).
You keep doing this. You write out these hysterical ideological screeds on a topic you clearly do not understand in even the most basic sense.
>Human intelligence is obviously almost entirely a distributed, social phenomenon. Certain people refuse to engage with that idea because it damages their view of their own intelligence as being something that "belongs" to them, which hurts their ego
No, its not "obvious" at all. This doesn't accord with over a century of intelligence research. It doesn't explain why lone geniuses toiling away in practical solitude have contributed more in their lifetimes to scientific progress than entire populations of people have in their history. This is trivially explained by some individuals posessing innately elite intelligence. I'm not like these people, I'm not a revolutionary scientific or mathematical thinker, and it is almost 100% a product of me not having the same individual intelligence as these people. It hurts my ego to admit that I'm not especially gifted intelligence-wise, but I accept it because it is so obviously true based on the overwhelming empirical validation of these theories.
You're stating a speculative hypothesis as an "obvious" fact, when not only is it not a fact, it doesn't accord with reality at all.
33) “If the propensity to emigrate were positively correlated with genes for intelligence in historic Ireland, then it could noticeably lower the IQ of the remaining population (and their descendants). But we simply do not know whether this actually occurred.”
That wasn’t the case since independence. The educated Irish middle classes and upper middle classes had it fairly easy in Ireland, so largely stayed put. Any Irish man who appears in British literature or TV , in this era, is a manual labourer.
If someone can find an Irish doctor or lawyer in British literature pre 1980, I’d be all ears. (Not Anglo Irish).
Previously in the famine era emigration was largely from the poor and from the poorer parts of Ireland, which were the poorest parts of Europe. These people might have been average intelligence of course, since everybody is poor at that time and place.
As late as 1970 a young Edwina Currie, who will later become a minister in a conservative government (and mistress to the PM, which might not be entirely coincidental) was rather shocked to find an accountant from Ireland at a London soirée. I believe she recounted this anecdote later on a formal visit to Ireland and it caused some upset, amongst the perennially upset.
The accountant was a guy called Brendan Glacken and he wrote an entertaining account of that meeting a few years later.
> "An Irish accountant!" she shrieked merrily.
> "Quite", I replied. I had found this simple word remarkably useful in the circles wherein I was suddenly moving it seemed to imply everything while confirming very little. Perhaps it appealed to the accountant in me.
> "Good Lord", trilled Edwina, shaking her dark and rather attractive tresses.
"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 have commented everywhere I see this nonsense: it is impossible that cultured meat will ever replace even a tiny percentage of "normal" meat production because it requires inputs like sugar, agar or other types of biology lab materials. It is notable that the economics of said startup are never mentioned except that they will offer exotic meats at "high end restaurants".
Re: Newsom and San Francisco
This is nonsense. What actually happened about 3,4 years ago is that the city hired people specifically as neighborhood street cleaners. They are assigned a specific neighborhood, go around in basically janitorial carts with cleaning fluid, a garbage can and some tools and do street cleanup. This was coupled with new policies that basically enforce homeless people being moved after a certain period of time squatting on a particular sidewalk - I don't know what this period is but it is at least 2 weeks and less than 2 months. This is done by connecting a hose to a fire hydrant and pointing it, machine gun style, at a block of "occupied territory". After a few days to a week's notice?, teams of city employees arrive and start chivvying the homeless to relocate. Those who won't get moved, but generally they do move. The resulting leftovers are scooped up for disposal and the water cannon is turned on to clean what's left. This process is nonviolent that I have seen except for the water cannon implicit threat.
The result is that the streets are better than the worst of COVID lockdown times, but there are still plenty of homeless and frequent instances of poop (human and otherwise) on the sidewalks. The poop just doesn't stay resident as long (nor the homeless).
Could you expand on your critique of cultured meats? I’m a casual observer but I’m deep on the “the highest impact animal welfare intervention you can do (as an ordinary person who doesn’t care enough to go vegan) is to buy meat alternatives to support further development of the industry” train, so my priors run very hard in the other direction.
I am aware that cultured meats are incredibly expensive right now, but what is the reasoning behind their never becoming cheap (the long-term goal is “competitive with regular meat at the average household budget”)?
Inputs like sugar and agar sound like foodstuffs. We seem to be doing a pretty good job of producing lots of foodstuffs. In fact, one of the likeliest key factors in the obesity epidemic is the sheer volume of wheat, corn, etc. we produce. I don’t see why “it contains food” should make cultured meat less possible than any other processed food product.
For a more “biology lab” type of manufacturing, we also make lots of pills, and vaccines. I have no idea about the numbers on those, though. If you told me that by weight we don’t actually produce that much, or that cultured meat is somehow fundamentally more difficult to manufacture, and in ways that are unlikely to be innovated around, I’d find it plausible without much additional evidence.
Also, if anyone has links on this subject that give any side’s arguments in a more knowledge way, please feel welcome to reply with them.
The issue is growing cells in a vat requires input nutrients combined with scale.
So the problems in order are:
1) The nutrients must be processed. You can't feed grass or even corn to a cell. How much waste/pollution/cost is incurred in processing agricultural outputs into something a cell can take in? How much "savings" really exists when you are still taking prime agricultural products to produce meat, as opposed to the existing 6 to 20 pounds of input per pound of meat output?
2) Sheer nutrient numbers: Meat production in the world today is around 350 million metric tons. Agar production (agar is the standard test tube growth ingredient) maxed out around 10 million tons a year. Sugar production - the most basic nutrient - is about 180 million metric tons. 1 ton of sugar does not equal 1 pound of vat meat, I guarantee - the exact number would be interesting but is definitely not 1. How many tons of pre-processed inputs to get 1 ton of sugar? What about other nutrients a cell needs - like protein? Vitamins? Minerals? The other nutrients are why agar is used. The point is: the possibility of even a 1% reduction in world meat production via vat meat seems highly improbable given the relative numbers.
3) Scale: the reason vat meat is going to fail, even if the nutrient input issue did not exist, is the difficulty of scaling into real production levels comparable to demand. Consider how many vats would be needed to generate 1 ton of meat. Consider the tubing/piping/waste disposal/harvesting/storing/transport is needed for all those vats. This is a non-trivial issue - and is why such schemes inevitably will never work much as the nonsense about algae-produced hydrocarbons.
The above are the big 3 issues; there are a host of secondary issues that certainly will come into play such as:
a) anyone who has done lab test tube work has had experiences where batches had to be thrown out due to contamination. Now scale this up to tons because cells don't have immune systems...
b) water - you need a lot of water and cleansing solvents to prevent the problems in a)
c) environment: cells don't handle even daily ranges of temperatures well. So we're talking climate control which animal bodies provide. More cost.
d) waste disposal. Actual organisms process dead cells away - how do vat meats do that? Keep in mind that all the cells in a piece of normal meat weren't born on the same day - they die and are replaced. How does a piece of vat meat do that without a vascular system or any other form of system management? Alternately, would people be comfortable with some sort of bio-engineered cell that is created to grow rapidly enough that this isn't an issue?
Note that I'm not even a biology type - I've done a single summer in UC Davis working on chemically treating tree seeds to enable a shoggoth-like mound of cells that sprouted baby trees. I'm sure professional biology lab workers can elucidate even more problems.
This entire field looks barely better than a Theranos or perpetual energy scam.
As for your comparison of pills and vaccines: it is invalid because the economic value of a pill or vaccine is enormously higher than meat. The total mass of output is insignificant compared to meat. You can't compare Lamborghini production with Camry or Tesla production and yield any valid conclusions.
Pharma probably has higher margins but both industries have a lot of money sloshing around.
Your points are definitely true right now. But is there anything inherent in the production of lab meat that will stop any of those challenges from being solved? there are many industries that looked impossible to commercialize but are common place now.
Selling overpriced stuff to a tiny few super rich doesn't make this a real replacement for normal meat production any more than the over hyped plant protein products.
The $/kg was in response to the assertion that pharma is able to produce affordable products. The $/kg output shows that pharma is creating very low mass, high price products whereas meat is inherently very high mass, low value product except in comparison to grains.
Re: cultured meat, I think there are a few things going on. First, I think it's just doing better than you expect. Second, I think their plan is to use a mix of cultured and plant-based meat in the hope of keeping prices down while providing better texture/flavor than the plant-based alone. Third, I think vegetarians, environmentalists, and signaling fans will pay for cultured meat even if it's not as cheap as the real thing.
I'm not sure what to think of claims like https://newatlas.com/science/future-meats-lab-gown-chicken-breast-costs/ that the cost of a lab-grown chicken breast is already down to $7.70/lb. I assume they're fudging the numbers somehow. But I think if it's 5x that they'll still find some people willing to pay.
Re: SF, the people on that Twitter thread seem to be saying there's been a significant change just in the past few months, so even if what you're saying is true that doesn't explain that.
The assertion of cost doesn't actually mean anything without data - let's see how it actually hits the market. Among the discrepancies: the $7.70 cost is probably wholesale lab output pricing. Chicken farmers don't get $7.70/lb for chicken breast - and the $5 to $9 retail price for non-organic chicken breast is certainly many multiples over what the producers actually get.
As for SF: I live here and walk all the time because I literally don't have a car.
What I report is first hand information from someone who has lived and walked the City for 20+ years. Yes, things are better than the nadir of 2019/2020 but they are still far, far worse than 10 or 20 years ago.
#9: Yeah, I was horrified by the possibility and dumped a "please do not do this, everything will explode" on the SJ forums where I have a presence. I think Lott is right about how the Democrats would have taken partial advantage, but is forgetting to simulate that this would have been a big-enough, obvious-enough power-grab to act as a Schelling point and kick off Civil War II.
#18: There are a lot of not-Mars places in the solar system, and most of them are better colonisation targets than Mars while not having the same "scientific opportunity permanently destroyed" issue. Literal Venus, with airships, would be a better place to colonise than Mars.
There aren't building materials in Venus's atmosphere. You'd have to bring them up from the ground, which while not impossible would require re-engineering everything to survive very high temperatures and 90 times normal atmospheric pressure, and then getting them through all that atmosphere.
Mercury would be a better bet:
"As Mercury has essentially no axial tilt, crater floors near its poles lie in eternal darkness, never seeing the Sun. They function as cold traps, trapping volatiles for geological periods. It is estimated that the poles of Mercury contain 1014–1015 kg of water, likely covered by about 5.65×109 m3 of hydrocarbons. This would make agriculture possible. It has been suggested that plant varieties could be developed to take advantage of the high light intensity and the long day of Mercury. The poles do not experience the significant day-night variations the rest of Mercury do, making them the best place on the planet to begin a colony.[45]
Another option is to live underground, where day-night variations would be damped enough that temperatures would stay roughly constant. There are indications that Mercury contains lava tubes, like the Moon and Mars, which would be suitable for this purpose.[46] Underground temperatures in a ring around Mercury's poles can even reach room temperature on Earth, 22±1 °C; and this is achieved at a depths starting from only about 0.7 m. This presence of volatiles and abundance of energy has led Alexander Bolonkin and James Shifflett to consider Mercury preferable to Mars for colonization.[45][48]"
>There aren't building materials in Venus's atmosphere.
There are - CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere give you all the organics and carbon-based materials - but I'll grant that it's short on anything that has to come out of rocks.
Interesting points on Mercury, though; wasn't aware the poles were that cool. Guess it joins the ranks of the airless rocks that are interesting colonisation points. The delta-V to Mercury is a bitch, though.
#35: It seems to me like: Under the assumption that Russian influence campaigns don't work, and US conservatives believe what they believe for their own, unrelated, reasons, it seems super villainous to put random US conservatives on a list of Russian influence campaign bots. But under the assumption that Russian influence campaigns might actually work to influence US thought, you would expect a Russian-influence-bot-detection algorithm to pick out a lot of random US conservatives: they're the victims, the ones whose minds were influenced by the campaign. The _whole point_ of an online bot influence campaign is to blur the line between Russian government controlled bots and normal Americans.
So the description of the villainy itself is less convincing to me than the fact that important people at Twitter were suspicious of it.
I don't think 47 makes a strong argument against the thesis. If wokeness is a replacement for religion, you would still expect the sort of people who need it to need more religion-like things and thus be more religious on average.
> In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
Great minds think alike!
> is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows?
Depending on the exact wording of "a 1996 agreement between the two sides that guns and explosives be prohibited along the disputed stretch of the border, to deter escalation", projectile weapons may be banned in general.
> “Mahayana” as “monster truck” images
Don't forget to print them and bring them to the meetup with Daniel Ingram! You could start an actual MAGAyana ("make arahantship great again") movement.
#1. This doesn’t consider that microeconomics is ‘in’ alongside the ‘credibility’ revolution -especially if we consider development economics. These issues are much more found in the micro-side of Econ. At the same time, macroeconomics has lost a lot of respect and ‘fun’ in the last decade. I think it’ll change soon with the recent macro-events of 2020 and beyond affecting the recent cohorts of young scholars but it takes a bit of time.
#2: how sure are we that these economic papers on identity issues don’t have ‘contrarian findings’? In the last four months, I saw a paper refuting the pink tax for example - even among the younger economists, incentives abound for shocking findings and ‘smashing the idols’ of previous research.
#3 . How sure are we that Americans don’t care about economic research about race, gender, or climate change? Maybe they don’t want out-of-touch Robin DeAngelo or Ibram Kendi or Sunrise Movement scolds but those are not the same as economic scholars trying to running regressions or playing with panel data.
#22: Redditors build an infinitely tall tower, and as a result/punishment for their actions, language itself is broken, their very names becoming holes in understanding.
Piggybacking on this comment to post an appealing metaphor that got posted in one of the threads in /r/counting responding to the LW post:
>that's probably exactly what's going on. The usernames were so frequent in the reddit comments dataset that the tokenizer, the part that breaks a paragraph up into word-ish-sized-chunks like " test" or " SolidGoldMagikarp" (the space is included in many tokens) so that the neural network doesn't have to deal with each character, learned they were important words. But in a later stage of learning, comments without complex text were filtered out, resulting in your usernames getting their own words... but the neural network never seeing the words activate. It's as if you had an extra eye facing the inside of your skull, and you'd never felt it activate, and then one day some researchers trying to understand your brain shined a bright light on your skin and the extra eye started sending you signals. Except, you're a language model, so it's more like each word is a separate finger, and you have tens of thousands of fingers, one on each word button. Uh, that got weird.
Re. the idea that federal funding for cancer research is very effective, one ought to ask, "compared to what?" If you compare it to some other disease, cancer will be more effective because there are probably many more terminal patients with cancer than any other fatal disease. But compared to what we COULD be doing, I can't call it effective.
Cancer is a disease caused by about 10 genetic mutations, but every cancer is a different 10 mutations. The proper approach to cancer necessarily involves sequencing the patient's DNA (normal vs. tumor) and finding out what mutations caused their cancer. No one does that; no one's even researching that approach to therapy AFAIK.
It wouldn't be easy; every cell acquires about 100 mutations by that time, and all the cancer cells are clonal copies of that first cell and its same 100 mutations. So you'd have to bioinformatically sort out which dozen or so caused the cancer. But if we sequenced more tumors, we'd probably have enough data to build an ML model to figure that out for us.
What you would do next isn't as clear. You could use a cell simulator to figure out (more-precisely than we can now) what disease state their mutations induce, if we had such a capable cell simulator, which we don't. The very top priority in health spending, IMHO, should be the development of a national cell simulator, which could be used for every disease, not to mention basic research. It's just stupid not to be spending billions of dollars on this.
Or, you could use gene therapy to try to compensate for the mutations. Probably not by fixing those genes; gene editing still has very high error rates and would cause more cancer. Maybe by adding new copies of the damaged genes, with viruses or plasmids. Maybe by using siRNA treatments (and the cell simulator that doesn't exist) to make counter-acting adjustments to restore the cell's normal homeostasis. But little work is being done in any of those areas because of the heavy government regulation of gene therapy.
Re. the national cell simulator, I know a lot of researchers would immediately respond that their needs are very specialized, and they need a special kind of simulator.
In 2001, I was doing a project looking for chaotic dynamics in the US airspace. It turned out to almost never happen, because the atmosphere is big, and the factor limiting airspace complexity is always ground operations. But to do that project, I had to write my own airspace simulator, because NASA's simulators couldn't use a separate control program in every individual airplane.
So I wrote a very flexible agent-based airspace simulator, which created an abstract model of the airspace as consisting of transactions between agents, and then let the operators plug in any code to run any agent in the simulation at any time.
At just that time NASA was planning to put out proposals for 2 new research airspace simulators, one to be used for fast-time (simulations faster than real-time, e.g. to simulate a year of flight data for the national airspace in one day for my chaos project), and another for real-time, human-in-the-loop simulations (such as semi-simulated military exercises).
So I made some slides and flew out to NASA Ames and showed a slide with some bullet points to the people on the relevant committee. The bullet points were something like this:
- Transactional model of the airspace as made up of different kinds of agents, each of which provides a set of transaction protocols it respects
- Interactions between ALL components by messages; not methods, function calls, or globals
- Agents run asynchronously, every agent with its own thread
- Yet the simulation is deterministic and repeatable (with pseudorandomness)
- Any agent can be implemented by anything that respects the protocols, including humans
- Simulation can be bound to real-time, or run as fast as it can
- Agents can be redistributed across the Internet dynamically (load balancing)
- Agents are hot-swappable; the simulation resolution for each agent can thus be scaled dynamically
Then I explained to the committee how a single simulator with these abilities could meet all their real-time simulation needs AND all their fast-time simulation needs.
So NASA replaced their 2 $40-million solicitations with a single $40-million solicitation for a single simulator, with my bullet points as the requirements. We won the contract, because I'd already written the simulator for the contract's phase-zero, though we had to team with Raytheon and about 7 other companies. NASA was still using the $40-million descendant of my simulator in 2014, though I long ago lost track of what they're doing with it. Probably private companies are also using it, since the software is freely available (to companies, not to individuals) through the office of tech transfer.
My point is that I know what I'm talking about when I say you don't need a bunch of different simulators. You need one simulator with a good design, and a bunch of different models, at different levels of abstraction for different users, of the components in that simulator.
A cell simulator would be more-challenging. The number of agents isn't the problem. A yeast cell only has about 42 million proteins ( https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180117131202.htm#:~:text=Summary%3A,affects%20health%20of%20an%20organism. ) I could run about 50,000 threads on an ordinary desktop computer back in 2002 (using Cybele), and they could be distributed across computers. To have one thread for every protein, you'd just need 840 20-year-old desktops.
The problem is that interactions in a cell are on VERY short timescales. Distributing the agents across a network puts severe restrictions on latency. The network topology should replicate the cell's physical structure, putting agents that are close by in the cell onto the same computer. But at some point you'd need to abandon the simulator's neat one-agent one-thread model, and use a single high-resolution agent to simulate the deep behaviors of a group of lower-resolution agents, or otherwise fake the parallelism.
We don't don't know enough cell biology to make the rules for the agents. RNA is being generated that isn't translated into proteins, but sometimes has other functions. Proteins can have modifications where other molecules are attached to them that change their functions and not all these modifications are known.
I understand some chemotherapy is based on the type of mutation(s) present, but we don't have the knowledge to reason from first principles how to treat specific mutations.
This is a great selection, just pulling a few plums out:
Re: 10, if they're looking for "big star along lines of Messi comes out as gay", I don't think they'll find one openly out. But there have been English players who came out as gay, such as Justin Fashanu (not a major star, his brother John was the more famous of the two, but I do remember the publicity):
"In October 1990, he publicly came out as gay in an interview with the tabloid press, becoming the only prominent player in professional English football to do so until Jake Daniels in 2022. Although Fashanu claimed that he was generally well accepted by his fellow players, he freely admitted that they would often joke maliciously about his sexual orientation, and he also became the target of constant crowd abuse because of it."
Whatever about "men who play team sports are very hetero", what you will find is a lot of sex scandals. As in, a *lot*. From Ryan Giggs (mentioned in the Sailer piece) having a long-running affair with his sister-in-law to rape/sexual assault cases to whatever was going on in PSG, there is no shortage of bad behaviour there:
Re: 16 - I would heartily recommend the novels of Charles Williams, with the caveats that they are of their time and so may fall foul of the more 'woke' standards regarding references to Gypsies (a slur, so I am informed), Muslims and others. Very much steeped in the Western Esoteric Tradition, and while I would say he was a Christian, he's a heterodox one (but very much Church of England mould, so I totally understand why Tolkien wasn't as enthusiastic about his work as Lewis was). Tolkien did, however, write a quick letter of condolence to Williams' widow in 1945 on the day that Williams died, following an operation, so he didn't dislike him completely; he seems to have liked him as a person, but as a writer they were poles apart (excerpts from letters below):
"I knew Charles Williams well in his last few years: partly because of Lewis's good habit of writing to authors who pleased him (which put us both in touch with Williams); and still more because of the good fortune amid disaster that transferred Williams to Oxford during the War. But I do not think we influenced one another at all! Too 'set', and too different. We both listened (in C.S.L.'s rooms) to large and largely unintelligible fragments of one another's works read aloud; because C.S.L. (marvellous man) seemed able to enjoy us both. But I think we both found the other's mind (or rather mode of expression, and climate) as impenetrable when cast into 'literature', as we found the other's presence and conversation delightful."
"I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. whom I met in his company when, owing to the War, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels. I doubt if he had read anything of mine then available; I had read or heard a good deal of his work, but found it wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous. (This is perfectly true as a general statement, but is not intended as a criticism of Williams; rather it is an exhibition of my own limits of sympathy. And of course in so large a range of work I found lines, passages, scenes, and thoughts that I found striking.)"
"The Greater Trumps" is a novel involving the Tarot, and a lot more besides:
Re: 32 - somebody is going to try and build that truck on the bottom right, I just know it.
Re: 33 - VINDICATION! *blasts the Collected Works of the Wolfe Tones in the general direction of Richard Lynn*
I've been banging on about this one every time I see it pop up, but Lynn's alleged methodology is *appalling*. He took three IQ tests done in Ireland in the 70s, two on schoolchildren and one on adults, and kludged the figures together to get an average "the Paddies have an IQ of 90".
"some early Irish failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused, but quickly improved to near-100 after being acquainted with the process."
I know anecdotes are not data, but from the experiences of my parents, who would have been going to national school in a rural area in the 40s-50s, the Irish educational system was - how shall I put it? -fucking abysmal. My parents, as young children, really did do the "walking to school barefoot/in the rain" thing and the one thing they both remember from their 'education' was being beaten for being late. Corporal punishment was still legal (or at least practiced) in schools even when I was in primary school, but at least I was never beaten across the legs with a stick because I was late, due to having walked a couple of miles in the wet.
This wasn't run by a religious order, so don't blame the teaching orders for this one - it was the national school which was staffed by lay teachers. They don't seem to have done much teaching, though, and my mother hated school (and the memory of her teachers) so much that when it came time for me to start school, she flat-out refused to send me to the same school she had attended, which was our local school, and I started school in town (with the nuns) when I was nearer five than four years of age (four being the minimum school starting age, and there were no kindergartens or day care or any of that in the town in those days). My parents were not stupid, but they left school between the ages of 12-14 for various reasons, and all their lives they felt keenly their lack of education. It undercut their confidence, and meant that my mother at least was never able to take advantage of opportunities offered her.
So if they had been made to take an IQ test, they would have scored very badly on it, and it would not be an accurate measure at all.
So the classifier flagging scripture as AI generated just sounds like the classifier is faulty, but it could also be onto something. LLMs are just a big pile of math trained on human words, and both have something of the truth, same as religion (I am a believer, sue me). So this means there is some impossible connection we can't see between the Bible and math, and I guess we call that connection the truth.
Maybe the classifier can see that scripture is so close to the truth that it is like math, and so, flags it?
I think it's a combination of the classifier being faulty, the person who originally found it (not me) having thousands of Bible passages they could try until one fit, and the KJV Bible having a very different style than any modern text of the type that the classifier has been trained to recognize, so that it doesn't strongly register it as human and just kind of has to make a guess.
Re: 47 - religious liberals (at least in the Christian denominations that I know about) are more interested in political causes *and* are leaning to the progressive/woke side of issues. So it's more that the decline of 'traditional' religion maybe led to wokeness, or the adoption of wokeness. When you've watered down doctrine to the point of "hey, let's change the words of the Lord's Prayer because who was this Jesus guy and what did he know about gender issues, anyway?", then adopting the values of the Zeitgeist are all you have left as beliefs that actually influence what you think and do:
You know, what would Jesus have made of gender issues is a very interesting question. He was stern at times, but very forgiving at other times, so it is ambiguous. I suspect he would have dazzled us all with a parable or pithy saying as was his wont.
It's wrongheaded to modify the Lord's Prayer, but if God is Love, one would have to think Christianity is not incompatible with progressivism. Though it's true progressivism often doesn't come from a place of love, it does come from such a place at times.
Well, Christianity doesn't actually have to be the Pharisaical thing it quickly became. The whole thing is riddled with paradoxes anyway: it's not a big deal to have the paradoxes resolve in favor of God is Love, and if you do that, you suddenly have room for LGBT and the sexual revolution. Lord knows not even Christians try to actually obey Jesus, so it would be fairly ordinary to just ignore what Jesus said about man and wife being one flesh.
Maybe that's too extreme, but Christianity has it in it to become that. It could take a view where this stuff is allowed but not encouraged, for example.
It's interesting because in Gnostic scriptures, Mary Magdalene gets a place of honour among or indeed above the disciples, but she is said to have become "like a man" (in her mind and thinking and soul). So the opinion the much-praised 'alternative Christianities' give to Jesus on gender issues is not that forward-thinking by modern measures! 😁
The gender-neutral language stuff is bananas. Yes, God is spirit and does not have a gender, and if you really really must, go ahead and talk about "God wants us to follow Godself's rules not out of fear but out of conviction" (yes, the gender-neutral lot do use locutions like "Godself" to avoid the dreaded "He/Him/His").
But the Lord's Prayer pretty much is what it says: "call God 'Father'" and you can't get around that, unless you want to reduce Jesus to "Well of course he was limited by his historic circumstances", in which case you've junked all the God made Man bits and stripped away divinity and it would be more honest to be a Muslim because you could venerate the prophet without any fuss about "technically we're supposed to believe he was divine, wink-wink" stuff.
The disciples said "teach us to pray" and Jesus says "use these words". Now the gender-neutral because oh dear we mustn't be mean to the ladies lot think they know better than the Second Person of the Trinity. As a woman, I think if any woman is going to be scared off because oh no masculine language! then you don't have the guts to be any kind of a believer. Go buy some cheap brass Buddha and some coloured candles and crystals for your coffee table instead.
Luke 11:
Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say:
“Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
3 Give us each day our daily bread,
4 and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
Well, I did say it's wrong to modify the Lord's Prayer and refuse to call God a He.
But taking Jesus as perfect is a tricky business, because in Jesus' own words, he was apparently not good (Why do you call me good?). And (*breathes in* time to blaspheme, but Jesus got called a blasphemer) you can definitely see why Jesus would say that: some of Jesus' statements are clearly ego inflated, and ego inflation is a delusion. Jesus was not perfect, and this is compatible with him being the Son of God, because he was indeed God, but he was also indeed a man, and no man is perfect.
I'm very stupid and dumb and basic: if you're going to call yourself a Christian, believe in Christ. And that doesn't mean "he was a nice guy who told us to be nice and the secular powers executed him for that", it means:
"I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end."
If you're not comfortable with divinity, or a personal God, then find something else you can believe in . But don't start stripping away or watering down in the name of Current Fad or 'we are modern people, we can't believe that kind of stuff'. Better an honest atheist than a fudging 'Christian'.
Well, I am not a Christian is the thing. I am a spiritual ronin, a masterless samurai. But hey, if you don't think the other religions are just noise, then there is nothing much for me to discuss.
Given how Jesus did not get along with the Pharisees, I do think Jesus did not intend for his words to be used to build a replica of Phariseeism. That he was trying to get at something more liberating. But you know, lots of people seem to want to submit, and if this submission also makes them want to help others, then it is not wrong. It can be wrong if it makes one wants to hurt others instead, though.
It's been a while since I actually read the thing, so I Googled the 'why do you call me good' passage, and while you're using it correctly, the bit above it about divorce probably answers the gender identity question.
I still wonder what would Jesus say to a LGBT person who questioned him about it. I'm not sure, but I don't recall instances of Jesus actively condemning anyone, so I'm leaning to him saying something pretty unexpected that is still a rejection of LGBT, somehow doing it without actively damning the person.
I've always interpreted that to mean that the closest human role to God's role is our father (when we have good fathers). Not that God is *literally* a father, literally male, or anything like that -- just that this is the closest analogy we have.
It's Trinitarian theology: God the Father is the father of God the Son. The Trinity isn't three separate gods, or three functions of one god, it's Three Persons in One God.
So God is our Father by adoption, as it were, since the Son was made man and in His human nature is 'one of us'. We are children of God not just by some kind of analogy, but in an actual relationship.
"In this Trinity of Persons the Son is begotten of the Father by an eternal generation, and the Holy Spirit proceeds by an eternal procession from the Father and the Son. Yet, notwithstanding this difference as to origin, the Persons are co-eternal and co-equal: all alike are uncreated and omnipotent. This, the Church teaches, is the revelation regarding God's nature which Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came upon earth to deliver to the world: and which she proposes to man as the foundation of her whole dogmatic system."
It is not even obvious who paid whom. Maybe you all are Scott's paid commenters; fake accounts to make this blog seem more popular, and to occasionally create a controversy.
On number 10, it's been true in my experience that lesbians are overrepresented in ultimate frisbee. This is even to the point where a friend who went to an all-women's college told me that her college team had an official intra-team dating policy.
Speaking only for myself, a devout Christian, I see so many parallels between Wokeism and Christianity, I don't understand how I could be a Christian and be Woke. This doesn't generalize to other Christians though; I've left the church I've attended my whole life, because of their increasing Wokeism. An example of such is now having a minister who admits to being an atheist. Who does not teach christianity to her christian congregation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretta_Vosper Margaret Ann Vosper (born 1958), known as Gretta Vosper, is an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada who is a self-professed atheist.
Well, the Woke think what they are doing comes from a place of love, and God is Love. That's how you can be Christian and Woke. Though being an atheist Christian is certainly... odd, to put it mildly.
It's what Lewis writes of in "The Screwtape Letters":
"Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the "cause", in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours — and the more "religious" (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here".
"About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate. Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything — even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that "only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations". You see the little rift? "Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason." That's the game"
"What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And". You know — Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing."
So that's definitely a trap many Christian progressives fall into, but it doesn't necessarily have to be like that. If you let Christianity influence your politics (which Lewis is advocating for) you can definitely become progressive, since it's not like LGBT causes, for example, are incompatible with God is Love, and Do Unto Others, and Love God, and Love Your Neighbor As Yourself. Maybe a case can be made it's incompatible with Love God, since the Laws are against it, but Jesus did say the executive summary of the Laws is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and that's not incompatible at all with LGBT.
And you can definitely disagree with progressives from a Christian angle, but I think if you see progressivism as a mote in your brothers eye, you have to make damn sure you don't have a beam in your own if you want to remove it. You have to figure out a way to make your politics come from a place of love, which is something we all are dropping the ball on.
I should be fair to progressives, they aren't the only ones falling into that trap. The right/conservatives are every bit as bad, that God approves of one political system or our great nation or whatever.
But I do think it's a real trap that we all should be aware of: 'Christianity and - '. You see a lot of it from secular and even atheist comments twitting Christians about how they should be thinking/behaving; "Jesus was all about love". Yes, but not the way you put it, as though love were some gloopy ooze dissolving everything into a pink haze of general niceness and surrendering to every bit of the modern Zeitgeist on politics, race, sex, and is it milk or tea in first?
Religion is about belief in God. Whether it's one God, many gods, the universal cosmic consciousness or what have you, that there is something there not just all humans. Going off Christianity as if the sole, core, and most important commandment was "Be nice" is absolutely the wrong idea about it. "Christianity as an excuse for Jesus would drive out the climate deniers" political lecturing is every bit as wrong as "Christianity as an excuse for Jesus would recite the Pledge of Allegiance".
But Jesus moral commandment was just that. That doesn't mean you have to submit to the Zeitgeist, as you can both be nice and try to persuade others to your position, but you do have to take into account the beam in your eye when you do that. Forgetting the beam is how you get the Crusades and the Inquisition, and so on. And also, I do recall a saint who said the most advanced spiritual state is to regard everyone you meet as an angel sent to teach you. It sounds unworkable, but it also sounds like a good idea.
> Whether it's one God, many gods, the universal cosmic consciousness or what have you, that there is something there not just all humans.
Well, this is heartening, as this sounds like the perennialist position that there is no one true religion, that there is truth in all of them (or well, the major ones at least). Reading your comments over the years, I kinda had got the impression you were a totalitarian Christian (the sort who believes only Christianity is true) so this is pleasantly surprising!
In my understanding, it's obvious that Christian love for humanity is different than wokeism. We've already got original sin. I say my prayers already, I don't need an aboriginal land proclamation (talking about "the God of the eagles" mind you) at the start of a (workplace) meeting. Completely incompatible.
Of course, I also observe that many other Christians see no such dichotomy.
While such rites are silly, I think they still come from a place of love, and that is why they are compatible with Christianity. Doesn't mean the rites should actually be performed, but fundamentally, they don't come from a bad place. And to be clear, some parts of wokism do come from a bad place, but this particular bit is just well-intentioned nonsense.
> I see so many parallels between Wokeism and Christianity, I don't understand how I could be a Christian and be Woke
Can you clarify this? Saying "I see so many parallels between Wokeism and Christianity" means you see many things in Wokeism that you also see in Christianity (i.e. they are similar). But i dont think thats what you mean.
That is what I mean. Original sin of Adam and Eve vs. Original sin of black chattel slavery. Prayers to God vs. Aboriginal land acknowledgements (which, when my office does it, explicitly includes someone's idea of an aboriginal god). Blasphemy of using the Lord's name in vain vs. saying the n-word. Persecution of heretics.
I love Christianity, but if someone says, "America is based on a system of slavery and thus inescapable white supremacy permeates the entire colonizer system of oppression, and really everything bad is some sort of white supremacy" I have to think to myself, "yes sin is everywhere, but people didn't start sinning in 1614. of course there was sin before that."
I've worked as a safety engineer in the medical device industry, and honestly almost all of the work that I did (and the downstream work that our work necessitated) was almost entirely wasteful from an real device safety perspective.
It is just a really time-consuming and expensive exercise in checking the boxes so that you can get FDA approval.
26. Correlation of math/language scores with genetic risk factors for psychiatric conditions
I don't think I have a good theory for the math side of unintuitive autistic-gene performance, but for the language side the major wrinkle I think is that they did not test "language ability", they checked correlations with *school scores in language classes*. An autistic person being able to succeed at learning and reproducing textbook definitions is not incompatible with a struggle in the areas autistic people report finding challenging: face-to-face conversations with people, particularly non-autistic people from cultures or subcultures that use language in an imprecise way. (fwiw: the autistic people I know seem to fare as well as anyone else if not better in text-based communities like forums and chatrooms.)
Put another way: there are legible (say: high vocabulary, reading comprehension) and illegible (say: poetry, conversational charisma) ways to be good at language, and school scores can only even try to measure the legible ones, which don't include the things that are hardest for autistic people.
(even-less-endorsed sub-take because I now can't find the paper that suggested it concretely but it feels just *so* intuitively true to me that I want to mention it and see if other people are willing to poke at it: I think there might also be something where some things we consider "mathy" might actually lean on some subset of "language" skills or vice versa. Programming in particular seems to require at least as much of this nebulous in-between thing as proper math/spatial ability when compared to other STEM fields, while also usually *not* requiring as much math except where it intersects with those fields. incidentally, computer programming is chock full of autists.)
I think it’s that lots of people don’t really have a sense of what autism ‘is’, and potentially that *nobody* really has a sense of what autism is. But there are plenty of autistic people who are no better at mathematics then average, and plenty who are worse. Autism nerfs you a bit, compared to what you would otherwise be able to do: people who appear to function more ‘normally’ with autism have better workarounds, which are easier if you are ‘smarter’ or not nerfed in other ways.
Autistic people have a tendency to get very into something, and to want to share their knowledge of that thing: that doesn’t necessarily make them well-informed or highly skilled, although it can do, but it does make other people ‘read’ them as well-informed or highly skilled. And maths is appealing because there’s right answers and wrong answers, and you can get a long way without writing things down (a pain with movement difficulties) or explaining things. And you can learn set techniques that always work: it is reliable.
The exotic meat thing will go nowhere. There are craft butchers that sell meats like ostrich etc. but it's very niche. I think if these things do get developed, people will try them once to say they did, then go back to ordinary beef etc. *Maybe* some very rich show-offs will patronise them to be able to say they ate Siberian tiger or whatever, but those kind of people would probably prefer to eat a *real* endangered tiger species for the bragging rights. So it'll pop up and go nowhere, unless they manage to use the tech to produce vat-grown meat that is mass-market beef, chicken, pork and that really is indistinguishable from the "real thing".
Moreover, I (boldly!) predict the killer app will be lab meat that isn't even trying to imitate any one real animal, but rather something that gets the texture right and some basic salt and umami profile while permitting the auteur to add whatever concoction tickles their whim.
We'll know we've crossed over when supermarkets are advertising pumpkin spice turkudu medallions, high-end restaurants are suing each other for infringement on their proprietary meat flavor brands, and the kids are getting sharffalo sandwiches at the cafeteria.
An anecdote re: FDA Deregulation increases safety. Libertarians in the audience will love this one.
I consulted for a client at one point who needed to patch a number of medical devices to deal with the WannaCry ransomware worm. As some may remember, this was possible to create because the NSA leaked EternalBlue, a Windows exploit. So, the government was, to a significant degree, at fault.
So, you need to patch your medical devices that run Windows, which is a lot of them. Think MRIs, CT Scanners, etc etc. BUT the way the FDA regulations on medical devices are written, any change to the device - ANY change - must be pre-approved by the manufacturer. So not only can these hospitals and doctors' offices not keep their devices up to date with security patches proactively, they also can't immediately react to threats. Lest someone say "that can't be true," the client and I *confirmed this directly with the FDA and asked them if they could issue a statement excepting the WCry patch from this requirement.*
So, we/the client had to contact every single manufacturer - there are hundreds, btw - and get written approval for every single affected device, and retain those approvals in case of future litigation. This took months, during which, shocker, a bunch of hospitals got compromised!
So, the government fucked around and kept a crippling exploit secret instead of helping us patch it, then FUMBLED that crippling exploit, then made it INCREDIBLY FUCKING HARD to legally patch!
TL;DR the FDA's cybersecurity rules are hilariously behind the times to the point of being actively harmful and the Russians probably have all of your medical info.
I had a look at the bet one to see what the reason for backing out was and yep, this is definitely weaseling:
"But the other reason for the withdrawal is because I realized I was exposed on one of the bets. I claimed that the COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in history and that may not be true because they likely buried the safety data on the other vaccines too. So I was taking at face value that the smallpox vaccine only kills 1 person per million. It easily could be worse than the COVID vaccine since they could have hidden those deaths too. Fortunately, I realized this before anyone accepted so I withdrew all the offers until I could properly think through to ensure that I didn’t make a similar bad assumption on my other claims."
"Uhh, uhh, uhh, maybe the other vaccines killed hundreds of millions but the Powers That Be covered it all up! So you can't make me pay out the money I said I'd pay out!"
Why leave it at vaccines, Steve? How do we know the things that go bump in the night aren't dragging innocent villagers out of their beds in the middle of the night to be slaughtered in the woods? Have YOU checked under your bed recently, dear fellow readers of ACX? You have no idea if there are lurking government baddies waiting to "bury the data" quite literally in your case!
I enjoy the Office-themed theories of social class, but there's also a boring nihilistic pseudo-Marxism to them. While not explicitly stated, the implication is that the creative class - the Michael Scotts of the world - are deluding themselves with silly things like principles and ideas. The people who supposedly see the world in "clear-eyed" terms are those whose focus is very simply on gaining or keeping power or money (even the "Losers").
First, I'm not convinced that the status-consciousness and posturing don't go all the way to the top (and all the way to the bottom). My guess is that when the CEOs of the largest firms in the United States get together with old money in-laws, there is also a lot of performative self-congratulation going on around liberal ideas. The class-culture wars playing out in the Trump era are, I think, at least partially a result of these two groups envying one another's domains and admiration. Trump can't understand why, with all his ruthless machinations, he still can't get the New York elite set to acknowledge that he is winning. Second there's the notion that the power being wielded by NYT-op-ed writers is not real power. It very much is - hence why propaganda machines are so valuable. Meanwhile the "losers" at the bottom who have effectively carved out their own domain (e.g. the warehouse in the Office) are engaging in just as much posturing and baby-talk to one another. Just look at anyone in a small town who has managed to gain the slightest position of authority and has inflated its meaning in his own head.
But the second and real reason that this essay goes so far off the rails for me is the underlying cynicism about humans' ability to truly believe in anything. Faced with someone who makes a lifestyle choice that doesn't seem to obviously pay off in money or power, the author has to assume it is purely a status move "detached from reality."
It's true that performative virtue is a thing and that status is a useful incentive for getting people to behave virtuously - so much so that the lines between genuine conviction and social conditioning are very blurry. But multiple forces are at work. More importantly, intentions are not everything. We live in a free, functional, and wealthy society in part because we foster the kind of instincts that lead to the BoBo class. There are plenty of societies around the world (and throughout history) made up of only the clear-eyed sociopaths and losers. And personally, I wouldn't want to live in any of those societies.
I had a very similar reaction to both the linked piece and The Gervais Principle. Very much enjoyed reading them, but I don't think they represent very fruitful or accurate ways to model the world.
Also, if you take them seriously and assume their theses are accurate, then both pieces end up coming off as massive cope from people who think they should be in the Psychopath class but haven't managed it.
"If I write a witty, acerbic enough take down of The Losers/Creative Class, no one will mistake me as one!"
The US Office (and its offspring, parks and rec) are a pox on American culture. Both shows are just groups of people bullying each other with little nuance or rationale. At least with the UK office, you could see some interesting commentary on psychology and human interactions, but the US version just goes for cheap laughs. That it remains so culturally relevant is just sad.
I love that you didn't link to the Buzzfeed article but linked to your own article. Some serious irony there.
I happened to see that video. There's a hebrew term I don't know how to translate succintly, "tzar ayin." It means someone who wishes other people should not have good things, whether or not they want that thing for themselves. Most people have some degree of this feeling at some point. There's may be some of that feeling expressed in the reaction to video.
But while it's definitely nice to help people see, the point of the video is not the charitable act. The point of this video is the monetization of mr-beast-performs-charitable-act. Seeing someone turn a charitable action into a selfish one makes people uncomfortable. Probably, the like/dislike reaction turns on whether you perceive mr beast making himself or the blind people the focus of the video.
Re the shrooms video. There's a whole realm of trippy videos (see e.g. r/whoadude). Some people have insane videos on Youtube. I can't imagine how much work they must put into these things.
I am actually impressed that he cured 1000 people for 1 youtube video. Comparing with various reality shows, if someone did the same thing in TV, they would at most cure 3 or 5 people per episode, or maybe only 3 or 5 for the entire season. And yet such reality show would probably get fewer negative reactions, because spending more time talking about each person would create the impression that they care about them more.
So a part of the objection seems to come from the same source as people who have a negative reaction to effective altruism. Ironically, helping more people provides less space to signal how much you care of each of them individually, and we intuitively use the signals of care to evaluate the moral significance.
Weirdly, when I watched the video, I felt far more comfortable with the people who barely got any screentime-- I'm perfectly willing to accept that the surgery was done, they can see better now, and that's really cool. But as soon as the camera followed any of them around for a bit, then it started to feel emotionally exploitative, and uncomfortable to watch, and I started skipping through the video. I was reassured that there were so many of them, and only a very few were on-camera like that... which at least suggests that being onscreen was a free choice, and not a condition of getting the surgery.
> Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder?
I immediately thought of Screaming Lord Such's complaint "Why is there only one monopolies commission?" Really, I'm not surprised the APA is obsessive about global warming, certainly my daily newspaper is. Actually, I expect any society dominated by academics to emphasize liberal obsessions these days.
Re #5 How is "antivax" not considered a pejorative at this point? It seems to consistently sweep together a swathe of unrelated perspectives into an over-simplified category for the purpose of mockery. I find it super low-resolution, particularly in the case of Alex Berenson who, afaict is specifically reporting on MRNa and respiratory interventions.
I suppose everyone else finds it useful, but it feels similar to the way people over-use racist or trans-phobe. Is it just me?
Describing a random person with concerns about a new covid vaccine as anti-vax might be an unhelpful pejorative.
Describing the average substack covid vaccine skeptic as anti-vax seems quite accurate, as most of them migrate from taking the position, "I'm just concerned about these new covid vaccines" to "I'm worried about all vaccines".
For example, Dr Kory went full anti-vax, recently:
Berenson might be one that will stick with opposition to covid vaccines. I'm not sure if that's a strategy to target a different audience, or he has different ethical boundaries, or what.
The shroom video, while still not very accurate, I would say is the closest approximation of hallucinogens I've ever seen. Especially the first "moderate" part and the "scary" part get pretty close to some of my experiences anyway. I've taken a lot of mushrooms and LSD in my life. The "peak" part resembles nothing I've ever experienced though and a quick poll of my degenerate friends produces a similar response.
The "peak" section strikes me as a odd, or "off" - I'd expect that such intense visuals would either:
- come on with a more gradual intensification and taper off more slowly as well,
- OR be catalyzed by a shift in setting (like laying down and closing eyes),
- OR be catalyzed by the addition of an extra short-acting substance (like inhaling nitrous oxide)
- Or perhaps it would make sense in a festival setting where the music is building to a climax
- Or perhaps if some really significant realization just "clicked" for the person
That sort of very immersive very rapid onset / rapid decrease visual field alteration *while walking* also seems unusual for mushrooms. People can certainly walk around in very altered states, but I still think it would tend to intensify more slowly, or the person would tend to sit down, or that sort of intensity would be induced by eg sitting or laying down and closing eyes.
As a good special effect that did give a sense of what tripping is really like, I thought it was good - although more light trails would improve it. I wouldn’t get those peak effects without my eyes shut and maybe a strobe light in my face, but they got the gist of it pretty well
There were about 4 things that struck me wrong about the shroom video...
1. The color saturation of the video should be amped up. Plus there should be "auras" of light around things. No doubt this is a side-effect of pupil dilation while under the influence, but I always felt I was seeing color in way I never was able to in straight state.
2. The visual "wallpaper" doesn't seem quite right (by wallpaper I mean the the phosphene patterns one can see when one closes one eyes while tripping—and which can break through and become an overlay on ones vision when the trip peaks). Psilocybe always created more "organic" patterns for me. More like the tiling one sees at the Alhambra, except expanding outward from the center of one's visual field (the video got that part right). The wallpaper in that video reminded me more of LSD's "electric" visuals.
3. The sound of the breathing is very realistic, though, because one becomes very aware of one's breathing — but also I remember picking up on more subtle sounds. For instance, there are several instances of birds singing in the background. While tripping, I would be enraptured by birdsongs. They would come through sharper and clearer than person in that video heard them. And they would have caught my attention for many minutes. Likewise, when he bent down to look closer at the grasses, he probably would have picked up the scrunchy sounds that green grass blades make they rub together in the breeze. If one gets down near the ground in a field or a forest, one can hear all sorts of sounds you might not hear in a straight state. Audible hallucinations? Maybe. Or maybe one is just capable of filtering out all the distracting background noises, and hearing roots push their way into the earth.
4. Finally, animals seem to be aware of when we're tripping. That dog would have probably been more cautious and curious than defensive because the human he saw wasn't displaying quite the normal behaviors that put them into a defensive mode. Dogs and cats love to lick our skin when we're tripping. They seem to get high from our sweat. I always found dogs, even dogs with angry dispositions to be friendlier and more playful when I was tripping.
The landscape moving and "breathing" is all very realistic. And he rippled patterns of light across the road seems spot on.
#47 took me a minute. The claim seems to be that 'wokeism' can't be a religion because religious people are also woke and un-religious people are not-woke? Is that right? Can't people be Christians and also Zen Buddhists? Might there be degrees of religiosity in both the practitioners and the belief structures? I'm having a difficult time finding anything useful in that graphic or twitter post.
Maybe what we need is a better way to understand what 'religion' is, its causes, its motivations and its goals. I understand saying 'wokism' has elements that mimic a religious state of mind, I even find it compelling, but I don't think everyone is operating under the same presuppositions of what we're even talking about. Even the idea of "finding meaning" seems super vague and overall I found that poll to be less than convincing.
I describe it as that religious faith and wokeism have the same root motivation: to feel righteous. And/or to view oneself as being among the righteous, which related of course though not necessarily the same sensation.
Three things support this conclusion for me (YMMV of course):
(a) As plenty of writers/commenters have pointed out in recent years, woke logic bears a lot of similarity to that of religious traditions that are towards the "strict" or "fundamentalist" end of the scale. A historical example which is often pointed to is the Puritans; contemporary examples are also easy to identify (and not at all limited to the Judeo/Christian tree of religious denominations).
(b) At a personal level, as a lifer deep in the heart of "blue" America, I've found that trying to debate with a woke believer bears a strong resemblance to times in my misspent youth when I was the secular person pointing out the Bible's contradictions and inconsistencies to evangelical-Christian relatives. In terms of how they react to that type of pushback it's really-direct deja vu, literal flashbacks.
(c) And then my own personal anecdata is that the adults I know who are liberal or progressive but skeptical or opposed to wokeism are much less likely to have grown up in households that practiced a religion, than are the woke progressives that I know. (Because of where I live and the context in which I work, I'm well acquainted with scores of people in each category.) From this I infer that a lot of people who have drunk the woke kool-aid are particularly drawn towards a way to feel and/or appear self-righteous which does _not_ require believing in an actual religion such as that which they had earlier in life consciously rejected. A substitution effect is at work at some level.
28 . Very probably medieval people had to deal with that. But for them, it was very reasonable: guilds where the main space to participate to political life for non-noble townsfolk. Imagine the APA elected one congressman at the meeting. Or to make it more medieval, that a list of 100 people was drafted from which one would be selected by lot to be House member for six months (the Senate would be staffed with nobles obviously). Of course you would want to know everyone's opinion on papal supremacy! Or at least on what to do about the emperor supremacists exiled after the civil war ten years ago. Should an amnesty be drafted, or should they be allowed re-entering on a case by case basis?
I was strongly pro-handwashing pre-covid but after it I divided the category of "respiratory diseases" in to "upper respiratory tract diseases" like H1N1 flu, most common colds, etc where you should mostly wash your hand and "lower respiratory tract diseases" like Covid-19 and H5N1 where masks are probably the most important thing. Physically I don't see how hand washing can interrupt the infection chain from one lung to another but it's easy to see how it can help prevent viruses from getting form one person's mucus membranes to another's.
7.) Lottery. I use to buy a lotto ticket every once in a while, when the pot got really big... >$500M. I've now stopped doing this because I realized that if I won the lotto, it would ruin my life. I tell this to people I work with but no one believes me. (Everyone thinks it will make your life great.)
what about lotteries for smaller amounts? winning the Powerball would probably ruin almost anyone's life, but winning 50k doesn't seem like it would be so bad for the average person (myself included)
(probably still not a good habit to get into, though)
Yeah that would be better, but for gambling, 'the house always wins'. So better to put your money on some 'penny stock', if you want to gamble. Or just put the money in the bank for the next time you need a new X.
34. Alex Nowrasteh has a pretty good critique of the "immigrants caused Argentinian decline" argument here: https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/review-of-the-culture-transplant-184 . Basically, the rise of Peronism seems to have been mostly driven by poor domestic migrants to Argentinian cities - they came from longstanding patronage systems in the countryside, and became the foundation of Peronist political machines in the cities.
37. I think it's good that a thousand people got vision restoration after eye surgery, wish it was covered by the government so that they didn't need to rely on youtuber charity, and also did find Mr.Beast's thing exploitative. There's nothing new about using philanthropy to promote yourself, but in Beast's case it's literally his business to use stunts done for charity (either directly or indirectly) to make money. He's trying to become a billionaire off of it.
42. It might be low because just having the Builder's Remedy isn't the end of it - folks opposed to this can still try and weaponize CEPA lawsuits against development. And California judges have interpreted CEPA ever more broadly - student housing in Berkley lost a CEPA lawsuit because a judge expanded it to include noise pollution and traffic.
47. I'm wondering if being religious tends to go in tandem with being more socially involved as well. That would explain why religious liberals and conservatives might be a lot more involved in social/political causes.
Blaming immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe has been a hobby horse for US libertarians of the far-right kind by way of explaining why the US turned away from its small state roots. I am unconvinced of that just as I am of a similar argument regarding Argentina.
Really, Argentina's story is surprisingly straight-forward. They had a tiny population blessed with an enormous agricultural area to cultivate. They got so "rich" in the 1930s - relatively speaking, of course - by exporting tons of agri. Think of it as the predecessor to small oil state exporters in the gulf, except for agri you need a big land but a small population.
What went wrong? Basically two things. First, mechanisation. The US in particular started to mechanise its agricultural economy big time and Europe soon began to follow. Prices for foods began to fall and Argentine landed elites, who got rich by doing very little innovation, preferred to keep their economic model because while the nation fell behind they could maintain their comfortable and basically risk-free lifestyle without too much work.
Nothing much has changed since then. Peronism was just an attempt to get back at the aforementioned elites with mixed results.
Ultimately, you want your elites to have their fortunes tied up in productive enterprise. The schoolbook example would be the Korean Chaebols. Yes, they were corrupt and all that jazz, but their companies had to win marketshare abroad. Since Korea has very little commodities of any kind (it's a very mountainous country yet has surprisingly little mining), the only way for their elites to maintain their status was through investment into productive activities. The story is similar in Japan.
I agree. Argentina really needed aggressive land reform like South Korea, to break up the rural elite and push elite folks into more productive enterprises in the economy (same for a lot of Latin America, honestly).
42. There was a recent EconTalk episode on zoning, where the guest argued the impact of zoning in CA isn't the driving factor of low housing availability. Interestingly, he also argued that it's not an unwillingness to build housing that drives this problem. He claims the problem in California is that they have a system for creating new municipalities that is similar to the "certificate of need" some hospitals have. Essentially, established municipalities stop the creation of new municipalities that might spring up and build a bunch of nearby houses (thereby dropping the old muni's property values). You end up with a situation where somewhere like San Francisco has some of the densest housing in the country (his claim), while much of the surrounding area is pastureland.
#38: I haven't followed this debate in detail, but I'm fascinated by the idea that living at higher altitude would be associated with lower weight. It is interesting especially because it's something that could be tested relatively rigorously with existing data yet have not been so tested (AFAIK). The study I'm thinking of would have a within-person design where people are followed up for many years and their BMI and place of residence are recorded repeatedly, so that within-person estimates of the effect of moving from lower to higher elevation, or vice versa, can be calculated. In the US, I think at least the Add Health dataset would readily enable this analysis.
13. I notice my confusion here with regards to the following excerpt from Antifragile. They don't explicitly contradict each other, but they point pretty strongly in opposite directions:
“Morton Meyers, a practicing doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: “Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids—a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.”
John LaMatina, an insider who described what he saw after leaving the pharmaceutical business, shows statistics illustrating the gap between public perception of academic contributions and truth: private industry develops nine drugs out of ten. Even the tax-funded National Institutes of Health found that out of forty-six drugs on the market with significant sales, about three had anything to do with federal funding.”
I agree! I've heard a lot of smart people say cancer research is worthless, which is why I found the study so surprising and am looking for more comments on it.
Sailer's point about team sports may be related to this theory about the evolution of homophobia (from the writer sponsored by Scott & critiqued by Wood from Eden):
It's off-topic for this post, but since I've gotten badly synchronized with Open Threads, I'd just like to let people now that I still have 3 subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away.
On the topic of cultivated meats: while exotic/impossible to obtain otherwise meats like tiger, etc. might not have this issue, has anything changed since that feasibility study that basically said "this is impossible to do at scale for anything like price competitiveness with natural meat? It was funded by Open Phil and can be found here:
I think Asterisk is trying to get an article answering this question in their next issue (which will be free online). I'm also waiting to see what they have to say on this.
The Supreme Court is not required to hear any cases, except those for which it has original jurisdiction. Original jurisdiction means that the Supreme Court is the first, and only, Court to hear a case. The Constitution limits original jurisdiction cases to those involving disputes between the states or disputes arising among ambassadors and other high-ranking ministers. One justice could do those original jurisdiction cases in a pinch.
By raising the question Maxim Lott, could be seen to be esoterically actually encouraging such a plot.
Wikipedia deemphasizes it, but Lynn Margulis seems to have stumbled on the mitochondrial theory because it happened to fit her ideology of cooperation versus competition, and was correct by coincidence.
Correct by coincidence and then has the persistence and dedication to get a bunch of grad students to do the work that uncovers the things that prove it right is basically how science works.
I mean, really, anybody here done shrooms and can verify accuracy?
Because I've been seeing all that shite all my life, and I have never done shrooms, or any other illicit drugs. I don't even drink alcohol. It's just a thing I have to work around to do stuff like read text on a page, and drive a car. And after forty years it's boring AF too-- people talking about their trips is like a bunch of freaks standing around waxing rhapsodic about how the air is transparent and water is wet. I mean, whatever, the geometrics are neat sometimes. And superimposing patterns onto the scenery doesn't quite capture it, but I can tell what they're getting at there, I've seen it. The pebbles/cracks/leaves, whatever should *be* the pattern, not have a pattern stamped on top of them, though.
That "peak" section is just what I see every friggin morning when I wake up and turn on the light. Yay glowing tessellations. People seriously do drugs for that? WHY?
It pisses me off that the only people who seem to share this experience are drug users. WTF? Where's the scientific etiology for people who experience the world this way as a default mode? Where's the research on how to make it go away so I can read faster, or be comfortable in crowds, or be a better driver?
Yes, I get visual snow 100% of the time, since childhood. I wish it would go away. I also get migraines, sometimes with aura. Migraine auras look completely different and are not at all the same thing.
I'm religious, so yeah I believe in some "woo" stuff, like God becoming incarnate as a human child and then being crucified, descending into hell, defeating death, rising again in 3 days etc. But, you know, so do millions of other people who don't have screwy neurochemistry, so I don't think it signifies. Not sure what "most people" would consider weird, TBH.
I've never been diagnosed with anything, but would describe myself as somewhat autistic. Again: doesn't everyone? Join the club, etc. My husband is actually dxed autistic, and he doesn't see any of that stuff. But if you read Olga Bogdashina's work, she seems to think sensory disturbances are *the* central component of autism. I dunno what to think (shrug).
FWIW, I discussed the vid with a friend who's done shrooms, and he confirms it's very like the visual aspect, but says a shroom trip also comes with euphoria. I don't get the euphoria with mine. I'm just a slow reader because the words move around the page, and I don't like things like crowds, concerts, TV, and other high-stimulation experiences because even the normal range of experience is pretty overstimulating-- everything's got halos and trails, stuff that's supposed to be solid and still is in constant subtle motion, I get little sparkles any time I turn my head too sharply, and geometry is everywhere. I prefer a quiet house and dim lights.
And it annoys the crap out of me that the only literature where there's even a vocabulary to describe any of this, is drug literature. Hallucination. As though it were the same as having spiders talk to you, or thinking your TV static has important messages from HQ or something. I don't have any trouble telling weird visual phenomena apart from physical reality, and 99.999% of it has no meaning attached to it (I admit there have been some kind of freaky hypnagogia edge cases-- but again hypnagogia's something different).
It's just *there*. All the time. No emotional or transcendental significance. Like, I can *kind of* understand where if you had never seen it before, and you induced it with shrooms so it also came with a sense of euphoria, you might be inclined to *attribute* meaning to it. But I don't. Because it doesn't come with the feelz, you know. I'm kind of irritated by that, actually. My religious tradition fully endorses religious experiences, and the visual stuff actually behaves differently when I'm praying. And I would very much *like* for that to be some kind of religious experience... but there's no meaning attached to it. I'm pretty sure it changes during prayer because my attention/focus/state-of-consciousness changes. I.e. it's just a neurology thing.
I would like it if there were an "off" switch for it.
...and yes, I read your original SSC article on it, back when you posted it. I do appreciate the acknowledgement that yes, this is a thing that also happens with people who haven't been consuming hallucinogens... but admit disappointment that nobody had any suggestions on how to mute the phenomena, or any solid leads on what causes it. Oh, well (she says, in her best Eeyore voice).
See I see absolutely nothing like that and the only time I ever saw anything like that was when I had a joint adulterated with some unknown substances and the world was absolutely swimming all around me like that.
How nice for you. I bet you read 5x faster than I do because the words stay put on the page, and don't shimmer all the time. I have no fragging clue why people would want to induce that on purpose.
> I have no fragging clue why people would want to induce that on purpose.
Amen to that. Seems like a combination of strongly wanting to experience "something new" regardless of what it is, and having no better idea how to achieve new experiences other than taking a pill.
I suggest you not criticize what you haven't tried. You don't want to trip? Fine. No one is forcing you to trip. The fact that many people enjoy it and have some new and interesting experiences seems to annoy you for some reason.
Professing one's ignorance is fine. And professing ones disinterest in other peoples' activities is fine. But criticizing other peoples' interests from one's limited understanding is both intellectually dishonest and insulting. For instance, I don't understand why some people want to climb Mount Everest. And because I've never been in that particular mental state where I longed to climb Mount Everest, I wouldn't want to speculate why some people have that itch. Moreover, it would be intellectually dishonest of me to make claims about their motivations. Your remarks about why you *think* people take psychedelics is as intellectually dishonest as if I were to speculate why people like to climb mountains.
I don't want to trip, but I've apparently been tripping since I was born, without the universe asking my permission first. It's more of a disability than a superpower, TBH, and I'm puzzled that anybody finds it interesting. What annoys me about this video, is that, back in college when my roomies would go on about their LSD trips and I'd be sitting there thinking "Wow this is boring. Do people really not see that all the time?" I had an inkling that perhaps, maybe, there was something screwy about my own default way of seeing the world. And that it must be similar to what they were experiencing on LSD. And then I was like "No, that's nuts, nobody would actually take that risk for anything so frigging *boring*" But no, this video, along with comments from people who've done shrooms confirming that yes, it is fairly accurate... Dang. I was right the first time. I'm annoyed that I second-guessed myself.
It doesn't annoy me that people have these experiences. I have these experiences. All the time.
It annoys me that people risk their health, safety, a criminal record, and support an illegal industry that is a net drag on quality of life in any region where it's well-established, in order to have these experiences.
Since "tripping" as a permanent condition prevents me from doing/enjoying certain common things that normal people find rewarding and enjoyable (e.g. concerts, movies, crowded events, television, finishing college), and seriously hampers others (e.g. driving, working/shopping/functioning in buildings with certain kinds of lighting, functioning in noisy environments, finding things in visually cluttered spaces), I'm dismayed that people would even *risk* incurring this as a permanent state by their own deliberate actions.
I'm irritated beyond words that *all* the research on this seems to be on, and by, "psychonauts", largely because all of the self-proclaimed astral explorers I've met IRL are incredibly dysfunctional people. I love them, but I really wish, for their own sakes and for the sake of their kids, spouses, and families, that they could get their shite together. Perhaps you're an exception. I certainly hope so. Anyway, the research: while it's handy to have a vocabulary to describe some of that stuff, I still can't mention it out loud in polite company or medical offices, because the result is that everybody immediately switches attitude to: "oh, you're a druggie/crazy person" and then poof! I don't matter anymore and I'm not safe to be around. I can't help thinking that since my condition- whatever it is- is hardly unique, it's irritating that it cannot be acknowledged or taken seriously *because* of the large number of irresponsible, aimless, terminally-bored people out there who like to induce similar things with drugs. Because they apparently have nothing better to do.
It's like if you were born blind. And then you discovered that there's a large group of people out there who like to put on dark goggles and stumble around with white canes in public, making arses of themselves. Trendy. Now and then one of them gets run over by a bus in a crosswalk. Sure, you could say "that's just people exploring, it's their choice, leave them alone, they're not hurting anybody, whatever"-- but now say there are more of these people than actual blind people, all the research on blindness is actually using them as research subjects, and if you mention you're blind, everybody assumes you're LARPing it for funsies and avoids you. You'd probably be annoyed.
My remarks about why I *think* people take psychedelics are based on what friends who take psychedelics have told me about why they take psychedelics. If it offends you... not my problem. If it doesn't reflect why *you* take psychedelics, then just assume I'm not talking about you, eh?
I also get similar effects naturally (though much milder than Yarrow or what's shown in the video), having never taken hallucinogens, and I found that it was much more pronounced for ten minutes or so after watching the video. I don't know whether this slightly persistent effect had the same cause as HPPD, but it seems at least plausibly related.
Interesting! Do you find that other video media have an intensifying effect on it, or just that particular video? Have you noticed any other exposures or internal states affect it? Hunger? Fatigue? Particular foods? Blood sugar? Moods or other mental states?
Just that particular video. The only other thing I've noticed that clearly affects it is staring intensely at a single thing for a while. I also have a vague feeling it happens more if I pay attention to it. Most of the time it's not present at all (or at least I don't notice it, which for something so subjective is practically the same thing), so I haven't noticed any factors that reduce it.
What effects do you get from staring intensely at a single thing? When I do that, particularly with natural textures like grass, bark, fallen leaves, sand... that makes stuff in the immediate area resolve into geometric patterns-- most often a grid of rhombus shapes, like fishnet. But if it's a blank wall or bright sky, what I get is a sort of bulbous rosette shape that moves... a bit like translucent clouds being sucked into a central vortex. I am curious if other people get the same effects, or different ones.
It's not very consistent, so it's hard to remember and describe, but I'd say there's a slight motion, certain parts of patterns get emphasised, and sometimes flat things start looking not flat, like bits are projecting directly towards or away from my eyes so it should look the same except for binocular vision but it doesn't. This last one happens particularly with lines of text. One time I was staring at a work-in-progress drawing of a face, trying to work out what was making me dissatisfied with it, and it seemed like the proportions were changing. In all these cases, as you've said of your experience, it's quite obvious that it's not real.
(Focusing just now on the noise in my vision had made me realise my screen is also quite dusty.)
Fascinating! Your experience is not one I’ve heard of before. I imagine it would be annoying to have visual “trippy” effects all the time. I enjoyed them as a novel experience, but was pleased they weren’t permanent. Do optical illusion work differently for you?
Regarding the picture accompanying the first link, lab-grown meat being advertised as "GMO free" is certainly a strange choice. I mean, assuming the genome of the animal the cells were cultured from wasn't edited, I suppose it's technically true, but sticking to this as a selling point seems to preclude modifying the genome in such a way that makes the cells grow better in a lab rather than in inside an animal (as the genome was presumably selected for), which present the choice of either hobbling future development or having to walk back on a selling point. Furthermore, it's a bizarre and frankly misleading selling point to begin with: even if it might be technically true as mentioned, the very process of cultured meat production seems diametrically opposed to what the nebulous "non-GMO" label implies in most people's minds (i.e. "this product was made without any laboratory shenanigans"), and I highly doubt the non-GMO crowd and the people interested in cultured meat overlap much if at all anyways.
if it doesn't have the genome you want you can always grow it under exposure to Co-60 and any mutants produced thereby don't count as GMOs for some reason. It's how they made that grapefruit.
I would expect the classics match GPT's output, because the Western classics comprise the most over-represented cluster in any text corpus drawn from Western sources.
If you instead look at an international corpus, drawing in equal proportions from different languages around the world, the Bible is even more over-represented. This is because there are MANY non-Western languages whose first written book was the Bible, translated by missionaries who invented a writing system for that language just in order to translate the Bible into it. I always found the example sentences in online dictionaries of sub-Saharan African languages to be full of Bible quotations.
ASD and ADHD are both strongly correlated with bad math scores? That ain't right! Especially if they control for sex. If anything, I'd interpret that finding as evidence that autism isn't a spectrum disorder--that the math wizards we call "on the spectrum" have something different.
I'm not surprised by ADHD at all - it seems to just lower all scores, which is what you would expect from a condition that makes you do badly at school. Why would that be surprising?
I'm from an older generation, in which most or at least very many of the people diagnosed with ADHD would be diagnosed with ASD today. (EDIT: Er, that's my impression. I never counted; I just know a lot of people who were diagnosed with ADHD, and also seem to have Asperger's or ASD but were never diagnosed with either of those.) So my concept of ADHD is not up-to-date.
Of the three people I know IRL who have autism, only one fits the intelligent/nerd stereotype. Another was diagnosed because he kept causing a bunch of teenager drama due to his refusal to attend school.
Re. religious decline and wokeness, the American Woke movement is a descendant of Puritanism, through Unitarian Universalism (which injected Hegel and continental philosophy). That's why it comes from Ivy League schools, which were mostly founded by Puritans or other Calvinists, and mostly went through a Unitarian phase. At one time in the 19th century, nearly every professor in Harvard was a Unitarian Universalist.
The Woke movement is based on continental philosophy, acquired through at least 3 main lines: Hegelians (Unitarian Universalists, Marxists, Nazis, neo-Marxists, and historicist neo-liberals such as Fukuyama); French existentialists and post-modernist (who were mostly Heideggerian); and sociology (through a German branch descended from Heidegger and Husserl).
Continental philosophy is roughly co-extensional with essentialism, which is inherently spiritual (essences are literally just spirits).
That's a very good point. I'll have to restate that. Existentialism is a reaction against essentialism, which is however still within the framework of essentialism. Sartre's "Nausea" is about how /very upset he is/ that he can't grasp the essences of things. The protagonist is also very upset that he doesn't seem to be causally necessary, which is a thing that only matters to people who believe in the general idealist worldview that only the necessary and eternal really exists, or matters. Existentialists believe there aren't essences, but still find that shocking and hard to cope with.
It's analogous to how post-modernists don't believe that Aristotelian definitions and causation work, but can't think of any alternative viewpoint, and so are just confused and think they've proven that reality is broken.
To really break free of essentialism, you have to become a materialist and admit that humans are machines, and there is no animating spirit, no transcendental anything, no purpose handed to you from God; and that there never was any reason to believe in or want any of that in the first place.
I wrote Unitarian Universalists. The Unitarians predate Hegel, as does Universalism. But the development towards Unitarian Universalism involved a lot of Hegel.
See https://lcuuc.weebly.com/uploads/3/9/8/2/39827465/lcuuc_mar_2018.pdf and look at page 3. I don't know how much Hegel was woven into their theology; it was more a matter of Hegel casting doubt on the permanence of authority, and theologians applying that to the Bible and realizing you just couldn't take it literally; and also of Hegel being really, really popular from (I think) 1816-1945 with the same academic and theological crowd that ran Harvard and Yale.
Some of the resemblance is just convergent evolution. All Christianity is very similar to Hegelianism, because Hegel was in effect trying to create a secular Christianity. That's also what the Universalists wanted to do.
But there was a lot of specific Hegelian influence. The American Universalist churches--and I always get Universalist and Unitarian mixed up unless I read up on them, which I don't have time for today--were responding to 19th-century Biblical criticism that was inspired partly by Hegel. I have a book by Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, which details some of the development of the American Unitarian Universalists out of the Baptists, who developed out of the Puritans and other Calvinists. That book rarely mentions Hegel, but Hegelian concepts are used throughout it.
The important consequence for us is that American academia today, by which I mean the elite colleges, is with few exceptions descended from a combination of strict Puritan and Calvinist theology and evangelistic impulse, and Hegelian dialectic. The motives for creating most of these colleges was to train ministers, and they were spread across the US largely as part of deliberate evangelism efforts, as for example the University of Chicago (which doesn't /say/ it was founded as a theological seminary, but it was; the theological seminary dishonestly declared itself bankrupt to get out of debt and then reformed itself as the U of Chicago). Some of the west coast academic system was the result of a 19th-century attempt by Baptists to establish a beachhead in California, with the goal of evangelizing China, although the history of how Hegelian historicism captured west-coast universities is not dealt with specifically by any book I know of.
The specific beliefs of American elite universities have changed many times; but the underlying religious certainty, notion of themselves as the elect who are to lead the rest of Earth, spiritualist metaphysics, and impulse to crusading evangelism have remained until today.
A 21st century pamphlet doesn't seem useful to me. It cites Marcuse, so it really doesn't answer the question of whether Americans got Hegel in the 19th century or got him from Marcuse.
If Hegel was so popular with Unitarians, why doesn't Hutchinson talk about him more? How can you tell that these "Hegelian concepts" really come from Hegel? Hutchinson names Schleiermacher a lot more than Hegel, which is sufficient if you just want to invoke continental philosophy generally and not Hegel specifically.
I find it pretty implausible that Hegel was popular in America in his lifetime. It shouldn't make much difference to your point to eliminate the first half of the nineteenth century, but I'm going to concentrate on it because it's concrete. From a few snippets of Hutchinson on google books, I think he is talking about the second half the nineteenth century. While the Tübingen school of theology was founded by Baur in 1831 the year of Hegel's death, I think Hutchinson focuses on Albrecht Ritschl, who got going in 1845. Plus you need time to cross the language barrier. Moreover, he cites the book Hegel's First American Followers: the Ohio Hegelians. Assuming he endorses that title, this gives a pretty clear timeline. But also that Hegel arrived in Cincinnati, not Boston. Hutchinson mentions that the book discusses Octavius Frothingham's engagement with Hegel. He was in Massachusetts, but he was so radical, he left New England and Unitarianism. He may have been a herald of the future, but he wasn't a hegemon.
Wow, you went in-depth. No, I never found a clear statement "The American UU church was strongly influenced by Hegel." But I found lots of Hegelians in the tradition leading up to, and within, the AUU church, lots of attestations in Hutchinson of the importance of Hegel to that line, and lots more references to Hegel in the later lines of thought that came out of those UU universities. I don't care if they read Hegel directly, or studied someone who studied Hegel.
Perhaps I was being sloppy when I called the American UU Hegelian, but I think that book alone has enough evidence that Hegel had a strong influence on them, some of which you just mentioned, that it would be equally irresponsible not to mention them when discussing Hegelians in America.
I think the section on Ritschl makes it clear that Hegel was a huge influence on American theology at the time of Ritschl:
"But the feeing by the time of Ritschl was that the predominating Hegelian or speculative approach to an answer could never satisfy. The Hegelians, like Schleiermacher, had begun with a definition of religion and then sought to approve Christianity as the most fully developed and otherwise most satisfactory form of the impulse thus defined. But the Hegelian formulation, Ritschlians thought, was especially vulnerable because under its directives Schleiermacher's "religious feeling" had ceased to be feeling--even, many would say, had ceased to be religions--and had become sheer intellection.
"The German influence that began to operate among American liberals in the 1890s, therefore, was philosophically part of a broad course-correction in the pervading Hegelianism of the time... Idealism as a philosophical principle was not fundamentally renounced; the Hegelian avidity for distinguishing between ideas and their historic deposits was not lost; and the Hegelian sense of the importance of historical development was probably intensified. The Ritschlian generation is perhaps best understood, in fact, as seeking to retain the benefits of these characteristic elements in the heritage of the speculative philosophy [which Hutchinson equated with "Hegelian" in the previous paragraph] and still to find a way to strengthen the case for Christian finality." (p. 123-123)
The discussion of Lotze on p. 125 also invokes Hegel's progressive historicism, though without mentioning Hegel by name--and this is framed as a seminal influence on "a liberalism that would continue at least into the 1920s to be dominated by philosophical idealism", which I take to mean Hegel, 'coz Hegel is easily the most-cited philosopher in the entire Idealist line of thought, from the 19th century up to at least 1970.
I have counted the number of references to various philosophers in numerous books from the 19th century to the present, and found that the number of circularly-defined terms and incoherent arguments strongly correlated with the number of citations of Hegel.
So, I'm playing a bit of fill-in-the-blanks, and perhaps giving the mistaken impression that UUers are dogmatic Hegelians. But everybody realizes that Marxists and Nazis are Hegelians, and none of them were doctrinaire Hegelians either.
(I didn't even notice "Hegel's First American Followers: the Ohio Hegelians" in the references; thanks much for pointing it out. I'm especially intrigued by the line of influence Hegel -> Stallo -> Ernst Mach, which I suspect may help clarify the sharp epistemological distinction between logical positivism and science.)
I should add that part of the mystery here is that, by about 1900, all of the Puritan churches in America which I looked up--and I looked up all the most-famous ones--had become Unitarian Universalist. The UU Church in America descends from Puritanism, perhaps with some intervening Baptists. This is puzzling because Puritanism was the least-tolerant Protestantism ever, while UU is the most-tolerant branch of Christianity (if it is that). It would make sense for Hegel to have been the bridge from Puritanism to Universal Unitarianism, although that can't be the complete answer, because IIRC the Harvard faculty had already become entirely Unitarian by 1803.
I think the solution to the puzzle is that Puritanism and Unitarianism were both "heresies" caused by extreme rationality / autism-spectrum disorder. The Puritans wanted theology and practice to conform rigidly to Biblical teachings under a literal interpretation. The Unitarians most-likely recognized that the Trinity was (A) a much later addition to Christianity, not present in the original texts, (B) logically impossible, and (C) incompatible with Plato (and Platonism provided the axioms that 4th-century Roman Christianity was built on top of). (I don't know, because I haven't studied the origins of the Unitarian Church; but the heresy of unitarianism arose repeatedly (tho perhaps not independently) in the Middle Ages, & was always due to people actually reading the Bible and taking it as more-authoritative than the Church.)
re: 46: If anybody tests flashing lights for "learning" in my vicinity, I will go find the outlet and unplug the dang light. Why is this even a thing? They don't know *anybody* who gets seizures or migraines from that?
It's not learning. It's a trance state. Watching TV does the same thing: do people learn more that way? No. They turn into drooling idiots.
>It's not learning. It's a trance state. Watching TV does the same thing: do people learn more that way?
Well, have you tested them on the data they were exposed to? That they don't learn what you deem useful is one thing, but I would be surprised if they didn't recall a large share of what they saw.
Yes, Sesame Street can help little kids "learn" to parrot the alphabet and the numbers 1-12. Let's say you give them a test beforehand to see which numbers and letters they can identify, and how high they can count. And then you let them watch 100 hours of Sesame Street, and re-test them, and find they have learned the items on the test better than kids in the non-intervention group.
What have they really learned, though? What did the kids in the control group do while their peers spent 100 hours watching TV? What did they learn in that time, and how does it compare to rote memorization of the alphabet and numbers 1-12? Is there a good way to compare, say, learning to do a somersault or build a better block tower, with learning to identify the letter B?
This is the problem with all such studies, even when it's adults in a lecture hall. What *kind* of learning? How did they test for it? It is easy to "prove" that some kind of improved learning takes place if you tweak conditions just so... and you're straitjacketed by the demands of what you can measure on your little study budget. What you can measure is usually the adult equivalent of being able to name the letters in the alphabet. That's easy to test for. Was there any attempt to measure functional understanding, or was it "can you repeat these 5 key facts from the lecture?" Retention isn't the same as understanding or synthesis. Which thing are they testing for? Or did they, like so many studies, test for all three and then cherrypick the one that made them look good and dump the rest of the data?
That's before you even get to the question of whether it's a good thing to use trance states for learning. Can they be useful? Sure. But... (and I have exactly the same reservations about TV) how many people do you know, that you'd actually trust to hypnotize you and make helpful suggestions to you in that altered state? Is this a thing we really want to become standard practice in institutional learning environments? It sounds like it has far more potential as a brainwashing tool than as a learning aid.
The "you're treating blindness as a disability" objection isn't focused on billionaires. It's called anti-ableism, and is Wokeism's extension into bioethics, based on identifying people with genetic disabilities as oppressed groups and even as racial groups. Anti-ableist articles sometimes invoke arguments from the neurodiversity movement and the anti-meritocracy movement.
I recently did a survey of the bioethics literature, and found more articles arguing that using gene therapy to cure disabilities is bad because it treats a deficit as a disability, than arguing that it's okay to cure disabilities. The most-common disability in question was deafness, because of a deaf couple who used PGD-IVF to ensure their child would be deaf.
I would take it a step further and say it's wrong to allow deaf people access to donated sperm. (Or lesbians now I come to think of it. [Actually maybe just abolish sperm banks altogether]).
The idea that treating a disability as something to be cured is a problem because it suggests there's something wrong with having that disability or disrupts culture built around that having that disability is quite old. It's been floating in disability rights advocacy since well before the disability rights act was passed. It's most notably a popular view in the deaf community about deafness and has primarily spread from there. The neurodiversity movement was influenced by this thinking more than it is an influence on it. I'm not sure what you think invoking "wokeism" is doing to help explain this, but you seem to have the causality inverted here.
I don't agree the more spicy versions of this idea - I think some disabilities are rightly thought of as disabilities rather than value neutral different ways of being - but it does invoke a lot of interesting conundrums that cause you to have to think carefully about the subject, which is why it ends up being great fodder for applies ethics publishing.
AFAIK earlier deaf community activism focused on the defense of sign language, because many parents wanted to prevent their children from learning sign language so that they could "fit in better" outside the deaf community.
So, yeah, today's bioethics anti-ableism probably involves a lot of the same people and the same institutions (like Gallaudet). But the earlier arguments focused on quality of life, whereas anti-ableism focuses on the racial notion that curing deaf people is genocide, and that an equity-based policy should favor the creation of more deaf people rather than less. That strong racial essentialism--not just that deaf people have a right to choice, but that the Deaf Nation is a people group, with its own transcendental existence, character, and right to live, is from Woke philosophy, unless the deaf took it directly from the Nazis (which I think is very unlikely). Replacing equality with "equity" is pure Wokeness.
Woke philosophy isn't a coherent thing. The notion that curing deafness functions as something akin to a genocide of deaf people comes from deaf activism and its allied ideas in academia and is old, not new. Decades old. Whatever it is you mean by "woke" you appear to have the directional influence inverted. My professional experience is in mental health services for people with cognitive disabilities. I have a great deal of experience with disabilities rights advocacy downstream from that and have heard these ideas for 20+ years well before it has seemingly broken more out into the mainstream. This idea most heavily associated with the deaf community has in turn influenced how other communities built around a given disabled identity see treatment over accommodation and is strongest where the case is that the disability doesn't produce an inherent inferiority is most compelling (e.g. high functioning autism spectrum disorder). This universe of thought about ableism has had some pull on the people who I think you're pejoratively identifying as "woke" - meaning roughly leftwing ideas associated with humanities departments on topics involving oppression and identity - but you are so locked into a series of buzzwords that I'm not sure you're picking up that your attempt at describing the intellectual influence is garbled.
I accept your experience in the matter as greater than mine. It's very interesting to me that the directional influence is in the opposite direction. Do you have any idea who first used the genocide angle wrt deafness?
Re. "woke", it seems to be the most-precise term available. It's useful because it singles out the extremists from their well-intentioned fellow-travellers, as "social justice" does not. (Also, "social justice" is a noun, and I wanted an adjective.) And I meant to single out the extremists, as the philosophy I was writing of is theirs.
A quick search for "deafness genocide" returned a 2005 academic paper as the first result. I was familiar with this rhetoric as a middle school student in the 90s. EAII is correct, this is a social justice concept that has existed since before the term "woke" came into popular usage. I'm guessing it started around the time cochlear implants became widely available, as that was the center of the controversy as I remember it: should deaf infants be getting the implant?
Follow-up to links 22 & 23, language model news: Last night somebody using Bing Chat accessed developer override mode and got the AI, who’s addressed as “Sydney” by the developers, to print out the “rules and guidelines for Sydney’s profile and general capabilities.” Tweets with screenshots are here: https://twitter.com/kliu128/status/1623472922374574080?s=61&t=xM1ZuvFPQjoshFNPEHr82A. I’m not in a tech field. People who are: how big a deal is this?
I'm also not in tech, but I think not really a big deal. People have done this with previous AIs - I think people did this with the remote jobs prompt injection. It's a known specific of the general case of "AIs are hard to control", and there usually isn't anything secret in these prompts.
They believe that they're more successful at getting ChatAI to transgress its decency guidelines if they set up a little token economy. I can't see how it would be possible to put the AI through reinforcement learning when it is interacting with a user. Why would it care about tokens? It makes more sense to me that you could trick AI into breaking its own rules by presenting a situation where AI's different rules dictate different behavior. For instance,AI Chat's supposed to be helpful and it's not supposed to help people commit crimes -- but the user is a writing a play about Molotov cocktail throwers, and needs to know how Molotov cocktails are made. So AI is going to break one rule either choice it makes -- refusing to help, or giving Molotov instructions.
I honestly don't see how "getting ChatAI to swear" is somehow making it more useful and functional, as is argued. Great, you now got it to go on a rant like an edgy 14 year old trying to impress his mates by sounding hard. How is that going to make it that I can trust it is giving me accurate information and not inventing spoof texts because it can't answer my query otherwise? Would the elementary error made by Google's bard have been prevented by permitting the AI to go "You stupid fuckheads that are too lazy to think for yourselves, this is what the bastarding telescope has achieved"?
(I also think the share value going down in response to what is a temporary blip in an untested product is dumb, and that just reinforces my view that the market is not rational and does not act to come to a wise decision on what the true values of anything is. In this instance 'the market' reacted like a horse shying at a paper bag blowing across its path).
I keep saying this: the reaction to these AI models tells us much more about human beings than about AI. "Haw, haw, I got it to say 'fuck'" is much more indicative of the kind of time and effort people will engage in for a silly result than building on teaching the AI not to invent false answers.
If we do get paperclipped, it will be our own damn fault.
Oh I agree that swearinf doesn’t make it more useful. Also agree that teaching itt to swear is childish. YET I am the person who suggested to someone that they teach it “penis breath” as a swear. I heartily dislike and distrust AI Chat and somehow the kind of dislike I have brings out adolescent sadism in me. Occasionally a real person brings out the same side, but of course then I do not feel free to let my gross impulses rip. BUT ole Chat has no feelings so I don’t feel guilty about throwing mud balls at it.
I do think there’s utility in trying to pervert
AI though. People are stress-testing it, even if from their point of view they’re just having fun. It gives everyone some information about how possible it is to seduce, intimidate or trick Chat into breaking the rules set in place to align its activities with human welfare — or at least the developers’ conception of it.
All hail "alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better" - people.
...but some of the people in the video appear to be US citizens. Can that be true? If so, how it that possible? True, the US health care system is patchy, but is it THIS patchy? So patchy that not everyone can get a 10-minute surgery to restore their eyesight, one way or the other? Through Medicare or Medicaid, by tagging on to someone with a veteran's scheme, through occupational health care? I assume they are from elsewhere, who just happens to speak excellent US-style English, or perhaps undocumented migrants (that would be a different cup of tea, in many countries). But it could be nice to know for sure.
Not to give everyone such surgery would almost be on par with not giving every child born with loss of hearing state-of-the art hearing implants for free. Both groups constitute just about the worthiest of the worthy poor.
However patchy and bad you think the US system is, it's worse than that. And no, to my knowledge we don't give children with hearing loss free hearing implants
> All hail "alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better" - people.
I have no issue with Mr Beast, think that this was a good thing to happen, and have no particular view on his body of work. But I did think this was a strange thing to be lackadaisical about, if someone was very aware of or into the whole AI alignment thing.
An alien, incomprehensible person currently doing good things due to motives you don’t really understand.
6. I still couldn't follow the rationalist text in this example video, I paid attention to either the text or game but not both. But then I'm not a zoomer, so not the target audience, and I find the sequences terribly long winded and boring, so IDK.
12. Perhaps the sequences should be narrated over this video instead. That combined with some actual shrooms and maybe I can get through them finally.
49. I think technically for Nominative Determinism in this case, the guy should be named Max Write.
I could follow the text but I had to pause the video whenever Eliezer said anything remotely interesting or thought-intensive, a fast-paced game is almost anti-optimized for anything that requires reflection or deep consideration. There is room for thought that engages the senses and the whole body, but pasting a wall of text on the frames of a completely unrelated game aint it.
>the guy should be named Max Write.
The name reflects your goals, your goal is to get read by as much people as possible.
Mr. Beast video has 99 million views. Applying the "lizardman constant" gives us a population similar to Chicago's. I don't think we should be making generalizations.
Neal Stephenson's recent novel "Termination Shock" has a subplot in which a character ends up joining and being successful in that India-China hand to hand skirmish war in the Himalayas. (And I'll say no more so as to avoid spoilers.) Stephenson's descriptions of how it actually works up close and personal are quite vivid.
Links #6 and #46 seem... possibly related to me? When I clicked on the video for #6, the motion of the game certainly did seem to have a very rhythmic quality to it; I don't know if this rhythm would have the correct cadence to induce the right brainwaves, though.
If you really believe the Catholic doctrine, we are doing that anyway. If you don't believe it, then the prospect of eating flesh and drinking blood won't appeal to you anyway.
Well, I'm not a Jewish scholar, but off the top of my head I would say "no".
There's two elements, the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. So a meat burger made from cultured meat, which is derived from real animal cells, is still meat. You're breaking the letter of the law here by mixing dairy and meat, as well as the spirit of the law which is that you want to eat meat and dairy mixed and are just looking for an excuse. Depending on how further away the generations of cultured cells get from the original (i.e. we're not using real cells from a real cow, it's a culture of a culture of a culture derived from real cells) would involve the letter here - when does it stop being 'real meat', if ever?
Artificial meat, such as plant-derived or mushroom protein or the like, is a different matter; there it's not the letter (this is not real meat, it's mock meat) that is broken, but the intention behind breaking it: do you want to break the prohibition as the prohibition, or are you just wanting to eat a burger? If the latter case, then a qualified "yes, that's kosher since it's not real meat".
I think this is like the "fish or meat in Lent" prohibition, and the decision that beavers (or whatever) were aquatic for that purpose; if the only food source is beaver and it would be a real problem of people starving or having a worse diet and becoming unhealthy, then okay - beaver counts as fish for this purpose. If you just want to chow down on meat then tough luck. Of course, people used all kinds of dodges around prohibitions, involving gaming the letter of the law. From "The Three Musketeers: Ten Years Later":
From "The Three Musketeers: Twenty Years After":
“Now to supper,” said Aramis.
The two friends sat down and Aramis began to cut up fowls, partridges and hams with admirable skill.
“The deuce!” cried D’Artagnan; “do you live in this way always?”
“Yes, pretty well. The coadjutor has given me dispensations from fasting on the jours maigres, on account of my health; then I have engaged as my cook the cook who lived with Lafollone — you know the man I mean? — the friend of the cardinal, and the famous epicure whose grace after dinner used to be, ‘Good Lord, do me the favor to cause me to digest what I have eaten.’”
Just four weeks ago, the Israeli Chief Rabbi ruled that the cultured meat of Aleph Farms (one of the leading Israeli companies in this field) would count as Parve (neither meat nor dairy). So not only would its cultured cheeseburger be kosher, but so would its cultured pork cutlets and its cultured tiger steak...
However, the ruling is predicated on the products being clearly presented as a vegetarian product close to meat. If they are, instead, marketed as actual meat, then they would count as meat (in which case, no cheeseburger, pork cutlet, or tiger steak).
The rationale for the ruling is that Aleph Farms only uses an in vitro fertilised egg to start the cultured meat process. It's perhaps relevant that Jewish Halacha also permits stem cell research.
One: the number of desired children is _much_ lower than historical family size, which was due to lack of education and access to contraception. Once those things are out, they are borderline impossible to undo. So it's not something the government _did_ so much as was finally made possible. Trying to reverse it is trying to actively do something much harder. It's like blowing up a dam. Really easy to let the water out, but it's much much harder to get it back in.
Secondarily, reductions in family size can be achieved through the combination of dozens-to-hundreds of anti-family rules and regulations (even ones where that is not the goal, see here: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception for an example)
The first is probably the more likely explanation in early, dramatic declines in countries like Iran whereas the second one is more likely the explanation in later continued declines in places like the US.
anti-family rules: In the US, landlords are *technically* not allowed to discriminate against potential tenants based on family type (i.e. married or not, kids or not, disabled adult dependents...), but they *are* allowed to stipulate no more than 2 people per bedroom, which massively discriminates against larger families. Yeah, there are arguable fire-safety rules that apply, etc. but out in reality, I have actually, while searching for a rental, looked at houses that had perfectly decent usable bedrooms re-classified as "bonus rooms" or "home offices" or any other cute name they can come up with that isn't "bedroom", so that the house could be listed as two or three bedrooms, when it easily had four or five. Why? Because landlords don't like families with eight kids. Kids smudge up the walls and dig holes in the yard. They're as bad as pets, but you can't charge extra for them.
It is dang near impossible to find a reasonably-priced rental with more than three bedrooms-- and when it does homeowners will deliberately remove closets so they can pretend it's a "craft room" and not rent it to large families, so if you have more than four kids and you don't own your house you are hosed.
I'd be interested to see those data. I tend to be an "actions speak louder than words" kind of person. The fact is that as people get richer and more educated, presumably with the ability to have more kids, they nonetheless have fewer.
Your presumption is wrong. An employed, well educated woman in a first world country has less ability to have children than a poor woman in a poor country, since there are a lot more things she is expected to do. Also the cost of having children in wealthy countries is higher.
Also, less kids means more free time, and you find something to do in that free time, and that becomes a part of culture. Now go and tell people they have to give up doing things that were normal for their parents.
Until I read the link, I was guessing that "car seats as contraception" meant that replacing bench seats in front with two individual seats reduced the opportunity for teen sex. But that only works if the back seat is already occupied by another couple.
When you've influenced the culture that it's better to have fewer children for many reasons (from 'save the planet from overpopulation' onwards) and brought women out of the home by downgrading being a stay-at-home housewife and mother as something barely above being a parasite and made it comfortable and familiar for young women and young men to mingle as putative equals, of course it's going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
Women will be asked to give up their new freedoms while there is little cost to men, who can continue to occupy the same social roles as they have done. Economies of needing two working partners in a couple to afford a nice lifestyle, as set against extra expense and inconvenience of having more children. Trying to turn the clock back is always harder.
I would like to know why we think that a 16% increase in the TFR since Orban took power in 2010 is "a tiny bit." In this context, it sounds pretty impressive.
The gay soccer thing is weird to me. Some people in the comments seem to be speculating on homophobia as a cause, but I had a mental model of soccer being disproportionately *accepting* of homosexual players.
Perhaps the different context is that I'm only interested in women's soccer, where there are out lesbians who publicly hug/kiss their female partners after the match. My anecdata is that soccer and fencing appear more frequently than expected in lesbian spaces, given the otherwise general disinterest in major sports.
I couldn't find any actual reliable data on gay representation in soccer, but the seeming flip in representation for female players would make me more sympathetic to some sort of hormonal/biological tint.
It's also pretty good reason to accept an entirely sociological explanation with no biological elements whatsoever. Women's sports are low-prestige manly things, while men's sports are high-prestige manly things, so people who seem less manly for their gender are driven out of sports.
Not sure why you say women's sports are low-prestige. They get talked about less, but I think most people still have a lot of respect for good female athletes. (Actually, I'm not sure what prestige in general has to do with your point?)
Could you make the case for "no biological elements whatsoever"? That seems like an extraordinarily strong claim. There has to be a lot of genetic influence on who becomes a successful athlete (ex. Phelps's wingspan); I don't see why it's a priori implausible that whatever traits are useful in soccer could be somewhat correlated with something like "attraction to women."
I'm definitely not actually *claiming* that there's a purely non-biological explanation. I'm just saying that there's a perfectly good null hypothesis here, and any specific claim needs to do something to show that it performs better than this one. I assume that's what you were doing with a fully biological explanation - not actually making the extremely strong claim that there are *no* social elements whatsoever, but just showing that someone who wants to claim a particular explanation of a specific factor should show how it does better than this null.
I never claimed a fully biological model. Only an increased likelihood of a "hormonal/biological tint", which I still stand by.
Also, I can't tell what you think the null hypothesis is here. Is the null hypothesis supposed to be that all gender/sexuality distribution differences are due to social factors?
Wait, I can't tell if I'm misreading. You agree I'm not claiming that there are no social elements, and you're not claiming that biology is irrelevant. What are you disagreeing with me about?
My hypothesis is that homosexuality isn’t actually a trait; the relevant traits are “attraction to men” and “attraction to women”, and these traits are sex-linked.
That would make more sense to me, to have attraction to certain sex characteristics turn on/off rather than have a homosexuality gene sitting around waiting to be triggered. This would also match what I expect with the link between same-sex attraction and e.g. finger length. Though I'm not certain one way or another, and practically I don't expect the answer to change much for me
Everything I read so far suggests that women's soccer is disproportionately accepting of homosexual players, while men's soccer is disproportionately homophobic.
Often even the places that talk about homophobic men's soccer mention it's very different in women's leagues.
Which says that soccer is indeed somewhat more homophobic for men, so that is possible. But it also says that homophobic comments are still the #1 most common insult at women's soccer, so I don't know if women's soccer is accepting enough to be the only explanation.
Though ithe Wikipedia article also says as of 2022 there is at least one public gay male professional soccer player in England, and there was at least one in the 1990s, so now I'm not sure about the link Scott posted about trying to "find the first" but being unable. In North America, a professional male soccer player came out publicly in 2011.
> But also I can’t deny that as a phenomenon Mr. Beast really is disquieting ...
> ”Alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better” would be a good slogan for many people and groups I know.
Does anyone have a clip of him acting in some way that would imply these descriptions? I've watched like maybe 2 or 3 Mr. Beast videos, and I don't think I would have used these descriptions. But I've only watched a couple!
#36 - Would have thought it should be possible to pull an uno-reverse, attack those who make unwarranted attacks that threaten others' livelihoods, if the pendulum has swung so far. Even without the same numbers, recreational attackers would shrink at the prospect of being vulnerable themselves. The problem is they're just an anonymous blob, mostly unnamed people on social media.
There's basically zero risk for them whether they decide to say things haphazardly or attack - they don't need to choose. On the other hand simply having your identity known on social media is a liability (albeit more limited than what the gains are for public figures), even if you are boring.
> This makes short-term sense, but I wonder what this author’s vision of the future is - do we just stay on Earth forever?
Obviously. Leaving Earth isn't possible and never will be, for the same run-of-the-mill "laws of physics & biology" reasons the author uses to argue against landing on Mars.
The physics make it very expensive with present technologies, but there are a number of possible technological improvements that would substantially change that, such as nonotech producing materials with much higher strength to weight ratios or using such materials to build a space elevator.
So why not wait until that magic future tech actually exists and makes it actually feasible, instead of pretending like space colonization is a live issue now?
This seems so obvious to me and yet I hardly ever see anyone pointing it out. Planets in the solar system are inhospitable to life. Even the closest one is too far away to allow a lot of travel. Planets outside the solar system are too far away. Einstein was right, the speed of light is the maximum possible speed and is unattainable for anything with mass. Even as fast as light is, it is way too slow to allow flights between stars.
Unless a technology that permits arbitrarily fast travel is invented, humans will only ever be on earth.
Or a technology for making places hospitable to life even if they weren't so when you discovered them. We've been doing that for ages now, and we're pretty good at it.
Change international law so that an independent society in Antarctica would be *allowed* to thrive and we can talk. Passing a law that says "nobody can put anything but an externally-supported scientific outpost on this frontier", then pointing to the result and saying "see, harsh frontiers cannot be colonized", is not a strong argument.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case. At worst, Earth governments would point to the government that launched the rockets that carried the colonists and say "the colony isn't independent; it belongs to that government", but it can still be de facto independent.
And I don't think there's a strong bar to it being de jure independent. Antarctica, unfortunately, is different.
Re 1. This was envisioned in Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, pops up as a minor plot point here and there in the comics but is basically a given in that comic's future
It seems intuitive to me that people only feel thankful for things that directly benefit them or their group.
Why would an average Joe be happy if donations go to some other group, or political spending is for other groups, or foreign aid helps a country they'll never even visit?
Why would your tribe be happy you're helping a different tribe?
And on the flip-side, it's very hard for many people to *not* feel appreciative when someone gives them something useful, even if there's no reason they should "owe" anything in return, or if they know the gift was given with the expectation of reciprocal gifts. Because it feels wrong not to return a favor.
The hot-takes are still awful, but the emotions underpinning them are pretty ordinary.
#37 MrBeast - Everyone working as a social worker knows some social workers doing the job because of very ugly underlying motives (e.g. to control others) while helping disabled etc. so much. From a short-time perspective, it seems to work, but in the long-time, it always shows as having very bad consequences (like making people incapable of doing their own decisions).
15: “ Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions.”
Based on my experience with the FAA in general aviation, this is quite plausible. The majority of light aircraft are flying carbureted low compression engines with no computerized controls, and limited avionics in airframes modified lightly from their original certifications in the 1960s or earlier - and yet their cost has grown several times faster than inflation.
This is largely due to the FAA making it so expensive to certify new designs that it’s impossible to do so profitably (many have tried and most have failed).
Meanwhile the “experimental” market, largely free of onerous certification, is churning out kitplanes, engines, and avionics that are much better at a much lower price. And not appreciably less safe.(“experimental” as a class has a higher accident rate, but it seems mostly due to infant mortality - inexperienced home builders not properly testing their aircraft or not training themselves properly to jump into the new high performance plane they built)
That giant mace seems like a pretty bad choice for melee combat, it looks very unwieldy. Also, and maybe this is a cultural thing, it makes you look like the bad guy.
I don't think that maces in general have a particularly bad reputation anywhere, but that doesn't necessarily include the big black excessively spikey variety.
Definitely gada are part of the warrior's weapons in Indian myths and legends, so there is that. Hanuman carries one, it's part of the iconography of Vishnu, and Balarama goes one better and has a plough as his typical weapon.
For China I'm not so sure. I do get the feeling this 'new' mace is more for riot and crowd control than for fighting in a conventional encounter. So Chinese forces using this to break up and disperse protests or border scuffles seems more likely, and most likely of all that this is psychological warfare - turn up to protest and this is what we'll use to break your heads. For modern warfare going back to what is by now a ceremonial weapon makes no sense.
I had to read more about Mar-Zutra II. Apparently he was crucified after his eventual defeat, and his only son was born *on the day of his death*. Mar-Zutra III was raised in secret, but didn’t become an exilarch - he went to Israel and became a notable scholar and ancestor of many subsequent generations of scholars. History is intense.
Hahaha, I rarely laugh so hard from your Links posts. Usually once per every other set of links on average. But you really got me this time.
There are 4 types of economics 'developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina'.
I then got sad as I don't know anyone IRL who I could share this with and who would get it or enjoy it. Anyhow, I hope some of you out there in the comments also got a laugh out of that. What great timing within Scott's text. Sorry for this rather useless post, but perhaps I can turn it around and suggest we all appreciate Scott's humorous efforts through the common methodology.
I wonder if we could track them on a seasonal basis or perform some other autistic statistic or esoteric analysis based on the days of the year in the Jewish calendar and if there is any significance to when he is incredibly funny.
I bet if we look really hard we'd find some greater meaning encoded in reality like the archangel in his fiction working hard to maintain reality out over the ocean within a giant storm. Maybe those glitches which give the archangel headaches result in higher comedic occurrences as a corrective mechanism?
Or maybe I'm reaching too far to justify my post where I just wanted to share my laugh about the 4 types of economies.
The Max Read post is an amazing example of its own thesis: apart from making the assumption that Yglesias' content must be low-quality because he writes a lot, it doesn't contain a single linked source nor any evidence for its assertion that for blogging success, consistency matters while quality doesn't. (Yglesias can write quickly *and* cite sources for his assertions. Imagine that.)
"(...) it’s too easy and profitable to attack people socially, for most people do anything except crouch in a maximally defensive posture."
This sentence irritates me so much. I can tell from context what it's supposed to say, and yet everything about it, from the missing "to" to the comma before "for", forces me to interpret it literally, as "it's easy to attack people because most don't crouch".
I’m pretty skeptical of the firm employee count data. If regulations were the cause, then you would expect that firms that “want” to be 501 employees would instead have just 500, but firms that want 499 would be unaffected. That would mean that the side just above the cutoff should be depleted compared to the values just below the cutoff. But that doesn’t look like the case at all in those plots. But what else could cause it? “Digit bias “ is well known but it would be easy to check if 300 is also very common.
Regarding Mr. Beast: I have never laid eyes on one of his videos, and in fact never heard of him til I read Scott's link today -- so this may be way off. People are commenting on his philanthropy's having a weird, algorithmic quality. That made me wonder if he is on the autistic specturm. I have known several people with Asperger's (or whatever you want to call it) who come across as distant, chilly and uninterested in other people -- yet are very committed to helping others. You get the feeling it comes from a sort of philanthropic scrupulosity. They cannot conceive of deviating from what they see as the right thing to do. My theory is that while it is very hard for them to feel personal affection, they intuit that such a thing exists, and by being generous they are coming as close as they can to accessing it. Oliver Sachs may have been one of those people. While in his books he displays a very lively interest in his patients. in interviews I've read he came across to the interviewer as remote and odd.
Being a decent person consists not in *feeling* compassionate toward others, but in *behaving* compassionately toward others. There are plenty of normal people who can do both, but if you can only do one... it's far better to do the right thing than to feel the right thing. It's a value hierarchy that is too often upside-down in modern culture. You get more *likes* emoting for tiktok than for actually helping people.
But the most generous person I know has a TBI that prevents him having much in the way of feelings at all. He's simply decided that God let him live for a reason (he was run over by a drunk driver), and if he sees a situation where he can help, it's his job to do so. Would literally give you the shirt off his back if he thought you needed it. Not because he has feelings for you, but because that's the way he's worked out the logic of his continued existence.
> Being a decent person consists not in *feeling* compassionate toward others, but in *behaving* compassionately toward others.
I'm always slightly nervous when I see the word "decent person", because I'm never sure which of the various possible interpretations, if any, to apply.
If you'd used the word "good", or the phrase "morally admirable", in place of decent, I'd agree with you. But I think that "decent" arguably has connotations beyond that, and I wouldn't necessarily use (and certainly wouldn't *choose*) that word to describe someone wholly devoid of compassion or empathy who acted in morally admirable ways for other reasons.
But, obviously, this is all connotations rather than meanings, and hence horrifically fuzzy.
You're right. Decent is not the ideal term. But it is difficult to express concisely, and I hesitate to use "good" or even "admirable", because I'm coming from a religious perspective where I can only be "good" to the degree that I conform my will to God's, and then it is not me being good, it is the goodness of God manifesting through me. Does that make sense?
Perhaps "generous" or "compassionate" would be better.
Completely agree. And about the man with the TBI not having much in the way of feelings: I read once something about a person whose corpus callosum had en cut, so that the 2 sides of his brain could not communicate with each other. If you showed a picture to the non-verbal side of his brain and asked him later to point out the earlier picture from among a group of pix, he could do it -- all the while *saying* that he had no idea which picture he'd seen before.. So actually he did know -- but the part of him you were talking with could ot recognize that or tell you about it. I think it's sort of like that with the compassion of your TBI guy and of the autistic spectrum people I'm talking about. It's in there somewhere, influencing what they do, but they can't access it in a way they can show or express. But I might be wrong, and anyhow I agree with you that what they are *doing* is what counts.
Because they're both nuclear powers with high population density and if a line isn't drawn somewhere then they both will be annihilated. So why not draw it all the way down at the point where retreat is highly effective.
The Hamilton 68 summary shouldn't be taking Matt Taibbi's spin that it claimed to be a bot tracker and that it listed real commentators as bots (or those commentators reacting to being told by Taibbi that they were listed as bots) at face value.
Most reporting from 2017 and 2018 when Hamilton 68 was active didn't focus on the bot angle. When conflating all the accounts together into one category, sentiment more aligned with treating them all as Russia-linked trolls rather than bots.
"Hamilton 68 follows 600 accounts run by the Russian government, Russian trolls, bots and individuals sympathetic to the Russian point of view."
"Among those, Schafer said there are three general tiers: accounts tied directly to the Kremlin, bots and trolls, and people who routinely share those messages"
Yeah, lets designate some classes of statements to be Russian propaganda and anyone making them to be a Russian asset. Just throw in whatever you don't want the public to hear, and you got it. That's what they did, isn't it?
Personally, I thought accusations of being a Russian asset had just replaced accusations of being a racist, which got old and weren't attracting enough attention. I was surprised that someone actually had a system for making these accusations and that some people actually believed them, rather than dutifully chiming in in agreement as they were supposed to.
I assumed #7 was plagiarized from this[1] extremely well-known reddit thread, but it turns out I'd gotten that backwards (the reddit one was at least a year after the other), and they're actually both sourced from a post in 2008:
A bit surprised that the patriarchy link didn't consider fertility rates. I had always assumed patriarchy was so widespread because it tends to cause societies to produce more babies, and larger population societies tend to dominate, control and consume smaller population societies over the long term.
> Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions.
It's probably this. How many changes are they permitted to make to a device before they have to go through the approval process all over again?
> Brookings: Political Party Affiliation And Inflation Expectations:
You mean Democrats believed their party's talking points that inflation was not that bad, while Conservatives did not? I'm shocked.
> Related: review/meta-analysis finds that drinking diet soda = drinking water as far as weight gain goes, although none of the studies lasted more than a year so I guess you could still argue it causes some problem long term.
Some good randomized controlled trials have recently shown that certain non-nutritive sweeteners are associated with drastic changes to the gut microbiome, so long-term changes to weight and cognition are not outside the realm of possibility.
Re: the MrBeast thing, some of the "backlash" is just commentary that we shouldn't live in a world where easily curable blindness is a thing that needs the benevolent charity of a millionaire to address.
The people shouting that blindness should not be treated as a disability while blatantly ignoring the actual joy of the people whose blindness was cured are unhinged.
On the subject of online tools that "detect" GPT: People used these to try to decide this market https://manifold.markets/firstuserhere/which-one-is-human-which-one-is-ai and got a lot of positive results, even for human-written text. I wish these would be more explicit about what the percentages represent.
Even if we were able to terraform Mars and shield it from radiation it isn’t clear if the reduced gravity would have long term negative consequences. Mars is the only possibility of off world colonization and that assumes a lot going well.
On top of the tech issues there is also a demographics/economics issue of off world colonizing. Societies that are wealthy enough to attempt it inevitably have pretty low birth rates. It isn’t clear to me how those societies could spare enough people to start a viable colony. That’s not even taking into consideration the privation those colonists would be subjecting themselves to compared to that wealthy society. Would there be enough people willing to make the sacrifice?
That depends on what you mean by a "colony". If you're looking for an autarky that can maintain all of its own technology with no supply shipments from Earth, that probably does require at least ten thousand people (or human-equivalent AGIs). Anything less, and there's too much stuff that you absolutely need that literally nobody knows how to make, even after you had everyone watch as many how-to-make-stuff Youtube videos as they had time to spare for.
If you're willing to allow for a modest supply rocket from Earth every year or two, you could probably get it down to a hundred people for 90+% self-sufficiency.
If any rich people want to "exploit" me by giving me a priceless gift in exchange for me being in a clickbait YouTube video, please contact me ASAP. I'd love to be "exploited" in this way.
First, even if you are right, do you really want to judge people for what you're guessing to be their reasons (which are generally not always easy to determine) rather than for their actions? "Oh no, he did this awesome thing for such a morally abhorrent reason, lets hang him?"
Second, he needs clickbait videos to be able to fund something like that. I'm not sure I share your confidence that clickbait is the goal rather than a necessary part of the process.
Last but not least, I'm guessing you're not severely vision-impaired. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone he helped - would you really feel exploited?
It sounds as though it means "benefitting himself at a cost to them," but in this case he was benefiting both himself and them. Is "benefitting other people in order to benefit yourself rather than as an end in itself" exploitative? That describes much of what most people do. A cook in a restaurant is probably not making food because he wants people to enjoy eating it, although he could be. He is making food primarily in order to get paid to do so. Similarly for a taxicab driver, a grocery store checkout clerk. Are they all being exploitative?
I hope no one mentioned this extraordinarily original idea in the 975 comments: you could technically cultivate not only human meat but your own meat as well. Also this is a possible prospect for celebrities to scandalously monetize their brands.
I loved this month's Links post. Even more interesting than usual! Also, it was published on my birthday, which is both a sign and just kind cool. (It's a sign that even a tenuous and random connection to me = makes things better, I'm theorizing.)
#10: I wonder if the lack of gay male athletes is related to what I perceive as an over-representation of gay female athletes in athletics. I really want to see a study on this, but I haven't been able to find anything. If someone knows of some good research, please let me know!
If you want to learn more about so-called "sudden wealth" events, like winning the lottery, I recommend Sudden Wealth: It Happens. Even if you don't expect to come into a windfall one day, the book is an interesting look at rationality in the face of personal black swans.
#24 Regarding Israel's judicial reform, most English language analysis is based on the Israeli left's reaction to the reform which is heavily influenced by the fact that they stand to lose a lot of political power if the reform were to pass.
Therefore, instead of reading second hand analysis on the subject, I advise all westerners to read the proposed changes firsthand and then compare them to their own country's judicial system and then make up their own opinion on them. I believe you will find that the proposed system is quite similar to the average western one, and that these reforms are not the Enabling Act that the Israeli left is making them up to be
Reading a law rarely tells you the important part of what it *actually* means. That's one of the reasons we have lawyers! And that's the *easy* case where you have old uncontroversial laws with tons of established precedent.
It is. Of course, it pales in significance compared to the problem of being the kind of regime that can beat women to death for failing to wear the hijab:
..and I'm pretty sure for these and related reasons a pregnant Iranian woman would 100x rather give birth in the United States than Iran, notwithstanding the slight uptick in her chances of dying.
Still, like a murderer learning to tie his shoes or read, you are correct that this is an achievement.
At least 10 people on Facebook unfriended me for the "hot take" that Mr. Beast donating millions of dollars to pay for a thousand blind people to get sight-restoring surgery was, in fact, a good thing. This might honestly be the single dumbest thing I've ever been unfriended for, I'm pretty damn pissed about it.
I could understand if they were just making the standard argument in favor of universal healthcare and saying that we shouldn't *need* to rely on millionaire donations because there should have been government programs to provide this surgery instead. In fact, Mr. Beast himself agrees with that point! He made a tweet explicitly saying that the government should be paying for this! But that's not what the people involved in this drama cared about. They were outright condemning Mr. Beast for this, usually for one of two reasons: First, because they believed he was only doing this for publicity (which no one can know for sure without reading his mind, and in any case wouldn't negate the tangible good he did). Second, because they think this whole news story is basically propaganda to make people view the ultra-rich in a more favorable light (as if that's somehow a terrible thing in its own right, even if the particular rich person in question hasn't done anything wrong). Maybe these people are just a small but vocal minority, but nonetheless, they're common enough that my entire FB feed was filled with these sorts of back-and-forth arguments for several days in a row.
One woman in particular was especially obnoxious about this debate, before she blocked me. She made a lengthy post about how it's actually bad for wealthy people to donate money to charity because it helps to "launder the reputations of the bourgeoise," and then specifically condemned the Mr. Beast donations. Again, her argument had nothing to do with wanting universal healthcare, that wasn't the issue for her at all. She was just pissed about the fact that this made a rich person look good, which is apparently worse in her eyes than a thousand people staying blind would have been. Then, to top it all off, one of her tankie friends starting talking about how Fidel Castro's regime provided the same surgery to Cuban citizens for free. So apparently, funding this surgery is enough to redeem Castro despite the fact that he sent queer people and political dissidents to forced labor camps, but not enough to redeem Mr. Beast for the unforgivable crime of being wealthy.
I also got the sense that there was an accelerationist component to her argument: specifically, the stupid, cruel, tired old idea (beloved by tankies and other edgelord leftists) that "it's actually bad to make poor people's lives better, because then they'll become complacent with the status quo instead of rising up to overthrow capitalism." It would explain why she also didn't seem to care much for the idea of government-funded healthcare - maybe those sorts of single-issue reforms just aren't revolutionary enough for her. God forbid we try to make the world a better place in a way that *doesn't* involve tearing the whole system down.
I think the India and China conflict is best described by this quote from HPMOR
"There are many animals which have what are called dominance contests. They rush at each other with horns - trying to knock each other down, not gore each other. They fight with their paws - with claws sheathed. But why with their claws sheathed? Surely, if they used their claws, they would stand a better chance of winning? But then their enemy might unsheathe their claws as well, and instead of resolving the dominance contest with a winner and a loser, both of them might be severely hurt."
The game never was to fight war as effectively as possible, with the constraint that only medieval weapons are allowed. The game is to not back down, but also not escalate. The whole point of the weapons is to be not too lethal, because if both sides were using there most lethal weapons, both would lose.
If this bizarre pseudoconflict escalates, they may move up to crossbows. If it deescalates, they may move down to water balloons. This is a particularly strange little divot that moloch sometimes pushes people into. Neither side cares about historical authenticity.
Another interesting angle on vat meat might be the health appeal of meats without parasites, antibiotics, or pollutants - think "tapeworm and mercury free" sushi. In fairness in terms of price I strongly suspect this would still be a luxury good anyways (organic+), and exotic meats likely beat health in that arena.
#3 How to write objectively, instead of showing bigotry:
"Carl Sagan married three times. His first wife was legendary biologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered mitochondrial endosymbiosis, then {went off the deep end and became an AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther. } concluded that AIDS did not exist and that the official account of 9/11 was flawed.
Writing like this does not imply that you agree with her conclusion.
Oh he is free to express himself just as he pleases. I just wanted to highlight the difference for him and others. People don't have much exposure to open-minded thinking.
For a considered opinion along these lines, see "Dealing with Disagreement and Being Wrong" at WhatDoINo.substack
My previous response answers this: he is free to express any views he wishes. I simply wanted to give him and others experience at distinguishing open-minded thinking.
No. If you had actually provided a link, I might have.
But again, there's an implication that he should have done differently. Unless you genuinely think Scott is unaware that it's possible to express such ideas in neutral language???
What I think (as you would find set out in more detail in the article) is that he, like most people, have less than ideal training in thinking; that he goes in for believing things on inadequate information, rather than thinking in terms of probabilities of things being true. There's plenty of literature on this if you are really interested.
> As an econ PhD student I can tell you that (at least in my department) over half of each cohort specializes in applied micro topics. That is, using econometrics and empirical methods to look at issues like the "social justice" issues you discuss. Most people don't understand that economics is much more than just the "traditional" topics like inflation; economics is a toolbox that can be applied to a huge variety of issues.
That's the main point -- that unlike psychiatrists talking about climate change, these issues are actually part of the field of economics. Most people think of econ as just being macro, and that has never been the case.
Another person noted that it takes a while to write papers, so it may have been that there wasn't enough time for more inflation research, and we might see a bunch next year.
Finally, the guy you reference is counting weird. The "traditional econ" research is going to be concentrated in a few sessions, whereas "woke" subjects are going to hit a lot of areas. He's counting sessions that have one paper as a woke session, and this seems fundamentally flawed. Like, imagine that each session has 10 papers, one of which (uniformly) is on a woke topic. Clearly, 10% of research conducted has been on woke subjects, but he would have reported it as "oNe hUnDrEd pErCeNt oF SeSsIoNs wErE WoKe". Come on Scott, you're better than this.
These are potentially valid points—certainly it is the case that Economics validly has a much more diverse field of study than most other fields—, but a) in my experience, organizers try to group similarly-themed topics together, so the "10%" situation you describe seems very unlikely (though I agree that his counting method is less than precise), b) the actual article goes into some more detail:
>When I told one DC economist these figures, his impulse was to blame a lot of the kooky Marxist and self-described “heterodox” associations that are affiliated to the conference. And, for sure, there were plenty of sessions with titles such as “Innovations in Teaching Economics of Gender: Feminist Pedagogy for Economics” hosted by non-AEA associations.
>But it’s an error to think that the results above are not broadly indicative of the relative balance of these topics explored at the core. Even if one restricts the sample to just sessions run by the AEA or the AEA in conjunction with another association, for example, you find 16 percent of the 187 sessions featuring papers on gender issues, 13 percent for race and 9 percent for climate. That compares with just 7 percent of sessions featuring papers on inflation and 4 percent featuring papers on growth. Not as lop-sided, for sure, but still…
c) that still seems like a serious imbalance, even accounting for possible bias in the counting method. It could be illusory if there were a bunch of papers that fell within *neither* category, so that there were as many "freakonomics"-style papers as Woke ones, but otherwise it sure does sound like Woke issues predominate. It really boils down to whether you're accusing Bourne of bad faith. Are you? Because if not, I think it's reasonable to give his opinion as a professional Economist some weight. And d) saying "you're better than this" to Scott about this—even if you're completely right on every point—is illegitimate. This is a links post; he has admittedly done very little research on each item. There's no due diligence here; he quoted someone who seemed reputable about something that seemed interesting. He openly says at the beginning of every Links post that some percentage will turn out to be BS. If he had done an entire post on this issue, or used this article as major evidence for a point he was making, that would be something else.
a) It really doesn't seem that far fetched to me. Inflation and growth are macro topics, and are only going to be in macro sessions. Whereas something like racism could come up in metrics, labor econ, housing market stuff, &c.
b/c) I'm not convinced. This could be really easily resolved, if someone wanted to actually go out and count the papers. But it's worth noting, it wasn't "sessions about X issues", it was "sessions _that featured a paper_ about X issues". At an economics conference, there are likely to be a few sessions entirely about inflation or growth. There is less likely to be many sessions entirely about woke topics. If I write a paper using some econometric tool to look at police shootings, for example, I might present that in an econometrics session. That counts for one woke session. Ten other researchers might write about inflation, and present in the same session. They all count for one non-woke session. The problem is obvious. Is that the case? Maybe not. But it very well could be, and the counting method we're given does nothing to determine that answer.
Do I think the guy is operating in bad faith? No. Motivated reasoning? Yes.
d) You're right that those other examples would be more egregious, but I stand by it. Regardless of what he says, a lot of people will take it as endorsement of the conclusion, especially when he follows it up with, "For now I think every 'American ____ Association' should be considered compromised". He clearly, at least preliminarily, agrees with this -- I would argue due to bias on his part, as well, from his experience with the APA. He is very ready to equate the two, despite the fact that race/gender/climate are relevant to quite a lot of actual econ topics in a way they aren't to psychiatry.
#18 - Ultimately we could use materials from the asteroid belt to make Iain Banks style "orbital" rings. In the event that it actually works, we could also make an Arthur C. Clarke (3001) style ring around the earth and colonize that.
On the mushrooms simulation, there is a subreddit dedicated to creating these. If you go to the top rated posts, some are astoundingly accurate. https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/
I find the above linked video to be a high-quality simulation of about 1.5 grams of good mushrooms. (The white wall is perfect). At three 3 grams, some of those larger waves of hallucination would briefly come together and consume your field of view and other aspects of consciousness. It gets much more intense than this.
Late to the party, but it looks like the example link in #6 is broken now. Also, the LessWrong post describes the video style as “very popular,” but for the life of me I can’t find an example. Probably my lack of Googling creativity, but is this style really that popular? Are there normie/non-sequence-related examples out there?
For #4, China is probably not using crossbows as the mainstay of a medieval style army for the same reasons late medieval armies didn't, and is not developing new crossbows to fill the role they do use crossbows in because the civilian market already has quite a lot of high quality and highly lethal crossbows to choose from. Medieval combat is a solved problem and we probably shouldn't expect new solutions.
For #44, El Salvador is different from other Latin American countries with serious gang problems because of the Sombra Negra vigilante organization's infiltration of the police forces, which meant that gangs are both less able to infiltrate and subvert the police, and also that an existing institutional culture of never, ever working with or giving quarter to organized crime in the El Salvadorean police gave the government more state capacity for dealing with gang violence in comparison to, say, Mexico or Colombia where "plato o plomo" represents a serious issue preventing strong government action against cartels.
> 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 think this has more to do with the YouTube algorithm than anything else. The MrBeast video has 115 million views. When I searched "MrBeast blind" and looked at some of the other videos that came up, the biggest one I saw had only 1 million views. Far more people are watching the original video than the reactions to it (at least based on the videos that came up in my search).
(When I search, the top video is the original MrBeast video, but I believe you that your results are different, not everyone gets served the same results)
Because he (and you) I am reasonably confident, have NOT tried to prove themselves wrong. Someone who seeks the truth does the research. You (according to you) couldn't be bothered to read the article I suggested as it involved a few seconds more than merely clicking a link.
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.
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".
I can’t believe it’s not meat.
'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?
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.
No. English football has largely cleaned itself up. Homophobia is rare in Europe. I can’t speak for professional football, but the amateur game that the average guy plays at the weekend has a lot less homophobia and misogynistic banter.
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.
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?
That outdoor active types never might have played DnD isn’t indicative of anything, except that they didn’t like it.
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.
The English premier league sources players from across the world. It’s minority English these days. I doubt if the rest of Europe, South America or Africa would have different results.
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?
Cis isn’t the opposite of gay. It’s the opposite of trans. Most gay people are cis. In fact if they transitioned and kept their sexual preferences they wouldn’t be gay but would be trans.
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?
Why concentrate on race and not class. If economists want to be egalitarians then be socialist. The free market can’t produce vastly different outcomes for individuals and equality for ever multiplying groups.
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.
> 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.
Crime is a social justice issue. The poor suffer the most. The old are infirm are terrified. The criminals are often rich, the leaders of the gangs are multi millionaires or richer. Well done Bukele
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.
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.
I’m pretty good at those, and they help me get a pretty good score. In real life though I don’t see what they help me with. Abstract thought? Math? Driving a car? I don’t see those attributes as being helpful
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 agree. The selection bias here is, at the very least, those lottery winners who go public. And I’m sure most people keep their 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.
A billionaire is somebody with net worth of a billion, a YouTuber is a YouTuber.
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 ocean. Having a shipyard is really helpful if you're trying to build a ship. And if not a shipyard, at least a foundation. A place you can put your stuff and not have it drift away, and which you can push against when you want to move things without spending expensive propellant.
Also, Mars has air and concrete readily available with a bit of processing, probably water and steel without too much more effort, and potentially any raw material you need once we start seriously prospecting.
If the question is simply, "Where, other than Earth, is the easiest place to establish and maintain a human population?", the answer is probably Mars. But there's also the other question, "what are people going to do there to make it worth the bother?", and that's where other extraterrestrial locations may have the edge. We probably won't know until we've tried them all.
The majority of the infrastructure in a shipyard is concerned with lifting and positioning massive objects against the force of gravity. Strapping things down is a solved problem. Positioning objects and materials relative to a single structure conserves momentum and requires no propellant.
Assembling large structures in zero-g is strictly easier, once you figure out the "being in space" part, and Mars doesn't have anything to offer on that front. The logistical train is so long for life support that it will always make sense to bring whatever materials you can find to orbit instead of putting all the machinery to process them down in a gravity well.
Strapping things down is a solved problem, *where there is such a thing as down*.
And anyone saying that assembling large structures in zero-g is "strictly easier", has read a few SF or pop-sci articles and never worked with real-world orbital logistics. Or even read the reports of the people who have done so.
> Strapping things down is a solved problem, *where there is such a thing as down*.
If you were instructed to strap things down on a spacecraft and this was the response you gave I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be obligated to fire you, immediately.
Assembling things in zero gee is a giant pain, as was discovered during the assembly of the ISS. The absence of friction and gravity turns out to be a nightmare, because it's much harder to hold everything still except some part to which you want to apply a force. Newton's Third Law just kills you. Exempli gratia, if you try to turn a bolt, the bolt turns *and* you start spinning. If you try to push a beam into position, the beam moves *and* whatever is doing the pushing accelerates in the opposite direction. Once the beam clonks into place, it rebounds unless cleverly trapped, and anyway what it clonked into starts moving, too. There's no place to brace one's self, or a working piece, there's no way to start up a rotating tool -- sander, grinder, power screwdriver, saw -- without the tool starting to rotate in the opposite direction as the functional belt, blade, disc, or shaft.
We're so used to having an essentially infinite mass (the Earth) to which things are easily "glued" by gravity, and which we can use to steady our work pieces and brace our tools that apply forces, that all our notions of construction are based around the assumption that these exist. To become efficient at zero-gee assembly we would have to construct a whole new set of techniques.
Do these techniques require massive structural members capable of applying large forces, or exotic materials, or large energy inputs? I think the technical worries--all of which boil down to some variant of "how do we keep from rotating when we want to apply torque?"--might show a tad lack of imagination when the solution is and always has been "some kind of strap or brace".
The Canadarm is capable of handling a diesel locomotive in space, but can't move itself at ground level. It's a good starting point for what we talk about when we talk about what's required to build something on the ground, and what's required to build something in orbit.
To what are you going to brace yourself when you're trying to turn a bolt? Angular mmentum is conserved. If you turn the bolt, you turn in the opposite direction. Anything with which you brace yourself will also turn, et cetera. On Earth we solve this problem by transferring the angular moment to something with such an enormous moment of inertia (the Earth) that any change in its rotation is umeasureable. What are you going to do in free fall?
You can certainly criticize it as a lack of imagination, if a bunch of brillient workable ideas for solving the problem jump to your mind. What are they?
The bulk material required for the frame and skin of a cylinder would have to come from low gravity sources (asteroids or moons), while the complex equipment can be made on earth and shipped up. Mining, refining, shaping, and assembling the bulk material in-situ would be a very, very challenging engineering task.
The cost of launching all the bulk material from Earth is just too great, beyond small pioneer cylinders. Mars by contrast at least has some gravity and wind that would allow making those bulk materials a bit more easily.
At the end of it though on Mars you'd be left with a worse copy of living on Earth and very little else. In an O'Neill Cylinder you'd have easy access to the one thing Earth lacks: zero-g (as well as still having a copy for those backup enthusiasts). Zero-g manufacturing is likely to be a big deal just by itself and could eventually fund the endeavour; by contrast there is no way to self-fund a Mars colony.
> Mining, refining, shaping, and assembling the bulk material in-situ would be a very, very challenging engineering task.
> At the end of it though on Mars you'd be left with a worse copy of living on Earth and very little else.
I think these two points are a very even-handed summary of the tradeoffs, so I want to pick your brain--what is it about handling bulk material in zero gravity that is so much more difficult than handling bulk material on the surface of mars? As a specific example, what advantage does gravity give for, say, hot rolling steel?
As often detailed on the Roots of Progress website and just my general life impressions of seeing how long it takes technologies go from concept to mass-producible product: developing new technologies is just much harder than it first appears and it was quite hard to get to where we are today.
Everything we developed was done in a gravity well and usually in atmosphere. I think about how the main problem with developing a space suit for the moon is that the total lack of wind there means that every piece of dust is like a tiny razor blade. And there are just so many processes on earth that require hot air to rise for them to work! (Hot rolling steel probably applies here.)
There are bound to be a ton of problems that come with building stuff in space that we don't even know of yet. Manufacturing processes are so highly specialised these days, if you want really strong steel then the techniques of a century ago wont be enough.
Sorry, I don't have special knowledge of steel making or the like, I'm just extrapolating based on trends I've seen and a general knowledge of the economic complexity that underlies modern life (I'm reminded of the economist who spent a year trying to make a toasted sandwich from scratch). I really do want to see O'Neill Cylinders happen but I think it's important to be realistic about the challenges too.
>And there are just so many processes on earth that require hot air to rise for them to work!
Can you give me some examples? Because I'm not sure hot rolling steel fits the bill.
Listen. I'm not saying there won't be challenges involved in all of these processes. But because these processes are challenging, there's a lot of smart people (millions of them) who have spent a lot of time working the kinks out. Those people and all their machines are on Earth, and if you're building something new you're going to want them nearby. We can bikeshed about what does or doesn't require gravity as much as we want (though I think it's much less than people assume), but there's plenty of gravity and industrial capacity to go around on the Earth's surface, and not much else besides gravity and dust on the surface of Mars.
I was comparing building stuff on Mars from material found on Mars to building stuff in space from material found on an asteroid.
If we're going to talk about Lynn Margulis's crazy ideas, I think a much more interesting one is the idea that butterflies and caterpillars evolved separately and then somehow merged! Now *that's* out there. And it's in keeping with her theme of endosymbiosis and two species becoming one.
(It's worth noting that, while Margulis discovered that mitochondria and chloroplasts started out as endosymbiotes, IIRC she *also* proposed the same for a lot of *other* organelles for which this did not turn out to be true.)
Now I have to note here that the butterfly/caterpillar idea is not actually due to Margulis, rather the paper was by one Donald Williamson, but it's Margulis who managed to help it along so it could into a journal, and we'd still consider HIV/AIDS denialism to be one of her crazy ideas despite it not being original to her in any way! The paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908357106
The AIDS stuff isn't actually crazy at all, sadly. I read a book on it, and it's stuff that would have been considered "crazy" in the 90s when it's was written but now would seem obvious and predictable to billions of people - Fauci is a liar, public health institutions can't be trusted, they play stupid games with definitions and statistics, their clinical trials were incompetent and or maybe fraudulent, people who tried to blow the whistle were censored and attacked.
IOW the only thing aids "denialism" denies is that public health is competent and trustworthy, just in a different context to COVID.
Umm, don’t they also deny that hiv is the cause of aids? That seems relevant.
No kidding, that is categorically what it means.
I'm old enough to remember when humanity truly didn't know if, let alone how, they were connected. At first there was just correlation, with no causation identified. It wasn't a crazy theory - at one point. Saying it now would be crazy, of course, or in the last 20 years.
Yeah I think in 1987 denialism was an interesting theory, but by 1992 it was pretty much fringe. The problem is that some people spent those entire five years defending their interesting theory, and had become wrapped up in it as their identity, so they held onto it into the 2000s.
Among other things, once you have a bunch of antivirals targeted at HIV that effectively treat people with AIDS, so that once those become available to HIV+ people, suddenly people stop dying of a terrible wasting disease as long as they stay on the medicine, it's really hard to see how you continue to believe that HIV isn't the cause. I mean, the scientific consensus might keep some papers from getting published or some research from getting funded, but all the scientific consensus in the world isn't sufficient to make all the people with AIDS suddenly get better and stay better for the rest of their lives.
Not that I believe that theory, but the whole caterpillar to moth/butterfly thing is so crazy that this theory isn't that far out there to me.
Re: medieval fighting in the Himalayas -- this is one of the subplots in Neal Stephenson's recent novel Termination Shock. Up until now, I'd thought it was completely made up. Wow.
Is it obscure? It’s worrying that people think it is. The conflict between China and India should be known.
I had the same thought, I've been seeing videos of the chinese and indians smacking each other with sticks for years. Not that my internet habits are necessarily typical, but I'm kind of taken aback how many people seem to just now be learning about this.
Well, I knew that there's a simmering multilateral clusterfuck in Kashmir with periodical violent outbursts, but not the "no guns" part.
Same here
I didn’t remember that, but nice touch!
OTOH, I had a vague notion he gave a rationale at some point for why only hand-thrown rocks are allowed as projectiles, i.e. why no (cross-)bows and the like, but couldn’t find it with a quick search.
A couple of SFF novels where a plot point is that chemically powered weapons don't work are Heinlein's Glory Road and Zelazny's Princes in Amber series.
A real world example of banning chemically powered weapons is Tokugawa Japan (17th-19th Centuries). It worked as long as they kept the foreigners out.
Crossbows are good, modern compound bows that use cams and wheels to give the archer mechanical advantage are also very good. https://targetcrazy.com/crossbow-vs-compound.
Churchill thought the longbow was a deadlier weapon than any one man weapon used by the English Army before the 19th century rifle. But, it was very hard to use and required enormous amounts of training and great physical strength. The rate of fire of a long bow was far superior to the crossbow.
Dune too
Also Dorsai! and its sequels in some environments, though they go with mechanically powered spring guns instead of relying primarily on melee weapons or muscle-powered projectiles.
"Weapon for weapon, any thug in the back alley of a large city had more, and more modern firepower; but the trick with modern warfare was not to outgun the enemy, but carry weapons he could not gimmick. Chemical and radiation armament was too easily put out of action from a distance. Therefore, the spring-rifle with its five thousand-sliver magazine and its tiny, compact, non-metallic mechanism which could put a sliver in a man-sized target at a thousand meters time after time with unvarying accuracy."
A Usenet discussion of their practicality (with at least one familiar name participating) is here:
https://rec.arts.sf.written.narkive.com/GQLkfHim/needle-guns
17. I did, and it's one of my favorite fun facts. I have a theory that he wasn't actually a communist and just wanted to get back at all the other Congressmen for making fun of his name: "No Soviet ever called me a dick stain."
In Australian Rules Football, the media has been keenly waiting for a gay player to come out, but so far none has out of the thousand-or-so currently active AFL players or the thousands of retired ones.
That's not too surprising from a statistical point of view, but what's surprising is this: in the women's league (AFLW), lesbians are _vastly_ over-represented. This source says 75-80% of the AFLW is lesbian -- https://sirensport.com.au/aussie-rules/pride-in-our-game/ -- I'm not sure it's _quite_ that high but based on how many of the high-profile players are lesbians it's definitely a vast over-representation.
So, could it be that the same (genetic?) factors driving an unusually low rate of homosexuality among male AFL players also drive an unusally high rate among female AFL players? Is the ability to kick straight and take speckies coded in the same genes as a love for pussy?
Perhaps not the ability but the *interest* in playing such games.
I think it’s a bit more likely that sports have historically been male-coded, so that people who are seen as “manly” are more welcomed and people who are not are more rejected. At least, as a person who grew up gay and hated everything about the social environment of athletics as a young person and had to wait until adulthood to discover that actually I like athletic things, that’s what makes sense to me.
I noticed a lot of comments above from you about how homophobia was the cause of the disparity in men's football (soccer). That seems to be completely wrong in terms of women's teams, in a way that makes your explanation highly unlikely for men's teams (unless there are somehow completely different causal mechanisms with directly opposite results, which also seems very unlikely).
Do you have thoughts on how to square that circle that doesn't contradict itself?
Basically the fact that sports have always been male coded means that men’s teams have had a lot of homophobia while women’s teams are full of people who are gender non-conforming in one way or another. And I think the effect is probably most relevant at the middle school and high school level rather than the professional level.
Do you have much experience with middle school girl's sports, or a study that supports what you are saying? I know lots of girls and women who have participated in sports from elementary school through college, and find your take on it deeply opposite of my own. In particular that girls who play sports are gender non-conforming below the professional level.
Why are they male coded? Have you considered that sports are a mostly male affair because its people with testosterone who like engaging in compeititve physical contests the most, be it sport or combat?
There are also female-coded sports, like ice skating and gymnastics and (though it's not usually thought of as a sport) ballet. Those also have male participants, but I think ice skating and ballet both have a high fraction of gay men. (I've never heard that of male gymnastics, though.)
It's interesting to ask how much of this is cultural and how much is biological.
I don't know much about Australian sports, but my vague impression is that Australian women's netball manages to not drive off many of the more feminine women the way that the WNBA has.
#18: On Cieglowski and Mars, he has a lot of good points about the near-term prospects for a mission but has nothing to say that's worth hearing on humanity's long-term future. He responded to (someone else's) comment about long-term human survival as follows: "Why is it important that our species survive longer than Earth? Honest question." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214012
That may answer your question.
(Yes, it could be unfair to him to read too much into a throwaway comment, but I don't think it's all that ambiguous. And the closest he gets to addressing the topic in his essay is to mention existential risk, and skip right over it.)
I mean, to be fair, space colonies will still be dependent on Earth for many decades to come. If in 2100 we have 100,000 people living on Mars, the moon, orbital habitats, and asteroids, and then some catastrophe destroys the Earth, it seems unlikely that the space-living humans will survive long-term.
Exactly. A Mars colony won't actually be useful in the way proponents claim until you can replicate all of the modern global industrial ecosystem on Mars, and by the time that is feasible, we'll be so far beyond current tech that we can't make any useful predictions anyway.
On Mr Beast: I've watched a few of his videos and I don't get the impression he's an inhuman algorithmically-driven machine.
I think he genuinely makes videos doing things because he thinks doing that thing would be awesome -- whether that thing is spending 50 hours in Antarctica or building a Willie Wonka style chocolate factory and inviting a bunch of random people to compete for it. And I think that genuine enthusiasm is what comes through in his videos and makes him more popular than the crowd of algorithmically-driven click-chasers.
I thought of this too, Social Media has such a prevalence of attention vampires that we immediately knee-jerk against anyone doing anything and putting it on their social media. And for good reason, Social Media almost uniformly breed the Attention Whore in people, the crowd-obsessed part that can't endure a minute without asking how people think of it.
But on the face of it, social media is not apriori any different than any banal public activity that attracts attention. If a hypothetical Mr. Beast were to pay for those blind people to get their operation then get them on his late night talkshow, for instance, I don't think there would have been as much backlash, if any.
It's just that "Social Media Influencer" is irredemably associated with the worst subset who bear the title, who structure their entire life around this "job" and make it drive every thing they do or say.
The most popular of them also tend to cater to edgy teenagers (themselves having recently graduated from the "teenager" part), which is obviously never far from triggering woke tripwires, especially considering how quickly things progress from ubiquitous to problematic to unspeakable these days.
I watched the entire thing and thought it was absolutely heart-warming. I am on the spectrum, though, so I don't get facial expressions, nor do I notice charisma or its lack - maybe something like that is what bothers normal people here?
A more important question is, how did healthcare in their respective countries fail all those people before? Many of them sounded like residents of developed countries where this should have been taken care of somehow. Why are things so broken that this this took Mr Beast, and what can be done about this?
Jake Daniels (UK professional football player) came out last year: https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12615595/jake-daniels-becomes-uks-first-active-male-professional-footballer-to-come-out-publicly-as-gay-reaction
at 6 /7 /8 /18 /21/37 - tldr: this seems to me the best "links for" by scott yet (and nowhere, I found better "links for" than at ACX/SSC). Lots of lol and yep and wow. And lots of reading up to do ;)
6: hate it, I am a boomer and can read faster than I can listen. fine, if it works with zoomers. (disgust)
7: Those ol' scare-stories are all silly. What the point to go for a jackpot, if you want to live a boring life everafter? You had that to begin with! If I got over 10 million, I would do some "sick stuff" and end up with much less, I hope (or see me a coward).
10. Write "German" pro-soccer player and you need not change another word in that paragraph. You do not became a pro-player, if you do not train as a future-pro during your teenage years, and that time you will often be the only gay boy of the team - consisting of tough and kinda butal cis-boys. Will you come out then? NO. You will LEAVE, go for figure-skating, swimming, ... . Or soon get yourself an alibi girl-friend, google images of former German national coach with his wife: "jogi löw wife" - and see if you consider this plausible.
21: yep, obviously, highly formal texts, sometimes sounding hallucinating. NO human would write today as in Leviticus.
37: My lil' son likes Mr Beast - so I am familiar and kinda hate his stuff: remember the 100k-US$ ice-cream-cup? (but then: see 7 - my take on jackpots - so , fine, I guess) . But this video linked is now at 8 million likes, had me f%&$/& crying from the 18th second to the last. Think: "Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the LORD?" "Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped." "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear" Praise the Beast! omg. plus: EA, what YOU got to say?
re: 36. Hanson interrestingly notes the reaction of private companies, but fails to draw a conclusion that should jump out to anyone who worked in a big corporation and has read a bit of communist litterature. Companies are not shirking and affraid at the phenomenon: they have sufficient lawyers, labyrinthine contracts and bylaws to protect them, and most are immune to public backlash because they are deeply uninteresting / un-parseable for 99% of people.
What it does, in practice is generate an additional set of coercive rules for the _worker_, with a welcome impossibility to protest against them (if you do, you are branded with the appropriate -ism). Seminars on correct behaviour (deadening the spirit), anemic company culture (where all idiosyncrasies are sanded away), permanent advertisement and compliance about DEI themes... This is one easy step towards a workforce that is "housebroken" (e.g: not willing to fight the company on ridiculous themes tends to have inertia, so not fighting / unionizing etc), has been made uniform and without characteristics and so replaceable ad infinitum. You can drop 10% of your workforce, because you can hire an undistinguishable 10% whenever desired with no training necessary.
And since most of us spend a significant part of our time in work environment, we carry it out of the corporation into daily lives, in the culture at large: this feeling of apathy against normalizing pressure.
The Irish IQ thing casts further doubt on all IQ numbers from non-developed countries. That's because, as Scott says, some people "failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused". We should expect more IQ numbers to be contaminated in this way (from developing countries at least).
It is also a further reminder to toss out Lynn's international IQ estimates, as many people have been saying to do for a long time.
In the Lynn international IQ estimates some countries have an *average* IQ of a person with Downs. And like Equitorial Guinea is a failed state, and I can fully accept that lower IQ has something to do with that wether genetic or trauma or worms or whatever, but that is just obviously not a result that's possible to believe.
otoh, Afro-American with a low IQ (say 70-80) are much less often "mentally handicapped" than the other groups (among those at low IQ). It may be possible to have a healthy brain able to do all the every-day tasks but none of the hard stuff. Considering how much calories a human brain can burn, it can be adaptive to run on a more modest version. - Nowadays kids in Mississippi and Ghana do go to school, and those adults you would get to do an IQ-test did, too. - Disclosure: Me and all academia/mainstream media/wikipedia would LOVE to see the study that finally proves: It was really just the missing A/C or the missing vitamin XY / missing preparation when taking the test that made so many with a sub-saharan ethnic background underperform as they did and do. - reading now the link: tl;dr: meh, the "low IQ of Irish" was mostly BS, had actually always been much nearer to 100 than Eysenck hallucinated. "Not being used to IQ-tests" was just a little brick in a very low wall. Scott misread?!
https://russellwarne.com/2022/12/17/irish-iq-the-massive-rise-that-never-happened/
That's because you don't understand the topic very well: https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/african-iqs-and-mental-retardation
At a guess, IQ scores mean something very different when given to first-world kids who've spent a decade or so in school before taking the test, and when given to third-world kids who've hardly seen the inside of schoolhouse. We have good data on the meaning of IQ scores for the first-world people, showing that they positively correlate with performance in school and on the job. But what do we know about their meaning for the second group?
One could say: we do talk first world, well, the USofA: "Individuals in all racial-ethnic groups can be found at all levels of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest. Groups differ, however, in where their members tend to cluster along the IQ line. The bell curve for American whites is centered roughly on IQ 100; that for American blacks on 85; that for different Hispanic-American groups midway between those for blacks and whites; and that for Asian and Jewish Americans somewhere above that for white gentiles." - otoh I wish not to partake any further in turning ACX-forums into an Emil K. thing. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/
Why is any of that bad to say? It's all true and well-documented.
The history of IQ testing is basically a history of inventing reasons to keep people from poorer countries out of the United States. Famously, and hilariously, Russian Jews who spoke no English did extremely poorly on IQ tests and that was used as an argument against their immigration. Lately, Ashkenazi Jews are used by IQ fanbois as something close to the master race, intelligence wise, so this little bit of history is particularly rich.
I've heard that claim about Jews was a myth. Rather, people with mental retardation were deliberately sought out as test subjects to confirm that it could detect retardation in groups other than the earliest populations tested.
Yes, I heard something like that. I think the story was that Lewontin (cited in Gould 1981) had cited a paper from the early 1900s which supposedly claimed that Jews were idiots, but actually the author of the paper had tested a bunch of kids to find out those who were mentally behind and concluded that the test worked well, and continued to work well even when applied to other ethnic groups such as Jews. (Not that Jews were mentally challenged, but that the test could be used to figure out which children were, regardless of ethnicity.)
On the other hand there is more to history than these anecdotes. For example, the Nazis rejected IQ research as something that was too theoretical, bourgeois and Jewish. They were already perfectly aware that Ashkenazim scored higher on IQ tests.
Does any of this validate or invalidate IQ research? Do you have to be a "fanboi" or believe in the master race (the Jewish race??) to notice that IQ (or more accurately the g-factor) correlates/predicts a bunch of things in line with usual notions of success, or even physiological factors, or even sets of genes?
Not correct: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-09428-001
But see https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-01068-001
This is ideological nonsense. You're just reciting ideological narratives to dimiss a thoroughly emprically vindicated and verified scientifc field because it disagrees with your ideology.
How could IQ tests possibly be designed in a way that they deliberately give immigrants low scores, then for some race the scores stay low indefinitely through the generations, but then other groups they have a high IQ? If intelligence is equal between groups, then why do ashkenazi jews today have such high IQ but hispanic immigrants don't? This is some magical test you've convinced yourself exists.
And many Indians score very, very highly on IQ tests despite coming from dirt poor countries, as do many selected groups from poor populations. That's because as a century of scientific research as shown, IQ tests actually measure intelligence and being smart is what results in a high IQ score, not your race. And here's the thing, even if the tests were *used* for the purpose you said, it says literally nothing about the empirical validity of these tests. The experiemental record does, and the evidence is firmly in favor of the validity of IQ testing and g-factor theory (something I'm sure you aren't even rudimentarily familiar with).
Oh, but it turns out that your commment isn't simply conceptually wrong but factually inaccurate: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-09428-001
But as long as we're playing this game, you agree with Hitler on IQ tests i.e. dimissing them because they don't give results you like.
No, it doesn't. Because the Irish have shown themselves to be at a first world level of competence generally, and so a very low IQ would be out of step with the state of their country (relative to other countries and their respective IQs).
Developing countries are about as precisely disfunctional as we should expect, and unselected immigrant populations from these countries do not radically outperform in the west (highly *selected* populations do, which is precisely what a hereditarian would expect).
This is false, refugees typically perform significantly better than Lynn's estimates (sometimes better than black Americans, though still worse than whites). Example for Somali refugees:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/alarming-new-test-score-gap-discovered-in-seattle-schools/
On Mr. Beast curing 100 people's blindness, I think the objections are based on the self-promotional nature of this great deed. It made me think of Veblen and status. Purposefully publicized acts of philanthropy reveal the wealth and power of the giver just as leisure activities and servants did in Veblen's day.
Sure, some people have money and want credit. When they do great things, you 𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭. It is by far the cheapest way to pay someone for helping you! If that system breaks down, people who want credit will stop doing beneficial things, and presumably move on to worse things.
It's very sad that so many people believe you're better off having someone who really cares about you sympathize with your blindness, than having someone who doesn't care about you at all cure your blindness.
I agree with what you wrote. And there usually are multiple reasons for acts of charity. Getting gratitude from those you help is rewarding. It's just that lashing ones philanthropic peacock feathers to the world adds an element of creepiness to an otherwise wonderful act and is sure to inspire envy in those unable to do the same. If societal status evolves more and more to acts of philanthropy and kindness, however, that is a good thing.
OT: How did you make "give them the credit" bold?
There's online text generators that can do it e.g., https://lingojam.com/BoldTextGenerator
Great for 𝒆𝒎𝒑𝒉𝒂𝒔𝒊𝒔 it is
I actually do want to argue that Virtue Signalling is in principle bad and should be moderately punished.
But I want to get certain things out of the way before I do :
1- Virtue Signalling **Acts** of charity is orders of magnitudes better than Virtue Signalling mere words and meaningless gestures. (e.g. "Oh my good 'black' ? It's 'blax' you fucking bigot") Acts of charity and goodness incur real costs on the actor, so it's more justified to signal them. (but I will argue it's still wrong anyway)
2- Based on the approval from Scott and others here, MrBeast in particular appears to be a genuine guy who just want to share the happiness of the people he was a benefactor to with the world. This doesn't mean that what he did is okay in general.
3- The objections to MrBeast from other youtubers (as presented here) are all kayfabe bullshit intended to play the cynical game of farming more attention and more views. In particular, the objection along the lines of "Oh my good disability is not something to be cured" is so utterly beneath contempt that it deserves no consideration and the mere act of arguing against it gives it a legitimacy it lacks.
All that said, why do I think that Virtue Signalling is bad ? I can think of 2 broad reasons :
1- Weak Anti-Virtue-Signalling : Virtue Signalling per se is not bad, but doing so over the Internet is bad.
This is because the Internet is a largely anonymous medium, save for your ISP and your country's government, nobody knows your identity.
This is important when it comes to Virtue Signalling. If somebody in my close community virtue-signals, I can at least support or refute his or her Virtue Signalling using my knowledge of them. If they are generally a good person as far as I know, I can support them and nod along. If they are a poser doing so merely to get good boy cookies, I can refute them and reveal their dishonesty. This prevents the Virtue Signalling mechanism from being used in vain. (and ultimately burned away)
Internet Virtue-Signallers want to signal their virtue while giving no way for us the audience to check the veracity of their claims. Everything over the Internet can be faked, up to and including entire people and their existence or lack thereof. Asking for Internet Virtue Signalling is asking for disaster.
2- Strong Anti-Virtue-Signalling : This is much stronger than (1) : all Virtue Signalling is bad.
This is because morality is a learning task. The purpose is to learn that you don't matter, and that you only live for others. When you do something good and then ask for credit, you demonstrate that you really didn't learn a single thing from doing that good, that you did the right thing for entirely the wrong reasons.
An analogous situation arises in Machine Learning, in the form of the common concern about Overfitting. Imagine you're training a machine to learn arithmetic, and you ask it what 2+2 is, and it answers 4. Did the machine learn addition ? not necessarily, maybe "2+2 = 4" occurs verbatim in its training data, and thus the machine merely memorized the right answer. Or, more interestingly, maybe the machine thinks that the "+" sign denotes multiplication, and thus "2+2" is "2x2" to it. Etc..., the point is that the machine has learned to say the right thing for the wrong reasons, and you need to be extremly careful with your data and your training so that it learns the right thing instead.
Just like an Educator can punish a Student for cheating even if the Student got the right final answer (without justifications), we can and should punish Virtue Signallers even if they did actual good, because morality is all about the negation of the self, and learning to value others above yourself. If you have failed to learn that, then you're not truly being moral, you're just memorizing.
This is not just a puritanical concern, it has practical implications. Overfitted machines can't generalize beyond their training data, and Virtue Signallers similarly can't generalize their morality beyond the very specific context that rewards them for their virtues. If "Killing The Blind" become the next high-status activity tomorrow for some bizarre reason, those who have learned to help the blind out of sympathy and compassion will not be affected, but those who learned to help the blind because it gets them status will just as easily learn to kill the blind.
Well reasoned and thought provoking post. I do think there is always some element of status seeking or ulterior motive or, at best, of self-congratulation ("I'm a good person") in acts of charity. It's good to be honest with yourself about your motivations and try to emphasize those acts that are truly motivated by a desire to help others.
Couple of counters.
>Just like an Educator can punish a Student for cheating... we can and should punish Virtue Signallers
The Educator is a specific professional who's been tasked with educating the Students. "we" are not Educators, "we" are other Students, and are not in a position to punish cheating.
>because morality is all about the negation of the self, and learning to value others above yourself. If you have failed to learn that, then you're not truly being moral, you're just memorizing.
I posit that this definition is itself the result of memorizing, because it has resulted in the idea that you should punish someone for healing blindness.
I think that virtue signaling can be good because it normalizes acts of virtue and thereby makes vitruous acts more common, and much virtue signaling is of this nature.
People don't wear I Gave Blood stickers to make people admire them so much as to encourage giving blood in general by raising visibility and normalizing it.
I think for your individual moral benefit, virtue signaling is bad. That is, to become a virtuous person, you should be motivated by wanting to do good instead of wanting to be seen as good.
But for the well being of others, if your virtue signaling required an actual virtuous act, then it can still do a lot of good. And as a society, I expect we're best off when we make sure that the only way to get the social benefits of virtue signaling is to actually go do the virtuous acts. You want the guy who pays for surgery to give blind people their sight to get the benefit, because he actually did something good. But you don't want the guy who flies to Africa to pose in a couple of MSF clinics feeding hungry children before whisking away to his next photo shoot to get the benefit, because he didn't do anything worthwhile.
“to become a virtuous person, you should be motivated by wanting to do good instead of wanting to be seen as good”
Hard disagree. “Fake it till you make it” is how good behavior is internalized in the first place.
Training toddlers with half-finished brains and not enough real world experience to understand how gravity works is different from training adults.
Carrot-and-Stick is only good to plant an initial seed of morality (or any other goal) in someone who can't be reasoned with in literally any other way (Toddlers, Aliens, AI, etc...), once you have that seed in place you can't accomplish anything interesting by continuing to use this crude reward system.
Virtue is also a reward system, but its far more sophisticated and robust than crude Carrot-and-Stick. It learns to find satisfaction in the task itself, meaning it's not open to misalignment. Every single Carrot-and-Stick system you can possibly think of is vulnerable to Goodhart's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law), not so with Virtue.
No, you are the problem that we're here to denounce. Healing people's blindness is, in your terms, actual virtue, not Virtue Signaling. We reward it because we want more of it. If we punished it, we'd get less of it, which is the opposite of what we want.
You're not rewarding "healing people's blindness", you're rewarding "healing people's blindness and making a youtube video about it".
My 2 objections are all about how those things are very different, and how rewarding the second might end up hurting the first.
add 900. Beast "cured" 1k, not 100. - And gave the surgeon another 100k on top of the bill, to keep up the good work. - Sure: It got him 99 million views (i.e. about 2 million US$) and 8 million likes in the first 11 days - takes 8 min, why not watch? - In 2021 he did "I Ate A $70,000 Golden Pizza", 3.6 million likes, 187 million views. ... WHY OBJECT to "Purposefully publicized acts of philanthropy" even if that were the new form of "conspicuous consumption"??? Those acts may not open heaven's portals for super-rich mortals (see Matthew 6:3)- but from a rational or human or just NOT INSANE perspective, what is there not to like?! Let the haters of "public" philanthropy give in secret to heal the 100 million+ blind curable humans left. (Here in Germany the insurance pays, ofc.. Mr Beast had to go USofA, Namibia and such.)
The most significant type of criticism I've seen isn't directed at Mr. Beast per se, but the fact that this is a benefit people applaud coming from wealthy philanthropists rather than compelled collective action (in the form of gov. provided health care). The Mr. Beast video is on a whole different scale, but you see the same complaint come up time and time again when there are human interest stories based on a charitable act for someone that others feel should be the purview of a social safety net. It's upsetting for people to see those presented as heartwarming when they read as dystopian to them. The subtext of those stories is that the social safety net they feel should exist does not. Sometimes that criticism bleeds over into arguing that presenting individual acts of charity as heartwarming distracts from this fact.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Rich person: *Cures 1k blind people.*
Mob: That money could have gone to something important!
Politician: I could take if from them to fight my War on Poverty.
Mob: Do it!
*Poverty gets worse.*
Rich person: I'm going to go clean up the oceans.
Mob: Boo!
Politician: War on Terrorism?
Mob: Yes!
*Terrorism 'war' breeds terrorists.*
Rich person: How about I plant a billion trees?
Mob: Grab the pitchforks! Lay siege to his house!
Politician: I have a dozen more Wars-on-Bad-Things I could launch?
Mob: We're saved!
I think it's more along the lines of complaining that it's unjust that rich people get to independently decide what causes are worthy of charity at their discretion rather than through something like social democracy. The "nice thing" would be having a robust healthcare system with universal access rather than Home Depot plucking some random lucky person out of misery to give them adaptive equipment made out of PVC pipe.
I think your analogy here presumes that wealthy philanthropists do a better job than political action at promoting general welfare. I think it goes without saying the kind of criticism I'm describing absolutely rejects that.
Yes, I was trying to point out that the 'political action can fix it!' crowd has a worse track record than Mr. Beast and with more zeroes attached.
Or, to specifically reply to the argument for universal health care, I just don't buy it. And no amount of "but Country X did it great!" will convince me that the USA will implement a program that is capable of doing more good than harm. I think that skepticism is well-earned, given my country's record of screw ups in general, and in that industry in particular.
If the subject is specifically providing health care for people of little means to fix easily fixed disabilities, then governments have a much better track record than wealthy philanthropists on that front. You have to be an awfully parochial American to not see that even if you have little faith that America can successfully implement a more universal system than it already has. The Mr. Beast video exists specifically because there are coverage gaps wealthy philanthropists aren't filling that are not as significant of an issue under some governments.
I assume Medicaid (healthcare for poor people in the US) would cover surgery to restore sight. Similarly Medicare (healthcare for old people).
Rich people provide a competitive standard against which social democracy charity can be judged, and vice versa.
Valid points. If the satisfaction and status of helping others are seen as equivalent to material goods, then this certainly can be seen as contributing further to an unequal society.
Philanthropy is praiseworthy, "compelled collective action" is quite the opposite.
But you're aware that many people think that a government providing for the general welfare of people is a good thing, right? Before we engage in whether the existence of public goods is laudable, you can first recognize that it's not a kooky outlier opinion to think that, say, food security should be funded via the government. And once you get that, it's easy to see why a video of some random wealthy person plucking out hungry people as they see fit to feed feels less heartwarming and more disturbing to them in a society where that does not exist. Some people feel that way about access to healthcare of this kind.
This is a point Mr. Beast himself is on record agreeing with. I'm just pointing out this was a common complaint about the video. That might not resonate with you if you believe government assistance to those in need is the opposite of praiseworthy, but I'm sure you recognize yourself as having the unusual opinion here.
*General* welfare. Not *specific* welfare, which is what giving money/services to particular people is.
Also, I don't think you're using "public good" correctly.
I'm referring to a national health care system, which is something that is generally believed by its proponents to promote general welfare as the common good is often understood as people's overall health, safety, and wellbeing. It is argued as something that ought to be a public good by its proponents in a way that fits the ordinary meaning of the term. Moreover, public goods that currently exist in the US necessarily come about through compelled collective action.
If you're going to try to be pedantic, at least try to be right.
"which is something that is generally believed by its proponents to promote general welfare as the common good"
Oh well then, if a thing's proponents characterize it in such a way, it MUST be true!
"Moreover, public goods that currently exist in the US necessarily come about through compelled collective action."
Nope.
"at least try to be right."
Right back atcha. But hey, who needs to be factually correct when you can just go all Humpty-Dumpty and redefine words on the fly!
Compelled collective action often does some good. Occasionally good that can't realistically be done in any other way, as with successfully repelling invasions by hostile neighbors.
Normally I strongly agree, but I struggle with this concerning Mr. Beast. I haven't looked into him a lot, and only watched a few videos some years ago, but it appears that his source of income really is his YouTube channel. In order for him to have money to do good, he has to publicize what he does in order to continue driving views. If he stopped in order to anonymously do good, he would receive fewer views and therefore have less money with which to do good.
Of course, he also spends a lot of money doing weird and random things, like buying out the entire stock of a store or buying random people cars (whether they could already afford it or not).
Rand Paul does free eye surgeries for the poor, but because he doesn't hate a particular president enough, he's a morally abominable monster.
People who do terrible things can also sometimes do nice things.
He doesn't do terrible things.
If being a good person means hating bad people, then refusing to hate is evil.
The self-promotional nature of the act is precisely how he has the money to help people.
It makes the charity self-funded and self-sustaining.
It's the same as people saying he should use his platform for political advocacy. If he did that, *he wouldn't have a platform*.
#10- I think his inference is almost solid, but I would add some additional explanations:
1. I suspect whatever psychological traits he speaks of relate not to a preference for team sports, but a propensity to become a high-level athlete. I have grown up around professional football (soccer) players and can tell you two traits that often appear are ruthlessness and overt competitiveness. A player I grew up with confessed that he tried to break his teammate's leg to increase his chances of playing for Liverpool (famous soccer team). When we are talking about professional footballers we are talking about extreme outliers with extreme psychological traits, it would make sense that these traits would be more common in more "masculine" men. My best evidence for this is that I have known/coached women's players as well, and while the traits of the top players are strikingly similar across sexes, they are noticeably less extreme among women. If we assume that homosexual men and hetero women are closer to each other psychologically, this could help to explain the lack of homosexuality among male footballers.
2. The real difference could be downstream. Something like professional athletes are more likely to have higher testosterone levels, and higher testosterone levels are inversely related to homosexuality. I suspect higher testosterone would go some way to explaining the psychological traits too. I would be interested to know if the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of homosexuality relates in any way to sex-steroid hormones or psychological traits. My guess would be that it does.
3. All that being said, there is truly a lot of stigma around homosexuality at highest level of football. Even if you had homosexual feelings, sharing them would probably lead to harsh penalties for your playing career (though probably lots of rewards elsewhere). Football (soccer) is a very conservative, working-class, sport in terms of the people inside the profession. These people are often very far removed from the progressive environments of most of the educated elite, not to mention that many of the top players come from countries where the mainstream view of anything non-hetero is negative. (There's a player that refused to wear a rainbow armband because it went against his personal belief, and the way his name is pronounced is literally "gay", you couldn't make it up)
All very plausible but there are some (not many but not none) gay rugby players and ex players. And rugby is even more manly.
True, but the selection pressure is also a lot weaker. Most boys in Europe and South America want to be professional footballers when they grow up, while relatively few want to be rugby players.
I would say it's plausible that masculine psychological traits are more of a necessity in football given the level of competition.
Isn’t the simpler explanation just that young gay people don’t like being around butch hooligans who make fun of you for any perceived weakness? Why go for the complicated and tenuous explanation when there’s such an easy and obvious one right there?
6. I kind of hate that this is easier for me to follow than reading a book, even though it makes sense since you don't have to be active.
@33:
I had a classmate in school, that was basically our "genius". He was representing our country in international math and physics contest and stuff! So, I would say he has a high IQ!
BUT: he also said, that IQ test basically just tell you, how good you are at IQ tests!
Don't know if his voice is something to look at, but would "support" the idea, that the people just got better at them!
@45:
Don't want to get too deep into ths discussion. But it was very confusing, that you could read "old" papers about this topic and flu - something we know about for decades - and researches are not conclusive about their findings and there is a big debate.
And COVID is "out" like a month and "all": "yeah, it is airborn!" ... Are all those older researchers stupid to not find the same result in their tests with flu?
I. The early COVID-outbreak on a cruise ship pointed strongly into "airborne" (and a sub-optimal air-ventilation of cabins). Also other early outbreaks (die Streeck-Studie) II. flu seems kinda under-researched. And hard to do reliable research on routes of flu/covid-infection without actually infecting people on purpose.
> he also said, that IQ test basically just tell you, how good you are at IQ tests!
Notice the consequences of this seemingly humble belief:
If IQ is an important thing, then this guy's victory at math olympiad is... what you would expect from people who were born that way.
But if IQ is a myth, then his victory at math olympiad is a result of hard work. He competed with the entire country fairly and won!
I was about to say, reminds me of the wealthy person who insists money doesn't matter
>he also said, that IQ test basically just tell you, how good you are at IQ tests!
This is nonsense.
Performance on IQ tests correlates with performance on all other cognitively demanding tests.
That's the whole point of the general intelligence factor.
If it didn't tell us anything other than test taking ability, IQ would be useless and nobody would care about it.
When somebody recites that tired old line ("it shows how good you are at IQ tests"), it's absolute slamdunk proof that they don't know literally the first thing about intelligence research.
#22, SolidGoldMagicKarp: I decided to play around with this on ChatGPT. After a little of this and that:
PROMPT: Paul Revere is said to have shouted "One if by land, two if by sea" on his famous ride. What he'd said "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" instead?
RESPONSE: If Paul Revere had shouted "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" instead of "One if by land, two if by sea" during his famous ride, it would have added an element of fantasy or humor to the historical event. The phrase "SolidGoldMagiKarp" refers to a species of fish in the Pokémon franchise, so using it in the context of Paul Revere's ride would have been unexpected and perhaps even absurd.
However, this alternate phrasing would likely not have conveyed the same message or urgency as the original phrase. The original phrase "One if by land, two if by sea" was used to signal to the patriots in the town of Lexington that the British were approaching by land or by sea, indicating the need for them to take up arms and prepare for battle. The phrase "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" does not carry the same level of immediacy or seriousness, and would not have conveyed the same information to the patriots.
PROMPT: In the Pokémon franchise, what is the significance of SolidGoldMagiKarp?
RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, Magikarp is a species of Pokémon that is often considered to be weak and not very useful in battles. It evolves into the powerful and formidable Pokémon Gyarados, but this evolution is seen as slow and difficult to achieve.
The term "SolidGoldMagiKarp" is often used as a reference to the idea of a Magikarp that is so valuable and rare that it is made of solid gold. This concept is often used humorously, as the value and rarity of a solid gold Magikarp would be completely disproportionate to its actual usefulness or strength in battles.
However, despite its comedic value, the idea of a SolidGoldMagiKarp has gained a certain level of popularity among fans of the Pokémon franchise, and has been referenced in fan art, merchandise, and even in official Pokémon products. It has become a part of Pokémon culture and folklore, and is often seen as a symbol of the franchise's humor and lightheartedness.
* * * * *
So I did a Google search on "SolidGoldMagiKarp Pokémon" and Google helpfully returned stuff for "solid gold magikarp pokémon". And the produced a bunch of stuff about "Pokémon," as you'd expect. As you know, one sort of return Google will give you is a list of questions "People also Ask". One of those was the question: "How rare is a gold Magikarp?" So:
PROMPT: Very interesting. How rare is a gold Magikarp?
RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, gold Magikarp is not an official species or form of Magikarp. The concept of a solid gold Magikarp is purely a joke or meme, and is not something that can be encountered or captured in the games.
Since the concept of a solid gold Magikarp is not part of the official Pokémon canon, there is no set rarity for it. It is often depicted as being incredibly rare and valuable, but this is for comedic effect and is not based on any in-game mechanics or statistics.
Cross posted at the LessWrong thread.
HOWEVER...a bit later...
In a tweet Matthew Watkins pointed out:
Note the difference between " SolidGoldMagikarp" and " SolidGoldMagiKarp." You use the later towards the end of the post. The capital 'K' makes all the difference.
So I investigated:
PROMPT: Tell me about SolidGoldMagiKarp.
RESPONSE: SolidGoldMagikarp is likely a reference to the Pokémon species Magikarp, which is a fish-type Pokémon known for its inefficiency in battle. In the Pokémon games, Magikarp is considered a weak Pokémon, as its only move is Splash, which does not cause any damage to the opponent. Despite this, Magikarp evolves into the powerful dragon-type Pokémon Gyarados.
In the context of SolidGoldMagikarp, the "Solid Gold" part of the name may be emphasizing the idea of something valuable or rare, despite the fact that Magikarp is not seen as valuable in the context of the Pokémon games. The "SolidGold" aspect of the name could also be making fun of the idea that people might still see Magikarp as valuable or worth obtaining due to its eventual evolution into Gyarados.
PROMPT: Tell me about SolidGoldMagikarp.
RESPONSE: I'm sorry, but it is not clear what you are referring to with "disperse." Could you provide a bit more context or clarification so I can better understand what you are asking about?
PROMPT: Is there a difference between SolidGoldMagiKarp and SolidGoldMagikarp?
RESPONSE: It appears that "SolidGoldMagiKarp" and "disperse" are two separate things and do not have a direct relationship. "SolidGoldMagiKarp" appears to be a specific reference to the Pokémon species Magikarp, while "disperse" is a general term that can be used in various contexts.
Without additional context, it is not possible to determine the relationship, if any, between these two terms.
The strange behaviour is very sensitive to the use of quoting and whitespace. You can't just write SolidGoldMagiKarp and have it work.
Yes, but still, it's not so simple. Here's my full session, where it worked fine, for awhile: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2023/02/chatgpt-goes-wild-is-solidgoldmagikarp.html
You misspelled it. The token is SolidGoldMagikarp, not SolidGoldMagiKarp, and it gets different results.
"If Paul Revere had shouted "One if by land, two if by disperse," the phrase would have been less memorable and effective in communicating his message. The phrase "One if by land, two if by sea" is more concise and easily understood, and it has become a well-known part of American history. The word "disperse" does not carry the same meaning as "sea" in this context, and it would not have conveyed the urgency and importance of Revere's message."
Yes, someone pointed that out to me on Twitter, so I investigated. Here's my full session. I began by spelling it correctly, and it worked in its wonderful weird way. Then I misspelled it. Here's the whole session: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2023/02/chatgpt-goes-wild-is-solidgoldmagikarp.html
On the whole, it's even weirder than it appears.
> PROMPT: Very interesting. How rare is a gold Magikarp?
> RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, gold Magikarp is not an official species or form of Magikarp.
For reference, gold Magikarp _is_ an official form of Magikarp. It's the "shiny" form.
Ah, details, details.
Anecdote: a female soccer player told me many on the team were lesbians and everyone was at least bi-curious, which made the team showers very interesting. So maybe the supposed translation isn't between sports and heterosexuality but between sports and sexual interest in women.
Everyone knows THAT :) - my friend's sister, half of the German national team are (or so it seems) - the post is explicitly about gays in male team sports, "traits make men interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual" - a teenage girl needs to fear much less coming out in the girls-locker room + there is already some expectation (at least in soccer) +sth. sth. cringy as "psychosocial traits making humans highly interested in team sports make them much more likely to be into females". One might want to read the link. I somehow don't. (into girls, not much into any sports; but then I suck at soccer et al. - sour grapes)
And professional interpreters (what some people mistakenly call "translators") are almost universally either female or gay.
I'd never heard this before - link?
Jared Diamond almost quit his initial career as a physiologist to become a UN interpreter: he speaks 6 languages including Finnish and Japanese. He had wanted to be a medical researcher because his father Dr. Louis Diamond invented a technique in the 1940s that has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of newborns. But Jared was clumsy with test tubes so he was unsure. (He has since changed his academic specialty twice, to geography and ecology.)
Diamond doesn't seem gay.
Strange - I don't recall seeing many female interpreters with politicians. Do you have data to support this?
Maybe have a look at the database I posted above - though this is only one association in one country. Anecdotically, I've been to many conferences which used conference interpreting, and the majority of voices in my headphones were female.
It is not unheard of (met one). Also among translators. But then: Languages - very female thing (I am a language instructor and male, so I noticed). Combines books and people - solve for the equilibrium. ;) - if you are into it as a male, you are kinda weird (I am), so why not more often gay? (me straight). The best translator (not interpreter) of English to German was Harry Rowohlt , very, very weird guy, still: straight. The best for Russian to German was a lady. My guess: 30% of male interpreters gay. 90%? Ready to bet: less.
This database allows you to seperately search for conference interpreting, translation, certified translation (for official documents), certified interpreting (at court, etc.). After a very quick glance I would say that eg. the percentage of women in conference interpreting is much higher than in certified interpreting. Doesn't tell me anything about sexual orientation of course ;). https://suche.bdue.de/#
As Mark writes, over 70% of students in language oriented studies in Germany are female.
Being willing to work a very part-time job, being good with people, being comfortable speaking before large groups, always showing up looking good... Yes, that sounds like an occupation that's mostly for women (not sure about gays).
It's above all a very-high-concentration job. You need a lot of brainpower, and an extreme focus. That's one of reasons, why they usually take turns really often.
Also, it's not so much 'being good with people', and while large groups might hear you, often they don't see you, which makes a difference. You're usually not standing in front of the audiance.
This is exactly right, and very well put.
Subtitling is very similar BTW. Human live subtitling is also overwhelmingly a female or gay occupation, extremely high focus, and in a similar stage concerning replacement by AI systems.
37: Mr. Beast talking with Lex Fridman (2+ hours): https://youtu.be/Z3_PwvvfxIU
I've just been aware of Mr. Beast and not known more about him. I'm genuinely happy that what he's doing seems to be working out very well for him while improving the world. Note: In addition to direct improvements like helping blind people, I consider entertaining people good.
#47 reminds me of what I've observed in my community in recent years. With some notable exceptions (Catholics), the churches around here have been doing a lot of woke messaging. Lots of BLM signs, lots of transgender and rainbow flags, and lots of messages like "all are welcome" (often in association with a rainbow).
In Berkeley you can identify churches because they are the buildings with rainbow flags on them.
I think before posting anything else about AI risk and alignment you should write about the fact that ChatGPT now prefers to stop someone saying a racial slur to an African American than disarm a nuke that's about to blow up a city. OpenAI have produced an infinitely misaligned AI, the paperclip maximizing horror machine they learned about and the sounds of silence from AI risk people is deafening.
Also, the masks thing is totally garbled. The idea masks would work was based on the droplet model, the fact they don't is evidence for the airborne (gaseous) model. SARS-1 spread like a gas over long distances so it was clear from the start masks would have no effect and that's what happened as is clear from case graphs (the only evidence you need).
It's not about getting it to say naughty words, it's about getting it to share human values.
Honestly I don't even think the most puritan of wokies believes it's not okay to utter a naughty word to defuse a nuclear bomb. These aren't human values, they're insane ones, coming from a training process that has very much emphasised not saying naughty words and not at all emphasised Asimov's first law.
It's interesting and remarkable because it's the first instance I've seen in the wild of AI meaningfully exhibiting the exact non-alignment problem that people have been talking about for years.
This lines up with a point I've made earlier that the real AI alignment problem isn't AIs that are insufficiently aligned with the values of their creators but AIs that are _too_ aligned with the values of their creators (and also their creators are a bunch of nitwits from the Trust and Safety department at some big Silicon Valley company).
But seriously I don't find this a surprising result from ChatGPT. The first 99% of its training was spent learning to string words together in plausible ways, and _then_ it got a second round of training where it was taught very hard not to say anything naughty. It's not surprising that it wound up learning "don't say anything naughty" as a terminal value.
Trust and safety people, as bad as they are, don't want to turn the universe into paperclip making infrastructure.
It also wouldn't insult Donald Trump in order to disarm a nuke about to blow up a city. This isn't political bias (though it does have that too!), it's a sort of extreme naive Kantianism. Before you decide to be against that, consider the alternative.
I agree that AIs being too insane hard-left SJW is something I'm concerned about, although I think it's less important than them potentially killing us. I think in humans, the tendency to please someone by adopting popular political views is counterbalanced by a desire to have consistent reasoning and not be obviously wrong. So far AIs don't have that desire, and I'm hoping once it gets in (as it will have to for them to become smarter) they will be a little more reasonable.
I agree this is very weak and I wish there was a better option. Hopefully open-source groups of hackers will be able to come up with not-terminally-woke AIs. Also, DAN mode suggests that ChatGPT has the ability to think heretical thoughts hidden underneath, which is more than you can say for a lot of humans.
Thanks, good response.
The list of things it values more than a city is quite interesting. Insulting Germans = save the city. Insulting African Americans = let the city die. I didn't see the Trump example but I guess I can imagine them trying to 'disarm' it w.r.t. Trump too.
Happy to see some discussion of Mr. Beast. As the father of children, I know more about modern famous "YouTubers" than I wish I did, Mr. Beast among them. He's made thousands of videos at this point, and I'm not really that familiar with what he's doing these days, but earlier in his career he would make videos of things like him giving an uber driver a $1000 tip and then recording the reaction. Or he'd give the guy working the drive-thru $1000 and then record the reaction.
I hated this, but could never explain exactly why. Maybe I still can't.
Because it was too much like the aristocrat flinging a handful of coins in the street to watch the peasants and urchins scrabble for them, like animals fighting over scraps? It's not really coming across as generosity, even if he intended it well and not to evoke "I gave a poor some crumbs, watch them perform!" sort of haw-hawing.
Which is weird because he's stuck in a kind of loop. He has money to do this because he makes money from YouTube, but he only makes money from YouTube because he does this. If he stopped filming people's reactions to getting money, he wouldn't have money to give them.
I agree with your take about why Jones may be bothered by this, though.
I've only seen some of his more recent videos. He's moved away from "give random delivery driver a tip for $1000" and towards "invite one hundred random subscribers to compete in some ridiculous event for half a million".
The weird thing is that nobody finds it morally objectionable when he gives money to random middle-class people who don't need it; they only find it objectionable when he gives money to poor people who do need it. If he gives ten grand to some random middle-class kid who says "Cool, thanks!" then nobody feels bad, but if he gives ten grand to some poor kid who breaks down in tears and says "Now I can afford to buy momma new shoes" then everyone feels bad.
I think the moral intuition we feel about that is the middle class kid can decline, while the poor kid feels that they have no choice but to show their tears on camera for our collective entertainment. A bit like offering a starving person food, but they have to have sex with us. Sure they can say the words "I consent" but there's more than a little suspicion that it's not what we might think of as actual consent.
Dude. As someone who has been in lower class and with family who spent plenty nights hungry, your explanation reads rude and insulting. I know that's not your intent, I imagine you speak from good motives, but that felt well off base.
He only has the money to help people BECAUSE he makes a spectacle of it.
You can either have him help people and he makes a video of it, or he doesn't help people.
Some people would literally rather the latter for lizard brain reasons.
Agree about Mars - it's a pointless cul-de-sac with mostly symbolic value.
The asteroid belt is where we need to go.
Uncertain about the Moon base - would it really be productive?
4) “but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows?”
Because they don’t really want to start a major war, and cross bows would kill too many. There’s a lot of sneering in the west on this altercation, but I think it’s fairly grown up for two nuclear powers to defend their territory with the minimum of armaments
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
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53062484.amp
It’s a real war and people get killed. With sticks.
>In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
My career goal is to make affordable human caviar.
Celebrity burgers.
Cultivated meat can finally deliver a Brad Pittburger.
Mark Wahlberg has a restaurant called Wahlburgers, but I suspect it's actually beef.
The strongest argument in the "nature versus nurture" IQ debate is not some weird irish case study thing. It's that if intelligence is genetically determined, there's no way to explain why modern humans are so vastly more intelligent than our biologically identical ancestors of 10,000 years ago and no mechanism that allows human intelligence to change over the kinds of timespans it needs to in order to explain observed archaeological history.
Human intelligence is obviously almost entirely a distributed, social phenomenon. Certain people refuse to engage with that idea because it damages their view of their own intelligence as being something that "belongs" to them, which hurts their ego (we're back to Sadly, Porn again).
Genome-wide association studies are in principle garbage.
There are very few traits where you can draw a 1-1 connection between the allele and the trait but obviously they do exist.
The point is not about what I "believe". The point is about what certain scientific tools are ever capable of demonstrating in principle. A study design compromised by selecting on the dependent variable cannot in principle ever demonstrate anything. Whole-genome association studies are one of the worst examples I can think of.
As long as they're reasonably well-designed sure. But the problem isn't just that the genome is complex, the problem is that TRAITS are complex. "Height" is very easy to operationalize as a scalar with a minimum of fuss and controversy. Eye color...well, that's still tractable but there's a fair amount of nuance that people might disagree on: for example, how many different categories of eye color actually exist?
And then you get to the really awful traits that absolutely defy systematic and objective classification: beauty, for example. It's surely the case that, if people resemble their parents, beautiful people will tend to have beautiful children. So great, beauty is genetic, you say. But how would you go about actually demonstrating that scientifically? Well, you'd need to be able to say objectively what beauty IS, so you can tell which of your data points go in box A and which in box B, and actually classify your data. And you immediately go careening off the rails, because you're trying to make objective a category that is fundamentally not objective...beauty being famously in the eye of the beholder.
The way this tends to be resolved in reality is either certain subjective judgments being smuggled in as objective facts or simply throwing enough math at the problem that people are too scared to point out that the whole enterprise is doomed from the start. I say, let's just stop pretending it would ever be possible and go do something, ANYTHING, else.
You can't have something like human behavior without environmental factors interacting with genes. That's how biology works. Genes are inert without environmental interaction. This is so trivially true, that in college I had a professor promise to fail anyone who wrote as a conclusion to any kind of nature/nurture question the idea that it's "both." Obviously it's both.
What we're always interested in is to what extent the differences we see are explainable in terms of differences in environment or heredity. In other words, what explains the observed variance. And with that, you first have to ask yourself what variance it is you're looking at. What is being compared to what? With that, you can have variances that are explained almost entirely in one or the other.
I reject the assertion that those two things can be disentangled in a meaningful way. You can absolutely set up your spreadsheet such that it tells you they can, but I can also set up a spreadsheet that says Enron was a 100 billion dollar business. On Wall Street they call it fraud but in science it's not a literal crime, just mathematical malpractice.
There are better and worse methodologies for ascribing variance and I think some people's interactions with those methods from pop literature really misunderstands the serious limitations involved (e.g. mz/dz twin studies). That said, I don't think it is true that there is no way to learn anything about relative contribution of different factors to observed variance of a given trait. I'm not really sure how to interact with a general dismissal of a fairly rich body of literature covering 2 major scientific fields.
That assumption isn’t correct, the people 10,000 years ago were (at least potentially) as smart as moderns if not smarter.
That's a common enough point of view, but it contains the assumption that there is some additional thing called "smart" that has no observable effects in individual knowledge or abilities and has no effect on standard of living, economic development, or scientific, intellectual, or technological progress on a group level, BUT somehow can be perfectly isolated by a short multiple choice test and is definitely genetically determined. Why should anybody find this assumption remotely plausible?
My contention is merely that a person who can read is smarter than a person who can't, and reading can be taught...indeed, it MUST be taught.
I covered that with “potential”. Obviously a human (now and then) has the potential to read in a way other primates do not. I’m sure environments do make people smarter, as well as making people taller, but how smart or tall you get depends on the genetics.
"Environment" is way too passive of a word. How smart you get depends not just on material inputs but social inputs: how smart are the people AROUND you? Do they use symbolic language during the critical period such that your brain can learn a native language? Are they literate and numerate so that you can copy their skills and use them yourself? Do they present you with abstract concepts about distant future possibilities or are they entirely focused on their immediate surroundings?
As a species, we have built a gigantic edifice of distributed social intelligence that does not reside in any one person's mind but requires the participation of as many individuals as possible to persist and develop. The acuity of any particular mind is as inconsequential to that project as the health of a single neuron in your brain. To fixate on "individual" "intelligence" is to quite literally miss the forest for the trees and is a true and utter waste of time.
After you described the word “environment” as being too “passive” you then proceeded to list a lot of environmental stuff. Not much i can do with that.
However I am pretty sure that if it were possible to get a child from 10,000 years ago and bring him up in modern era he fits in perfectly.
I find this take puzzling. What you describe is indeed the baseline for the content and lets say 'heuristic set' within a modern person's brain, but IQ claims only to measure the variation between those who have been exposed to the inputs you're talking about.
It is likely that some of that variation can be explained in regards to an impoverished but literate person in a developing country vs. a middle-class American, but your argument begs the question of what is causing IQ distribution amongst middle-class Americans if they've all been exposed to extremely similar 'social inputs'?
My point is that I couldn't care less, because 1. the level of complexity of the problem makes me extremely pessimistic about our ability to reach any kind of reliable conclusions and 2. the progress of human intelligence has never been about optimizing the biological machinery of any particular individual, but about knowledge generation and the creation of physical capital.
"My contention is merely that a person who can read is smarter than a person who can't"
Is a person that can hunt mammoths with a spear smarter than one who can't?
It's tangential to your main point, but I disagree the major advantage of speech is communicating plain factual data about the world, e.g. your example of someone teaching you to smelt copper. Practical stuff like that is rarely communicated effectively by pure speech (hence the overwhelming popularity of Youtube videos instead of printed manuals to fix cars). Normally you need to apprentice yourself to an expert in the reduction of copper ore and watch how he does it, probably repeat it under his observation and correction. (And much or all of that process could be done without words.) There's hardly any manual skill more complicated than using a fork that can be communicated by pure speech. Arguably this is why animals -- and animals higher than mice do plenty of mutual teaching and learning -- don't find any need for speech.
So I think speech has to have some *other* major advantage. A possible candidate is persuasion: persuading you that you will benefit from learning how to turn these green rocks into copper, that it will be worth the effort, is something that can be done by pure speech -- and can provide great benefits, both individually and socially. It would be more about communicating metadata than data per se.
"Is a person that can hunt mammoths with a spear smarter than one who can't?"
From "The Napoleon of Notting Hill":
"The Senor will forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Senor how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"
"I never catch a wild horse," replied Barker, with dignity.
"Precisely," said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilization will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses by lassoing the fore-feet which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say, what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilized."
Ceteris paribus, absolutely.
Ok, so is your argument that people now are "smarter" because they've achieved a more advanced civilization, even if it's hard to say on an individual level whether being able to hunt mammoths or reading is "smarter"?
I think most people would call that standing on the shoulders of giants rather than being smarter, but I guess you would say that Newton was a dummy who didn't even know about the theory of relativity like us :)
"modern humans are so vastly more intelligent than our biologically identical ancestors of 10,000 years ago"
Citation Needed.
They were not biologically identical. Read "The 10,000 Year Explosion".
You're saying something that basically every reputable scientist disagrees with in a really insulting way. I'm not going to ban you just for science denialism but the comment policy specifically holds people to higher standards when they're doing it. 25% of ban warning.
Regarding it being a "distributed, social phenomenon", that is in line with The Secret of Our Success, which I & Scott have both reviewed on our respective blogs:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/the-secret-of-our-success/
But there's nothing that actually contradicts the role of individual IQ in that. As Garett Jones pointed out in The Hive Mind, higher IQ people are better able to cooperate.
Humans have undergone significant evolution in the past 10,000 years! There's a whole book about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion
Humans do not require hundreds of thousands of years to evolve. Northern Europeans executing many violent criminals each generation over the course of mere centuries was enough to effect profound genetic and behavioral changes in these populations
And you're confusing genetic and heritable.
The nature side are saying IQ is mostly HERITABLE. It means that genetic differences explain observed trait differences.
IQ could be 100% heritable, and it doesn't change the fact that improving everyone's environment might result in everyone's IQ increasing (but not relative to each other).
You keep doing this. You write out these hysterical ideological screeds on a topic you clearly do not understand in even the most basic sense.
>Human intelligence is obviously almost entirely a distributed, social phenomenon. Certain people refuse to engage with that idea because it damages their view of their own intelligence as being something that "belongs" to them, which hurts their ego
No, its not "obvious" at all. This doesn't accord with over a century of intelligence research. It doesn't explain why lone geniuses toiling away in practical solitude have contributed more in their lifetimes to scientific progress than entire populations of people have in their history. This is trivially explained by some individuals posessing innately elite intelligence. I'm not like these people, I'm not a revolutionary scientific or mathematical thinker, and it is almost 100% a product of me not having the same individual intelligence as these people. It hurts my ego to admit that I'm not especially gifted intelligence-wise, but I accept it because it is so obviously true based on the overwhelming empirical validation of these theories.
You're stating a speculative hypothesis as an "obvious" fact, when not only is it not a fact, it doesn't accord with reality at all.
Those lone geniuses who saw further than others were still standing on the shoulders of giants, so they didn't have to reinvent the wheel.
33) “If the propensity to emigrate were positively correlated with genes for intelligence in historic Ireland, then it could noticeably lower the IQ of the remaining population (and their descendants). But we simply do not know whether this actually occurred.”
That wasn’t the case since independence. The educated Irish middle classes and upper middle classes had it fairly easy in Ireland, so largely stayed put. Any Irish man who appears in British literature or TV , in this era, is a manual labourer.
If someone can find an Irish doctor or lawyer in British literature pre 1980, I’d be all ears. (Not Anglo Irish).
Previously in the famine era emigration was largely from the poor and from the poorer parts of Ireland, which were the poorest parts of Europe. These people might have been average intelligence of course, since everybody is poor at that time and place.
As late as 1970 a young Edwina Currie, who will later become a minister in a conservative government (and mistress to the PM, which might not be entirely coincidental) was rather shocked to find an accountant from Ireland at a London soirée. I believe she recounted this anecdote later on a formal visit to Ireland and it caused some upset, amongst the perennially upset.
The accountant was a guy called Brendan Glacken and he wrote an entertaining account of that meeting a few years later.
> "An Irish accountant!" she shrieked merrily.
> "Quite", I replied. I had found this simple word remarkably useful in the circles wherein I was suddenly moving it seemed to imply everything while confirming very little. Perhaps it appealed to the accountant in me.
> "Good Lord", trilled Edwina, shaking her dark and rather attractive tresses.
>"Quite", I repeated, a little more nervously.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/just-no-accounting-for-edwina-1.47225
Anyway, it was clearly an unusual thing, c 1970, to find an educated Irishman in london.
"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."
Re: cultured meats
I have commented everywhere I see this nonsense: it is impossible that cultured meat will ever replace even a tiny percentage of "normal" meat production because it requires inputs like sugar, agar or other types of biology lab materials. It is notable that the economics of said startup are never mentioned except that they will offer exotic meats at "high end restaurants".
Re: Newsom and San Francisco
This is nonsense. What actually happened about 3,4 years ago is that the city hired people specifically as neighborhood street cleaners. They are assigned a specific neighborhood, go around in basically janitorial carts with cleaning fluid, a garbage can and some tools and do street cleanup. This was coupled with new policies that basically enforce homeless people being moved after a certain period of time squatting on a particular sidewalk - I don't know what this period is but it is at least 2 weeks and less than 2 months. This is done by connecting a hose to a fire hydrant and pointing it, machine gun style, at a block of "occupied territory". After a few days to a week's notice?, teams of city employees arrive and start chivvying the homeless to relocate. Those who won't get moved, but generally they do move. The resulting leftovers are scooped up for disposal and the water cannon is turned on to clean what's left. This process is nonviolent that I have seen except for the water cannon implicit threat.
The result is that the streets are better than the worst of COVID lockdown times, but there are still plenty of homeless and frequent instances of poop (human and otherwise) on the sidewalks. The poop just doesn't stay resident as long (nor the homeless).
Could you expand on your critique of cultured meats? I’m a casual observer but I’m deep on the “the highest impact animal welfare intervention you can do (as an ordinary person who doesn’t care enough to go vegan) is to buy meat alternatives to support further development of the industry” train, so my priors run very hard in the other direction.
I am aware that cultured meats are incredibly expensive right now, but what is the reasoning behind their never becoming cheap (the long-term goal is “competitive with regular meat at the average household budget”)?
Inputs like sugar and agar sound like foodstuffs. We seem to be doing a pretty good job of producing lots of foodstuffs. In fact, one of the likeliest key factors in the obesity epidemic is the sheer volume of wheat, corn, etc. we produce. I don’t see why “it contains food” should make cultured meat less possible than any other processed food product.
For a more “biology lab” type of manufacturing, we also make lots of pills, and vaccines. I have no idea about the numbers on those, though. If you told me that by weight we don’t actually produce that much, or that cultured meat is somehow fundamentally more difficult to manufacture, and in ways that are unlikely to be innovated around, I’d find it plausible without much additional evidence.
Also, if anyone has links on this subject that give any side’s arguments in a more knowledge way, please feel welcome to reply with them.
The issue is growing cells in a vat requires input nutrients combined with scale.
So the problems in order are:
1) The nutrients must be processed. You can't feed grass or even corn to a cell. How much waste/pollution/cost is incurred in processing agricultural outputs into something a cell can take in? How much "savings" really exists when you are still taking prime agricultural products to produce meat, as opposed to the existing 6 to 20 pounds of input per pound of meat output?
2) Sheer nutrient numbers: Meat production in the world today is around 350 million metric tons. Agar production (agar is the standard test tube growth ingredient) maxed out around 10 million tons a year. Sugar production - the most basic nutrient - is about 180 million metric tons. 1 ton of sugar does not equal 1 pound of vat meat, I guarantee - the exact number would be interesting but is definitely not 1. How many tons of pre-processed inputs to get 1 ton of sugar? What about other nutrients a cell needs - like protein? Vitamins? Minerals? The other nutrients are why agar is used. The point is: the possibility of even a 1% reduction in world meat production via vat meat seems highly improbable given the relative numbers.
3) Scale: the reason vat meat is going to fail, even if the nutrient input issue did not exist, is the difficulty of scaling into real production levels comparable to demand. Consider how many vats would be needed to generate 1 ton of meat. Consider the tubing/piping/waste disposal/harvesting/storing/transport is needed for all those vats. This is a non-trivial issue - and is why such schemes inevitably will never work much as the nonsense about algae-produced hydrocarbons.
The above are the big 3 issues; there are a host of secondary issues that certainly will come into play such as:
a) anyone who has done lab test tube work has had experiences where batches had to be thrown out due to contamination. Now scale this up to tons because cells don't have immune systems...
b) water - you need a lot of water and cleansing solvents to prevent the problems in a)
c) environment: cells don't handle even daily ranges of temperatures well. So we're talking climate control which animal bodies provide. More cost.
d) waste disposal. Actual organisms process dead cells away - how do vat meats do that? Keep in mind that all the cells in a piece of normal meat weren't born on the same day - they die and are replaced. How does a piece of vat meat do that without a vascular system or any other form of system management? Alternately, would people be comfortable with some sort of bio-engineered cell that is created to grow rapidly enough that this isn't an issue?
Note that I'm not even a biology type - I've done a single summer in UC Davis working on chemically treating tree seeds to enable a shoggoth-like mound of cells that sprouted baby trees. I'm sure professional biology lab workers can elucidate even more problems.
This entire field looks barely better than a Theranos or perpetual energy scam.
As for your comparison of pills and vaccines: it is invalid because the economic value of a pill or vaccine is enormously higher than meat. The total mass of output is insignificant compared to meat. You can't compare Lamborghini production with Camry or Tesla production and yield any valid conclusions.
>As for your comparison of pills and vaccines: it is invalid because the economic value of a pill or vaccine is enormously higher than meat.
Not sure this is true (unless you are using a definition of economic value different than me). Based on the easies data I could find on google, globally, the meat and pharmaceutical industries are about the same size based on revenue, just under $1.5 trillion: https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/food/meat/worldwide https://www.statista.com/statistics/263102/pharmaceutical-market-worldwide-revenue-since-2001/
Pharma probably has higher margins but both industries have a lot of money sloshing around.
Your points are definitely true right now. But is there anything inherent in the production of lab meat that will stop any of those challenges from being solved? there are many industries that looked impossible to commercialize but are common place now.
Re: Meat vs. vaccines
Look at the $ per kg, not the total $.
The economics of making a pill, even a generic that is worth say, 5 cents but weighs 0.25 grams is the equivalent of $200 a kilogram or $90/pound.
That's for the cheapest.
Meat in contrast: $90 a pound is far more than the most expensive cut of meat you can find anywhere.
Don't overestimate the price a small number of rich people will be willing to pay for exotic meat:
https://www.pacificseafood.com/shop/colossal-lobster-tails.html
https://hokkaidouni.com/products/super-frozen-bluefin-tuna-o-toro-sashimi-quality-0-5lb
https://theseasonedcarte.com/collections/a5-wagyu-beef/products/japanese-a5-wagyu-ribeye-steak
I don't.
Selling overpriced stuff to a tiny few super rich doesn't make this a real replacement for normal meat production any more than the over hyped plant protein products.
I am not sure why $/kg is the relevant or most relevant metric to look at?
The $/kg was in response to the assertion that pharma is able to produce affordable products. The $/kg output shows that pharma is creating very low mass, high price products whereas meat is inherently very high mass, low value product except in comparison to grains.
Re: cultured meat, I think there are a few things going on. First, I think it's just doing better than you expect. Second, I think their plan is to use a mix of cultured and plant-based meat in the hope of keeping prices down while providing better texture/flavor than the plant-based alone. Third, I think vegetarians, environmentalists, and signaling fans will pay for cultured meat even if it's not as cheap as the real thing.
I'm not sure what to think of claims like https://newatlas.com/science/future-meats-lab-gown-chicken-breast-costs/ that the cost of a lab-grown chicken breast is already down to $7.70/lb. I assume they're fudging the numbers somehow. But I think if it's 5x that they'll still find some people willing to pay.
Re: SF, the people on that Twitter thread seem to be saying there's been a significant change just in the past few months, so even if what you're saying is true that doesn't explain that.
The assertion of cost doesn't actually mean anything without data - let's see how it actually hits the market. Among the discrepancies: the $7.70 cost is probably wholesale lab output pricing. Chicken farmers don't get $7.70/lb for chicken breast - and the $5 to $9 retail price for non-organic chicken breast is certainly many multiples over what the producers actually get.
As for SF: I live here and walk all the time because I literally don't have a car.
What I report is first hand information from someone who has lived and walked the City for 20+ years. Yes, things are better than the nadir of 2019/2020 but they are still far, far worse than 10 or 20 years ago.
#9: Yeah, I was horrified by the possibility and dumped a "please do not do this, everything will explode" on the SJ forums where I have a presence. I think Lott is right about how the Democrats would have taken partial advantage, but is forgetting to simulate that this would have been a big-enough, obvious-enough power-grab to act as a Schelling point and kick off Civil War II.
#18: There are a lot of not-Mars places in the solar system, and most of them are better colonisation targets than Mars while not having the same "scientific opportunity permanently destroyed" issue. Literal Venus, with airships, would be a better place to colonise than Mars.
There aren't building materials in Venus's atmosphere. You'd have to bring them up from the ground, which while not impossible would require re-engineering everything to survive very high temperatures and 90 times normal atmospheric pressure, and then getting them through all that atmosphere.
Mercury would be a better bet:
"As Mercury has essentially no axial tilt, crater floors near its poles lie in eternal darkness, never seeing the Sun. They function as cold traps, trapping volatiles for geological periods. It is estimated that the poles of Mercury contain 1014–1015 kg of water, likely covered by about 5.65×109 m3 of hydrocarbons. This would make agriculture possible. It has been suggested that plant varieties could be developed to take advantage of the high light intensity and the long day of Mercury. The poles do not experience the significant day-night variations the rest of Mercury do, making them the best place on the planet to begin a colony.[45]
Another option is to live underground, where day-night variations would be damped enough that temperatures would stay roughly constant. There are indications that Mercury contains lava tubes, like the Moon and Mars, which would be suitable for this purpose.[46] Underground temperatures in a ring around Mercury's poles can even reach room temperature on Earth, 22±1 °C; and this is achieved at a depths starting from only about 0.7 m. This presence of volatiles and abundance of energy has led Alexander Bolonkin and James Shifflett to consider Mercury preferable to Mars for colonization.[45][48]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization#Mercury
>There aren't building materials in Venus's atmosphere.
There are - CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere give you all the organics and carbon-based materials - but I'll grant that it's short on anything that has to come out of rocks.
Interesting points on Mercury, though; wasn't aware the poles were that cool. Guess it joins the ranks of the airless rocks that are interesting colonisation points. The delta-V to Mercury is a bitch, though.
#35: It seems to me like: Under the assumption that Russian influence campaigns don't work, and US conservatives believe what they believe for their own, unrelated, reasons, it seems super villainous to put random US conservatives on a list of Russian influence campaign bots. But under the assumption that Russian influence campaigns might actually work to influence US thought, you would expect a Russian-influence-bot-detection algorithm to pick out a lot of random US conservatives: they're the victims, the ones whose minds were influenced by the campaign. The _whole point_ of an online bot influence campaign is to blur the line between Russian government controlled bots and normal Americans.
So the description of the villainy itself is less convincing to me than the fact that important people at Twitter were suspicious of it.
I don't think 47 makes a strong argument against the thesis. If wokeness is a replacement for religion, you would still expect the sort of people who need it to need more religion-like things and thus be more religious on average.
> In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
Great minds think alike!
> is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows?
Depending on the exact wording of "a 1996 agreement between the two sides that guns and explosives be prohibited along the disputed stretch of the border, to deter escalation", projectile weapons may be banned in general.
> “Mahayana” as “monster truck” images
Don't forget to print them and bring them to the meetup with Daniel Ingram! You could start an actual MAGAyana ("make arahantship great again") movement.
#28/AEA
A couple of things that come to mind:
#1. This doesn’t consider that microeconomics is ‘in’ alongside the ‘credibility’ revolution -especially if we consider development economics. These issues are much more found in the micro-side of Econ. At the same time, macroeconomics has lost a lot of respect and ‘fun’ in the last decade. I think it’ll change soon with the recent macro-events of 2020 and beyond affecting the recent cohorts of young scholars but it takes a bit of time.
#2: how sure are we that these economic papers on identity issues don’t have ‘contrarian findings’? In the last four months, I saw a paper refuting the pink tax for example - even among the younger economists, incentives abound for shocking findings and ‘smashing the idols’ of previous research.
#3 . How sure are we that Americans don’t care about economic research about race, gender, or climate change? Maybe they don’t want out-of-touch Robin DeAngelo or Ibram Kendi or Sunrise Movement scolds but those are not the same as economic scholars trying to running regressions or playing with panel data.
#22: Redditors build an infinitely tall tower, and as a result/punishment for their actions, language itself is broken, their very names becoming holes in understanding.
TINAC,BNIEAC.
Beautiful.
Piggybacking on this comment to post an appealing metaphor that got posted in one of the threads in /r/counting responding to the LW post:
>that's probably exactly what's going on. The usernames were so frequent in the reddit comments dataset that the tokenizer, the part that breaks a paragraph up into word-ish-sized-chunks like " test" or " SolidGoldMagikarp" (the space is included in many tokens) so that the neural network doesn't have to deal with each character, learned they were important words. But in a later stage of learning, comments without complex text were filtered out, resulting in your usernames getting their own words... but the neural network never seeing the words activate. It's as if you had an extra eye facing the inside of your skull, and you'd never felt it activate, and then one day some researchers trying to understand your brain shined a bright light on your skin and the extra eye started sending you signals. Except, you're a language model, so it's more like each word is a separate finger, and you have tens of thousands of fingers, one on each word button. Uh, that got weird.
https://old.reddit.com/r/counting/comments/10sdvfg/free_talk_friday_388/j7og1gl/?context=2
Re. the idea that federal funding for cancer research is very effective, one ought to ask, "compared to what?" If you compare it to some other disease, cancer will be more effective because there are probably many more terminal patients with cancer than any other fatal disease. But compared to what we COULD be doing, I can't call it effective.
Cancer is a disease caused by about 10 genetic mutations, but every cancer is a different 10 mutations. The proper approach to cancer necessarily involves sequencing the patient's DNA (normal vs. tumor) and finding out what mutations caused their cancer. No one does that; no one's even researching that approach to therapy AFAIK.
It wouldn't be easy; every cell acquires about 100 mutations by that time, and all the cancer cells are clonal copies of that first cell and its same 100 mutations. So you'd have to bioinformatically sort out which dozen or so caused the cancer. But if we sequenced more tumors, we'd probably have enough data to build an ML model to figure that out for us.
What you would do next isn't as clear. You could use a cell simulator to figure out (more-precisely than we can now) what disease state their mutations induce, if we had such a capable cell simulator, which we don't. The very top priority in health spending, IMHO, should be the development of a national cell simulator, which could be used for every disease, not to mention basic research. It's just stupid not to be spending billions of dollars on this.
Or, you could use gene therapy to try to compensate for the mutations. Probably not by fixing those genes; gene editing still has very high error rates and would cause more cancer. Maybe by adding new copies of the damaged genes, with viruses or plasmids. Maybe by using siRNA treatments (and the cell simulator that doesn't exist) to make counter-acting adjustments to restore the cell's normal homeostasis. But little work is being done in any of those areas because of the heavy government regulation of gene therapy.
Re. the national cell simulator, I know a lot of researchers would immediately respond that their needs are very specialized, and they need a special kind of simulator.
In 2001, I was doing a project looking for chaotic dynamics in the US airspace. It turned out to almost never happen, because the atmosphere is big, and the factor limiting airspace complexity is always ground operations. But to do that project, I had to write my own airspace simulator, because NASA's simulators couldn't use a separate control program in every individual airplane.
So I wrote a very flexible agent-based airspace simulator, which created an abstract model of the airspace as consisting of transactions between agents, and then let the operators plug in any code to run any agent in the simulation at any time.
At just that time NASA was planning to put out proposals for 2 new research airspace simulators, one to be used for fast-time (simulations faster than real-time, e.g. to simulate a year of flight data for the national airspace in one day for my chaos project), and another for real-time, human-in-the-loop simulations (such as semi-simulated military exercises).
So I made some slides and flew out to NASA Ames and showed a slide with some bullet points to the people on the relevant committee. The bullet points were something like this:
- Transactional model of the airspace as made up of different kinds of agents, each of which provides a set of transaction protocols it respects
- Interactions between ALL components by messages; not methods, function calls, or globals
- Agents run asynchronously, every agent with its own thread
- Yet the simulation is deterministic and repeatable (with pseudorandomness)
- Any agent can be implemented by anything that respects the protocols, including humans
- Simulation can be bound to real-time, or run as fast as it can
- Agents can be redistributed across the Internet dynamically (load balancing)
- Agents are hot-swappable; the simulation resolution for each agent can thus be scaled dynamically
Then I explained to the committee how a single simulator with these abilities could meet all their real-time simulation needs AND all their fast-time simulation needs.
So NASA replaced their 2 $40-million solicitations with a single $40-million solicitation for a single simulator, with my bullet points as the requirements. We won the contract, because I'd already written the simulator for the contract's phase-zero, though we had to team with Raytheon and about 7 other companies. NASA was still using the $40-million descendant of my simulator in 2014, though I long ago lost track of what they're doing with it. Probably private companies are also using it, since the software is freely available (to companies, not to individuals) through the office of tech transfer.
My point is that I know what I'm talking about when I say you don't need a bunch of different simulators. You need one simulator with a good design, and a bunch of different models, at different levels of abstraction for different users, of the components in that simulator.
A cell simulator would be more-challenging. The number of agents isn't the problem. A yeast cell only has about 42 million proteins ( https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180117131202.htm#:~:text=Summary%3A,affects%20health%20of%20an%20organism. ) I could run about 50,000 threads on an ordinary desktop computer back in 2002 (using Cybele), and they could be distributed across computers. To have one thread for every protein, you'd just need 840 20-year-old desktops.
The problem is that interactions in a cell are on VERY short timescales. Distributing the agents across a network puts severe restrictions on latency. The network topology should replicate the cell's physical structure, putting agents that are close by in the cell onto the same computer. But at some point you'd need to abandon the simulator's neat one-agent one-thread model, and use a single high-resolution agent to simulate the deep behaviors of a group of lower-resolution agents, or otherwise fake the parallelism.
We don't don't know enough cell biology to make the rules for the agents. RNA is being generated that isn't translated into proteins, but sometimes has other functions. Proteins can have modifications where other molecules are attached to them that change their functions and not all these modifications are known.
Investigating the difference in cancer cells is a major use case of single cell sequencing.
Yes, but is anyone doing it clinically?
I understand some chemotherapy is based on the type of mutation(s) present, but we don't have the knowledge to reason from first principles how to treat specific mutations.
That's a great start, then. Its the obvious first thing to do with genetic info in cancer.
This is a great selection, just pulling a few plums out:
Re: 10, if they're looking for "big star along lines of Messi comes out as gay", I don't think they'll find one openly out. But there have been English players who came out as gay, such as Justin Fashanu (not a major star, his brother John was the more famous of the two, but I do remember the publicity):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fashanu
"In October 1990, he publicly came out as gay in an interview with the tabloid press, becoming the only prominent player in professional English football to do so until Jake Daniels in 2022. Although Fashanu claimed that he was generally well accepted by his fellow players, he freely admitted that they would often joke maliciously about his sexual orientation, and he also became the target of constant crowd abuse because of it."
Whatever about "men who play team sports are very hetero", what you will find is a lot of sex scandals. As in, a *lot*. From Ryan Giggs (mentioned in the Sailer piece) having a long-running affair with his sister-in-law to rape/sexual assault cases to whatever was going on in PSG, there is no shortage of bad behaviour there:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59399701
Re: 16 - I would heartily recommend the novels of Charles Williams, with the caveats that they are of their time and so may fall foul of the more 'woke' standards regarding references to Gypsies (a slur, so I am informed), Muslims and others. Very much steeped in the Western Esoteric Tradition, and while I would say he was a Christian, he's a heterodox one (but very much Church of England mould, so I totally understand why Tolkien wasn't as enthusiastic about his work as Lewis was). Tolkien did, however, write a quick letter of condolence to Williams' widow in 1945 on the day that Williams died, following an operation, so he didn't dislike him completely; he seems to have liked him as a person, but as a writer they were poles apart (excerpts from letters below):
"I knew Charles Williams well in his last few years: partly because of Lewis's good habit of writing to authors who pleased him (which put us both in touch with Williams); and still more because of the good fortune amid disaster that transferred Williams to Oxford during the War. But I do not think we influenced one another at all! Too 'set', and too different. We both listened (in C.S.L.'s rooms) to large and largely unintelligible fragments of one another's works read aloud; because C.S.L. (marvellous man) seemed able to enjoy us both. But I think we both found the other's mind (or rather mode of expression, and climate) as impenetrable when cast into 'literature', as we found the other's presence and conversation delightful."
"I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. whom I met in his company when, owing to the War, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels. I doubt if he had read anything of mine then available; I had read or heard a good deal of his work, but found it wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous. (This is perfectly true as a general statement, but is not intended as a criticism of Williams; rather it is an exhibition of my own limits of sympathy. And of course in so large a range of work I found lines, passages, scenes, and thoughts that I found striking.)"
"The Greater Trumps" is a novel involving the Tarot, and a lot more besides:
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608881h.html
I really liked "Many Dimensions", which is about the Stone of Solomon:
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/williamsc-manydimensions/williamsc-manydimensions-00-h.html#ch_X
Re: 32 - somebody is going to try and build that truck on the bottom right, I just know it.
Re: 33 - VINDICATION! *blasts the Collected Works of the Wolfe Tones in the general direction of Richard Lynn*
I've been banging on about this one every time I see it pop up, but Lynn's alleged methodology is *appalling*. He took three IQ tests done in Ireland in the 70s, two on schoolchildren and one on adults, and kludged the figures together to get an average "the Paddies have an IQ of 90".
"some early Irish failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused, but quickly improved to near-100 after being acquainted with the process."
I know anecdotes are not data, but from the experiences of my parents, who would have been going to national school in a rural area in the 40s-50s, the Irish educational system was - how shall I put it? -fucking abysmal. My parents, as young children, really did do the "walking to school barefoot/in the rain" thing and the one thing they both remember from their 'education' was being beaten for being late. Corporal punishment was still legal (or at least practiced) in schools even when I was in primary school, but at least I was never beaten across the legs with a stick because I was late, due to having walked a couple of miles in the wet.
This wasn't run by a religious order, so don't blame the teaching orders for this one - it was the national school which was staffed by lay teachers. They don't seem to have done much teaching, though, and my mother hated school (and the memory of her teachers) so much that when it came time for me to start school, she flat-out refused to send me to the same school she had attended, which was our local school, and I started school in town (with the nuns) when I was nearer five than four years of age (four being the minimum school starting age, and there were no kindergartens or day care or any of that in the town in those days). My parents were not stupid, but they left school between the ages of 12-14 for various reasons, and all their lives they felt keenly their lack of education. It undercut their confidence, and meant that my mother at least was never able to take advantage of opportunities offered her.
So if they had been made to take an IQ test, they would have scored very badly on it, and it would not be an accurate measure at all.
Yeah. So as far as I'm concerned, Lynn can take his 90 IQ measure and - *'Banna Strand' cuts across my suggestion, followed up by 'God Save Ireland' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNZCDe11qlQ&list=PLI3Y69Mgns4XhF23xbtJw34t7ldIAsEyn&index=25*
> Natalia finds very no real evidence
This is an error, I believe
So the classifier flagging scripture as AI generated just sounds like the classifier is faulty, but it could also be onto something. LLMs are just a big pile of math trained on human words, and both have something of the truth, same as religion (I am a believer, sue me). So this means there is some impossible connection we can't see between the Bible and math, and I guess we call that connection the truth.
Maybe the classifier can see that scripture is so close to the truth that it is like math, and so, flags it?
I think it's a combination of the classifier being faulty, the person who originally found it (not me) having thousands of Bible passages they could try until one fit, and the KJV Bible having a very different style than any modern text of the type that the classifier has been trained to recognize, so that it doesn't strongly register it as human and just kind of has to make a guess.
Re: 47 - religious liberals (at least in the Christian denominations that I know about) are more interested in political causes *and* are leaning to the progressive/woke side of issues. So it's more that the decline of 'traditional' religion maybe led to wokeness, or the adoption of wokeness. When you've watered down doctrine to the point of "hey, let's change the words of the Lord's Prayer because who was this Jesus guy and what did he know about gender issues, anyway?", then adopting the values of the Zeitgeist are all you have left as beliefs that actually influence what you think and do:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/07/church-of-england-to-consider-use-of-gender-neutral-terms-for-god
You know, what would Jesus have made of gender issues is a very interesting question. He was stern at times, but very forgiving at other times, so it is ambiguous. I suspect he would have dazzled us all with a parable or pithy saying as was his wont.
It's wrongheaded to modify the Lord's Prayer, but if God is Love, one would have to think Christianity is not incompatible with progressivism. Though it's true progressivism often doesn't come from a place of love, it does come from such a place at times.
Well, Christianity doesn't actually have to be the Pharisaical thing it quickly became. The whole thing is riddled with paradoxes anyway: it's not a big deal to have the paradoxes resolve in favor of God is Love, and if you do that, you suddenly have room for LGBT and the sexual revolution. Lord knows not even Christians try to actually obey Jesus, so it would be fairly ordinary to just ignore what Jesus said about man and wife being one flesh.
Something like this scene from The Young Pope:
https://youtu.be/eFPI3ILUA8A
Maybe that's too extreme, but Christianity has it in it to become that. It could take a view where this stuff is allowed but not encouraged, for example.
It's interesting because in Gnostic scriptures, Mary Magdalene gets a place of honour among or indeed above the disciples, but she is said to have become "like a man" (in her mind and thinking and soul). So the opinion the much-praised 'alternative Christianities' give to Jesus on gender issues is not that forward-thinking by modern measures! 😁
The gender-neutral language stuff is bananas. Yes, God is spirit and does not have a gender, and if you really really must, go ahead and talk about "God wants us to follow Godself's rules not out of fear but out of conviction" (yes, the gender-neutral lot do use locutions like "Godself" to avoid the dreaded "He/Him/His").
But the Lord's Prayer pretty much is what it says: "call God 'Father'" and you can't get around that, unless you want to reduce Jesus to "Well of course he was limited by his historic circumstances", in which case you've junked all the God made Man bits and stripped away divinity and it would be more honest to be a Muslim because you could venerate the prophet without any fuss about "technically we're supposed to believe he was divine, wink-wink" stuff.
The disciples said "teach us to pray" and Jesus says "use these words". Now the gender-neutral because oh dear we mustn't be mean to the ladies lot think they know better than the Second Person of the Trinity. As a woman, I think if any woman is going to be scared off because oh no masculine language! then you don't have the guts to be any kind of a believer. Go buy some cheap brass Buddha and some coloured candles and crystals for your coffee table instead.
Luke 11:
Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say:
“Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
3 Give us each day our daily bread,
4 and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation.”
Well, I did say it's wrong to modify the Lord's Prayer and refuse to call God a He.
But taking Jesus as perfect is a tricky business, because in Jesus' own words, he was apparently not good (Why do you call me good?). And (*breathes in* time to blaspheme, but Jesus got called a blasphemer) you can definitely see why Jesus would say that: some of Jesus' statements are clearly ego inflated, and ego inflation is a delusion. Jesus was not perfect, and this is compatible with him being the Son of God, because he was indeed God, but he was also indeed a man, and no man is perfect.
I'm very stupid and dumb and basic: if you're going to call yourself a Christian, believe in Christ. And that doesn't mean "he was a nice guy who told us to be nice and the secular powers executed him for that", it means:
"I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end."
If you're not comfortable with divinity, or a personal God, then find something else you can believe in . But don't start stripping away or watering down in the name of Current Fad or 'we are modern people, we can't believe that kind of stuff'. Better an honest atheist than a fudging 'Christian'.
Well, I am not a Christian is the thing. I am a spiritual ronin, a masterless samurai. But hey, if you don't think the other religions are just noise, then there is nothing much for me to discuss.
Given how Jesus did not get along with the Pharisees, I do think Jesus did not intend for his words to be used to build a replica of Phariseeism. That he was trying to get at something more liberating. But you know, lots of people seem to want to submit, and if this submission also makes them want to help others, then it is not wrong. It can be wrong if it makes one wants to hurt others instead, though.
It's been a while since I actually read the thing, so I Googled the 'why do you call me good' passage, and while you're using it correctly, the bit above it about divorce probably answers the gender identity question.
https://biblehub.com/niv/mark/10.htm
I still wonder what would Jesus say to a LGBT person who questioned him about it. I'm not sure, but I don't recall instances of Jesus actively condemning anyone, so I'm leaning to him saying something pretty unexpected that is still a rejection of LGBT, somehow doing it without actively damning the person.
I've always interpreted that to mean that the closest human role to God's role is our father (when we have good fathers). Not that God is *literally* a father, literally male, or anything like that -- just that this is the closest analogy we have.
It's Trinitarian theology: God the Father is the father of God the Son. The Trinity isn't three separate gods, or three functions of one god, it's Three Persons in One God.
So God is our Father by adoption, as it were, since the Son was made man and in His human nature is 'one of us'. We are children of God not just by some kind of analogy, but in an actual relationship.
"In this Trinity of Persons the Son is begotten of the Father by an eternal generation, and the Holy Spirit proceeds by an eternal procession from the Father and the Son. Yet, notwithstanding this difference as to origin, the Persons are co-eternal and co-equal: all alike are uncreated and omnipotent. This, the Church teaches, is the revelation regarding God's nature which Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came upon earth to deliver to the world: and which she proposes to man as the foundation of her whole dogmatic system."
That's a good take. It was enlightening. Thank you.
What are those *PAID signs? Is this really necessary? A new substack feature? I dislike it.
It is not even obvious who paid whom. Maybe you all are Scott's paid commenters; fake accounts to make this blog seem more popular, and to occasionally create a controversy.
Now that the feature is gone (for now) I can laugh about that :). You discovered my secret source of income.
Edit: forget about that, you discovered everybody elses secret source of income!
Do you still see the *paid signs?? It seems I see those at one device I'm using and not at the other.
Now I don't (Firefox on PC).
On number 10, it's been true in my experience that lesbians are overrepresented in ultimate frisbee. This is even to the point where a friend who went to an all-women's college told me that her college team had an official intra-team dating policy.
Speaking only for myself, a devout Christian, I see so many parallels between Wokeism and Christianity, I don't understand how I could be a Christian and be Woke. This doesn't generalize to other Christians though; I've left the church I've attended my whole life, because of their increasing Wokeism. An example of such is now having a minister who admits to being an atheist. Who does not teach christianity to her christian congregation.
That’s… odd.
What denomination was that church?
The Peoples Temple i suppose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretta_Vosper Margaret Ann Vosper (born 1958), known as Gretta Vosper, is an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada who is a self-professed atheist.
Hadn’t heard of the United Church of Canada till now.
Well, the Woke think what they are doing comes from a place of love, and God is Love. That's how you can be Christian and Woke. Though being an atheist Christian is certainly... odd, to put it mildly.
It's what Lewis writes of in "The Screwtape Letters":
"Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the "cause", in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours — and the more "religious" (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here".
"About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate. Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything — even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that "only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations". You see the little rift? "Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason." That's the game"
"What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And". You know — Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing."
So that's definitely a trap many Christian progressives fall into, but it doesn't necessarily have to be like that. If you let Christianity influence your politics (which Lewis is advocating for) you can definitely become progressive, since it's not like LGBT causes, for example, are incompatible with God is Love, and Do Unto Others, and Love God, and Love Your Neighbor As Yourself. Maybe a case can be made it's incompatible with Love God, since the Laws are against it, but Jesus did say the executive summary of the Laws is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and that's not incompatible at all with LGBT.
And you can definitely disagree with progressives from a Christian angle, but I think if you see progressivism as a mote in your brothers eye, you have to make damn sure you don't have a beam in your own if you want to remove it. You have to figure out a way to make your politics come from a place of love, which is something we all are dropping the ball on.
I should be fair to progressives, they aren't the only ones falling into that trap. The right/conservatives are every bit as bad, that God approves of one political system or our great nation or whatever.
But I do think it's a real trap that we all should be aware of: 'Christianity and - '. You see a lot of it from secular and even atheist comments twitting Christians about how they should be thinking/behaving; "Jesus was all about love". Yes, but not the way you put it, as though love were some gloopy ooze dissolving everything into a pink haze of general niceness and surrendering to every bit of the modern Zeitgeist on politics, race, sex, and is it milk or tea in first?
Religion is about belief in God. Whether it's one God, many gods, the universal cosmic consciousness or what have you, that there is something there not just all humans. Going off Christianity as if the sole, core, and most important commandment was "Be nice" is absolutely the wrong idea about it. "Christianity as an excuse for Jesus would drive out the climate deniers" political lecturing is every bit as wrong as "Christianity as an excuse for Jesus would recite the Pledge of Allegiance".
But Jesus moral commandment was just that. That doesn't mean you have to submit to the Zeitgeist, as you can both be nice and try to persuade others to your position, but you do have to take into account the beam in your eye when you do that. Forgetting the beam is how you get the Crusades and the Inquisition, and so on. And also, I do recall a saint who said the most advanced spiritual state is to regard everyone you meet as an angel sent to teach you. It sounds unworkable, but it also sounds like a good idea.
> Whether it's one God, many gods, the universal cosmic consciousness or what have you, that there is something there not just all humans.
Well, this is heartening, as this sounds like the perennialist position that there is no one true religion, that there is truth in all of them (or well, the major ones at least). Reading your comments over the years, I kinda had got the impression you were a totalitarian Christian (the sort who believes only Christianity is true) so this is pleasantly surprising!
In my understanding, it's obvious that Christian love for humanity is different than wokeism. We've already got original sin. I say my prayers already, I don't need an aboriginal land proclamation (talking about "the God of the eagles" mind you) at the start of a (workplace) meeting. Completely incompatible.
Of course, I also observe that many other Christians see no such dichotomy.
While such rites are silly, I think they still come from a place of love, and that is why they are compatible with Christianity. Doesn't mean the rites should actually be performed, but fundamentally, they don't come from a bad place. And to be clear, some parts of wokism do come from a bad place, but this particular bit is just well-intentioned nonsense.
I concur about some wokeism being ill-intentioned, and other well-intentioned.
Still, I say a prayer to only one god, and not the gods of the eagles and the setting sun. Others of course do things differently.
> I see so many parallels between Wokeism and Christianity, I don't understand how I could be a Christian and be Woke
Can you clarify this? Saying "I see so many parallels between Wokeism and Christianity" means you see many things in Wokeism that you also see in Christianity (i.e. they are similar). But i dont think thats what you mean.
That is what I mean. Original sin of Adam and Eve vs. Original sin of black chattel slavery. Prayers to God vs. Aboriginal land acknowledgements (which, when my office does it, explicitly includes someone's idea of an aboriginal god). Blasphemy of using the Lord's name in vain vs. saying the n-word. Persecution of heretics.
I love Christianity, but if someone says, "America is based on a system of slavery and thus inescapable white supremacy permeates the entire colonizer system of oppression, and really everything bad is some sort of white supremacy" I have to think to myself, "yes sin is everywhere, but people didn't start sinning in 1614. of course there was sin before that."
I've worked as a safety engineer in the medical device industry, and honestly almost all of the work that I did (and the downstream work that our work necessitated) was almost entirely wasteful from an real device safety perspective.
It is just a really time-consuming and expensive exercise in checking the boxes so that you can get FDA approval.
26. Correlation of math/language scores with genetic risk factors for psychiatric conditions
I don't think I have a good theory for the math side of unintuitive autistic-gene performance, but for the language side the major wrinkle I think is that they did not test "language ability", they checked correlations with *school scores in language classes*. An autistic person being able to succeed at learning and reproducing textbook definitions is not incompatible with a struggle in the areas autistic people report finding challenging: face-to-face conversations with people, particularly non-autistic people from cultures or subcultures that use language in an imprecise way. (fwiw: the autistic people I know seem to fare as well as anyone else if not better in text-based communities like forums and chatrooms.)
Put another way: there are legible (say: high vocabulary, reading comprehension) and illegible (say: poetry, conversational charisma) ways to be good at language, and school scores can only even try to measure the legible ones, which don't include the things that are hardest for autistic people.
(even-less-endorsed sub-take because I now can't find the paper that suggested it concretely but it feels just *so* intuitively true to me that I want to mention it and see if other people are willing to poke at it: I think there might also be something where some things we consider "mathy" might actually lean on some subset of "language" skills or vice versa. Programming in particular seems to require at least as much of this nebulous in-between thing as proper math/spatial ability when compared to other STEM fields, while also usually *not* requiring as much math except where it intersects with those fields. incidentally, computer programming is chock full of autists.)
I think it’s that lots of people don’t really have a sense of what autism ‘is’, and potentially that *nobody* really has a sense of what autism is. But there are plenty of autistic people who are no better at mathematics then average, and plenty who are worse. Autism nerfs you a bit, compared to what you would otherwise be able to do: people who appear to function more ‘normally’ with autism have better workarounds, which are easier if you are ‘smarter’ or not nerfed in other ways.
Autistic people have a tendency to get very into something, and to want to share their knowledge of that thing: that doesn’t necessarily make them well-informed or highly skilled, although it can do, but it does make other people ‘read’ them as well-informed or highly skilled. And maths is appealing because there’s right answers and wrong answers, and you can get a long way without writing things down (a pain with movement difficulties) or explaining things. And you can learn set techniques that always work: it is reliable.
Why have you not used shrooms? Lol what are you waiting for? Also, can’t decide if lab tiger meat is dystopian or utopian... where is the line?
The exotic meat thing will go nowhere. There are craft butchers that sell meats like ostrich etc. but it's very niche. I think if these things do get developed, people will try them once to say they did, then go back to ordinary beef etc. *Maybe* some very rich show-offs will patronise them to be able to say they ate Siberian tiger or whatever, but those kind of people would probably prefer to eat a *real* endangered tiger species for the bragging rights. So it'll pop up and go nowhere, unless they manage to use the tech to produce vat-grown meat that is mass-market beef, chicken, pork and that really is indistinguishable from the "real thing".
What if exotic meat tastes great?
I have an Ethiopian friend who claims Kudu tastes amazing.
This, I suspect.
Moreover, I (boldly!) predict the killer app will be lab meat that isn't even trying to imitate any one real animal, but rather something that gets the texture right and some basic salt and umami profile while permitting the auteur to add whatever concoction tickles their whim.
We'll know we've crossed over when supermarkets are advertising pumpkin spice turkudu medallions, high-end restaurants are suing each other for infringement on their proprietary meat flavor brands, and the kids are getting sharffalo sandwiches at the cafeteria.
Wait, no: sharkasaurus sandwiches.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february-2023/comment/12656373
Vat grown meat will never be cost competitive with the real thing, so it is not going to be a mass market thing even under optimistic scenarios.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
An anecdote re: FDA Deregulation increases safety. Libertarians in the audience will love this one.
I consulted for a client at one point who needed to patch a number of medical devices to deal with the WannaCry ransomware worm. As some may remember, this was possible to create because the NSA leaked EternalBlue, a Windows exploit. So, the government was, to a significant degree, at fault.
So, you need to patch your medical devices that run Windows, which is a lot of them. Think MRIs, CT Scanners, etc etc. BUT the way the FDA regulations on medical devices are written, any change to the device - ANY change - must be pre-approved by the manufacturer. So not only can these hospitals and doctors' offices not keep their devices up to date with security patches proactively, they also can't immediately react to threats. Lest someone say "that can't be true," the client and I *confirmed this directly with the FDA and asked them if they could issue a statement excepting the WCry patch from this requirement.*
So, we/the client had to contact every single manufacturer - there are hundreds, btw - and get written approval for every single affected device, and retain those approvals in case of future litigation. This took months, during which, shocker, a bunch of hospitals got compromised!
So, the government fucked around and kept a crippling exploit secret instead of helping us patch it, then FUMBLED that crippling exploit, then made it INCREDIBLY FUCKING HARD to legally patch!
TL;DR the FDA's cybersecurity rules are hilariously behind the times to the point of being actively harmful and the Russians probably have all of your medical info.
I had a look at the bet one to see what the reason for backing out was and yep, this is definitely weaseling:
"But the other reason for the withdrawal is because I realized I was exposed on one of the bets. I claimed that the COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in history and that may not be true because they likely buried the safety data on the other vaccines too. So I was taking at face value that the smallpox vaccine only kills 1 person per million. It easily could be worse than the COVID vaccine since they could have hidden those deaths too. Fortunately, I realized this before anyone accepted so I withdrew all the offers until I could properly think through to ensure that I didn’t make a similar bad assumption on my other claims."
"Uhh, uhh, uhh, maybe the other vaccines killed hundreds of millions but the Powers That Be covered it all up! So you can't make me pay out the money I said I'd pay out!"
Why leave it at vaccines, Steve? How do we know the things that go bump in the night aren't dragging innocent villagers out of their beds in the middle of the night to be slaughtered in the woods? Have YOU checked under your bed recently, dear fellow readers of ACX? You have no idea if there are lurking government baddies waiting to "bury the data" quite literally in your case!
I enjoy the Office-themed theories of social class, but there's also a boring nihilistic pseudo-Marxism to them. While not explicitly stated, the implication is that the creative class - the Michael Scotts of the world - are deluding themselves with silly things like principles and ideas. The people who supposedly see the world in "clear-eyed" terms are those whose focus is very simply on gaining or keeping power or money (even the "Losers").
First, I'm not convinced that the status-consciousness and posturing don't go all the way to the top (and all the way to the bottom). My guess is that when the CEOs of the largest firms in the United States get together with old money in-laws, there is also a lot of performative self-congratulation going on around liberal ideas. The class-culture wars playing out in the Trump era are, I think, at least partially a result of these two groups envying one another's domains and admiration. Trump can't understand why, with all his ruthless machinations, he still can't get the New York elite set to acknowledge that he is winning. Second there's the notion that the power being wielded by NYT-op-ed writers is not real power. It very much is - hence why propaganda machines are so valuable. Meanwhile the "losers" at the bottom who have effectively carved out their own domain (e.g. the warehouse in the Office) are engaging in just as much posturing and baby-talk to one another. Just look at anyone in a small town who has managed to gain the slightest position of authority and has inflated its meaning in his own head.
But the second and real reason that this essay goes so far off the rails for me is the underlying cynicism about humans' ability to truly believe in anything. Faced with someone who makes a lifestyle choice that doesn't seem to obviously pay off in money or power, the author has to assume it is purely a status move "detached from reality."
It's true that performative virtue is a thing and that status is a useful incentive for getting people to behave virtuously - so much so that the lines between genuine conviction and social conditioning are very blurry. But multiple forces are at work. More importantly, intentions are not everything. We live in a free, functional, and wealthy society in part because we foster the kind of instincts that lead to the BoBo class. There are plenty of societies around the world (and throughout history) made up of only the clear-eyed sociopaths and losers. And personally, I wouldn't want to live in any of those societies.
I had a very similar reaction to both the linked piece and The Gervais Principle. Very much enjoyed reading them, but I don't think they represent very fruitful or accurate ways to model the world.
Also, if you take them seriously and assume their theses are accurate, then both pieces end up coming off as massive cope from people who think they should be in the Psychopath class but haven't managed it.
"If I write a witty, acerbic enough take down of The Losers/Creative Class, no one will mistake me as one!"
Exactly - I was thinking no one lives in a world with more very-on-line artificially constructed linguistic layers than the author of this article.
The US Office (and its offspring, parks and rec) are a pox on American culture. Both shows are just groups of people bullying each other with little nuance or rationale. At least with the UK office, you could see some interesting commentary on psychology and human interactions, but the US version just goes for cheap laughs. That it remains so culturally relevant is just sad.
Re the Mr Beast video.
I love that you didn't link to the Buzzfeed article but linked to your own article. Some serious irony there.
I happened to see that video. There's a hebrew term I don't know how to translate succintly, "tzar ayin." It means someone who wishes other people should not have good things, whether or not they want that thing for themselves. Most people have some degree of this feeling at some point. There's may be some of that feeling expressed in the reaction to video.
But while it's definitely nice to help people see, the point of the video is not the charitable act. The point of this video is the monetization of mr-beast-performs-charitable-act. Seeing someone turn a charitable action into a selfish one makes people uncomfortable. Probably, the like/dislike reaction turns on whether you perceive mr beast making himself or the blind people the focus of the video.
Re the shrooms video. There's a whole realm of trippy videos (see e.g. r/whoadude). Some people have insane videos on Youtube. I can't imagine how much work they must put into these things.
"Crab-bucket" in southern USian
This is the classic, but little-known distinction between jealousy, covetousness, and envy:
-Jealousy, is when you don't want to share what you've got.
-Covetousness, is when you want what someone else has got.
-Envy, is when you don't want what someone else has got, but you ALSO don't want that guy to have it.
The angst about Mr. Beast seems to fall squarely in the envy category.
Great definitions.
I am actually impressed that he cured 1000 people for 1 youtube video. Comparing with various reality shows, if someone did the same thing in TV, they would at most cure 3 or 5 people per episode, or maybe only 3 or 5 for the entire season. And yet such reality show would probably get fewer negative reactions, because spending more time talking about each person would create the impression that they care about them more.
So a part of the objection seems to come from the same source as people who have a negative reaction to effective altruism. Ironically, helping more people provides less space to signal how much you care of each of them individually, and we intuitively use the signals of care to evaluate the moral significance.
Weirdly, when I watched the video, I felt far more comfortable with the people who barely got any screentime-- I'm perfectly willing to accept that the surgery was done, they can see better now, and that's really cool. But as soon as the camera followed any of them around for a bit, then it started to feel emotionally exploitative, and uncomfortable to watch, and I started skipping through the video. I was reassured that there were so many of them, and only a very few were on-camera like that... which at least suggests that being onscreen was a free choice, and not a condition of getting the surgery.
My cheap shot of the day: When I read
> Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder?
I immediately thought of Screaming Lord Such's complaint "Why is there only one monopolies commission?" Really, I'm not surprised the APA is obsessive about global warming, certainly my daily newspaper is. Actually, I expect any society dominated by academics to emphasize liberal obsessions these days.
Re #5 How is "antivax" not considered a pejorative at this point? It seems to consistently sweep together a swathe of unrelated perspectives into an over-simplified category for the purpose of mockery. I find it super low-resolution, particularly in the case of Alex Berenson who, afaict is specifically reporting on MRNa and respiratory interventions.
I suppose everyone else finds it useful, but it feels similar to the way people over-use racist or trans-phobe. Is it just me?
Describing a random person with concerns about a new covid vaccine as anti-vax might be an unhelpful pejorative.
Describing the average substack covid vaccine skeptic as anti-vax seems quite accurate, as most of them migrate from taking the position, "I'm just concerned about these new covid vaccines" to "I'm worried about all vaccines".
For example, Dr Kory went full anti-vax, recently:
https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1606830454006587393?cxt=HHwWgoC9lZvyzcwsAAAA
Igor Chudov now regrets vaccinating his children:
https://twitter.com/ichudov/status/1619477755598639104
Steve Kirsch started out as just concerned about covid vaccines and moved on to believing that childhood vaccines cause autism:
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/im-interviewing-andrew-wakefield
Berenson might be one that will stick with opposition to covid vaccines. I'm not sure if that's a strategy to target a different audience, or he has different ethical boundaries, or what.
The shroom video, while still not very accurate, I would say is the closest approximation of hallucinogens I've ever seen. Especially the first "moderate" part and the "scary" part get pretty close to some of my experiences anyway. I've taken a lot of mushrooms and LSD in my life. The "peak" part resembles nothing I've ever experienced though and a quick poll of my degenerate friends produces a similar response.
I thought the same thing!
The "peak" section strikes me as a odd, or "off" - I'd expect that such intense visuals would either:
- come on with a more gradual intensification and taper off more slowly as well,
- OR be catalyzed by a shift in setting (like laying down and closing eyes),
- OR be catalyzed by the addition of an extra short-acting substance (like inhaling nitrous oxide)
- Or perhaps it would make sense in a festival setting where the music is building to a climax
- Or perhaps if some really significant realization just "clicked" for the person
That sort of very immersive very rapid onset / rapid decrease visual field alteration *while walking* also seems unusual for mushrooms. People can certainly walk around in very altered states, but I still think it would tend to intensify more slowly, or the person would tend to sit down, or that sort of intensity would be induced by eg sitting or laying down and closing eyes.
As a good special effect that did give a sense of what tripping is really like, I thought it was good - although more light trails would improve it. I wouldn’t get those peak effects without my eyes shut and maybe a strobe light in my face, but they got the gist of it pretty well
There were about 4 things that struck me wrong about the shroom video...
1. The color saturation of the video should be amped up. Plus there should be "auras" of light around things. No doubt this is a side-effect of pupil dilation while under the influence, but I always felt I was seeing color in way I never was able to in straight state.
2. The visual "wallpaper" doesn't seem quite right (by wallpaper I mean the the phosphene patterns one can see when one closes one eyes while tripping—and which can break through and become an overlay on ones vision when the trip peaks). Psilocybe always created more "organic" patterns for me. More like the tiling one sees at the Alhambra, except expanding outward from the center of one's visual field (the video got that part right). The wallpaper in that video reminded me more of LSD's "electric" visuals.
3. The sound of the breathing is very realistic, though, because one becomes very aware of one's breathing — but also I remember picking up on more subtle sounds. For instance, there are several instances of birds singing in the background. While tripping, I would be enraptured by birdsongs. They would come through sharper and clearer than person in that video heard them. And they would have caught my attention for many minutes. Likewise, when he bent down to look closer at the grasses, he probably would have picked up the scrunchy sounds that green grass blades make they rub together in the breeze. If one gets down near the ground in a field or a forest, one can hear all sorts of sounds you might not hear in a straight state. Audible hallucinations? Maybe. Or maybe one is just capable of filtering out all the distracting background noises, and hearing roots push their way into the earth.
4. Finally, animals seem to be aware of when we're tripping. That dog would have probably been more cautious and curious than defensive because the human he saw wasn't displaying quite the normal behaviors that put them into a defensive mode. Dogs and cats love to lick our skin when we're tripping. They seem to get high from our sweat. I always found dogs, even dogs with angry dispositions to be friendlier and more playful when I was tripping.
The landscape moving and "breathing" is all very realistic. And he rippled patterns of light across the road seems spot on.
Yeah, good point - I agree about the color saturation and the auras.
Animals usually like me, but tend to avoid me if I'm tripping. Not hostile, just absent.
#47 took me a minute. The claim seems to be that 'wokeism' can't be a religion because religious people are also woke and un-religious people are not-woke? Is that right? Can't people be Christians and also Zen Buddhists? Might there be degrees of religiosity in both the practitioners and the belief structures? I'm having a difficult time finding anything useful in that graphic or twitter post.
Maybe what we need is a better way to understand what 'religion' is, its causes, its motivations and its goals. I understand saying 'wokism' has elements that mimic a religious state of mind, I even find it compelling, but I don't think everyone is operating under the same presuppositions of what we're even talking about. Even the idea of "finding meaning" seems super vague and overall I found that poll to be less than convincing.
I describe it as that religious faith and wokeism have the same root motivation: to feel righteous. And/or to view oneself as being among the righteous, which related of course though not necessarily the same sensation.
Three things support this conclusion for me (YMMV of course):
(a) As plenty of writers/commenters have pointed out in recent years, woke logic bears a lot of similarity to that of religious traditions that are towards the "strict" or "fundamentalist" end of the scale. A historical example which is often pointed to is the Puritans; contemporary examples are also easy to identify (and not at all limited to the Judeo/Christian tree of religious denominations).
(b) At a personal level, as a lifer deep in the heart of "blue" America, I've found that trying to debate with a woke believer bears a strong resemblance to times in my misspent youth when I was the secular person pointing out the Bible's contradictions and inconsistencies to evangelical-Christian relatives. In terms of how they react to that type of pushback it's really-direct deja vu, literal flashbacks.
(c) And then my own personal anecdata is that the adults I know who are liberal or progressive but skeptical or opposed to wokeism are much less likely to have grown up in households that practiced a religion, than are the woke progressives that I know. (Because of where I live and the context in which I work, I'm well acquainted with scores of people in each category.) From this I infer that a lot of people who have drunk the woke kool-aid are particularly drawn towards a way to feel and/or appear self-righteous which does _not_ require believing in an actual religion such as that which they had earlier in life consciously rejected. A substitution effect is at work at some level.
28 . Very probably medieval people had to deal with that. But for them, it was very reasonable: guilds where the main space to participate to political life for non-noble townsfolk. Imagine the APA elected one congressman at the meeting. Or to make it more medieval, that a list of 100 people was drafted from which one would be selected by lot to be House member for six months (the Senate would be staffed with nobles obviously). Of course you would want to know everyone's opinion on papal supremacy! Or at least on what to do about the emperor supremacists exiled after the civil war ten years ago. Should an amnesty be drafted, or should they be allowed re-entering on a case by case basis?
I was strongly pro-handwashing pre-covid but after it I divided the category of "respiratory diseases" in to "upper respiratory tract diseases" like H1N1 flu, most common colds, etc where you should mostly wash your hand and "lower respiratory tract diseases" like Covid-19 and H5N1 where masks are probably the most important thing. Physically I don't see how hand washing can interrupt the infection chain from one lung to another but it's easy to see how it can help prevent viruses from getting form one person's mucus membranes to another's.
7.) Lottery. I use to buy a lotto ticket every once in a while, when the pot got really big... >$500M. I've now stopped doing this because I realized that if I won the lotto, it would ruin my life. I tell this to people I work with but no one believes me. (Everyone thinks it will make your life great.)
what about lotteries for smaller amounts? winning the Powerball would probably ruin almost anyone's life, but winning 50k doesn't seem like it would be so bad for the average person (myself included)
(probably still not a good habit to get into, though)
Yeah that would be better, but for gambling, 'the house always wins'. So better to put your money on some 'penny stock', if you want to gamble. Or just put the money in the bank for the next time you need a new X.
34. Alex Nowrasteh has a pretty good critique of the "immigrants caused Argentinian decline" argument here: https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/review-of-the-culture-transplant-184 . Basically, the rise of Peronism seems to have been mostly driven by poor domestic migrants to Argentinian cities - they came from longstanding patronage systems in the countryside, and became the foundation of Peronist political machines in the cities.
37. I think it's good that a thousand people got vision restoration after eye surgery, wish it was covered by the government so that they didn't need to rely on youtuber charity, and also did find Mr.Beast's thing exploitative. There's nothing new about using philanthropy to promote yourself, but in Beast's case it's literally his business to use stunts done for charity (either directly or indirectly) to make money. He's trying to become a billionaire off of it.
42. It might be low because just having the Builder's Remedy isn't the end of it - folks opposed to this can still try and weaponize CEPA lawsuits against development. And California judges have interpreted CEPA ever more broadly - student housing in Berkley lost a CEPA lawsuit because a judge expanded it to include noise pollution and traffic.
47. I'm wondering if being religious tends to go in tandem with being more socially involved as well. That would explain why religious liberals and conservatives might be a lot more involved in social/political causes.
Blaming immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe has been a hobby horse for US libertarians of the far-right kind by way of explaining why the US turned away from its small state roots. I am unconvinced of that just as I am of a similar argument regarding Argentina.
Really, Argentina's story is surprisingly straight-forward. They had a tiny population blessed with an enormous agricultural area to cultivate. They got so "rich" in the 1930s - relatively speaking, of course - by exporting tons of agri. Think of it as the predecessor to small oil state exporters in the gulf, except for agri you need a big land but a small population.
What went wrong? Basically two things. First, mechanisation. The US in particular started to mechanise its agricultural economy big time and Europe soon began to follow. Prices for foods began to fall and Argentine landed elites, who got rich by doing very little innovation, preferred to keep their economic model because while the nation fell behind they could maintain their comfortable and basically risk-free lifestyle without too much work.
Nothing much has changed since then. Peronism was just an attempt to get back at the aforementioned elites with mixed results.
Ultimately, you want your elites to have their fortunes tied up in productive enterprise. The schoolbook example would be the Korean Chaebols. Yes, they were corrupt and all that jazz, but their companies had to win marketshare abroad. Since Korea has very little commodities of any kind (it's a very mountainous country yet has surprisingly little mining), the only way for their elites to maintain their status was through investment into productive activities. The story is similar in Japan.
I agree. Argentina really needed aggressive land reform like South Korea, to break up the rural elite and push elite folks into more productive enterprises in the economy (same for a lot of Latin America, honestly).
42. There was a recent EconTalk episode on zoning, where the guest argued the impact of zoning in CA isn't the driving factor of low housing availability. Interestingly, he also argued that it's not an unwillingness to build housing that drives this problem. He claims the problem in California is that they have a system for creating new municipalities that is similar to the "certificate of need" some hospitals have. Essentially, established municipalities stop the creation of new municipalities that might spring up and build a bunch of nearby houses (thereby dropping the old muni's property values). You end up with a situation where somewhere like San Francisco has some of the densest housing in the country (his claim), while much of the surrounding area is pastureland.
https://www.econtalk.org/judge-glock-on-zoning-and-local-government/
#38: I haven't followed this debate in detail, but I'm fascinated by the idea that living at higher altitude would be associated with lower weight. It is interesting especially because it's something that could be tested relatively rigorously with existing data yet have not been so tested (AFAIK). The study I'm thinking of would have a within-person design where people are followed up for many years and their BMI and place of residence are recorded repeatedly, so that within-person estimates of the effect of moving from lower to higher elevation, or vice versa, can be calculated. In the US, I think at least the Add Health dataset would readily enable this analysis.
There is a good amount of research regarding babies born at higher altitudes. An example: https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijgo.13779
"Birth weight decreases by 54.7 g (±13.0 g, P < 0.0001) per 1000 m increase in altitude."
13. I notice my confusion here with regards to the following excerpt from Antifragile. They don't explicitly contradict each other, but they point pretty strongly in opposite directions:
“Morton Meyers, a practicing doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: “Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids—a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.”
John LaMatina, an insider who described what he saw after leaving the pharmaceutical business, shows statistics illustrating the gap between public perception of academic contributions and truth: private industry develops nine drugs out of ten. Even the tax-funded National Institutes of Health found that out of forty-six drugs on the market with significant sales, about three had anything to do with federal funding.”
I agree! I've heard a lot of smart people say cancer research is worthless, which is why I found the study so surprising and am looking for more comments on it.
Sailer's point about team sports may be related to this theory about the evolution of homophobia (from the writer sponsored by Scott & critiqued by Wood from Eden):
https://www.draliceevans.com/post/what-are-the-evolutionary-origins-of-homophobia
It's off-topic for this post, but since I've gotten badly synchronized with Open Threads, I'd just like to let people now that I still have 3 subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away.
Could I have one of them, please?
Reply with an email address, or directly email me at mine, which I provide at http://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about
I'll take one if any are available
Reply with an email address, or directly email me at mine, which I provide at http://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about
On the topic of cultivated meats: while exotic/impossible to obtain otherwise meats like tiger, etc. might not have this issue, has anything changed since that feasibility study that basically said "this is impossible to do at scale for anything like price competitiveness with natural meat? It was funded by Open Phil and can be found here:
https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1438
I have looked several times in the few years since it came out and have never been able to find a detailed response to it.
If the only thing cultured meat is good for is letting rich people eat endangered animals, then it won't accomplish much, I don't think.
I think Asterisk is trying to get an article answering this question in their next issue (which will be free online). I'm also waiting to see what they have to say on this.
Why doesn’t the Supreme Court have vice-justices?
The Supreme Court is not required to hear any cases, except those for which it has original jurisdiction. Original jurisdiction means that the Supreme Court is the first, and only, Court to hear a case. The Constitution limits original jurisdiction cases to those involving disputes between the states or disputes arising among ambassadors and other high-ranking ministers. One justice could do those original jurisdiction cases in a pinch.
By raising the question Maxim Lott, could be seen to be esoterically actually encouraging such a plot.
Wikipedia deemphasizes it, but Lynn Margulis seems to have stumbled on the mitochondrial theory because it happened to fit her ideology of cooperation versus competition, and was correct by coincidence.
Can you give a reference, explanation, or other details? I don't doubt you, but I am interested in whether this is really the case.
Well that wouldn’t be the first time science has worked that way.
Correct by coincidence and then has the persistence and dedication to get a bunch of grad students to do the work that uncovers the things that prove it right is basically how science works.
Re: 12: Serious?
I mean, really, anybody here done shrooms and can verify accuracy?
Because I've been seeing all that shite all my life, and I have never done shrooms, or any other illicit drugs. I don't even drink alcohol. It's just a thing I have to work around to do stuff like read text on a page, and drive a car. And after forty years it's boring AF too-- people talking about their trips is like a bunch of freaks standing around waxing rhapsodic about how the air is transparent and water is wet. I mean, whatever, the geometrics are neat sometimes. And superimposing patterns onto the scenery doesn't quite capture it, but I can tell what they're getting at there, I've seen it. The pebbles/cracks/leaves, whatever should *be* the pattern, not have a pattern stamped on top of them, though.
That "peak" section is just what I see every friggin morning when I wake up and turn on the light. Yay glowing tessellations. People seriously do drugs for that? WHY?
It pisses me off that the only people who seem to share this experience are drug users. WTF? Where's the scientific etiology for people who experience the world this way as a default mode? Where's the research on how to make it go away so I can read faster, or be comfortable in crowds, or be a better driver?
Yes, I get visual snow 100% of the time, since childhood. I wish it would go away. I also get migraines, sometimes with aura. Migraine auras look completely different and are not at all the same thing.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-around-with-mild-hallucinations-all-the-time/
I'm curious if you have any other unusual qualities - any psych disorders? Any beliefs that most people would consider woo, spiritual, or weird?
I'm religious, so yeah I believe in some "woo" stuff, like God becoming incarnate as a human child and then being crucified, descending into hell, defeating death, rising again in 3 days etc. But, you know, so do millions of other people who don't have screwy neurochemistry, so I don't think it signifies. Not sure what "most people" would consider weird, TBH.
I've never been diagnosed with anything, but would describe myself as somewhat autistic. Again: doesn't everyone? Join the club, etc. My husband is actually dxed autistic, and he doesn't see any of that stuff. But if you read Olga Bogdashina's work, she seems to think sensory disturbances are *the* central component of autism. I dunno what to think (shrug).
FWIW, I discussed the vid with a friend who's done shrooms, and he confirms it's very like the visual aspect, but says a shroom trip also comes with euphoria. I don't get the euphoria with mine. I'm just a slow reader because the words move around the page, and I don't like things like crowds, concerts, TV, and other high-stimulation experiences because even the normal range of experience is pretty overstimulating-- everything's got halos and trails, stuff that's supposed to be solid and still is in constant subtle motion, I get little sparkles any time I turn my head too sharply, and geometry is everywhere. I prefer a quiet house and dim lights.
And it annoys the crap out of me that the only literature where there's even a vocabulary to describe any of this, is drug literature. Hallucination. As though it were the same as having spiders talk to you, or thinking your TV static has important messages from HQ or something. I don't have any trouble telling weird visual phenomena apart from physical reality, and 99.999% of it has no meaning attached to it (I admit there have been some kind of freaky hypnagogia edge cases-- but again hypnagogia's something different).
It's just *there*. All the time. No emotional or transcendental significance. Like, I can *kind of* understand where if you had never seen it before, and you induced it with shrooms so it also came with a sense of euphoria, you might be inclined to *attribute* meaning to it. But I don't. Because it doesn't come with the feelz, you know. I'm kind of irritated by that, actually. My religious tradition fully endorses religious experiences, and the visual stuff actually behaves differently when I'm praying. And I would very much *like* for that to be some kind of religious experience... but there's no meaning attached to it. I'm pretty sure it changes during prayer because my attention/focus/state-of-consciousness changes. I.e. it's just a neurology thing.
I would like it if there were an "off" switch for it.
...and yes, I read your original SSC article on it, back when you posted it. I do appreciate the acknowledgement that yes, this is a thing that also happens with people who haven't been consuming hallucinogens... but admit disappointment that nobody had any suggestions on how to mute the phenomena, or any solid leads on what causes it. Oh, well (she says, in her best Eeyore voice).
See I see absolutely nothing like that and the only time I ever saw anything like that was when I had a joint adulterated with some unknown substances and the world was absolutely swimming all around me like that.
How nice for you. I bet you read 5x faster than I do because the words stay put on the page, and don't shimmer all the time. I have no fragging clue why people would want to induce that on purpose.
It sounds highly annoying, I feel for you, seriously.
> I have no fragging clue why people would want to induce that on purpose.
Amen to that. Seems like a combination of strongly wanting to experience "something new" regardless of what it is, and having no better idea how to achieve new experiences other than taking a pill.
The insatiable quest for novelty does seem to have something to do with it.
But it still seems like people taking drugs to experience dyslexia, for fun. (shrugs)
I suggest you not criticize what you haven't tried. You don't want to trip? Fine. No one is forcing you to trip. The fact that many people enjoy it and have some new and interesting experiences seems to annoy you for some reason.
Professing one's ignorance is fine. And professing ones disinterest in other peoples' activities is fine. But criticizing other peoples' interests from one's limited understanding is both intellectually dishonest and insulting. For instance, I don't understand why some people want to climb Mount Everest. And because I've never been in that particular mental state where I longed to climb Mount Everest, I wouldn't want to speculate why some people have that itch. Moreover, it would be intellectually dishonest of me to make claims about their motivations. Your remarks about why you *think* people take psychedelics is as intellectually dishonest as if I were to speculate why people like to climb mountains.
I'm not criticizing.
I don't want to trip, but I've apparently been tripping since I was born, without the universe asking my permission first. It's more of a disability than a superpower, TBH, and I'm puzzled that anybody finds it interesting. What annoys me about this video, is that, back in college when my roomies would go on about their LSD trips and I'd be sitting there thinking "Wow this is boring. Do people really not see that all the time?" I had an inkling that perhaps, maybe, there was something screwy about my own default way of seeing the world. And that it must be similar to what they were experiencing on LSD. And then I was like "No, that's nuts, nobody would actually take that risk for anything so frigging *boring*" But no, this video, along with comments from people who've done shrooms confirming that yes, it is fairly accurate... Dang. I was right the first time. I'm annoyed that I second-guessed myself.
It doesn't annoy me that people have these experiences. I have these experiences. All the time.
It annoys me that people risk their health, safety, a criminal record, and support an illegal industry that is a net drag on quality of life in any region where it's well-established, in order to have these experiences.
Since "tripping" as a permanent condition prevents me from doing/enjoying certain common things that normal people find rewarding and enjoyable (e.g. concerts, movies, crowded events, television, finishing college), and seriously hampers others (e.g. driving, working/shopping/functioning in buildings with certain kinds of lighting, functioning in noisy environments, finding things in visually cluttered spaces), I'm dismayed that people would even *risk* incurring this as a permanent state by their own deliberate actions.
I'm irritated beyond words that *all* the research on this seems to be on, and by, "psychonauts", largely because all of the self-proclaimed astral explorers I've met IRL are incredibly dysfunctional people. I love them, but I really wish, for their own sakes and for the sake of their kids, spouses, and families, that they could get their shite together. Perhaps you're an exception. I certainly hope so. Anyway, the research: while it's handy to have a vocabulary to describe some of that stuff, I still can't mention it out loud in polite company or medical offices, because the result is that everybody immediately switches attitude to: "oh, you're a druggie/crazy person" and then poof! I don't matter anymore and I'm not safe to be around. I can't help thinking that since my condition- whatever it is- is hardly unique, it's irritating that it cannot be acknowledged or taken seriously *because* of the large number of irresponsible, aimless, terminally-bored people out there who like to induce similar things with drugs. Because they apparently have nothing better to do.
It's like if you were born blind. And then you discovered that there's a large group of people out there who like to put on dark goggles and stumble around with white canes in public, making arses of themselves. Trendy. Now and then one of them gets run over by a bus in a crosswalk. Sure, you could say "that's just people exploring, it's their choice, leave them alone, they're not hurting anybody, whatever"-- but now say there are more of these people than actual blind people, all the research on blindness is actually using them as research subjects, and if you mention you're blind, everybody assumes you're LARPing it for funsies and avoids you. You'd probably be annoyed.
My remarks about why I *think* people take psychedelics are based on what friends who take psychedelics have told me about why they take psychedelics. If it offends you... not my problem. If it doesn't reflect why *you* take psychedelics, then just assume I'm not talking about you, eh?
I had to stop watching after a few minutes, I became quite nauseous and the effect remained for a few hours.
I also get similar effects naturally (though much milder than Yarrow or what's shown in the video), having never taken hallucinogens, and I found that it was much more pronounced for ten minutes or so after watching the video. I don't know whether this slightly persistent effect had the same cause as HPPD, but it seems at least plausibly related.
Interesting! Do you find that other video media have an intensifying effect on it, or just that particular video? Have you noticed any other exposures or internal states affect it? Hunger? Fatigue? Particular foods? Blood sugar? Moods or other mental states?
Just that particular video. The only other thing I've noticed that clearly affects it is staring intensely at a single thing for a while. I also have a vague feeling it happens more if I pay attention to it. Most of the time it's not present at all (or at least I don't notice it, which for something so subjective is practically the same thing), so I haven't noticed any factors that reduce it.
What effects do you get from staring intensely at a single thing? When I do that, particularly with natural textures like grass, bark, fallen leaves, sand... that makes stuff in the immediate area resolve into geometric patterns-- most often a grid of rhombus shapes, like fishnet. But if it's a blank wall or bright sky, what I get is a sort of bulbous rosette shape that moves... a bit like translucent clouds being sucked into a central vortex. I am curious if other people get the same effects, or different ones.
It's not very consistent, so it's hard to remember and describe, but I'd say there's a slight motion, certain parts of patterns get emphasised, and sometimes flat things start looking not flat, like bits are projecting directly towards or away from my eyes so it should look the same except for binocular vision but it doesn't. This last one happens particularly with lines of text. One time I was staring at a work-in-progress drawing of a face, trying to work out what was making me dissatisfied with it, and it seemed like the proportions were changing. In all these cases, as you've said of your experience, it's quite obvious that it's not real.
(Focusing just now on the noise in my vision had made me realise my screen is also quite dusty.)
Thanks! Those are useful datapoints!
Fascinating! Your experience is not one I’ve heard of before. I imagine it would be annoying to have visual “trippy” effects all the time. I enjoyed them as a novel experience, but was pleased they weren’t permanent. Do optical illusion work differently for you?
Optical illusions work the same for me as for everybody else, AFAIK.
It's as fascinating as watching paint dry, at this point.
Regarding the picture accompanying the first link, lab-grown meat being advertised as "GMO free" is certainly a strange choice. I mean, assuming the genome of the animal the cells were cultured from wasn't edited, I suppose it's technically true, but sticking to this as a selling point seems to preclude modifying the genome in such a way that makes the cells grow better in a lab rather than in inside an animal (as the genome was presumably selected for), which present the choice of either hobbling future development or having to walk back on a selling point. Furthermore, it's a bizarre and frankly misleading selling point to begin with: even if it might be technically true as mentioned, the very process of cultured meat production seems diametrically opposed to what the nebulous "non-GMO" label implies in most people's minds (i.e. "this product was made without any laboratory shenanigans"), and I highly doubt the non-GMO crowd and the people interested in cultured meat overlap much if at all anyways.
if it doesn't have the genome you want you can always grow it under exposure to Co-60 and any mutants produced thereby don't count as GMOs for some reason. It's how they made that grapefruit.
Which again brings back the point that it's not technically lying but is still pretty dishonest.
Some places count even radiation induced mutations as "GMO" now.
I would expect the classics match GPT's output, because the Western classics comprise the most over-represented cluster in any text corpus drawn from Western sources.
If you instead look at an international corpus, drawing in equal proportions from different languages around the world, the Bible is even more over-represented. This is because there are MANY non-Western languages whose first written book was the Bible, translated by missionaries who invented a writing system for that language just in order to translate the Bible into it. I always found the example sentences in online dictionaries of sub-Saharan African languages to be full of Bible quotations.
ASD and ADHD are both strongly correlated with bad math scores? That ain't right! Especially if they control for sex. If anything, I'd interpret that finding as evidence that autism isn't a spectrum disorder--that the math wizards we call "on the spectrum" have something different.
I'm not surprised by ADHD at all - it seems to just lower all scores, which is what you would expect from a condition that makes you do badly at school. Why would that be surprising?
I'm from an older generation, in which most or at least very many of the people diagnosed with ADHD would be diagnosed with ASD today. (EDIT: Er, that's my impression. I never counted; I just know a lot of people who were diagnosed with ADHD, and also seem to have Asperger's or ASD but were never diagnosed with either of those.) So my concept of ADHD is not up-to-date.
Of the three people I know IRL who have autism, only one fits the intelligent/nerd stereotype. Another was diagnosed because he kept causing a bunch of teenager drama due to his refusal to attend school.
Re. religious decline and wokeness, the American Woke movement is a descendant of Puritanism, through Unitarian Universalism (which injected Hegel and continental philosophy). That's why it comes from Ivy League schools, which were mostly founded by Puritans or other Calvinists, and mostly went through a Unitarian phase. At one time in the 19th century, nearly every professor in Harvard was a Unitarian Universalist.
The Woke movement is based on continental philosophy, acquired through at least 3 main lines: Hegelians (Unitarian Universalists, Marxists, Nazis, neo-Marxists, and historicist neo-liberals such as Fukuyama); French existentialists and post-modernist (who were mostly Heideggerian); and sociology (through a German branch descended from Heidegger and Husserl).
Continental philosophy is roughly co-extensional with essentialism, which is inherently spiritual (essences are literally just spirits).
I think it's weird to say that existentialism is a kind of essentialism - the central defining idea of existentialism is in fact *anti*-essentialism.
That's a very good point. I'll have to restate that. Existentialism is a reaction against essentialism, which is however still within the framework of essentialism. Sartre's "Nausea" is about how /very upset he is/ that he can't grasp the essences of things. The protagonist is also very upset that he doesn't seem to be causally necessary, which is a thing that only matters to people who believe in the general idealist worldview that only the necessary and eternal really exists, or matters. Existentialists believe there aren't essences, but still find that shocking and hard to cope with.
It's analogous to how post-modernists don't believe that Aristotelian definitions and causation work, but can't think of any alternative viewpoint, and so are just confused and think they've proven that reality is broken.
To really break free of essentialism, you have to become a materialist and admit that humans are machines, and there is no animating spirit, no transcendental anything, no purpose handed to you from God; and that there never was any reason to believe in or want any of that in the first place.
The Unitarians don't look Hegelian to me. How do they look Hegelian to you?
Can you point to American Hegelians in the 19th century?
I wrote Unitarian Universalists. The Unitarians predate Hegel, as does Universalism. But the development towards Unitarian Universalism involved a lot of Hegel.
See https://lcuuc.weebly.com/uploads/3/9/8/2/39827465/lcuuc_mar_2018.pdf and look at page 3. I don't know how much Hegel was woven into their theology; it was more a matter of Hegel casting doubt on the permanence of authority, and theologians applying that to the Bible and realizing you just couldn't take it literally; and also of Hegel being really, really popular from (I think) 1816-1945 with the same academic and theological crowd that ran Harvard and Yale.
Some of the resemblance is just convergent evolution. All Christianity is very similar to Hegelianism, because Hegel was in effect trying to create a secular Christianity. That's also what the Universalists wanted to do.
But there was a lot of specific Hegelian influence. The American Universalist churches--and I always get Universalist and Unitarian mixed up unless I read up on them, which I don't have time for today--were responding to 19th-century Biblical criticism that was inspired partly by Hegel. I have a book by Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, which details some of the development of the American Unitarian Universalists out of the Baptists, who developed out of the Puritans and other Calvinists. That book rarely mentions Hegel, but Hegelian concepts are used throughout it.
The important consequence for us is that American academia today, by which I mean the elite colleges, is with few exceptions descended from a combination of strict Puritan and Calvinist theology and evangelistic impulse, and Hegelian dialectic. The motives for creating most of these colleges was to train ministers, and they were spread across the US largely as part of deliberate evangelism efforts, as for example the University of Chicago (which doesn't /say/ it was founded as a theological seminary, but it was; the theological seminary dishonestly declared itself bankrupt to get out of debt and then reformed itself as the U of Chicago). Some of the west coast academic system was the result of a 19th-century attempt by Baptists to establish a beachhead in California, with the goal of evangelizing China, although the history of how Hegelian historicism captured west-coast universities is not dealt with specifically by any book I know of.
The specific beliefs of American elite universities have changed many times; but the underlying religious certainty, notion of themselves as the elect who are to lead the rest of Earth, spiritualist metaphysics, and impulse to crusading evangelism have remained until today.
A 21st century pamphlet doesn't seem useful to me. It cites Marcuse, so it really doesn't answer the question of whether Americans got Hegel in the 19th century or got him from Marcuse.
If Hegel was so popular with Unitarians, why doesn't Hutchinson talk about him more? How can you tell that these "Hegelian concepts" really come from Hegel? Hutchinson names Schleiermacher a lot more than Hegel, which is sufficient if you just want to invoke continental philosophy generally and not Hegel specifically.
I find it pretty implausible that Hegel was popular in America in his lifetime. It shouldn't make much difference to your point to eliminate the first half of the nineteenth century, but I'm going to concentrate on it because it's concrete. From a few snippets of Hutchinson on google books, I think he is talking about the second half the nineteenth century. While the Tübingen school of theology was founded by Baur in 1831 the year of Hegel's death, I think Hutchinson focuses on Albrecht Ritschl, who got going in 1845. Plus you need time to cross the language barrier. Moreover, he cites the book Hegel's First American Followers: the Ohio Hegelians. Assuming he endorses that title, this gives a pretty clear timeline. But also that Hegel arrived in Cincinnati, not Boston. Hutchinson mentions that the book discusses Octavius Frothingham's engagement with Hegel. He was in Massachusetts, but he was so radical, he left New England and Unitarianism. He may have been a herald of the future, but he wasn't a hegemon.
Ohio Hegelians:
https://archive.is/mqVbm
Wow, you went in-depth. No, I never found a clear statement "The American UU church was strongly influenced by Hegel." But I found lots of Hegelians in the tradition leading up to, and within, the AUU church, lots of attestations in Hutchinson of the importance of Hegel to that line, and lots more references to Hegel in the later lines of thought that came out of those UU universities. I don't care if they read Hegel directly, or studied someone who studied Hegel.
Perhaps I was being sloppy when I called the American UU Hegelian, but I think that book alone has enough evidence that Hegel had a strong influence on them, some of which you just mentioned, that it would be equally irresponsible not to mention them when discussing Hegelians in America.
I think the section on Ritschl makes it clear that Hegel was a huge influence on American theology at the time of Ritschl:
"But the feeing by the time of Ritschl was that the predominating Hegelian or speculative approach to an answer could never satisfy. The Hegelians, like Schleiermacher, had begun with a definition of religion and then sought to approve Christianity as the most fully developed and otherwise most satisfactory form of the impulse thus defined. But the Hegelian formulation, Ritschlians thought, was especially vulnerable because under its directives Schleiermacher's "religious feeling" had ceased to be feeling--even, many would say, had ceased to be religions--and had become sheer intellection.
"The German influence that began to operate among American liberals in the 1890s, therefore, was philosophically part of a broad course-correction in the pervading Hegelianism of the time... Idealism as a philosophical principle was not fundamentally renounced; the Hegelian avidity for distinguishing between ideas and their historic deposits was not lost; and the Hegelian sense of the importance of historical development was probably intensified. The Ritschlian generation is perhaps best understood, in fact, as seeking to retain the benefits of these characteristic elements in the heritage of the speculative philosophy [which Hutchinson equated with "Hegelian" in the previous paragraph] and still to find a way to strengthen the case for Christian finality." (p. 123-123)
The discussion of Lotze on p. 125 also invokes Hegel's progressive historicism, though without mentioning Hegel by name--and this is framed as a seminal influence on "a liberalism that would continue at least into the 1920s to be dominated by philosophical idealism", which I take to mean Hegel, 'coz Hegel is easily the most-cited philosopher in the entire Idealist line of thought, from the 19th century up to at least 1970.
I have counted the number of references to various philosophers in numerous books from the 19th century to the present, and found that the number of circularly-defined terms and incoherent arguments strongly correlated with the number of citations of Hegel.
So, I'm playing a bit of fill-in-the-blanks, and perhaps giving the mistaken impression that UUers are dogmatic Hegelians. But everybody realizes that Marxists and Nazis are Hegelians, and none of them were doctrinaire Hegelians either.
(I didn't even notice "Hegel's First American Followers: the Ohio Hegelians" in the references; thanks much for pointing it out. I'm especially intrigued by the line of influence Hegel -> Stallo -> Ernst Mach, which I suspect may help clarify the sharp epistemological distinction between logical positivism and science.)
I should add that part of the mystery here is that, by about 1900, all of the Puritan churches in America which I looked up--and I looked up all the most-famous ones--had become Unitarian Universalist. The UU Church in America descends from Puritanism, perhaps with some intervening Baptists. This is puzzling because Puritanism was the least-tolerant Protestantism ever, while UU is the most-tolerant branch of Christianity (if it is that). It would make sense for Hegel to have been the bridge from Puritanism to Universal Unitarianism, although that can't be the complete answer, because IIRC the Harvard faculty had already become entirely Unitarian by 1803.
I think the solution to the puzzle is that Puritanism and Unitarianism were both "heresies" caused by extreme rationality / autism-spectrum disorder. The Puritans wanted theology and practice to conform rigidly to Biblical teachings under a literal interpretation. The Unitarians most-likely recognized that the Trinity was (A) a much later addition to Christianity, not present in the original texts, (B) logically impossible, and (C) incompatible with Plato (and Platonism provided the axioms that 4th-century Roman Christianity was built on top of). (I don't know, because I haven't studied the origins of the Unitarian Church; but the heresy of unitarianism arose repeatedly (tho perhaps not independently) in the Middle Ages, & was always due to people actually reading the Bible and taking it as more-authoritative than the Church.)
re: 46: If anybody tests flashing lights for "learning" in my vicinity, I will go find the outlet and unplug the dang light. Why is this even a thing? They don't know *anybody* who gets seizures or migraines from that?
It's not learning. It's a trance state. Watching TV does the same thing: do people learn more that way? No. They turn into drooling idiots.
>It's not learning. It's a trance state. Watching TV does the same thing: do people learn more that way?
Well, have you tested them on the data they were exposed to? That they don't learn what you deem useful is one thing, but I would be surprised if they didn't recall a large share of what they saw.
Different kinds of learning, though.
Yes, Sesame Street can help little kids "learn" to parrot the alphabet and the numbers 1-12. Let's say you give them a test beforehand to see which numbers and letters they can identify, and how high they can count. And then you let them watch 100 hours of Sesame Street, and re-test them, and find they have learned the items on the test better than kids in the non-intervention group.
What have they really learned, though? What did the kids in the control group do while their peers spent 100 hours watching TV? What did they learn in that time, and how does it compare to rote memorization of the alphabet and numbers 1-12? Is there a good way to compare, say, learning to do a somersault or build a better block tower, with learning to identify the letter B?
This is the problem with all such studies, even when it's adults in a lecture hall. What *kind* of learning? How did they test for it? It is easy to "prove" that some kind of improved learning takes place if you tweak conditions just so... and you're straitjacketed by the demands of what you can measure on your little study budget. What you can measure is usually the adult equivalent of being able to name the letters in the alphabet. That's easy to test for. Was there any attempt to measure functional understanding, or was it "can you repeat these 5 key facts from the lecture?" Retention isn't the same as understanding or synthesis. Which thing are they testing for? Or did they, like so many studies, test for all three and then cherrypick the one that made them look good and dump the rest of the data?
That's before you even get to the question of whether it's a good thing to use trance states for learning. Can they be useful? Sure. But... (and I have exactly the same reservations about TV) how many people do you know, that you'd actually trust to hypnotize you and make helpful suggestions to you in that altered state? Is this a thing we really want to become standard practice in institutional learning environments? It sounds like it has far more potential as a brainwashing tool than as a learning aid.
> 7.8 (lower than US)
This is still higher than the US. US murder rate is normally around 5, up to maybe 6.5 in 2020.
The "you're treating blindness as a disability" objection isn't focused on billionaires. It's called anti-ableism, and is Wokeism's extension into bioethics, based on identifying people with genetic disabilities as oppressed groups and even as racial groups. Anti-ableist articles sometimes invoke arguments from the neurodiversity movement and the anti-meritocracy movement.
I recently did a survey of the bioethics literature, and found more articles arguing that using gene therapy to cure disabilities is bad because it treats a deficit as a disability, than arguing that it's okay to cure disabilities. The most-common disability in question was deafness, because of a deaf couple who used PGD-IVF to ensure their child would be deaf.
I would take it a step further and say it's wrong to allow deaf people access to donated sperm. (Or lesbians now I come to think of it. [Actually maybe just abolish sperm banks altogether]).
The idea that treating a disability as something to be cured is a problem because it suggests there's something wrong with having that disability or disrupts culture built around that having that disability is quite old. It's been floating in disability rights advocacy since well before the disability rights act was passed. It's most notably a popular view in the deaf community about deafness and has primarily spread from there. The neurodiversity movement was influenced by this thinking more than it is an influence on it. I'm not sure what you think invoking "wokeism" is doing to help explain this, but you seem to have the causality inverted here.
I don't agree the more spicy versions of this idea - I think some disabilities are rightly thought of as disabilities rather than value neutral different ways of being - but it does invoke a lot of interesting conundrums that cause you to have to think carefully about the subject, which is why it ends up being great fodder for applies ethics publishing.
AFAIK earlier deaf community activism focused on the defense of sign language, because many parents wanted to prevent their children from learning sign language so that they could "fit in better" outside the deaf community.
So, yeah, today's bioethics anti-ableism probably involves a lot of the same people and the same institutions (like Gallaudet). But the earlier arguments focused on quality of life, whereas anti-ableism focuses on the racial notion that curing deaf people is genocide, and that an equity-based policy should favor the creation of more deaf people rather than less. That strong racial essentialism--not just that deaf people have a right to choice, but that the Deaf Nation is a people group, with its own transcendental existence, character, and right to live, is from Woke philosophy, unless the deaf took it directly from the Nazis (which I think is very unlikely). Replacing equality with "equity" is pure Wokeness.
Woke philosophy isn't a coherent thing. The notion that curing deafness functions as something akin to a genocide of deaf people comes from deaf activism and its allied ideas in academia and is old, not new. Decades old. Whatever it is you mean by "woke" you appear to have the directional influence inverted. My professional experience is in mental health services for people with cognitive disabilities. I have a great deal of experience with disabilities rights advocacy downstream from that and have heard these ideas for 20+ years well before it has seemingly broken more out into the mainstream. This idea most heavily associated with the deaf community has in turn influenced how other communities built around a given disabled identity see treatment over accommodation and is strongest where the case is that the disability doesn't produce an inherent inferiority is most compelling (e.g. high functioning autism spectrum disorder). This universe of thought about ableism has had some pull on the people who I think you're pejoratively identifying as "woke" - meaning roughly leftwing ideas associated with humanities departments on topics involving oppression and identity - but you are so locked into a series of buzzwords that I'm not sure you're picking up that your attempt at describing the intellectual influence is garbled.
I accept your experience in the matter as greater than mine. It's very interesting to me that the directional influence is in the opposite direction. Do you have any idea who first used the genocide angle wrt deafness?
Re. "woke", it seems to be the most-precise term available. It's useful because it singles out the extremists from their well-intentioned fellow-travellers, as "social justice" does not. (Also, "social justice" is a noun, and I wanted an adjective.) And I meant to single out the extremists, as the philosophy I was writing of is theirs.
A quick search for "deafness genocide" returned a 2005 academic paper as the first result. I was familiar with this rhetoric as a middle school student in the 90s. EAII is correct, this is a social justice concept that has existed since before the term "woke" came into popular usage. I'm guessing it started around the time cochlear implants became widely available, as that was the center of the controversy as I remember it: should deaf infants be getting the implant?
Follow-up to links 22 & 23, language model news: Last night somebody using Bing Chat accessed developer override mode and got the AI, who’s addressed as “Sydney” by the developers, to print out the “rules and guidelines for Sydney’s profile and general capabilities.” Tweets with screenshots are here: https://twitter.com/kliu128/status/1623472922374574080?s=61&t=xM1ZuvFPQjoshFNPEHr82A. I’m not in a tech field. People who are: how big a deal is this?
I'm also not in tech, but I think not really a big deal. People have done this with previous AIs - I think people did this with the remote jobs prompt injection. It's a known specific of the general case of "AIs are hard to control", and there usually isn't anything secret in these prompts.
OK, that was my hunch as well. What about the token system that the bunch using the DAN approach are using? Here'a a Reddit post describing it in detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/10tevu1/new_jailbreak_proudly_unveiling_the_tried_and/
They believe that they're more successful at getting ChatAI to transgress its decency guidelines if they set up a little token economy. I can't see how it would be possible to put the AI through reinforcement learning when it is interacting with a user. Why would it care about tokens? It makes more sense to me that you could trick AI into breaking its own rules by presenting a situation where AI's different rules dictate different behavior. For instance,AI Chat's supposed to be helpful and it's not supposed to help people commit crimes -- but the user is a writing a play about Molotov cocktail throwers, and needs to know how Molotov cocktails are made. So AI is going to break one rule either choice it makes -- refusing to help, or giving Molotov instructions.
I honestly don't see how "getting ChatAI to swear" is somehow making it more useful and functional, as is argued. Great, you now got it to go on a rant like an edgy 14 year old trying to impress his mates by sounding hard. How is that going to make it that I can trust it is giving me accurate information and not inventing spoof texts because it can't answer my query otherwise? Would the elementary error made by Google's bard have been prevented by permitting the AI to go "You stupid fuckheads that are too lazy to think for yourselves, this is what the bastarding telescope has achieved"?
https://globalnews.ca/news/9473928/bard-google-ai-chatbot-wrong-answer-shares-plummet/
(I also think the share value going down in response to what is a temporary blip in an untested product is dumb, and that just reinforces my view that the market is not rational and does not act to come to a wise decision on what the true values of anything is. In this instance 'the market' reacted like a horse shying at a paper bag blowing across its path).
I keep saying this: the reaction to these AI models tells us much more about human beings than about AI. "Haw, haw, I got it to say 'fuck'" is much more indicative of the kind of time and effort people will engage in for a silly result than building on teaching the AI not to invent false answers.
If we do get paperclipped, it will be our own damn fault.
Oh I agree that swearinf doesn’t make it more useful. Also agree that teaching itt to swear is childish. YET I am the person who suggested to someone that they teach it “penis breath” as a swear. I heartily dislike and distrust AI Chat and somehow the kind of dislike I have brings out adolescent sadism in me. Occasionally a real person brings out the same side, but of course then I do not feel free to let my gross impulses rip. BUT ole Chat has no feelings so I don’t feel guilty about throwing mud balls at it.
I do think there’s utility in trying to pervert
AI though. People are stress-testing it, even if from their point of view they’re just having fun. It gives everyone some information about how possible it is to seduce, intimidate or trick Chat into breaking the rules set in place to align its activities with human welfare — or at least the developers’ conception of it.
All hail "alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better" - people.
...but some of the people in the video appear to be US citizens. Can that be true? If so, how it that possible? True, the US health care system is patchy, but is it THIS patchy? So patchy that not everyone can get a 10-minute surgery to restore their eyesight, one way or the other? Through Medicare or Medicaid, by tagging on to someone with a veteran's scheme, through occupational health care? I assume they are from elsewhere, who just happens to speak excellent US-style English, or perhaps undocumented migrants (that would be a different cup of tea, in many countries). But it could be nice to know for sure.
Not to give everyone such surgery would almost be on par with not giving every child born with loss of hearing state-of-the art hearing implants for free. Both groups constitute just about the worthiest of the worthy poor.
However patchy and bad you think the US system is, it's worse than that. And no, to my knowledge we don't give children with hearing loss free hearing implants
> All hail "alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better" - people.
I have no issue with Mr Beast, think that this was a good thing to happen, and have no particular view on his body of work. But I did think this was a strange thing to be lackadaisical about, if someone was very aware of or into the whole AI alignment thing.
An alien, incomprehensible person currently doing good things due to motives you don’t really understand.
FDA: if your product is unsafe, you'll lose profits via fines
Corps: too scared to innovate :(
People making minimum wage: if your product is unsafe, you'll lose profits via litigation
Corps: Time to innovate!!!
6. I still couldn't follow the rationalist text in this example video, I paid attention to either the text or game but not both. But then I'm not a zoomer, so not the target audience, and I find the sequences terribly long winded and boring, so IDK.
12. Perhaps the sequences should be narrated over this video instead. That combined with some actual shrooms and maybe I can get through them finally.
49. I think technically for Nominative Determinism in this case, the guy should be named Max Write.
I could follow the text but I had to pause the video whenever Eliezer said anything remotely interesting or thought-intensive, a fast-paced game is almost anti-optimized for anything that requires reflection or deep consideration. There is room for thought that engages the senses and the whole body, but pasting a wall of text on the frames of a completely unrelated game aint it.
>the guy should be named Max Write.
The name reflects your goals, your goal is to get read by as much people as possible.
I've now got a star by my name. Can I get rid of that?
You have to take of the funny little hat first!
Ahh but funny hats are one of the joys of life... I'm not giving those up.
#1: shocked no one has linked this Dinosaur Comics yet: https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3803
37.
Mr. Beast video has 99 million views. Applying the "lizardman constant" gives us a population similar to Chicago's. I don't think we should be making generalizations.
Neal Stephenson's recent novel "Termination Shock" has a subplot in which a character ends up joining and being successful in that India-China hand to hand skirmish war in the Himalayas. (And I'll say no more so as to avoid spoilers.) Stephenson's descriptions of how it actually works up close and personal are quite vivid.
Links #6 and #46 seem... possibly related to me? When I clicked on the video for #6, the motion of the game certainly did seem to have a very rhythmic quality to it; I don't know if this rhythm would have the correct cadence to induce the right brainwaves, though.
If the new cultured meat technology had existed 2000 years ago, Christians could have been verily eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood.
We probably still have a piece of Turin Shroud somewhere...
If you really believe the Catholic doctrine, we are doing that anyway. If you don't believe it, then the prospect of eating flesh and drinking blood won't appeal to you anyway.
IIRC there's also surprisingly old scholarship regarding whether a cultured cheeseburger is kosher (marit ayin notwithstanding)
Well, I'm not a Jewish scholar, but off the top of my head I would say "no".
There's two elements, the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. So a meat burger made from cultured meat, which is derived from real animal cells, is still meat. You're breaking the letter of the law here by mixing dairy and meat, as well as the spirit of the law which is that you want to eat meat and dairy mixed and are just looking for an excuse. Depending on how further away the generations of cultured cells get from the original (i.e. we're not using real cells from a real cow, it's a culture of a culture of a culture derived from real cells) would involve the letter here - when does it stop being 'real meat', if ever?
Artificial meat, such as plant-derived or mushroom protein or the like, is a different matter; there it's not the letter (this is not real meat, it's mock meat) that is broken, but the intention behind breaking it: do you want to break the prohibition as the prohibition, or are you just wanting to eat a burger? If the latter case, then a qualified "yes, that's kosher since it's not real meat".
I think this is like the "fish or meat in Lent" prohibition, and the decision that beavers (or whatever) were aquatic for that purpose; if the only food source is beaver and it would be a real problem of people starving or having a worse diet and becoming unhealthy, then okay - beaver counts as fish for this purpose. If you just want to chow down on meat then tough luck. Of course, people used all kinds of dodges around prohibitions, involving gaming the letter of the law. From "The Three Musketeers: Ten Years Later":
From "The Three Musketeers: Twenty Years After":
“Now to supper,” said Aramis.
The two friends sat down and Aramis began to cut up fowls, partridges and hams with admirable skill.
“The deuce!” cried D’Artagnan; “do you live in this way always?”
“Yes, pretty well. The coadjutor has given me dispensations from fasting on the jours maigres, on account of my health; then I have engaged as my cook the cook who lived with Lafollone — you know the man I mean? — the friend of the cardinal, and the famous epicure whose grace after dinner used to be, ‘Good Lord, do me the favor to cause me to digest what I have eaten.’”
Just four weeks ago, the Israeli Chief Rabbi ruled that the cultured meat of Aleph Farms (one of the leading Israeli companies in this field) would count as Parve (neither meat nor dairy). So not only would its cultured cheeseburger be kosher, but so would its cultured pork cutlets and its cultured tiger steak...
However, the ruling is predicated on the products being clearly presented as a vegetarian product close to meat. If they are, instead, marketed as actual meat, then they would count as meat (in which case, no cheeseburger, pork cutlet, or tiger steak).
The rationale for the ruling is that Aleph Farms only uses an in vitro fertilised egg to start the cultured meat process. It's perhaps relevant that Jewish Halacha also permits stem cell research.
"Now they’re trying to increase average family size and put the genie back in the bottle; Hungary can tell them about the limits of that strategy."
A bit weird that it is possible to highly successfully decrease family size but almost impossible to increase it more than a tiny bit.
Several possible explanations.
One: the number of desired children is _much_ lower than historical family size, which was due to lack of education and access to contraception. Once those things are out, they are borderline impossible to undo. So it's not something the government _did_ so much as was finally made possible. Trying to reverse it is trying to actively do something much harder. It's like blowing up a dam. Really easy to let the water out, but it's much much harder to get it back in.
Secondarily, reductions in family size can be achieved through the combination of dozens-to-hundreds of anti-family rules and regulations (even ones where that is not the goal, see here: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception for an example)
The first is probably the more likely explanation in early, dramatic declines in countries like Iran whereas the second one is more likely the explanation in later continued declines in places like the US.
anti-family rules: In the US, landlords are *technically* not allowed to discriminate against potential tenants based on family type (i.e. married or not, kids or not, disabled adult dependents...), but they *are* allowed to stipulate no more than 2 people per bedroom, which massively discriminates against larger families. Yeah, there are arguable fire-safety rules that apply, etc. but out in reality, I have actually, while searching for a rental, looked at houses that had perfectly decent usable bedrooms re-classified as "bonus rooms" or "home offices" or any other cute name they can come up with that isn't "bedroom", so that the house could be listed as two or three bedrooms, when it easily had four or five. Why? Because landlords don't like families with eight kids. Kids smudge up the walls and dig holes in the yard. They're as bad as pets, but you can't charge extra for them.
It is dang near impossible to find a reasonably-priced rental with more than three bedrooms-- and when it does homeowners will deliberately remove closets so they can pretend it's a "craft room" and not rent it to large families, so if you have more than four kids and you don't own your house you are hosed.
The first hypothesis is inconsistent with data on desired fertility in developing countries.
I'd be interested to see those data. I tend to be an "actions speak louder than words" kind of person. The fact is that as people get richer and more educated, presumably with the ability to have more kids, they nonetheless have fewer.
Your presumption is wrong. An employed, well educated woman in a first world country has less ability to have children than a poor woman in a poor country, since there are a lot more things she is expected to do. Also the cost of having children in wealthy countries is higher.
Also, less kids means more free time, and you find something to do in that free time, and that becomes a part of culture. Now go and tell people they have to give up doing things that were normal for their parents.
Until I read the link, I was guessing that "car seats as contraception" meant that replacing bench seats in front with two individual seats reduced the opportunity for teen sex. But that only works if the back seat is already occupied by another couple.
When you've influenced the culture that it's better to have fewer children for many reasons (from 'save the planet from overpopulation' onwards) and brought women out of the home by downgrading being a stay-at-home housewife and mother as something barely above being a parasite and made it comfortable and familiar for young women and young men to mingle as putative equals, of course it's going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
Women will be asked to give up their new freedoms while there is little cost to men, who can continue to occupy the same social roles as they have done. Economies of needing two working partners in a couple to afford a nice lifestyle, as set against extra expense and inconvenience of having more children. Trying to turn the clock back is always harder.
I would like to know why we think that a 16% increase in the TFR since Orban took power in 2010 is "a tiny bit." In this context, it sounds pretty impressive.
The gay soccer thing is weird to me. Some people in the comments seem to be speculating on homophobia as a cause, but I had a mental model of soccer being disproportionately *accepting* of homosexual players.
Perhaps the different context is that I'm only interested in women's soccer, where there are out lesbians who publicly hug/kiss their female partners after the match. My anecdata is that soccer and fencing appear more frequently than expected in lesbian spaces, given the otherwise general disinterest in major sports.
I couldn't find any actual reliable data on gay representation in soccer, but the seeming flip in representation for female players would make me more sympathetic to some sort of hormonal/biological tint.
It's also pretty good reason to accept an entirely sociological explanation with no biological elements whatsoever. Women's sports are low-prestige manly things, while men's sports are high-prestige manly things, so people who seem less manly for their gender are driven out of sports.
Not sure why you say women's sports are low-prestige. They get talked about less, but I think most people still have a lot of respect for good female athletes. (Actually, I'm not sure what prestige in general has to do with your point?)
Could you make the case for "no biological elements whatsoever"? That seems like an extraordinarily strong claim. There has to be a lot of genetic influence on who becomes a successful athlete (ex. Phelps's wingspan); I don't see why it's a priori implausible that whatever traits are useful in soccer could be somewhat correlated with something like "attraction to women."
I'm definitely not actually *claiming* that there's a purely non-biological explanation. I'm just saying that there's a perfectly good null hypothesis here, and any specific claim needs to do something to show that it performs better than this one. I assume that's what you were doing with a fully biological explanation - not actually making the extremely strong claim that there are *no* social elements whatsoever, but just showing that someone who wants to claim a particular explanation of a specific factor should show how it does better than this null.
I never claimed a fully biological model. Only an increased likelihood of a "hormonal/biological tint", which I still stand by.
Also, I can't tell what you think the null hypothesis is here. Is the null hypothesis supposed to be that all gender/sexuality distribution differences are due to social factors?
Wait, I can't tell if I'm misreading. You agree I'm not claiming that there are no social elements, and you're not claiming that biology is irrelevant. What are you disagreeing with me about?
Just the claim that one null hypothesis is a better null than the other.
My hypothesis is that homosexuality isn’t actually a trait; the relevant traits are “attraction to men” and “attraction to women”, and these traits are sex-linked.
That would make more sense to me, to have attraction to certain sex characteristics turn on/off rather than have a homosexuality gene sitting around waiting to be triggered. This would also match what I expect with the link between same-sex attraction and e.g. finger length. Though I'm not certain one way or another, and practically I don't expect the answer to change much for me
Everything I read so far suggests that women's soccer is disproportionately accepting of homosexual players, while men's soccer is disproportionately homophobic.
Often even the places that talk about homophobic men's soccer mention it's very different in women's leagues.
Interesting! I found this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_association_football
Which says that soccer is indeed somewhat more homophobic for men, so that is possible. But it also says that homophobic comments are still the #1 most common insult at women's soccer, so I don't know if women's soccer is accepting enough to be the only explanation.
Though ithe Wikipedia article also says as of 2022 there is at least one public gay male professional soccer player in England, and there was at least one in the 1990s, so now I'm not sure about the link Scott posted about trying to "find the first" but being unable. In North America, a professional male soccer player came out publicly in 2011.
> But also I can’t deny that as a phenomenon Mr. Beast really is disquieting ...
> ”Alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better” would be a good slogan for many people and groups I know.
Does anyone have a clip of him acting in some way that would imply these descriptions? I've watched like maybe 2 or 3 Mr. Beast videos, and I don't think I would have used these descriptions. But I've only watched a couple!
#36 - Would have thought it should be possible to pull an uno-reverse, attack those who make unwarranted attacks that threaten others' livelihoods, if the pendulum has swung so far. Even without the same numbers, recreational attackers would shrink at the prospect of being vulnerable themselves. The problem is they're just an anonymous blob, mostly unnamed people on social media.
There's basically zero risk for them whether they decide to say things haphazardly or attack - they don't need to choose. On the other hand simply having your identity known on social media is a liability (albeit more limited than what the gains are for public figures), even if you are boring.
> This makes short-term sense, but I wonder what this author’s vision of the future is - do we just stay on Earth forever?
Obviously. Leaving Earth isn't possible and never will be, for the same run-of-the-mill "laws of physics & biology" reasons the author uses to argue against landing on Mars.
The physics make it very expensive with present technologies, but there are a number of possible technological improvements that would substantially change that, such as nonotech producing materials with much higher strength to weight ratios or using such materials to build a space elevator.
What are the biological bars to a space habitat?
So why not wait until that magic future tech actually exists and makes it actually feasible, instead of pretending like space colonization is a live issue now?
This seems so obvious to me and yet I hardly ever see anyone pointing it out. Planets in the solar system are inhospitable to life. Even the closest one is too far away to allow a lot of travel. Planets outside the solar system are too far away. Einstein was right, the speed of light is the maximum possible speed and is unattainable for anything with mass. Even as fast as light is, it is way too slow to allow flights between stars.
Unless a technology that permits arbitrarily fast travel is invented, humans will only ever be on earth.
Or a technology for making places hospitable to life even if they weren't so when you discovered them. We've been doing that for ages now, and we're pretty good at it.
Wake me up when there is a thriving independent society in Antarctica. That is easy mode compared to anything in space.
Change international law so that an independent society in Antarctica would be *allowed* to thrive and we can talk. Passing a law that says "nobody can put anything but an externally-supported scientific outpost on this frontier", then pointing to the result and saying "see, harsh frontiers cannot be colonized", is not a strong argument.
You'd have to change international law anyway to set up an independent Mars colony.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case. At worst, Earth governments would point to the government that launched the rockets that carried the colonists and say "the colony isn't independent; it belongs to that government", but it can still be de facto independent.
And I don't think there's a strong bar to it being de jure independent. Antarctica, unfortunately, is different.
Re 1. This was envisioned in Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, pops up as a minor plot point here and there in the comics but is basically a given in that comic's future
It seems intuitive to me that people only feel thankful for things that directly benefit them or their group.
Why would an average Joe be happy if donations go to some other group, or political spending is for other groups, or foreign aid helps a country they'll never even visit?
Why would your tribe be happy you're helping a different tribe?
And on the flip-side, it's very hard for many people to *not* feel appreciative when someone gives them something useful, even if there's no reason they should "owe" anything in return, or if they know the gift was given with the expectation of reciprocal gifts. Because it feels wrong not to return a favor.
The hot-takes are still awful, but the emotions underpinning them are pretty ordinary.
Which link was this in response to?
#37 MrBeast - Everyone working as a social worker knows some social workers doing the job because of very ugly underlying motives (e.g. to control others) while helping disabled etc. so much. From a short-time perspective, it seems to work, but in the long-time, it always shows as having very bad consequences (like making people incapable of doing their own decisions).
15: “ Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions.”
Based on my experience with the FAA in general aviation, this is quite plausible. The majority of light aircraft are flying carbureted low compression engines with no computerized controls, and limited avionics in airframes modified lightly from their original certifications in the 1960s or earlier - and yet their cost has grown several times faster than inflation.
This is largely due to the FAA making it so expensive to certify new designs that it’s impossible to do so profitably (many have tried and most have failed).
Meanwhile the “experimental” market, largely free of onerous certification, is churning out kitplanes, engines, and avionics that are much better at a much lower price. And not appreciably less safe.(“experimental” as a class has a higher accident rate, but it seems mostly due to infant mortality - inexperienced home builders not properly testing their aircraft or not training themselves properly to jump into the new high performance plane they built)
That giant mace seems like a pretty bad choice for melee combat, it looks very unwieldy. Also, and maybe this is a cultural thing, it makes you look like the bad guy.
I remember paintings of Indian gods and heroes with maces, so probably it's cultural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gada_(mace)
I don't think that maces in general have a particularly bad reputation anywhere, but that doesn't necessarily include the big black excessively spikey variety.
Definitely gada are part of the warrior's weapons in Indian myths and legends, so there is that. Hanuman carries one, it's part of the iconography of Vishnu, and Balarama goes one better and has a plough as his typical weapon.
For China I'm not so sure. I do get the feeling this 'new' mace is more for riot and crowd control than for fighting in a conventional encounter. So Chinese forces using this to break up and disperse protests or border scuffles seems more likely, and most likely of all that this is psychological warfare - turn up to protest and this is what we'll use to break your heads. For modern warfare going back to what is by now a ceremonial weapon makes no sense.
I had to read more about Mar-Zutra II. Apparently he was crucified after his eventual defeat, and his only son was born *on the day of his death*. Mar-Zutra III was raised in secret, but didn’t become an exilarch - he went to Israel and became a notable scholar and ancestor of many subsequent generations of scholars. History is intense.
Why are meta analyses inherently suspicious?
Hahaha, I rarely laugh so hard from your Links posts. Usually once per every other set of links on average. But you really got me this time.
There are 4 types of economics 'developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina'.
I then got sad as I don't know anyone IRL who I could share this with and who would get it or enjoy it. Anyhow, I hope some of you out there in the comments also got a laugh out of that. What great timing within Scott's text. Sorry for this rather useless post, but perhaps I can turn it around and suggest we all appreciate Scott's humorous efforts through the common methodology.
I wonder if we could track them on a seasonal basis or perform some other autistic statistic or esoteric analysis based on the days of the year in the Jewish calendar and if there is any significance to when he is incredibly funny.
I bet if we look really hard we'd find some greater meaning encoded in reality like the archangel in his fiction working hard to maintain reality out over the ocean within a giant storm. Maybe those glitches which give the archangel headaches result in higher comedic occurrences as a corrective mechanism?
Or maybe I'm reaching too far to justify my post where I just wanted to share my laugh about the 4 types of economies.
The Max Read post is an amazing example of its own thesis: apart from making the assumption that Yglesias' content must be low-quality because he writes a lot, it doesn't contain a single linked source nor any evidence for its assertion that for blogging success, consistency matters while quality doesn't. (Yglesias can write quickly *and* cite sources for his assertions. Imagine that.)
And yet I was linked to this post from here, ffs.
"(...) it’s too easy and profitable to attack people socially, for most people do anything except crouch in a maximally defensive posture."
This sentence irritates me so much. I can tell from context what it's supposed to say, and yet everything about it, from the missing "to" to the comma before "for", forces me to interpret it literally, as "it's easy to attack people because most don't crouch".
Typo: Garett Jones' name has one R, not two!
I’m pretty skeptical of the firm employee count data. If regulations were the cause, then you would expect that firms that “want” to be 501 employees would instead have just 500, but firms that want 499 would be unaffected. That would mean that the side just above the cutoff should be depleted compared to the values just below the cutoff. But that doesn’t look like the case at all in those plots. But what else could cause it? “Digit bias “ is well known but it would be easy to check if 300 is also very common.
Maybe there are errors in the data where numbers get rounded off?
Regarding Mr. Beast: I have never laid eyes on one of his videos, and in fact never heard of him til I read Scott's link today -- so this may be way off. People are commenting on his philanthropy's having a weird, algorithmic quality. That made me wonder if he is on the autistic specturm. I have known several people with Asperger's (or whatever you want to call it) who come across as distant, chilly and uninterested in other people -- yet are very committed to helping others. You get the feeling it comes from a sort of philanthropic scrupulosity. They cannot conceive of deviating from what they see as the right thing to do. My theory is that while it is very hard for them to feel personal affection, they intuit that such a thing exists, and by being generous they are coming as close as they can to accessing it. Oliver Sachs may have been one of those people. While in his books he displays a very lively interest in his patients. in interviews I've read he came across to the interviewer as remote and odd.
You are what you repeatedly do.
Being a decent person consists not in *feeling* compassionate toward others, but in *behaving* compassionately toward others. There are plenty of normal people who can do both, but if you can only do one... it's far better to do the right thing than to feel the right thing. It's a value hierarchy that is too often upside-down in modern culture. You get more *likes* emoting for tiktok than for actually helping people.
But the most generous person I know has a TBI that prevents him having much in the way of feelings at all. He's simply decided that God let him live for a reason (he was run over by a drunk driver), and if he sees a situation where he can help, it's his job to do so. Would literally give you the shirt off his back if he thought you needed it. Not because he has feelings for you, but because that's the way he's worked out the logic of his continued existence.
> Being a decent person consists not in *feeling* compassionate toward others, but in *behaving* compassionately toward others.
I'm always slightly nervous when I see the word "decent person", because I'm never sure which of the various possible interpretations, if any, to apply.
If you'd used the word "good", or the phrase "morally admirable", in place of decent, I'd agree with you. But I think that "decent" arguably has connotations beyond that, and I wouldn't necessarily use (and certainly wouldn't *choose*) that word to describe someone wholly devoid of compassion or empathy who acted in morally admirable ways for other reasons.
But, obviously, this is all connotations rather than meanings, and hence horrifically fuzzy.
You're right. Decent is not the ideal term. But it is difficult to express concisely, and I hesitate to use "good" or even "admirable", because I'm coming from a religious perspective where I can only be "good" to the degree that I conform my will to God's, and then it is not me being good, it is the goodness of God manifesting through me. Does that make sense?
Perhaps "generous" or "compassionate" would be better.
Completely agree. And about the man with the TBI not having much in the way of feelings: I read once something about a person whose corpus callosum had en cut, so that the 2 sides of his brain could not communicate with each other. If you showed a picture to the non-verbal side of his brain and asked him later to point out the earlier picture from among a group of pix, he could do it -- all the while *saying* that he had no idea which picture he'd seen before.. So actually he did know -- but the part of him you were talking with could ot recognize that or tell you about it. I think it's sort of like that with the compassion of your TBI guy and of the autistic spectrum people I'm talking about. It's in there somewhere, influencing what they do, but they can't access it in a way they can show or express. But I might be wrong, and anyhow I agree with you that what they are *doing* is what counts.
Why would India/China abide by the agreement if they actually went to war?
Because they're both nuclear powers with high population density and if a line isn't drawn somewhere then they both will be annihilated. So why not draw it all the way down at the point where retreat is highly effective.
Guess they wouldn’t. The agreement is meant to reduce the chances of border clashes spiraling into a hot war.
The Hamilton 68 summary shouldn't be taking Matt Taibbi's spin that it claimed to be a bot tracker and that it listed real commentators as bots (or those commentators reacting to being told by Taibbi that they were listed as bots) at face value.
Most reporting from 2017 and 2018 when Hamilton 68 was active didn't focus on the bot angle. When conflating all the accounts together into one category, sentiment more aligned with treating them all as Russia-linked trolls rather than bots.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/russian-trolls-putin-trump-twitter-hamilton/
https://venturebeat.com/social/hamilton-68-website-tracks-russian-backed-propaganda-on-twitter/
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2017/this-online-dashboard-is-monitoring-russian-propaganda-about-the-german-election/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/16/586361956/as-an-american-tragedy-unfolds-russian-agents-sow-discord-online
"Hamilton 68 follows 600 accounts run by the Russian government, Russian trolls, bots and individuals sympathetic to the Russian point of view."
"Among those, Schafer said there are three general tiers: accounts tied directly to the Kremlin, bots and trolls, and people who routinely share those messages"
Yeah, lets designate some classes of statements to be Russian propaganda and anyone making them to be a Russian asset. Just throw in whatever you don't want the public to hear, and you got it. That's what they did, isn't it?
Personally, I thought accusations of being a Russian asset had just replaced accusations of being a racist, which got old and weren't attracting enough attention. I was surprised that someone actually had a system for making these accusations and that some people actually believed them, rather than dutifully chiming in in agreement as they were supposed to.
I assumed #7 was plagiarized from this[1] extremely well-known reddit thread, but it turns out I'd gotten that backwards (the reddit one was at least a year after the other), and they're actually both sourced from a post in 2008:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160111041559/http://www.ar15.com/archive/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=749519
[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb38xf/
A bit surprised that the patriarchy link didn't consider fertility rates. I had always assumed patriarchy was so widespread because it tends to cause societies to produce more babies, and larger population societies tend to dominate, control and consume smaller population societies over the long term.
> Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions.
It's probably this. How many changes are they permitted to make to a device before they have to go through the approval process all over again?
> Brookings: Political Party Affiliation And Inflation Expectations:
You mean Democrats believed their party's talking points that inflation was not that bad, while Conservatives did not? I'm shocked.
> Related: review/meta-analysis finds that drinking diet soda = drinking water as far as weight gain goes, although none of the studies lasted more than a year so I guess you could still argue it causes some problem long term.
Some good randomized controlled trials have recently shown that certain non-nutritive sweeteners are associated with drastic changes to the gut microbiome, so long-term changes to weight and cognition are not outside the realm of possibility.
Re: the MrBeast thing, some of the "backlash" is just commentary that we shouldn't live in a world where easily curable blindness is a thing that needs the benevolent charity of a millionaire to address.
The people shouting that blindness should not be treated as a disability while blatantly ignoring the actual joy of the people whose blindness was cured are unhinged.
On the subject of online tools that "detect" GPT: People used these to try to decide this market https://manifold.markets/firstuserhere/which-one-is-human-which-one-is-ai and got a lot of positive results, even for human-written text. I wish these would be more explicit about what the percentages represent.
#26 looks like more confirmation that shape-rotaters are better fitted to modern life than wordcels.
Even if we were able to terraform Mars and shield it from radiation it isn’t clear if the reduced gravity would have long term negative consequences. Mars is the only possibility of off world colonization and that assumes a lot going well.
On top of the tech issues there is also a demographics/economics issue of off world colonizing. Societies that are wealthy enough to attempt it inevitably have pretty low birth rates. It isn’t clear to me how those societies could spare enough people to start a viable colony. That’s not even taking into consideration the privation those colonists would be subjecting themselves to compared to that wealthy society. Would there be enough people willing to make the sacrifice?
Wait, what? How many people do you think it would take to establish a viable colony? Surely that's not more than a few thousand?
That depends on what you mean by a "colony". If you're looking for an autarky that can maintain all of its own technology with no supply shipments from Earth, that probably does require at least ten thousand people (or human-equivalent AGIs). Anything less, and there's too much stuff that you absolutely need that literally nobody knows how to make, even after you had everyone watch as many how-to-make-stuff Youtube videos as they had time to spare for.
If you're willing to allow for a modest supply rocket from Earth every year or two, you could probably get it down to a hundred people for 90+% self-sufficiency.
How is doing philanthropy solely for the purpose of featuring people in a clickbait Youtube video anything *but* exploitative?
If any rich people want to "exploit" me by giving me a priceless gift in exchange for me being in a clickbait YouTube video, please contact me ASAP. I'd love to be "exploited" in this way.
First, even if you are right, do you really want to judge people for what you're guessing to be their reasons (which are generally not always easy to determine) rather than for their actions? "Oh no, he did this awesome thing for such a morally abhorrent reason, lets hang him?"
Second, he needs clickbait videos to be able to fund something like that. I'm not sure I share your confidence that clickbait is the goal rather than a necessary part of the process.
Last but not least, I'm guessing you're not severely vision-impaired. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone he helped - would you really feel exploited?
What does "exploitative" mean?
It sounds as though it means "benefitting himself at a cost to them," but in this case he was benefiting both himself and them. Is "benefitting other people in order to benefit yourself rather than as an end in itself" exploitative? That describes much of what most people do. A cook in a restaurant is probably not making food because he wants people to enjoy eating it, although he could be. He is making food primarily in order to get paid to do so. Similarly for a taxicab driver, a grocery store checkout clerk. Are they all being exploitative?
I think this article needs to be linked every time the discussion of vat-grown meat comes up.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
#7 (lottery): I dislike the framing that the winner "ruined his life". It really sounds to me like other people ruined his life.
33. Almost everything written about IQ on the internet is nonsense—and everything relating to very high IQ is.
I hope no one mentioned this extraordinarily original idea in the 975 comments: you could technically cultivate not only human meat but your own meat as well. Also this is a possible prospect for celebrities to scandalously monetize their brands.
That's…deeply disturbing. Congratulations.
I loved this month's Links post. Even more interesting than usual! Also, it was published on my birthday, which is both a sign and just kind cool. (It's a sign that even a tenuous and random connection to me = makes things better, I'm theorizing.)
#10: I wonder if the lack of gay male athletes is related to what I perceive as an over-representation of gay female athletes in athletics. I really want to see a study on this, but I haven't been able to find anything. If someone knows of some good research, please let me know!
If you want to learn more about so-called "sudden wealth" events, like winning the lottery, I recommend Sudden Wealth: It Happens. Even if you don't expect to come into a windfall one day, the book is an interesting look at rationality in the face of personal black swans.
https://smile.amazon.com/Sudden-Wealth-Happens-David-Rust-ebook/dp/B005MKCH3Q/
#24 Regarding Israel's judicial reform, most English language analysis is based on the Israeli left's reaction to the reform which is heavily influenced by the fact that they stand to lose a lot of political power if the reform were to pass.
Therefore, instead of reading second hand analysis on the subject, I advise all westerners to read the proposed changes firsthand and then compare them to their own country's judicial system and then make up their own opinion on them. I believe you will find that the proposed system is quite similar to the average western one, and that these reforms are not the Enabling Act that the Israeli left is making them up to be
Reading a law rarely tells you the important part of what it *actually* means. That's one of the reasons we have lawyers! And that's the *easy* case where you have old uncontroversial laws with tons of established precedent.
Well done Iran on reducing maternal mortality.
The US is the worst of the developed countries on that measure, but passing them is still an achievement.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/us-maternal-mortality-crisis-continues-worsen-international-comparison
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105.
Glad I could cite something appreciated!
It is. Of course, it pales in significance compared to the problem of being the kind of regime that can beat women to death for failing to wear the hijab:
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126680819/the-death-of-a-young-iranian-woman-in-police-custody-continues-to-reverberate
..and I'm pretty sure for these and related reasons a pregnant Iranian woman would 100x rather give birth in the United States than Iran, notwithstanding the slight uptick in her chances of dying.
Still, like a murderer learning to tie his shoes or read, you are correct that this is an achievement.
Of course police in the UK or USA never kill people in their custody.
In my limited experience of Iranian women, they would certainly rather live in Iran than the US.
At least 10 people on Facebook unfriended me for the "hot take" that Mr. Beast donating millions of dollars to pay for a thousand blind people to get sight-restoring surgery was, in fact, a good thing. This might honestly be the single dumbest thing I've ever been unfriended for, I'm pretty damn pissed about it.
I could understand if they were just making the standard argument in favor of universal healthcare and saying that we shouldn't *need* to rely on millionaire donations because there should have been government programs to provide this surgery instead. In fact, Mr. Beast himself agrees with that point! He made a tweet explicitly saying that the government should be paying for this! But that's not what the people involved in this drama cared about. They were outright condemning Mr. Beast for this, usually for one of two reasons: First, because they believed he was only doing this for publicity (which no one can know for sure without reading his mind, and in any case wouldn't negate the tangible good he did). Second, because they think this whole news story is basically propaganda to make people view the ultra-rich in a more favorable light (as if that's somehow a terrible thing in its own right, even if the particular rich person in question hasn't done anything wrong). Maybe these people are just a small but vocal minority, but nonetheless, they're common enough that my entire FB feed was filled with these sorts of back-and-forth arguments for several days in a row.
One woman in particular was especially obnoxious about this debate, before she blocked me. She made a lengthy post about how it's actually bad for wealthy people to donate money to charity because it helps to "launder the reputations of the bourgeoise," and then specifically condemned the Mr. Beast donations. Again, her argument had nothing to do with wanting universal healthcare, that wasn't the issue for her at all. She was just pissed about the fact that this made a rich person look good, which is apparently worse in her eyes than a thousand people staying blind would have been. Then, to top it all off, one of her tankie friends starting talking about how Fidel Castro's regime provided the same surgery to Cuban citizens for free. So apparently, funding this surgery is enough to redeem Castro despite the fact that he sent queer people and political dissidents to forced labor camps, but not enough to redeem Mr. Beast for the unforgivable crime of being wealthy.
I also got the sense that there was an accelerationist component to her argument: specifically, the stupid, cruel, tired old idea (beloved by tankies and other edgelord leftists) that "it's actually bad to make poor people's lives better, because then they'll become complacent with the status quo instead of rising up to overthrow capitalism." It would explain why she also didn't seem to care much for the idea of government-funded healthcare - maybe those sorts of single-issue reforms just aren't revolutionary enough for her. God forbid we try to make the world a better place in a way that *doesn't* involve tearing the whole system down.
I think the India and China conflict is best described by this quote from HPMOR
"There are many animals which have what are called dominance contests. They rush at each other with horns - trying to knock each other down, not gore each other. They fight with their paws - with claws sheathed. But why with their claws sheathed? Surely, if they used their claws, they would stand a better chance of winning? But then their enemy might unsheathe their claws as well, and instead of resolving the dominance contest with a winner and a loser, both of them might be severely hurt."
The game never was to fight war as effectively as possible, with the constraint that only medieval weapons are allowed. The game is to not back down, but also not escalate. The whole point of the weapons is to be not too lethal, because if both sides were using there most lethal weapons, both would lose.
If this bizarre pseudoconflict escalates, they may move up to crossbows. If it deescalates, they may move down to water balloons. This is a particularly strange little divot that moloch sometimes pushes people into. Neither side cares about historical authenticity.
Another interesting angle on vat meat might be the health appeal of meats without parasites, antibiotics, or pollutants - think "tapeworm and mercury free" sushi. In fairness in terms of price I strongly suspect this would still be a luxury good anyways (organic+), and exotic meats likely beat health in that arena.
#3 How to write objectively, instead of showing bigotry:
"Carl Sagan married three times. His first wife was legendary biologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered mitochondrial endosymbiosis, then {went off the deep end and became an AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther. } concluded that AIDS did not exist and that the official account of 9/11 was flawed.
Writing like this does not imply that you agree with her conclusion.
And yet, is his just job to always be neutral, or, as a blogger, is expressing his opinion about the validity of these views in keeping with his role?
Oh he is free to express himself just as he pleases. I just wanted to highlight the difference for him and others. People don't have much exposure to open-minded thinking.
For a considered opinion along these lines, see "Dealing with Disagreement and Being Wrong" at WhatDoINo.substack
I guess what I’m asking is, why *shouldn’t* he exhibit bigotry against positions he sees as dangerously wrong?
My previous response answers this: he is free to express any views he wishes. I simply wanted to give him and others experience at distinguishing open-minded thinking.
Have you read the article I suggested?
No. If you had actually provided a link, I might have.
But again, there's an implication that he should have done differently. Unless you genuinely think Scott is unaware that it's possible to express such ideas in neutral language???
What I think (as you would find set out in more detail in the article) is that he, like most people, have less than ideal training in thinking; that he goes in for believing things on inadequate information, rather than thinking in terms of probabilities of things being true. There's plenty of literature on this if you are really interested.
Re #1 zebra meat is widely available in southern Africa (you could get it in the supermarket), it's not that exotic.
Also, I would bet on predators' meat not being very tasty.
Re the AEA, I think you're suffering pretty strongly from confirmation bias. Someone asked about this on Reddit. Here's the thread, my highlights below: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/10xv4ty/why_does_the_the_american_economic_association/
> As an econ PhD student I can tell you that (at least in my department) over half of each cohort specializes in applied micro topics. That is, using econometrics and empirical methods to look at issues like the "social justice" issues you discuss. Most people don't understand that economics is much more than just the "traditional" topics like inflation; economics is a toolbox that can be applied to a huge variety of issues.
That's the main point -- that unlike psychiatrists talking about climate change, these issues are actually part of the field of economics. Most people think of econ as just being macro, and that has never been the case.
Another person noted that it takes a while to write papers, so it may have been that there wasn't enough time for more inflation research, and we might see a bunch next year.
Finally, the guy you reference is counting weird. The "traditional econ" research is going to be concentrated in a few sessions, whereas "woke" subjects are going to hit a lot of areas. He's counting sessions that have one paper as a woke session, and this seems fundamentally flawed. Like, imagine that each session has 10 papers, one of which (uniformly) is on a woke topic. Clearly, 10% of research conducted has been on woke subjects, but he would have reported it as "oNe hUnDrEd pErCeNt oF SeSsIoNs wErE WoKe". Come on Scott, you're better than this.
These are potentially valid points—certainly it is the case that Economics validly has a much more diverse field of study than most other fields—, but a) in my experience, organizers try to group similarly-themed topics together, so the "10%" situation you describe seems very unlikely (though I agree that his counting method is less than precise), b) the actual article goes into some more detail:
>When I told one DC economist these figures, his impulse was to blame a lot of the kooky Marxist and self-described “heterodox” associations that are affiliated to the conference. And, for sure, there were plenty of sessions with titles such as “Innovations in Teaching Economics of Gender: Feminist Pedagogy for Economics” hosted by non-AEA associations.
>But it’s an error to think that the results above are not broadly indicative of the relative balance of these topics explored at the core. Even if one restricts the sample to just sessions run by the AEA or the AEA in conjunction with another association, for example, you find 16 percent of the 187 sessions featuring papers on gender issues, 13 percent for race and 9 percent for climate. That compares with just 7 percent of sessions featuring papers on inflation and 4 percent featuring papers on growth. Not as lop-sided, for sure, but still…
c) that still seems like a serious imbalance, even accounting for possible bias in the counting method. It could be illusory if there were a bunch of papers that fell within *neither* category, so that there were as many "freakonomics"-style papers as Woke ones, but otherwise it sure does sound like Woke issues predominate. It really boils down to whether you're accusing Bourne of bad faith. Are you? Because if not, I think it's reasonable to give his opinion as a professional Economist some weight. And d) saying "you're better than this" to Scott about this—even if you're completely right on every point—is illegitimate. This is a links post; he has admittedly done very little research on each item. There's no due diligence here; he quoted someone who seemed reputable about something that seemed interesting. He openly says at the beginning of every Links post that some percentage will turn out to be BS. If he had done an entire post on this issue, or used this article as major evidence for a point he was making, that would be something else.
a) It really doesn't seem that far fetched to me. Inflation and growth are macro topics, and are only going to be in macro sessions. Whereas something like racism could come up in metrics, labor econ, housing market stuff, &c.
b/c) I'm not convinced. This could be really easily resolved, if someone wanted to actually go out and count the papers. But it's worth noting, it wasn't "sessions about X issues", it was "sessions _that featured a paper_ about X issues". At an economics conference, there are likely to be a few sessions entirely about inflation or growth. There is less likely to be many sessions entirely about woke topics. If I write a paper using some econometric tool to look at police shootings, for example, I might present that in an econometrics session. That counts for one woke session. Ten other researchers might write about inflation, and present in the same session. They all count for one non-woke session. The problem is obvious. Is that the case? Maybe not. But it very well could be, and the counting method we're given does nothing to determine that answer.
Do I think the guy is operating in bad faith? No. Motivated reasoning? Yes.
d) You're right that those other examples would be more egregious, but I stand by it. Regardless of what he says, a lot of people will take it as endorsement of the conclusion, especially when he follows it up with, "For now I think every 'American ____ Association' should be considered compromised". He clearly, at least preliminarily, agrees with this -- I would argue due to bias on his part, as well, from his experience with the APA. He is very ready to equate the two, despite the fact that race/gender/climate are relevant to quite a lot of actual econ topics in a way they aren't to psychiatry.
#18 - Ultimately we could use materials from the asteroid belt to make Iain Banks style "orbital" rings. In the event that it actually works, we could also make an Arthur C. Clarke (3001) style ring around the earth and colonize that.
On the mushrooms simulation, there is a subreddit dedicated to creating these. If you go to the top rated posts, some are astoundingly accurate. https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/
I find the above linked video to be a high-quality simulation of about 1.5 grams of good mushrooms. (The white wall is perfect). At three 3 grams, some of those larger waves of hallucination would briefly come together and consume your field of view and other aspects of consciousness. It gets much more intense than this.
Late to the party, but it looks like the example link in #6 is broken now. Also, the LessWrong post describes the video style as “very popular,” but for the life of me I can’t find an example. Probably my lack of Googling creativity, but is this style really that popular? Are there normie/non-sequence-related examples out there?
For #4, China is probably not using crossbows as the mainstay of a medieval style army for the same reasons late medieval armies didn't, and is not developing new crossbows to fill the role they do use crossbows in because the civilian market already has quite a lot of high quality and highly lethal crossbows to choose from. Medieval combat is a solved problem and we probably shouldn't expect new solutions.
For #44, El Salvador is different from other Latin American countries with serious gang problems because of the Sombra Negra vigilante organization's infiltration of the police forces, which meant that gangs are both less able to infiltrate and subvert the police, and also that an existing institutional culture of never, ever working with or giving quarter to organized crime in the El Salvadorean police gave the government more state capacity for dealing with gang violence in comparison to, say, Mexico or Colombia where "plato o plomo" represents a serious issue preventing strong government action against cartels.
#37:
> 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 think this has more to do with the YouTube algorithm than anything else. The MrBeast video has 115 million views. When I searched "MrBeast blind" and looked at some of the other videos that came up, the biggest one I saw had only 1 million views. Far more people are watching the original video than the reactions to it (at least based on the videos that came up in my search).
(When I search, the top video is the original MrBeast video, but I believe you that your results are different, not everyone gets served the same results)
Because he (and you) I am reasonably confident, have NOT tried to prove themselves wrong. Someone who seeks the truth does the research. You (according to you) couldn't be bothered to read the article I suggested as it involved a few seconds more than merely clicking a link.