I just can't imagine the face. Is it like, you look at the photo and can't tell it's really a dog? Or like an "if this was abstract art I would say they buried a face in there"?
When I first glanced at the photo never having seen it before, the face was so ghastly and jarring, it was like a demon baby's face grimacing on a dog's body. Then my eyes drifted up to the caption, back down, and the face was never seen again.
I may be missing something important, but it seems to me that some people in this debate are making a "base rate fallacy".
Specifically, the article "Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones" complains that few Brahmins lead Indian companies. Out of 20 wealthiest Indian companies, not even one is led by a Brahmin!
Okay, so how many Brahmins are there in India? According to Wikipedia, they make 5% of the population, in other words, one in 20. So, under perfect equality, you would statistically expect 1 out of the 20 wealthiest Indian companies on average to be led by a Brahmin. And it is not one, it is zero. Perhaps my math is wrong, but I think that even under perfect equality, where would be about 30% chance that a randomly selected group of 20 people would contain zero members of a 5% minority. (Someone please check my math.)
So the actual question is why Brahmins are *overrepresented* in American companies (compared to other Indians), not why they are underrepresented in Indian ones (because most likely, they are not). I think it could simply be a selection effect of Brahmins being more rich and being traditionally the educated ones -- this is why they are more likely to pay to study at an American university, and then some of them get a great job opportunity and stay here.
I can't imagine much for most books. Probably because of the economics of publishing, most books are barely touched by editors. If you write a non-fiction book and want to have it fact checked you have to pay for that yourself.
She may be an usual case, given this was an already published and successful book, that had become controversial and was being reviewed for changes before publishing a new edition. Maybe they pushed harder because of the (apparent) controversy, but also, she had much more leverage.
"Had to" seems a bit strong for the written fact. I thought it was interesting that the author wrote "Before we could discuss this, Picador and I agreed to split." Clearly authors don't always think/know they have power in these situations but it isn't clear to me that they wouldn't have actually published the book.
Having said that, those suggestions did seem pretty nuts.
The book was already published by Picador, but because of heavy criticism they stopped selling it and planned a new version – "to be revised in consultation with sensitivity readers". This article was about this new version.
I can't speak to the general case, but Naomi Novik, one of my favorite authors, wrote a cringing apology for using the word "dreadlocks" in a context having nothing to do with race after being informed, I conjecture by a sensitivity reader working for her publisher but might be wrong, that the term was not politically correct. Judging by her writing she is not herself particularly woke, so I interpreted that as a response to incentives.
Sure, but the point is precisely that they're using them all at the first place. They may not be literally doing the censoring, but publishers using them means they intend to censor their works for woke reasons.
It's kind of silly to suggest that they would pay for this work to be done but not actually care about what the readers say, unless you want to argue it's some kind of weird act of signalling or something.
But you can ask a dozen women about their experiences with pregnancy and get a dozen different responses. It is the same problem as with 'sensitivity readers'. Given the near infinite number of identity politics subcategories that people claim to belong to these days, how could a few such people even begin to pretend to represent them all fairly?
Don't compare it to a gun editor - compare it to a traditional editor who says things like "the story would flow a lot better if Chapter 18 was before Chapter 17, and Chapter 19 seems like a waste so you should cut it".
This matches my understanding. Authors may choose to self-censor based on the reader's recommendation, but the ones I've been aware of were advisors with no power to actually censor the work. Even in the linked description it's not clear to me that "censor" is an appropriate term for what happened. Same for the "context" warning from Facebook.
I think it may also be conflating "normal" low intelligence with what were considered genetic defects. Down Syndrome and whatever we call Mental Retardation (apparently "intellectual development disorder" in the new DSM) or similar issues.
My experience was that I started by seeing the face (on the bottom of the dog's head), switched after a few seconds to seeing the dog, and now I can't see the face at all no matter how hard I try. I think dog is stickier than face, if you've already seen the dog it's probably hopeless.
I think I was able to see the face after first seeing the dog, but I had to cheat by using the back of my hand to cover up my view of the dogs eyes and top part of the picture. Once the image was no longer obviously a dog, I think my brain was a bit more free to interpret shadows as spooky face-like. The face I ended up seeing had the dogs collar as an eye, the dogs nose as the spooky face nose, a shadow to the left of the dogs nose as the other eye, and the underside of the dogs muzzle as a creepy gaping mouth with visible teeth. It sort of reminds me of the redead from Zelda Ocarina of Time.
Also, I've been a longtime reader, and just recently a subscriber and now first-time commenter. Thanks for all your great writing over the years Scott, and congrats on the marriage!
Similar experience here. I saw the face, then read the caption and could only see the dog. I was eventually able to recover the face by covering the dog's eyes and top part of the image.
The light patch to the left of the dog's nose is the profile of the face's nose (the face is looking somewhat down and to the viewer's left), and the dog's nose is one of the face's eyes. The reddish patch of the dog's collar is the face's left ear.
This was my experience too I think the brain is really well trained on eyes, such that if it "latches" on to a pair of eyes the rest of the face takes shape almost immediately
After reading the comments I scrolled back up to see the face and found that I can catch a glimpse of the face as I quickly scroll up, but the moment it stops it turns back into a dog.
Interesting, I just scrolled back up quickly, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a face. Scrolling down quickly, I didn't get the impression of a face. I gave it a break for a minute, and scrolled up again quickly. Thought I saw a face. Gave it a break. Scrolled down quickly, didn't see the face.
Has it got to do with what part of the pic (bottom vs top) that we see first?
I can switch back and forth with relative ease but notice that when I do there is a change in muscular tension in my upper right back accompanying the switch.
wait... so you saw the face first? I am having trouble seeing the face, but based on (https://imgur.com/SRDcnOr) the face still only takes up a small portion of the picture. And the face is floating on a dogs body? Why would this be seen before a dog when the rest of the picture has all the context of a dog??
..and i wonder how this correlates with dog ownership..
I think if you scroll down the dog is more obvious and if you scroll up you'll be more likely to see the face. Start with the image off screen in both cases.
I’m in the “completely hopeless” camp. I wonder if it might be because I’ve owned dogs, similar to that one (mostly Labs) my entire life. Even if I cover up the dog’s eyes, there is just way too much else in the picture that immediately pattern matches to “black dog laying on the floor” for me.
Wait, really? I didn't see the face at all at first, but after looking at the image that highlights the facial feature locations, I can freely "see" it by focusing on those for a bit
...same as you, I started by seeing the face, from second look on I could only see the dog and was not able to see the face again. But then I accidentally looked at the picture in small (thumbnail) and there I can only see the face, not the dog (even if I have both the large picture and the small one next to each other, I see a different thing in either of them) :) pretty weird :)
If you're having trouble seeing the face: squint so hard your eyes are almost closed and focus on the white parts of the dog's face, which are the highlights of a face mostly in shadow.
Does it resemble jar-jar binks? Like, with 2 eye stalks on top of a head with a mouth on the front of a head sticking out? That's the closest I saw when squinting at the lighter area
I saw the dog first, and was only able to see the face once I concentrated on seeing the dog's nose as an eye. The small white triangle to its right as a nose was also a feature that helped transform the image
Don't know if this helps, but: the dog is looking straight at us with a chill expression. The human face is looking down between the dog's legs and looks horrified / hopeless. Edit: the whitest part of the photo is the human's left cheek and the dog's left upper lip.
It took me a non-trivial amount of seconds to see the dog, but now I can see whichever I want to see.
This is still a dog's nose for me. I'm not able to see any faces anywhere (including the ones illustrated into the photo in other links).
Maybe it has to do with some individual priming? I had a dog with a vaguely similarly shaped face, maybe that's the reason it's instantly recognizable as dog-and-nothing-but-dog for me.
This rings potentially true to me. I can't really see the face either, even after reading some descriptions and looking at a cropped image or two. (I usually experience these optical illusions in a more typical way.)
I'm a big fan of dogs, and I think they're a more salient feature of any dog-containing image for me than they are for the average person. It's hard for me to see the nose as anything other than part of a dog, even when it's cropped out of context.
I never saw the face. I spent two or three minutes staring at that damn dog, and I began to think it was a joke. I'm wondering it isn't due to being told that you'll see a face before you focus on the dog, that you see a face. Anyway, it's interesting that so many people did see a face when all I see is a dog. Of course, I have abundant personal experience that I don't perceive patterns the way other people seem to. I suspect I'm quite neurodivergent in that I don't perceive things the way other people claim to perceive them.
Unlike what most comments describe here, I could not see the dog! I stared for at least a literal minute at the photo in the post (here, above), and I just could not find the dog’s head. I thought it was some kind of creepy AI-generated photo or something.
(I couldn’t really see a face, either, it just looked like a headless dog, and the place where the head should be kind of sort of had some shadows that might suggest a face in a creepy-enough nightmare.)
But I literally spent a minute looking for the dog’s head and couldn’t find it. Then I opened a link from one of the comments here and the dog was obvious. Now I can’t turn it back into nightmare fuel.
Of the many purported benefits of extracurricular activities, I don't ever recall hearing that they were supposed to improve your academic performance. I don't know how it could; it sucks time and resources away from classes, with the goal of giving a broader range of experience and skills beyond book learnin'.
Yes, here in Brooklyn there's this whole layer of the local economy where art and music etc lessons are sold to bourgie parents, usually expressly under the theory that they will help them become STEM geniuses.
For a good, complete summary, look up “Spearman’s G” on wikipedia. For a brief, bad summary, it’s how “generally intelligent” you are, measured by success on various tests in different domains. Doing well on one of them predicts doing well on others, which is why G is interesting; it also seems to track to what we usually mean by “smart”.
I find it amazing that you're continually in the comments crticizing this stuff when you lack even the most rudimentary, 'two minutes on wikipedia' level of understanding of the topics you're criticizing.
Literally how can you possibly express any kind of judgement about IQ and IQ testing (or intelligence research generally) when you don't even know what g is and why it matters.?
g is the general factor of cognitive ability. When a large group of people takes a large number of cognitive tasks, they ALL will correlate positively.
You can extract a single factor using a technique called factor analysis or a principle component using a technique called principle component analysis. The number one factor or first principle component is referred to as g. It is not an average of the scores of the cognitive tasks but a distillation of what they have in common. It is theoretically possible that we wouldn't have this g factor and that cognitive tasks would not correlate like this but they do. And all cognitive tasks positively correlate with g to varying degrees. A very interesting observation.
Some tasks have higher g loadings than others, meaning they correlate more with g. We use a relative scale of IQ to express the scores on tests that accurately measure g. IQ correlates with what people traditionally call "smart" things.
The claim that it doesn't correlate as well with g is not-even-wrong, in that it depends on how you measure *g*. There's no God-given concept of g that is not subject to arbitrary choice-of-test issues. If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music. That the normal g does not do so is a prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is "better", one which is not supported by any literature I could find.
(I do agree that intuitively, music tests don't measure what we want IQ to measure. But you don't get to use *g* as a get-out-of-arbitrary-test-choices-free card, it doesn't work that way. You must instead argue on the object level that nobody cares about music.)
Just because you can't measure something perfectly doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Take "aggressiveness." There is no God-given concept of it; any measure of it will involve choosing a test. But some of those tests will be better than others, and an "aggressiveness test" which focused mainly on irrelevant physiological characteristics would be a bad test.
So the question then becomes: what makes a test for intelligence better or worse? What grounds the "prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is better"?
Spearman's g is one compelling answer to that question. When we test people's aptitudes across various domains, we find that there are some domains, like visual-spatial reasoning and logical inference, where if someone does well in them, they are likely to also do well in lots of other domains. We call those domains "g-loaded". To measure g, we can generate a score from a particular person's aptitudes - critically, placing a higher weight on those domains which seem more "g-loaded". No test will perfectly measure g, but some will come closer than others, by prioritizing heavily g-loaded tests.
A battery with lots of music tests would be a poor measure of g, since music ability correlates only mildly well with skill in other domains - it's not heavily "g-loaded". In fact, Spearman included a music test in his original analysis, and found it to be the least g-loaded out of all the domains he investigated! Interestingly, math was second-worst; the strongest predictor out of his list was "classics". Selection effects may be involved here, but there's reason to believe linguistic skill is actually very g-loaded.
I hope this goes part of the way to explaining why the concept of g actually does help justify a choice of tests to measure IQ. It's not about what we *care* about; it's about what talents tend to predict being multitalented, and music just so happens to be a poor predictor of that.
"If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music"
I don't think you understand 'g'. But the whole point of g is that its a GENERAL intelligence factor.
IQ tests predict performance on most cognitively demanding tasks i.e. stuff completely outside of IQ test questions. That's the whole point of g. It's not simply 'correlates with other IQ questions'.
Reading sheet music almost assuredly does NOT correlate very well in this way, and it probably does not correlate nearly as well with life outcomes as IQ does.
IQ tests are not constructed arbitrarily, and I find it bizarre that you could have possibly 'checked the literature' on this subject and then say something like this.
It's not that 'nobody cares about music', it's that music simply does not have the predictive validity of IQ tests. If you have no predictive validity, then there's zero point of psychometrics. Being good at identifying the next pattern in a series tells us that you'll probably be good at most things that require abstract reasoning. Being good at reading sheet music does not. That's it. That's all there is to it.
Your appeal to 'god given' concepts is totally bizarre. Nothing is god given, everything is ultimately a social construct. But nobody ever takes this as a refutation of anything else. There's no god given definition of species, it's just an arbitrary category we made up on the basis of arbitrary criteria. But it's extremely useful, so we use it.
All tests of cognitive ability correlate positively. A test which consists of literally all cognitive tasks would take too long, so psychologists create intelligence tests like Wechsler with various tasks on it that are more g loaded. This is a better and more efficient way of measuring g and measures it more accurately.
The g factor is not dependent on the contents of a test. See chapter 1 of In The Know by Russel T Warne. If you arbitrarily cut out a bunch of tasks, then you have lowered the g loading of your test but you have NOT changed the g factor. It is not an average or a sum of tests, it is a distillation.
Why not? No, why SHOULD it include that? Do you actually know that the purpose and rationale behind intelligence testing is?
You're acting like it's some arbitrary thing that includes anything and everything for no good reason. Which means you don't know the first thing about the subject.
Minor warning - I more or less agree with your points, but I think "you don't know the first thing about the subject" is neither kind nor necessary here.
Okay, and how do you feel about repeated criticisms of a topic that this person is ignorant of? Would you feel the same if it were a person declaring climate change is BS and then asking what the greenhouse effect is?
That doesn't make sense because the people in the comments here do not construct intelligence tests. I think you're trying to accuse the pro-IQ crowd in the comments of motivated reasoning in a clever way, but it doesn't make sense.
The powerful predictive ability of the g factor and heritability of it is a good argument for the welfare state depending on your moral foundations. People do not choose to have lower average cognitive ability and are in need of more assistance. It's not their fault generally. Here is a coherent pro-welfare argument which recognized IQ and heritability of IQ.
Freddie DeBoer's "The Cult of Smart" is about how much kids already bring their general intelligence with them to school without it being affected that much by school, and I suppose it could be said he wants to "dismantle" the status quo in order to replace it with communism.
Where I went to school it was both; "Music" in the curriculum covered things like music theory and the occasional bit of singing or playing the goddamn recorder, but if you wanted to actually learn a musical instrument properly you'd be paying for private lessons. Pretty sure it's the same way in most parts of the world.
that seems to be far-fetched. However, many people think that music training improves fine motorics in young children and ability to concentrate and persistence in older children. I find these things plausible, as many skills can be improved by intensive training and I do not see why fine motorics or concentration would not.
Then you aren't paying attention. The trope that chess, or music, or art, or Latin, will not just improve your chess class grades but your general grades is older than most of the people here. Literally when I was in middle school and joined the school chess club, one of the justifications we were given for it was that it'd improve our grades by helping us learn to think. (I don't remember if the teacher in charge actually intoned "Studies show..." but I'm sure someone along the way did.)
yep! "It's good for your brain" I've heard this justification given.
This is studied under the name "transfer of learning" and I think the result is that learning doesn't really transfer. I see these things - provided the kid isn't having fun - as very unfair. If you're going to force a kid into doing something, I think there should be a good reason and I think that without the general effect, it's really not fair to make kids learn chess or Latin.
I think it's probably true in the sense of "you train your brain on something" but not true in the sense of "general brain function improvement." I think chess can actually improve your ability to think about chess and areas of similar types of thinking, such as strategy games, spatial location, etc. I don't see any reason at all to think that playing chess would increase your verbal score on the SAT, and probably not your math either.
I think it would be even more narrow. I think chess makes you good at chess. It probably doesn't make you good very good at Go. But that's just an impression from what I've read and I don't have a solid opinion on that.
We probably agree more than disagree. I'm thinking in terms of pretty narrow skills that transfer between games, and maybe other areas. Thinking about the interactions of pieces and planning out chess moves can extend beyond the literal game of chess (obviously in terms of something like 3D chess, but also in other games at least). Less narrowly, you can learn to read your opponent's goals and playstyle, and identify if someone is being aggressive verses reactive as one example.
I am not sure what the cut off is for how similar a task has to be, but a lot of top ranked auto battler players (Hearthstone Battlegrounds, TFT, Autochess) seem to be able to quickly reach top rank when they try other auto battlers.
Do you think there's a meaningful difference between phonics vs. whole language? For that matter, are there any such teaching-technique differences that convincingly beat the null?
Most of the hostility towards phonics I've seen has come from teachers who are all in on whole word. Also, I actually remember being taught phonics, and it was fun, so this take is very confusing.
Motivation was certainly crucial for me, so I'm trying to find that with my own kids.
I had very little interest in reading until my parents subscribed us to Nintendo Power magazine. I probably spent 30 minutes studying and re-studying every page over the course of a month, trying to discern everything it was telling me.
That said, working through those pages at first required a lot of phonics, sounding words out. I was taught the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes (which really doesn't require that much teaching), and I went from there. I haven't encountered the "whole word" thing but it seems like it would be more teacher-intensive, not less.
From educators I have talked to, phonics is more robust in that it can teach a larger fraction of the population to achieve basic literacy than other techniques. More efficient/faster for the average or median student is less certain.
I think it's reasonable to _not_ bet on the null when it comes to the question of "which of these two rather different methods for teaching X is better for teaching X?"
I can imagine how hard this is to measure too, but also how high the stakes are. If phonics means that 3% of the adult population has substantially higher reading proficiency, that's really important.
I'm pretty sure it made a significant difference to me. I couldn't read at all before a remedial reading tutor started me on phonics in third grade. But phonics didn't teach me to read "better;" it's a trick for getting over the first hump of being able to read at all - which, for some reason comes naturally to some people but definitely did not for me.
I went straight from completely illiterate to reading at twelfth grade level in about two months of systematic phonics - but obviously I already had a lot of other foundational skills in place.
Whole language is underspecified. If, as suggested in that article, it means trying the whole task, combining multiple cues, then there is a theoretical argument that it is a mistake. Instead you should strengthen the cues separately, called "deliberate practice." Phonics is only about isolating one cue, which might be a mistake, but the others already exist in speech, so may not really need practice.
I mean, why should it improve skills in other subjects? Why would piano lessons be of any help in my later career as a, say, social scientist that earns his or her money by correlating things with other things? The causal path from exposure to outcome is not obvious at all. And the elephant in the room is selection bias, because these poor children of these rich parents do not just get piano lessons, but all kinds of extra training, including academic training, and they have access to better colleges and universities just because they can afford it.
PS. The time spent with piano lessons and exercises must also be taken into account; if you use that for, say, matrix calculus, you'll be even better at math or whatever areas in which matrices are used.
Some learnings clearly cross over and affect other subjects. Learning any one programming language spills to others and possibly into general communication ability. Learning(or at least understanding) calculus helps you to model physical phenomena in your mind. Statistics applies to many scenarios throughout life in an automatic even intuitive way(academic and not). Presumably, philosophy provides a basis for understanding and evaluating aspects of history and social science both of which can still be learned without it.
A lot of the very smart people I know in grad school play a musical instrument, and probably learned it early in life. Of course this proves that correlation is not causation. However, this tells us why the belief that learning music earlier in life probably leads to better fluid intelligence or something is quite intuitive, and almost common sense; at least based on the ample evidence around me. Perhaps research in education is important because it can help disabuse us of our "intuitive" notions.
I got the impression that the government changed their mind about the funding and Snopes correctly changed their rating to reflect that, but that my description correctly matches the original state of affairs.
The snopes article was directly responding to claims like "The Biden administration is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further racial equality". That statement could... kinda sorta be true if you view the world from a Faerie-like dedication to maximally misinterpreting everything without technically lying.
Crack pipes were one example component of one part of the program that has an overall goal of promoting racial equality, but there's a huge qualitative gap between (Safe drug use kits reduce the lethality of drugs) + (minority groups suffer from poor treatment of addiction and drug use, leading to higher deaths per capita) = (Send safe smoking kits - which may include crack pipes - to minority areas as part of a large scale effort to treat and reduce drug addiction) and (Biden is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further equality).
Even if the second statement is technically kind of true, it's such a gross abuse of the facts and context that I'd feel comfortable calling it a lie. This specific case doesn't feel like a woke outrage overreaction, so doesn't really fit with the list
OK, but this is part of the problem with Snopes' current operating procedure: when a fact that's embarrassing to Democrats start to spread, they go out of their way to find some version of that fact with some not-so-true frills attached and then debunk _that_.
Another particularly horrible example is the Biden/KKK thing. Faced with the (entirely true) rumour that Biden eulogised former KKK member Robert Byrd at his funeral, Snopes managed to find someone on facebook claiming that Byrd was the Grand Wizard of the KKK (in fact he was "only" an Exalted Cyclops, because KKK titles are fucking ridiculous).
The administration's plan to send safe smoking kits is a sound one. There is no version of the claim "Biden is sending crack pipes to minority groups" that does not either
A) Distort the context to manufacture outrage or
B) Retain the context, and therefore has nothing worth getting upset over
The only version of the story even worth addressing is the mostly-false manufactured outrage version spinning this into some sort of drug pushing program
Even the "particularly horrible" example you're pointing out isn't that bad. It's labeled as "miscaptioned" and even the summary points out that Byrd was in fact a former KKK member. And that seems like a very fair assessment of something that takes "Biden eulogized someone who used to be a member of the KKK before leaving and becoming a high profile opponent of the KKK" and twists it into "Biden eulogized a former KKK member". Both statements are strictly true, but context and connotation matters.
Are there any cases where you think snopes has failed to apply that level of nuance to a right wing issue to cast them in a bad light? I don't spend much time on snopes, so I can't speak to any systemic issues they may have. But these two evaluations seem fair
Then again, I am on the left so these are all evaluations that support my team. If you have any cases that are similar on a meta level but go against my biases I'd like to see them to see if I'd feel the same way
Snopes shouldn't be trying to provide an evaluation of whether the plan (sending safe crack kits to minority communities) is sound. It exists to check the facts. The facts were, that was the plan; they fact-checked reporting of that plan as "mostly false". That's a failure. If they had fact-checked it as "missing context", I could be persuaded they were somewhat in the right. But there was a true thing, and they fact-checked it as false.
Don't trust liars just because they're on your team; don't underestimate the harm they do to you in the name of a cause.
Evaluating "Missing so much context that the conclusion is dramatically wrong" to "basically a lie" is not itself a lie. A simplification, sure. But not a lie
> The administration's plan to send safe smoking kits is a sound one.
That's... well, it's an opinion that Democrats might share, but I don't. I find out outrageous to send "safe smoking kits" to anyone under any circumstances, and I think at least a very large fraction of the population would agree with me.
I value the rule of law, and the rule of law is not well served by having the government send people kits to help them break the law. Furthermore, I don't think people should smoke crack/meth, and it doesn't seem necessarily true that having the government send people apparatus for smoking crack/meth is going to serve the interests of not having people smoke crack or meth.
I can definitely sympathize with this sentiment: I don't think merely making drug use more comfortable should be the core of a government response to an addiction epidemic. With that said, there are versions of this program that I can get behind - for example, tying the benefits to strict requirements to join and stay in a cessation program.
>The snopes article was directly responding to claims like "The Biden administration is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further racial equality".
...
>Crack pipes were one example component of one part of the program
"Crack pipes" is metonymy. The proper thing to measure is not literally crack pipes and nothing else, but the entire category of "things that make it easier for people to get or take drugs".
I don't see how you got that at all. Snopes originally assumed that "safe smoking kits" referred in part to crack pipes, but the administration later clarified that the kits wouldn't include pipes, hence the update.
Also, part of what they were debunking was the claim that the pipes were being distributed "to advance racial equity". That's nakedly false. I'm fine saying that a false claim plus a misleading claim qualifies as "mostly false".
In what way is that "distributing crack pipes to advance racial equity"? That statement is just saying they intend to implement their program equitably. But the purpose of the program isn't to advance racial equity, it's to combat drug addiction.
I'm not sure what you mean. By definition, "historically underserved communities" are ones who have been prioritized lower by previous programs. Saying you'll prioritize them higher is just saying "This time around, we won't forget about the guys everyone always forgets about." I don't see how that's controversial or even really notable.
The purpose is not to combat drug addiction, it's to combat harms from drug addiction. Hence "harm reduction" - combating addiction is a separate program.
Either way: that being its purpose doesn't make it not *also* intended to advance racial equity, and the text of the order makes it clear that HHS wants implementation to happen in a way that targets minority and marginalized communities in the name of advancing racial equity.
As I said in another comment - the section of the program labeled "purpose" makes it clear that advancing racial equity is part of the program's purpose.
If I bring a box of donuts to work and give one to everybody in the office, am I intending to "advance fairness"? Or am I just being fair while pursuing the goal of group donut consumption?
I'm confused how you managed to convince yourself of this. The program also intended to fund "syringes to prevent and control the spread of infectious diseases." What do you think those syringes were meant to help safely inject? Insulin? Give me a break.
"Safe smoking kits" meant providing the means to use crack. You don't need a "safe smoking kit", or a "kit" of any kind, for a cigarette, blunt, or vape. For the record, I don't think that providing such kits is necessarily a bad idea, like needle exchanges aren't necessarily a bad idea! But transparently, "safe smoking kits" meant crack pipes. And Snopes initially fact-checked that as "false" when it was clearly true, using exactly the justification Scott provided ("it also funded other things").
Then, after the "Biden is giving out crack pipes, lol" meme got trending, the administration "clarified" by claiming that the term "safe smoking kits" didn't include crack pipes. But I don't think their assertion is at all credible; rather, it was a transparent half-assed attempt to walk it back, and Snopes is carrying their water.
Clean syringes are a very common harm reduction measure. The article said about a dozen times that the spending is aimed at harm reduction.
Safe smoking kits can include stuff like sturdier pipes and screens that make the act of smoking safer, but they don't have to -- typically they're things like alcohol swabs, Vaseline, and plastic mouthpieces, the point being to keep people from spreading bloodborne diseases when sharing. It wasn't crazy to expect the kits to include pipes, but it was misleading to claim it with certainty and flat-out wrong to say the purpose was to advance racial equity.
Upon gaining power, Chairman Mao instigated a harm reduction programme against opium use. His policy was to threaten to execute 'addicts'. It was remarkable how quickly 'addicts' suddenly found themselves able to cope without their drug.
It sounds like you're advocating for some sort of large, concerted push to crack down on drug users. A war on drugs, even. If only someone had thought of that before
Uh, I'm not a drug dove, but I don't think any sane person's solution should be "killing all the addicts". Nor is Mao a great policy role model, for all kinds of reasons.
Part 1, section 1, the second-to-last paragraph characterizing the "PURPOSE": "The priority populations for this program are underserved communities that are greatly impacted by SUD. Underserved communities are defined under section 2 of Executive Order 13985." EO 13985 characterizes "underserved community" by referencing (in order) race, sexuality, disability, and poverty, and its text repeatedly invokes the need for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda".
So in defining its purpose and target population, the program explicitly and implicitly invoked advancing racial equity. Other kinds of equity too - but it's fair to describe it as prioritizing minority communities. Calling that "flat-out wrong" is ignorant of the facts.
That's a very tunnel-visiony reading. Like I said in the other thread, committing to prioritize underserved communities (which, as you noticed, is not exclusively a racial designation) is not the purpose of the program, it's just a fact about the implementation. Applicants don't have to be from underserved communities, they're just more likely have their applications approved if they are.
They state the purpose of the program in their own words multiple times. From the executive summary and the first paragraph of the section you posted: "The purpose of the program is to support community-based overdose prevention programs, syringe services programs, and other harm reduction services. Funding will be used to enhance overdose and other types of prevention activities to help control the spread of infectious diseases and the consequences of such diseases for individuals with, or at risk of developing substance use disorders (SUD), support distribution of FDA-approved overdose reversal medication to individuals at risk of overdose, build connections for individuals at risk for, or with, a SUD to overdose education, counseling, and health education, refer individuals to treatment for infectious diseases such as HIV, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and viral hepatitis, and encourage such individuals to take steps to reduce the negative personal and public health impacts of substance use or misuse. This will include supporting capacity development to strengthen harm reduction programs as part of the continuum of care. Recipients will also establish processes, protocols, and mechanisms for referral to appropriate treatment and recovery support services. Grantees will also provide overdose prevention education to their target populations regarding the consumption of substances including but not limited to opioids and their synthetic analogs. Funds may also be used to help address the stigma often associated with substance use and participation in harm reduction activities." There's nothing in there about advancing racial equity, because that is plainly not what their goal was. It's something they took into consideration, not their objective in any way.
Thanks. I didn't think the "to advance racial equity" was a relevant part of the claim or the reason it was supposed to be outrageous, but it sounds like some people thought it was and that makes Snopes' decision more reasonable.
That is to say, I have come across the "Biden administration sends out crack pipes" meme quite a few times over the last week in the right wing memeopshere, but this is the first time I've heard it with the "to advance racial equity" bit attached.
First time I heard about it was a meme with Forrest Gump saying "And just like that, crack was safer than Ivermectin". This was followed by several references to Hunter Biden's own crack-smoking proclivities. Then a picture of Joe Biden kindly offering a crack pipe to a black man sitting on a bench, who replies "Sir, I'm waiting for a bus". In each case, the "Biden administration handing out crack pipes" part was the core of the joke.
fwiw, i disagree with the decision to remove this. Snoops objectively reported that a claim that was true, albeit misleading, was false. Unless we're redefining false to mean something else, snoop's original claim of this being false was a lie. They have updated it to be more nuanced now, but i think the original post is worthy of being noted as something related to excessive wokeness.
Update: ah, i see the more clear reasoning you gave on the mistakes page, and i understand better. It's specifically that snoops said that "true statement AND potentially false statement" could reasonable be called a false statement due to the AND. That's...a bit of a reach but defensible.
> Unless we're redefining false to mean something else, snoop's original claim of this being false was a lie.
A key point in Bounded Distrust was that quite a bit of journalism consists of a series of individually narrowly true statements woven together to give a strongly misleading impression, often with the rhetorical punchline being a qualitative statement that can't be strictly evaluated on its own metric. Lots of people would nonetheless round an egregious example off to "that article is lying to me". Would that claim itself be a lie, assuming the journalist was scrupulous in never quite overstepping on any individual point?
I would say yeah, that claiming that such an article is lying is incorrect. You can say many other things about it (misleading narrative, cherrypicked facts, etc) but lying wouldn't be right.
Adding "to racial equality" seemed to me to be a case of making a general claim that you don't like more specific, refuting the more specific claim, and then insinuating that the general claim is also refuted.
Maybe Biden didn't include crack pipes in the bill to advance racial equality (maybe he was just pro crack), but if I knock down that more complicated claim, it would seem to unsuspecting eyes that maybe Biden didn't include crack pipes in the bill at all.
It would... except that advancing racial equity was very much a part of the program's purpose. You can tell because it says so, specifically, under "PURPOSE": "the priority populations for this program are..." and then invokes an EO (#13985) which is focused entirely on a woke conceptualization of "equity", centering race.
Snopes is still the bad guy here, for the reasons you initially provided and more besides. Even if you've revised your opinion, I would appreciate that section of the post being caveat'ed rather than removed, for future readers' sake.
> I got the impression that the government changed their mind about the funding and Snopes correctly changed their rating to reflect that
My brain first interpreted this as "the government changed their mind about funding Snopes, and Snopes got scared and quickly changed their rating to make the government happy". :D
They've updated to "Outdated" which is a rating I don't really understand the purpose of. It seems to obfuscate "did X really happen" by putting it behind a layer of "maybe it happened, maybe it didn't happen, but for some reason we no longer consider it 'relevant'".
Like to pick a fairly straight-forward example "Did Facebook Censor a Picture of Santa Kneeling to Jesus" (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-santa-jesus-image/) - it's a pretty straightforward factual statement: I would rate that "Mostly true" - Facebook did indeed put a "mature content" warning on top of such an image. Yes, it was almost certainly just an algorithmic glitch or human error, but factually it did happen.
They nitpick over the wording "censor" (... despite that they have control over the exact wording of their claims), and Facebook fixed it so that it no longer has the content warning... but I'm not sure why that makes it "Outdated". The claim is in the past tense, and, yes, that really happened.
It kind of feels like a "True, but inconvenient if people were to screenshot this" rating. (Incidentally the "Aztec Chanting in Public Schools" that Scott mentioned in a previous article also got an "Outdated" rating)
Like, yeah, if some controversial law gets repealed that's an important part of the story, but I still care about whether or not it really existed at all. "Outdated" could be a modifier, but shouldn't 'mask' the actual truth rating.
What's cool is how much thought the isochronic map put into human travel time. Apparently I can ride a horse east from Perm much faster than I can try to cross the Greenland icepack.
I'm not sure whether they'd figured out rope teams by that point so crossing Greenland probably had a far higher attrition rate too, what with all the crevasses covered by thin layers of snow.
Nansen first crossed the Greenland ice pack in 1888, before then there was no recorded crossing. So indeed it would have been quite hard and probably deadly.
Apparently Nansen's big advantage was that he knew how to ski, which at the time was a peculiar skill possessed by a handful of Norwegians.
I’m not sure. I see a hall as a corridor. In Bill Bryson’s At Home he says the Hall came first and sometimes was all there was, for instance a Viking great hall, then rooms were added around the side, and the rooms took up more space, and the hall got smaller? Is a hall a corridor? I tend to use either interchangeably but maybe a hall/hallway has to get to the front door.
The distinction is that a hall in that sense of the word *is* a room, where things are meant to occur, instead of being primarily a space for getting between rooms.
I don't understand what you're claiming. A "hall" in the sense of a "great hall" is a distinctly different thing from a "hall" in the sense of "it's just down the hall", and it's the latter that's being discussed. Stand in the two and the difference is obvious. Are you trying to make some sort of argument based on a dictionary, that no distinction can be drawn because the particular dictionary you checked doesn't draw such a distinction??
I also don’t know what you are arguing about. The link said that corridors were invented in the 16C. I said that halls existed long before that, starting out as great halls with small rooms (if any) attached, and then getting smaller - in most houses - to the present day size. So I’m doubting that corridors were invented in the 16C.
I mean, if that's your claim, then you should make that explicit by saying something like "Halls in the modern sense evolved from halls in the older sense, as the latter gradually shrank; there was no hard line where corridors were suddently 'invented'.", not go on about looking up meanings of words!
A hall in the sense of "great hall" is not a corridor but a large multifunction space, generally a singularly large room of a castle or manor. In modern people's houses, rooms such as dining rooms, living rooms, and TV rooms tend to be the spiritual successors of a great hall, while event spaces and multifunction spaces fill the same role in convention centers and hotels.
Before corridors there were just doorways from one room with a purpose to another; corridors as "rooms" whose only purpose is to connect other rooms are less materially efficient, and are less likely to appear as organic extensions to an existing building.
I just did a couple quick google image searches for "Roman Villa Floor Plan" and "Roman Palace Floor Plan". Something like 10% of the results have features that look an awful lot like corridors to me. When they're labelled, it's usually either "corridor" (which seems like a vote in favor of counting as a corridor) or "atrium" (which I think in Classical Roman architecture denotes a sort of semi-enclosed courtyard that opened out onto proper rooms).
I also searched for floor plans for Charlemenge's palace at Aachen, which also had long, narrow features that were often labeled "corridor", but these were walkways connecting otherwise-separated wings or sub-buildings of the palace complex, not direct analogues of a modern hallway with rows of rooms opening onto either side.
Between the Roman atria, Carolingian walkway corridors, and Viking great halls, I'm starting to suspect that the root of the "Corridors were invented in the 16th Century" claim is that before then, internal subdivision of large buildings was limited by concerns about lighting and ventilation. Subdividing a building with internal partitions limits internal air circulation, cuts off natural light and ventilation from exterior windows and doorways, and also cuts off line of sight to artificial lighting (oil lamps, candles, hearth fires, etc).
In this context, a modern-style interior corridor is a subdivided space with little or no exterior facing for natural light and ventilation and is probably more trouble than it's worth. Using courtyard and Roman-style atria to perform the office of corridors is a pretty easy workaround, since that increases surface area for windows and whatnot while the transitional space has most of the advantages of an outdoor area but is still at least marginally protected from wind (and rain, in the case of Roman atria which had partial roofs). Likewise, a Carolingian-style walkway corridor connecting separated wings of a palace complex leaves plenty of surface area for working and living areas of the palace, while the corridors themselves are fully sheltered from the elements but still have ample access to natural light and ventilation. A great hall is not as clear-cut, but doing double-duty as a room in its own right mitigates the problem, and I'd expect a great hall to also be a natural spot to put a hearth fire.
> No. I mean, for a long time, for a very long time, right up at least until - really, until about the age of Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare, most houses, even quite well-to-do houses, were fundamentally a single room, which was called the hall.
And the hall was so important that that became the name of the whole house sometimes. And indeed, hall, in a wider sense, became a word signifying a grand space, which is why we have Carnegie Hall and Baseball Hall of Fame and the Halls of Montezuma, and so on.
So in kind of original sense, it was a really grand room. It was the whole house. But then as time went on, people, they discovered the comforts and attractions, the privacy, and they began to add more rooms onto the home and to spread the house both upwards and outwards.
And the hall became diminished in its importance until now. In most domestic settings, it's really just a kind of entryway in which we - where we hang our coats and take our hats off and that sort of thing.
And also I found an article on ancient Roman apartment buildings that mentions at least one of them as having a "narrow corridor": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building). I looked for this because I knew they had apartment buildings, which I think almost require hallways.
Some halls are corridors. Halls which are corridors are frequently called "hallways", but that can be abbreviated to "hall" in contexts where there aren't going to be non-corridor halls, e.g. a middle-class house.
Some halls are *not* corridors, but rooms in their own right and in which people spend a significant amount of time. The innovation (which may have occurred more than once) is the development of a long skinny room-like thing that is only or primarily used to travel between other rooms.
Corridors are a very inefficient use of space, so I'm not sure the inventor should be proud of themselves.
In fact, there is something distinctly modern about corridors - it's a place for untrusted strangers to move between places that are better guarded. There is nothing of value in corridors. I assume ancients didn't need corridors because their buildings were either more oriented towards common unrestricted use, or were strictly invite-only for one reason or another.
It's a lot like the difference between a street (a public space between buildings) and a road (a means of transportation from one place to another). Much of 20th century urban design has been focused on turning streets into roads.
“ would answer ‘yes’ to this because she [the queen] visited Ireland when I lived there, I watched the parade in her honor, and I could vaguely glimpse her on the inside of her car).”
You and a few thousand Corkonians waving their plastic union jacks. Rebel county, my arse.
> I have checked Wordle to see if this is true, and can confirm that it now tells me that “slave” is not a real word
This is of course not true. It tells you that "slave" is not in the word list. I also think removing slave from the word list is stupid but misrepresenting what Wordle says in a way that anyone can double check in two seconds is sloppy in a way that seems motivated.
Scrabble bans classes of words that are already extant, including not only expletives but proper nouns, for various reasons but all ultimately related to making the gaming experience better. It does not create a new class of words to ban with no linguistic justification, which is what is happening here. Whilst the reason for the decision may be to avoid offence, this seems basically to be a political policing of language by people who don't know how language works.
How is 'Slavery' offensive ? is it an insult or a slur ? What about 'War', 'Hunger', 'Death' or 'Murder', are they banned too ? How many negative words is too many ?
Yes but Wordle is not attempting to tell you it’s not a word, only that it’s not on its list of words. You get the same thing with any computerized word game (like Scrabble) - they have a list of allowed words in that game. One can disagree with their choice of words to include on their list but it’s simply wrong to say that they have declared something as “not a word”
I mean, the word list is...the list of real words? At least that's what it is for every other word on the list? I agree you can claim this is merely a coincidence and there's no necessary connection, but it's a bit weird.
I'll edit the sentence just in case other people have the same objection.
I think it's important to be precise when accusing one's opponents of malfeasance; if you do so inaccurately, you open the door for their defenders to point out your inaccuracy while conveniently ignoring your point, and then you're making no progress (except perhaps in tribal point-scoring, which I do not think is your goal).
For clarity, there are two Wordle word lists: the list of possible answers and the list of possible guesses.
The list of possible answers includes only words that are reasonably well known, because the game isn't fun if the answer turns out to be some hyper-obscure archaic sheep disease that you've never heard of. And it's quite reasonable for this to exclude swear words etc as well.
The list of possible _guesses_, though, previously encompassed pretty much every five letter word that could be found in some large dictionary. But once the NYT bought it, a bunch of words (including some fairly common ones that appear within the New York Times practically every day) disappeared from this list.
It turns out they didn't delete anything from the list of possible guesses. The game doesn't actually have a list of possible guesses. Rather, it has a list of possible answers, and a list of non-answer possible guesses. When they deleted something from the list of possible answers, it accidentally got removed as a possible guess because it is no longer an answer, and had never been a non-answer possible guess.
So, most of the removals I can see the reasoning for, even if I don't agree with removing words like "slave" or "lynch", but what the hell is the objection to "fibre"?!
I can see why they removed "slave" and "lynch," and I suppose "wench" could be seen as problematic. "Fibre" is a British spelling, but why remove "pupal" and "agora"? Just too obscure?
If they had removed it from the list of possible answers, I would agree. But removing it from the list of words you can even guess is a step further than that. There are several other impolite words that are still usable as guesses, like "FUCKS", "SHITS", and "NEGRO". I'd expect the only unguessable strings to be gibberish or words too obscure for the word list.
That is quite surprising! I had assumed this was just about removing it from the list of potential answers. And that would be in total keeping with much NYTimes practice.
They officially apply a "breakfast test" to the crossword - they don't want an entry in the grid to be something that will dismay someone if it comes up while they're working on the crossword over breakfast, so no URINE or ENEMA or HITLER. The big challenge is eliminating IDI and AMIN, because those letter combinations are so good for completing grids, even though the person is one you don't want to think about when you're having fun.
It seems to me that you definitely don't want to pick a word like SLAVE and force people to guess it. But it does seem over the top to prevent people from using it as a guess to find letters.
Exactly. I generally like the NYT, so my thought process was this:
1) Seems like an overstatement, I bet they just removed it from the answer list, which is a good decision. [Falsified by trying to guess SLAVE and failing]
2) Hmm, maybe they just imported the word list from Spelling Bee, which needs to have its guesses sanitized. [Falsified by trying to guess other rude words and succeeding]
Someone in a different thread noted that it was probably an attempt at the first thing, that accidentally went wrong. It turns out that Wordle has an "answers list" and a "guesses that aren't answers list", so that if you remove something from the answers list while forgetting to add it to the other list, it disappears completely. Most people assumed they had an "answers list" and a "guesses list", so that removal from the answers wouldn't interfere with the guesses. Hopefully they fix it soon.
Someone pointed out that the "allowed guesses that aren't answers" list has always had words like JIHAD and NEGRO (and SOARE and other unfamiliar words). They didn't realize that when they deleted something from the "possible answers" list they needed to add it to this other list in order to not break things. Hopefully they will fix it.
#32, on beautiful buildings surviving: there is definitely something to be said about modern architecture, auto-centrism, and technological changes, but I think another important factor that often goes undiscussed is labor efficiency. Construction remains a labor-intensive industry, even as raw materials and equipment grow cheaper. Some of the beauty of old buildings is related to the careful craftsmanship put into designing, building, and decorating even simple features. Today, that kind of time costs more relative to the other costs involved in building (land, permitting, materials, equipment).
The relevant economic law is "shipping the good apples out." If you look at buildings where the price has already been increased by other components besides labor (e.g. homes in an area where zoning limits supply and drives up the cost of lots), it's easier to spend more on construction since that cost is a smaller proportion of the overall cost. As a result, the design is notably better.
I'd highly recommend looking up the Twitter account of the article's author, Samuel Hughes. A lot of his posts highlight the efforts of late 19th and early 20th century architects and builders to combine modern labour-saving technologies and materials with colourful, textured, highly ornamented design in both traditional and novel styles. It leaves one without a shadow of doubt that the deterioration in the design standards of the built environment over the course of the 20th century was above all the result of poor aesthetic choices, not economic necessities.
It seems unfair that intelligent people are allowed to compete in intelligence competitions without any beauty component thrown in, but beautiful people are not allowed to compete in beauty competitions without some kind of intelligence component thrown in.
There's an underlying idea that somehow intelligence is a well-deserved virtue while beauty is just a genetic luck of the draw. If anything the opposite is closer to the truth; you can do a lot more to improve your beauty through hard work than you can to improve your intelligence.
I don't think it's that intelligence is considered more virtuous than beauty. I think it's that admiring intelligence in others is virtuous, while admiring beauty in others is shallow.
I don’t know for that one, but certainly appreciating physical beauty is classified as “lust” and thus “sin” in Christianity, and that can shape the debate. I think it’s also bad in Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, but am less sure about those three
I'd argue the notion that "wisdom" (which is probably correlated with intelligence even if it's distinct from it) is virtuous is very old, there was wisdom literature in the Egyptian Old Kingdom. And men needed to be cautioned against selecting a bride solely on the basis of beauty:
"A beautiful woman without discretion is like a gold ring in a pig's snout."
-Proverbs 11:22
But I think the meritocracy of modern times has really sent the idea of intelligence itself as virtue into overdrive. The world is run by people of above-average intelligence who need to justify that they deserve their high incomes and status. The Blank Slate mythology also helps this idea along:
"The reason we are intelligent is we studied harder in school and got into good colleges which served to make us even smarter, and you could have done it too but didn't. Therefore we deserve everything that's coming to us."
Not sure how often this is mentioned so sorry if this is banal, but I really hate how substack wraps all the links in the email, making it impossible to see what they are before you click them. This makes reading a lot of posts annoying (since stuff is often linked to with other words that don't directly say what kind of link it is), but it's especially a drag for link posts.
Guess I'll just resolve to stop reading posts in my email client. Great post as always!
You forgot: "Obfuscate the emails with links several hundred characters long, when tiny URLs can be done in a dozen characters max, such that an email with about 50 links will *so* large that it will blow through client limits on HTML email display sizes, so your email readers can only see about half of the email, and blame it on your underlying email provider because you are a newsletter service and yet outsource your core functionality and cannot fix these sorts of things."
(Guess how I learned this. I wonder if Substack ever fixed that... It's been like 2 years since I reported it to them.)
Regarding (1), on how much / whether being bilingual improves academics, the paper abstract does not claim no effect. They say data is inconclusive. Quote below:
--
Evidence supporting the bilingual effect seems to appear when assessing inhibition and cognitive flexibility, but to disappear when working memory is considered. The inconsistent results of the studies do not allow drawing definite conclusions on the bilingual effect. Further studies are needed; they should consider the role of some modulators (e.g., language history and context, methodological differences) on the observed results.
Context for non-Jews; "Jewish Genetic Engineering" is mostly about all the genetic diseases Jews, particularly Ashkenazi Jews, have. Jews in the diaspora lived in insular communities periodically decimated by pogroms, creating artificial founder effects.
Young Jews all get genetically screened for dozens of common genetic diseases, and occasionally couples are told they must not bear children. Obviously this is heartbreaking, but so are e.g. Cystic Fibrosis, Gaucher, and Tay-Sachs.
You're not missing out on some program to have more IQ points. Or, if you are, so are we.
Not true. Those diseases are recessive. Typically Jews who get screened and are carriers of those and other recessive disorders are told not to reproduce with other carriers of the same disease (and to make sure they know they and a prospective reproductive partner are not mutual carriers for such genetic disorders). No one who happens to be a carrier is ever given a blanket ban or recommendation against reproduction altogether. Source: Jewish, Orthodox, Ashkenazi ethnic background, happened to do my screening with Dor Yeshorim.
You're right, my writing was sloppy and I was missing a word. *Couples* are told not to have children for the reasons you described, not individuals as my original post implied. Thank you, I have corrected it.
Not really on the table given extremely strong preferences among the vast majority of observant Jews for observant Jewish spouses and the relative uncommonness of conversion (as it happens one of my spouse's parents is a convert with a non-Ashkenazi ethnic background). Trying to change this preference would, from what I have seen, be essentially impossible, while accessible and affordable genetic testing and community norms encouraging checking potential matches for genetic compatibility has already been achieved.
Given the natural tendency for young humans to procreate widely, I would suggest that socially-enforced limiting of their prospective partners to a small fraction of humanity is a far more profound example of 'changing dating preferences' than not doing that.
If a young Jewish person was planning to do that anyway, there just wouldn't be an issue. For those that want to make their mother happy and marry in the community, a blood test is a very good idea to avoid having children with a 25% chance of Tay-Sachs. I've heard stories about shadchans (matchmakers) having some idea of this when matchmaking way back when, but it's likely apocryphal
Huh. So I'm half-Ashkenazi, and I found out as an adult. Is there some sort of screening that I would have had if my bio-dad knew about me that I should get done on my kids? My mom is standard middle-american mutt (Irish, Scots, Native, and other in unknown proportions), and my wife is primarily Irish and Lithuanian in descent.
I think it's only an issue of there's Ashkenazi genetics on both sides - the relevant genes are recessive and rare in the general population - so if you're confident there's nothing significant on your wife's side you should be OK for now. But maybe worth mentioning to your kids if it looks like they're going to marry an Ashkenazi.
Made these notes on Discord, but somewhere other people can see them:
#2 is evidently -- maybe not consciously, but evidently -- drawn from Wikipedia's "did you know?" section (we ran it on NYE), which is amusing, especially given DYK is the subject of constant shitflinging about whether Readers Really Notice It.
#35 is already extensively noted in Wikipedia's article on MS, and 1. Wikipedia's coverage of any complex topic is intentionally slow (medical articles only refer to literature reviews, rather than individual studies) and 2. that article specifically, as a few people would be happy to talk your ear off about if you let them, is about 10-15 years out of date. Accordingly, this doesn't really sound like a Groundbreaking New Discovery.
Yeah the idea that viruses cause "idiopathic" diseases like MS has been investigated for decades. In that link, Cochran mentions that EBV infection is noted in all patients with MS. He didn't get that from nowhere - it was common medical knowledge! I learned it in med school 15 years ago.
But almost everyone, with or without MS, gets EBV at some point in their life. So going from noting the link to actually proving it as the causative agent was easier said than done. But it was happening whether or not Cochran noticed it.
On the rise of content censorship: I encourage anyone and everyone to read an old book, published in 2003 called "The Language Police", by Diane Ravitch.
In short, academic textbook and test publishers have employed detailed rules that cater to various political groups (left and right) to police language, bowdlerize literature excerpts, and so forth - cutting out and replacing words, censoring content. I actually own two literature textbooks from c.1990 and have the source material where I can point to examples of that kind of bowdlerization.
Re 11: I am doing this with the weekly online meetings. The curriculum is quite good and I would recommend for anyone who wants to know more about what is happening in the world of technical alignment stuff.
On 22, it isn't just the brain that is quite efficient. The human body as a whole is quite efficient. This is especially true for those organs that use a lot of energy. Only inexpensive organs such as the pancreas have significant safety factors (the pancreas has a safety factor of 10x). Peter Sterling's book 'What is Health?: Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design' (https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/What_Is_Health/s6XODwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0) is excellent on this subject.
Allostasis, being a sort of predictive control directed by the brain, is of course part of the reason for this efficiency. But there are many other reasons of which the most significant is that the human body (and many other complex adaptive systems) relies less on naive redundancy/slack for resilience and more on what is known in biology as degeneracy which is the existence of multi-functional components with partially overlapping functions.
Yet that's what people thought. This stuff was everywhere, I recall it as the consensus view of people who paid attention to the MSM. I was the only person I knew who had an opinion on the topic and thought it was hot air (though to be sure, probably 95% of people I knew had no opinion).
I'm very dissapointed by your links. I was expecting some reasonable cost-benefit analysis of net-neutrality laws but got meaningless "Hurray, market!" sentiment without any engagement with the points of pro-net-neutrality crowd.
26: Cook's paper itself explicitly says that the vast majority of her data (65%) comes from patent office surveys done by Henry Baker of the USPTO during 1900 AND 1913 (page 9).
The 1913 survey was considerably more comprehensive, according to the Lemelson Center, which noted that the 1900 survey identified 370 patents and the 1913 survey 800.
The appendix to Cook's paper notes that her total universe of data extended far beyond that, including academic journals, biographies, contemporary lists of African-American doctors/engineers, and other "Negro" exhibits at world's fairs from 1904 and 1933. The elision to 1900 alone is made by not made by her, but by NPR, most likely because her long and technical explanation of the biographical matching process between data sets was too boring for a snappy radio hit.
Is this paper good? I don't know enough about the statistics to say. Is the sharp drop-off at 1900 real, and attributable to Jim Crow? Haven't the foggiest. But if it's wrong, it's for more sophisticated reasons than "lol she used one data set that stopped at 1900."
A year ago, I found a different problem with the paper: there are 35 riots over the time period, but the panel regressions use a dataset with only 5 riots.
Re 24; I really don't understand what Sumner means by this: "If the Obama tax increases did not cause Gates and Buffett to tighten their belts, then they paid precisely 0% of that tax increase."
Say we raise Gates' income tax such that he pays an additional $500 million in taxes while still eating the same amount of food, living in the same house, traveling the same amount, etc. Isn't this an example of a super efficient tax, whereby we've managed to get $500 million essentially for free without reducing the overall output of the economy? Sure it'll reduce Gates' investment by $500 million, but that money doesn't just disappear, it can be redistributed in a way to increase consumption elsewhere in the economy.
I think it's meant to fight against an emotion that many activists have: that we need to raise taxes on the rich to punish them, to reduce their quality of life to be more in line with the median. In other words, to advance equality by cutting the tall wheat short. Sumner is merely pointing out that you have to tax the rich quite a lot indeed before you will hurt them in that way, and in order to get there you'll end up hurting a lot of other people first.
As you say, it would reduce his investment by $500 MM, which reduces the overall output of the economy (investment is included in output). Perhaps it will be redistributed in an equally efficient way, but you can justify literally any tax that way if the government isn't actually lighting the money on fire.
The point is, it's not Gates who's affected by that tax; it's whomever he was investing in.
In the paragraph just before, Sumner says "in theory total wealth is the present value of consumption–including heirs, charity, etc. So if we could measure wealth accurately (including human capital) a wealth tax should be identical to a consumption tax."
So in Sumners view, taxing Gates' income by $500MM will reduce his wealth by $500MM, which in turn reduces his future consumption (including heirs, charity, etc) by $500MM. How does that square with what he says in the very next paragraph that taxing Gates and Buffet doesn't cut into their consumption?
It seems like Sumner is saying that billionaires have so much money that taxing them won't decrease their consumption, and also that reducing their investment in the present won't reduce their future consumption
In the later paragraph I'm pretty sure he's not lumping in heirs and charity with Gates' consumption; he's making the claim that a wealth tax wouldn't affect Bill, but rather his heirs and charity
I think the author might be considering charity as consumption by those who receive the charity rather than by those who pay for it. That'd mean that Gates's consumption is unaffected, while some Africans reduce their consumption of malaria nets or whatever.
A better explanatory example might be corporate taxes where the tax burden has been shown to pass on to customers. If a corporation gets a tax increase of $100 and they have 100 customers, prices just go up by $1/customer.
The observation is valuable because it encourages an evaluation of the tax burden beyond the direct payer.
It's not free because real resources are the limit on economic production, not money. Anything the government spends that $500 million on will use resources that could be used for something else. The cost is the opportunity cost of what those resources would otherwise be used for.
That said, having now read the full post I think Sumner is being quite unfair to his opponents here. Smart progressives do understand this basic economic point. If you want to even out standard of living then progressive consumption taxes make sense, but that's not the only progressive goal. We also want to redistribute power. Wealth taxes can be good for that. Extreme economic inequality is distorting of democracy in ways that aren't captured by consumption.
So you want to use a democracy distorted by the power of wealth to take away the wealth to fix the distortions it causes? If you believe you are capable of this, why do you not believe that you can just take away the distortions?
My (perhaps silly) read, is that because it was a tax increase on income and not consumption there was no effect on Gates or Buffet. The presumption being that they can hide move income, but not consumption.
36. To clarify, the BMJ article was not censored. Facebook applied a "missing context" tag whenever the article was shared. From the lead stories response: "In this case, Facebook users seeing BMJ.com's article are merely warned of "Missing Context", the lightest measure Facebook applies, with no restrictions in traffic, visibility or advertising revenue." I was very impressed by Lead Stories' response to the accusation. The handling of the situation by BMJ is worse than I would have expected.
Notably missing from their rebuttal is any discussion of sample size, significance, the potential for other problematic trial sites given 3 being identified as issue-ridden, or how those three trial sites could have affected the result. I'm less impressed by their result than Scott was.
I think the "missing context" is that the whole world is being injected with a new biotech whose safety trials were slipshod, abbreviated, showed no benefit in mortality, hospitalization, ventilator use, or any other non-bean-counter metric, and where there is no public transparency of the underlying data.
Edit: Never mind that the trials themselves were performed by companies whose financial conflict-of-interest weighs tens of billions of Dollars, were published in the NEJM, a journal said to have "failed its readers" in a previous matter of drug safety, and the drugs were approved by regulators that have a revolving career door with the companies they oversee. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1502213/
You mean like the post-hoc policy decisions we make about the effectiveness of parachutes for preventing blunt force trauma from falling out of airplanes? Randomized trials are great where you can get them, and we got good ones for these vaccines, but the post-hoc data is even stronger in this case, just like with the parachutes.
Anyone can observe parachutes working. We don't need a trusted middleman to convince us. Vaccines are not like that.
In the trials, severe outcomes were increased for the vaccines (except maybe AZ) versus the placebo. Covid-19 was reduced but immunity wanes quickly, and most people care about overall harm where the only statistically significant signals went against the vaccine.
Ask yourself how things would be if the vaccines were a failure. Covid would be raging as strongly as ever and public health people would come up with some unverifiable explanation for why. Sound familiar?
I'm talking about the trials. You know, randomized data with actual scientific value rather than whatever is coming out now to post-hoc justify policy decisions that cost trillions and would cause mass-unrest if shown to be erroneous.
There were trials, and people like Garett Jones are accusing the trials of having been delayed even after sufficient data was collected so that Pfizer would not announce in time to give Trump an October surprise!
> they thought the BMJ article lacked important context, that was all they told Facebook, and they stand by their decision even after learning that the BMJ is much more prestigious and important than they thought.
Even more telling is their description of the "missing context", like this:
> But BMJ's open letter fails to mention important context: The Brook Jackson Twitter account agreed with leading COVID misinformation-spreader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s criticism of the "Sesame Street" episode in which Big Bird encourages kids to get a COVID-19 vaccine. "Shocking, actually." she wrote in a November 9, 2021, response to a Kennedy tweet blasting Sesame Street (archived here). Elsewhere on Twitter, the Brook Jackson account wrote to a vaccine-hesitant person that vaccination makes sense if a person is in a high-risk category. When the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a federal employee vaccine mandate, she tweeted "HUGE!" and not with a frowny emoji.
Apparently not using the proper emojis is "critical context" to assessing whether claims of data integrity failures have merit.
The missing context that they highlighted first and most often was that "the allegation concerns just three of the 153 sites at which the vaccine was tested on 44,000 participants." The comments about Jackson's motivations seemed a bit off but they were clearly not the main point of the rebuttal
The quote I cited does not qualify as "missing context", that's my point. By including it at all they're undermining their own credibility as fact checkers.
Your bit on Wordle is slightly inaccurate: they didn't "screw up synchronization between different layers by rewriting it to ban players from using “offensive” words", as they also went and removed words they thought would be "too hard"*
Funnily enough people on Twitter have in fact convinced themselves that the Times is actually going out of its way to make Wordle harder. There's maybe a lesson in here somewhere...
* I almost feel like the Snopes people playing with weird technicalities to say that a claim is "false" but I think what you said about Wordle does in fact mislead people about what the Times set out to do.
So the idea is that since they were already breaking synchronization to get rid of the too-hard words, they might as well get rid of the offensive ones too? Fair enough, I'll edit the link to make that clearer.
Based on my own research combined with other people's comments here's a more detailed summary than what I've seen anywhere else so far:
The original version of Wordle has two separate lists, a "words that you can guess" list and a "words that can be the answer" list that was manually curated. Previously there were quite a few words that could be on the first list but not the second. This makes a lot of sense; it's one thing to allow a player to type slurs or obscenities when picking up clues and quite another to force someone to type those same words to solve the puzzle that day.
What I didn't know until I read other comments (and just verified myself using the wordlist I pulled from the original site when it was still up) was that the two lists were disjoint; that is, the first list isn't a "legal guesses" list but a "legal guesses that aren't possible solutions" list. This means that deleting "AGORA" from the answer list without adding it to the guess list doesn't just remove it as a possible solution but also removes it as a guess. It's indeed possible that this part is an accident and someone just meant "SLAVE shouldn't be a daily solution" and not "SLAVE is to be treated as a word no longer."
This makes some sense. Perhaps NYT would have left it if the allowed guesses list was a superset, but did not want to make the positive action of *adding* it to the list
That would explain how super-offensive words like "FUCKS" and "CUNTS" are still allowable words; they were never on the "possible solutions" list to begin with.
On the trans statistics, I first think a critique of the source is appropriate. GIDS is a clinic known for incredibly poor record-keeping (I believe it may be actually a matter of court record due to Bell vs Tavistock/GIDS) and essentially refusing to approve any form of medical transition for the vast majority of patients during their tenure at the youth service. They reject current international standards like those developed by WPATH in favour of their own much older standard that apparently relies heavily on appearance and behaviour stereotypes and seems to involve essentially endless psychotherapy that is reported to often be quite hostile. They are an incredible outlier among youth gender clinics in general for those reasons among others, but the poor state of their records is more than sufficient reason to view this result with significant skepticism and to preferentially trust results from other gender clinics, such as the Belgian one referenced in the paper. One specific criticism is including patients on their waiting list in the total. How would GIDS have learned of the suicides of people on the waiting list reliably? Perhaps they might have been told when they went to schedule the person's first appointment or perhaps the person's parents may have called to take them off the waiting list, but we know from court records that they do essentially no systematic data collection at all at the clinic, and both of the opportunistic methods described would be unrealiable and likely lead to a severe underestimate of the suicide rate of people on the nearly 9000-person waiting list (as of June 2021). Also, the journal this study is published in is edited by Canadian conversion therapist Dr. Kenneth Zucker. Some will dispute that description of him, but I have read his work (including a study he published evaluating the "attractiveness" of his prepubescent patients at CAMH before he was fired for doing conversion therapy) and heard testimony from former patients and that is the conclusion I draw from the evidence. Needless to say, one may expect a particular bias to articles published therein.
So, given that the GIDS study is likely unreliable and there is only one other roughly comparable study, let's analyze the situation and decide when in their lives we would expect most trans people to attempt or complete suicide. Not being able to transition is one of the largest suicide risk factors for trans people, as is poor treatment and rejection by those in one's environment and by one's family. Given that, I think an appropriate prior would be that trans suicide rates would be higher while puberty is ongoing and still elevated while they are adults but dependent on their parents. First, the physical changes of puberty would dramatically increase gender dysphoria in most cases. The social changes that happen over that same timespan would likely also do this, as young people are differentiated more and more by gender into separate spheres with different expectations at that age. Especially in the past this was quite strongly and at times violently enforced, less so today.
Second, during this phase, trans minors are unable to take much significant action to alleviate the dysphoria they experience without support from schools and parents. Social transition requires support from teachers and administrative staff at school, and is made much easier with parental support (since otherwise they will be forced to conceal any steps they take). Accessing any form of medical transition essentially requires parental consent and is quite an involved process as a minor. The same is largely true for any sort of psychotherapy, particularly with a gender specialist. Thus, if a trans minor has parents who do or would not accept this fact about them, they are unable to do much to help their dysphoria and may subjected to conversion attempts or abuse if their trans status is revealed.
Much of this continues into early adulthood. While moving away for post-secondary education can make an unauthorized social transition possible, it may be difficult to access medical transition without parental discovery so long as the trans person is dependent on their parents for medical insurance coverage. Parents who discover that their child has transitioned or attempted to may take punitive action (such as by withholding needed financial support for their studies). If the trans person still lives at home, more of the above limitations still apply. One's body may also continue to change during this time, possibly further exacerbating physical dysphoria.
Thus, naively, knowing nothing of the statistics but understanding something of the nature of gender dysphoria and the societal forces that affect people who have it, one would expect suicide attempts of trans people to be concentrated in the pre-teen and teen years and in early adulthood due to factors like the above.
As an aside, almost every death statistic for trans people that is gathered from "hard" data rather than surveys (or a gender clinic that does good data collection, unlike GIDS) is likely a severe underestimate due to data recording problems which massively skew results in that direction. Police (a group that is overwhelmingly right-wing and socially conservative in the US and elsewhere, and thus unlikely to treat trans people with any sort of dignity or care) and coroners will not necessarily know if a deceased person is trans or not by simple observation, they may not accept or record that fact even if they deduce it, and their records systems may not store that information in a systematic way which can be easily analyzed on a large scale. Data from parents is also unreliable and in the same direction, since those who are trans-hostile (which is most of them, historically, though this is changing) may be in denial about their child's trans status and simply record them as their birth sex.
It sounds like GIDS is incompetent, but I'm surprised that would lower their suicide rate rather than increase it, unless they're bad at other forms of record-keeping besides the ones addressed by the waitlist vs. being seen issue.
Counter-theory: the most competent therapists increase your risk of suicide, just like how anti-depressants can give you enough of a pick-up to go through with your ideation :P
38. Kirkegaard's discussion of exercise for depression seems to reflect a pure top-down view of problems. He looked at two meta-analyses and two observational studies. He didn't look at the content of the actual experiments. What's the specific experimental claim being made and what are the main points of debate? Surely an area of research with that many papers on the topic should have an opinion that's more specific than simply exercise decreases depression. Perhaps the studies are flawed, but Kirkegaard didn't really examine them.
The burden of proof is on anyone claiming that a specific activity cures a specific mental illness, when we know very few activities cure anything, and that depression in particular has proven pretty intractable. Why does he need to examine the experiments when they are already, purely on their bottom-lines and the crudest statistical grounds, so shaky? Surely you would only care about any flaws in the studies if the studies wound up with strong conclusions and looked like the proved anything at all, and you needed to continue evaluating them more deeply; but they didn't even pass that bar.
Shaky? Multiple meta-analyses concluded there was a small but demonstrable effect. It's fine for him to disagree with their analysis. But the meta-analyses were pulling from dozens of studies which were likely wildly different in their goals and methods. When a meta-analysis pulls from that many different studies, those studies are very unlikely to be replications of one another. He evaluated the analyses based on the experiments pretty deeply (multiple times over several years I might add), so why not spend more than a cursory glance to figure out what the experimenters were trying to actually do? Maybe read a review paper that explains the differences between the experiments? I'm not saying he's wrong. It's just that he spent a lot of time viewing the problem from a narrow lens.
"Multiple meta-analyses" is unimpressive because they are all extremely correlated in their results because they are using the same input. 'Small' means shaky, because small effects always exist due to the systematic biases that meta-analyses generally can only pass through - and there is *very obviously* bias in the studies being meta-analyzed, just look at those funnel plots. The bias the meta-analyses show exists, which you already know exists anyway, is enough to explain why 'multiple meta-analyses concluded there was a small but demonstrable effect'. Of course they did.
You still have not explained why, given that the pooled evidence is exactly what one would expect from a much smaller or null effect, one should bother to examine the underlying studies more deeply. What do you expect to learn from reading one of those, say, d=5 datapoints? What is this broader perspective you have in mind?
No, they are not pulling from the same input. The meta-analyses have different goals, and are looking at different studies. Yes, there's some overlap, but they're not the same studies. And the individual studies are, again, very different in terms of goals, methods and measures.
Yes, studies are often biased, but that doesn't mean every small effect should be treated as no effect. Yes, the smaller studies tend to have larger effect sizes as is always the case.
I'm not saying to examine the problem more deeply. I'm saying to examine the problem differently. It was large observational analysis followed by large observational analysis followed by large observational analysis. As in read a review paper, a theory paper, an actual experiment, or a methods paper. I mean something like this:
Which is a review paper. It's also unimpressed by the effects of exercise for depression, but gives specific recommendations on where it thinks research on this topic should proceed. It's providing necessary context to understand what's being researched.
Don't just look at the problem the same way every single time.
Since you are just repeating the same false statements (overlap *does* mean they are correlated) and still not answering why results entirely consistent with the null of small-study and other biases should make us excited about wasting time reading each result in detail, I think we are done here.
What's more, according to my high school Spanish teacher, herself a native Spaniard, the "doce uvas" tradition was entirely the result of a marketing tradition by the grape growers in order to sell more grapes.
Corroborated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Grapes: "In December of [1909], some Alicantese vine growers spread this custom to better sell huge numbers of grapes from an excellent harvest."
I'm not sure where you are seeing this (and ctrl-f is no help) but TLP is probably "the last psychiatrist" and channeling it is likely to be tongue-in-cheek because his most recent work (which scott reviewed) is sort of a velvet-madness incarnate, a dark, confusing edgeless thing from beyond the defined edge of definitions themselves.
2. Eating 12 grapes on New Year's is also a (rather old-fashioned) tradition in parts of Latin America. The reference to a clock in Madrid has been forgotten, as far as I can tell.
7. Outdoors corridors (surrounding a patio, or between a building and an open space; covered, and closed on one side) are surely older (though they can have been common only in clement climates). It's the indoors corridor that must have been a novelty. Note it implies that you have space to waste.
15. Here the wording strongly suggests that Galton had really proved that "genius is genetic", presumably to our standards of proof - surely that's an overstatement.
32. Looking at the map of Paris given in the article makes it clear that there is significant survivorship bias. Few buildings survive in the eastern outer arrondissements, which were the poorer ones. (NB: they may also have had some empty space, even in 1914.) Example: the 13th, on the other side of Place d'Italie, was infamous for its poor-quality housing; little of it survives now - it's now the one part of Paris with a substantial number of high rises from the 1950s-1970s (on which opinions vary).
On a different note - it's trivial to find instances in the literature of new buildings that were considered ugly in their day, and/or associated to the bad taste of a rising class, are now sought after, no?
42. How does one choose grayscale in Android? All I see is settings to adapt to different kinds of (non-total) color blindness - they all still have some color in them.
I guess it implies that you have a moderate amount of space to waste; grand palaces and villas would have had many rooms emerging off grand halls rather than corridors, which is what you'd do if you had unlimited space. Diocletian's palace, for example: https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/58200/58216/58216_diocletian.htm
Corridors are very middle class. Rich people have grand halls, poor people have one-room shacks, and only in early modernity did we get people who were rich enough to have many rooms in their house but not rich enough to have an enormous palace.
Nowadays of course we have "open plan" living, because the houses we live in are optimised for looking good in a five-minute inspection rather than living in for decades.
There's some truth to this, but, again, when the weather allows, you do have outer corridors, or at least a porch that may connect to more than one room ("verandah" covers both - incidentally, it's an interesting word, in that went from Portuguese to Hindi to English).
Now, in Paris, where the price/m^2 is higher than 10k eur and local salaries are very much *not* to scale, corridors are seen as bugs rather than features - part of an architect's job is to tear down walls, and rearrange things cleverly so that a corridor is not needed.
I meant to say "... you do have outer corridors, or at least a porch, in places that are neither palaces nor grand villas".
(Incidentally, from what I read, the norm in Colonial times in the US for the non-rich was not the one-room shack, but the two-room shack, with no corridor.)
I don't know what counts as proving that genius is genetic but Galton provided strong evidence that it is heritable, by analyzing relationships among extraordinarily able members of various professions.
RE #32: I'm fascinating by how often the topic of prettiness in buildings comes up in rationalist writings, and how it seems like prettiness gets equated in a staightforward way with how 'traditional' a building is. In a similar vein, it often feels like "design" is taken to mean primarily the 'look' of the building, with relatively little discussion of how the look relates to other paramaters like cost, material availability, performance, etc...
For a community whose tenants are so rooted in modernist and enlightenment projects (and for a community so interested in city building!) the "rationalist" parallel in architectural thought seems conspicuously absent to me. Just wanted to register this observation! Maybe a topic for a longer post.
OK, forgive my clumsiness--I'm a new commentor but fairly long-time lurker.
Please bear with me as I am not attacking taste and absolutely believe people are entitled to surround themselves with things they like and that make them feel good. But—herein lies my concern, that a pretty wide domain, which lots of interesting intersections, tends to be collapsed into personal taste instead of treated like other topics.
By “rationalist” architectural thought, I mean applying the same kind of model of examining priors for cultural/historical assumptions, bias, missteps in logic, etc. to architecture. That is, people thinking about what buildings and architecture are ‘for,’ how prevailing ways of approaching this function may no longer work well/be ‘true,’ and proposing new models and solutions that better match the current understanding of the ‘purpose’ with the current landscape of technology and resources.
(this has a point, I promise)
This is essentially the logic driving the work of many architects in the early 20th century, who were struggling to reconcile new technological/scientific/social innovations (e.g. relating to domestic work, rising middle class) with the pretty rigid ideals for architecture and beauty perpetuated by the legacy elite. Specifically, they railed against the Beaux Arts schools (founded for Louis XIV, the Versailles guy, and supported by Napoleon) who were endlessly propping up the French aristocracy’s image of itself as the rightful heir of Greece and Rome and then exporting this ideal across capitals and suburbs of Europe and America. ‘Modernist’ architects saw this as a propagandistic exercise at worst and a wasteful farce at best, and inspired by the general intellectual climate of the time and its enthusiasm for scientific thinking, they believed that the whole way of approaching architecture (and city building) should be re-evaluated at first principles. And so, we developed new structural innovations, which made possible open span spaces and truly multi-story buildings, and their corresponding inventions in mechanical systems/air-conditioning, different building enclosures, etc. I feel like these architects should be heroes of rationalist thought! Or at least be examined in good faith for their legacy and how their project succeeded/failed in its ambitions.
Instead, we’re in a strange time where there’s a pretty small but vocal group of American/British architects/city ‘beautifiers’ revising this history, to set up an ahistorical ideological struggle between “traditionalists/classicists” and “modernists”, where instead of “Modernists” referring to a specific group of architects working in response to the way the world was between 1890-1960, they reconfigure ‘modernist’ as synonymous with ‘progressive,’ with all the corresponding implications of moral decay, and elitism(ironically). Meanwhile, most of the architectural field, schools, urban planners, code writers, policy makers, architectural historians/critics, professional organizations, the construction industry, engineering, and related disciplines and industries do not use these terms in this way, and instead refer to buildings by their use type or maybe the time period in which they were built/are attempting to emulate. The only other place I’ve seen the terms “traditionalist” or “modernist” used in this way is by developers, companies who make products for residential homes, HGTV, Trump (a developer) and his executive order for Classical Architecture, and NIMBY organizations—all entities who could be considered as having a “stake in the game” by influencing lay people’s definition of architecture.
This is not to speak of postmodernism and all architecture’s more recent, more literary ‘critical’ permutations. Modernist architects really believed it could be possible to reason better architecture, and they did!* Because of their innovations, so many more can afford build safe, airconditioned homes with earthquake-proof modernist steel structures, and clad them if they wish with expanded foam sculpted to evoke the Grecian aspirations of French 17th century aristocracy . And, we still can continue re-examining the purpose and best solutions for architecture, as we do in any other field.
So, there’s the basis for my confusion as to why the Rationalist community seems to have gravitated toward the second definition of ‘modernist,’ and why there is a sense of defensiveness about the way buildings look. There’s also a tendency in some of the “traditionalist” writing to use appeals to beauty (and now prettiness, I guess) that I would assume bother ‘rationalist’ sensitivities for the way it that resembles appeals to nature (as a slippery, inarguable, indefinable ‘good’).
I tend to have similar feelings about Modernist painting/art or whatever—that there’s some sense that the community’s awesome ability to keep personal perspectives, judgement and value in “play” is lost and the definition of good and bad gets kind of rigid and flattened, which is ironic to me because I feel like painting and art is literally for individuals to explore messing with judgement and value in a rhetorical space with fewer consequences.
Thank you for reading this long tome! I appreciate anyone’s thoughts.
You are regurgitating a narrative about architectural history that is not supported by the evidence, it's a whiggish just-so story based on the out of date, horrendously biased scholarship of Pevsner and other postwar architectural historians. The fact is that new technologies, materials, and functions were being incorporated into architecture long before the self-proclaimed Modernists came on the scene. Their totalitarian, nihilistic aesthetic claims were unnecessary, pointless non sequiturs based on nothing more than their own musings and baseless, potboiler social theory. Architecture, and the world's built environment, would be far better off if the Bauhaus and CIAM had never happened, and that may not be a particularly rationalist thing to say, but it's the truth.
but if something is made of a steel skeleton, why clad it in a three section parti to make it look like stone? I hate to go all ayn rand here, but why spend the money?
Perhaps we just hate ugly pragmatic buildings you mention and see ourselves as intellectual heirs of the aristocracy, and would like our environment to reflect it.
Or perhaps in the era of 3D printing and CNC the dichotomy between beautiful and inexpensive is absurd.
I mean, I think it would be helpful to talk about actual buildings, maybe. 3D printing isnt quite happening at a large building scale in any real capacity, but CNC is happening everywhere for sure. When you say ugly then, do you mean simple? As in, without ornamentation? CNC makes ornamenation cheaper, for sure, so simpleness no longer should be equated with thrift and utility, and ornamentation no longer needs to be equated with waste. But, then, how about David Adjaye's African American History Museum at the Smithsonian? This building has a CNC cut (I think) steel cladding/rainskin that is quite ornate. It is not aggressively simple and does not attempt to say "less is more,"--if anything it would suggest that statement is needlessly reductive. But, is it 'traditional'? Is it 'ugly'?
I think I see what you're getting at. The rationalist taste in architecture /does/ seem strangely regressive compared to rationalist community's other projects, which by comparison seem highly theoretical and speculative. How do rationalists square a preference for 19th century civic buildings on the one hand, and experimental model cities on the other?
As a non-rationalist lurker and outside observer, I think the answer lies in the dichotomy between the empirical and the theoretical. The rationalist community /seems/ equally obsessed with both. When I read my way through the 'rat-sphere' I see lots statistical analysis /and/ lots of theorizing. So why aren't rationalists excited by the theoretical ideas of 20c architecture and contemporary architecture? For the same reason that rationalists seem, on the whole, unimpressed by Marxism - the data is in and the theory doesn't work. Data trumps theory - as an outside observer this seems to me pretty close to The Iron Law (tm) of the rationalist project.
Some of the replies below mention the various studies that show that people overwhelmingly prefer so-called 'traditionalist' architecture. Does architecture exist to cater to people's preferences? Maybe, maybe not. But failure to align with the users preferences isn't the only data that the theoretical excesses of modernist (and later) architecture were practical failures. Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" makes a strong case that older architectural styles and older building methods lead to buildings that are more culturally and economically viable in the long term, due to their ability to be cheaply adapted to new uses. "How Buildings Learn" is the best fit, in my mind, for how I think rationalists think about architecture. As opposed to Le Corbusier's "Ville Radieuse" which is speculative in the same way that model cities /seem/ to be, except that the the data is in on Le Corbusier and he flopped.
It's reasonable to use this as the basis for what is 'better' because the reason the look of buildings (and therefore cities) is so important is because of the impact it has on a plurality of people. Being surrounded by buildings you think look nice makes you feel better than being around ones that you don't.
I have no idea what it could mean to think that it's 'rational' to prefer the look of modern buildings.
I did not mean to imply something was better because it was modern. I would say the terms traditional and modern have been invented by someone with an agenda that I'm suspicious of. I also would argue with your definition of defining "betterness," because the look of buildings is really just a small part of what they are designed for---the primary is being cost and ROI. Everyone is building as cheaply as they can get away with. Emulating the look of historic buildings in todays material, zoning, and skill environment likely costs more which often leads to "watered down" version of traditional buildings, which can end up looking worse than so called 'modern' buildings.
I've read what Hughes (and others with similar sympathies) have written, and I don't think there's any suspicious agenda there. I'd summarise the movement this way (deliberately avoiding the term 'modern'):
Hughes and the like don't share architects' taste in buildings.
Studies have repeatedly shown that the public don't share architects' taste in buildings either. In fact, their taste usually comes out as diametrically opposite: the buildings most liked in popular taste are the ones most disliked in architects' taste, and vice versa.
This wasn't always the case; there's good historical evidence that architects used to design buildings in sympathy with public tastes, but the architectural profession has changed strongly in its taste, since roughly a century back.
The theoretical justifications for architects' taste are not robust; they are easily criticised from both historical and modern practical perspectives.
Hughes and the rest of the movement think architects really are mistaken, and are making poor design decisions based on their own odd taste in buildings; and that these design decisions could be made otherwise in ways that would still be practical but would also popular.
I don't really read about architecture but it seems like these discussions are often conflating multiple senses of the word, capital-M Modernist and generic "modern."
-Mabuse upthread, for instance, seems to be talking about Modernism in the way I think about Mid-Centure Modernism -- Fallingwater and the like, which I absolutely find attractive.
yes I would definitely agree with this, and its what I was trying to convey in my first response to Scott. The first step of making this conversation more nuanced is to accept that there are two definitions of Modernism, and people are using them towards different arguments. If we can concede this, then we can actually start to talk about different ideas in architecture (and whether they are bad or not, and whether bauhaus should never have existed (as Mabuse7 asserts), and what it means for something to be bad architecture) I am not a huge fan of the look of lots of gehry's work myself because they seem cartoonish to me. But I appreciate the engineering problems these buildings solve and I'm excited by their ingenuity. And they make sense to me as an extension of the early buildings Gehry was creating, as well as the context he comes from (Los Angeles! Possibly the strangest architectural fantasy situation). And these conversations are exciting! and interesting! and they affect us everyday of our lives, cause we live in buildings! So I just want to be able to have a conversation about them without them being shut down prematurely in conversations about taste and beauty, as if those things werent open to be discussed either.
Isn't progress a bit of a political and subjective thing? Its easy to call something progress and something regression--I mean, its a tactic many politicians have used so many times. I personally think that many of the innovations in architecture--such as a glass curtain wall, CNC, BIM, etc, are amazing progress. They make buildings cheaper, safer, healthier for people, better performing, easier on energy/water/material resources, faster to make, etc... all of these things are more important to me than what historical references a building makes. I would rather a building addresses these questions, which are measurable and quantifiable, than de-prioritize them for the sake of 'looking like' what a person thinks a building should look like. Besides, "traditional" buildings look like they did, because that was the best most efficient way to perform at the time. Not because a grecian temple sprung into someones mind as the penultimate symbol of knowledge. All of the things we associate with 'traditional' buildings were linked to the best function available to people through trial and error. So,it seems strange to me to "arrest" the look of buildings forever, based on how they looked in some arbitrary point in history.
Because when people build 'traditional'-looking buildings now, they do not build them in the same way that they did when that building style was invented. They have insulation and electricity and plumbing and all matter of progress. Then, they put a sticker on the outside to give it the look of a 'traditional' building. Why? and why is that beautiful? Can we not also examine the concept of beauty as something that can be picked apart and analysed from a rationalist perspective? Why does beauty get a free, unchecked pass?
I was encouraging someone to read what the "progress studies" guy had to say about this specific issue. The question whether "progress" is subjective is a much bigger one for which relevant readings would be much earlier in that site's history.
35. Did not know about the old cochran paper on the topic. Not surprised. IF the gay germ hypothesis turns out to be correct I will eat a 10pt printed copy of West Hunter
40. Yup, China & India actually. India's per cap income is now like $2k, so $6-$7 a day - a big tranche of the indian population is pushing up that median too.
I'm pretty skeptical of the gay germ thing too, but the MS thing has updated me slightly in favor. I wonder what Cochran thinks of the rise in transgender; it seems to have the same dynamics as homosexuality (non-genetic but seemingly fixed condition that decreases the chance of reproduction) - would he have to argue it's also caused by pathogens? The same one? A different one? If transgender can happen for social/psychological reasons, seems like homosexuality could too.
Yea, agreed. I mean there is probably a nuanced point for Cochran to make here that the recent rise in trans (and even LGBTQ broadly) can be attributed to mimetic proliferation/contagion (pick your framing) and not germs since for whatever reason the social capital equation has shifted such that it is all the sudden a positive social capital move to be trans/LGBTQ. The unusually high levels of voluntary castration in the ancient Chinese dynasties was a consequence of the power afforded to eunuchs, not a rise in gender dysphoria (same for celibate priests, etc). Cochran would probably suggest that the persistence of homosexuality (and possibly trans too) at low but significant rates throughout history, in spite of the often massively negative social capital associated with the trait, is a different phenomena than the recent social crowning of LGBTQ.
Actually, Cochran would probably just say "Wrong." and not elaborate.
Scott, Cochran is a broken clock on "everything is caused by pathogens". Your post makes it sound like he deserves a bunch of credit, but of course, he is merely citing a 1998 paper (not by Cochran) saying maybe MS is caused by EBV, and jumping on that due to his prior that everything is caused by pathogens. "20 year gap between Cochran and everyone else" is pretty misleading.
Yeah a quick pubmed search of “Epstein Barr virus” and “multiple sclerosis” brings up 850+ articles, going back almost 50 years. Two from The Lancet in 1979 and 1981.
This wasn’t some outsider hypothesis. The association has been known since the 1970s and was frankly widely recognized. Proving it hasn’t been for lack of trying. And it certainly didn’t need any input from someone like Cochran. It’s wild to give him credit for anything here, which I agree is what the comment sounds to me like it’s doing.
Cochran does not go around proclaiming "everything is caused by pathogens". Gay germs is simply a hypothesis. He admits this and says there is limited evidence in its favor.
Rather than saying "everything" he has some guidelines for that being likely. If it significantly reduces fitness, has a frequency rate above 1%, and isn't new, then you'd expect selection to have removed it long ago and thus more likely a pathogen than genes. However, he previously suggested schizophrenia was caused by a pathogen and now acknowledges it appears to be genetic.
What does "genetic" even mean? Leprosy has a identical twin concordance of 75%, higher than almost anything. Leprosy is genetic. When he "admits" that schizophrenia is genetic, are you sure he's actually retracting the infectious theory? Of course it's heritable, we've always known that.
He now compares it to having sufficiently low-IQ to be considered mentally retarded. I expressed some skepticism of that and said I thought it seemed more like an acute condition causing retardation rather than "naturally" having it through many alleles of small effect, but he informed me that's what the evidence supported.
The interesting thing is that there has been a big increase in people identifying as LGBT, but not really as gay specifically (even though gay men were more harshly persecuted than lesbians or bisexual women). So homosexuality among males might reflect something more hard-wired/biological.
I'm agnostic about Gay Germ, but the hard thing it seeks to explain is exclusive homosexuality (as understood biologically, not necessarily socially): a seemingly deep-rooted and lifelong lack of sexual interest in the opposite sex, yet a full sexual appetite for the same sex, that is extremely maladaptive. It's also interesting that this sort of homosexuality was probably more maladaptive in the ancestral environment for men than for women, yet the female equivalent appears to be far less common, if it exists at all.
There's no arguing that people engage in specific maladaptive behaviors all the time, like self-castration. Or for that matter, using birth control. But ordinarily they're in service of other things that at times have been adaptive, like securing resources or boosting one's status or having a sense of belonging to a community. That last one probably has something to do with why a huge percentage of Gen Z identifies as LGBT, but I don't think it does much to explain a very large lifelong preference for the same sex.
Ha, yeah, I can see that. But the idea "I do not want to produce children at the biological maximum" is not novel, premodern peoples very often did not produce anywhere near the biological maximum. This often served an adaptive function: why go through the costs of bearing a child that you can't feed?
Modern birth control simply hijacks this thought process and vastly reduces the costs of pursuing it, even as modernity has largely eliminated the problem of not being able to feed and care for more children.
When I first read the phrase "biological maximum" I thought you meant that Malthusian carrying capacity. I should note that even aside from behavioural adaptations, malnutrition reduces fertility & increases the child mortality rate.
> You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption
What a strange take. It's not about forbidding this money to be spent at all, it's about making sure the power to control this spending is not in their hands, but in the hands of somebody ostensibly democratically elected and accountable. The money is not burned
Scott Sumner argues that in order to tax the rich, you need to actually tax yachts etc.
He says that some politicians profess to want to tax rich people but then shy away from taxing yachts because that might cost jobs in the yacht building, or other excuses.
Scott Sumner is arguing for more of a tax burden on rich people. Your choice of words, like trickle down economics, suggests to me that you made up your mind before reading?
He’s using tax burden in a very technical and specific sense here. The burden lies with whoever ultimately decreases their consumption to pay the tax. If that doesn’t happen then the taxes entity is just passing on the burden to someone else.
“Tax burden” is kinda just what the term is called. Maybe that’s nefarious on the part of economists? Shrug.
The entity truly paying the tax is the one whose consumption has changed. That’s the assertion. You can layer that into whatever value system you want. In your case you have strong opinions about taxation and democracy. Fine. The way you measure if the tax actually affects someone or not is by analyzing its effects on consumption.
How else would you suggest one analyze whether a tax is “effective”?
His point is that if the tax doesn't affect their material standard of living, then they effectively haven't experienced any kind of tax burden. You're not taking money away from the rich people, you're taking it away from the things/people the money otherwise would have been spent on. You can debate if this is better or worse than the government spending the money on stuff, but that's besides this precise point.
I don't get it. What does the material standard of living has to do with it? Taxes are not some kind of a punishment, they are a means to change who controls this money. It's exactly their point to insure that it's not personally Gates and Buffett who decides who gets this money as wages. These money will still reach somebody, and saying that they are "taken away" from "very poor African’s" is missing the point. The taxes are legitimised for us as a way for us to control spending, and the point is that (in this utopian world of our control) we can decide which poor people will receive this money.
The point is that you're diverting resources away from investment, charity etc. and not consumption spending. Again, you may think this is a good thing, but if you're advocating more taxes on the rich you need to be aware that this is what is happening and I would argue that the vast majority of people advocating for 'taxes on the rich' aren't aware of this, and think in terms of 'well now he has to do with buying one less yacht...'
I remember when Bezos got divorced and his ex-wife announced a charity, I saw enough sober takes that were quite clear that it’s far from a “amazing thing” because no matter how good her intentions are, she still exercises a lot of power over socially-produced wealth. Even if I accept the existence of this vast majority of people, the argument about “yachts vs sick puppies” is misleading; as long as we stick to “good vs bad uses of money” instead of “our control vs not our control”, we are not going to arrive at a sober tax policy
if you have neither hope in possibility to influence the governmental decision-making, nor any desire to acquire such possibility, it is definitely a sensible logical conclusion for you to insist over having 100% personal control of all of the resources you can get under that control. in this case it's not really clear what kind of tax policy you'd want to discuss over than a no-tax policy
I'd rather leave that money in control of Bezos or his ex-wife, than give it to the government to spend on Predator drones and surveillance.
Once the government spending gets even remotely aligned with the needs of taxpayers, we can start discussing tax policy. Currently, a more moral thing to discuss is methods of tax evasion.
it’s not really a question of waiting for this alignment to happen, you know what i’m saying? it’s not like there’s a cheat code when you vote in some particular way and suddenly it works. and it’s definitely not like letting Bezoses of the world have more control is something that will help other, less rich taxpayers somehow control governmental spending more. i’d say it’s the opposite
As an aside, do you think ALL resources should be allocated by "democratically elected and accountable" people? If so, then have fun with your communist dystopia. If not, then where do you draw the line?
I think some of the resources, notably ones that are needed for the public goods , have to be allocated and controlled in some way that allows for accountability before the people; and I think that is the point of taxes. I don’t find this take weird or communist
Some of the resources *are* allocated in a way that (modulo the inscrutability of government bureaucracy) allows for accountability before the people. Quite a lot of them, actually. So if someone doesn't even nod in the direction of a cost-benefit argument re shifting a marginal dollar from the private to the public sphere before saying something along the lines of "want exists, inequality exists, therefore we should raise taxes on the rich", that looks like an argument for allocating basically all resources to the state save for a standardized basic ration.
I don't understand, sorry. There's X dollars in somebody's coffer (call him "B"). There's a mechanism that allows them to be spent in some way that is (ultimately, at the limit, with caveats) decided by some kind of a general consensus (say, an elected government, or even decision markets a-la Hanson). One says: the efficiency of this decision mechanism might be lower than just letting B decide. The public decision mechanism gets T*X utility, B's decisions get B*X utility. One gives an example where B*X is some good, obvious utility. A poor person is fed, a sick puppy is cured. In no way does this imply that B*X is larger that T*X. It only implies that B*X is more than zero.
And that is all I'm saying, by the way. I'm not saying that necessarily T*X > B*X, I'm just saying that that particular implication is meaningless and misleading.
One important premise of tax policy is that it's clear that individuals (and other entities) are good at having enough local knowledge to make good local money decisions (Hayek-style), but they lack motivation for some of the global money decisions. From this the question follows: what kind of percentage of funds should be decided about locally, so that the rest can be somehow managed globally? This scheme can be complicated in a variety of ways but I find the general gist here.
Well, you have trouble right out of the gate if you start from the assumption that there's a "should" label we can slap on the percentage of B's income. Most people interpret "should" in the sense of "deserve", and deserve has nothing to do with it unless we *are* trying to impose some moral failing on B for having acquired so much income.
There is no justice to be had here; only consequences. If you tax B more, you *will* cause B to invest less, whether you think B ought to consume less or not.
If you're trying to convey "should" in the sense of some allotment of B's wealth between B and T such that B manages his slice and T manages its slice and overall we get the maximum utility, then you win some cred for acknowledging B wants to improve society, but that argument still mistakenly assumes that utility in B's terms is the same as utility in T's. It should be easy to notice that B and T will have different goals, and therefore different utility functions. If they had the same function, then T would have no problem letting B spend his income as he wishes. Even if T had information B didn't, it would be easy for T to share that information with B and let B spend as above. If that information can't be shared for some reason, then T could still persuade B that they share utility and let B "spend" whatever portion of his income on T that B wishes. At no point is there a percentage that T "should" levy on B, over B's objections, if they shared utility function. So we're only looking at the case where they don't, but if they don't, then there's no shared function to maximize by definition.
Moreover, if you notice that any tax office (T) is distinct from the people in its domain (P), then it shouldn't be hard to see how T and P will have different goals, and thus utility functions, as well. Whatever T levied on B, would not necessarily make P better off.
If you want to try to argue that T's (or P's) utility function is somehow "better" than B's, and therefore B should hand over some cash, it should be trivial to notice that B's simply going to disagree, and rearrange his investment in response. Which puts us where Sumner's argument is.
this is interesting, thank you. one thing that is not immediately clear to me is how such an approach can address the differences in income/capital of each individual
my gut - which i’m prepared not to trust - tells me that 1. there might be economic mechanisms constantly discoverable to lower the necessary percentage of centralized(-ish) spending, which however will never approach absolute zero without sacrificing some very valuable public goods. 2. a lot of those mechanisms will have side-effects and “bugs” and deteriorate requiring maintenance and replacement only possible through coercive action
I can't say as much about quadratic funding, but regarding Tabarrok's dominant assurance contracts I don't see how differences in income/capital are relevant. The point of the contract is to get around the free-rider problem for public goods funding. Nobody wants to pay for it because they're relying on everyone else paying for it, thus it doesn't get paid for and everyone is worse off. With a regular assurance contract, you get your money back if the funding goal isn't met (there are now multiple sites supporting this model, though I should note that Tabarrok's version has people merely pledging to donate so there's nothing to return if it doesn't go through). It's thus in your interest to fund it if the public good is worth more to you than the amount you're donating (making it efficient). If you don't have any money to fund it with, then you don't, but since it's a public good you get the benefit anyway. With a dominant assurance contract donors get paid extra if the funding goal isn't met, which makes pledging a no-lose (dominant) option for everyone who would benefit from the public good and can help fund it. Yes, people who can't donate won't get the bonus if it's not funded, but the point is to ensure that the goal is met and the public good is funded.
The idea that scientific American "suddenly" became a bunch of woke extremists is false. Way back in 2013, they were already literally advocating for politically incorrect scientific research be banned. In America.
This is soviet-level censorship being proposed long before the word 'woke' was even a thing.
I can only guess, but I think the elephant in the room is Native Americans - if you do Native American people will complain about appropriation (unless the model happens to be NA), but if you don't do Native American you'll get complains that you're excluding that part of history.
My guess is that they intentionally went "non-historical" to try to bypass the whole issue - they were hoping to invoke the more universal 'American ideals' embodied by Superman rather than a specific historical period that might get bogged down in complaints of racism.
(Still probably either Cowboy or 'Hamilton-esque' costume would have done better)
Yes, Retsam makes a good point about Native Americans. In the USA, there are a lot of white people with 0 - 1% Native American ancestry and see themselves as culturally different. Whereas, in in many countries in South America, it is maybe okay for people to wear the native dress because people are at least somewhat mixed heritage usually? Maybe? I don't know what the politics of a white Mexican or white Peruvian wearing the traditional dress would be. The American isn't white but he doesn't really look Native American, I would say, so that puts him in a weird position I suppose. Would it be culturally appropriate or feel fitting for a non-white/non-hispanic to wear a cowboy outfit? It's tricky I suppose.
It's a shame that the old melting pot idea seems to be no longer current. The idea of a cowboy is very American, even if the actual historic incarnations were obviously of some specific subgroups of people.
I suspect this is the reason (and of course both “Cowboy” and “Hamilton-esque” would get tagged as symbols of white supremacy).
The thing is, every single one of those costumes is probably some sort of stereotypical, appropriated, simplified, out of context, sacrilegious or whatever. The difference is the other countries don’t care - it looks cool, it’s for a silly fun beauty contest, have at it. But the US entry is absolutely going to be scrutinized by woke scolds, and the poor model will be the main character on Twitter for a day for even a slight misstep, and so must be as inoffensive as possible.
The woke world is less fun, because having fun distracts from being ideologically pure and is thus always held in suspicion.
EDIT: and in the comments over there, even the Superman outfit is getting accused of appropriation since the original artist was Canadian. The real problem seems to be that it’s a crappy costume, literally looks off-the-rack from a cheap Halloween store, and the model looks bad in it.
That '31% of British people have met/seen Queen Elizabeth' sounds pretty reasonable to me.
I am a normalish, middle class, middle aged, English bloke and I have seen (in person) Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Prince Andrew, Lady Sarah Ferguson, Prince Philip (to speak to), and Queen Elizabeth. They get around quite a bit.
I have seen more royals than I have seen either cabinet ministers or ABC-list celebs, which is a bit odd from a purely Bayesian perspective as there are far more of the latter than the former.
In order for the Queen to have appeared to 31% of the British population during her seventy-year reign she'd have to appear to eight hundred new people a day (actually more, because she's outlived most people who saw her early in her reign). It's a lot, but doesn't sound the least bit implausible for someone whose day job is travelling around making public appearances.
Something that struck me when looking at the Sensitivity Readers link was the similarity to bioethicists: the need to say things that border on the deranged, because if they didn't, there would be little need for them at all.
When I peer review a paper, I feel obliged to find _something_ to criticise, just to prove that I've actually read it. I imagine "sensitivity readers" are subject to the same incentives, but more so.
I do a reasonable amount of peer review and don't find this at all. Firstly, most of the time I review, the other reviewers don't bother doing that ("This is a good paper and I recommend acceptance," or something to that effect, is way too common, to the point where I am not sure they did more than scan the text briefly), so I think you are in the minority. Second, it's rare to find a paper which can't be improved, because nobody's perfect. I try to make improving the paper the goal when I do peer review, but if I ever did find a perfect paper, I'd say so, and try and point out some of the bits I found particularly good. I have reviewed some where the only comments I could make were minor clarifications and typoes. I like those ones :)
I’m still working my way through the links, but I think #34 is misinterpreting 1984. The Principles of Newspeak is, to me, pretty clearly a excerpt from The Book - the phony compendium of history and philosophy that O’Brien uses as a stage prop in his efforts to make Winston believe in the existence of The Brotherhood, and thus rebel from the Party.
The genius of the Book is that, while it’s entirely fake in the sense that it does not truly act as a center of gravity for resistance to the Party, it IS true and accurate in its recitation of the history of Oceania and it’s analysis of Newspeak and the philosophy of Ingsoc. It’s supposed to make your head spin and give you Winston’s feeling of being unmoored. It’s part of the tragedy of 1984.
I think they covered most of these objections in the thread. It doesn't read as something written in their time, for example it talks about the 11th edition of the dictionary while saying that in 1984 only the 10th had come out. Winston is also mentioned by name.
I'm with you on that one. I'm less optimistic about the short timeframe for the fall of the party system: It is the nature of Newspeak, that it doesn't evolve. It is designed that way. Therefore it is plausible, that for a long time after the final 11th edition, the party rules without new editions of the Newspeak dictionary being released.
EDIT: On further reading, I think that the interpretation in the link is a valid one, but not the only plausible one. I disagree, that the essay is part of the Book, as Lasagna writes, but it could well just be Orwell himself talking to his reader and the past tense a choice to further the feeling, that the things in the book happened sometime.
For Table 6, putting in a dummy for "year <= 1899" doesn't mean the regression doesn't gain identifying variation from the 1899 -> 1900 decline. That's..... not how within transformations work.
For Table 7, the state level data is clearly a mess. E.g. in column 6 (the one he focuses on) we have 23 years of data and 147 observations from 49 states. So the average state appears 3 years out of 23. Ooft. Gonna be an utter mess.
The NYT made two changes to Wordle. The first was removing certain swearwords (such as "whore") from the words you're allowed to guess. The second was removing a handful of words from the *answer* list, including words which are too obscure and words which are potentially controversial - slave, fibre, lynch, agora, pupal, and wench. (I leave it to the reader to decide which were removed for which reason.)
However, what they didn't realise is that Wordle's word lists don't overlap - by removing "fibre" and "slave" from the "answers" list but failing to add it to the "non-answer valid words" list, they made them impossible to guess period. I think it's pretty embarrassing that they haven't fixed this (I just checked and it's still the case as I write this - try guessing "fibre"!)
I will admit in principle it might make sense to remove even the most mildly controversial words from the answer list, especially if you're pruning it anyway (and it probably did need to be pruned, "agora" is absurdly obscure). I'm less OK with removing the ability to guess swear words like "whore" or "bitch" on purpose, especially given the choices were rather random, but it's not surprising I guess.
There's literally the source. You can read the source code from before and after the NYT transition by using the Wayback Machine. The word lists are right there and have always been sent to the browser.
I agree with their basic assessment because I diff'd the before/after answer lists a few days ago, although I didn't bother checking whether the guessable-words list had changed.
The other effect is that the answers are now out of sync -- if you had a copy of Wordle saved off, the NYT answers are now a day or two "ahead", and will fall farther out of sync periodically. *Very* sloppy.
Do you have a link to this, for those of us who have no idea what's wrong with "fibre" or "pupal"? I am guessing "agora" is banned because this is where slaves were sold, but I realize I might be wrong.
OK, I can see banning the British spelling. But you'd have to ban a lot of words if you banned everything that could be a misspelling of something else - are you sure that was their reason?
Of the people I know who played wordle before the NYT takeover, approximately none would have found "agora" obscure.
Maybe the NYT - home of what's supposedly a really hard crossword on weekends - might want to consider that wordle previously appealed to people who did NYT crosswords, rather than to people who knew almost all the words in their sixth grade reader.
But OTOH, it might be racist or "white" not to make the english language wordle accessible to immigrants who began learning English in adulthood.
I'm not a native English speaker, but I knew about agora - as in the agora in Athens and other city-states of ancient Greece - ever since attending public high school. Just as I knew agoraphobic as the opposite of claustrophobic.
It's only from reading the comments today that I learned that slave traders also picked that same word to denote the area where they conducted business. Well, some slave traders at least - I'm quite sure that Arabic or Turkish slave traders were not using that particular word, and I'm not sure what words the sub-Saharan African slave traders used.
In light of that, I seriously doubt that agora was removed due to being "obscure". It looks more as a demonstration of power, where the fact a word was used by some slave traders trumps its cultural heritage from antiquity's most prominent European civilization. Being stuck in such a worldview would give me claustrophobia, not agoraphobia.
I'm just cynical enough to wonder whether any appreciable number of slave traders ever did use the term "agora", particularly as referring to slave trading areas in particular. (Parading one's classical education by using "agora" for any outdoor market is a different story.)
I've only heard that in this thread, and "some rando on the internet said it" isn't especially good evidence. After all, by that logic, niggardly comes from the word "negro" and refers to the long entrenched stereotype of black people being miserly. (sic).
No. I think the etymology goes back to Old Norse and has no relationship to ‘negro’ or it’s cognates. If you challenge this I can pull the proper volume of the OED down but that’s more work than I have time for at the moment.
Edit
Okay I couldn’t leave it alone. OED says of obscure origin. No connection to negro though. I was recalling George Will once saying it was from Old Norse.
The NYT *also* makes really easy crosswords on Monday, and realizes that they want Wordle to appeal to them too. It's no fun to play Wordle and end up seeing a sequence of five letters as the answer that's not a word you've ever heard. If there are 2000 something possible answer words they still have left, they're doing fine.
Dang, you may be the most highly skilled curator I've ever read. The ratio of (I want to read this ∩ I wasn't aware of this) / (total links curated) is just very high for me. Thank you!
There's also a certain ratio of heat to light in certain types of discussions, that makes them worth avoiding. If you know how the debate goes every single time, then it's better to just get people to avoid it unless they're absolutely sure that *this* time something new will be said that makes the flame war worth it.
I get uneasy talking about AOC but I know that my discomfort is coming is coming from my particular cultural socialization, which is of course specific to a particular time and place.
I had made a remark in an earlier thread about not being able to bring myself to read ‘Lolita’ but if I allow myself to take a step back I can see my discomfort is pretty irrational.
Calls to mind “The Alman Brothers” and their laminated ‘age of consent by state’ cheat sheet that they brought on tour. Now I’m back to feeling uneasy about this.
I agree bringing this up unnecessarily and in a low effort way is probably not a good way to allocate weirdness points or generate more light than heat. Sorry.
18 seems to be unusual in the United States, too. Looking at the equivalent wikipedia page for the country, 31 states have 16 as the age of consent, 6 states have 17, and 13 states have 18. 18 is the age for transporting people across state lines or using the US postal service to have sex. 16 is the age of consent on military installations, allowing for as low as 12 as long as you're married.
37: On isochronic maps, see these maps of travel time from New York City to the interior of the country in 1800, 1830, 1857, and 1930 (that last, by rail or air). This country used to be an impassable wilderness. https://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas/138/a/
I've read that, before they built the rail connection, the fastest way to get from Kansas City to the west coast was by sailing all the way around South America.
On kids and extracurriculars, just go with gut instinct. Ignore studies. Look to parents with a kid of similar age and abilities, from a family of similar values, for advice. But ignore even that if it makes no sense. Try different things, see what they enjoy. If they reject something you think they ought to give another shot to, then wait a while and present it using different material, maybe in a different environment. And keep them away from screens until they're 7 or so, or they'll only show interest in screens. After that, keep screens rare. This must be hard nowadays as many schools rely on kids using screens.
On another topic you had : Why are Americans suddenly interested in caste? It is pretty bizarre. I'm tired of identity politics. Disappointed to see this blog get into this "new" branch of it, as well.
>On kids and extracurriculars, just go with gut instinct. Ignore studies. Look to parents with a kid of similar age and abilities, from a family of similar values, for advice.
So, ignore data, use anecdotes. Got it.
If you want to say get kids to do what they enjoy doing, fine. But the point is whether or not it improves academic ability. The data suggests no.
>Why are Americans suddenly interested in caste? It is pretty bizarre. I'm tired of identity politics. Disappointed to see this blog get into this "new" branch of it, as well.
Identity politics is the most politically salient issue of the modern age. Ignoring it makes no sense. To do so is to stick your head in the sand.
>>On kids and extracurriculars, just go with gut instinct. Ignore studies. Look to parents with a kid of similar age and abilities, from a family of similar values, for advice.
>So, ignore data, use anecdotes. Got it.
Or perhaps, ignore the two-bit analyses in social-science papers that apply gross statistical oversimplifications to an array of complex interrelated inputs, before concluding with "data says". The kind by which an alien will arrive to the assessment that the average human adult has one boob and one testicle, p = 0.0000001.
Rather follow - to use Highbrow Scientific Terms - the precepts of Machine Learning, which gladly exchange legibility for error-minimization on predictions.
The concept of ML is to absorb a "training dataset", and use it to repeatedly rearrange a messy and *quite illegible* network of weights, until it comes to acceptably match the training dataset's inputs to their known outputs. Whereas there's lots of individual parameters on the input side, and many aspects of outcomes on the output side, *for each digested case*. Once you've done that, you may use this *illegible but trained* network to see what it predicts as outputs for some other arbitrary inputs.
***
ML is also known to us under the much older names of "gut instinct", "intuition" etc. It is the same in shape if not in internal implementation details. It is the "don't ask me to explain why I say X123 for the case C123, but I'm quite sure it will be like this, from experience". The said experience having consisted of observing outcomes X1..X122 for cases C1..C122, whereas neither of those 122 cases are exactly equal to C123, since there's a ton of parameters involved, but their dynamic range covers the general area where C123 lies.
And if someone forces you to explain your X123 intuition, you can *try* to, but that verbalized, "legible" explanation - largely a rationalization - will be quite crude and missing out a lot of things that you don't quite know how to express. By doing all that you'll often arrive to a somewhat different "legible" conclusion, which I'll call L123. And every difference between X123 and L123, every bit of the intuited answer that you were not able to express in a "verbal and legible" manner, will then by default be proclaimed "irrational" -- *even if X123 later comes way closer to actual reality than L123*.
That's the root of the "metis vs. epistemic knowledge" contrast: things optimized for actually working vs. things optimized for legibility.
Maintaining legibility is interesting to those who like to argue among themselves, or who wish to be proven right "on paper" while also believing that the said paper is of consequence. In contrast, intuition (i.e. error-minimization on predictions involving many input parameters and many outputs), is interesting to those who care about results. Intelligence is the art of navigating legible rationalizations. Wisdom is the art of consolidating intuitions over the long term.
So I agree with Deepa - prefer metis to epistemic knowledge on matters like these.
Rather "go with gut instinct. Ignore studies. Look to parents with a kid of similar age and abilities, from a family of similar values, for advice." Rather train your intuition on an empirically-verified training set taken from those in your local environment, similar in many aspects and different in particular important details. Add in what your parents or grandparents think. Then use this trained network (i.e. intuition) by taking your kids as they are, and differently tweaking those elements that are possible to tweak, to predict the corresponding outputs and thus assess what approach might work out best *for them specifically*.
You shouldn't be surprised that there will be some error in the prediction. That's normal, and do reevaluate when you notice it, as that error is basically additional input. It should still be quite less than the error that would result had you instead applied the lessons from a two-bit analysis of "data not anecdote" in some social-sciences paper, which used huge amounts of samples whose circumstances were significantly different to yours, which steamrolled over a huge amount of factors which apply to your case, which arbitrarily split across complex interrelated inputs until it got a particular p-value that made them say "gotcha!", and which is likely fated to be forgotten after one study-replication-crisis or another.
> On another topic you had : Why are Americans suddenly interested in caste? It is pretty bizarre. I'm tired of identity politics
Because it's basically like identity politics from an alternative universe. You can see all the same effects apply, but between a set of groups that none of us has any real investment in. This (a) gives an independent data set to test our hypotheses regarding identity politics on, and (b) allows Americans to discuss identity politics more safely.
Talking about (say) anti-White discrimination in the US is societally dangerous, but talking about anti-Brahmin discrimination in India is perfectly acceptable, and the Straussian interpretation is up to the reader.
> Why are Americans suddenly interested in caste? It is pretty bizarre. I'm tired of identity politics.
Some people enjoy politics more than others. And if the politics as usual is boring, you can go meta. One possible meta question is: Which mechanism *actually* decides which groups are considered privileged and which are considered oppressed, especially in situations where you could make reasonable arguments in either way? (You can use a rule of thumb "which side the Democrat party would defend", but you cannot apply this to foreign topics that are typically not discussed in American politics.)
Another is: What is the proposed way to deal with situations when one oppressed group is hurting another oppressed group? Because, if you try to stop the former group from doing so, they will likely start complaining "hey, you are oppressing us", and the rules say that when an oppressed group says that, you better shut up and listen. But at the same time you are also supposed to listen to the latter group, and both of them are right by definition, but they also happen to disagree with each other, therefore...? (An idealistic argument would be that the tiniest intersection deserves the greatest support. A pragmatic argument would be that the strongest - but still technically oppressed - group makes the best political ally, and we should not antagonize them.)
Yet another interesting thing is that being oppressed is perhaps anticorrelated with the standardly accepted signals of oppression. I mean, imagine a stereotypical rich kid studying at an expensive woke university, vs a poor working-class kid working two jobs since they were 16. Which one will have more followers on Twitter, more time to argue, better knowledge of social justice, more skill at using the right pronouns, and the most recent politically correct opinions? The chances of the latter to win an online debate about who is more oppressed are practically zero; it would cost the former only one tweet to get the latter denounced as racist and fired from both jobs.
The debates about caste technically belong here. Should the listen to the people of color who say that other people of color are oppressing them in a way that is quite analogical to our concept of racism? Or should we listen to the people of color who say that this is utter nonsense, that caste is an important part of their religion, and expressing negative opinions on a religion of people of color is the actual racism here? Should we side with those who more resemble our officially oppressed groups? Or should we side with those who are better at debating social justice using the academical language? Those who are more numerous, or those who are more likely to work at corporate HR or a newspaper?
If you scroll through the article far enough you find the answer: apparently a poorly-fitting Superman outfit.
Blue jeans and a t-shirt seems the most reasonable answer to what American traditional dress looks like. It's not America's fault that the rest of the world has appropriated American culture.
In my mind, the 'traditional American clothes' outfit is obvious: recreate the outfit of Daniel Boone.
Moccasins, leather breeches, a shirt, a leather jacket with tassels, and a coon-skin cap. Accessorize with a Kentucky Long Rifle, a horn of powder, and a big multi-purpose knife.
For history nerds, also accessorize with the skull of a bear, and a piece from an old tree-trunk carved with the words "D. Boone killed a bear here, in the year 1760".
"Mister Global Contestants Dress In Their National Costumes And Look Like Video Game Bosses"
#1. Class: Heavy Battlemage. Spells and Abilities: spellshield/deflect; powerstance; can cast large area-of-effect damage spells that deal elemental damage. Slow-moving but very high poise, cannot be staggered or interrupted.
#2. Class: Necromancer. Conjures living dead to fight alongside him, can summon mythical creatures onto the battlefield. Spells: Creeping Death; Curse; Soul of Kahlo
#3. Class: Druid. Summons short-lived but very high damage spirit animals; can transform into one of three Embodiments: Peacock Form (high burst damage spellcaster, glass cannon), Tree Form (heals self and nearby allies), Armadillo Form (tank with very high HP and high poise).
#4. Class: Pyromancer. Casts spells that deal fire damage. Can switch between two stances: Pemanas (highly mobile caster with short-cooldown, long range fire damage spells); when he puts on the mask, adopts the stance of Gunung Perapi (cannot move, but deals massive AoE fire damage in all directions).
#5. Class: Forlorn Cleric. Very high mobility, hand-to-hand combat character. Can phase through walls, deals heavy burst damage. Low HP and low armor, but can lifesteal if he lands his combo.
#6. Class: Aeromancer. Spellcaster specialising in air-elemental damage using his unique casting catalyst Parasolis to channel shockwaves and blasts of air toward the enemy. Very fast moving, low HP and armour but high chance repel incoming damage.
#7. Class: Hunter. Combination melee and ranged physical damage, can call nearby beasts to temporarily fight alongside him. Sets invisible traps that deal very high initial burst damage and cause the player's health to slowly decrease over time. Main weapon is Barbed Net, thrown like a lasso and causes laceration and entanglement upon contact with enemy. Very weak to fire damage.
#8. Class: Rune Priest. Medium range spellcaster with unique abilities. Creates identical copies of himself during battle who share the same spells and movesets. Each copy only has 1HP but explodes in a cloud of toxic mist dealing lingering AoE damage upon death. The original Rune Priest can cast Orb of Oblivion, a slow moving projectile ball of dark magic. The Orb is easily dodged, but if it collides with one of his clones, it releases a massive blast that kills the player instantly, so kill all his clones as a priority.
#9. Class: Rogue. Melee character specialising in high burst damage ambush attacks, stealth and assassination. Main weapons are a pair of daggers or a garotte laced with poison. Can throw smokebombs, and when walking through smoke becomes temporarily invisible and immune to physical damage. Can be out-traded in combat by players with high armour and defences, but his poison deals true damage ignoring armour.
#10. Class: Holy Spellsword. Hybrid melee-spellcaster who can conjure a magic sword that lasts a short amount of time but deals heavy holy damage on hit. Casts large AoE miracles causing beams of holy damage to come down from the sky in many locations at once. This spell has a short cooldown so he will spam it, forcing you to stay agile and avoid the blast areas. Immune to lightning and air elemental damage but weak to physical, can be staggered by greatswords and other heavy weapons.
"This is not to say errors are OK or should be tolerated because "everybody's doin' it". Academic econ is in a parlous state and needs to be fixed (just like other academic fields). There needs to be some form of systematic quality control and error checking."
He's just saying that he thinks the attacks on Cook seem politically motivated, and that if you went after _any_ individual economist, you probably could find errors of similar scale. (And you can look up the Reinhardt-Rogoff 90% of GDP nonsense, for an example.)
There is definitely a problem here with poor-quality peer-review in econ papers. But to the extent you want to condemn Cook, you may as well condemn the whole field. Alternatively, you can decide that econ does still have some useful things to recommend it, and that actually they've come up with some cool new statistical techniques over the last thirty years that even have useful applications in other fields, and then try to assess Cook in more subtle ways than just nitpicking problems in a paper or two. Maybe you'll still decide you think she's not great. But this line of critique doesn't seem to usefully differentiate her even from the people leveling the criticism.
You could probably find similar errors if you dig into the world of a lot of individual economists, but very few individual economists are nominated to be Fed chair.
I'm sure that if you go through the average academic's papers, you can find data errors. Heck, the average paper probably has errors. Perhaps even consequential ones (e.g. in the code, peer review doesn't even look here).
But the average academic doesn't have their fame largely rest on a single paper that they bizarrely claimed would have been published in a top journal except for racism, that turns out to have numerous glaring elementary data errors. That combination is a bit special.
Regarding the Snopes crack pipe fiasco, there were some mitigating circumstances that justify the "Mostly False" rating. (A few other people mentioned below that Snopes has changed the rating to "Outdated," now that the Biden administration has explicitly confirmed that crack pipes *won't* be included in the program, but I'm going a step further and arguing that the "Mostly False" rating was never wrong to begin with, even given the information available at the time.)
1. Safer-use crack pipes were simply listed in the grant proposal as an example of something that *could* potentially be provided as a form of harm reduction. It's not simply that the grant included money for other things, it's that the part about crack pipes was purely hypothetical and there was a very good chance they might not have been included at all. (And, indeed, that was exactly what ended up happening: The actual program, as implemented by the Biden administration, will *not* include any crack pipes.) So the claim that the program would give out crack pipes was misleading because it presented a mere possibility - and a fairly unlikely one, at that - as a certainty. That alone would justify the claim being rated "Mostly False" or at least "Mixture," and definitely precludes it from being considered "True" or even "Mostly True."
2. However, the claim that Snopes was addressing wasn't *just* about the crack pipes, it was also about the motivation of the program. Conservative politicians, pundits, and news outlets were claiming that the crack pipes were being included in the name of racial equality, implying that the Biden administration was trying to close the racial disparity in crack use by getting more White people hooked on crack. This is an absolutely absurd and outlandish claim with literally zero basis in reality! (The actual reason that the grant proposal suggested included crack pipes was as a harm reduction measure, on the grounds that these crack pipes would be safer and cleaner than the ones crack addicts normally use.) This is the element that pushes the claim from maybe just warranting a "Mixture" rating to conclusively deserving a "Mostly False" rating, since this part of the claim is just straight-up 100% false.
1. That's like disproving a claim that your burger is full of mouse feces by saying "it's really rat feces". People don't care about specifically crack pipes and not other things that can be used to ingest crack, or other illegal drugs. It's metonymy and means "things that fit in a category of which crack pipes are a central example".
2. Other posters have already provided quotes from the "Purpose" indicating otherwise.
1. It really depends on the specifics here. If these kits were supposed to include clean needles for heroin users to shoot up with, then sure, that's basically the same as including crack pipes. On the other hand, if they were just supposed to include narcan so that people who overdosed on heroin could be given emergency treatment that would dramatically improve their odds of survival, then I wouldn't consider that to be in the same ballpark at all - even though I've heard some conservatives claim that it's still encouraging drug use.
2. Not clear what you mean here. If you mean "no, most conservative outlets were not making the claim that Biden wanted to get Whites hooked on crack in the name of anti-racism, that was just something a few crackpots said and Snopes was cherry-picking by portraying that as the main right-wing narrative," then you may be right (though the fact that someone as prominent as Marco Rubio was pushing the anti-racism narrative is strong evidence to the contrary). On the other hand, if you mean "yes, this really was some kind of twisted attempt at ending racial disparities by creating more White crack addicts," then I am damn near certain that wasn't actually the case.
I took the claim as "an attempt to benefit disadvantaged groups by doing something good — reducing risks associated with drug use — and giving them priority." That seems to me the most natural interpretation of the facts.
I really, really, really wish we could just once have a harm reduction strategy that didn't end with "the government is paying kids to take drugs". But the populist temptations are just too strong.
"And, indeed, that was exactly what ended up happening: The actual program, as implemented by the Biden administration, will *not* include any crack pipes."
After the program had been attacked for including crack pipes by Biden's political opponents. That is very weak evidence of the initial intent.
#34. I'm very skeptical about the idea that 1984's Appendix is a diegetic article written by future historians in the same world. Sanchez's argument for that proposition seems to rest on two points: that it's written in an academic style that contrasts with the rest of the book, and that the last word of the appendix is "2050", which encourages us to think of the Party's rule as having an endpoint. I don't find either of those arguments convincing in the slightest.
He also says that the existence of a "final" edition of Newspeak implies that there's an end-date to the Party's rule, but the early part of the book is pretty clear that Newspeak was never intended to evolve over time: once the language is finished, it's finished. It's another way of showing the static, joyless world that the Oceanian government intends to create.
The appendix seems to me like it has the sole purpose of fleshing out the setting. This is less common nowadays, but seems pretty consistent with other novels from the mid-20th century (such as the Lord of the Rings). I think that it's written from 'our' perspective about the state of the setting in the year 1984. If the appendix was actually written in-setting, I think there would be more references to the horrifying damage done to the world, and more clues about what had happened in the decades since 1984.
I really like the book, so I hope that the diegetic interpretation described above doesn't become commonly accepted. It undermines the book's entire vision: that of the boot on one's face, forever.
"The appendix seems to me like it has the sole purpose of fleshing out the setting. This is less common nowadays, but seems pretty consistent with other novels from the mid-20th century (such as the Lord of the Rings)."
Not sure this example really helps your case, since the Lord of the Rings appendices were absolutely meant to be in-universe documents. Tolkien was a linguist who specialized in ancient languages, and his entire premise for the LotR books was that they were ancient manuscripts that he had translated.
Oh, shoot, I didn't know that. Thanks for the clarification, but I wasn't referring to the Lord of the Rings appendices. What I was thinking of was Tolkien's notes on how he had translated the stories into English, such as his explanation of the origin of the name "Merry". Another example would be the side-notes about the English names of the rabbits in Watership Down ("Or, as we say, Bigwig"). I was trying to illustrate how explanations from the author to the reader were pretty common in Orwell's day.
> #34. I'm very skeptical about the idea that 1984's Appendix is a diegetic article written by future historians in the same world. Sanchez's argument for that proposition seems to rest on two points: that it's written in an academic style that contrasts with the rest of the book, and that the last word of the appendix is "2050", which encourages us to think of the Party's rule as having an endpoint. I don't find either of those arguments convincing in the slightest.
There's plenty more than just those two points in the appendix.
There's lots more in the appendix about how Ingsoc people planned to do stuff, but never got around to it in the end.
Just read the fine thing. A copy was linked in the Twitter thread.
Sorry, maybe I should have been clearer about this. You're referring to passages like "When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed."
In isolation, this can imply "...but we're in the future, and we know that didn't happen," but it can also imply "...but we're talking about the year 1984, so that hasn't happened yet." Sanchez is arguing for the first interpretation, but that doesn't fit with the rest of the text. He even mentions the fact that it refers to "English" (not Oldspeak) words we "already possess".
If it was written in-universe, the language would be corrupted and modified. It is unlikely that it would mention Winston Smith, except as one of a class of re-educated dissidents. It would make reference to works that had been lost, and Newspeak speakers who had difficulties readjusting to speaking English. It would, in short, reflect the trauma that civilization had suffered. It doesn't, so I don't find it credible that it was written in-universe.
It's interesting how much is still left up to interpretation for the most famous dystopian fiction.
Some people prefer to excise Burgess's final chapter in Clockwork Orange, which in part says, hey, a lot of kids actually just grow out of delinquency without mind control (and the others become the state).
For his part, Bradbury claims he was attacking too much easy media, TV as a medium, not censorship. (We've mostly vetoed the author on this one.)
There are two questions here that are only loosely related:
1) which point is most interesting, and (2) which point did the authors intend?
I think you have good counterarguments on (2). I found the original arguments compelling, but your response shows me there's still a lot of room for debate here.
On (1)... I also think there's room for debate.
I actually think the message that fascism has a tendency to eat itself from the inside is pretty astute.
I worry 1984 is often used as an "all things are fascism" cudgel, that dilutes its usefulness for understanding how fascist systems actually work. It reads like a fable, but he was often just literally recounting things the soviet state really did.
But like Bradbury, I understand that I am generally outvoted on this one, and many more people are interested in 1984 as a story about slippery slopes.
You're right, the author's intent is definitely separate from what the text actually means. I haven't read A Clockwork Orange, but I take your point.
But for me, 1984 is very definitely not a story about how fascism tends to eat itself from within, but rather the opposite: it's about how a totalitarian system can become self-sustaining. It argues that totalitarianism can persist even if it's not in anybody's interests, not even those of the people who are notionally in charge.
A fascist government can sometimes collapse due to a power struggle, or if the paramount leader dies. In Oceania, the paramount leader (Big Brother) probably isn't a real person, and power is decentralized throughout the Inner Party. No individual can try to slow things down or suggest that the repression is a bad idea, because that will be taken as evidence of treason. Trying to do so collectively is nearly impossible, because no Party member can be trusted, the bonds of family and friendship have been eroded, and the younger generation (e.g. Julia) has been raised to be complacent and unimaginative.
In other words, a society like Oceania could persist many generations into the future - maybe even forever. That's why the suggestion that it somehow spontaneously underwent a revolution gets my goat to such a degree. If that could happen in the world of 1984, then the moral of the story becomes something like this:
"When things go wrong, it's inevitable that they'll get better, because human decency will always triumph in the end. But until then, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down; so just wait out the hard times and don't try to resist an unjust system on your own."
But if the suffering is endless and eternal, the story says something more like:
"Hold on to freedom of expression with all your might, because once it's gone, you might not be able to get it back. The good ending isn't inevitable: the future can still go wrong, if you let it."
I feel the second one makes the book more worthwhile, so I guess I have to agree that 1984 is best viewed as a story about slippery slopes. Still, I see what you mean: it's also a story about how fascism works on the ground level, even if it's a bit distorted by how it takes it to its logical extreme.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I should back up and state points of agreement before asking one hard question.
1) I think the point you lay out is really compelling warning, and deserves to be preserved, and I think you lay it out really well. "The future can go wrong," and nearly unrecoverably, and it's on us all to preserve it, constantly.
2) In general, I think the collective reading of a work is the more natural one. And although it's plausible a new reading is the right one, we should consider the common reading the default prior, instead of assuming a radical shift is likely.
I'm curious though how to map your model of authoritarianism against the course of the USSR.
My (perhaps naive) take would be that post-Stalin, it immediately took a half-step back from the ledge. Still oppressive, but brutal extremes like the Doctors' purge far less likely the moment Kruschev took power, with psychopaths like Beria immediately removed from positions of power. Deng seems like the Kruschevian half-step back from the ledge for the PRC.
So, I don't know, if authoritarian structures are self-perpetuating, why did the CCCP fail? (And I suppose the hard question for me is, why hasn't the CPC?)
EDIT: I think there are variations of these questions about whether or not authoritarian systems naturally moderate slightly in their second generation to become truly stable, while still staying awful.
Thinking more about history, it does seem like authoritarians tend to have fewer revolutions, they are a peak of stability in governing systems, despite how morally abhorrent they are. Maybe I'm talking myself into your view...
I suspect a part of the answer is the mechanism how the leaders are selected. Even the usual corporate or socialist world (a socialist country could be modelled as a country-sized corporation) selects people with slightly psychopathic traits, but the literal revolution or war selects them much more. In politics (whether state or corporate) you must be good at cooperation, before you are allowed to get higher. In revolution, you need to be ideologically pure and good at killing; then if you start grabbing more power, the others will rationalize why it is good for the Party. Stalin made many enemies during his career; if he wasn't allowed to literally kill them, at some moment this would stop his career.
> So, I don't know, if authoritarian structures are self-perpetuating, why did the CCCP fail?
I don't know. Growing up in a socialist country, I can only try to describe what I observed, how it all felt. A part of it was like a generational conflict: the positions of power were held by old people, and thus the system felt boring to the young people. Yeah, those old people were talking a lot about how the youth are the future of socialism and how the communist party is on their side, but it had this "how do you do, fellow kids" vibe. Somehow, socialism succeeded to make itself seem uncool, even to people who were brainwashed from the childhood.
The system somehow ran out of emotional energy, even that brainwashing was half-assed, just like everything else. Everything controlled by the state meant that whatever you do will most likely make no difference, therefore people stopped giving a fuck, apparently even in areas that were vital for the survival of the system.
This is not a full explanation, because a part of the experience of living in a country that was within the soviet bloc, but not a part of Soviet Union, was the knowledge of "whatever we decide is unimportant anyway, the Soviet Union will override our decisions on whim". I don't know whether the feelings inside Soviet Union were different. In some sense, Soviet Union killed the natural enthusiasm for socialism in other countries, as it became apparent that socialism is not "we the workers collectively represented by the communist party will make the decisions", but rather "our communist party is merely a servant of a foreign communist party, our workers have no actual representation". I wonder how the communist party of Soviet Union has alienated its workers.
Your first one reminded me of Kamil Galeev's recent points about how Shoygu, in contrast to Serdyukov, min-maxed for political survivability rather than aggressively modernizing the military. Much more investment in minimizing conflicts with other interest groups, much more political durabililty. I think you're right that the second generation filters much more for ability to build political alliances.
Then also, yeah, probably hard to maintain a utopian movement for four generations, especially when there isn't really ever true access to power. Maybe you get to defer it while you're in rapid economic growth and it looks like improvements are right around the corner. But it looks like 1979 started ten very hard years for the system. Meanwhile, the PRC has been insulated from major shocks so far, maybe from more rapid privatization and greater willingness to contract out its labor pool to the rest of the world, partly just from getting a later start.
Can authoritarians survive indefinitely with a more open economy?
I worry they can if they find the right balance. Also, I often think about early Persian history, which seems like it alternated between periods of (relative) progressive liberalism and periods of brutal authoritarianism that each lasted hundreds of years. Maybe Rome had similar issues. Maybe there's no arc of history, just a random walk. Or maybe there is, but the problem is that it is in no hurry.
On Mafia degrees, I'm betting the signal to employers raised the floor the Mafia needed to pay mafiosos to retain them vs the money they could make by just e.g. opening a legit business; the degree functioned as a competitive advantage in legit markets and thus the same way 10 years of experience or a degree allow a person to get hired in at a higher rate in corporations, it functions the same in the mafia.
Another possibility: only the top mafiosos can afford to send their sons to college, and those same sons also have the connections to achieve high rank themselves.
Much simpler explanation: people who attend and graduate college are usually smarter, and smarter people are better at most stuff (involving management, planning etc.)
Going to college is an honest signal that you are at least moderately smart, willing to follow instructions, somewhat conformist, and able to stick out a longer programme.
I presume these qualities are probably useful in a mafia setting as well.
I don't see how this study would be a challenge to the argument in The Case Against Education at all?
The book merely says that the education signalling game is wasteful for society. But the book also says that it is very useful on an individual level. Regardless of whether the Mafia is involved or not.
The Case Against Education does not endorse a "pure signalling" model, and instead incorporates nearly as much of an "ability bias" model that would fit mafia evidence even if they disregarded diplomas:
I said "even if", because that would set aside the signalling theory (which the mafia study was supposed to argue against). Caplan has said he thinks that signalling explains roughly 50% of the individual education premium, ability bias explains 40% and genuine human capital improvements explains 10%.
In support: Sudhir Venkatesh's dissertation on the workings of a Chicago drug gang, as reported in "Freakonomics", was for obvious reasons less than comprehensive in its biological detail, but did note that the leader of the gang was a college graduate with a business major. This does not appear to have been coincidental; beyond simply being smart, the man was in fact running a business and using skills he had learned in his education.
My first thought on this is, perhaps it's a selection effect where the children of parents who're more able and willing to spend time with them at home rather than sending them to preschool are more likely to perform well?
Preschool might have negative educational value relative to what it's an alternative to (which will probably usually be more direct attention from relatives,) but even if there's no difference at all, children who're sent to preschool may have a comparative disadvantage at the outset.
I read an analysis of this which said the issue was the preschool that the treatment group got was a pretty shabby kind of preschool, with large groups and teachers who were more interested in keeping order, which the teachers kind of have to be when they have 30+ four-year-olds. I don't remember where I saw it, and I suspect there's still some selection effect going on. And maybe one parent who's not an ECE specialist, but cares about the one kid they're dealing with will do better than someone who has to manage thirty kids.
I have something similar in mind; the study was done on the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Program, which states that it is for:
"Pre-K in Tennessee is accessible to all four year olds, with an emphasis on at-risk students and high-priority communities."
So it's available for all, but probably they will have more low-income, more minority, and more disadvantaged and unstable families using it, which are exactly the kind of families which are going to have literacy, behavioural and other problems dogging the kids anyway.
Their conclusion isn't too sanguine:
"Children from poor families who attended a state pre-K program did not, for the most part, become proficient readers in third grade. On the contrary, their performance on all measures of achievement through sixth grade was significantly below that of comparable children who did not attend. Children who attended pre-K were not less likely to be retained and had a greater likelihood of being referred for special education services from pre-K through sixth grade—both of these in opposition to savings promised to states (Council of Economic Advisers, 2015). Given prior research, our findings of more disciplinary infractions for children in sixth grade who attended pre-K should not have been so unexpected but are nonetheless worrisome."
So if the question is "whether parents should be trying to keep their kids out of preschool", the answer is "Yes, IF your family is stable, relatively well-off/well-educated, you have some form of one-to-one care available e.g. one parent stays home and interacts with the kid(s), the kids do not require IEP or special education because they don't have behavioural, physical, psychological or learning difficulties, you make sure they develop self-control and problem-solving capacity so they don't get frustrated and challenge authority and end up suspended from school, and cherry on top if you manage to teach them 'unconstrained skills'
If you tick all those boxes, then your kid will be fine to start without going to preschool first and will soon catch up. Of course, if you tick all those boxes, your kid will probably be in some kind of private daycare anyway.
"One contributor to the fade out of pre-K effects may involve the content focus of the instruction children receive, an idea recently gaining traction. Evaluating eight statewide pre-K programs, Barnett et al. (2018) found, as we did, that the largest immediate effect was in concrete literacy skills, with much smaller effects on language and math skills. They urge pre-K programs to broaden their scope of instruction. These early concrete literacy skills include directly teachable skills in a finite domain (e.g., 26 letters of the alphabet): “constrained skills have a ceiling; the learner can achieve perfect performance” (Snow & Matthews, 2016, p. 58).
Unconstrained skills in literacy (vocabulary, listening comprehension, and background knowledge) and in numeracy (problem solving and mathematical reasoning) are not typically the focus of instruction in early childhood classrooms (Montrosse-Moorhead et al., 2019; Valentino, 2017), perhaps because they are not the usual content of assessments amid the increasing emphasis on “school readiness.”
Over time, these skills become increasingly important in school, but they are more difficult to teach and assess (Snow & Matthews, 2016). A consistent finding across recent studies is that children who attend pre-K enter kindergarten scoring higher on concrete school readiness skills, skills that are then mastered by nonattenders over the course of the kindergarten year or shortly thereafter. "
Yes, I read a similar article. Beyond the issues you list, a lot (most?) of the time was spent in transition--going from room to room. This was exacerbated by it taking place in a school for older children, leading to long walks (by preschooler standards) to bathrooms, art room, etc. Corralling the students for all this transition exacerbated emphasis on keeping order, which hurts development of self-discipline. In short, the study showed that bad preschool has long-term bad effects.
I get that it isn't great they couldn't pull rank effectively, but I think that censorship and free speech is a nuanced landscape in terms of the potential harms and historical pathways we've observed. Some forms of suppression and censorship are worse than others.
When a prominent group of intellectuals or academics or whomever...an existing institutional power structure begins to be subverted and attacked and censored by the political elite...that is a very bad sign which means society is heading towards particularly bad outcomes or it has pretty consistently meant that in the past.
When you look at the accounts of the beatings, murder, and loyalty pledges extracted from academics in early Maoist China or you can see the spying and strict political restrictions and gulags of the USSR, you can see how bad a society is getting when it turns its attack dogs on the old institutions of knowledge. Any power or voice outside of the reigning political voice must be squashed, all dissent is intolerable to the new power structures. In this case the axis point where tech, intelligence agencies, and political powers meet on one place to interact with a flowering corporate capture of all aspects of the world within the bounds of a slow motion central banking neoliberal ideological global coup.
So while some purely free speech issue about straight up neo-nazis or comedians using 'bad words' on stage or if you can shout fire in a crowded theatre or 'what is' pornographic...these are indeed important, but are perhaps somewhat limited affairs in terms of knowing if a society is collapsing into a neo-feudal corpo/banking dictatorship or not.
It sounds all newfangled...but in more olden time terms....this is a mercantile class takeover. It has happened many many times in history where the merchants get too wealthy and corrupt the heck out of everything. But they lack the desire to rule, set religious doctrine, and will go to war without regard to human life.
A society is bankrupt and dangerous for commoners at well....pretty much all the time....but this is very true when the merchants take over and make everything about money.
All those years of stakeholder profits and lean management in California haven't done well for the people when their electricity went out due to there being no redundancy or disaster preparation were skipped. But those wealthy merchant class investors get to keep all their money over all those years as wildfires burn and people live with rolling blackouts. Merchants are about extraction, it is a game of cut and run with a global society where those juicy California utility dollars buy them a nice home in Europe where they don't have to live with the problems they caused.
A politician wants your vote, a general wants you to fight, a priest wants you to worship...but a merchant will just leave you for dead after taking everything from you. They just don't need you if you can be replaced and as big as any merchant gets, no single one tends to run society or have a total monopoly in all industries....so people are seen as easy come and easy go.
But when expert speech or political speech in the form of protests or journalism by those wicked 'non-journalists'...then the issues really extends beyond free speech and we talk about curtailing a broader collection of rights.
Who is doing this? Why are they doing it? What power to do they have to go outside courts, use a secret police or even a public police force to do this? What tools of oppression and punishment do they have available to them. Will they get you fired, freeze your bank accounts, put you in jail, plant fake evidence, or will they murder you, threaten your family, torture you?
All very real possibiltles and when we see the 3 letter agencies in the US and in Canada saying that 'misinformation' as deemed by them is a crime which exists outside the legal and court system and is determined upon their whim...when they call speech terrorism...that's a HUGE problem and is worse then locking up comedians for saying 'dirty' words. Both are bad, but one is a harbinger of the downfall of your society and any residual scraps of democracy you thought you had.
So the BMJ is yet another canary in a very unsafe and very profitable mine in my view and has ramifications beyond just free speech.
I am extremely confused by the article on pretty buildings. As evidence that cities in the past didn't have "ugly buildings" that were later demolished, he offers some aerial photos of cities in the 1800s. And those photos look... completely unremarkable? Basically boxes with gabled roofs? I honestly have no idea what these are supposed to prove - from this distance all I can say is "yup, that looks like a city." If you took a photo of a modern city of similar density from a similar height, and tinted it sepia, I think I would have a hard time telling which was which.
He also cites the "Gorbals slums" as evidence of "look, these buildings from the past weren't that ugly," but it looks as boxy and monotonous as any of the concrete apartment blocks that anti-modernists love to complain about. And he also shows off some historic wooden houses as "not splendid, but not generally ugly." But I would say the same thing about a lot of "ugly modern buildings"! They're not ugly, they're just not particularly splendid. They're apartment buildings, not gothic cathedrals. This seems like equivocation to me - on the one hand asking why modern buildings aren't *beautiful*, and on the other hand asking us to forgive older buildings so long as they're not outright *ugly.*
My understanding is that early 20th century eugenicists understood that "positive" traits were heritable, but just considered sterilizing people to be easier than encouraging people to breed. The 1918 textbook Applied Eugenics contains several schemes to increase the number of good genes, such as creating lots of propaganda about the nobility of parenthood, which would appeal more to "the superior" and thus cause them to breed more. There's also a section telling alcoholic geniuses that they should reproduce because increasing genius is more important than decreasing alcoholism.
(Eugenic texts are interesting because they're a time capsule of what traits were valued in the past. Nowadays people who are swayed by that kind of emotive propaganda are seen as uneducated bumpkins, not as superior. On the other hand, contract laborers are for some reason on the list of classes not allowed to immigrate to the United States in 1918.)
It strikes me that increasing the number of people with very good genes, and decreasing the number of people with very bad genes, are two complementary aims of eugenics which need not go together. Increasing the top end can be seen as a "National Greatness" objective, while decreasing at the bottom end can be seen more as a compassionate objective.
If we did Rawls' Veil of Ignorance thing (and I'm sure that Rawls would not approve) then would you rather be born into a random body in a society where:
a) The number of people born with IQ > 140 has been increased tenfold, or
b) The number of people born with IQ < 90 has been decreased tenfold?
There's a strong argument to be made for the latter; people born with poor genes have a bad life and wind up caught up in all sorts of social problems, whereas people born very smart typically have lives which are subjectively no better than the average. Society (a) will technologically advance faster, but society (b) will have less human misery.
Honestly, I'd go with neither, for two reasons. My biggest objection to eugenics, even if we could somehow successfully implement it in a way that doesn't violate anyone's human rights, is Chesterton's Fence. Genetics is so complicated, especially involving the brain, and I'm worried that by messing with the balance of genes that affect IQ in a population, we'd horribly screw something up.
My second reason is that I'm a proponent of neurodiversity, and not just for "high-functioning" people. Diversity of conscious experience is a terminal value for me, and there are certain kinds of human experiences that are very uncommon among the kinds of people who tend to be good at taking IQ tests. And mental disability doesn't have to equal a life of suffering, even though society is set up so that it often does.
1. We would mess up individuals or society? And how?
2. What types of experience? What do you think of the idea of adding lead back to paint or gasoline to counteract the Flynn effect to preserve neurodiversity? Like, I see this personally as a strange preference. Would you consider lowering the IQ of your own child if the average got too high or something? Just trying to understand your thinking on this. Not suggesting you support the policies but I want to understand why not, if not.
1. Society, not individuals. What if we eliminated genes that it's really good to have in the gene pool? Values change over time. If the ancient Spartans had eugenics, they'd probably select for aggressive children, which would be disastrous in the long run. I'm worried we'd make a similar mistake.
2. For instance, the late Mel Baggs described the heavily sensory- and pattern-based form of perception that was their default mode: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1052/1238 Baggs was borderline intellectually disabled and had great difficulty using language. Many people with that kind of mind can't use language at all. But still, I think those experiences are worth preserving. There are other examples of positive experiences that can come from disability, this is just the first one I could think of off the top of my head.
I don't support adding lead back to paint. There are enough genetic factors that can cause intellectual disability that people can continue to have those experiences without the need to damage brains that already exist. I wouldn't try to either raise or lower my hypothetical child's IQ - geniuses also deserve to exist and enjoy their unique experiences, and my child wouldn't have much of an effect on the average of millions of people.
Level of ability has less to do with happiness than you'd think. I can't drive or live independently and my main duty at work is pushing carts, but I'm probably happier than most people because I inherited my dad's sunny disposition. (Depression is one of the few traits I'd consider trying to eliminate with eugenics. I still wouldn't do it because, again, I'm afraid of screwing something up.)
"I don't support adding lead back to paint. There are enough genetic factors that can cause intellectual disability that people can continue to have those experiences without the need to damage brains that already exist. "
That makes it sound as though you think the current level of intellectual diversity is optimal, since you oppose both lowering and raising it. Why would one expect that?
I don't know what the optimal level of intellectual diversity is, and actually, now that I've thought about it, I think I'd prefer the first society in Melvin's comment to the second, since there'd still be no shortage of people of average intelligence. I support people with lots of different types of minds existing, but I don't know what the optimal balance would be. I continue to be opposed to eugenics for fear of screwing something up, and because our current level of mental diversity seems okay enough.
But we're already "messing with the balance of genes that affect IQ". https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1612113114 showed that we (well, Iceland) are currently undergoing selection for lower educational attainment. As Greg Cochran said, "every society selects for something".
You set the ranges to have different proportions. That might affect how some people answer. <90 pop is so much larger than >140.
I think really smart people live better lives. They benefits to IQ don’t diminish from what I understand. Why do you have this position? I’m Interested.
It's possible that people with IQ140+ struggle because there are very few of them, and they'd do better if there were more people they had a lot in common with.
Galton's variant of eugenics was focused on increasing positive traits. I suppose what was "easy to do" changed as governments started claiming more coercive power.
Galton, who I think invented the term "eugenics," proposed policies for increasing the reproduction of smart people not reducing that of stupid people.
Grayscaling your phone does 100% make it less addictive. It's partially because the "normal" colors are a hypersaturated superstimulus. I first turned on grayscale mode while walking around in the Castro district of SF and had the sudden realization of "oh my god, I'm surrounded by rainbows!". They simply didn't stand out beforehand because the colors on my phone were so much more intense.
> 2: Did you know: Spanish people consider it good luck to eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Years, one at each chime of the clock tower in Madrid. This has caused enough choking deaths that doctors started a petition to make the clock tower chime more slowly.
It's a tradition. I never was told it was for good luck. It was just The Thing You Do On New Years. Often washing it down with wine.
> 7
He didn't invent it. He popularized it as a new style in England and started to put them in smaller homes that previously hadn't had them. Basically trading smaller space that was private per person instead of a larger shared space. But he didn't invent them. They existed before that. Both in contemporary Europe and going back to at least the Bronze Age if not earlier. You can even look at plans for Whitehall (where the monarch lived in his time) and see corridors. Yes, even separate rooms that were places you could stay while moving between rooms.
> 12: The Dangers Of Low-Pay, High-Status Jobs. A good article in many ways, but the part I appreciate most was taking “why are so many journalists live in Brooklyn?” (which I had always thought of as a kind of a running gag, or dig on the journalistic monoculture) and doing economic analysis to it, of the same form of “why are so many tech companies in the Bay Area?” or “why are so many entertainment studios in LA?”
Something the article only indirectly brings up and I think they underemphasize. If your "compensation package" is largely based in status then you take a bigger "pay cut" by leaving a high status region than a profession that pays more in money. Imagine that the average Brooklyn journalist gets paid $40k and 100 status points. They do (as the article mentions) need to live in a place where they can spend those status points. But they also get a certain part of those status points simply from being in Brooklyn and from doing the "work" of conspicuous participation in the industry's culture.
Imagine if a journalist got an offer to get $70k to work at the Plain Dealer. An old, prestigious newspaper with a good circulation in (low cost of living) Cleveland. They'd be gaining $30k. But they'd be losing a lot of status points by moving into a city that's constantly the butt of jokes and won't let them rub shoulders with Ezra Klein or whoever. Perhaps they've stored enough from their career they can do it for a stint. But that's like moving to New York and living on savings in reverse.
Of course, you can just... not do this. Scott and Freddie don't. (Admittedly, I think Freddie was forced out over some controversy? But from reading him I really, really don't think he was ever the type to care about meeting Ezra Klein. I'm not picking on Ezra Klein, by the way. He's just the first name I came up with.) You do need status with some community to be a success on a subscription model. But any community will do. Dollars are fungible.
Which leads me to the second point: I think they tend to jump to edgelord stuff because they spend so much time in progressive conformity. Every Christian semi-intellectual knows about the arguments the New Atheists in detail. They might know something of pagans or Muslims but they couldn't pass as one. But an edgelord New Atheist? Being a Christian actually qualifies you to be better at that! Likewise, if you spend all day fretting about conservative anti-woke arguments then that sets you up to become a conservative anti-woke writer.
But you can just... not. You can write for an audience that isn't one side or the other. It's actually easier! The field is less crowded! Write about sake production! Or African agribusiness! Or a third thing that isn't food related! (I'm hungry.) But you get the point. Think about how few people need to follow you to have a decent living. Let's say you get a thousand people interested in your substack (SakeTalk) paying $5 a month. That's $60k. And a thousand people isn't hard. Not over the long term. Hundreds of millions of people pay for online writing. You just need a fraction of a percent. You can't find a thousand people interested in sake?
Yes, you're not going to be Ezra Klein with his six interns and his six figure salary. But you probably weren't going to be anyway. And you can live where you want and do what you want and never have to feign sympathy with a high 24 year old in a bathroom saying her life is over because she doesn't get to write "real stuff."
> 23: I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet - I haven’t checked this study but I bet there are lots of possible confounders. Still, this would be fun for somebody more interested to analyze in depth:
Criminal organizations pay more for criminals with useful skills (hacking, chemistry, accounting). They also piggyback have various forms of education. The traditional example is footsoldiers joining the army to get combat training. But the skilled workers are what they really have trouble with. These people are so in demand that the mob will sometimes contract innocuous activities onto legitimate firms while keeping them in the dark. As you'd expect, mobs in poorer economies have an easier time attracting skilled talent. Which is why Russia or Nigeria can become havens for hackers. Lower wages means criminals can more easily outbid legitimate firms. (Though at least in Nigeria the government is trying, albeit not hugely successfully, to crack down on such activity. Russia actively encourages it.)
Anyway, this is the third time I've heard about this study. I'll give it a read later. My unstudied thesis: everywhere (though especially in advanced economies) illegal organizations have a relative surplus of low skill talent and a relative deficit of high skill. It's easy for gangs to attract high school dropouts and hard for them to recruit cryptography PhDs. They also tend to be highly hierarchical and have huge amounts of pay inequality. So I thought it was people with more useful skills starting at a higher payscale plus the need to compensate them against more lucrative legal opportunities and the need to pay more for the talent they have a deficit in.
> 24: Best of Scott Sumner archives: There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality. “You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption. If … tax increases did not cause Gates and Buffett to tighten their belts, then they paid precisely 0% of that tax increase. Someone else paid, even if they wrote the check. If they invested less due to the tax, then workers might have received lower wages. If they gave less to charity then very poor Africans paid the tax.”
In short, taxes are not paid by the person who transmits the money to the government but by the person whose consumption is ultimately redirected to government ends. Insofar as the person paying taxes controls their own spending, this actually empowers the taxpayer to direct who pays the tax. For example, a perfectly non-competitive unregulated business (so with absolute control over its economic decisions) will decide to pass it all on to other people. A perfectly competitive business with extreme regulation (so with minimal control over its economic decisions) will be forced to eat the costs. (And, in some societies, might even be prevented from exiting the business so the state can continue to extract from them!)
But taxpayers will almost always have some economic choice. They will generally choose to distribute the loss of consumption in the way that's least personally disadvanageous. This will generally not be in a way the government intends. At that point the government can either realize it's a failed policy or double down. They usually choose the latter. That means asserting control over private decisions which is almost invariably bad.
I'm not saying the government can't gather tax money or spend it on useful things. I'm saying it has minimal ability to determine who pays taxes. So you should be inherently suspicious of any claims about robbing one class to pay another. Because what they usually mean is they're going to levy the tax in one place. But that doesn't mean that's where the tax will be paid from in an economic sense.
> 32: Related, from Works In Progress: no, it’s not just that only the prettiest buildings of past ages survived, past ages really did produce (on average) prettier buildings.
I don't struggle to identify an ugly house from the 19th century. Have you ever seen a wattle and daub house? I have. This is like saying clothes have gotten worse because you've looked at a lot of royal dresses in paintings and museums. This is simply the author being unable to comprehend that urban areas were a much smaller, relatively wealthier part of the population in the past. Even when they mentions surviving cities they're dealing with the most downtown areas. The author conveniently ignores all kinds of slum clearance in the exurban areas. Or renovations. He kind of glides over this citing a few elite houses in remote villages and paintings, of all things. Yes, picturesque paintings meant to romanticize the countryside look nice. That says more about painters than buildings.
> 39. Interested in hearing more about this: was the 2000 - 2017 period really better than previous periods? If so, why? Is it just China, or something else?
Yeah, it was better. And not just in China. It still baffles me how much is just missed by the average person. The birth of the Nigerian film industry. The end of the deadliest conflict since WW2. Brazilian GDP per capita going up by a factor of four. Or any number of other changes. I probably notice it more because (as I said above) I have fairly significant international exposure in economic terms.
The main things I'd say is increasing peace, better economic governance, and more trade. We are unfortunately seeing reversals in all three of these trends.
Here's a theory for the uglification of buildings: are managers at construction companies still architects/engineers/people who have actually built a building? Or are they professional managers?
I was recently listening to the cast of Critical Role's watch party of their recently released show, and time and time again they pointed out little moments where, because they the actors were running the show and not just cogs in a machine, they were able to go the extra mile and put their soul into it. And it shines through! Legends of Vox Machina is not a perfect show but it is an awesome one.
So maybe you can run that change in reverse, and replace *specifically the managers of construction companies* with MBAs? Did such a thing happen? Did it happen at the right time? Is it sufficient? The first MBA was awarded by Harvard in 1908, so it at least satisfies a Fermi quiz but I don't really know how to get more traction.
Why isn't the obvious answer to why college increases mafia earnings just that college selects for smart hard working people. And smart hard working people are probably better at crime.
Alternatively, why would we expect the mob to be a more “rational” employer than anyone else? Even if college is “just signaling” a mob boss might use that signal the same way a CEO in a legal business would, and hand the plum high paying roles to college boys.
I thought the obvious answer is that most college educated people have better enough options from other employers that they're not going to join the mob unless they see a way to keep their higher pay.
The Gwern link on Dune led me to his review of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life, which made me feel less out of step. I had read that story after reading Pinker trash Sapir-Whorf in "The Language Instince" and took the scifi premise to me that S-W was actually true and changed how the protagonist wrote about past/present/future. Then I saw "Arrival", which differs from the story in that she makes use of future knowledge, and concluded I had misread the story. But Gwern appears to agree with my take, unlike every other take on it I've read.
I disagree with Gwern there; I think the story, like all of Chiang's, should be taken on face value; that the protagonist really does come to be able to see her own future.
The film changes the plot to have the protagonist make use of her new awareness to change the timeline, which is very different (almost opposite) from what happens in the book.
However; I don't think that it's helpful to think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as an explanation of what's happening to the protagonist; S-W is about learning different human languages, whereas the book is about learning a very alien kind of language.
28: Another cool quote in the Scientific American article: "First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against." I'd be interested in the details of that interesting new limit theorem.
A bit of truth in this: much psycho diagnostics (personality, clinical, educational, and of course IQ that so many people in this forum love so much) is actually "norm-based", telling the patient that "you differ from the rest". It's not like a driving license in which there are some established criteria that you need to pass ("criterion-oriented"). That norm-based diagnostics is logically flawed and should definitely disappear.
Some people, myself included, have various interests which we like to discuss just like others. For some people, that includes IQ. People frame interest in taboo topics as "love" or "obsession" or "fetish", but I don't think it is a fair framing and it makes people with these interests look weird or have ulterior motives or something. I don't think it was your attention, but it's worth noting this phenomenon.
It depends. A rough distinction can be made between "psychiatric" ICD-based instruments that indeed check for criteria, so these follow the driving license-paradigm.
The psychological self-report scales such as the Beck Depression Inventory, but also the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale basically count your yes-responses and compare this to the distribution of scores in the general population, and if you're in the upper tail, say, in the upper 10%, then you're considered depressive. The 10% are arbitrary, just insert any quantile. By the way, this is not related to the Normal distribution, the number can be determined nonparametrically. Depression scores in the general population are typically at the floor; a Normal distribution is not an appropriate model for that.
BUT, there are also people who consider being, say, two SDs above the mean as a "diagnosis". And using the SD as a metric is a smoking gun for the Normal distribution.
See, e.g., Jacobson, N. S., Follette, W. C., & Revenstorf, D. (1984). Psychotherapy outcome research: Methods for reporting variability and evaluating clinical significance. Behavior Therapy, 15, 336–352.
Quote from the article: "2. Does the level o f functioning at posttest fall within the range of the functional or normal population, where range is defined as beginning at two standard deviations below the mean for the normal population?"
Not to mention that when using a self-report questionnaire for depression, the patient is basically doing the diagnosis him or herself. [for free, the salary is paid to the psychologist]
To be fair, the FDA prefers "anchor-based" methods (= criteria) over "distribution-based" methods (= norm-based), see here: https://www.fda.gov/media/77832/download
It's a fascinating claim in part because it shows such a verbal-tilt, even 'wordcel', way of thinking. 'Normal' might have that sort of implication in lay language, but it definitely doesn't in statistics. Similarly, 'deviate': as a noun, harshly negative (you can 'deviate' as a verb without it being bad, as in, 'I deviated from the beaten path', but you can't *be* 'a deviate', sexual or otherwise, without that being bad), but in statistics, it is neutral or even good (if we didn't have random deviates, it wouldn't be statistics, it'd be a boring subset of geometry or something). Or 'bias': always negative, but in stats/ML, frequently desirable (Bayesianism is big on the benefits of using 'biased' methods to get more accurate inferences). In the other direction, 'significance' sounds much nicer and more important to laymen than it does to a statistician, who knows to treat it with a certain contempt.
I'm going to push back on the implied 'wokeness gone mad' frame around NYT's Wordle censorship. I get the idea that including a word on the list is a value-neutral act; obviously it doesn't imply endorsement of the referent. But would you be annoyed to learn that they'd struck out 'cunty' or 'shits' or 'semen' or 'vomit', along with 'slave' and 'wench' and 'lynch'? They're all just words, and plenty of people are comfortable seeing any or all of them. But they'll have a negative emotional impact on a non-trivial number of others. So why not omit them from an inoffensive mainstream word game? The word list is already heavily curated; it's not like we were promised the full set of 5-letter English words.
Okay, I've just seen the bit in the linked article that says the offensive words have been removed "from both the list of acceptable guesses and the answers". That's much more annoying to me; I had thought they were only being removed from the list of answers.
It sounds like the game works with two lists - a list of possible answers, and a list of legal guesses that aren't possible answers. In this case, they deleted things from the list of possible answers and didn't realize that they needed to add it to the list of legal guesses, since they assumed the list of legal guesses *included* the answers.
Not knowing this, I'd be pretty pissed off if I learned that I was making guesses that seemed legal but could not possibly be the correct answer; that has different strategic implications.
There are effectively no strategic implications for this, since almost every guess is either being used to explore letters, or has already been confirmed to be the answer based on the already revealed information. There have been one or two times when there are two or three distinct words possible (I think once it was something like I had confirmed there was an M but not in the second position, there was a U, and there was a Y in the last position, but I hadn't tested G, so it could be either MUMMY or MUGGY) and I suppose if you knew that it wouldn't pick the rarer one, then you could get the immediate answer there, rather than needing one more guess. But that's rare.
#24 is very wrong. Say we accept the premise that money spend/invested by Gates is spend/invested just as beneficially to the people as the government would. The "real tax" still occurs much before Gates himself will feel it in his consumption. It will be his children's children (and so on) that will feel it. He has more than enough money to last many lifetimes. He will not notice a million more or less. But with an exponentially growing number of life's depending on that money a million dollars more or less is definitely going to be noticed somewhere down the line.
(P.S. Gates is not the best example as he is arguably spending his money much better and more altruistically than the US government would. He also plans to give most of his money to charity rather then his family/descendants. However, this does not hold for most billionaires.)
I've been sharing this Mr. Global photoshoot with my female friends a lot, each one has a different favorite contestant. Here are some other photo albums I like:
Zendaya seems like some kind of Leonardo da Vinci of weird low-brow popculture. After seeing Euphoria in particular, I remain impressed by the person behind all the masks.
Thanks. That would appear to be my missing bit of context. My finger is even further from the pulse of pop music than movies/tv, but I'm still surprised not to have heard of this person who was evidently famous prior to The Greatest Showman & that Spiderman movie.
35. MS by virus by Cochran: 43 pages tl;dr: first mentions the logic at Page 422 "Several common disorders reduce reproduction sufficiently to generate high fitness loads. Schizophrenia has an fitness load that is at least 0.005, much larger than that of any autosomal dominant genetic disease.
Many diseases ascribed to autoimmunity, such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, and lupus, have fitness loads above or only slightly below 0.001 (Table 1), high enough to implicate infectious origins."
On page 429 Cochran hits it with the Epstein-Barr-Virus: "Virtually all MS patients are infected with Epstein-Barr virus, raising the possibility that MS may result from coinfection of
Epstein-Barr virus with one or more other pathogens [82]." - 82 is a study from 1998!!! SORRY? It took 24 years to acknowledge? Still unknown when any action will result - My mom bakes the cakes for the local MS-group, brother's friend died on it - not an abstract matter to me.
On page 436f Greg's famous take on gays: Infection as cause for male homsexuality. Fun-sentence: "The occurrence of exclusive male/male sexual preferences in sheep shows that cultural “powers of suggestion” are not necessary to generate the phenomenon [127–130]. (Sheep do not watch television, read newspapers, or discuss alternatives lifestyles.)"
Wikipedia on Greg felt the strong need to write a repudiation. Wokipedia?
***"Virtually all MS patients are infected with Epstein-Barr virus, raising the possibility that MS may result from coinfection of
Epstein-Barr virus with one or more other pathogens [82]." - 82 is a study from 1998!!! SORRY? It took 24 years to acknowledge?***
Cochran wasn't doing anything but noting something widely known in the medical field 20 years ago. It didn't take 24 years to acknowledge. But it took a long time to actually prove it.
The big difference between EBV-->MS and Unknown Virus-->Gay is that we had decades of actual peer reviewed epidemiologic and serologic evidence for the former and nothing but conjecture for the latter.
I stand corrected. But grumbling: Scott (and Tyler and very many; the media even) celebrating the study with its "new" insight. And no one says: "Hey, all evidence was on EBV since 1998. This is just an even better study stating the same. We were pretty sure all the time. Somehow it did not help us at all to think about cure/prevention. " As it seems your domain: Why did it not? - (no need to argue the gay-stuff, love and let love; I celebrate it, best thing ever happened to us hetero-guys, no matter why - only thinking: wikipedia should let the "conjecture" stand and just link to its article about "causes of h.")
The evidence was pretty good in 1998. There has been better evidence since then, but the recent paper was not better than 2015, probably not better than 2008. The only value of the new paper is that it was published in Science, so it counts.
Why would you expect this knowledge to produce a cure? Many diseases are post infectious autoimmune syndromes (Reiter’s disease for instance) - and I’m not aware of any that have cures as such, only immunosuppressive treatments.
Prevention is also a dead end. EBV is extremely common, fairly contagious and no vaccine exists despite significant funding.
Re the EBV-MS link, iirc the consensus is that contracting EBV as an adult is a risk factor. Most of the population is infected in childhood and it seems safe. This is related to the hygiene hypothesis - the Third World has basically no MS, to the extent some article brought up geomagnetism as a possible causal factor (!).
I actually did some work for members of a militia some years back. Nicest antigovernment extremists I ever met, and they were quite emphatically opposed to racism.
They sent me Valentines' Day cat treats there for a while.
29. As kinda expert in Ukrainian/Russian matters, I liked the article by Anatoly Karlin much more than I expected. I would be very, very happily surprised if Putin's action (22.2.22) - now officially taking over his two puppet-republics - will be the end of this. Still the idea that a *rapidly* aging population of 200 million of which MANY dislike you is more viable than, well, an aging people of 144 million (which might stabilise by generous gas-financed-subsidies) that you got brain-washed just fine - I would stick to my empire - I mean: You been to Ukraine, ever? Seen anything outside Odessa, Lviv or Kiev worth taking - or much improved since 1999??? I want your glasses!* - I guess it is similar for Belarus. - I see cities emptied of 30-50 year olds. They work in Poland/Germany - or Russia. Those with kids leave them to the their granny. 20-25: students, learning a trade to use abroad. Will they fight? Mostly not, cars are packed to drive west, fast. Putin conquers a nation of grumpy pensioners. Posdrawlaju! (my congrats)
29 b) the Kazakhstan tweet: excellent? Sorry: BS. - not as in "all lies", but as in "all less-than-half-truths and you know it!". I worked in KZ for an NGO. "1 million"? Ridiculous. Xmas - indeed at Jan. 7. - but not even a small deal outside church. Russians go over the top on New Years Eve (they really do - Santa comes that day, too). And so on. Every single tweet is sh..t - I hate to say it: Karlin's text excels.
* From 1992 - my first bicycle tour Kovel-Luhansk - to 2020 I saw a lot of positive change. As in: stinky factories closed and more consumption (2nd hand-clothes/cars from the west - much better than what they had). Efficient western agribusiness. Just no investment in industry, little in infrastructure, little in housing outside the capital. No profitable raw-materials. No value-added exports. ("no" meaning: too little to mention). Only "human ressources" and those work: abroad. The most valuable asset is the relatively new visa-free-travel to the west. Ukranians would hate to lose this. As Putin's underlings they would.
As someone living in a post soviet country neighbouring Russia, and with Ukranian friends, I strongly feel that that Anatoly Karlin is a piece of shit, showing a disturbing lack of basic empathy and decency.
Back when I did the ACM programming tournaments in college, we literally had a binder full of "standard" algorithms printed out on paper (since we were allowed unlimited paper resources, but no digital resources) that we transcribed into the contest computer really quickly at the beginning of the contest and then copied-and-pasted as necessary to solve particular problems. And many of the easier problems were explicitly designed by the judges to be straightforward applications of those same "standard" algorithms.
Our team members who specialized in those simple problems would get good at skimming the problems for keywords in the first couple of minutes after opening them, shouting "Problem C is just Floyd's!", and immediately start the ten-minute task of parsing the problem's input format and passing it into our boilerplate implementation of Floyd's algorithm. Following that strategy, it was pretty typical for the top teams to have accepted solutions for the two or three easiest problems within 15 minutes or so. (The ACM contest format was usually five hours, with 6-10 problems total.)
I don't know how much more variety there is in the Codeforces problem set, but I'm pretty sure a dumb brute-force program that just generated random permutations of the same dozen or so algorithm snippets would probably have done okay-ish on the ACM problems.
(And I'd be really curious to see some work from human competitors in that same 54th percentile... how many registered accounts on Codeforces are just curious noobs who joined one contest once, solved zero problems, and gave up forever?)
Does anyone know if there's a good contemporary isochrone map of the United States? I think that, given air travel, it would have to be denominated in hours rather than days or weeks, but it would have some really interesting structures. For instance, I just traveled from College Station, TX to Chicago, and it's clear that this took a lot longer than it would have to get to Chicago from Los Angeles or New York, despite being a lot closer. But the places halfway between College Station and Dallas would probably have even longer travel times. You'd have an interesting polka-dotted landscape around airports, highway exits, and the like.
A quick google reveals some toolsets used to produce isochrone maps. Google Maps being the most obvious one of course, though many plug-ins that used it were impacted when Google put restrictions on the API a few years back.
Still, lots of software can produce the underlying data. The challenge is putting in the design work to turn it into a pretty map.
The first time I attended an event at Cornell, many years ago, I commented that after getting there (probably from Chicago) I now knew why it took Ulysses ten years to get from Troy to Ithaca.
I could have sworn I'd seen an isochrone map of travel times/postage in the Roman Empire at some point.
Just went down a moderate internet rabbit hole looking for such a thing. It appears that whatever I'm remembering was probably a modern reconstruction -- the Romans had the necessary information on travel times, but their cartography wasn't up to the task (at least as much due to printing constraints as other factors).
Careful tracking of human metabolism found that exercise (generally?) doesn't increase total energy use. Instead, the brain uses less energy, possibly on energetically costly anxiety.
"By borrowing a method developed by physiologists studying obesity, Pontzer and colleagues systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life. The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass."
"For his Ph.D. thesis, Pontzer measured how much CO2 dogs and goats exhaled while running and walking. He found, for example, that dogs with long legs used less energy to run than corgis, as he reported in 2007, soon after he got his first job at Washington University in St. Louis. Over time, he says, “What started as an innocent project measuring the cost of walking and running in humans, dogs, and goats grew into a sort of professional obsession with measuring energy expenditures.”"
"Pontzer’s first of many breakthroughs with the method came in 2008 when, with $20,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, he got the chance to collect urine samples at what was then the Great Ape Trust, a sanctuary and research center in Iowa. There, primatologist Rob Shumaker poured isotope-laced sugar-free iced tea into the mouths of four orangutans. Pontzer worried about collecting the urine from a full-grown ape, but Shumaker reassured him the orangs were trained to pee in a cup."
Partly about the trained orangs, but also a reminder that small grants can make a big difference.
"Subsequent doubly labeled water studies of apes in captivity and in sanctuaries shattered the consensus view that mammals all have similar metabolic rates when adjusted for body mass. Among great apes, humans are the outlier. When adjusted for body mass, we burn 20% more energy per day than chimps and bonobos, 40% more than gorillas, and 60% more than orangutans, Pontzer and colleagues reported in Nature in 2016."
"Individual Hadza had days of more and less activity, and some burned 10% more or less calories than average. But when adjusted for nonfat body mass, Hadza men and women burned the same amount of energy per day on average as men and women in the United States, as well as those in Europe, Russia, and Japan, he reported in PLOS ONE in 2012. “It’s surprising when you consider the differences in physical activity,” Schoeller says."
The big question remaining might be whether there's something about being the sort of person who likes a lot of coffee is related to whether they get a benefit from coffee.
If that's true, then people who were cutting back on coffee for their "health" (rather than for particular symptoms) should just have their coffee, but we still don't know whether coffee benefits people who weren't drinking it because they didn't like it or because of religious rules.
"Altschmied and Haendeler, both University of Dusseldorf biologists, say that four cups a day can actually help heart cells function more efficiently, as that amount of caffeine will “push” a protein called p27 into the mitochondria of heart cells."
> 1: The newest studies don’t find evidence that extracurriculars like chess, second languages, playing an instrument, etc can improve in-school learning.
I suspect the causality is something like this: higher intelligence makes people more successful at school, and also more likely to pick hobbies such as chess or foreign languages. So between the hobbies and school, there is correlation but no causation.
And when it becomes known that "chess and languages make you better at school", average parents will force their average kids to do chess and language education. And then the correlation disappears.
Does 'you are writing a book with a deaf character and you don't know much about deaf people so you pay a deaf person to read it and see if you wrote anything tremendously stupid' go from being a good idea on it's face to a bad idea in practice if you call that deaf person a 'sensitivity reader'?
Re: 32 Pretty buildings. I think this idea is from "A Pattern Language" by C. Alexander etal. You need 'things' at every scale, from 1/4" to ... It's all the fiddley bits at the ~1 inch scale that cost money and get excluded from modern buildings. But it's the fiddley bits that draw you in, beauty at all levels.
I agree this is at least part of the problem, but I disagree about the costs. Those fiddley bits could be manufactured cheaply in many cases (and in fact are - my parents live in a 19 century building and they could replace vanished plaster decorations with cheap plastic imitations that look basically the same.
I need someone to explain “You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption ...... they gave less to charity then very poor Africans paid the tax.” to me a little bit.
It reads as facile trickledown nonsense, or a totally dishonest representation on what taxes are; which can't be right.
Alright, I buckled down a read the post, and I still don't see the connection. He makes a bunch of true statements and interesting points, but fails to come to grips with what he (seems?) to be arguing against, eg, that the hyper rich have too much liquidity under lock and key, and that it should be anywhere else.
It's not that complicated. All the money that Rich Person A takes home post-tax is either consumed, saved/invested, or given away. If the tax reduces income but not enough to make A reduce his or her consumption, then it reduces investment or giving. If it affects giving, then the recipient rather than A is affected. If it reduces investment, then it is the employees, customers, etc. who would have gained through that investment who are affected. If the investment would have produced profit for A, then again, if that profit would not be consumed, it would be further invested or given.
Let's use a real example. Billionaire spends $4M a year on consumption, $36M a year in new investments, and $10M a year in charities (4% drawdown rule). New wealth tax comes online, and the billionaire has to pay $20M a year in new taxes. Do you expect the billionaire to reduce consumption or investment + charities first? So to pay the $20M tax, charity is reduced by $5M and new investments is reduced by $15M. So who actually bears the brunt of the new wealth tax?
There’s no such thing as “liquidity under lock and key”. Wealth isn’t kept in vaults any more, nor is it locked up in illiquid things like land. It’s usually money in a bank, which means that the bank is able to use it for lending and investment.
To be fair, I don’t think this answers your question entirely, because if all money is liquid now, then it doesn’t matter whether it flows to the rich person or not. It’s still there and could be used for charity or investment by less-rich people. I think Summer would say that the fact A is rich shows that A knows how to make money productive, generating more resources for the economy as a whole; if you divert the money through other people (with redistributive taxes), then that money is still flowing around, but it’s less likely to be invested in making microchips (highly productive) and more likely and more likely to be used for relatively inefficient things like buying food.
> implies that 1/1000th of the youth who report attempting suicide on surveys complete suicide - which sounds about right to me
Whoa, are you telling me you expect 99.9% of suicide attempts to fail? I know of one person in my life who attempted suicide. And she died. Of suicide.
Or he expects 99+% of people who report attempting suicide on surveys are lying. That's higher than I'd expect, but suicide is still fairly rare and the lizardman constant is a thing.
Also note that "I want to kill myself" is something that nearly every teenager said (that I used to know when I was teenager or had contact for longer time since).
Ant "colonies" being an issue matches my pattern of 'rage meme' that doesn't reflect reel people or at the very least is extremely non-representative. My prior on this being 'real' (as I see it) is about 1/20, even after taking into account Scott's high epistemic status.
27 sounds plausible - one of the requirements for being a good monarch is showing yourself in public as much as you can, things like TV help of course but HM Queen Elizabeth II has been very dedicated to travelling around and putting in appearances in person.
RE 36: I think this is an interesting conflict that shows different ethical standards in research and journalism. It also seems to show that BMJ really dropped the ball with their open letter, even according to their own standards. A more in depth analysis from the fact-checker ( https://leadstories.com/analysis/2022/01/context-matters-why-lead-stories-fact-checked-the-bmj.html ) is worth a read. The fact-checker claims that the paper has the following journalistic problems: 1. the headline does not mention that the whistleblower is at a subcontractor (Ventavia) that is responsible for only 3 out of 153 sites. Now, it is possible that this is only the tip of the iceberg, but this is speculation, and publishing that is irresponsible journalism, unless it is a quote from an expert or in an opinion piece. And it seems that quite a few experts (including someone at the FDA, which was aware of the situation, unlike what the open letter from the BMJ seems to suggest. This open letter is also a very good exercise in (mostly) telling the truth but still being very misleading) think the whistle-blowers report is no cause for concern. 2. The evidence for violations is circumstantial and unclear. The whistle-blower only claims to have noticed meetings about potential violations, and did not personally witness them. So, the precise nature of the violations and whether they actually impacted the vaccination (were the incorrectly stored vaccines used or thrown away? ) is unclear. 3. The author of the piece did not inform Ventavia or Pfizer before publication and did not give them an opportunity to comment on the allegations. This (the fact checker claims) is an important journalistic principle, but (I know) is not something scientific journals usually care about. 4. The investigative journalist that wrote the article is known to push an anti-vaccination agenda. While most journals encourage authors to not such conflicts of interests, it's all voluntarily, and too objective to catch "pushes an agenda" unless you are employed by an organization with this purpose. 5. Many social media accounts, politicians, and news outlets published false conclusions based on this publication. This is of course not data the BMJ could be aware of before publishing, but it does support the claim of the fact-checker that the publication, while true, is misleading without further context.
Some related thoughts: why did the BMJ write this open letter without clarifying the publication "under fire" or addressing any of the issues observed? Well, I think they simply saw a political opportunity to make a preemptive strike (simulacra level 4 is strong here) against potential censorship by powerful media outlets that do not care much for their status. There's a reason the letter is addressed to Facebook/Meta, and not to the fact checker. Given this possible political motive, I think it is no coincidence this letter is a moment after the Cochrane incident. In general, while I'm generally against monopolist social media like Facebook and censorship, it seems the role of the fact-checker here is to annotate and explain, rather than censor (though it had the ability to censor, this seems to be closer to the interest of Facebook than the fact checker). We may blame the game, but blaming the player here doesn't seem reasonable. Which is why BMJ blames the game-master.
I just can't imagine the face. Is it like, you look at the photo and can't tell it's really a dog? Or like an "if this was abstract art I would say they buried a face in there"?
When I first glanced at the photo never having seen it before, the face was so ghastly and jarring, it was like a demon baby's face grimacing on a dog's body. Then my eyes drifted up to the caption, back down, and the face was never seen again.
I may be missing something important, but it seems to me that some people in this debate are making a "base rate fallacy".
Specifically, the article "Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones" complains that few Brahmins lead Indian companies. Out of 20 wealthiest Indian companies, not even one is led by a Brahmin!
Okay, so how many Brahmins are there in India? According to Wikipedia, they make 5% of the population, in other words, one in 20. So, under perfect equality, you would statistically expect 1 out of the 20 wealthiest Indian companies on average to be led by a Brahmin. And it is not one, it is zero. Perhaps my math is wrong, but I think that even under perfect equality, where would be about 30% chance that a randomly selected group of 20 people would contain zero members of a 5% minority. (Someone please check my math.)
So the actual question is why Brahmins are *overrepresented* in American companies (compared to other Indians), not why they are underrepresented in Indian ones (because most likely, they are not). I think it could simply be a selection effect of Brahmins being more rich and being traditionally the educated ones -- this is why they are more likely to pay to study at an American university, and then some of them get a great job opportunity and stay here.
What happens if the sensitivity reader suggests a change and the author says no?
The second paragraph doesn't mesh with what I get from the article; do you think the writer's case is atypical?
Most authors don't have much money to burn, the idea that they're spending money "voluntarily" on this is difficult to believe even for the woke ones.
I can't imagine much for most books. Probably because of the economics of publishing, most books are barely touched by editors. If you write a non-fiction book and want to have it fact checked you have to pay for that yourself.
The author in the article refused all sensitivity reader suggestions, and ended up having to change publisher for her book: https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-sensitivity-readers-corrupted-literature/
She may be an usual case, given this was an already published and successful book, that had become controversial and was being reviewed for changes before publishing a new edition. Maybe they pushed harder because of the (apparent) controversy, but also, she had much more leverage.
"Had to" seems a bit strong for the written fact. I thought it was interesting that the author wrote "Before we could discuss this, Picador and I agreed to split." Clearly authors don't always think/know they have power in these situations but it isn't clear to me that they wouldn't have actually published the book.
Having said that, those suggestions did seem pretty nuts.
The book was already published by Picador, but because of heavy criticism they stopped selling it and planned a new version – "to be revised in consultation with sensitivity readers". This article was about this new version.
I can't speak to the general case, but Naomi Novik, one of my favorite authors, wrote a cringing apology for using the word "dreadlocks" in a context having nothing to do with race after being informed, I conjecture by a sensitivity reader working for her publisher but might be wrong, that the term was not politically correct. Judging by her writing she is not herself particularly woke, so I interpreted that as a response to incentives.
Sure, but the point is precisely that they're using them all at the first place. They may not be literally doing the censoring, but publishers using them means they intend to censor their works for woke reasons.
It's kind of silly to suggest that they would pay for this work to be done but not actually care about what the readers say, unless you want to argue it's some kind of weird act of signalling or something.
Not him, but I'd say maybe 9/10 "sensitivity advisors" of any kind are virtue-signalling.
The difference is that guns are mechanical devices about which one can make objective claims, while 'sensitivity' is entirely subjective.
Apparently men can be pregnant too, don't you know? Please re-write your comment to reflect that. "Voluntarily," I might add.
But you can ask a dozen women about their experiences with pregnancy and get a dozen different responses. It is the same problem as with 'sensitivity readers'. Given the near infinite number of identity politics subcategories that people claim to belong to these days, how could a few such people even begin to pretend to represent them all fairly?
The whole thing is an absurdity.
Don't compare it to a gun editor - compare it to a traditional editor who says things like "the story would flow a lot better if Chapter 18 was before Chapter 17, and Chapter 19 seems like a waste so you should cut it".
This matches my understanding. Authors may choose to self-censor based on the reader's recommendation, but the ones I've been aware of were advisors with no power to actually censor the work. Even in the linked description it's not clear to me that "censor" is an appropriate term for what happened. Same for the "context" warning from Facebook.
I think it may also be conflating "normal" low intelligence with what were considered genetic defects. Down Syndrome and whatever we call Mental Retardation (apparently "intellectual development disorder" in the new DSM) or similar issues.
Low IQ is not the same thing as genetic disorder.
Note that there’s also a AI Governance curriculum for a track running parallel to the Alignment course! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F4lq6yB9SCINuo190MeTSHXGfF5PnPk693JToszRttY/edit#
Thanks, I've added it in.
Great links, really appreciate the AGI stuff. Thank you.
#13 can someone help me out here?
My experience was that I started by seeing the face (on the bottom of the dog's head), switched after a few seconds to seeing the dog, and now I can't see the face at all no matter how hard I try. I think dog is stickier than face, if you've already seen the dog it's probably hopeless.
I think I was able to see the face after first seeing the dog, but I had to cheat by using the back of my hand to cover up my view of the dogs eyes and top part of the picture. Once the image was no longer obviously a dog, I think my brain was a bit more free to interpret shadows as spooky face-like. The face I ended up seeing had the dogs collar as an eye, the dogs nose as the spooky face nose, a shadow to the left of the dogs nose as the other eye, and the underside of the dogs muzzle as a creepy gaping mouth with visible teeth. It sort of reminds me of the redead from Zelda Ocarina of Time.
Also, I've been a longtime reader, and just recently a subscriber and now first-time commenter. Thanks for all your great writing over the years Scott, and congrats on the marriage!
Similar experience here. I saw the face, then read the caption and could only see the dog. I was eventually able to recover the face by covering the dog's eyes and top part of the image.
The light patch to the left of the dog's nose is the profile of the face's nose (the face is looking somewhat down and to the viewer's left), and the dog's nose is one of the face's eyes. The reddish patch of the dog's collar is the face's left ear.
This was my experience too I think the brain is really well trained on eyes, such that if it "latches" on to a pair of eyes the rest of the face takes shape almost immediately
thank you for explaining where the face is! Until reading this, I did not see any face at all.
After reading the comments I scrolled back up to see the face and found that I can catch a glimpse of the face as I quickly scroll up, but the moment it stops it turns back into a dog.
Interesting, I just scrolled back up quickly, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a face. Scrolling down quickly, I didn't get the impression of a face. I gave it a break for a minute, and scrolled up again quickly. Thought I saw a face. Gave it a break. Scrolled down quickly, didn't see the face.
Has it got to do with what part of the pic (bottom vs top) that we see first?
I can switch back and forth with relative ease but notice that when I do there is a change in muscular tension in my upper right back accompanying the switch.
wait... so you saw the face first? I am having trouble seeing the face, but based on (https://imgur.com/SRDcnOr) the face still only takes up a small portion of the picture. And the face is floating on a dogs body? Why would this be seen before a dog when the rest of the picture has all the context of a dog??
..and i wonder how this correlates with dog ownership..
I think if you scroll down the dog is more obvious and if you scroll up you'll be more likely to see the face. Start with the image off screen in both cases.
Yep.
For me it the exact opposite. It took time to flip from dog to face and now it won’t flip back
Not hopeless - I was in the same situation as you, but switched back to face after turning the image sideways and upside down on my phone.
I’m in the “completely hopeless” camp. I wonder if it might be because I’ve owned dogs, similar to that one (mostly Labs) my entire life. Even if I cover up the dog’s eyes, there is just way too much else in the picture that immediately pattern matches to “black dog laying on the floor” for me.
Wait, really? I didn't see the face at all at first, but after looking at the image that highlights the facial feature locations, I can freely "see" it by focusing on those for a bit
I can see the face again by rotating my head 90 degrees.
...same as you, I started by seeing the face, from second look on I could only see the dog and was not able to see the face again. But then I accidentally looked at the picture in small (thumbnail) and there I can only see the face, not the dog (even if I have both the large picture and the small one next to each other, I see a different thing in either of them) :) pretty weird :)
If you're having trouble seeing the face: squint so hard your eyes are almost closed and focus on the white parts of the dog's face, which are the highlights of a face mostly in shadow.
Does it resemble jar-jar binks? Like, with 2 eye stalks on top of a head with a mouth on the front of a head sticking out? That's the closest I saw when squinting at the lighter area
No. It's white-face clown, with sloppily-applied black makeup around the mouth.
I saw the dog first, and was only able to see the face once I concentrated on seeing the dog's nose as an eye. The small white triangle to its right as a nose was also a feature that helped transform the image
I think this worked, but unfortunately also caused me to forget everything I knew about Georgism.
Don't know if this helps, but: the dog is looking straight at us with a chill expression. The human face is looking down between the dog's legs and looks horrified / hopeless. Edit: the whitest part of the photo is the human's left cheek and the dog's left upper lip.
It took me a non-trivial amount of seconds to see the dog, but now I can see whichever I want to see.
I could only see the dog at first. Squinted. Now whenever I squint I can see a face. I don't think it's what others are seeing though. Illustration overlaid on the image may prime you to see what I'm seeing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/142RY870sOU4frFFnU8G0dqOk-hUaBcn1/view?usp=drivesdk
Can confirm that is not what I was seeing. It's weird / nice how easy it is to see faces everywhere.
This is the face I see, which was explained to me from Measure's comment above. https://i.imgur.com/g9rzRLd.jpg
This is the face I am seeing https://imgur.com/SRDcnOr
Yes this is the face
This is still a dog's nose for me. I'm not able to see any faces anywhere (including the ones illustrated into the photo in other links).
Maybe it has to do with some individual priming? I had a dog with a vaguely similarly shaped face, maybe that's the reason it's instantly recognizable as dog-and-nothing-but-dog for me.
This rings potentially true to me. I can't really see the face either, even after reading some descriptions and looking at a cropped image or two. (I usually experience these optical illusions in a more typical way.)
I'm a big fan of dogs, and I think they're a more salient feature of any dog-containing image for me than they are for the average person. It's hard for me to see the nose as anything other than part of a dog, even when it's cropped out of context.
It became easier for me to see the face once I switched my screen to grayscale.
I never saw the face. I spent two or three minutes staring at that damn dog, and I began to think it was a joke. I'm wondering it isn't due to being told that you'll see a face before you focus on the dog, that you see a face. Anyway, it's interesting that so many people did see a face when all I see is a dog. Of course, I have abundant personal experience that I don't perceive patterns the way other people seem to. I suspect I'm quite neurodivergent in that I don't perceive things the way other people claim to perceive them.
Unlike what most comments describe here, I could not see the dog! I stared for at least a literal minute at the photo in the post (here, above), and I just could not find the dog’s head. I thought it was some kind of creepy AI-generated photo or something.
(I couldn’t really see a face, either, it just looked like a headless dog, and the place where the head should be kind of sort of had some shadows that might suggest a face in a creepy-enough nightmare.)
But I literally spent a minute looking for the dog’s head and couldn’t find it. Then I opened a link from one of the comments here and the dog was obvious. Now I can’t turn it back into nightmare fuel.
1. In education, always bet on the null.
Of the many purported benefits of extracurricular activities, I don't ever recall hearing that they were supposed to improve your academic performance. I don't know how it could; it sucks time and resources away from classes, with the goal of giving a broader range of experience and skills beyond book learnin'.
I definitely heard that music was supposed to increase your IQ and I think people extended that to academic achievement.
Yes, here in Brooklyn there's this whole layer of the local economy where art and music etc lessons are sold to bourgie parents, usually expressly under the theory that they will help them become STEM geniuses.
It increases your IQ if your IQ test includes reading sheet music and identifying diminished fifth intervals by ear. Which, I mean, why not?
...because it doesn't correlate as well with g as the stuff IQ tests actually test, and it isn't culture-fair which most modern IQ tests strive to be?
What is the value of "g" supposed to be?
For a good, complete summary, look up “Spearman’s G” on wikipedia. For a brief, bad summary, it’s how “generally intelligent” you are, measured by success on various tests in different domains. Doing well on one of them predicts doing well on others, which is why G is interesting; it also seems to track to what we usually mean by “smart”.
I find it amazing that you're continually in the comments crticizing this stuff when you lack even the most rudimentary, 'two minutes on wikipedia' level of understanding of the topics you're criticizing.
Literally how can you possibly express any kind of judgement about IQ and IQ testing (or intelligence research generally) when you don't even know what g is and why it matters.?
g is the general factor of cognitive ability. When a large group of people takes a large number of cognitive tasks, they ALL will correlate positively.
You can extract a single factor using a technique called factor analysis or a principle component using a technique called principle component analysis. The number one factor or first principle component is referred to as g. It is not an average of the scores of the cognitive tasks but a distillation of what they have in common. It is theoretically possible that we wouldn't have this g factor and that cognitive tasks would not correlate like this but they do. And all cognitive tasks positively correlate with g to varying degrees. A very interesting observation.
Some tasks have higher g loadings than others, meaning they correlate more with g. We use a relative scale of IQ to express the scores on tests that accurately measure g. IQ correlates with what people traditionally call "smart" things.
The claim that it doesn't correlate as well with g is not-even-wrong, in that it depends on how you measure *g*. There's no God-given concept of g that is not subject to arbitrary choice-of-test issues. If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music. That the normal g does not do so is a prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is "better", one which is not supported by any literature I could find.
(I do agree that intuitively, music tests don't measure what we want IQ to measure. But you don't get to use *g* as a get-out-of-arbitrary-test-choices-free card, it doesn't work that way. You must instead argue on the object level that nobody cares about music.)
Just because you can't measure something perfectly doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Take "aggressiveness." There is no God-given concept of it; any measure of it will involve choosing a test. But some of those tests will be better than others, and an "aggressiveness test" which focused mainly on irrelevant physiological characteristics would be a bad test.
So the question then becomes: what makes a test for intelligence better or worse? What grounds the "prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is better"?
Spearman's g is one compelling answer to that question. When we test people's aptitudes across various domains, we find that there are some domains, like visual-spatial reasoning and logical inference, where if someone does well in them, they are likely to also do well in lots of other domains. We call those domains "g-loaded". To measure g, we can generate a score from a particular person's aptitudes - critically, placing a higher weight on those domains which seem more "g-loaded". No test will perfectly measure g, but some will come closer than others, by prioritizing heavily g-loaded tests.
A battery with lots of music tests would be a poor measure of g, since music ability correlates only mildly well with skill in other domains - it's not heavily "g-loaded". In fact, Spearman included a music test in his original analysis, and found it to be the least g-loaded out of all the domains he investigated! Interestingly, math was second-worst; the strongest predictor out of his list was "classics". Selection effects may be involved here, but there's reason to believe linguistic skill is actually very g-loaded.
I hope this goes part of the way to explaining why the concept of g actually does help justify a choice of tests to measure IQ. It's not about what we *care* about; it's about what talents tend to predict being multitalented, and music just so happens to be a poor predictor of that.
"If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music"
I don't think you understand 'g'. But the whole point of g is that its a GENERAL intelligence factor.
IQ tests predict performance on most cognitively demanding tasks i.e. stuff completely outside of IQ test questions. That's the whole point of g. It's not simply 'correlates with other IQ questions'.
Reading sheet music almost assuredly does NOT correlate very well in this way, and it probably does not correlate nearly as well with life outcomes as IQ does.
IQ tests are not constructed arbitrarily, and I find it bizarre that you could have possibly 'checked the literature' on this subject and then say something like this.
It's not that 'nobody cares about music', it's that music simply does not have the predictive validity of IQ tests. If you have no predictive validity, then there's zero point of psychometrics. Being good at identifying the next pattern in a series tells us that you'll probably be good at most things that require abstract reasoning. Being good at reading sheet music does not. That's it. That's all there is to it.
Your appeal to 'god given' concepts is totally bizarre. Nothing is god given, everything is ultimately a social construct. But nobody ever takes this as a refutation of anything else. There's no god given definition of species, it's just an arbitrary category we made up on the basis of arbitrary criteria. But it's extremely useful, so we use it.
All tests of cognitive ability correlate positively. A test which consists of literally all cognitive tasks would take too long, so psychologists create intelligence tests like Wechsler with various tasks on it that are more g loaded. This is a better and more efficient way of measuring g and measures it more accurately.
The g factor is not dependent on the contents of a test. See chapter 1 of In The Know by Russel T Warne. If you arbitrarily cut out a bunch of tasks, then you have lowered the g loading of your test but you have NOT changed the g factor. It is not an average or a sum of tests, it is a distillation.
Scott, this is correct and a good response. Thank you.
Why not? No, why SHOULD it include that? Do you actually know that the purpose and rationale behind intelligence testing is?
You're acting like it's some arbitrary thing that includes anything and everything for no good reason. Which means you don't know the first thing about the subject.
Minor warning - I more or less agree with your points, but I think "you don't know the first thing about the subject" is neither kind nor necessary here.
Okay, and how do you feel about repeated criticisms of a topic that this person is ignorant of? Would you feel the same if it were a person declaring climate change is BS and then asking what the greenhouse effect is?
Given the tenor of the comments here, the purpose of general intelligence testing is to provide a permission structure to dismantle the welfare state.
That doesn't make sense because the people in the comments here do not construct intelligence tests. I think you're trying to accuse the pro-IQ crowd in the comments of motivated reasoning in a clever way, but it doesn't make sense.
The powerful predictive ability of the g factor and heritability of it is a good argument for the welfare state depending on your moral foundations. People do not choose to have lower average cognitive ability and are in need of more assistance. It's not their fault generally. Here is a coherent pro-welfare argument which recognized IQ and heritability of IQ.
Freddie DeBoer's "The Cult of Smart" is about how much kids already bring their general intelligence with them to school without it being affected that much by school, and I suppose it could be said he wants to "dismantle" the status quo in order to replace it with communism.
where i went to school, music was a during the day class, not extracurricular
Where I went to school it was both; "Music" in the curriculum covered things like music theory and the occasional bit of singing or playing the goddamn recorder, but if you wanted to actually learn a musical instrument properly you'd be paying for private lessons. Pretty sure it's the same way in most parts of the world.
Yeah! At my school too
that seems to be far-fetched. However, many people think that music training improves fine motorics in young children and ability to concentrate and persistence in older children. I find these things plausible, as many skills can be improved by intensive training and I do not see why fine motorics or concentration would not.
Then you aren't paying attention. The trope that chess, or music, or art, or Latin, will not just improve your chess class grades but your general grades is older than most of the people here. Literally when I was in middle school and joined the school chess club, one of the justifications we were given for it was that it'd improve our grades by helping us learn to think. (I don't remember if the teacher in charge actually intoned "Studies show..." but I'm sure someone along the way did.)
yep! "It's good for your brain" I've heard this justification given.
This is studied under the name "transfer of learning" and I think the result is that learning doesn't really transfer. I see these things - provided the kid isn't having fun - as very unfair. If you're going to force a kid into doing something, I think there should be a good reason and I think that without the general effect, it's really not fair to make kids learn chess or Latin.
I think it's probably true in the sense of "you train your brain on something" but not true in the sense of "general brain function improvement." I think chess can actually improve your ability to think about chess and areas of similar types of thinking, such as strategy games, spatial location, etc. I don't see any reason at all to think that playing chess would increase your verbal score on the SAT, and probably not your math either.
I think it would be even more narrow. I think chess makes you good at chess. It probably doesn't make you good very good at Go. But that's just an impression from what I've read and I don't have a solid opinion on that.
We probably agree more than disagree. I'm thinking in terms of pretty narrow skills that transfer between games, and maybe other areas. Thinking about the interactions of pieces and planning out chess moves can extend beyond the literal game of chess (obviously in terms of something like 3D chess, but also in other games at least). Less narrowly, you can learn to read your opponent's goals and playstyle, and identify if someone is being aggressive verses reactive as one example.
I am not sure what the cut off is for how similar a task has to be, but a lot of top ranked auto battler players (Hearthstone Battlegrounds, TFT, Autochess) seem to be able to quickly reach top rank when they try other auto battlers.
Do you think there's a meaningful difference between phonics vs. whole language? For that matter, are there any such teaching-technique differences that convincingly beat the null?
Don't know, but the phonics people I know are really adamant that phonics is more efficient/faster.
Stories are fun to read. Phonics are boring. Do enthusiasm & motivation matter?
Edit: Phonics are well-suited for the prison-guards they call teachers.
Most of the hostility towards phonics I've seen has come from teachers who are all in on whole word. Also, I actually remember being taught phonics, and it was fun, so this take is very confusing.
A healthy skepticism of American pedagogy, among the least successful of human endeavors, is all I need.
Motivation was certainly crucial for me, so I'm trying to find that with my own kids.
I had very little interest in reading until my parents subscribed us to Nintendo Power magazine. I probably spent 30 minutes studying and re-studying every page over the course of a month, trying to discern everything it was telling me.
That said, working through those pages at first required a lot of phonics, sounding words out. I was taught the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes (which really doesn't require that much teaching), and I went from there. I haven't encountered the "whole word" thing but it seems like it would be more teacher-intensive, not less.
From educators I have talked to, phonics is more robust in that it can teach a larger fraction of the population to achieve basic literacy than other techniques. More efficient/faster for the average or median student is less certain.
I think it's reasonable to _not_ bet on the null when it comes to the question of "which of these two rather different methods for teaching X is better for teaching X?"
I mean, even if one technique is faster, that's no guarantee that it matters five years down the line. I've read phonics people claim that this makes a lifelong difference (https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading). I'm genuinely curious if this is true.
I can imagine how hard this is to measure too, but also how high the stakes are. If phonics means that 3% of the adult population has substantially higher reading proficiency, that's really important.
I'm pretty sure it made a significant difference to me. I couldn't read at all before a remedial reading tutor started me on phonics in third grade. But phonics didn't teach me to read "better;" it's a trick for getting over the first hump of being able to read at all - which, for some reason comes naturally to some people but definitely did not for me.
I went straight from completely illiterate to reading at twelfth grade level in about two months of systematic phonics - but obviously I already had a lot of other foundational skills in place.
Whole language is underspecified. If, as suggested in that article, it means trying the whole task, combining multiple cues, then there is a theoretical argument that it is a mistake. Instead you should strengthen the cues separately, called "deliberate practice." Phonics is only about isolating one cue, which might be a mistake, but the others already exist in speech, so may not really need practice.
and parenting
"Sehr gut. Setzen."
I mean, why should it improve skills in other subjects? Why would piano lessons be of any help in my later career as a, say, social scientist that earns his or her money by correlating things with other things? The causal path from exposure to outcome is not obvious at all. And the elephant in the room is selection bias, because these poor children of these rich parents do not just get piano lessons, but all kinds of extra training, including academic training, and they have access to better colleges and universities just because they can afford it.
PS. The time spent with piano lessons and exercises must also be taken into account; if you use that for, say, matrix calculus, you'll be even better at math or whatever areas in which matrices are used.
In case it comes up, the German for the command "Sit" is "Platz".
Only to dogs, not to school children.
Some learnings clearly cross over and affect other subjects. Learning any one programming language spills to others and possibly into general communication ability. Learning(or at least understanding) calculus helps you to model physical phenomena in your mind. Statistics applies to many scenarios throughout life in an automatic even intuitive way(academic and not). Presumably, philosophy provides a basis for understanding and evaluating aspects of history and social science both of which can still be learned without it.
A lot of the very smart people I know in grad school play a musical instrument, and probably learned it early in life. Of course this proves that correlation is not causation. However, this tells us why the belief that learning music earlier in life probably leads to better fluid intelligence or something is quite intuitive, and almost common sense; at least based on the ample evidence around me. Perhaps research in education is important because it can help disabuse us of our "intuitive" notions.
That seems like it would be highly confounded by tiger mom parents who make their children learn musical instruments.
28: The snopes link you posted has been updated, suggest you strike that paragraph
I got the impression that the government changed their mind about the funding and Snopes correctly changed their rating to reflect that, but that my description correctly matches the original state of affairs.
The snopes article was directly responding to claims like "The Biden administration is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further racial equality". That statement could... kinda sorta be true if you view the world from a Faerie-like dedication to maximally misinterpreting everything without technically lying.
Crack pipes were one example component of one part of the program that has an overall goal of promoting racial equality, but there's a huge qualitative gap between (Safe drug use kits reduce the lethality of drugs) + (minority groups suffer from poor treatment of addiction and drug use, leading to higher deaths per capita) = (Send safe smoking kits - which may include crack pipes - to minority areas as part of a large scale effort to treat and reduce drug addiction) and (Biden is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further equality).
Even if the second statement is technically kind of true, it's such a gross abuse of the facts and context that I'd feel comfortable calling it a lie. This specific case doesn't feel like a woke outrage overreaction, so doesn't really fit with the list
OK, but this is part of the problem with Snopes' current operating procedure: when a fact that's embarrassing to Democrats start to spread, they go out of their way to find some version of that fact with some not-so-true frills attached and then debunk _that_.
Another particularly horrible example is the Biden/KKK thing. Faced with the (entirely true) rumour that Biden eulogised former KKK member Robert Byrd at his funeral, Snopes managed to find someone on facebook claiming that Byrd was the Grand Wizard of the KKK (in fact he was "only" an Exalted Cyclops, because KKK titles are fucking ridiculous).
The administration's plan to send safe smoking kits is a sound one. There is no version of the claim "Biden is sending crack pipes to minority groups" that does not either
A) Distort the context to manufacture outrage or
B) Retain the context, and therefore has nothing worth getting upset over
The only version of the story even worth addressing is the mostly-false manufactured outrage version spinning this into some sort of drug pushing program
Even the "particularly horrible" example you're pointing out isn't that bad. It's labeled as "miscaptioned" and even the summary points out that Byrd was in fact a former KKK member. And that seems like a very fair assessment of something that takes "Biden eulogized someone who used to be a member of the KKK before leaving and becoming a high profile opponent of the KKK" and twists it into "Biden eulogized a former KKK member". Both statements are strictly true, but context and connotation matters.
Are there any cases where you think snopes has failed to apply that level of nuance to a right wing issue to cast them in a bad light? I don't spend much time on snopes, so I can't speak to any systemic issues they may have. But these two evaluations seem fair
Then again, I am on the left so these are all evaluations that support my team. If you have any cases that are similar on a meta level but go against my biases I'd like to see them to see if I'd feel the same way
Snopes shouldn't be trying to provide an evaluation of whether the plan (sending safe crack kits to minority communities) is sound. It exists to check the facts. The facts were, that was the plan; they fact-checked reporting of that plan as "mostly false". That's a failure. If they had fact-checked it as "missing context", I could be persuaded they were somewhat in the right. But there was a true thing, and they fact-checked it as false.
Don't trust liars just because they're on your team; don't underestimate the harm they do to you in the name of a cause.
Evaluating "Missing so much context that the conclusion is dramatically wrong" to "basically a lie" is not itself a lie. A simplification, sure. But not a lie
> The administration's plan to send safe smoking kits is a sound one.
That's... well, it's an opinion that Democrats might share, but I don't. I find out outrageous to send "safe smoking kits" to anyone under any circumstances, and I think at least a very large fraction of the population would agree with me.
I value the rule of law, and the rule of law is not well served by having the government send people kits to help them break the law. Furthermore, I don't think people should smoke crack/meth, and it doesn't seem necessarily true that having the government send people apparatus for smoking crack/meth is going to serve the interests of not having people smoke crack or meth.
I can definitely sympathize with this sentiment: I don't think merely making drug use more comfortable should be the core of a government response to an addiction epidemic. With that said, there are versions of this program that I can get behind - for example, tying the benefits to strict requirements to join and stay in a cessation program.
>The snopes article was directly responding to claims like "The Biden administration is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further racial equality".
...
>Crack pipes were one example component of one part of the program
"Crack pipes" is metonymy. The proper thing to measure is not literally crack pipes and nothing else, but the entire category of "things that make it easier for people to get or take drugs".
I don't see how you got that at all. Snopes originally assumed that "safe smoking kits" referred in part to crack pipes, but the administration later clarified that the kits wouldn't include pipes, hence the update.
Also, part of what they were debunking was the claim that the pipes were being distributed "to advance racial equity". That's nakedly false. I'm fine saying that a false claim plus a misleading claim qualifies as "mostly false".
From the Snopes article:
“the grant description did state that priority would be given to applicants who serve communities that are historically underserved. “
That sounds a lot like trying to advance racial equity to me. It certainly doesn’t come across as “nakedly false”
In what way is that "distributing crack pipes to advance racial equity"? That statement is just saying they intend to implement their program equitably. But the purpose of the program isn't to advance racial equity, it's to combat drug addiction.
All crackheads are equal. Some are just more equally prioritized than others.
I'm not sure what you mean. By definition, "historically underserved communities" are ones who have been prioritized lower by previous programs. Saying you'll prioritize them higher is just saying "This time around, we won't forget about the guys everyone always forgets about." I don't see how that's controversial or even really notable.
The purpose is not to combat drug addiction, it's to combat harms from drug addiction. Hence "harm reduction" - combating addiction is a separate program.
Either way: that being its purpose doesn't make it not *also* intended to advance racial equity, and the text of the order makes it clear that HHS wants implementation to happen in a way that targets minority and marginalized communities in the name of advancing racial equity.
As I said in another comment - the section of the program labeled "purpose" makes it clear that advancing racial equity is part of the program's purpose.
If I bring a box of donuts to work and give one to everybody in the office, am I intending to "advance fairness"? Or am I just being fair while pursuing the goal of group donut consumption?
I'm confused how you managed to convince yourself of this. The program also intended to fund "syringes to prevent and control the spread of infectious diseases." What do you think those syringes were meant to help safely inject? Insulin? Give me a break.
"Safe smoking kits" meant providing the means to use crack. You don't need a "safe smoking kit", or a "kit" of any kind, for a cigarette, blunt, or vape. For the record, I don't think that providing such kits is necessarily a bad idea, like needle exchanges aren't necessarily a bad idea! But transparently, "safe smoking kits" meant crack pipes. And Snopes initially fact-checked that as "false" when it was clearly true, using exactly the justification Scott provided ("it also funded other things").
Then, after the "Biden is giving out crack pipes, lol" meme got trending, the administration "clarified" by claiming that the term "safe smoking kits" didn't include crack pipes. But I don't think their assertion is at all credible; rather, it was a transparent half-assed attempt to walk it back, and Snopes is carrying their water.
Clean syringes are a very common harm reduction measure. The article said about a dozen times that the spending is aimed at harm reduction.
Safe smoking kits can include stuff like sturdier pipes and screens that make the act of smoking safer, but they don't have to -- typically they're things like alcohol swabs, Vaseline, and plastic mouthpieces, the point being to keep people from spreading bloodborne diseases when sharing. It wasn't crazy to expect the kits to include pipes, but it was misleading to claim it with certainty and flat-out wrong to say the purpose was to advance racial equity.
Upon gaining power, Chairman Mao instigated a harm reduction programme against opium use. His policy was to threaten to execute 'addicts'. It was remarkable how quickly 'addicts' suddenly found themselves able to cope without their drug.
It sounds like you're advocating for some sort of large, concerted push to crack down on drug users. A war on drugs, even. If only someone had thought of that before
Uh, I'm not a drug dove, but I don't think any sane person's solution should be "killing all the addicts". Nor is Mao a great policy role model, for all kinds of reasons.
The actual text of the order disagrees with you.
Part 1, section 1, the second-to-last paragraph characterizing the "PURPOSE": "The priority populations for this program are underserved communities that are greatly impacted by SUD. Underserved communities are defined under section 2 of Executive Order 13985." EO 13985 characterizes "underserved community" by referencing (in order) race, sexuality, disability, and poverty, and its text repeatedly invokes the need for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda".
So in defining its purpose and target population, the program explicitly and implicitly invoked advancing racial equity. Other kinds of equity too - but it's fair to describe it as prioritizing minority communities. Calling that "flat-out wrong" is ignorant of the facts.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/grants/pdf/fy22-harm-reduction-nofo.pdf
That's a very tunnel-visiony reading. Like I said in the other thread, committing to prioritize underserved communities (which, as you noticed, is not exclusively a racial designation) is not the purpose of the program, it's just a fact about the implementation. Applicants don't have to be from underserved communities, they're just more likely have their applications approved if they are.
They state the purpose of the program in their own words multiple times. From the executive summary and the first paragraph of the section you posted: "The purpose of the program is to support community-based overdose prevention programs, syringe services programs, and other harm reduction services. Funding will be used to enhance overdose and other types of prevention activities to help control the spread of infectious diseases and the consequences of such diseases for individuals with, or at risk of developing substance use disorders (SUD), support distribution of FDA-approved overdose reversal medication to individuals at risk of overdose, build connections for individuals at risk for, or with, a SUD to overdose education, counseling, and health education, refer individuals to treatment for infectious diseases such as HIV, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and viral hepatitis, and encourage such individuals to take steps to reduce the negative personal and public health impacts of substance use or misuse. This will include supporting capacity development to strengthen harm reduction programs as part of the continuum of care. Recipients will also establish processes, protocols, and mechanisms for referral to appropriate treatment and recovery support services. Grantees will also provide overdose prevention education to their target populations regarding the consumption of substances including but not limited to opioids and their synthetic analogs. Funds may also be used to help address the stigma often associated with substance use and participation in harm reduction activities." There's nothing in there about advancing racial equity, because that is plainly not what their goal was. It's something they took into consideration, not their objective in any way.
Thanks. I didn't think the "to advance racial equity" was a relevant part of the claim or the reason it was supposed to be outrageous, but it sounds like some people thought it was and that makes Snopes' decision more reasonable.
I don't think it ever was.
That is to say, I have come across the "Biden administration sends out crack pipes" meme quite a few times over the last week in the right wing memeopshere, but this is the first time I've heard it with the "to advance racial equity" bit attached.
First time I heard about it was a meme with Forrest Gump saying "And just like that, crack was safer than Ivermectin". This was followed by several references to Hunter Biden's own crack-smoking proclivities. Then a picture of Joe Biden kindly offering a crack pipe to a black man sitting on a bench, who replies "Sir, I'm waiting for a bus". In each case, the "Biden administration handing out crack pipes" part was the core of the joke.
fwiw, i disagree with the decision to remove this. Snoops objectively reported that a claim that was true, albeit misleading, was false. Unless we're redefining false to mean something else, snoop's original claim of this being false was a lie. They have updated it to be more nuanced now, but i think the original post is worthy of being noted as something related to excessive wokeness.
Update: ah, i see the more clear reasoning you gave on the mistakes page, and i understand better. It's specifically that snoops said that "true statement AND potentially false statement" could reasonable be called a false statement due to the AND. That's...a bit of a reach but defensible.
> Unless we're redefining false to mean something else, snoop's original claim of this being false was a lie.
A key point in Bounded Distrust was that quite a bit of journalism consists of a series of individually narrowly true statements woven together to give a strongly misleading impression, often with the rhetorical punchline being a qualitative statement that can't be strictly evaluated on its own metric. Lots of people would nonetheless round an egregious example off to "that article is lying to me". Would that claim itself be a lie, assuming the journalist was scrupulous in never quite overstepping on any individual point?
I would say yeah, that claiming that such an article is lying is incorrect. You can say many other things about it (misleading narrative, cherrypicked facts, etc) but lying wouldn't be right.
Adding "to racial equality" seemed to me to be a case of making a general claim that you don't like more specific, refuting the more specific claim, and then insinuating that the general claim is also refuted.
Maybe Biden didn't include crack pipes in the bill to advance racial equality (maybe he was just pro crack), but if I knock down that more complicated claim, it would seem to unsuspecting eyes that maybe Biden didn't include crack pipes in the bill at all.
that's a good trick actually, do you know if it has a name?
EDIT: wait this is just motte and baily isn't it.
It would... except that advancing racial equity was very much a part of the program's purpose. You can tell because it says so, specifically, under "PURPOSE": "the priority populations for this program are..." and then invokes an EO (#13985) which is focused entirely on a woke conceptualization of "equity", centering race.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/grants/pdf/fy22-harm-reduction-nofo.pdf
Snopes is still the bad guy here, for the reasons you initially provided and more besides. Even if you've revised your opinion, I would appreciate that section of the post being caveat'ed rather than removed, for future readers' sake.
Agreed that it shouldn't be memory-holed; I had no idea what this discussion was about at first glance.
> I got the impression that the government changed their mind about the funding and Snopes correctly changed their rating to reflect that
My brain first interpreted this as "the government changed their mind about funding Snopes, and Snopes got scared and quickly changed their rating to make the government happy". :D
They've updated to "Outdated" which is a rating I don't really understand the purpose of. It seems to obfuscate "did X really happen" by putting it behind a layer of "maybe it happened, maybe it didn't happen, but for some reason we no longer consider it 'relevant'".
Like to pick a fairly straight-forward example "Did Facebook Censor a Picture of Santa Kneeling to Jesus" (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-santa-jesus-image/) - it's a pretty straightforward factual statement: I would rate that "Mostly true" - Facebook did indeed put a "mature content" warning on top of such an image. Yes, it was almost certainly just an algorithmic glitch or human error, but factually it did happen.
They nitpick over the wording "censor" (... despite that they have control over the exact wording of their claims), and Facebook fixed it so that it no longer has the content warning... but I'm not sure why that makes it "Outdated". The claim is in the past tense, and, yes, that really happened.
It kind of feels like a "True, but inconvenient if people were to screenshot this" rating. (Incidentally the "Aztec Chanting in Public Schools" that Scott mentioned in a previous article also got an "Outdated" rating)
Like, yeah, if some controversial law gets repealed that's an important part of the story, but I still care about whether or not it really existed at all. "Outdated" could be a modifier, but shouldn't 'mask' the actual truth rating.
>which is a rating I don't really understand the purpose of. It seems to obfuscate "did X really happen"
That's the purpose of it.
What's cool is how much thought the isochronic map put into human travel time. Apparently I can ride a horse east from Perm much faster than I can try to cross the Greenland icepack.
I'm not sure whether they'd figured out rope teams by that point so crossing Greenland probably had a far higher attrition rate too, what with all the crevasses covered by thin layers of snow.
Nansen first crossed the Greenland ice pack in 1888, before then there was no recorded crossing. So indeed it would have been quite hard and probably deadly.
Apparently Nansen's big advantage was that he knew how to ski, which at the time was a peculiar skill possessed by a handful of Norwegians.
#7 corridors invented in the 16C.
I’m not sure. I see a hall as a corridor. In Bill Bryson’s At Home he says the Hall came first and sometimes was all there was, for instance a Viking great hall, then rooms were added around the side, and the rooms took up more space, and the hall got smaller? Is a hall a corridor? I tend to use either interchangeably but maybe a hall/hallway has to get to the front door.
The distinction is that a hall in that sense of the word *is* a room, where things are meant to occur, instead of being primarily a space for getting between rooms.
Not really. I did as it happen subsequently look it up and hall and corridors are synonymous- at least inside buildings.
I don't understand what you're claiming. A "hall" in the sense of a "great hall" is a distinctly different thing from a "hall" in the sense of "it's just down the hall", and it's the latter that's being discussed. Stand in the two and the difference is obvious. Are you trying to make some sort of argument based on a dictionary, that no distinction can be drawn because the particular dictionary you checked doesn't draw such a distinction??
I also don’t know what you are arguing about. The link said that corridors were invented in the 16C. I said that halls existed long before that, starting out as great halls with small rooms (if any) attached, and then getting smaller - in most houses - to the present day size. So I’m doubting that corridors were invented in the 16C.
I mean, if that's your claim, then you should make that explicit by saying something like "Halls in the modern sense evolved from halls in the older sense, as the latter gradually shrank; there was no hard line where corridors were suddently 'invented'.", not go on about looking up meanings of words!
A hall in the sense of "great hall" is not a corridor but a large multifunction space, generally a singularly large room of a castle or manor. In modern people's houses, rooms such as dining rooms, living rooms, and TV rooms tend to be the spiritual successors of a great hall, while event spaces and multifunction spaces fill the same role in convention centers and hotels.
Before corridors there were just doorways from one room with a purpose to another; corridors as "rooms" whose only purpose is to connect other rooms are less materially efficient, and are less likely to appear as organic extensions to an existing building.
I just did a couple quick google image searches for "Roman Villa Floor Plan" and "Roman Palace Floor Plan". Something like 10% of the results have features that look an awful lot like corridors to me. When they're labelled, it's usually either "corridor" (which seems like a vote in favor of counting as a corridor) or "atrium" (which I think in Classical Roman architecture denotes a sort of semi-enclosed courtyard that opened out onto proper rooms).
I also searched for floor plans for Charlemenge's palace at Aachen, which also had long, narrow features that were often labeled "corridor", but these were walkways connecting otherwise-separated wings or sub-buildings of the palace complex, not direct analogues of a modern hallway with rows of rooms opening onto either side.
Between the Roman atria, Carolingian walkway corridors, and Viking great halls, I'm starting to suspect that the root of the "Corridors were invented in the 16th Century" claim is that before then, internal subdivision of large buildings was limited by concerns about lighting and ventilation. Subdividing a building with internal partitions limits internal air circulation, cuts off natural light and ventilation from exterior windows and doorways, and also cuts off line of sight to artificial lighting (oil lamps, candles, hearth fires, etc).
In this context, a modern-style interior corridor is a subdivided space with little or no exterior facing for natural light and ventilation and is probably more trouble than it's worth. Using courtyard and Roman-style atria to perform the office of corridors is a pretty easy workaround, since that increases surface area for windows and whatnot while the transitional space has most of the advantages of an outdoor area but is still at least marginally protected from wind (and rain, in the case of Roman atria which had partial roofs). Likewise, a Carolingian-style walkway corridor connecting separated wings of a palace complex leaves plenty of surface area for working and living areas of the palace, while the corridors themselves are fully sheltered from the elements but still have ample access to natural light and ventilation. A great hall is not as clear-cut, but doing double-duty as a room in its own right mitigates the problem, and I'd expect a great hall to also be a natural spot to put a hearth fire.
I got my idea from bill Bryson’s book on houses.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/130569743?t=1645575717983
> No. I mean, for a long time, for a very long time, right up at least until - really, until about the age of Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare, most houses, even quite well-to-do houses, were fundamentally a single room, which was called the hall.
And the hall was so important that that became the name of the whole house sometimes. And indeed, hall, in a wider sense, became a word signifying a grand space, which is why we have Carnegie Hall and Baseball Hall of Fame and the Halls of Montezuma, and so on.
So in kind of original sense, it was a really grand room. It was the whole house. But then as time went on, people, they discovered the comforts and attractions, the privacy, and they began to add more rooms onto the home and to spread the house both upwards and outwards.
And the hall became diminished in its importance until now. In most domestic settings, it's really just a kind of entryway in which we - where we hang our coats and take our hats off and that sort of thing.
I tried to find the Wikipedia page pictured in the tweet, and failed.
I did find an extremely short article that credits John Thorpe with inventing the hallway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallway
And also I found an article on ancient Roman apartment buildings that mentions at least one of them as having a "narrow corridor": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building). I looked for this because I knew they had apartment buildings, which I think almost require hallways.
> I tried to find the Wikipedia page pictured in the tweet, and failed.
It is simply the article for 'Hall'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall
While your wording is somewhat confusing your general claim is correct.
Some halls are corridors. Halls which are corridors are frequently called "hallways", but that can be abbreviated to "hall" in contexts where there aren't going to be non-corridor halls, e.g. a middle-class house.
Some halls are *not* corridors, but rooms in their own right and in which people spend a significant amount of time. The innovation (which may have occurred more than once) is the development of a long skinny room-like thing that is only or primarily used to travel between other rooms.
Corridors are a very inefficient use of space, so I'm not sure the inventor should be proud of themselves.
In fact, there is something distinctly modern about corridors - it's a place for untrusted strangers to move between places that are better guarded. There is nothing of value in corridors. I assume ancients didn't need corridors because their buildings were either more oriented towards common unrestricted use, or were strictly invite-only for one reason or another.
It's a lot like the difference between a street (a public space between buildings) and a road (a means of transportation from one place to another). Much of 20th century urban design has been focused on turning streets into roads.
“ would answer ‘yes’ to this because she [the queen] visited Ireland when I lived there, I watched the parade in her honor, and I could vaguely glimpse her on the inside of her car).”
You and a few thousand Corkonians waving their plastic union jacks. Rebel county, my arse.
> I have checked Wordle to see if this is true, and can confirm that it now tells me that “slave” is not a real word
This is of course not true. It tells you that "slave" is not in the word list. I also think removing slave from the word list is stupid but misrepresenting what Wordle says in a way that anyone can double check in two seconds is sloppy in a way that seems motivated.
Scrabble bans classes of words that are already extant, including not only expletives but proper nouns, for various reasons but all ultimately related to making the gaming experience better. It does not create a new class of words to ban with no linguistic justification, which is what is happening here. Whilst the reason for the decision may be to avoid offence, this seems basically to be a political policing of language by people who don't know how language works.
How is 'Slavery' offensive ? is it an insult or a slur ? What about 'War', 'Hunger', 'Death' or 'Murder', are they banned too ? How many negative words is too many ?
War, Hunger and murder are definitely banned: they don't have five letters.
That's the "error code" it has always given for non-words.
It gives that for any input that is not in the wordlist, including but not limited to strings of characters that are "non-words"
Yeh but slave is a word, right. Just tested on WWF and it’s there ( with many derivatives - slaver, slavery etc).
Yes but Wordle is not attempting to tell you it’s not a word, only that it’s not on its list of words. You get the same thing with any computerized word game (like Scrabble) - they have a list of allowed words in that game. One can disagree with their choice of words to include on their list but it’s simply wrong to say that they have declared something as “not a word”
This is all a bit pedantic.
Yes of course! People on the spectrum discussing a word game, not surprising right (smile)
I mean, the word list is...the list of real words? At least that's what it is for every other word on the list? I agree you can claim this is merely a coincidence and there's no necessary connection, but it's a bit weird.
I'll edit the sentence just in case other people have the same objection.
I think it's important to be precise when accusing one's opponents of malfeasance; if you do so inaccurately, you open the door for their defenders to point out your inaccuracy while conveniently ignoring your point, and then you're making no progress (except perhaps in tribal point-scoring, which I do not think is your goal).
There are lots of 5-letter words that are not on the wordle word list. See the 3blue1brown video on YouTube.
For clarity, there are two Wordle word lists: the list of possible answers and the list of possible guesses.
The list of possible answers includes only words that are reasonably well known, because the game isn't fun if the answer turns out to be some hyper-obscure archaic sheep disease that you've never heard of. And it's quite reasonable for this to exclude swear words etc as well.
The list of possible _guesses_, though, previously encompassed pretty much every five letter word that could be found in some large dictionary. But once the NYT bought it, a bunch of words (including some fairly common ones that appear within the New York Times practically every day) disappeared from this list.
It turns out they didn't delete anything from the list of possible guesses. The game doesn't actually have a list of possible guesses. Rather, it has a list of possible answers, and a list of non-answer possible guesses. When they deleted something from the list of possible answers, it accidentally got removed as a possible guess because it is no longer an answer, and had never been a non-answer possible guess.
They did in fact delete multiple words from both lists.
Words that used to be valid answers, and are no longer on either list:
agora
pupal
lynch
fibre
slave
wench
Words that used to be valid non-answer guesses, and are no longer on either list:
bitch
chink
coons
darky
dyked
dykes
dykey
faggy
fagot
gooks
homos
kikes
lesbo
pussy
sluts
spick
spics
spiks
whore
No words have been added to either list.
[I really hope this comment doesn't get auto-moderated]
Source:
Comparing the javascript of the NYT's wordle as of Feb 18, and the waybackmachine's backup of powerlanguage's wordle as of Feb 1.
So, most of the removals I can see the reasoning for, even if I don't agree with removing words like "slave" or "lynch", but what the hell is the objection to "fibre"?!
I can see why they removed "slave" and "lynch," and I suppose "wench" could be seen as problematic. "Fibre" is a British spelling, but why remove "pupal" and "agora"? Just too obscure?
Luckily CUNTS is still fine
If they had removed it from the list of possible answers, I would agree. But removing it from the list of words you can even guess is a step further than that. There are several other impolite words that are still usable as guesses, like "FUCKS", "SHITS", and "NEGRO". I'd expect the only unguessable strings to be gibberish or words too obscure for the word list.
Editing to include a screenshot just because: https://i.imgur.com/JFdV1wW.png
That is quite surprising! I had assumed this was just about removing it from the list of potential answers. And that would be in total keeping with much NYTimes practice.
They officially apply a "breakfast test" to the crossword - they don't want an entry in the grid to be something that will dismay someone if it comes up while they're working on the crossword over breakfast, so no URINE or ENEMA or HITLER. The big challenge is eliminating IDI and AMIN, because those letter combinations are so good for completing grids, even though the person is one you don't want to think about when you're having fun.
It seems to me that you definitely don't want to pick a word like SLAVE and force people to guess it. But it does seem over the top to prevent people from using it as a guess to find letters.
Exactly. I generally like the NYT, so my thought process was this:
1) Seems like an overstatement, I bet they just removed it from the answer list, which is a good decision. [Falsified by trying to guess SLAVE and failing]
2) Hmm, maybe they just imported the word list from Spelling Bee, which needs to have its guesses sanitized. [Falsified by trying to guess other rude words and succeeding]
3) Yeah, this is a bizarre and bad decision.
Someone in a different thread noted that it was probably an attempt at the first thing, that accidentally went wrong. It turns out that Wordle has an "answers list" and a "guesses that aren't answers list", so that if you remove something from the answers list while forgetting to add it to the other list, it disappears completely. Most people assumed they had an "answers list" and a "guesses list", so that removal from the answers wouldn't interfere with the guesses. Hopefully they fix it soon.
Jihad remains an option as well. If negro is as well, they are officially incompetent.
Someone pointed out that the "allowed guesses that aren't answers" list has always had words like JIHAD and NEGRO (and SOARE and other unfamiliar words). They didn't realize that when they deleted something from the "possible answers" list they needed to add it to this other list in order to not break things. Hopefully they will fix it.
That's still incompetent, just a different kind.
#32, on beautiful buildings surviving: there is definitely something to be said about modern architecture, auto-centrism, and technological changes, but I think another important factor that often goes undiscussed is labor efficiency. Construction remains a labor-intensive industry, even as raw materials and equipment grow cheaper. Some of the beauty of old buildings is related to the careful craftsmanship put into designing, building, and decorating even simple features. Today, that kind of time costs more relative to the other costs involved in building (land, permitting, materials, equipment).
The relevant economic law is "shipping the good apples out." If you look at buildings where the price has already been increased by other components besides labor (e.g. homes in an area where zoning limits supply and drives up the cost of lots), it's easier to spend more on construction since that cost is a smaller proportion of the overall cost. As a result, the design is notably better.
I have a hope that 3D printing will lead to some kind of renaissance in ornamentation.
There is at least a new trend towards patterned perforated metal sheets as a form of ornamentation. Even my own state's new white elephant covid quarantine facility has them https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-20/victoria-mickleham-quarantine-facility-open/100845058 and I have to admit that it looks a lot better than it would without them.
I'd highly recommend looking up the Twitter account of the article's author, Samuel Hughes. A lot of his posts highlight the efforts of late 19th and early 20th century architects and builders to combine modern labour-saving technologies and materials with colourful, textured, highly ornamented design in both traditional and novel styles. It leaves one without a shadow of doubt that the deterioration in the design standards of the built environment over the course of the 20th century was above all the result of poor aesthetic choices, not economic necessities.
Interesting - I will!
They made a male beauty pageant and they called it Mr Global instead of the obvious high-karma choice of Mr Worldwide?
then Pitbull would have to host it (and win it) every year
A beauty contest in our culture probably wouldn't want the word "wide" associated with it in any way.
I remember reading that much (all?) of Ms Universe had been changed to not depend on physical beauty. Has that happened to Mr Global as well?
Obviously not in that years batch though
I dare say that the chaps all have lovely personalities and like to work for charities, children and animals.
It seems unfair that intelligent people are allowed to compete in intelligence competitions without any beauty component thrown in, but beautiful people are not allowed to compete in beauty competitions without some kind of intelligence component thrown in.
There's an underlying idea that somehow intelligence is a well-deserved virtue while beauty is just a genetic luck of the draw. If anything the opposite is closer to the truth; you can do a lot more to improve your beauty through hard work than you can to improve your intelligence.
I don't think it's that intelligence is considered more virtuous than beauty. I think it's that admiring intelligence in others is virtuous, while admiring beauty in others is shallow.
OK, but why should admiring intelligence in others be seen as virtuous?
I would guess it's something like "because people high in intelligence are generally better at allocating scarce resources"
I don’t know for that one, but certainly appreciating physical beauty is classified as “lust” and thus “sin” in Christianity, and that can shape the debate. I think it’s also bad in Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, but am less sure about those three
I'd argue the notion that "wisdom" (which is probably correlated with intelligence even if it's distinct from it) is virtuous is very old, there was wisdom literature in the Egyptian Old Kingdom. And men needed to be cautioned against selecting a bride solely on the basis of beauty:
"A beautiful woman without discretion is like a gold ring in a pig's snout."
-Proverbs 11:22
But I think the meritocracy of modern times has really sent the idea of intelligence itself as virtue into overdrive. The world is run by people of above-average intelligence who need to justify that they deserve their high incomes and status. The Blank Slate mythology also helps this idea along:
"The reason we are intelligent is we studied harder in school and got into good colleges which served to make us even smarter, and you could have done it too but didn't. Therefore we deserve everything that's coming to us."
It's kind of farcical that Ms Universe even continues without a beauty component. Just scrap it all together.
Considering the halo effect, as long as humans are making subjective judgments on something, the beauty component is never removed completely.
The contestants are all still very beautiful.
Not sure how often this is mentioned so sorry if this is banal, but I really hate how substack wraps all the links in the email, making it impossible to see what they are before you click them. This makes reading a lot of posts annoying (since stuff is often linked to with other words that don't directly say what kind of link it is), but it's especially a drag for link posts.
Guess I'll just resolve to stop reading posts in my email client. Great post as always!
I hate this as well.
1. Take the concept of blogging.
2. Reduce the amount of allowable formatting/markup in order to make it better-for-email.
3. Obfuscate all the outbound links in your emails so nobody can tell whether they're about to visit the NYTimes or Goatse.
4. In no small part due to #3, everyone just reads it on web anyway.
5. Congrats, you've invented blogs-but-worse!
You forgot: "Obfuscate the emails with links several hundred characters long, when tiny URLs can be done in a dozen characters max, such that an email with about 50 links will *so* large that it will blow through client limits on HTML email display sizes, so your email readers can only see about half of the email, and blame it on your underlying email provider because you are a newsletter service and yet outsource your core functionality and cannot fix these sorts of things."
(Guess how I learned this. I wonder if Substack ever fixed that... It's been like 2 years since I reported it to them.)
5. Congrats, you've invented: the perfect Rick Roll opportunity!
Regarding (1), on how much / whether being bilingual improves academics, the paper abstract does not claim no effect. They say data is inconclusive. Quote below:
--
Evidence supporting the bilingual effect seems to appear when assessing inhibition and cognitive flexibility, but to disappear when working memory is considered. The inconsistent results of the studies do not allow drawing definite conclusions on the bilingual effect. Further studies are needed; they should consider the role of some modulators (e.g., language history and context, methodological differences) on the observed results.
--
Context for non-Jews; "Jewish Genetic Engineering" is mostly about all the genetic diseases Jews, particularly Ashkenazi Jews, have. Jews in the diaspora lived in insular communities periodically decimated by pogroms, creating artificial founder effects.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15516842/
Young Jews all get genetically screened for dozens of common genetic diseases, and occasionally couples are told they must not bear children. Obviously this is heartbreaking, but so are e.g. Cystic Fibrosis, Gaucher, and Tay-Sachs.
You're not missing out on some program to have more IQ points. Or, if you are, so are we.
Not true. Those diseases are recessive. Typically Jews who get screened and are carriers of those and other recessive disorders are told not to reproduce with other carriers of the same disease (and to make sure they know they and a prospective reproductive partner are not mutual carriers for such genetic disorders). No one who happens to be a carrier is ever given a blanket ban or recommendation against reproduction altogether. Source: Jewish, Orthodox, Ashkenazi ethnic background, happened to do my screening with Dor Yeshorim.
You're right, my writing was sloppy and I was missing a word. *Couples* are told not to have children for the reasons you described, not individuals as my original post implied. Thank you, I have corrected it.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and simpler to just encourage young Jewish people to date people from genetically more distant populations?
Not really on the table given extremely strong preferences among the vast majority of observant Jews for observant Jewish spouses and the relative uncommonness of conversion (as it happens one of my spouse's parents is a convert with a non-Ashkenazi ethnic background). Trying to change this preference would, from what I have seen, be essentially impossible, while accessible and affordable genetic testing and community norms encouraging checking potential matches for genetic compatibility has already been achieved.
I'm not sure how you think changing the dating preferences of millions of people is 'simpler' than straightforward genetic screening and counselling.
Given the natural tendency for young humans to procreate widely, I would suggest that socially-enforced limiting of their prospective partners to a small fraction of humanity is a far more profound example of 'changing dating preferences' than not doing that.
If a young Jewish person was planning to do that anyway, there just wouldn't be an issue. For those that want to make their mother happy and marry in the community, a blood test is a very good idea to avoid having children with a 25% chance of Tay-Sachs. I've heard stories about shadchans (matchmakers) having some idea of this when matchmaking way back when, but it's likely apocryphal
Huh. So I'm half-Ashkenazi, and I found out as an adult. Is there some sort of screening that I would have had if my bio-dad knew about me that I should get done on my kids? My mom is standard middle-american mutt (Irish, Scots, Native, and other in unknown proportions), and my wife is primarily Irish and Lithuanian in descent.
I think it's only an issue of there's Ashkenazi genetics on both sides - the relevant genes are recessive and rare in the general population - so if you're confident there's nothing significant on your wife's side you should be OK for now. But maybe worth mentioning to your kids if it looks like they're going to marry an Ashkenazi.
Made these notes on Discord, but somewhere other people can see them:
#2 is evidently -- maybe not consciously, but evidently -- drawn from Wikipedia's "did you know?" section (we ran it on NYE), which is amusing, especially given DYK is the subject of constant shitflinging about whether Readers Really Notice It.
#35 is already extensively noted in Wikipedia's article on MS, and 1. Wikipedia's coverage of any complex topic is intentionally slow (medical articles only refer to literature reviews, rather than individual studies) and 2. that article specifically, as a few people would be happy to talk your ear off about if you let them, is about 10-15 years out of date. Accordingly, this doesn't really sound like a Groundbreaking New Discovery.
Yeah the idea that viruses cause "idiopathic" diseases like MS has been investigated for decades. In that link, Cochran mentions that EBV infection is noted in all patients with MS. He didn't get that from nowhere - it was common medical knowledge! I learned it in med school 15 years ago.
But almost everyone, with or without MS, gets EBV at some point in their life. So going from noting the link to actually proving it as the causative agent was easier said than done. But it was happening whether or not Cochran noticed it.
On the rise of content censorship: I encourage anyone and everyone to read an old book, published in 2003 called "The Language Police", by Diane Ravitch.
In short, academic textbook and test publishers have employed detailed rules that cater to various political groups (left and right) to police language, bowdlerize literature excerpts, and so forth - cutting out and replacing words, censoring content. I actually own two literature textbooks from c.1990 and have the source material where I can point to examples of that kind of bowdlerization.
Re 11: I am doing this with the weekly online meetings. The curriculum is quite good and I would recommend for anyone who wants to know more about what is happening in the world of technical alignment stuff.
On 22, it isn't just the brain that is quite efficient. The human body as a whole is quite efficient. This is especially true for those organs that use a lot of energy. Only inexpensive organs such as the pancreas have significant safety factors (the pancreas has a safety factor of 10x). Peter Sterling's book 'What is Health?: Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design' (https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/What_Is_Health/s6XODwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0) is excellent on this subject.
Allostasis, being a sort of predictive control directed by the brain, is of course part of the reason for this efficiency. But there are many other reasons of which the most significant is that the human body (and many other complex adaptive systems) relies less on naive redundancy/slack for resilience and more on what is known in biology as degeneracy which is the existence of multi-functional components with partially overlapping functions.
The brain too has a significant amount of built-in degeneracy (e.g. refs https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.160.3469&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/96/6/3257). Degeneracy enables any system to be robust and still be near-optimally efficient which is why it is common across domains. I wrote something on the subject a few days ago at https://macroresilience.substack.com/p/redundancy-degeneracy-and-resilience?utm_source=url.
The internet as we knew it in 2017 might not have ended but i'm pretty sure that internets as we knew them earlier have
Web 1.0 is dead and Web 2.0 is in poor health, but I don't think that has a great deal to do with the abandonment of net neutrality.
It would be rather weird, if the health of the global internet would depend on one arcane bit of American ISP regulation.
Yet that's what people thought. This stuff was everywhere, I recall it as the consensus view of people who paid attention to the MSM. I was the only person I knew who had an opinion on the topic and thought it was hot air (though to be sure, probably 95% of people I knew had no opinion).
Like many laws and regulations, 'net neutrality' has a great name! So it's easy to assume it must be something great.
See https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/06/net_neutrality.html and https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/the_unseen_effe.html for an economics perspective.
I'm very dissapointed by your links. I was expecting some reasonable cost-benefit analysis of net-neutrality laws but got meaningless "Hurray, market!" sentiment without any engagement with the points of pro-net-neutrality crowd.
I only did a quick Google search to fish those out.
If you want something better, you can start with the criticism section of the net neutrality article on Wikipedia and follow links and sources.
26: Cook's paper itself explicitly says that the vast majority of her data (65%) comes from patent office surveys done by Henry Baker of the USPTO during 1900 AND 1913 (page 9).
https://lisadcook.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/pats_paper17_1013_final_web.pdf
The 1913 survey was considerably more comprehensive, according to the Lemelson Center, which noted that the 1900 survey identified 370 patents and the 1913 survey 800.
https://invention.si.edu/sites/default/files/Lemelson-Center-Black-Inventors-Innovators-Report-updated-2021-10.pdf
The appendix to Cook's paper notes that her total universe of data extended far beyond that, including academic journals, biographies, contemporary lists of African-American doctors/engineers, and other "Negro" exhibits at world's fairs from 1904 and 1933. The elision to 1900 alone is made by not made by her, but by NPR, most likely because her long and technical explanation of the biographical matching process between data sets was too boring for a snappy radio hit.
Is this paper good? I don't know enough about the statistics to say. Is the sharp drop-off at 1900 real, and attributable to Jim Crow? Haven't the foggiest. But if it's wrong, it's for more sophisticated reasons than "lol she used one data set that stopped at 1900."
See here for the 1913 "data": https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1490635003855790080
A year ago, I found a different problem with the paper: there are 35 riots over the time period, but the panel regressions use a dataset with only 5 riots.
https://michaelwiebe.com/blog/2021/02/cook_violence
More problems documented here:
https://twitter.com/michael_wiebe/status/1489683478232768515
Some more follow-up:
https://twitter.com/michael_wiebe/status/1496625424243171329
Re 24; I really don't understand what Sumner means by this: "If the Obama tax increases did not cause Gates and Buffett to tighten their belts, then they paid precisely 0% of that tax increase."
Say we raise Gates' income tax such that he pays an additional $500 million in taxes while still eating the same amount of food, living in the same house, traveling the same amount, etc. Isn't this an example of a super efficient tax, whereby we've managed to get $500 million essentially for free without reducing the overall output of the economy? Sure it'll reduce Gates' investment by $500 million, but that money doesn't just disappear, it can be redistributed in a way to increase consumption elsewhere in the economy.
I think it's meant to fight against an emotion that many activists have: that we need to raise taxes on the rich to punish them, to reduce their quality of life to be more in line with the median. In other words, to advance equality by cutting the tall wheat short. Sumner is merely pointing out that you have to tax the rich quite a lot indeed before you will hurt them in that way, and in order to get there you'll end up hurting a lot of other people first.
As you say, it would reduce his investment by $500 MM, which reduces the overall output of the economy (investment is included in output). Perhaps it will be redistributed in an equally efficient way, but you can justify literally any tax that way if the government isn't actually lighting the money on fire.
The point is, it's not Gates who's affected by that tax; it's whomever he was investing in.
In the paragraph just before, Sumner says "in theory total wealth is the present value of consumption–including heirs, charity, etc. So if we could measure wealth accurately (including human capital) a wealth tax should be identical to a consumption tax."
So in Sumners view, taxing Gates' income by $500MM will reduce his wealth by $500MM, which in turn reduces his future consumption (including heirs, charity, etc) by $500MM. How does that square with what he says in the very next paragraph that taxing Gates and Buffet doesn't cut into their consumption?
It seems like Sumner is saying that billionaires have so much money that taxing them won't decrease their consumption, and also that reducing their investment in the present won't reduce their future consumption
In the later paragraph I'm pretty sure he's not lumping in heirs and charity with Gates' consumption; he's making the claim that a wealth tax wouldn't affect Bill, but rather his heirs and charity
I think the author might be considering charity as consumption by those who receive the charity rather than by those who pay for it. That'd mean that Gates's consumption is unaffected, while some Africans reduce their consumption of malaria nets or whatever.
A better explanatory example might be corporate taxes where the tax burden has been shown to pass on to customers. If a corporation gets a tax increase of $100 and they have 100 customers, prices just go up by $1/customer.
The observation is valuable because it encourages an evaluation of the tax burden beyond the direct payer.
It's not free because real resources are the limit on economic production, not money. Anything the government spends that $500 million on will use resources that could be used for something else. The cost is the opportunity cost of what those resources would otherwise be used for.
That said, having now read the full post I think Sumner is being quite unfair to his opponents here. Smart progressives do understand this basic economic point. If you want to even out standard of living then progressive consumption taxes make sense, but that's not the only progressive goal. We also want to redistribute power. Wealth taxes can be good for that. Extreme economic inequality is distorting of democracy in ways that aren't captured by consumption.
So you want to use a democracy distorted by the power of wealth to take away the wealth to fix the distortions it causes? If you believe you are capable of this, why do you not believe that you can just take away the distortions?
To 'just' take away the distortions still need a mechanism.
So using a mechanism isn't automatically something to blame them for.
Redistributing wealth is taking away the distortions.
My (perhaps silly) read, is that because it was a tax increase on income and not consumption there was no effect on Gates or Buffet. The presumption being that they can hide move income, but not consumption.
36. To clarify, the BMJ article was not censored. Facebook applied a "missing context" tag whenever the article was shared. From the lead stories response: "In this case, Facebook users seeing BMJ.com's article are merely warned of "Missing Context", the lightest measure Facebook applies, with no restrictions in traffic, visibility or advertising revenue." I was very impressed by Lead Stories' response to the accusation. The handling of the situation by BMJ is worse than I would have expected.
Notably missing from their rebuttal is any discussion of sample size, significance, the potential for other problematic trial sites given 3 being identified as issue-ridden, or how those three trial sites could have affected the result. I'm less impressed by their result than Scott was.
Thanks, fixed.
You can see here what it looks like: https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/376/bmj.o95/F1.medium.jpg
I think the "missing context" is that the whole world is being injected with a new biotech whose safety trials were slipshod, abbreviated, showed no benefit in mortality, hospitalization, ventilator use, or any other non-bean-counter metric, and where there is no public transparency of the underlying data.
Edit: Never mind that the trials themselves were performed by companies whose financial conflict-of-interest weighs tens of billions of Dollars, were published in the NEJM, a journal said to have "failed its readers" in a previous matter of drug safety, and the drugs were approved by regulators that have a revolving career door with the companies they oversee. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1502213/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533509/
I'm pretty sure you're wrong about vaccines showing no benefit. The unvaccinated are vastly overrepresented among hospitalizations & deaths.
You mean like the post-hoc policy decisions we make about the effectiveness of parachutes for preventing blunt force trauma from falling out of airplanes? Randomized trials are great where you can get them, and we got good ones for these vaccines, but the post-hoc data is even stronger in this case, just like with the parachutes.
Anyone can observe parachutes working. We don't need a trusted middleman to convince us. Vaccines are not like that.
In the trials, severe outcomes were increased for the vaccines (except maybe AZ) versus the placebo. Covid-19 was reduced but immunity wanes quickly, and most people care about overall harm where the only statistically significant signals went against the vaccine.
Ask yourself how things would be if the vaccines were a failure. Covid would be raging as strongly as ever and public health people would come up with some unverifiable explanation for why. Sound familiar?
I'm talking about the trials. You know, randomized data with actual scientific value rather than whatever is coming out now to post-hoc justify policy decisions that cost trillions and would cause mass-unrest if shown to be erroneous.
There were trials, and people like Garett Jones are accusing the trials of having been delayed even after sufficient data was collected so that Pfizer would not announce in time to give Trump an October surprise!
> they thought the BMJ article lacked important context, that was all they told Facebook, and they stand by their decision even after learning that the BMJ is much more prestigious and important than they thought.
Even more telling is their description of the "missing context", like this:
> But BMJ's open letter fails to mention important context: The Brook Jackson Twitter account agreed with leading COVID misinformation-spreader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s criticism of the "Sesame Street" episode in which Big Bird encourages kids to get a COVID-19 vaccine. "Shocking, actually." she wrote in a November 9, 2021, response to a Kennedy tweet blasting Sesame Street (archived here). Elsewhere on Twitter, the Brook Jackson account wrote to a vaccine-hesitant person that vaccination makes sense if a person is in a high-risk category. When the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a federal employee vaccine mandate, she tweeted "HUGE!" and not with a frowny emoji.
Apparently not using the proper emojis is "critical context" to assessing whether claims of data integrity failures have merit.
The missing context that they highlighted first and most often was that "the allegation concerns just three of the 153 sites at which the vaccine was tested on 44,000 participants." The comments about Jackson's motivations seemed a bit off but they were clearly not the main point of the rebuttal
The quote I cited does not qualify as "missing context", that's my point. By including it at all they're undermining their own credibility as fact checkers.
Your bit on Wordle is slightly inaccurate: they didn't "screw up synchronization between different layers by rewriting it to ban players from using “offensive” words", as they also went and removed words they thought would be "too hard"*
Funnily enough people on Twitter have in fact convinced themselves that the Times is actually going out of its way to make Wordle harder. There's maybe a lesson in here somewhere...
* I almost feel like the Snopes people playing with weird technicalities to say that a claim is "false" but I think what you said about Wordle does in fact mislead people about what the Times set out to do.
So the idea is that since they were already breaking synchronization to get rid of the too-hard words, they might as well get rid of the offensive ones too? Fair enough, I'll edit the link to make that clearer.
Based on my own research combined with other people's comments here's a more detailed summary than what I've seen anywhere else so far:
The original version of Wordle has two separate lists, a "words that you can guess" list and a "words that can be the answer" list that was manually curated. Previously there were quite a few words that could be on the first list but not the second. This makes a lot of sense; it's one thing to allow a player to type slurs or obscenities when picking up clues and quite another to force someone to type those same words to solve the puzzle that day.
What I didn't know until I read other comments (and just verified myself using the wordlist I pulled from the original site when it was still up) was that the two lists were disjoint; that is, the first list isn't a "legal guesses" list but a "legal guesses that aren't possible solutions" list. This means that deleting "AGORA" from the answer list without adding it to the guess list doesn't just remove it as a possible solution but also removes it as a guess. It's indeed possible that this part is an accident and someone just meant "SLAVE shouldn't be a daily solution" and not "SLAVE is to be treated as a word no longer."
This makes some sense. Perhaps NYT would have left it if the allowed guesses list was a superset, but did not want to make the positive action of *adding* it to the list
I think more likely they didn't quite realize what was happening. We will see if they add these words back to the guesses list in the next few days.
That would explain how super-offensive words like "FUCKS" and "CUNTS" are still allowable words; they were never on the "possible solutions" list to begin with.
On the trans statistics, I first think a critique of the source is appropriate. GIDS is a clinic known for incredibly poor record-keeping (I believe it may be actually a matter of court record due to Bell vs Tavistock/GIDS) and essentially refusing to approve any form of medical transition for the vast majority of patients during their tenure at the youth service. They reject current international standards like those developed by WPATH in favour of their own much older standard that apparently relies heavily on appearance and behaviour stereotypes and seems to involve essentially endless psychotherapy that is reported to often be quite hostile. They are an incredible outlier among youth gender clinics in general for those reasons among others, but the poor state of their records is more than sufficient reason to view this result with significant skepticism and to preferentially trust results from other gender clinics, such as the Belgian one referenced in the paper. One specific criticism is including patients on their waiting list in the total. How would GIDS have learned of the suicides of people on the waiting list reliably? Perhaps they might have been told when they went to schedule the person's first appointment or perhaps the person's parents may have called to take them off the waiting list, but we know from court records that they do essentially no systematic data collection at all at the clinic, and both of the opportunistic methods described would be unrealiable and likely lead to a severe underestimate of the suicide rate of people on the nearly 9000-person waiting list (as of June 2021). Also, the journal this study is published in is edited by Canadian conversion therapist Dr. Kenneth Zucker. Some will dispute that description of him, but I have read his work (including a study he published evaluating the "attractiveness" of his prepubescent patients at CAMH before he was fired for doing conversion therapy) and heard testimony from former patients and that is the conclusion I draw from the evidence. Needless to say, one may expect a particular bias to articles published therein.
So, given that the GIDS study is likely unreliable and there is only one other roughly comparable study, let's analyze the situation and decide when in their lives we would expect most trans people to attempt or complete suicide. Not being able to transition is one of the largest suicide risk factors for trans people, as is poor treatment and rejection by those in one's environment and by one's family. Given that, I think an appropriate prior would be that trans suicide rates would be higher while puberty is ongoing and still elevated while they are adults but dependent on their parents. First, the physical changes of puberty would dramatically increase gender dysphoria in most cases. The social changes that happen over that same timespan would likely also do this, as young people are differentiated more and more by gender into separate spheres with different expectations at that age. Especially in the past this was quite strongly and at times violently enforced, less so today.
Second, during this phase, trans minors are unable to take much significant action to alleviate the dysphoria they experience without support from schools and parents. Social transition requires support from teachers and administrative staff at school, and is made much easier with parental support (since otherwise they will be forced to conceal any steps they take). Accessing any form of medical transition essentially requires parental consent and is quite an involved process as a minor. The same is largely true for any sort of psychotherapy, particularly with a gender specialist. Thus, if a trans minor has parents who do or would not accept this fact about them, they are unable to do much to help their dysphoria and may subjected to conversion attempts or abuse if their trans status is revealed.
Much of this continues into early adulthood. While moving away for post-secondary education can make an unauthorized social transition possible, it may be difficult to access medical transition without parental discovery so long as the trans person is dependent on their parents for medical insurance coverage. Parents who discover that their child has transitioned or attempted to may take punitive action (such as by withholding needed financial support for their studies). If the trans person still lives at home, more of the above limitations still apply. One's body may also continue to change during this time, possibly further exacerbating physical dysphoria.
Thus, naively, knowing nothing of the statistics but understanding something of the nature of gender dysphoria and the societal forces that affect people who have it, one would expect suicide attempts of trans people to be concentrated in the pre-teen and teen years and in early adulthood due to factors like the above.
As an aside, almost every death statistic for trans people that is gathered from "hard" data rather than surveys (or a gender clinic that does good data collection, unlike GIDS) is likely a severe underestimate due to data recording problems which massively skew results in that direction. Police (a group that is overwhelmingly right-wing and socially conservative in the US and elsewhere, and thus unlikely to treat trans people with any sort of dignity or care) and coroners will not necessarily know if a deceased person is trans or not by simple observation, they may not accept or record that fact even if they deduce it, and their records systems may not store that information in a systematic way which can be easily analyzed on a large scale. Data from parents is also unreliable and in the same direction, since those who are trans-hostile (which is most of them, historically, though this is changing) may be in denial about their child's trans status and simply record them as their birth sex.
Thanks for this useful comment. I've edited a reference to it into the main post.
The study has a supplement at https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs10508-022-02287-7/MediaObjects/10508_2022_2287_MOESM1_ESM.pdf , which I think suggests that there's not a big difference between the waitlist population and the being seen population in terms of suicide rate, though I only eyeballed it.
It sounds like GIDS is incompetent, but I'm surprised that would lower their suicide rate rather than increase it, unless they're bad at other forms of record-keeping besides the ones addressed by the waitlist vs. being seen issue.
Counter-theory: the most competent therapists increase your risk of suicide, just like how anti-depressants can give you enough of a pick-up to go through with your ideation :P
38. Kirkegaard's discussion of exercise for depression seems to reflect a pure top-down view of problems. He looked at two meta-analyses and two observational studies. He didn't look at the content of the actual experiments. What's the specific experimental claim being made and what are the main points of debate? Surely an area of research with that many papers on the topic should have an opinion that's more specific than simply exercise decreases depression. Perhaps the studies are flawed, but Kirkegaard didn't really examine them.
The burden of proof is on anyone claiming that a specific activity cures a specific mental illness, when we know very few activities cure anything, and that depression in particular has proven pretty intractable. Why does he need to examine the experiments when they are already, purely on their bottom-lines and the crudest statistical grounds, so shaky? Surely you would only care about any flaws in the studies if the studies wound up with strong conclusions and looked like the proved anything at all, and you needed to continue evaluating them more deeply; but they didn't even pass that bar.
Shaky? Multiple meta-analyses concluded there was a small but demonstrable effect. It's fine for him to disagree with their analysis. But the meta-analyses were pulling from dozens of studies which were likely wildly different in their goals and methods. When a meta-analysis pulls from that many different studies, those studies are very unlikely to be replications of one another. He evaluated the analyses based on the experiments pretty deeply (multiple times over several years I might add), so why not spend more than a cursory glance to figure out what the experimenters were trying to actually do? Maybe read a review paper that explains the differences between the experiments? I'm not saying he's wrong. It's just that he spent a lot of time viewing the problem from a narrow lens.
"Multiple meta-analyses" is unimpressive because they are all extremely correlated in their results because they are using the same input. 'Small' means shaky, because small effects always exist due to the systematic biases that meta-analyses generally can only pass through - and there is *very obviously* bias in the studies being meta-analyzed, just look at those funnel plots. The bias the meta-analyses show exists, which you already know exists anyway, is enough to explain why 'multiple meta-analyses concluded there was a small but demonstrable effect'. Of course they did.
You still have not explained why, given that the pooled evidence is exactly what one would expect from a much smaller or null effect, one should bother to examine the underlying studies more deeply. What do you expect to learn from reading one of those, say, d=5 datapoints? What is this broader perspective you have in mind?
No, they are not pulling from the same input. The meta-analyses have different goals, and are looking at different studies. Yes, there's some overlap, but they're not the same studies. And the individual studies are, again, very different in terms of goals, methods and measures.
Yes, studies are often biased, but that doesn't mean every small effect should be treated as no effect. Yes, the smaller studies tend to have larger effect sizes as is always the case.
I'm not saying to examine the problem more deeply. I'm saying to examine the problem differently. It was large observational analysis followed by large observational analysis followed by large observational analysis. As in read a review paper, a theory paper, an actual experiment, or a methods paper. I mean something like this:
https://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Physical%20activity,%20exercise,%20depression%20and%20anxiety%20disordrs.pdf
Which is a review paper. It's also unimpressed by the effects of exercise for depression, but gives specific recommendations on where it thinks research on this topic should proceed. It's providing necessary context to understand what's being researched.
Don't just look at the problem the same way every single time.
Since you are just repeating the same false statements (overlap *does* mean they are correlated) and still not answering why results entirely consistent with the null of small-study and other biases should make us excited about wasting time reading each result in detail, I think we are done here.
What's more, according to my high school Spanish teacher, herself a native Spaniard, the "doce uvas" tradition was entirely the result of a marketing tradition by the grape growers in order to sell more grapes.
Corroborated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Grapes: "In December of [1909], some Alicantese vine growers spread this custom to better sell huge numbers of grapes from an excellent harvest."
Fascinating. Sounds just like Valentine's Day?
What is TLP and what does it mean to channel it?
I'm not sure where you are seeing this (and ctrl-f is no help) but TLP is probably "the last psychiatrist" and channeling it is likely to be tongue-in-cheek because his most recent work (which scott reviewed) is sort of a velvet-madness incarnate, a dark, confusing edgeless thing from beyond the defined edge of definitions themselves.
2. Eating 12 grapes on New Year's is also a (rather old-fashioned) tradition in parts of Latin America. The reference to a clock in Madrid has been forgotten, as far as I can tell.
7. Outdoors corridors (surrounding a patio, or between a building and an open space; covered, and closed on one side) are surely older (though they can have been common only in clement climates). It's the indoors corridor that must have been a novelty. Note it implies that you have space to waste.
15. Here the wording strongly suggests that Galton had really proved that "genius is genetic", presumably to our standards of proof - surely that's an overstatement.
32. Looking at the map of Paris given in the article makes it clear that there is significant survivorship bias. Few buildings survive in the eastern outer arrondissements, which were the poorer ones. (NB: they may also have had some empty space, even in 1914.) Example: the 13th, on the other side of Place d'Italie, was infamous for its poor-quality housing; little of it survives now - it's now the one part of Paris with a substantial number of high rises from the 1950s-1970s (on which opinions vary).
On a different note - it's trivial to find instances in the literature of new buildings that were considered ugly in their day, and/or associated to the bad taste of a rising class, are now sought after, no?
42. How does one choose grayscale in Android? All I see is settings to adapt to different kinds of (non-total) color blindness - they all still have some color in them.
> Note it implies that you have space to waste.
I guess it implies that you have a moderate amount of space to waste; grand palaces and villas would have had many rooms emerging off grand halls rather than corridors, which is what you'd do if you had unlimited space. Diocletian's palace, for example: https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/58200/58216/58216_diocletian.htm
Corridors are very middle class. Rich people have grand halls, poor people have one-room shacks, and only in early modernity did we get people who were rich enough to have many rooms in their house but not rich enough to have an enormous palace.
Nowadays of course we have "open plan" living, because the houses we live in are optimised for looking good in a five-minute inspection rather than living in for decades.
There's some truth to this, but, again, when the weather allows, you do have outer corridors, or at least a porch that may connect to more than one room ("verandah" covers both - incidentally, it's an interesting word, in that went from Portuguese to Hindi to English).
Now, in Paris, where the price/m^2 is higher than 10k eur and local salaries are very much *not* to scale, corridors are seen as bugs rather than features - part of an architect's job is to tear down walls, and rearrange things cleverly so that a corridor is not needed.
I meant to say "... you do have outer corridors, or at least a porch, in places that are neither palaces nor grand villas".
(Incidentally, from what I read, the norm in Colonial times in the US for the non-rich was not the one-room shack, but the two-room shack, with no corridor.)
the outdoor corridors (open to the elements on one side, and covered with a roof) are generally called "galleries"
I don't know what counts as proving that genius is genetic but Galton provided strong evidence that it is heritable, by analyzing relationships among extraordinarily able members of various professions.
RE #32: I'm fascinating by how often the topic of prettiness in buildings comes up in rationalist writings, and how it seems like prettiness gets equated in a staightforward way with how 'traditional' a building is. In a similar vein, it often feels like "design" is taken to mean primarily the 'look' of the building, with relatively little discussion of how the look relates to other paramaters like cost, material availability, performance, etc...
For a community whose tenants are so rooted in modernist and enlightenment projects (and for a community so interested in city building!) the "rationalist" parallel in architectural thought seems conspicuously absent to me. Just wanted to register this observation! Maybe a topic for a longer post.
What do you mean by "the rationalist parallel in architectural thought"?
OK, forgive my clumsiness--I'm a new commentor but fairly long-time lurker.
Please bear with me as I am not attacking taste and absolutely believe people are entitled to surround themselves with things they like and that make them feel good. But—herein lies my concern, that a pretty wide domain, which lots of interesting intersections, tends to be collapsed into personal taste instead of treated like other topics.
By “rationalist” architectural thought, I mean applying the same kind of model of examining priors for cultural/historical assumptions, bias, missteps in logic, etc. to architecture. That is, people thinking about what buildings and architecture are ‘for,’ how prevailing ways of approaching this function may no longer work well/be ‘true,’ and proposing new models and solutions that better match the current understanding of the ‘purpose’ with the current landscape of technology and resources.
(this has a point, I promise)
This is essentially the logic driving the work of many architects in the early 20th century, who were struggling to reconcile new technological/scientific/social innovations (e.g. relating to domestic work, rising middle class) with the pretty rigid ideals for architecture and beauty perpetuated by the legacy elite. Specifically, they railed against the Beaux Arts schools (founded for Louis XIV, the Versailles guy, and supported by Napoleon) who were endlessly propping up the French aristocracy’s image of itself as the rightful heir of Greece and Rome and then exporting this ideal across capitals and suburbs of Europe and America. ‘Modernist’ architects saw this as a propagandistic exercise at worst and a wasteful farce at best, and inspired by the general intellectual climate of the time and its enthusiasm for scientific thinking, they believed that the whole way of approaching architecture (and city building) should be re-evaluated at first principles. And so, we developed new structural innovations, which made possible open span spaces and truly multi-story buildings, and their corresponding inventions in mechanical systems/air-conditioning, different building enclosures, etc. I feel like these architects should be heroes of rationalist thought! Or at least be examined in good faith for their legacy and how their project succeeded/failed in its ambitions.
Instead, we’re in a strange time where there’s a pretty small but vocal group of American/British architects/city ‘beautifiers’ revising this history, to set up an ahistorical ideological struggle between “traditionalists/classicists” and “modernists”, where instead of “Modernists” referring to a specific group of architects working in response to the way the world was between 1890-1960, they reconfigure ‘modernist’ as synonymous with ‘progressive,’ with all the corresponding implications of moral decay, and elitism(ironically). Meanwhile, most of the architectural field, schools, urban planners, code writers, policy makers, architectural historians/critics, professional organizations, the construction industry, engineering, and related disciplines and industries do not use these terms in this way, and instead refer to buildings by their use type or maybe the time period in which they were built/are attempting to emulate. The only other place I’ve seen the terms “traditionalist” or “modernist” used in this way is by developers, companies who make products for residential homes, HGTV, Trump (a developer) and his executive order for Classical Architecture, and NIMBY organizations—all entities who could be considered as having a “stake in the game” by influencing lay people’s definition of architecture.
This is not to speak of postmodernism and all architecture’s more recent, more literary ‘critical’ permutations. Modernist architects really believed it could be possible to reason better architecture, and they did!* Because of their innovations, so many more can afford build safe, airconditioned homes with earthquake-proof modernist steel structures, and clad them if they wish with expanded foam sculpted to evoke the Grecian aspirations of French 17th century aristocracy . And, we still can continue re-examining the purpose and best solutions for architecture, as we do in any other field.
So, there’s the basis for my confusion as to why the Rationalist community seems to have gravitated toward the second definition of ‘modernist,’ and why there is a sense of defensiveness about the way buildings look. There’s also a tendency in some of the “traditionalist” writing to use appeals to beauty (and now prettiness, I guess) that I would assume bother ‘rationalist’ sensitivities for the way it that resembles appeals to nature (as a slippery, inarguable, indefinable ‘good’).
I tend to have similar feelings about Modernist painting/art or whatever—that there’s some sense that the community’s awesome ability to keep personal perspectives, judgement and value in “play” is lost and the definition of good and bad gets kind of rigid and flattened, which is ironic to me because I feel like painting and art is literally for individuals to explore messing with judgement and value in a rhetorical space with fewer consequences.
Thank you for reading this long tome! I appreciate anyone’s thoughts.
You are regurgitating a narrative about architectural history that is not supported by the evidence, it's a whiggish just-so story based on the out of date, horrendously biased scholarship of Pevsner and other postwar architectural historians. The fact is that new technologies, materials, and functions were being incorporated into architecture long before the self-proclaimed Modernists came on the scene. Their totalitarian, nihilistic aesthetic claims were unnecessary, pointless non sequiturs based on nothing more than their own musings and baseless, potboiler social theory. Architecture, and the world's built environment, would be far better off if the Bauhaus and CIAM had never happened, and that may not be a particularly rationalist thing to say, but it's the truth.
but if something is made of a steel skeleton, why clad it in a three section parti to make it look like stone? I hate to go all ayn rand here, but why spend the money?
Perhaps we just hate ugly pragmatic buildings you mention and see ourselves as intellectual heirs of the aristocracy, and would like our environment to reflect it.
Or perhaps in the era of 3D printing and CNC the dichotomy between beautiful and inexpensive is absurd.
I mean, I think it would be helpful to talk about actual buildings, maybe. 3D printing isnt quite happening at a large building scale in any real capacity, but CNC is happening everywhere for sure. When you say ugly then, do you mean simple? As in, without ornamentation? CNC makes ornamenation cheaper, for sure, so simpleness no longer should be equated with thrift and utility, and ornamentation no longer needs to be equated with waste. But, then, how about David Adjaye's African American History Museum at the Smithsonian? This building has a CNC cut (I think) steel cladding/rainskin that is quite ornate. It is not aggressively simple and does not attempt to say "less is more,"--if anything it would suggest that statement is needlessly reductive. But, is it 'traditional'? Is it 'ugly'?
I think I see what you're getting at. The rationalist taste in architecture /does/ seem strangely regressive compared to rationalist community's other projects, which by comparison seem highly theoretical and speculative. How do rationalists square a preference for 19th century civic buildings on the one hand, and experimental model cities on the other?
As a non-rationalist lurker and outside observer, I think the answer lies in the dichotomy between the empirical and the theoretical. The rationalist community /seems/ equally obsessed with both. When I read my way through the 'rat-sphere' I see lots statistical analysis /and/ lots of theorizing. So why aren't rationalists excited by the theoretical ideas of 20c architecture and contemporary architecture? For the same reason that rationalists seem, on the whole, unimpressed by Marxism - the data is in and the theory doesn't work. Data trumps theory - as an outside observer this seems to me pretty close to The Iron Law (tm) of the rationalist project.
Some of the replies below mention the various studies that show that people overwhelmingly prefer so-called 'traditionalist' architecture. Does architecture exist to cater to people's preferences? Maybe, maybe not. But failure to align with the users preferences isn't the only data that the theoretical excesses of modernist (and later) architecture were practical failures. Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" makes a strong case that older architectural styles and older building methods lead to buildings that are more culturally and economically viable in the long term, due to their ability to be cheaply adapted to new uses. "How Buildings Learn" is the best fit, in my mind, for how I think rationalists think about architecture. As opposed to Le Corbusier's "Ville Radieuse" which is speculative in the same way that model cities /seem/ to be, except that the the data is in on Le Corbusier and he flopped.
Is it because people seek a rational definition of beauty, or because creating ugly buildings is an irrational act?
what makes something ugly?
In the case of buildings? Incompetent architects usually.
Where does their incompetency lie?
Making buildings that people actively dislike looking at.
I like looking at a lot of buildings of different styles! Am I wrong? or brainwashed?
You're just doing the same thing you're accusing rationalists of, in that something must be good because its modern.
Surveys suggest that most people prefer the look of traditional buildings to modern ones: https://www.dezeen.com/2009/10/16/people-prefer-traditionally-designed-buildings-yougov/
It's reasonable to use this as the basis for what is 'better' because the reason the look of buildings (and therefore cities) is so important is because of the impact it has on a plurality of people. Being surrounded by buildings you think look nice makes you feel better than being around ones that you don't.
I have no idea what it could mean to think that it's 'rational' to prefer the look of modern buildings.
I did not mean to imply something was better because it was modern. I would say the terms traditional and modern have been invented by someone with an agenda that I'm suspicious of. I also would argue with your definition of defining "betterness," because the look of buildings is really just a small part of what they are designed for---the primary is being cost and ROI. Everyone is building as cheaply as they can get away with. Emulating the look of historic buildings in todays material, zoning, and skill environment likely costs more which often leads to "watered down" version of traditional buildings, which can end up looking worse than so called 'modern' buildings.
I've read what Hughes (and others with similar sympathies) have written, and I don't think there's any suspicious agenda there. I'd summarise the movement this way (deliberately avoiding the term 'modern'):
Hughes and the like don't share architects' taste in buildings.
Studies have repeatedly shown that the public don't share architects' taste in buildings either. In fact, their taste usually comes out as diametrically opposite: the buildings most liked in popular taste are the ones most disliked in architects' taste, and vice versa.
This wasn't always the case; there's good historical evidence that architects used to design buildings in sympathy with public tastes, but the architectural profession has changed strongly in its taste, since roughly a century back.
The theoretical justifications for architects' taste are not robust; they are easily criticised from both historical and modern practical perspectives.
Hughes and the rest of the movement think architects really are mistaken, and are making poor design decisions based on their own odd taste in buildings; and that these design decisions could be made otherwise in ways that would still be practical but would also popular.
I think they have a strong case, myself.
I don't really read about architecture but it seems like these discussions are often conflating multiple senses of the word, capital-M Modernist and generic "modern."
-Mabuse upthread, for instance, seems to be talking about Modernism in the way I think about Mid-Centure Modernism -- Fallingwater and the like, which I absolutely find attractive.
- The 2 "modern" buildings in the study you cite are called "contemporary" in the press release, which seems significantly different. I like Frank Lloyd Wright stuff but hate Gehry stuff: https://adamarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/YouGov-survey_Oct09_resultsfollowup.pdf. #4 there is ugly as all hell but I don't think that's an indictment of Fallingwater.
yes I would definitely agree with this, and its what I was trying to convey in my first response to Scott. The first step of making this conversation more nuanced is to accept that there are two definitions of Modernism, and people are using them towards different arguments. If we can concede this, then we can actually start to talk about different ideas in architecture (and whether they are bad or not, and whether bauhaus should never have existed (as Mabuse7 asserts), and what it means for something to be bad architecture) I am not a huge fan of the look of lots of gehry's work myself because they seem cartoonish to me. But I appreciate the engineering problems these buildings solve and I'm excited by their ingenuity. And they make sense to me as an extension of the early buildings Gehry was creating, as well as the context he comes from (Los Angeles! Possibly the strangest architectural fantasy situation). And these conversations are exciting! and interesting! and they affect us everyday of our lives, cause we live in buildings! So I just want to be able to have a conversation about them without them being shut down prematurely in conversations about taste and beauty, as if those things werent open to be discussed either.
If you actually read the link it discusses how odd it is from a "progress studies" perspective that negative progress could be made over time.
Isn't progress a bit of a political and subjective thing? Its easy to call something progress and something regression--I mean, its a tactic many politicians have used so many times. I personally think that many of the innovations in architecture--such as a glass curtain wall, CNC, BIM, etc, are amazing progress. They make buildings cheaper, safer, healthier for people, better performing, easier on energy/water/material resources, faster to make, etc... all of these things are more important to me than what historical references a building makes. I would rather a building addresses these questions, which are measurable and quantifiable, than de-prioritize them for the sake of 'looking like' what a person thinks a building should look like. Besides, "traditional" buildings look like they did, because that was the best most efficient way to perform at the time. Not because a grecian temple sprung into someones mind as the penultimate symbol of knowledge. All of the things we associate with 'traditional' buildings were linked to the best function available to people through trial and error. So,it seems strange to me to "arrest" the look of buildings forever, based on how they looked in some arbitrary point in history.
Because when people build 'traditional'-looking buildings now, they do not build them in the same way that they did when that building style was invented. They have insulation and electricity and plumbing and all matter of progress. Then, they put a sticker on the outside to give it the look of a 'traditional' building. Why? and why is that beautiful? Can we not also examine the concept of beauty as something that can be picked apart and analysed from a rationalist perspective? Why does beauty get a free, unchecked pass?
I was encouraging someone to read what the "progress studies" guy had to say about this specific issue. The question whether "progress" is subjective is a much bigger one for which relevant readings would be much earlier in that site's history.
35. Did not know about the old cochran paper on the topic. Not surprised. IF the gay germ hypothesis turns out to be correct I will eat a 10pt printed copy of West Hunter
40. Yup, China & India actually. India's per cap income is now like $2k, so $6-$7 a day - a big tranche of the indian population is pushing up that median too.
I'm pretty skeptical of the gay germ thing too, but the MS thing has updated me slightly in favor. I wonder what Cochran thinks of the rise in transgender; it seems to have the same dynamics as homosexuality (non-genetic but seemingly fixed condition that decreases the chance of reproduction) - would he have to argue it's also caused by pathogens? The same one? A different one? If transgender can happen for social/psychological reasons, seems like homosexuality could too.
Yea, agreed. I mean there is probably a nuanced point for Cochran to make here that the recent rise in trans (and even LGBTQ broadly) can be attributed to mimetic proliferation/contagion (pick your framing) and not germs since for whatever reason the social capital equation has shifted such that it is all the sudden a positive social capital move to be trans/LGBTQ. The unusually high levels of voluntary castration in the ancient Chinese dynasties was a consequence of the power afforded to eunuchs, not a rise in gender dysphoria (same for celibate priests, etc). Cochran would probably suggest that the persistence of homosexuality (and possibly trans too) at low but significant rates throughout history, in spite of the often massively negative social capital associated with the trait, is a different phenomena than the recent social crowning of LGBTQ.
Actually, Cochran would probably just say "Wrong." and not elaborate.
Cochran has compared them to the skoptsys of Russia & cathars of France.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/skoptsys/
Scott, Cochran is a broken clock on "everything is caused by pathogens". Your post makes it sound like he deserves a bunch of credit, but of course, he is merely citing a 1998 paper (not by Cochran) saying maybe MS is caused by EBV, and jumping on that due to his prior that everything is caused by pathogens. "20 year gap between Cochran and everyone else" is pretty misleading.
Yeah a quick pubmed search of “Epstein Barr virus” and “multiple sclerosis” brings up 850+ articles, going back almost 50 years. Two from The Lancet in 1979 and 1981.
This wasn’t some outsider hypothesis. The association has been known since the 1970s and was frankly widely recognized. Proving it hasn’t been for lack of trying. And it certainly didn’t need any input from someone like Cochran. It’s wild to give him credit for anything here, which I agree is what the comment sounds to me like it’s doing.
Cochran does not go around proclaiming "everything is caused by pathogens". Gay germs is simply a hypothesis. He admits this and says there is limited evidence in its favor.
Rather than saying "everything" he has some guidelines for that being likely. If it significantly reduces fitness, has a frequency rate above 1%, and isn't new, then you'd expect selection to have removed it long ago and thus more likely a pathogen than genes. However, he previously suggested schizophrenia was caused by a pathogen and now acknowledges it appears to be genetic.
Where does he say that?
What does "genetic" even mean? Leprosy has a identical twin concordance of 75%, higher than almost anything. Leprosy is genetic. When he "admits" that schizophrenia is genetic, are you sure he's actually retracting the infectious theory? Of course it's heritable, we've always known that.
He now compares it to having sufficiently low-IQ to be considered mentally retarded. I expressed some skepticism of that and said I thought it seemed more like an acute condition causing retardation rather than "naturally" having it through many alleles of small effect, but he informed me that's what the evidence supported.
The interesting thing is that there has been a big increase in people identifying as LGBT, but not really as gay specifically (even though gay men were more harshly persecuted than lesbians or bisexual women). So homosexuality among males might reflect something more hard-wired/biological.
I'm agnostic about Gay Germ, but the hard thing it seeks to explain is exclusive homosexuality (as understood biologically, not necessarily socially): a seemingly deep-rooted and lifelong lack of sexual interest in the opposite sex, yet a full sexual appetite for the same sex, that is extremely maladaptive. It's also interesting that this sort of homosexuality was probably more maladaptive in the ancestral environment for men than for women, yet the female equivalent appears to be far less common, if it exists at all.
There's no arguing that people engage in specific maladaptive behaviors all the time, like self-castration. Or for that matter, using birth control. But ordinarily they're in service of other things that at times have been adaptive, like securing resources or boosting one's status or having a sense of belonging to a community. That last one probably has something to do with why a huge percentage of Gen Z identifies as LGBT, but I don't think it does much to explain a very large lifelong preference for the same sex.
Birth control is relatively novel. Pinker once quipped that if it grew on trees we would have an instinctive aversion to it like snakes.
Ha, yeah, I can see that. But the idea "I do not want to produce children at the biological maximum" is not novel, premodern peoples very often did not produce anywhere near the biological maximum. This often served an adaptive function: why go through the costs of bearing a child that you can't feed?
Modern birth control simply hijacks this thought process and vastly reduces the costs of pursuing it, even as modernity has largely eliminated the problem of not being able to feed and care for more children.
When I first read the phrase "biological maximum" I thought you meant that Malthusian carrying capacity. I should note that even aside from behavioural adaptations, malnutrition reduces fertility & increases the child mortality rate.
> You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption
What a strange take. It's not about forbidding this money to be spent at all, it's about making sure the power to control this spending is not in their hands, but in the hands of somebody ostensibly democratically elected and accountable. The money is not burned
Have you read the article at all?
Scott Sumner argues that in order to tax the rich, you need to actually tax yachts etc.
He says that some politicians profess to want to tax rich people but then shy away from taxing yachts because that might cost jobs in the yacht building, or other excuses.
Scott Sumner is arguing for more of a tax burden on rich people. Your choice of words, like trickle down economics, suggests to me that you made up your mind before reading?
He’s using tax burden in a very technical and specific sense here. The burden lies with whoever ultimately decreases their consumption to pay the tax. If that doesn’t happen then the taxes entity is just passing on the burden to someone else.
Please see my reply to the parallel thread https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february/comment/5210638 . But still, okay we call it a "burden", but it doesn't actually mean taxes are intended as punishment and their sole goal is to decrease someone's consumption.
“Tax burden” is kinda just what the term is called. Maybe that’s nefarious on the part of economists? Shrug.
The entity truly paying the tax is the one whose consumption has changed. That’s the assertion. You can layer that into whatever value system you want. In your case you have strong opinions about taxation and democracy. Fine. The way you measure if the tax actually affects someone or not is by analyzing its effects on consumption.
How else would you suggest one analyze whether a tax is “effective”?
as long as we stick to “good vs bad uses of money” instead of “our control vs not our control”, we are not going to arrive at a sober tax policy
being able to exercise control is not a value, it is a prerequisite to be in a position to be able to act on your values
A tax is to raise money. The person who (ultimately) pays the money has the 'burden' of the tax.
His point is that if the tax doesn't affect their material standard of living, then they effectively haven't experienced any kind of tax burden. You're not taking money away from the rich people, you're taking it away from the things/people the money otherwise would have been spent on. You can debate if this is better or worse than the government spending the money on stuff, but that's besides this precise point.
I don't get it. What does the material standard of living has to do with it? Taxes are not some kind of a punishment, they are a means to change who controls this money. It's exactly their point to insure that it's not personally Gates and Buffett who decides who gets this money as wages. These money will still reach somebody, and saying that they are "taken away" from "very poor African’s" is missing the point. The taxes are legitimised for us as a way for us to control spending, and the point is that (in this utopian world of our control) we can decide which poor people will receive this money.
The point is that you're diverting resources away from investment, charity etc. and not consumption spending. Again, you may think this is a good thing, but if you're advocating more taxes on the rich you need to be aware that this is what is happening and I would argue that the vast majority of people advocating for 'taxes on the rich' aren't aware of this, and think in terms of 'well now he has to do with buying one less yacht...'
I remember when Bezos got divorced and his ex-wife announced a charity, I saw enough sober takes that were quite clear that it’s far from a “amazing thing” because no matter how good her intentions are, she still exercises a lot of power over socially-produced wealth. Even if I accept the existence of this vast majority of people, the argument about “yachts vs sick puppies” is misleading; as long as we stick to “good vs bad uses of money” instead of “our control vs not our control”, we are not going to arrive at a sober tax policy
Who is "our"? I am not under the illusion that I am part of the "us" that gets to decide how taxes are spent.
if you have neither hope in possibility to influence the governmental decision-making, nor any desire to acquire such possibility, it is definitely a sensible logical conclusion for you to insist over having 100% personal control of all of the resources you can get under that control. in this case it's not really clear what kind of tax policy you'd want to discuss over than a no-tax policy
I'd rather leave that money in control of Bezos or his ex-wife, than give it to the government to spend on Predator drones and surveillance.
Once the government spending gets even remotely aligned with the needs of taxpayers, we can start discussing tax policy. Currently, a more moral thing to discuss is methods of tax evasion.
it’s not really a question of waiting for this alignment to happen, you know what i’m saying? it’s not like there’s a cheat code when you vote in some particular way and suddenly it works. and it’s definitely not like letting Bezoses of the world have more control is something that will help other, less rich taxpayers somehow control governmental spending more. i’d say it’s the opposite
As an aside, do you think ALL resources should be allocated by "democratically elected and accountable" people? If so, then have fun with your communist dystopia. If not, then where do you draw the line?
I think some of the resources, notably ones that are needed for the public goods , have to be allocated and controlled in some way that allows for accountability before the people; and I think that is the point of taxes. I don’t find this take weird or communist
Some of the resources *are* allocated in a way that (modulo the inscrutability of government bureaucracy) allows for accountability before the people. Quite a lot of them, actually. So if someone doesn't even nod in the direction of a cost-benefit argument re shifting a marginal dollar from the private to the public sphere before saying something along the lines of "want exists, inequality exists, therefore we should raise taxes on the rich", that looks like an argument for allocating basically all resources to the state save for a standardized basic ration.
In which case, yeah, communist dystopia.
I don't understand, sorry. There's X dollars in somebody's coffer (call him "B"). There's a mechanism that allows them to be spent in some way that is (ultimately, at the limit, with caveats) decided by some kind of a general consensus (say, an elected government, or even decision markets a-la Hanson). One says: the efficiency of this decision mechanism might be lower than just letting B decide. The public decision mechanism gets T*X utility, B's decisions get B*X utility. One gives an example where B*X is some good, obvious utility. A poor person is fed, a sick puppy is cured. In no way does this imply that B*X is larger that T*X. It only implies that B*X is more than zero.
And that is all I'm saying, by the way. I'm not saying that necessarily T*X > B*X, I'm just saying that that particular implication is meaningless and misleading.
One important premise of tax policy is that it's clear that individuals (and other entities) are good at having enough local knowledge to make good local money decisions (Hayek-style), but they lack motivation for some of the global money decisions. From this the question follows: what kind of percentage of funds should be decided about locally, so that the rest can be somehow managed globally? This scheme can be complicated in a variety of ways but I find the general gist here.
Well, you have trouble right out of the gate if you start from the assumption that there's a "should" label we can slap on the percentage of B's income. Most people interpret "should" in the sense of "deserve", and deserve has nothing to do with it unless we *are* trying to impose some moral failing on B for having acquired so much income.
There is no justice to be had here; only consequences. If you tax B more, you *will* cause B to invest less, whether you think B ought to consume less or not.
If you're trying to convey "should" in the sense of some allotment of B's wealth between B and T such that B manages his slice and T manages its slice and overall we get the maximum utility, then you win some cred for acknowledging B wants to improve society, but that argument still mistakenly assumes that utility in B's terms is the same as utility in T's. It should be easy to notice that B and T will have different goals, and therefore different utility functions. If they had the same function, then T would have no problem letting B spend his income as he wishes. Even if T had information B didn't, it would be easy for T to share that information with B and let B spend as above. If that information can't be shared for some reason, then T could still persuade B that they share utility and let B "spend" whatever portion of his income on T that B wishes. At no point is there a percentage that T "should" levy on B, over B's objections, if they shared utility function. So we're only looking at the case where they don't, but if they don't, then there's no shared function to maximize by definition.
Moreover, if you notice that any tax office (T) is distinct from the people in its domain (P), then it shouldn't be hard to see how T and P will have different goals, and thus utility functions, as well. Whatever T levied on B, would not necessarily make P better off.
If you want to try to argue that T's (or P's) utility function is somehow "better" than B's, and therefore B should hand over some cash, it should be trivial to notice that B's simply going to disagree, and rearrange his investment in response. Which puts us where Sumner's argument is.
It should be noted there are ways other than taxes to fund public goods: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/01/dominant-assurance-contracts-and-quadratic-funding.html
this is interesting, thank you. one thing that is not immediately clear to me is how such an approach can address the differences in income/capital of each individual
my gut - which i’m prepared not to trust - tells me that 1. there might be economic mechanisms constantly discoverable to lower the necessary percentage of centralized(-ish) spending, which however will never approach absolute zero without sacrificing some very valuable public goods. 2. a lot of those mechanisms will have side-effects and “bugs” and deteriorate requiring maintenance and replacement only possible through coercive action
I can't say as much about quadratic funding, but regarding Tabarrok's dominant assurance contracts I don't see how differences in income/capital are relevant. The point of the contract is to get around the free-rider problem for public goods funding. Nobody wants to pay for it because they're relying on everyone else paying for it, thus it doesn't get paid for and everyone is worse off. With a regular assurance contract, you get your money back if the funding goal isn't met (there are now multiple sites supporting this model, though I should note that Tabarrok's version has people merely pledging to donate so there's nothing to return if it doesn't go through). It's thus in your interest to fund it if the public good is worth more to you than the amount you're donating (making it efficient). If you don't have any money to fund it with, then you don't, but since it's a public good you get the benefit anyway. With a dominant assurance contract donors get paid extra if the funding goal isn't met, which makes pledging a no-lose (dominant) option for everyone who would benefit from the public good and can help fund it. Yes, people who can't donate won't get the bonus if it's not funded, but the point is to ensure that the goal is met and the public good is funded.
so it would require some kind of external funding? allocated and produced in what way?
Burning money would actually be fine.
As asking people to pay their taxes in physical paper notes and then setting those on fire.
The idea that scientific American "suddenly" became a bunch of woke extremists is false. Way back in 2013, they were already literally advocating for politically incorrect scientific research be banned. In America.
This is soviet-level censorship being proposed long before the word 'woke' was even a thing.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/should-research-on-race-and-iq-be-banned/
#31 National Dress: Many of the men look really cool, but USA is superman and looks very silly. see #37 (https://www.boredpanda.com/mister-global-2019-national-costume/)
Agreed US didn't come off looking great there. Why not a cowboy?
I can only guess, but I think the elephant in the room is Native Americans - if you do Native American people will complain about appropriation (unless the model happens to be NA), but if you don't do Native American you'll get complains that you're excluding that part of history.
My guess is that they intentionally went "non-historical" to try to bypass the whole issue - they were hoping to invoke the more universal 'American ideals' embodied by Superman rather than a specific historical period that might get bogged down in complaints of racism.
(Still probably either Cowboy or 'Hamilton-esque' costume would have done better)
Yes, Retsam makes a good point about Native Americans. In the USA, there are a lot of white people with 0 - 1% Native American ancestry and see themselves as culturally different. Whereas, in in many countries in South America, it is maybe okay for people to wear the native dress because people are at least somewhat mixed heritage usually? Maybe? I don't know what the politics of a white Mexican or white Peruvian wearing the traditional dress would be. The American isn't white but he doesn't really look Native American, I would say, so that puts him in a weird position I suppose. Would it be culturally appropriate or feel fitting for a non-white/non-hispanic to wear a cowboy outfit? It's tricky I suppose.
Weren't many cowboys black anyway?
It's a shame that the old melting pot idea seems to be no longer current. The idea of a cowboy is very American, even if the actual historic incarnations were obviously of some specific subgroups of people.
I suspect this is the reason (and of course both “Cowboy” and “Hamilton-esque” would get tagged as symbols of white supremacy).
The thing is, every single one of those costumes is probably some sort of stereotypical, appropriated, simplified, out of context, sacrilegious or whatever. The difference is the other countries don’t care - it looks cool, it’s for a silly fun beauty contest, have at it. But the US entry is absolutely going to be scrutinized by woke scolds, and the poor model will be the main character on Twitter for a day for even a slight misstep, and so must be as inoffensive as possible.
The woke world is less fun, because having fun distracts from being ideologically pure and is thus always held in suspicion.
EDIT: and in the comments over there, even the Superman outfit is getting accused of appropriation since the original artist was Canadian. The real problem seems to be that it’s a crappy costume, literally looks off-the-rack from a cheap Halloween store, and the model looks bad in it.
I was hoping that Australia would have an entry with one of those hats with the corks, a string vest, shorts and a can of fizzy lager. Oh well.
If I were the Australian contestant I'd just go with a pair of red Speedos and a lifesaver's cap. Maybe some zinc cream on the face.
Silly indeed, but better than the Swiss guy.
That '31% of British people have met/seen Queen Elizabeth' sounds pretty reasonable to me.
I am a normalish, middle class, middle aged, English bloke and I have seen (in person) Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Prince Andrew, Lady Sarah Ferguson, Prince Philip (to speak to), and Queen Elizabeth. They get around quite a bit.
I have seen more royals than I have seen either cabinet ministers or ABC-list celebs, which is a bit odd from a purely Bayesian perspective as there are far more of the latter than the former.
In order for the Queen to have appeared to 31% of the British population during her seventy-year reign she'd have to appear to eight hundred new people a day (actually more, because she's outlived most people who saw her early in her reign). It's a lot, but doesn't sound the least bit implausible for someone whose day job is travelling around making public appearances.
Something that struck me when looking at the Sensitivity Readers link was the similarity to bioethicists: the need to say things that border on the deranged, because if they didn't, there would be little need for them at all.
When I peer review a paper, I feel obliged to find _something_ to criticise, just to prove that I've actually read it. I imagine "sensitivity readers" are subject to the same incentives, but more so.
I do a reasonable amount of peer review and don't find this at all. Firstly, most of the time I review, the other reviewers don't bother doing that ("This is a good paper and I recommend acceptance," or something to that effect, is way too common, to the point where I am not sure they did more than scan the text briefly), so I think you are in the minority. Second, it's rare to find a paper which can't be improved, because nobody's perfect. I try to make improving the paper the goal when I do peer review, but if I ever did find a perfect paper, I'd say so, and try and point out some of the bits I found particularly good. I have reviewed some where the only comments I could make were minor clarifications and typoes. I like those ones :)
I’m still working my way through the links, but I think #34 is misinterpreting 1984. The Principles of Newspeak is, to me, pretty clearly a excerpt from The Book - the phony compendium of history and philosophy that O’Brien uses as a stage prop in his efforts to make Winston believe in the existence of The Brotherhood, and thus rebel from the Party.
The genius of the Book is that, while it’s entirely fake in the sense that it does not truly act as a center of gravity for resistance to the Party, it IS true and accurate in its recitation of the history of Oceania and it’s analysis of Newspeak and the philosophy of Ingsoc. It’s supposed to make your head spin and give you Winston’s feeling of being unmoored. It’s part of the tragedy of 1984.
I think they covered most of these objections in the thread. It doesn't read as something written in their time, for example it talks about the 11th edition of the dictionary while saying that in 1984 only the 10th had come out. Winston is also mentioned by name.
I'm with you on that one. I'm less optimistic about the short timeframe for the fall of the party system: It is the nature of Newspeak, that it doesn't evolve. It is designed that way. Therefore it is plausible, that for a long time after the final 11th edition, the party rules without new editions of the Newspeak dictionary being released.
EDIT: On further reading, I think that the interpretation in the link is a valid one, but not the only plausible one. I disagree, that the essay is part of the Book, as Lasagna writes, but it could well just be Orwell himself talking to his reader and the past tense a choice to further the feeling, that the things in the book happened sometime.
re: 26 -- you're missing the main article in favor of Cook's research, which is Brad Delong's: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/have-harald-uhlig-and-company-read?utm_source=url . Roughly Delong's argument is "the paper already contains alternate specifications the critiques don't apply to, and they show the same results"
Thanks, I've added that into the post.
Thanks! :)
Unsurprisingly, Delong is wrong.
For Table 6, putting in a dummy for "year <= 1899" doesn't mean the regression doesn't gain identifying variation from the 1899 -> 1900 decline. That's..... not how within transformations work.
For Table 7, the state level data is clearly a mess. E.g. in column 6 (the one he focuses on) we have 23 years of data and 147 observations from 49 states. So the average state appears 3 years out of 23. Ooft. Gonna be an utter mess.
To clarify the Wordle thing:
The NYT made two changes to Wordle. The first was removing certain swearwords (such as "whore") from the words you're allowed to guess. The second was removing a handful of words from the *answer* list, including words which are too obscure and words which are potentially controversial - slave, fibre, lynch, agora, pupal, and wench. (I leave it to the reader to decide which were removed for which reason.)
However, what they didn't realise is that Wordle's word lists don't overlap - by removing "fibre" and "slave" from the "answers" list but failing to add it to the "non-answer valid words" list, they made them impossible to guess period. I think it's pretty embarrassing that they haven't fixed this (I just checked and it's still the case as I write this - try guessing "fibre"!)
I will admit in principle it might make sense to remove even the most mildly controversial words from the answer list, especially if you're pruning it anyway (and it probably did need to be pruned, "agora" is absurdly obscure). I'm less OK with removing the ability to guess swear words like "whore" or "bitch" on purpose, especially given the choices were rather random, but it's not surprising I guess.
Huh, I hadn't heard that and it makes sense. Any source?
There's literally the source. You can read the source code from before and after the NYT transition by using the Wayback Machine. The word lists are right there and have always been sent to the browser.
I agree with their basic assessment because I diff'd the before/after answer lists a few days ago, although I didn't bother checking whether the guessable-words list had changed.
The other effect is that the answers are now out of sync -- if you had a copy of Wordle saved off, the NYT answers are now a day or two "ahead", and will fall farther out of sync periodically. *Very* sloppy.
Do you have a link to this, for those of us who have no idea what's wrong with "fibre" or "pupal"? I am guessing "agora" is banned because this is where slaves were sold, but I realize I might be wrong.
Fibre is a misspelling if you're American. And pupal looks like a misspelling of pupil if you don't know what pupal means.
OK, I can see banning the British spelling. But you'd have to ban a lot of words if you banned everything that could be a misspelling of something else - are you sure that was their reason?
I'm speculating, but what sets pupal apart is that it's an obscure word that looks like a misspelling of a non-obscure word.
Of the people I know who played wordle before the NYT takeover, approximately none would have found "agora" obscure.
Maybe the NYT - home of what's supposedly a really hard crossword on weekends - might want to consider that wordle previously appealed to people who did NYT crosswords, rather than to people who knew almost all the words in their sixth grade reader.
But OTOH, it might be racist or "white" not to make the english language wordle accessible to immigrants who began learning English in adulthood.
I'm not a native English speaker, but I knew about agora - as in the agora in Athens and other city-states of ancient Greece - ever since attending public high school. Just as I knew agoraphobic as the opposite of claustrophobic.
It's only from reading the comments today that I learned that slave traders also picked that same word to denote the area where they conducted business. Well, some slave traders at least - I'm quite sure that Arabic or Turkish slave traders were not using that particular word, and I'm not sure what words the sub-Saharan African slave traders used.
In light of that, I seriously doubt that agora was removed due to being "obscure". It looks more as a demonstration of power, where the fact a word was used by some slave traders trumps its cultural heritage from antiquity's most prominent European civilization. Being stuck in such a worldview would give me claustrophobia, not agoraphobia.
I'm just cynical enough to wonder whether any appreciable number of slave traders ever did use the term "agora", particularly as referring to slave trading areas in particular. (Parading one's classical education by using "agora" for any outdoor market is a different story.)
I've only heard that in this thread, and "some rando on the internet said it" isn't especially good evidence. After all, by that logic, niggardly comes from the word "negro" and refers to the long entrenched stereotype of black people being miserly. (sic).
No. I think the etymology goes back to Old Norse and has no relationship to ‘negro’ or it’s cognates. If you challenge this I can pull the proper volume of the OED down but that’s more work than I have time for at the moment.
Edit
Okay I couldn’t leave it alone. OED says of obscure origin. No connection to negro though. I was recalling George Will once saying it was from Old Norse.
Sorry, I was just using this as a handy example of nonsense people sometimes state as "facts". I didn't intend for anyone to think it was true.
For the record, AFAIK, there's also no such stereotype for black people - that one's applied to Jews.
I probably didn’t read your comment carefully enough.
The NYT *also* makes really easy crosswords on Monday, and realizes that they want Wordle to appeal to them too. It's no fun to play Wordle and end up seeing a sequence of five letters as the answer that's not a word you've ever heard. If there are 2000 something possible answer words they still have left, they're doing fine.
Dang, you may be the most highly skilled curator I've ever read. The ratio of (I want to read this ∩ I wasn't aware of this) / (total links curated) is just very high for me. Thank you!
Thank you!
#4 is great and more evidence that age of consent should not exceed 16 (18 is quite unusual in global terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent#/media/File:Age_of_Consent_-_Global.svg)
Let's add "age of consent" to the list of things not to bring up except when absolutely necessary.
You still worried about being cancelled?
There's also a certain ratio of heat to light in certain types of discussions, that makes them worth avoiding. If you know how the debate goes every single time, then it's better to just get people to avoid it unless they're absolutely sure that *this* time something new will be said that makes the flame war worth it.
I get uneasy talking about AOC but I know that my discomfort is coming is coming from my particular cultural socialization, which is of course specific to a particular time and place.
I had made a remark in an earlier thread about not being able to bring myself to read ‘Lolita’ but if I allow myself to take a step back I can see my discomfort is pretty irrational.
https://www.theonion.com/man-knows-unsettling-amount-about-nationwide-age-of-con-1819565878
Calls to mind “The Alman Brothers” and their laminated ‘age of consent by state’ cheat sheet that they brought on tour. Now I’m back to feeling uneasy about this.
I agree bringing this up unnecessarily and in a low effort way is probably not a good way to allocate weirdness points or generate more light than heat. Sorry.
18 seems to be unusual in the United States, too. Looking at the equivalent wikipedia page for the country, 31 states have 16 as the age of consent, 6 states have 17, and 13 states have 18. 18 is the age for transporting people across state lines or using the US postal service to have sex. 16 is the age of consent on military installations, allowing for as low as 12 as long as you're married.
Using the US postal service to have sex? This gives a new meaning to "play by mail."
"If you were planning on seducing that youngun by mail, ya might just want to letter alone."
Also, there has to be a Swiftie in there somewhere.
37: On isochronic maps, see these maps of travel time from New York City to the interior of the country in 1800, 1830, 1857, and 1930 (that last, by rail or air). This country used to be an impassable wilderness. https://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas/138/a/
Also, see this nifty isochrone generator: https://traveltime.com/blog/free-isochrone-map-generator
I've read that, before they built the rail connection, the fastest way to get from Kansas City to the west coast was by sailing all the way around South America.
On kids and extracurriculars, just go with gut instinct. Ignore studies. Look to parents with a kid of similar age and abilities, from a family of similar values, for advice. But ignore even that if it makes no sense. Try different things, see what they enjoy. If they reject something you think they ought to give another shot to, then wait a while and present it using different material, maybe in a different environment. And keep them away from screens until they're 7 or so, or they'll only show interest in screens. After that, keep screens rare. This must be hard nowadays as many schools rely on kids using screens.
On another topic you had : Why are Americans suddenly interested in caste? It is pretty bizarre. I'm tired of identity politics. Disappointed to see this blog get into this "new" branch of it, as well.
>On kids and extracurriculars, just go with gut instinct. Ignore studies. Look to parents with a kid of similar age and abilities, from a family of similar values, for advice.
So, ignore data, use anecdotes. Got it.
If you want to say get kids to do what they enjoy doing, fine. But the point is whether or not it improves academic ability. The data suggests no.
>Why are Americans suddenly interested in caste? It is pretty bizarre. I'm tired of identity politics. Disappointed to see this blog get into this "new" branch of it, as well.
Identity politics is the most politically salient issue of the modern age. Ignoring it makes no sense. To do so is to stick your head in the sand.
I think studies in some areas are bogus. Too many factors, too many unknowns, unknown unknowns.
Anecdotes from similar kids you find in your circles, far more applicable to your kids.
Identity politics == boring.
>>On kids and extracurriculars, just go with gut instinct. Ignore studies. Look to parents with a kid of similar age and abilities, from a family of similar values, for advice.
>So, ignore data, use anecdotes. Got it.
Or perhaps, ignore the two-bit analyses in social-science papers that apply gross statistical oversimplifications to an array of complex interrelated inputs, before concluding with "data says". The kind by which an alien will arrive to the assessment that the average human adult has one boob and one testicle, p = 0.0000001.
Rather follow - to use Highbrow Scientific Terms - the precepts of Machine Learning, which gladly exchange legibility for error-minimization on predictions.
The concept of ML is to absorb a "training dataset", and use it to repeatedly rearrange a messy and *quite illegible* network of weights, until it comes to acceptably match the training dataset's inputs to their known outputs. Whereas there's lots of individual parameters on the input side, and many aspects of outcomes on the output side, *for each digested case*. Once you've done that, you may use this *illegible but trained* network to see what it predicts as outputs for some other arbitrary inputs.
***
ML is also known to us under the much older names of "gut instinct", "intuition" etc. It is the same in shape if not in internal implementation details. It is the "don't ask me to explain why I say X123 for the case C123, but I'm quite sure it will be like this, from experience". The said experience having consisted of observing outcomes X1..X122 for cases C1..C122, whereas neither of those 122 cases are exactly equal to C123, since there's a ton of parameters involved, but their dynamic range covers the general area where C123 lies.
And if someone forces you to explain your X123 intuition, you can *try* to, but that verbalized, "legible" explanation - largely a rationalization - will be quite crude and missing out a lot of things that you don't quite know how to express. By doing all that you'll often arrive to a somewhat different "legible" conclusion, which I'll call L123. And every difference between X123 and L123, every bit of the intuited answer that you were not able to express in a "verbal and legible" manner, will then by default be proclaimed "irrational" -- *even if X123 later comes way closer to actual reality than L123*.
That's the root of the "metis vs. epistemic knowledge" contrast: things optimized for actually working vs. things optimized for legibility.
Maintaining legibility is interesting to those who like to argue among themselves, or who wish to be proven right "on paper" while also believing that the said paper is of consequence. In contrast, intuition (i.e. error-minimization on predictions involving many input parameters and many outputs), is interesting to those who care about results. Intelligence is the art of navigating legible rationalizations. Wisdom is the art of consolidating intuitions over the long term.
So I agree with Deepa - prefer metis to epistemic knowledge on matters like these.
Rather "go with gut instinct. Ignore studies. Look to parents with a kid of similar age and abilities, from a family of similar values, for advice." Rather train your intuition on an empirically-verified training set taken from those in your local environment, similar in many aspects and different in particular important details. Add in what your parents or grandparents think. Then use this trained network (i.e. intuition) by taking your kids as they are, and differently tweaking those elements that are possible to tweak, to predict the corresponding outputs and thus assess what approach might work out best *for them specifically*.
You shouldn't be surprised that there will be some error in the prediction. That's normal, and do reevaluate when you notice it, as that error is basically additional input. It should still be quite less than the error that would result had you instead applied the lessons from a two-bit analysis of "data not anecdote" in some social-sciences paper, which used huge amounts of samples whose circumstances were significantly different to yours, which steamrolled over a huge amount of factors which apply to your case, which arbitrarily split across complex interrelated inputs until it got a particular p-value that made them say "gotcha!", and which is likely fated to be forgotten after one study-replication-crisis or another.
excellent advice, and very well put in those last two paragraphs.
> On another topic you had : Why are Americans suddenly interested in caste? It is pretty bizarre. I'm tired of identity politics
Because it's basically like identity politics from an alternative universe. You can see all the same effects apply, but between a set of groups that none of us has any real investment in. This (a) gives an independent data set to test our hypotheses regarding identity politics on, and (b) allows Americans to discuss identity politics more safely.
Talking about (say) anti-White discrimination in the US is societally dangerous, but talking about anti-Brahmin discrimination in India is perfectly acceptable, and the Straussian interpretation is up to the reader.
> Why are Americans suddenly interested in caste? It is pretty bizarre. I'm tired of identity politics.
Some people enjoy politics more than others. And if the politics as usual is boring, you can go meta. One possible meta question is: Which mechanism *actually* decides which groups are considered privileged and which are considered oppressed, especially in situations where you could make reasonable arguments in either way? (You can use a rule of thumb "which side the Democrat party would defend", but you cannot apply this to foreign topics that are typically not discussed in American politics.)
Another is: What is the proposed way to deal with situations when one oppressed group is hurting another oppressed group? Because, if you try to stop the former group from doing so, they will likely start complaining "hey, you are oppressing us", and the rules say that when an oppressed group says that, you better shut up and listen. But at the same time you are also supposed to listen to the latter group, and both of them are right by definition, but they also happen to disagree with each other, therefore...? (An idealistic argument would be that the tiniest intersection deserves the greatest support. A pragmatic argument would be that the strongest - but still technically oppressed - group makes the best political ally, and we should not antagonize them.)
Yet another interesting thing is that being oppressed is perhaps anticorrelated with the standardly accepted signals of oppression. I mean, imagine a stereotypical rich kid studying at an expensive woke university, vs a poor working-class kid working two jobs since they were 16. Which one will have more followers on Twitter, more time to argue, better knowledge of social justice, more skill at using the right pronouns, and the most recent politically correct opinions? The chances of the latter to win an online debate about who is more oppressed are practically zero; it would cost the former only one tweet to get the latter denounced as racist and fired from both jobs.
The debates about caste technically belong here. Should the listen to the people of color who say that other people of color are oppressing them in a way that is quite analogical to our concept of racism? Or should we listen to the people of color who say that this is utter nonsense, that caste is an important part of their religion, and expressing negative opinions on a religion of people of color is the actual racism here? Should we side with those who more resemble our officially oppressed groups? Or should we side with those who are better at debating social justice using the academical language? Those who are more numerous, or those who are more likely to work at corporate HR or a newspaper?
Re. the “wear your country’s traditional dress” contest: What would an American contestant even wear?
If you scroll through the article far enough you find the answer: apparently a poorly-fitting Superman outfit.
Blue jeans and a t-shirt seems the most reasonable answer to what American traditional dress looks like. It's not America's fault that the rest of the world has appropriated American culture.
On the contrary, you could blame the US for exporting its culture all over the place. :-)
Blue jeans and t-shirts are actually south-of-France culture, appropriated by Americans!
In my mind, the 'traditional American clothes' outfit is obvious: recreate the outfit of Daniel Boone.
Moccasins, leather breeches, a shirt, a leather jacket with tassels, and a coon-skin cap. Accessorize with a Kentucky Long Rifle, a horn of powder, and a big multi-purpose knife.
For history nerds, also accessorize with the skull of a bear, and a piece from an old tree-trunk carved with the words "D. Boone killed a bear here, in the year 1760".
I believe that word on the tree was spelled ‘bar’ :)
Another option might be "70's businessman". Hat, suit, dress shoes, etc.
Hmm my first thought was a coal miner. The costumes that didn't show off the guys bod were kinda boring.
"Mister Global Contestants Dress In Their National Costumes And Look Like Video Game Bosses"
#1. Class: Heavy Battlemage. Spells and Abilities: spellshield/deflect; powerstance; can cast large area-of-effect damage spells that deal elemental damage. Slow-moving but very high poise, cannot be staggered or interrupted.
#2. Class: Necromancer. Conjures living dead to fight alongside him, can summon mythical creatures onto the battlefield. Spells: Creeping Death; Curse; Soul of Kahlo
#3. Class: Druid. Summons short-lived but very high damage spirit animals; can transform into one of three Embodiments: Peacock Form (high burst damage spellcaster, glass cannon), Tree Form (heals self and nearby allies), Armadillo Form (tank with very high HP and high poise).
#4. Class: Pyromancer. Casts spells that deal fire damage. Can switch between two stances: Pemanas (highly mobile caster with short-cooldown, long range fire damage spells); when he puts on the mask, adopts the stance of Gunung Perapi (cannot move, but deals massive AoE fire damage in all directions).
#5. Class: Forlorn Cleric. Very high mobility, hand-to-hand combat character. Can phase through walls, deals heavy burst damage. Low HP and low armor, but can lifesteal if he lands his combo.
#6. Class: Aeromancer. Spellcaster specialising in air-elemental damage using his unique casting catalyst Parasolis to channel shockwaves and blasts of air toward the enemy. Very fast moving, low HP and armour but high chance repel incoming damage.
#7. Class: Hunter. Combination melee and ranged physical damage, can call nearby beasts to temporarily fight alongside him. Sets invisible traps that deal very high initial burst damage and cause the player's health to slowly decrease over time. Main weapon is Barbed Net, thrown like a lasso and causes laceration and entanglement upon contact with enemy. Very weak to fire damage.
#8. Class: Rune Priest. Medium range spellcaster with unique abilities. Creates identical copies of himself during battle who share the same spells and movesets. Each copy only has 1HP but explodes in a cloud of toxic mist dealing lingering AoE damage upon death. The original Rune Priest can cast Orb of Oblivion, a slow moving projectile ball of dark magic. The Orb is easily dodged, but if it collides with one of his clones, it releases a massive blast that kills the player instantly, so kill all his clones as a priority.
#9. Class: Rogue. Melee character specialising in high burst damage ambush attacks, stealth and assassination. Main weapons are a pair of daggers or a garotte laced with poison. Can throw smokebombs, and when walking through smoke becomes temporarily invisible and immune to physical damage. Can be out-traded in combat by players with high armour and defences, but his poison deals true damage ignoring armour.
#10. Class: Holy Spellsword. Hybrid melee-spellcaster who can conjure a magic sword that lasts a short amount of time but deals heavy holy damage on hit. Casts large AoE miracles causing beams of holy damage to come down from the sky in many locations at once. This spell has a short cooldown so he will spam it, forcing you to stay agile and avoid the blast areas. Immune to lightning and air elemental damage but weak to physical, can be staggered by greatswords and other heavy weapons.
I do not understand your characterizing of Noah Smith's take on the Lisa Cook / Rogoff situation as even being "woke". Like, he specifically says: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1494152400751321088
"This is not to say errors are OK or should be tolerated because "everybody's doin' it". Academic econ is in a parlous state and needs to be fixed (just like other academic fields). There needs to be some form of systematic quality control and error checking."
He's just saying that he thinks the attacks on Cook seem politically motivated, and that if you went after _any_ individual economist, you probably could find errors of similar scale. (And you can look up the Reinhardt-Rogoff 90% of GDP nonsense, for an example.)
There is definitely a problem here with poor-quality peer-review in econ papers. But to the extent you want to condemn Cook, you may as well condemn the whole field. Alternatively, you can decide that econ does still have some useful things to recommend it, and that actually they've come up with some cool new statistical techniques over the last thirty years that even have useful applications in other fields, and then try to assess Cook in more subtle ways than just nitpicking problems in a paper or two. Maybe you'll still decide you think she's not great. But this line of critique doesn't seem to usefully differentiate her even from the people leveling the criticism.
Even completely disregarding these errors, it's plainly obvious she's a diversity hire.
You could probably find similar errors if you dig into the world of a lot of individual economists, but very few individual economists are nominated to be Fed chair.
Your comment, like Noah's, reads to me like a classic example of special pleading.
I'm sure that if you go through the average academic's papers, you can find data errors. Heck, the average paper probably has errors. Perhaps even consequential ones (e.g. in the code, peer review doesn't even look here).
But the average academic doesn't have their fame largely rest on a single paper that they bizarrely claimed would have been published in a top journal except for racism, that turns out to have numerous glaring elementary data errors. That combination is a bit special.
I know nothing about the Cook controversy, but I find Noah Smith talking about quality control and error checking bizarre, given his record.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/07/noah-smith-on-adam-smith.html
Regarding the Snopes crack pipe fiasco, there were some mitigating circumstances that justify the "Mostly False" rating. (A few other people mentioned below that Snopes has changed the rating to "Outdated," now that the Biden administration has explicitly confirmed that crack pipes *won't* be included in the program, but I'm going a step further and arguing that the "Mostly False" rating was never wrong to begin with, even given the information available at the time.)
1. Safer-use crack pipes were simply listed in the grant proposal as an example of something that *could* potentially be provided as a form of harm reduction. It's not simply that the grant included money for other things, it's that the part about crack pipes was purely hypothetical and there was a very good chance they might not have been included at all. (And, indeed, that was exactly what ended up happening: The actual program, as implemented by the Biden administration, will *not* include any crack pipes.) So the claim that the program would give out crack pipes was misleading because it presented a mere possibility - and a fairly unlikely one, at that - as a certainty. That alone would justify the claim being rated "Mostly False" or at least "Mixture," and definitely precludes it from being considered "True" or even "Mostly True."
2. However, the claim that Snopes was addressing wasn't *just* about the crack pipes, it was also about the motivation of the program. Conservative politicians, pundits, and news outlets were claiming that the crack pipes were being included in the name of racial equality, implying that the Biden administration was trying to close the racial disparity in crack use by getting more White people hooked on crack. This is an absolutely absurd and outlandish claim with literally zero basis in reality! (The actual reason that the grant proposal suggested included crack pipes was as a harm reduction measure, on the grounds that these crack pipes would be safer and cleaner than the ones crack addicts normally use.) This is the element that pushes the claim from maybe just warranting a "Mixture" rating to conclusively deserving a "Mostly False" rating, since this part of the claim is just straight-up 100% false.
1. That's like disproving a claim that your burger is full of mouse feces by saying "it's really rat feces". People don't care about specifically crack pipes and not other things that can be used to ingest crack, or other illegal drugs. It's metonymy and means "things that fit in a category of which crack pipes are a central example".
2. Other posters have already provided quotes from the "Purpose" indicating otherwise.
1. It really depends on the specifics here. If these kits were supposed to include clean needles for heroin users to shoot up with, then sure, that's basically the same as including crack pipes. On the other hand, if they were just supposed to include narcan so that people who overdosed on heroin could be given emergency treatment that would dramatically improve their odds of survival, then I wouldn't consider that to be in the same ballpark at all - even though I've heard some conservatives claim that it's still encouraging drug use.
2. Not clear what you mean here. If you mean "no, most conservative outlets were not making the claim that Biden wanted to get Whites hooked on crack in the name of anti-racism, that was just something a few crackpots said and Snopes was cherry-picking by portraying that as the main right-wing narrative," then you may be right (though the fact that someone as prominent as Marco Rubio was pushing the anti-racism narrative is strong evidence to the contrary). On the other hand, if you mean "yes, this really was some kind of twisted attempt at ending racial disparities by creating more White crack addicts," then I am damn near certain that wasn't actually the case.
I took the claim as "an attempt to benefit disadvantaged groups by doing something good — reducing risks associated with drug use — and giving them priority." That seems to me the most natural interpretation of the facts.
I really, really, really wish we could just once have a harm reduction strategy that didn't end with "the government is paying kids to take drugs". But the populist temptations are just too strong.
"And, indeed, that was exactly what ended up happening: The actual program, as implemented by the Biden administration, will *not* include any crack pipes."
After the program had been attacked for including crack pipes by Biden's political opponents. That is very weak evidence of the initial intent.
#34. I'm very skeptical about the idea that 1984's Appendix is a diegetic article written by future historians in the same world. Sanchez's argument for that proposition seems to rest on two points: that it's written in an academic style that contrasts with the rest of the book, and that the last word of the appendix is "2050", which encourages us to think of the Party's rule as having an endpoint. I don't find either of those arguments convincing in the slightest.
He also says that the existence of a "final" edition of Newspeak implies that there's an end-date to the Party's rule, but the early part of the book is pretty clear that Newspeak was never intended to evolve over time: once the language is finished, it's finished. It's another way of showing the static, joyless world that the Oceanian government intends to create.
The appendix seems to me like it has the sole purpose of fleshing out the setting. This is less common nowadays, but seems pretty consistent with other novels from the mid-20th century (such as the Lord of the Rings). I think that it's written from 'our' perspective about the state of the setting in the year 1984. If the appendix was actually written in-setting, I think there would be more references to the horrifying damage done to the world, and more clues about what had happened in the decades since 1984.
I really like the book, so I hope that the diegetic interpretation described above doesn't become commonly accepted. It undermines the book's entire vision: that of the boot on one's face, forever.
"The appendix seems to me like it has the sole purpose of fleshing out the setting. This is less common nowadays, but seems pretty consistent with other novels from the mid-20th century (such as the Lord of the Rings)."
Not sure this example really helps your case, since the Lord of the Rings appendices were absolutely meant to be in-universe documents. Tolkien was a linguist who specialized in ancient languages, and his entire premise for the LotR books was that they were ancient manuscripts that he had translated.
Oh, shoot, I didn't know that. Thanks for the clarification, but I wasn't referring to the Lord of the Rings appendices. What I was thinking of was Tolkien's notes on how he had translated the stories into English, such as his explanation of the origin of the name "Merry". Another example would be the side-notes about the English names of the rabbits in Watership Down ("Or, as we say, Bigwig"). I was trying to illustrate how explanations from the author to the reader were pretty common in Orwell's day.
Have you read the appendix? There's a lot more to suggest the diegetic interpretation.
I'd be grateful if you'd elaborate.
> #34. I'm very skeptical about the idea that 1984's Appendix is a diegetic article written by future historians in the same world. Sanchez's argument for that proposition seems to rest on two points: that it's written in an academic style that contrasts with the rest of the book, and that the last word of the appendix is "2050", which encourages us to think of the Party's rule as having an endpoint. I don't find either of those arguments convincing in the slightest.
There's plenty more than just those two points in the appendix.
There's lots more in the appendix about how Ingsoc people planned to do stuff, but never got around to it in the end.
Just read the fine thing. A copy was linked in the Twitter thread.
Sorry, maybe I should have been clearer about this. You're referring to passages like "When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed."
In isolation, this can imply "...but we're in the future, and we know that didn't happen," but it can also imply "...but we're talking about the year 1984, so that hasn't happened yet." Sanchez is arguing for the first interpretation, but that doesn't fit with the rest of the text. He even mentions the fact that it refers to "English" (not Oldspeak) words we "already possess".
If it was written in-universe, the language would be corrupted and modified. It is unlikely that it would mention Winston Smith, except as one of a class of re-educated dissidents. It would make reference to works that had been lost, and Newspeak speakers who had difficulties readjusting to speaking English. It would, in short, reflect the trauma that civilization had suffered. It doesn't, so I don't find it credible that it was written in-universe.
It's interesting how much is still left up to interpretation for the most famous dystopian fiction.
Some people prefer to excise Burgess's final chapter in Clockwork Orange, which in part says, hey, a lot of kids actually just grow out of delinquency without mind control (and the others become the state).
For his part, Bradbury claims he was attacking too much easy media, TV as a medium, not censorship. (We've mostly vetoed the author on this one.)
There are two questions here that are only loosely related:
1) which point is most interesting, and (2) which point did the authors intend?
I think you have good counterarguments on (2). I found the original arguments compelling, but your response shows me there's still a lot of room for debate here.
On (1)... I also think there's room for debate.
I actually think the message that fascism has a tendency to eat itself from the inside is pretty astute.
I worry 1984 is often used as an "all things are fascism" cudgel, that dilutes its usefulness for understanding how fascist systems actually work. It reads like a fable, but he was often just literally recounting things the soviet state really did.
But like Bradbury, I understand that I am generally outvoted on this one, and many more people are interested in 1984 as a story about slippery slopes.
You're right, the author's intent is definitely separate from what the text actually means. I haven't read A Clockwork Orange, but I take your point.
But for me, 1984 is very definitely not a story about how fascism tends to eat itself from within, but rather the opposite: it's about how a totalitarian system can become self-sustaining. It argues that totalitarianism can persist even if it's not in anybody's interests, not even those of the people who are notionally in charge.
A fascist government can sometimes collapse due to a power struggle, or if the paramount leader dies. In Oceania, the paramount leader (Big Brother) probably isn't a real person, and power is decentralized throughout the Inner Party. No individual can try to slow things down or suggest that the repression is a bad idea, because that will be taken as evidence of treason. Trying to do so collectively is nearly impossible, because no Party member can be trusted, the bonds of family and friendship have been eroded, and the younger generation (e.g. Julia) has been raised to be complacent and unimaginative.
In other words, a society like Oceania could persist many generations into the future - maybe even forever. That's why the suggestion that it somehow spontaneously underwent a revolution gets my goat to such a degree. If that could happen in the world of 1984, then the moral of the story becomes something like this:
"When things go wrong, it's inevitable that they'll get better, because human decency will always triumph in the end. But until then, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down; so just wait out the hard times and don't try to resist an unjust system on your own."
But if the suffering is endless and eternal, the story says something more like:
"Hold on to freedom of expression with all your might, because once it's gone, you might not be able to get it back. The good ending isn't inevitable: the future can still go wrong, if you let it."
I feel the second one makes the book more worthwhile, so I guess I have to agree that 1984 is best viewed as a story about slippery slopes. Still, I see what you mean: it's also a story about how fascism works on the ground level, even if it's a bit distorted by how it takes it to its logical extreme.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I should back up and state points of agreement before asking one hard question.
1) I think the point you lay out is really compelling warning, and deserves to be preserved, and I think you lay it out really well. "The future can go wrong," and nearly unrecoverably, and it's on us all to preserve it, constantly.
2) In general, I think the collective reading of a work is the more natural one. And although it's plausible a new reading is the right one, we should consider the common reading the default prior, instead of assuming a radical shift is likely.
I'm curious though how to map your model of authoritarianism against the course of the USSR.
My (perhaps naive) take would be that post-Stalin, it immediately took a half-step back from the ledge. Still oppressive, but brutal extremes like the Doctors' purge far less likely the moment Kruschev took power, with psychopaths like Beria immediately removed from positions of power. Deng seems like the Kruschevian half-step back from the ledge for the PRC.
So, I don't know, if authoritarian structures are self-perpetuating, why did the CCCP fail? (And I suppose the hard question for me is, why hasn't the CPC?)
EDIT: I think there are variations of these questions about whether or not authoritarian systems naturally moderate slightly in their second generation to become truly stable, while still staying awful.
Thinking more about history, it does seem like authoritarians tend to have fewer revolutions, they are a peak of stability in governing systems, despite how morally abhorrent they are. Maybe I'm talking myself into your view...
EDIT: clarity
I suspect a part of the answer is the mechanism how the leaders are selected. Even the usual corporate or socialist world (a socialist country could be modelled as a country-sized corporation) selects people with slightly psychopathic traits, but the literal revolution or war selects them much more. In politics (whether state or corporate) you must be good at cooperation, before you are allowed to get higher. In revolution, you need to be ideologically pure and good at killing; then if you start grabbing more power, the others will rationalize why it is good for the Party. Stalin made many enemies during his career; if he wasn't allowed to literally kill them, at some moment this would stop his career.
> So, I don't know, if authoritarian structures are self-perpetuating, why did the CCCP fail?
I don't know. Growing up in a socialist country, I can only try to describe what I observed, how it all felt. A part of it was like a generational conflict: the positions of power were held by old people, and thus the system felt boring to the young people. Yeah, those old people were talking a lot about how the youth are the future of socialism and how the communist party is on their side, but it had this "how do you do, fellow kids" vibe. Somehow, socialism succeeded to make itself seem uncool, even to people who were brainwashed from the childhood.
The system somehow ran out of emotional energy, even that brainwashing was half-assed, just like everything else. Everything controlled by the state meant that whatever you do will most likely make no difference, therefore people stopped giving a fuck, apparently even in areas that were vital for the survival of the system.
This is not a full explanation, because a part of the experience of living in a country that was within the soviet bloc, but not a part of Soviet Union, was the knowledge of "whatever we decide is unimportant anyway, the Soviet Union will override our decisions on whim". I don't know whether the feelings inside Soviet Union were different. In some sense, Soviet Union killed the natural enthusiasm for socialism in other countries, as it became apparent that socialism is not "we the workers collectively represented by the communist party will make the decisions", but rather "our communist party is merely a servant of a foreign communist party, our workers have no actual representation". I wonder how the communist party of Soviet Union has alienated its workers.
Great points, thanks.
Your first one reminded me of Kamil Galeev's recent points about how Shoygu, in contrast to Serdyukov, min-maxed for political survivability rather than aggressively modernizing the military. Much more investment in minimizing conflicts with other interest groups, much more political durabililty. I think you're right that the second generation filters much more for ability to build political alliances.
Then also, yeah, probably hard to maintain a utopian movement for four generations, especially when there isn't really ever true access to power. Maybe you get to defer it while you're in rapid economic growth and it looks like improvements are right around the corner. But it looks like 1979 started ten very hard years for the system. Meanwhile, the PRC has been insulated from major shocks so far, maybe from more rapid privatization and greater willingness to contract out its labor pool to the rest of the world, partly just from getting a later start.
Can authoritarians survive indefinitely with a more open economy?
I worry they can if they find the right balance. Also, I often think about early Persian history, which seems like it alternated between periods of (relative) progressive liberalism and periods of brutal authoritarianism that each lasted hundreds of years. Maybe Rome had similar issues. Maybe there's no arc of history, just a random walk. Or maybe there is, but the problem is that it is in no hurry.
Thanks for your thoughts.
On Mafia degrees, I'm betting the signal to employers raised the floor the Mafia needed to pay mafiosos to retain them vs the money they could make by just e.g. opening a legit business; the degree functioned as a competitive advantage in legit markets and thus the same way 10 years of experience or a degree allow a person to get hired in at a higher rate in corporations, it functions the same in the mafia.
Another possibility: only the top mafiosos can afford to send their sons to college, and those same sons also have the connections to achieve high rank themselves.
Much simpler explanation: people who attend and graduate college are usually smarter, and smarter people are better at most stuff (involving management, planning etc.)
Not necessarily smarter.
In line with The Case Against Education:
Going to college is an honest signal that you are at least moderately smart, willing to follow instructions, somewhat conformist, and able to stick out a longer programme.
I presume these qualities are probably useful in a mafia setting as well.
I don't see how this study would be a challenge to the argument in The Case Against Education at all?
The book merely says that the education signalling game is wasteful for society. But the book also says that it is very useful on an individual level. Regardless of whether the Mafia is involved or not.
The Case Against Education does not endorse a "pure signalling" model, and instead incorporates nearly as much of an "ability bias" model that would fit mafia evidence even if they disregarded diplomas:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/economic_models_1.html
Maybe. But I don't see why the Mafia would disregard honest signalling any more than any other employer (or investor)?
There's no puzzle here as far as I can tell.
I said "even if", because that would set aside the signalling theory (which the mafia study was supposed to argue against). Caplan has said he thinks that signalling explains roughly 50% of the individual education premium, ability bias explains 40% and genuine human capital improvements explains 10%.
In support: Sudhir Venkatesh's dissertation on the workings of a Chicago drug gang, as reported in "Freakonomics", was for obvious reasons less than comprehensive in its biological detail, but did note that the leader of the gang was a college graduate with a business major. This does not appear to have been coincidental; beyond simply being smart, the man was in fact running a business and using skills he had learned in his education.
Mario Puzo, "The Godfather": "A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns" 😀
And Luca Brazi still sleeps with the fishes. :)
Re: Preschool-
My first thought on this is, perhaps it's a selection effect where the children of parents who're more able and willing to spend time with them at home rather than sending them to preschool are more likely to perform well?
Preschool might have negative educational value relative to what it's an alternative to (which will probably usually be more direct attention from relatives,) but even if there's no difference at all, children who're sent to preschool may have a comparative disadvantage at the outset.
I read an analysis of this which said the issue was the preschool that the treatment group got was a pretty shabby kind of preschool, with large groups and teachers who were more interested in keeping order, which the teachers kind of have to be when they have 30+ four-year-olds. I don't remember where I saw it, and I suspect there's still some selection effect going on. And maybe one parent who's not an ECE specialist, but cares about the one kid they're dealing with will do better than someone who has to manage thirty kids.
See the economist: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/02/03/a-new-study-finds-preschool-can-be-detrimental-to-children
34% of the control group attended early education or day care programs, which complicates the results.
I have something similar in mind; the study was done on the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Program, which states that it is for:
"Pre-K in Tennessee is accessible to all four year olds, with an emphasis on at-risk students and high-priority communities."
So it's available for all, but probably they will have more low-income, more minority, and more disadvantaged and unstable families using it, which are exactly the kind of families which are going to have literacy, behavioural and other problems dogging the kids anyway.
Their conclusion isn't too sanguine:
"Children from poor families who attended a state pre-K program did not, for the most part, become proficient readers in third grade. On the contrary, their performance on all measures of achievement through sixth grade was significantly below that of comparable children who did not attend. Children who attended pre-K were not less likely to be retained and had a greater likelihood of being referred for special education services from pre-K through sixth grade—both of these in opposition to savings promised to states (Council of Economic Advisers, 2015). Given prior research, our findings of more disciplinary infractions for children in sixth grade who attended pre-K should not have been so unexpected but are nonetheless worrisome."
So if the question is "whether parents should be trying to keep their kids out of preschool", the answer is "Yes, IF your family is stable, relatively well-off/well-educated, you have some form of one-to-one care available e.g. one parent stays home and interacts with the kid(s), the kids do not require IEP or special education because they don't have behavioural, physical, psychological or learning difficulties, you make sure they develop self-control and problem-solving capacity so they don't get frustrated and challenge authority and end up suspended from school, and cherry on top if you manage to teach them 'unconstrained skills'
If you tick all those boxes, then your kid will be fine to start without going to preschool first and will soon catch up. Of course, if you tick all those boxes, your kid will probably be in some kind of private daycare anyway.
"One contributor to the fade out of pre-K effects may involve the content focus of the instruction children receive, an idea recently gaining traction. Evaluating eight statewide pre-K programs, Barnett et al. (2018) found, as we did, that the largest immediate effect was in concrete literacy skills, with much smaller effects on language and math skills. They urge pre-K programs to broaden their scope of instruction. These early concrete literacy skills include directly teachable skills in a finite domain (e.g., 26 letters of the alphabet): “constrained skills have a ceiling; the learner can achieve perfect performance” (Snow & Matthews, 2016, p. 58).
Unconstrained skills in literacy (vocabulary, listening comprehension, and background knowledge) and in numeracy (problem solving and mathematical reasoning) are not typically the focus of instruction in early childhood classrooms (Montrosse-Moorhead et al., 2019; Valentino, 2017), perhaps because they are not the usual content of assessments amid the increasing emphasis on “school readiness.”
Over time, these skills become increasingly important in school, but they are more difficult to teach and assess (Snow & Matthews, 2016). A consistent finding across recent studies is that children who attend pre-K enter kindergarten scoring higher on concrete school readiness skills, skills that are then mastered by nonattenders over the course of the kindergarten year or shortly thereafter. "
Yes, I read a similar article. Beyond the issues you list, a lot (most?) of the time was spent in transition--going from room to room. This was exacerbated by it taking place in a school for older children, leading to long walks (by preschooler standards) to bathrooms, art room, etc. Corralling the students for all this transition exacerbated emphasis on keeping order, which hurts development of self-discipline. In short, the study showed that bad preschool has long-term bad effects.
#39 checks out. See https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$ui$chart$opacitySelectDim:0;;&model$markers$mountain$encoding$group$data$;;&frame$value=2001;;;;;&chart-type=mountain&url=v1 .
Median Chinese went from ~$2.30/day to $10.30 between 2000 and 2017.
Median Indian went from $1.90/day to $3.15.
36. On the BMJ being censored by FB.
I get that it isn't great they couldn't pull rank effectively, but I think that censorship and free speech is a nuanced landscape in terms of the potential harms and historical pathways we've observed. Some forms of suppression and censorship are worse than others.
When a prominent group of intellectuals or academics or whomever...an existing institutional power structure begins to be subverted and attacked and censored by the political elite...that is a very bad sign which means society is heading towards particularly bad outcomes or it has pretty consistently meant that in the past.
When you look at the accounts of the beatings, murder, and loyalty pledges extracted from academics in early Maoist China or you can see the spying and strict political restrictions and gulags of the USSR, you can see how bad a society is getting when it turns its attack dogs on the old institutions of knowledge. Any power or voice outside of the reigning political voice must be squashed, all dissent is intolerable to the new power structures. In this case the axis point where tech, intelligence agencies, and political powers meet on one place to interact with a flowering corporate capture of all aspects of the world within the bounds of a slow motion central banking neoliberal ideological global coup.
So while some purely free speech issue about straight up neo-nazis or comedians using 'bad words' on stage or if you can shout fire in a crowded theatre or 'what is' pornographic...these are indeed important, but are perhaps somewhat limited affairs in terms of knowing if a society is collapsing into a neo-feudal corpo/banking dictatorship or not.
It sounds all newfangled...but in more olden time terms....this is a mercantile class takeover. It has happened many many times in history where the merchants get too wealthy and corrupt the heck out of everything. But they lack the desire to rule, set religious doctrine, and will go to war without regard to human life.
A society is bankrupt and dangerous for commoners at well....pretty much all the time....but this is very true when the merchants take over and make everything about money.
All those years of stakeholder profits and lean management in California haven't done well for the people when their electricity went out due to there being no redundancy or disaster preparation were skipped. But those wealthy merchant class investors get to keep all their money over all those years as wildfires burn and people live with rolling blackouts. Merchants are about extraction, it is a game of cut and run with a global society where those juicy California utility dollars buy them a nice home in Europe where they don't have to live with the problems they caused.
A politician wants your vote, a general wants you to fight, a priest wants you to worship...but a merchant will just leave you for dead after taking everything from you. They just don't need you if you can be replaced and as big as any merchant gets, no single one tends to run society or have a total monopoly in all industries....so people are seen as easy come and easy go.
But when expert speech or political speech in the form of protests or journalism by those wicked 'non-journalists'...then the issues really extends beyond free speech and we talk about curtailing a broader collection of rights.
Who is doing this? Why are they doing it? What power to do they have to go outside courts, use a secret police or even a public police force to do this? What tools of oppression and punishment do they have available to them. Will they get you fired, freeze your bank accounts, put you in jail, plant fake evidence, or will they murder you, threaten your family, torture you?
All very real possibiltles and when we see the 3 letter agencies in the US and in Canada saying that 'misinformation' as deemed by them is a crime which exists outside the legal and court system and is determined upon their whim...when they call speech terrorism...that's a HUGE problem and is worse then locking up comedians for saying 'dirty' words. Both are bad, but one is a harbinger of the downfall of your society and any residual scraps of democracy you thought you had.
So the BMJ is yet another canary in a very unsafe and very profitable mine in my view and has ramifications beyond just free speech.
I am extremely confused by the article on pretty buildings. As evidence that cities in the past didn't have "ugly buildings" that were later demolished, he offers some aerial photos of cities in the 1800s. And those photos look... completely unremarkable? Basically boxes with gabled roofs? I honestly have no idea what these are supposed to prove - from this distance all I can say is "yup, that looks like a city." If you took a photo of a modern city of similar density from a similar height, and tinted it sepia, I think I would have a hard time telling which was which.
He also cites the "Gorbals slums" as evidence of "look, these buildings from the past weren't that ugly," but it looks as boxy and monotonous as any of the concrete apartment blocks that anti-modernists love to complain about. And he also shows off some historic wooden houses as "not splendid, but not generally ugly." But I would say the same thing about a lot of "ugly modern buildings"! They're not ugly, they're just not particularly splendid. They're apartment buildings, not gothic cathedrals. This seems like equivocation to me - on the one hand asking why modern buildings aren't *beautiful*, and on the other hand asking us to forgive older buildings so long as they're not outright *ugly.*
My understanding is that early 20th century eugenicists understood that "positive" traits were heritable, but just considered sterilizing people to be easier than encouraging people to breed. The 1918 textbook Applied Eugenics contains several schemes to increase the number of good genes, such as creating lots of propaganda about the nobility of parenthood, which would appeal more to "the superior" and thus cause them to breed more. There's also a section telling alcoholic geniuses that they should reproduce because increasing genius is more important than decreasing alcoholism.
(Eugenic texts are interesting because they're a time capsule of what traits were valued in the past. Nowadays people who are swayed by that kind of emotive propaganda are seen as uneducated bumpkins, not as superior. On the other hand, contract laborers are for some reason on the list of classes not allowed to immigrate to the United States in 1918.)
It strikes me that increasing the number of people with very good genes, and decreasing the number of people with very bad genes, are two complementary aims of eugenics which need not go together. Increasing the top end can be seen as a "National Greatness" objective, while decreasing at the bottom end can be seen more as a compassionate objective.
If we did Rawls' Veil of Ignorance thing (and I'm sure that Rawls would not approve) then would you rather be born into a random body in a society where:
a) The number of people born with IQ > 140 has been increased tenfold, or
b) The number of people born with IQ < 90 has been decreased tenfold?
There's a strong argument to be made for the latter; people born with poor genes have a bad life and wind up caught up in all sorts of social problems, whereas people born very smart typically have lives which are subjectively no better than the average. Society (a) will technologically advance faster, but society (b) will have less human misery.
Honestly, I'd go with neither, for two reasons. My biggest objection to eugenics, even if we could somehow successfully implement it in a way that doesn't violate anyone's human rights, is Chesterton's Fence. Genetics is so complicated, especially involving the brain, and I'm worried that by messing with the balance of genes that affect IQ in a population, we'd horribly screw something up.
My second reason is that I'm a proponent of neurodiversity, and not just for "high-functioning" people. Diversity of conscious experience is a terminal value for me, and there are certain kinds of human experiences that are very uncommon among the kinds of people who tend to be good at taking IQ tests. And mental disability doesn't have to equal a life of suffering, even though society is set up so that it often does.
1. We would mess up individuals or society? And how?
2. What types of experience? What do you think of the idea of adding lead back to paint or gasoline to counteract the Flynn effect to preserve neurodiversity? Like, I see this personally as a strange preference. Would you consider lowering the IQ of your own child if the average got too high or something? Just trying to understand your thinking on this. Not suggesting you support the policies but I want to understand why not, if not.
1. Society, not individuals. What if we eliminated genes that it's really good to have in the gene pool? Values change over time. If the ancient Spartans had eugenics, they'd probably select for aggressive children, which would be disastrous in the long run. I'm worried we'd make a similar mistake.
2. For instance, the late Mel Baggs described the heavily sensory- and pattern-based form of perception that was their default mode: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1052/1238 Baggs was borderline intellectually disabled and had great difficulty using language. Many people with that kind of mind can't use language at all. But still, I think those experiences are worth preserving. There are other examples of positive experiences that can come from disability, this is just the first one I could think of off the top of my head.
I don't support adding lead back to paint. There are enough genetic factors that can cause intellectual disability that people can continue to have those experiences without the need to damage brains that already exist. I wouldn't try to either raise or lower my hypothetical child's IQ - geniuses also deserve to exist and enjoy their unique experiences, and my child wouldn't have much of an effect on the average of millions of people.
Level of ability has less to do with happiness than you'd think. I can't drive or live independently and my main duty at work is pushing carts, but I'm probably happier than most people because I inherited my dad's sunny disposition. (Depression is one of the few traits I'd consider trying to eliminate with eugenics. I still wouldn't do it because, again, I'm afraid of screwing something up.)
"I don't support adding lead back to paint. There are enough genetic factors that can cause intellectual disability that people can continue to have those experiences without the need to damage brains that already exist. "
That makes it sound as though you think the current level of intellectual diversity is optimal, since you oppose both lowering and raising it. Why would one expect that?
I don't know what the optimal level of intellectual diversity is, and actually, now that I've thought about it, I think I'd prefer the first society in Melvin's comment to the second, since there'd still be no shortage of people of average intelligence. I support people with lots of different types of minds existing, but I don't know what the optimal balance would be. I continue to be opposed to eugenics for fear of screwing something up, and because our current level of mental diversity seems okay enough.
But we're already "messing with the balance of genes that affect IQ". https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1612113114 showed that we (well, Iceland) are currently undergoing selection for lower educational attainment. As Greg Cochran said, "every society selects for something".
You set the ranges to have different proportions. That might affect how some people answer. <90 pop is so much larger than >140.
I think really smart people live better lives. They benefits to IQ don’t diminish from what I understand. Why do you have this position? I’m Interested.
It's possible that people with IQ140+ struggle because there are very few of them, and they'd do better if there were more people they had a lot in common with.
Galton's variant of eugenics was focused on increasing positive traits. I suppose what was "easy to do" changed as governments started claiming more coercive power.
Galton, who I think invented the term "eugenics," proposed policies for increasing the reproduction of smart people not reducing that of stupid people.
"The authors gather data on completed suicides among trans people, and find that they’re about 0.01%/year (which is about 5x the cisgender rate)."
The sources I'm finding all give the adolescent suicide rate as 0.011%/year,
https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/health-of-women-and-children/measure/teen_suicide/state/ALL
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr69/nvsr-69-11-508.pdf
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/youth-suicide-rates-are-on-the-rise-in-the-u-s
If so, then your trans adolescent suicide rate of 0.01% would be almost identical to the cis adolescent suicide rate. From which we would conclude,
A: half of trans adolescents "attempt suicide", but they suck at it compared to the cis kids, or
B: half of *all* adolescents "attempt suicide", and they all suck at it, or
C: trans adolescents vastly overstate the frequency with which they "attempt suicide", or
D: as suggested by naamah, GIDS isn't credible.
Grayscaling your phone does 100% make it less addictive. It's partially because the "normal" colors are a hypersaturated superstimulus. I first turned on grayscale mode while walking around in the Castro district of SF and had the sudden realization of "oh my god, I'm surrounded by rainbows!". They simply didn't stand out beforehand because the colors on my phone were so much more intense.
> 2: Did you know: Spanish people consider it good luck to eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Years, one at each chime of the clock tower in Madrid. This has caused enough choking deaths that doctors started a petition to make the clock tower chime more slowly.
It's a tradition. I never was told it was for good luck. It was just The Thing You Do On New Years. Often washing it down with wine.
> 7
He didn't invent it. He popularized it as a new style in England and started to put them in smaller homes that previously hadn't had them. Basically trading smaller space that was private per person instead of a larger shared space. But he didn't invent them. They existed before that. Both in contemporary Europe and going back to at least the Bronze Age if not earlier. You can even look at plans for Whitehall (where the monarch lived in his time) and see corridors. Yes, even separate rooms that were places you could stay while moving between rooms.
> 12: The Dangers Of Low-Pay, High-Status Jobs. A good article in many ways, but the part I appreciate most was taking “why are so many journalists live in Brooklyn?” (which I had always thought of as a kind of a running gag, or dig on the journalistic monoculture) and doing economic analysis to it, of the same form of “why are so many tech companies in the Bay Area?” or “why are so many entertainment studios in LA?”
Something the article only indirectly brings up and I think they underemphasize. If your "compensation package" is largely based in status then you take a bigger "pay cut" by leaving a high status region than a profession that pays more in money. Imagine that the average Brooklyn journalist gets paid $40k and 100 status points. They do (as the article mentions) need to live in a place where they can spend those status points. But they also get a certain part of those status points simply from being in Brooklyn and from doing the "work" of conspicuous participation in the industry's culture.
Imagine if a journalist got an offer to get $70k to work at the Plain Dealer. An old, prestigious newspaper with a good circulation in (low cost of living) Cleveland. They'd be gaining $30k. But they'd be losing a lot of status points by moving into a city that's constantly the butt of jokes and won't let them rub shoulders with Ezra Klein or whoever. Perhaps they've stored enough from their career they can do it for a stint. But that's like moving to New York and living on savings in reverse.
Of course, you can just... not do this. Scott and Freddie don't. (Admittedly, I think Freddie was forced out over some controversy? But from reading him I really, really don't think he was ever the type to care about meeting Ezra Klein. I'm not picking on Ezra Klein, by the way. He's just the first name I came up with.) You do need status with some community to be a success on a subscription model. But any community will do. Dollars are fungible.
Which leads me to the second point: I think they tend to jump to edgelord stuff because they spend so much time in progressive conformity. Every Christian semi-intellectual knows about the arguments the New Atheists in detail. They might know something of pagans or Muslims but they couldn't pass as one. But an edgelord New Atheist? Being a Christian actually qualifies you to be better at that! Likewise, if you spend all day fretting about conservative anti-woke arguments then that sets you up to become a conservative anti-woke writer.
But you can just... not. You can write for an audience that isn't one side or the other. It's actually easier! The field is less crowded! Write about sake production! Or African agribusiness! Or a third thing that isn't food related! (I'm hungry.) But you get the point. Think about how few people need to follow you to have a decent living. Let's say you get a thousand people interested in your substack (SakeTalk) paying $5 a month. That's $60k. And a thousand people isn't hard. Not over the long term. Hundreds of millions of people pay for online writing. You just need a fraction of a percent. You can't find a thousand people interested in sake?
Yes, you're not going to be Ezra Klein with his six interns and his six figure salary. But you probably weren't going to be anyway. And you can live where you want and do what you want and never have to feign sympathy with a high 24 year old in a bathroom saying her life is over because she doesn't get to write "real stuff."
> 23: I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet - I haven’t checked this study but I bet there are lots of possible confounders. Still, this would be fun for somebody more interested to analyze in depth:
Criminal organizations pay more for criminals with useful skills (hacking, chemistry, accounting). They also piggyback have various forms of education. The traditional example is footsoldiers joining the army to get combat training. But the skilled workers are what they really have trouble with. These people are so in demand that the mob will sometimes contract innocuous activities onto legitimate firms while keeping them in the dark. As you'd expect, mobs in poorer economies have an easier time attracting skilled talent. Which is why Russia or Nigeria can become havens for hackers. Lower wages means criminals can more easily outbid legitimate firms. (Though at least in Nigeria the government is trying, albeit not hugely successfully, to crack down on such activity. Russia actively encourages it.)
Anyway, this is the third time I've heard about this study. I'll give it a read later. My unstudied thesis: everywhere (though especially in advanced economies) illegal organizations have a relative surplus of low skill talent and a relative deficit of high skill. It's easy for gangs to attract high school dropouts and hard for them to recruit cryptography PhDs. They also tend to be highly hierarchical and have huge amounts of pay inequality. So I thought it was people with more useful skills starting at a higher payscale plus the need to compensate them against more lucrative legal opportunities and the need to pay more for the talent they have a deficit in.
> 24: Best of Scott Sumner archives: There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality. “You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption. If … tax increases did not cause Gates and Buffett to tighten their belts, then they paid precisely 0% of that tax increase. Someone else paid, even if they wrote the check. If they invested less due to the tax, then workers might have received lower wages. If they gave less to charity then very poor Africans paid the tax.”
In short, taxes are not paid by the person who transmits the money to the government but by the person whose consumption is ultimately redirected to government ends. Insofar as the person paying taxes controls their own spending, this actually empowers the taxpayer to direct who pays the tax. For example, a perfectly non-competitive unregulated business (so with absolute control over its economic decisions) will decide to pass it all on to other people. A perfectly competitive business with extreme regulation (so with minimal control over its economic decisions) will be forced to eat the costs. (And, in some societies, might even be prevented from exiting the business so the state can continue to extract from them!)
But taxpayers will almost always have some economic choice. They will generally choose to distribute the loss of consumption in the way that's least personally disadvanageous. This will generally not be in a way the government intends. At that point the government can either realize it's a failed policy or double down. They usually choose the latter. That means asserting control over private decisions which is almost invariably bad.
I'm not saying the government can't gather tax money or spend it on useful things. I'm saying it has minimal ability to determine who pays taxes. So you should be inherently suspicious of any claims about robbing one class to pay another. Because what they usually mean is they're going to levy the tax in one place. But that doesn't mean that's where the tax will be paid from in an economic sense.
> 32: Related, from Works In Progress: no, it’s not just that only the prettiest buildings of past ages survived, past ages really did produce (on average) prettier buildings.
I don't struggle to identify an ugly house from the 19th century. Have you ever seen a wattle and daub house? I have. This is like saying clothes have gotten worse because you've looked at a lot of royal dresses in paintings and museums. This is simply the author being unable to comprehend that urban areas were a much smaller, relatively wealthier part of the population in the past. Even when they mentions surviving cities they're dealing with the most downtown areas. The author conveniently ignores all kinds of slum clearance in the exurban areas. Or renovations. He kind of glides over this citing a few elite houses in remote villages and paintings, of all things. Yes, picturesque paintings meant to romanticize the countryside look nice. That says more about painters than buildings.
> 39. Interested in hearing more about this: was the 2000 - 2017 period really better than previous periods? If so, why? Is it just China, or something else?
Yeah, it was better. And not just in China. It still baffles me how much is just missed by the average person. The birth of the Nigerian film industry. The end of the deadliest conflict since WW2. Brazilian GDP per capita going up by a factor of four. Or any number of other changes. I probably notice it more because (as I said above) I have fairly significant international exposure in economic terms.
The main things I'd say is increasing peace, better economic governance, and more trade. We are unfortunately seeing reversals in all three of these trends.
Here's a theory for the uglification of buildings: are managers at construction companies still architects/engineers/people who have actually built a building? Or are they professional managers?
I was recently listening to the cast of Critical Role's watch party of their recently released show, and time and time again they pointed out little moments where, because they the actors were running the show and not just cogs in a machine, they were able to go the extra mile and put their soul into it. And it shines through! Legends of Vox Machina is not a perfect show but it is an awesome one.
So maybe you can run that change in reverse, and replace *specifically the managers of construction companies* with MBAs? Did such a thing happen? Did it happen at the right time? Is it sufficient? The first MBA was awarded by Harvard in 1908, so it at least satisfies a Fermi quiz but I don't really know how to get more traction.
Architects tend to love contemporary architecture, so this explanation looks dubious...
Why isn't the obvious answer to why college increases mafia earnings just that college selects for smart hard working people. And smart hard working people are probably better at crime.
Alternatively, why would we expect the mob to be a more “rational” employer than anyone else? Even if college is “just signaling” a mob boss might use that signal the same way a CEO in a legal business would, and hand the plum high paying roles to college boys.
I thought the obvious answer is that most college educated people have better enough options from other employers that they're not going to join the mob unless they see a way to keep their higher pay.
The Gwern link on Dune led me to his review of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life, which made me feel less out of step. I had read that story after reading Pinker trash Sapir-Whorf in "The Language Instince" and took the scifi premise to me that S-W was actually true and changed how the protagonist wrote about past/present/future. Then I saw "Arrival", which differs from the story in that she makes use of future knowledge, and concluded I had misread the story. But Gwern appears to agree with my take, unlike every other take on it I've read.
The source material is a short story rather than a book. And Gwern is saying that the third step is just in the movie, not the story:
https://www.gwern.net/Story-Of-Your-Life
The progenitor of these stories is the novel "Babel-17" by Samuel Delany, which apparently influenced Chiang's story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
It's written in 1966 so that colours everything about it, but I'd recommend it as a good read.
That reminds me of the IF game Slouching Towards Bedlam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slouching_Towards_Bedlam
I disagree with Gwern there; I think the story, like all of Chiang's, should be taken on face value; that the protagonist really does come to be able to see her own future.
The film changes the plot to have the protagonist make use of her new awareness to change the timeline, which is very different (almost opposite) from what happens in the book.
However; I don't think that it's helpful to think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as an explanation of what's happening to the protagonist; S-W is about learning different human languages, whereas the book is about learning a very alien kind of language.
But it's still learning a language. It would just seem to be an application of S-W within the genre of scifi where very alien languages exist.
28: Another cool quote in the Scientific American article: "First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against." I'd be interested in the details of that interesting new limit theorem.
A bit of truth in this: much psycho diagnostics (personality, clinical, educational, and of course IQ that so many people in this forum love so much) is actually "norm-based", telling the patient that "you differ from the rest". It's not like a driving license in which there are some established criteria that you need to pass ("criterion-oriented"). That norm-based diagnostics is logically flawed and should definitely disappear.
Some people, myself included, have various interests which we like to discuss just like others. For some people, that includes IQ. People frame interest in taboo topics as "love" or "obsession" or "fetish", but I don't think it is a fair framing and it makes people with these interests look weird or have ulterior motives or something. I don't think it was your attention, but it's worth noting this phenomenon.
I think you have a point, sorry for the framing.
It’s okay :)
Are tests for stuff like depression, anxiety, BPD, schizophrenia relational? I thought they usually asked questions which weren’t.
It depends. A rough distinction can be made between "psychiatric" ICD-based instruments that indeed check for criteria, so these follow the driving license-paradigm.
The psychological self-report scales such as the Beck Depression Inventory, but also the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale basically count your yes-responses and compare this to the distribution of scores in the general population, and if you're in the upper tail, say, in the upper 10%, then you're considered depressive. The 10% are arbitrary, just insert any quantile. By the way, this is not related to the Normal distribution, the number can be determined nonparametrically. Depression scores in the general population are typically at the floor; a Normal distribution is not an appropriate model for that.
BUT, there are also people who consider being, say, two SDs above the mean as a "diagnosis". And using the SD as a metric is a smoking gun for the Normal distribution.
See, e.g., Jacobson, N. S., Follette, W. C., & Revenstorf, D. (1984). Psychotherapy outcome research: Methods for reporting variability and evaluating clinical significance. Behavior Therapy, 15, 336–352.
Quote from the article: "2. Does the level o f functioning at posttest fall within the range of the functional or normal population, where range is defined as beginning at two standard deviations below the mean for the normal population?"
Not to mention that when using a self-report questionnaire for depression, the patient is basically doing the diagnosis him or herself. [for free, the salary is paid to the psychologist]
To be fair, the FDA prefers "anchor-based" methods (= criteria) over "distribution-based" methods (= norm-based), see here: https://www.fda.gov/media/77832/download
It's a fascinating claim in part because it shows such a verbal-tilt, even 'wordcel', way of thinking. 'Normal' might have that sort of implication in lay language, but it definitely doesn't in statistics. Similarly, 'deviate': as a noun, harshly negative (you can 'deviate' as a verb without it being bad, as in, 'I deviated from the beaten path', but you can't *be* 'a deviate', sexual or otherwise, without that being bad), but in statistics, it is neutral or even good (if we didn't have random deviates, it wouldn't be statistics, it'd be a boring subset of geometry or something). Or 'bias': always negative, but in stats/ML, frequently desirable (Bayesianism is big on the benefits of using 'biased' methods to get more accurate inferences). In the other direction, 'significance' sounds much nicer and more important to laymen than it does to a statistician, who knows to treat it with a certain contempt.
I'm looking for a source for the "petition to make the clock tower chime more slowly" but I can't find anything. Is it true?
I'm going to push back on the implied 'wokeness gone mad' frame around NYT's Wordle censorship. I get the idea that including a word on the list is a value-neutral act; obviously it doesn't imply endorsement of the referent. But would you be annoyed to learn that they'd struck out 'cunty' or 'shits' or 'semen' or 'vomit', along with 'slave' and 'wench' and 'lynch'? They're all just words, and plenty of people are comfortable seeing any or all of them. But they'll have a negative emotional impact on a non-trivial number of others. So why not omit them from an inoffensive mainstream word game? The word list is already heavily curated; it's not like we were promised the full set of 5-letter English words.
Okay, I've just seen the bit in the linked article that says the offensive words have been removed "from both the list of acceptable guesses and the answers". That's much more annoying to me; I had thought they were only being removed from the list of answers.
It sounds like the game works with two lists - a list of possible answers, and a list of legal guesses that aren't possible answers. In this case, they deleted things from the list of possible answers and didn't realize that they needed to add it to the list of legal guesses, since they assumed the list of legal guesses *included* the answers.
Not knowing this, I'd be pretty pissed off if I learned that I was making guesses that seemed legal but could not possibly be the correct answer; that has different strategic implications.
There are effectively no strategic implications for this, since almost every guess is either being used to explore letters, or has already been confirmed to be the answer based on the already revealed information. There have been one or two times when there are two or three distinct words possible (I think once it was something like I had confirmed there was an M but not in the second position, there was a U, and there was a Y in the last position, but I hadn't tested G, so it could be either MUMMY or MUGGY) and I suppose if you knew that it wouldn't pick the rarer one, then you could get the immediate answer there, rather than needing one more guess. But that's rare.
#24 is very wrong. Say we accept the premise that money spend/invested by Gates is spend/invested just as beneficially to the people as the government would. The "real tax" still occurs much before Gates himself will feel it in his consumption. It will be his children's children (and so on) that will feel it. He has more than enough money to last many lifetimes. He will not notice a million more or less. But with an exponentially growing number of life's depending on that money a million dollars more or less is definitely going to be noticed somewhere down the line.
(P.S. Gates is not the best example as he is arguably spending his money much better and more altruistically than the US government would. He also plans to give most of his money to charity rather then his family/descendants. However, this does not hold for most billionaires.)
I've been sharing this Mr. Global photoshoot with my female friends a lot, each one has a different favorite contestant. Here are some other photo albums I like:
Cage homes of Hong Kong (TW: claustrophobia): https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/jun/07/boxed-life-inside-hong-kong-coffin-cubicles-cage-homes-in-pictures
Using drones to make light halos around mountains:
https://mymodernmet.com/reuben-wu-long-exposure-drone-photography/
https://mymodernmet.com/reuben-wu-long-exposure-composite-photos/
Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards:
https://www.comedywildlifephoto.com/gallery/comedy-widlife-2021-competition-winners.php
Reactions of Soviet people to seeing Dior fashion models in Moscow:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/dior-models-soviet-moscow-1959
Longest photographic exposures in history:
http://itchyi.squarespace.com/thelatest/2010/7/20/the-longest-photographic-exposures-in-history.html
This street photographer has impeccable timing:
https://petapixel.com/2015/01/02/self-taught-chinese-street-photographer-tao-liu-eye-peculiar-moments/
Zendaya seems like some kind of Leonardo da Vinci of weird low-brow popculture. After seeing Euphoria in particular, I remain impressed by the person behind all the masks.
What's with the single name?
She was a pop singer before she became an actress, and for whatever reason, it seems to be common for singers to be known by single names.
Thanks. That would appear to be my missing bit of context. My finger is even further from the pulse of pop music than movies/tv, but I'm still surprised not to have heard of this person who was evidently famous prior to The Greatest Showman & that Spiderman movie.
35. MS by virus by Cochran: 43 pages tl;dr: first mentions the logic at Page 422 "Several common disorders reduce reproduction sufficiently to generate high fitness loads. Schizophrenia has an fitness load that is at least 0.005, much larger than that of any autosomal dominant genetic disease.
Many diseases ascribed to autoimmunity, such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, and lupus, have fitness loads above or only slightly below 0.001 (Table 1), high enough to implicate infectious origins."
On page 429 Cochran hits it with the Epstein-Barr-Virus: "Virtually all MS patients are infected with Epstein-Barr virus, raising the possibility that MS may result from coinfection of
Epstein-Barr virus with one or more other pathogens [82]." - 82 is a study from 1998!!! SORRY? It took 24 years to acknowledge? Still unknown when any action will result - My mom bakes the cakes for the local MS-group, brother's friend died on it - not an abstract matter to me.
On page 436f Greg's famous take on gays: Infection as cause for male homsexuality. Fun-sentence: "The occurrence of exclusive male/male sexual preferences in sheep shows that cultural “powers of suggestion” are not necessary to generate the phenomenon [127–130]. (Sheep do not watch television, read newspapers, or discuss alternatives lifestyles.)"
Wikipedia on Greg felt the strong need to write a repudiation. Wokipedia?
***"Virtually all MS patients are infected with Epstein-Barr virus, raising the possibility that MS may result from coinfection of
Epstein-Barr virus with one or more other pathogens [82]." - 82 is a study from 1998!!! SORRY? It took 24 years to acknowledge?***
Cochran wasn't doing anything but noting something widely known in the medical field 20 years ago. It didn't take 24 years to acknowledge. But it took a long time to actually prove it.
The big difference between EBV-->MS and Unknown Virus-->Gay is that we had decades of actual peer reviewed epidemiologic and serologic evidence for the former and nothing but conjecture for the latter.
I stand corrected. But grumbling: Scott (and Tyler and very many; the media even) celebrating the study with its "new" insight. And no one says: "Hey, all evidence was on EBV since 1998. This is just an even better study stating the same. We were pretty sure all the time. Somehow it did not help us at all to think about cure/prevention. " As it seems your domain: Why did it not? - (no need to argue the gay-stuff, love and let love; I celebrate it, best thing ever happened to us hetero-guys, no matter why - only thinking: wikipedia should let the "conjecture" stand and just link to its article about "causes of h.")
The evidence was pretty good in 1998. There has been better evidence since then, but the recent paper was not better than 2015, probably not better than 2008. The only value of the new paper is that it was published in Science, so it counts.
Why would you expect this knowledge to produce a cure? Many diseases are post infectious autoimmune syndromes (Reiter’s disease for instance) - and I’m not aware of any that have cures as such, only immunosuppressive treatments.
Prevention is also a dead end. EBV is extremely common, fairly contagious and no vaccine exists despite significant funding.
The lifetime prevalence of EBV is 90%. So you can imagine that causality is hard to prove. Not impossible but it requires very careful analysis.
Re the EBV-MS link, iirc the consensus is that contracting EBV as an adult is a risk factor. Most of the population is infected in childhood and it seems safe. This is related to the hygiene hypothesis - the Third World has basically no MS, to the extent some article brought up geomagnetism as a possible causal factor (!).
Great stuff, thanks.
I actually did some work for members of a militia some years back. Nicest antigovernment extremists I ever met, and they were quite emphatically opposed to racism.
They sent me Valentines' Day cat treats there for a while.
#7: “All artificial things are designed” - Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
29. As kinda expert in Ukrainian/Russian matters, I liked the article by Anatoly Karlin much more than I expected. I would be very, very happily surprised if Putin's action (22.2.22) - now officially taking over his two puppet-republics - will be the end of this. Still the idea that a *rapidly* aging population of 200 million of which MANY dislike you is more viable than, well, an aging people of 144 million (which might stabilise by generous gas-financed-subsidies) that you got brain-washed just fine - I would stick to my empire - I mean: You been to Ukraine, ever? Seen anything outside Odessa, Lviv or Kiev worth taking - or much improved since 1999??? I want your glasses!* - I guess it is similar for Belarus. - I see cities emptied of 30-50 year olds. They work in Poland/Germany - or Russia. Those with kids leave them to the their granny. 20-25: students, learning a trade to use abroad. Will they fight? Mostly not, cars are packed to drive west, fast. Putin conquers a nation of grumpy pensioners. Posdrawlaju! (my congrats)
29 b) the Kazakhstan tweet: excellent? Sorry: BS. - not as in "all lies", but as in "all less-than-half-truths and you know it!". I worked in KZ for an NGO. "1 million"? Ridiculous. Xmas - indeed at Jan. 7. - but not even a small deal outside church. Russians go over the top on New Years Eve (they really do - Santa comes that day, too). And so on. Every single tweet is sh..t - I hate to say it: Karlin's text excels.
* From 1992 - my first bicycle tour Kovel-Luhansk - to 2020 I saw a lot of positive change. As in: stinky factories closed and more consumption (2nd hand-clothes/cars from the west - much better than what they had). Efficient western agribusiness. Just no investment in industry, little in infrastructure, little in housing outside the capital. No profitable raw-materials. No value-added exports. ("no" meaning: too little to mention). Only "human ressources" and those work: abroad. The most valuable asset is the relatively new visa-free-travel to the west. Ukranians would hate to lose this. As Putin's underlings they would.
As someone living in a post soviet country neighbouring Russia, and with Ukranian friends, I strongly feel that that Anatoly Karlin is a piece of shit, showing a disturbing lack of basic empathy and decency.
Back when I did the ACM programming tournaments in college, we literally had a binder full of "standard" algorithms printed out on paper (since we were allowed unlimited paper resources, but no digital resources) that we transcribed into the contest computer really quickly at the beginning of the contest and then copied-and-pasted as necessary to solve particular problems. And many of the easier problems were explicitly designed by the judges to be straightforward applications of those same "standard" algorithms.
Our team members who specialized in those simple problems would get good at skimming the problems for keywords in the first couple of minutes after opening them, shouting "Problem C is just Floyd's!", and immediately start the ten-minute task of parsing the problem's input format and passing it into our boilerplate implementation of Floyd's algorithm. Following that strategy, it was pretty typical for the top teams to have accepted solutions for the two or three easiest problems within 15 minutes or so. (The ACM contest format was usually five hours, with 6-10 problems total.)
I don't know how much more variety there is in the Codeforces problem set, but I'm pretty sure a dumb brute-force program that just generated random permutations of the same dozen or so algorithm snippets would probably have done okay-ish on the ACM problems.
(And I'd be really curious to see some work from human competitors in that same 54th percentile... how many registered accounts on Codeforces are just curious noobs who joined one contest once, solved zero problems, and gave up forever?)
Scott, how about a new lynx? The old one is cute and all, but I like variety.
Does anyone know if there's a good contemporary isochrone map of the United States? I think that, given air travel, it would have to be denominated in hours rather than days or weeks, but it would have some really interesting structures. For instance, I just traveled from College Station, TX to Chicago, and it's clear that this took a lot longer than it would have to get to Chicago from Los Angeles or New York, despite being a lot closer. But the places halfway between College Station and Dallas would probably have even longer travel times. You'd have an interesting polka-dotted landscape around airports, highway exits, and the like.
A quick google reveals some toolsets used to produce isochrone maps. Google Maps being the most obvious one of course, though many plug-ins that used it were impacted when Google put restrictions on the API a few years back.
Still, lots of software can produce the underlying data. The challenge is putting in the design work to turn it into a pretty map.
The first time I attended an event at Cornell, many years ago, I commented that after getting there (probably from Chicago) I now knew why it took Ulysses ten years to get from Troy to Ithaca.
I could have sworn I'd seen an isochrone map of travel times/postage in the Roman Empire at some point.
Just went down a moderate internet rabbit hole looking for such a thing. It appears that whatever I'm remembering was probably a modern reconstruction -- the Romans had the necessary information on travel times, but their cartography wasn't up to the task (at least as much due to printing constraints as other factors).
Super fascinating Roman guide-map of the whole empire's postal system -- surviving copy transcribed in a 13th century Germanic hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana
Also: this & the post about hallways led me to think about a heuristic for evaluating stuff in links posts.
"Do these claims make sense for ancient history?"
Maybe it's just extra reason to be cautious of stuff claiming to be the first/only instance of something.
Maybe you saw this? https://orbis.stanford.edu/?fbclid=IwAR02N4Z_u2B_wb26WSm9-OOzeKBaZkxahLkbPMS28IVyxdMlwwUypRePgNo
While that Scientific American article is weak, much more credible and serious allegations about his support for Philippe Rushton have come out since and are quite a bit more serious: https://science.thewire.in/society/history/new-letters-questions-edward-o-wilson-racism-philippe-rushton/. The accuracy of the claim in that article has been acknowledged by his foundation. https://eowilsonfoundation.org/e-o-wilson-rushton/. If you find this evidence more convincing, consider how it should make you feel about dismissing prior criticism of Wilson based on interpretation of his more public statements.
Thank you for posting! I’d read this a month ago and couldn’t for the life of me find it again!
Careful tracking of human metabolism found that exercise (generally?) doesn't increase total energy use. Instead, the brain uses less energy, possibly on energetically costly anxiety.
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myths-about-how-humans-burn-calories-and-why
"By borrowing a method developed by physiologists studying obesity, Pontzer and colleagues systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life. The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass."
"For his Ph.D. thesis, Pontzer measured how much CO2 dogs and goats exhaled while running and walking. He found, for example, that dogs with long legs used less energy to run than corgis, as he reported in 2007, soon after he got his first job at Washington University in St. Louis. Over time, he says, “What started as an innocent project measuring the cost of walking and running in humans, dogs, and goats grew into a sort of professional obsession with measuring energy expenditures.”"
"Pontzer’s first of many breakthroughs with the method came in 2008 when, with $20,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, he got the chance to collect urine samples at what was then the Great Ape Trust, a sanctuary and research center in Iowa. There, primatologist Rob Shumaker poured isotope-laced sugar-free iced tea into the mouths of four orangutans. Pontzer worried about collecting the urine from a full-grown ape, but Shumaker reassured him the orangs were trained to pee in a cup."
Partly about the trained orangs, but also a reminder that small grants can make a big difference.
"Subsequent doubly labeled water studies of apes in captivity and in sanctuaries shattered the consensus view that mammals all have similar metabolic rates when adjusted for body mass. Among great apes, humans are the outlier. When adjusted for body mass, we burn 20% more energy per day than chimps and bonobos, 40% more than gorillas, and 60% more than orangutans, Pontzer and colleagues reported in Nature in 2016."
"Individual Hadza had days of more and less activity, and some burned 10% more or less calories than average. But when adjusted for nonfat body mass, Hadza men and women burned the same amount of energy per day on average as men and women in the United States, as well as those in Europe, Russia, and Japan, he reported in PLOS ONE in 2012. “It’s surprising when you consider the differences in physical activity,” Schoeller says."
https://www.inverse.com/article/46350-surprising-health-benefits-from-4-cups-of-coffee-a-day
The big question remaining might be whether there's something about being the sort of person who likes a lot of coffee is related to whether they get a benefit from coffee.
If that's true, then people who were cutting back on coffee for their "health" (rather than for particular symptoms) should just have their coffee, but we still don't know whether coffee benefits people who weren't drinking it because they didn't like it or because of religious rules.
"Altschmied and Haendeler, both University of Dusseldorf biologists, say that four cups a day can actually help heart cells function more efficiently, as that amount of caffeine will “push” a protein called p27 into the mitochondria of heart cells."
https://heart.bmj.com/content/101/9/686.short
> 1: The newest studies don’t find evidence that extracurriculars like chess, second languages, playing an instrument, etc can improve in-school learning.
I suspect the causality is something like this: higher intelligence makes people more successful at school, and also more likely to pick hobbies such as chess or foreign languages. So between the hobbies and school, there is correlation but no causation.
And when it becomes known that "chess and languages make you better at school", average parents will force their average kids to do chess and language education. And then the correlation disappears.
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Does 'you are writing a book with a deaf character and you don't know much about deaf people so you pay a deaf person to read it and see if you wrote anything tremendously stupid' go from being a good idea on it's face to a bad idea in practice if you call that deaf person a 'sensitivity reader'?
That seems perfectly reasonable to me, but I also don't think it matches the situation that the article was describing, for a number of reasons.
Re: 32 Pretty buildings. I think this idea is from "A Pattern Language" by C. Alexander etal. You need 'things' at every scale, from 1/4" to ... It's all the fiddley bits at the ~1 inch scale that cost money and get excluded from modern buildings. But it's the fiddley bits that draw you in, beauty at all levels.
I agree this is at least part of the problem, but I disagree about the costs. Those fiddley bits could be manufactured cheaply in many cases (and in fact are - my parents live in a 19 century building and they could replace vanished plaster decorations with cheap plastic imitations that look basically the same.
I need someone to explain “You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption ...... they gave less to charity then very poor Africans paid the tax.” to me a little bit.
It reads as facile trickledown nonsense, or a totally dishonest representation on what taxes are; which can't be right.
Alright, I buckled down a read the post, and I still don't see the connection. He makes a bunch of true statements and interesting points, but fails to come to grips with what he (seems?) to be arguing against, eg, that the hyper rich have too much liquidity under lock and key, and that it should be anywhere else.
Or maybe I misunderstood it X2/
It's not that complicated. All the money that Rich Person A takes home post-tax is either consumed, saved/invested, or given away. If the tax reduces income but not enough to make A reduce his or her consumption, then it reduces investment or giving. If it affects giving, then the recipient rather than A is affected. If it reduces investment, then it is the employees, customers, etc. who would have gained through that investment who are affected. If the investment would have produced profit for A, then again, if that profit would not be consumed, it would be further invested or given.
This is an argument for heavy taxation and spending programs, though; not less.
Let's use a real example. Billionaire spends $4M a year on consumption, $36M a year in new investments, and $10M a year in charities (4% drawdown rule). New wealth tax comes online, and the billionaire has to pay $20M a year in new taxes. Do you expect the billionaire to reduce consumption or investment + charities first? So to pay the $20M tax, charity is reduced by $5M and new investments is reduced by $15M. So who actually bears the brunt of the new wealth tax?
There’s no such thing as “liquidity under lock and key”. Wealth isn’t kept in vaults any more, nor is it locked up in illiquid things like land. It’s usually money in a bank, which means that the bank is able to use it for lending and investment.
To be fair, I don’t think this answers your question entirely, because if all money is liquid now, then it doesn’t matter whether it flows to the rich person or not. It’s still there and could be used for charity or investment by less-rich people. I think Summer would say that the fact A is rich shows that A knows how to make money productive, generating more resources for the economy as a whole; if you divert the money through other people (with redistributive taxes), then that money is still flowing around, but it’s less likely to be invested in making microchips (highly productive) and more likely and more likely to be used for relatively inefficient things like buying food.
If this is true, than the argument goes from "I don't get it" to "Kulak" in one move; it still doesn't seem correct.
> implies that 1/1000th of the youth who report attempting suicide on surveys complete suicide - which sounds about right to me
Whoa, are you telling me you expect 99.9% of suicide attempts to fail? I know of one person in my life who attempted suicide. And she died. Of suicide.
Edit: I just remembered about magic9mushroom....
Or he expects 99+% of people who report attempting suicide on surveys are lying. That's higher than I'd expect, but suicide is still fairly rare and the lizardman constant is a thing.
Also note that "I want to kill myself" is something that nearly every teenager said (that I used to know when I was teenager or had contact for longer time since).
The statistic below implies that the suicide completion rate is 1 to 30. So I also wonder why Scott thinks that a rate of 1 to 1000 is about right.
> https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Suicide/state/ALL
My issues with # 28:
Ant "colonies" being an issue matches my pattern of 'rage meme' that doesn't reflect reel people or at the very least is extremely non-representative. My prior on this being 'real' (as I see it) is about 1/20, even after taking into account Scott's high epistemic status.
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying but you only need to read the article to see that the bit on ant colonies was really in it.
27 sounds plausible - one of the requirements for being a good monarch is showing yourself in public as much as you can, things like TV help of course but HM Queen Elizabeth II has been very dedicated to travelling around and putting in appearances in person.
I think Viking longhouses had corridors in the middle ages, way before 1597.
Google "viking longhouse floor plan".
RE 36: I think this is an interesting conflict that shows different ethical standards in research and journalism. It also seems to show that BMJ really dropped the ball with their open letter, even according to their own standards. A more in depth analysis from the fact-checker ( https://leadstories.com/analysis/2022/01/context-matters-why-lead-stories-fact-checked-the-bmj.html ) is worth a read. The fact-checker claims that the paper has the following journalistic problems: 1. the headline does not mention that the whistleblower is at a subcontractor (Ventavia) that is responsible for only 3 out of 153 sites. Now, it is possible that this is only the tip of the iceberg, but this is speculation, and publishing that is irresponsible journalism, unless it is a quote from an expert or in an opinion piece. And it seems that quite a few experts (including someone at the FDA, which was aware of the situation, unlike what the open letter from the BMJ seems to suggest. This open letter is also a very good exercise in (mostly) telling the truth but still being very misleading) think the whistle-blowers report is no cause for concern. 2. The evidence for violations is circumstantial and unclear. The whistle-blower only claims to have noticed meetings about potential violations, and did not personally witness them. So, the precise nature of the violations and whether they actually impacted the vaccination (were the incorrectly stored vaccines used or thrown away? ) is unclear. 3. The author of the piece did not inform Ventavia or Pfizer before publication and did not give them an opportunity to comment on the allegations. This (the fact checker claims) is an important journalistic principle, but (I know) is not something scientific journals usually care about. 4. The investigative journalist that wrote the article is known to push an anti-vaccination agenda. While most journals encourage authors to not such conflicts of interests, it's all voluntarily, and too objective to catch "pushes an agenda" unless you are employed by an organization with this purpose. 5. Many social media accounts, politicians, and news outlets published false conclusions based on this publication. This is of course not data the BMJ could be aware of before publishing, but it does support the claim of the fact-checker that the publication, while true, is misleading without further context.
Some related thoughts: why did the BMJ write this open letter without clarifying the publication "under fire" or addressing any of the issues observed? Well, I think they simply saw a political opportunity to make a preemptive strike (simulacra level 4 is strong here) against potential censorship by powerful media outlets that do not care much for their status. There's a reason the letter is addressed to Facebook/Meta, and not to the fact checker. Given this possible political motive, I think it is no coincidence this letter is a moment after the Cochrane incident. In general, while I'm generally against monopolist social media like Facebook and censorship, it seems the role of the fact-checker here is to annotate and explain, rather than censor (though it had the ability to censor, this seems to be closer to the interest of Facebook than the fact checker). We may blame the game, but blaming the player here doesn't seem reasonable. Which is why BMJ blames the game-master.
I just saw https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-59601335 which looks like the sort of Model City you're interested in, and I don't recall having seen you write about it before.
Anyone have a link to the TLP "you have said it" source? Don't get the reference and couldn't find anything googling