Yeah, the model for *courts* blocking populist right actions was probably the Trump travel bans. And SCOTUS mostly took the Administration's side in the end, it's just that various lower courts moved to immediately block the bans and several months were spent overcoming that.
The point about SCOTUS wasn't in the original article though -- that's Scott editorializing. The original article is mainly about leftist control of the bureaucracy (including teachers, etc.), which the author argues isn't changing anytime soon because the young and educated are all on the left and the gap is widening, which therefore makes Republican politicians less able to exert their will.
My understanding is that most people want more than 1 child, higher than 2 on average in fact. The difference between desired fertility and actual fertility is therefore due to economics. But very few parents want 1 child.
I think a lot of disagreement about this revolves around different meanings of "want". It reminds me of the thing Bryan Caplan wrote about ADHD: roughly, "you can probably focus if I apply sufficient pressure".
The biggest advantage of two kids over one kid is that the kids can play with each other and talk to each other, instead of constantly demanding their parents' attention.
I have two kids and am considering the possibility of a third, but I'm not that keen. The economic factor wouldn't be that big a deal, but the time and effort factor of resetting the clock back to zero just as I'm starting to get some sort of my life back again depresses me.
"I think the biggest belief driving low fertility is materialism"
Maybe this is just arguing about words but for a lot of people I don't think it's wanting more stuff, more material things. It's about, um, convenience? If I don't feel like cooking, there's take-out. If I don't feel like doing anything, I can watch tv. If I want to go somewhere far, I can just buy a plane ticket.
"Better public schools" are an inherently limited good because bright, motivated kids are scarce. 90% of what makes a school good or bad are the students. Smart, motivated students will result in a "good" school. Stupid, unmotivated students will result in a "bad" school. Everyone thinks that we can somehow get good schools by spending more or having better facilities or better teachers or vouchers or some wonderful thing that no one has been able to come up with yet. We can't.
Yes - I helped them with some logistics and although I haven't watched the videos yet I was impressed by both sides' professionalism. I would like to watch the videos, but 18 hours of video is a big ask.
It's a great debate- I definitely recommend a watch.
I came into it deeply uncertain about the question. It seemed like both theories involved an enormously improbable coincidence- either a lab leak that just happened to start spreading at the same sort of live animal market that so many other coronaviruses originated at, or a natural origin that just happened to to break out in the same city as one of the world's top labs studying coronaviruses.
After watching the first five hours or so of this debate, I have say: I don't think either of the sides' attempts to explain away the central coincidence of their theory have been very convincing. The natural origin side's detours into debunking leak theories from other labs felt a little strawmanish, while the lab leak side's argument that the market origin was probably a super-spreader event from a popular mahjong parlor was very dramatically dismantled by the other side with photos of a tiny semi-private mahjong room directly above a shop selling live animals, along with a report that samples of the virus were only found in the shop.
That said, I did feel that natural origin side did a slightly better job of demonstrating the unlikelihood of the other side's central coincidence. I'm pretty convinced now that the first probable cases of COVID-19 were clustered not just in the market, but around the specific part of the market selling animals- a thirty minute drive from the lab, and a particularly huge coincidence if it came from there.
By contrast, the lab leak side's claim that the lab's proximity would be an especially unlikely coincidence because they were unusually lax with safety was interesting, but didn't quite bring it up to the same level of improbability in my view.
I was also pretty skeptical of the lab leak side's methodology. I respect them for putting the work they did into quantifying their uncertainty and trying to be rigorous about avoiding bias, but the way they're combining their probabilities seems extremely sensitive to small differences in which pieces of evidence are included. The larger a set of data you have and the more you sift through it, the more unlikely coincidences you'll find by chance- if you just sift through data for an arbitrary amount of time and add up the unlikeliness of everything you find, that number is going to change by orders of magnitude depending on when you stop looking. And if your search is biased toward one kind of evidence, you can get an ever-increasing level of certainty just by searching longer. The fact that these guys were getting ~99.99% levels of certainty after multiplying out their probabilities also just doesn't pass the smell test. And it seemed a little suspicious when they described two anecdotes where their methodology resulted in heterodox positions that turned out to be correct, but made no attempt to calculate their overall calibration- or even mention times when they got something wrong.
I still have a lot more of the debate to watch- it's possible the upcoming debate over genetics that they keep teasing might be a knock-down argument for the lab-leak side- but so far, I've definitely updated a bit toward the natural origin position.
COVID strikes me as a remarkable disease-- not just the speed of mutation, but the number of body systems it attacks. Is there anything else in the same class?
I'm not a virologist, but it seems to me that COVID infection and vaccines both have reasonably strong protection for the future, in contrast to e.g. regular flu, where you need a new shot every year to have any protection at all and the yearly shot is still much less effective, both of which are related to the fact that flu mutates much more quickly than COVID. (On the flip side, a virus like smallpox grants complete immunity for life--presumably at least in part because smallpox mutates more slowly).
As for the number of systems it attacks, its symptoms are similar to the aforementioned flu or even common colds. Does it attack substantially more systems than those diseases?
The fact that COVID became a worldwide human pandemic obviously separates it from other viruses which did not, which is most of them. There's certainly some very strong selection effects there; by definition it has to be unusual on some axes.
Covid and the flu are different viruses (well, virus families or whatever as each mutate fairly rapidly). Different responses to various vaccines and shots isn't a surprise I suppose (much like we aren't too surprised that we don't need annual shots against measles, mumps, etc.)
And I'll note that Covid is different from viruses that didn't spread world-wide, but the seasonal flu virus does spread world-wide annually so clearly Covid isn't THAT unusual.
I don't know if we have a model for what causes some viruses to mutate quickly and others slowly. I'd love to know if we do.
They are different; I hope it didn't seem like I was saying that's the *only* difference between them. I don't think that COVID is an outlier when it comes to mutation speed, among human-pandemic viruses.
Other diseases have spread worldwide, but they're still a tiny fraction of all viruses. Like a few dozen out of millions instead of 1 out of millions.
Maybe other respiratory diseases do that too, but we haven't studied them enough, with enough ideological fervor to find a bunch of results saying that they affect other organ system.
I also am skeptical of the lab leak sides methodology (so far; still watching) for a different reason. The connection between the Dreyfus affair and COVID isn't clear to me, and it seems like they spend a lot of time discussing bias rather then diving into the particulars of the available information. Miller seems to have a much better grasp of the details of many different points, at least so far. Rootclaim is giving high-level, very general arguments that don't address the facts, such as discussing the bias of various authors.
(They also say that social media check-ins are biased, and then immediately use social media data to estimate cases and claims that Weibo is unbiased).
>Either a lab leak that just happened to start spreading at the same sort of live animal market that so many other coronaviruses originated at, or a natural origin that just happened to to break out in the same city as one of the world's top labs studying coronaviruses.
David Friedman shows how to use Bayesian statistics to balance these likelihoods here:
Thanks for that. I'm not totally sure I buy that analysis, however. Suppose we tracked down the first cases of COVID to a particular stall in the animal market. That should increase our credence in natural origin slightly, but if we then re-run this analysis with total number of wet market stalls in the world rather than total wet markets, it more strongly favors a lab leak, doesn't it? And if you were to re-run it with the number of cities with wet markets rather than number of wet markets, it would favor natural origin, right?
I feel like a good Bayesian analysis shouldn't be so sensitive to that kind of reframing. It seems like the probabilities need to somehow be measuring how surprised you'd be to see that general kind of evidence given the counterfactual, not just how probable the exact thing is. Like, if you're trying to decide whether a news article about a 35-year-old drunk driver is fraudulent, you wouldn't take some prior probability of an article being fake and then adjust it by the odds of a random drunk driver being exactly 35 (~1/60?). The age of the driver there wouldn't be surprising, so it shouldn't really lead us to update our credence at all. If it did, then every specific detail about the event, no matter how normal, should further lower our credence.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how you'd actually go about calculating how surprising something like that would be- my vague suspicion is that maybe you have to just put an entirely subjective number on it, like you have to with the prior probability.
I understand your general point about trivial details not reducing the veracity of an account (I am reminded of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy in which an event is mistakenly viewed as anomalous even when any alternative would have been equally anomalous), but I'm not sure about the particular applications.
What would it look like to run such analysis for number of stalls or number of cities with wet markets? The latter number only seems relevant inasumuch as a disease could break out at a wet market, so why would you treat a city with multiple wet markets and a city with one wet market equally?
I don't get how these would fit with your description of "how surprised you'd be to see that general kind of evidence given the counterfactual."
I'd think that I wouldn't be more more surprised about a virus breaking out in one stall, rather than another stall.
But I would be surprised about a virus just happening to break out in the same city as one of the few labs doing certain types of research with such viruses, if the virus didn't emerge from the lab.
And I would be surprised about a virus just happening to break out in a city that contains a wet market, if the virus didn't actually emerge from that market.
But if a city had multiple labs I would be less surprised, and if a city had more wet-markets I would also be less surprised. So I'd think that the relevant factors would be number of labs and number of wet-markets, not number of cities with one.
Having re-read the article: you're absolutely correct, I apparently mis-read it the first time somehow.
I'm not sure that comparing the likelihood of each hypothetical outbreak occurring in Wuhan quite captures the possible coincidence of a lab leak first spreading in a live animal market, but the analysis is definitely not invalid in the way I thought it was.
I'm reasonably sure I'd want to be finer-grained about the wet market than number of stalls. I'm willing to bet the stalls are of various sizes, have different numbers of customers, and sell different animals, probably different numbers of species per stall.
Just while I'm thinking about this, I'd like to know what the original animal host was (I'm assuming that there was an original host even if the virus was tweaked in a lab), but that may not be possible any more, since some animals have gotten the virus from people.
Yes. And this is how statistics in general works. For example, if you have 3 models each fit to 10,000 data points, and you compute a likelihood for each model, the actual value will be very low, because you're multiplying 10,000 numbers which are each less than 1. The only thing that matters in this case is the relative likelihood of each model compared to the others. Or to give another example, when you do hypothesis test, you don't ask for the probability of your exact result, you as, for the probability of your result *or one more extreme*. Or if you shuffle a deck of cards, the probability of whatever order it came out in is 1/52!... but that doesn't mean that it was definitely stacked in that order. You have to batch similar outcomes together, unless you're claiming a completely precise and deterministic model and measurement.
The presence of a lab isn't neutral. it would also boost the chances of an outbreak , lab or natural, being detected there. kind of like how they have lots of radiation detection equipment at western nuclear power plants, so radiation from chernoble was first detected at Forsmark in Stockholm. Of course with radioactive material it's much easier to point back at a specific source.
That's addressed in a lot of depth in the first debate. The natural origin side makes a very strong argument that if there were more than a handful of cases elsewhere in the city before the market, that would show up clearly in the exponential growth later on, even if the early data was strongly biased. Instead, the cases radiated out from the market, with the total COVID case numbers following a very predictable curve.
The lab leak people later concede that the market was the first major spreading event- they speculate that someone from the lab might have lived nearby and brought it directly there from the lab.
In the last debate, they put a lot of effort into giving evidence that the market was a likely place for the first super-spreader event to occur after a lab leak- eventually claiming to prove that the market was literally the number one most likely spot in the city for a super-spreader event (which actually really hurt their credibility, in my opinion). The natural origins side countered that there were a huge number of other historically likely super-spreader spots closer to the lab, and that empirically, cases in the market grew more slowly than elsewhere in the city.
"just happened to to break out in the same city as one of the world's top labs studying coronaviruses."
Well... the location of the lab isn't totally random. It was founded and upgraded to study such viruses because they're available in the vicinity.
it's like saying "what are the odds of an eruption *right* next to that volcanology lab.
I continue to believe either are plausible. but about every 2 weeks for the last few years someone publishes a headline along the lines of "[some group or organisation] says it can't rule out a lab leak" and then the same people go "SEE WE TOLD YOU SO!" and try to act like it's definitive proof.
How should we square #27s speedup of malaria vaccination with TheZvi's criticisim in his recent medical roundup:
>Also, EA and everyone else who works in global health needs to do a complete post-mortem of how this was allowed to take so long, and why they couldn’t or didn’t do more to speed things along. There are in particular claims that the 2015-2019 delay was due to lack of funding, despite a malaria vaccine being an Open Phil priority. Saloni Dattani, Rachel Glennerster and Siddhartha Haria write about the long road for Works in Progress. They recommend future use of advance market commitments, which seems like a no brainer first step.
I've found Zvi to be pretty trustworthy but these seem to be two diametrically opposed analyses of what happened and so someone has to be wrong here.
I don't see a direct opposition. #27 is saying that EAs did some things that sped up the malaria vaccine, Zvi is saying that there were additional things that EAs could've done which would have sped up the vaccine some more.
I suppose it's technically the case that both things could be true (EA sped up the malaria vaccine; it was unacceptably slow), but if both things are true, then EA should probably not be touting "we sped it up" as a large accomplishment even if it's technically correct, or Zvi is overstating the extent of the ball-dropping.
If they did more than trivial things to speed it up, if they managed to pick all the low-hanging fruit and then some, such that it being praise worthy is warranted; then Zvi's criticsim is at the very least over stated. In that case, while it might be true that there was more that could have theoretically been done in hindsight, that is probably _always_ the case in every situation and does not warrant a post mortem or reflection.
If however, what they did was a pittance, that there were obvious and easy routes to dramatic gains, and that the speedup they actually got was trivial, then that is not something worth touting as an accomplishment.
So I still think that one of the two must be overstating. Zvi must be claiming too much failure or EA must be claiming too much victory.
-edit- As is almost always the case: my comment is overly long and ramply and after I posted it I thought of a succinct way to sum it up:
Regardless of the facts on the ground and what happened, if two people are looking at the same events and one says "look at this marvelous thing I accomplished" and the other says "how on earth could this have been allowed, we must immediately assess and self-reflect" one of them has to be overstating.
If (made up numbers here) the vaccine would have been 10 years delayed relative to a sane trajectory absent EA help, and, due to getting that help was actually instead 5 years slower than the sane trajectory, it can be simultaneously true that EA helped a lot, and that there was more EA could have done.
I'm always lurking in the shadows waiting to comment on genealogy items and/or kill related joys. There are several errors in that Biden descent line (setting the mythological content aside).
The line breaks at the first William Taylor and the second man of the same name, said here to be his father. Joe Biden was indeed descended from the first William Taylor. William Taylor was a Quaker immigrant from Cheshire, England to Pennsylvania. I don't believe his parentage is known, most likely because the parish registers for his home village have not survived for the period. So the line should end right there. But instead he has been grafted onto the family of an unrelated William Taylor, an immigrant to colonial Virginia (most certainly not a Quaker), who furthermore has no known descendants.
The line follows the Virginia man's likely but unproven ancestry for a bit, but makes the wholly unwarranted assertion that he was descended from the Marian martyr Rowland Taylor. It furthermore adopts the long-disproved idea that the martyr's wife was a niece of William Tyndale. And then it connects the Tyndales to some northern English gentry families. I don't know much about that part but I would guess there are errors there too. All these errors have been floating around the internet for years and probably on paper long before that.
That all said, the funny thing is that you _could_ do this exercise with several other former presidents, including, most recently, George W. Bush. And there's no reason to think Joe Biden (and ultimately everyone else of European descent) isn't descended from the same people when you go far back enough, but, for Joe at least, the documentation isn't there.
As to the ancient stuff, you could safely take the line back to "Eahlmund, Under-King of Kent." Beyond that, you're relying on a genealogy mostly fabricated during the reign of Alfred the Great as your only source.
What about Trump? Supposedly he has a well-founded ancestry back to King Christian I of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, and that certainly sounds like the kind of person who ought to have Odin on his family tree.
I'd have to see the purported line, but my understanding is that Donald Trump has no proven royal descent. But that understanding is a few years out of date. Scottish records aren't bad, for the most part. Someone chipping away at it could find something. But Christian I seems a little too recent. Most people aren't descended from a monarch later than the 1300s.
The error appears to be at #11. That man should be John Macleod, a peasant on the Isle of Lewis. His parentage is unknown. Someone, without evidence, replaced him with a wealthier man.
I'd think this information would mostly be *less* accessible if you traveled back in time. You'd actually have to travel across hundreds or thousands of miles to check in with people individually. Today, people have actually compiled most of the information we have in much more accessible places, like the internet.
My father was a professional genealogist, contracted to assist Hugh Peskett in tracing then-president Reagan and VP Bush's ancestry. My recollection is that Bush had proven royal lineage, while Reagan was less delighted by his peasant heritage--but I was very young at the time.
Of course there is not a sharp line between the two, I say as an official descendant of royal bastards.
I've heard that due to the frequency of marital infidelity by women, something like 25% of people have a father other than who they believe is their father, and even if that's inflated a little, it almost surely makes tracing lineage back more than 4 generations basically pointless. Even if you go matrilineal to avoid that, there are hidden adoptions all over the place (and various scenarios like the Sarah Palin conspiracy theory where some other family member claims the child to spare the actual mother the stigma of unwed birth).
I assume a professional genealogist must have some way to reconcile this in their head and still feel like they're doing something real, but it makes the whole enterprise feel pointless to me.
Hidden adoptions and other family secrets can often be teased out through careful examination not only of official records, but family bibles, letters, and other ancillary materials as well. With practice you learn suspicious patterns for each generation, going back quite far. I believe this is the real thrill for a genealogist: not the dry retracing of an official family tree, but the detective work of solving family mysteries; of which you note there are many.
Heredity isn't especially significant to me, so I'm a bystander in this matter.
>I've heard that due to the frequency of marital infidelity by women, something like 25% of people have a father other than who they believe is their father, and even if that's inflated a little
All estimates like this I've seen have basically been based on percentages like this being demonstrated in paternity testing - without taking into account that paternity testing (when used to demonstrate infidelity and not resolve a multiple daddy candidates situation) is pretty much by definition used in situations when there's a reasonable suspicion that the paternity is in doubt (earlier evidence of cheating, child looks very different from the father etc., not situations where there are absolutely no grounds for suspicion.
German: From river Jordan to Med. sea "free" is a fine rhyme, just happens to mean: Destroy Israel (and kill all Israeli Jews). Still okay-ish in Germany. BUT: it was said/shouted/written after the Oct 7 murders/rapes/etc. . The best German blogger Thomas Fischer - a fat old guy who happens to be our country's best criminal lawyer/judge - explains the legal reasoning here (readers are lawyers, thus not a fun read): "(The slogan) is not only directed at the German state in the abstract, but at all people living in Germany, especially the Jews living here. At the same time, it calls on other population groups to join the call for the destruction of the state of Israel. For this reason alone, it is highly suitable (and intended) to cause aggression, insecurity and fear and to incite population groups living in Germany against each other. In addition, there is a threat to the population as a whole with the situation of danger and fear that this creates.
There is therefore no doubt about the suitability to "disturb the peace" in the specific context given here"
The Law is §140 "Reward and approval of criminal offenses"
Anyone who ...
1) rewards (a serious crime) after it has been committed ... or
2) applauds such crime in a manner likely to disturb the public peace, publicly, ...
shall be liable to a custodial sentence NOT exceeding three years or to a monetary penalty.
It is not "incitement to hatred" (§130). Nor is showing the Palestine flag or shouting "Stop the genocide (in Gaza)" against any German law. Which a few hundred do every Saturday in my town. Shrug. - And the slogan is "ok" again, if it is shouted NOT in connection with the Oct 7 attack. I'd guess even in those rallies now, after Israel's attacks.
That's an interesting legal analysis you've linked, and I find it persuasive. However, Scott's original link contradicts it, saying that it *is* about §130, according to "The prosecutor’s office for the German city-state of Berlin", which is the relevant authority making the claim here.
I'd still like to see a direct source, but at least it passes the test that the news outlet (i24news) would be explicitly lying if it was in fact *not* about incitement to hatred.
I suspect(ed), police/courts followed Fischer's reasoning about 140 (published Oct. 16 !), and did not update. Journalists are not very trustworthy when it comes to reports about legal topics (as Thomas Fischer complains in several blogs: a journalist writing about cars is expected to know stuff about engines; if about soccer: to know about "offside". But when it comes to law: anything goes!) About 130 Fischer writes: "Der Tatbestand des § 130 Abs. 1 ist aber aus einem anderen Grund wohl nicht (probably not) gegeben: Die Parole, Palästina solle 'vom Jordan bis zum Mittelmeer' reichen, richtet sich ausdrücklich gegen den Staat Israel, nicht aber mit einer hinreichenden Konkretheit gegen den jüdischen Bevölkerungsteil Deutschlands." - 130 demands a more "concrete" expression against people IN Germany: "Kill the Danish minority" or "Kill Bavarians" might suffice. Or not. There were not many §130 prosecutions that stood the test of courts (if not holocaust-denial). - My/Fischer's point: German law is not as crazy as Scott assumed. There was a short time, when that slogan was - possibly - a legal offence. Now it is back to normal. - Those accused of §130 then or now will have an easy time to get of that hook. I bet my 40€ against 10$. (Will resolve according to the final judgement of the highest level court appealed to.)
But if such symbolism is protected speech in the US under the First Amendment, now I'm curious why e.g. IS doesn't have a bunch of American supporters film a propaganda stunt where they drive around Washington DC waving flags and declaring victory over the crusaders. Or maybe they totally did and it just wasn't outrageous enough to garner sufficient media attention.
Interesting, thank you! I have doubts this decision will hold in all parts - esp. banning the slogan (which is the only non-Logo in the list). - I am curious, too; hopefully some US-readers will post some links (not of US-Nazis, please, no need!).
Well, there is the precedent of banning NSDAP slogans. However I think that a good case can be made that this slogan in particular (genocidal implications and all) is not Hamas-specific. Would be interesting to see this in court.
Lawyer here: It was a decision by the Staatsanwaltschaft (prosecutor's office) of Berlin to consider the chant a violation of § 130 StGB (which among other things forbids calls for violence against/defamation of ethnic and religious gropus. This means the prosecutors will try to prosecute you if you chant it. Wether or not it is actually a crime will be decided by the judge who has to consider your unique case, he doesn't have a list of forbidden words.
> I'm curious why e.g. IS doesn't have a bunch of American supporters film a propaganda stunt where they drive around Washington DC waving flags and declaring victory over the crusaders.
As an American, this seems fine to me? Of course, they'd need to keep off private property, and put up with hecklers. And apparently, if they want to film in Washington, D.C., they'd need a film permit. So maybe our bureaucracy is what's preventing this.
Driving around, say, New York or Philadelphia or Boston could get most of the upshot and not have to deal with the film permit issue (or at least do so in a different bureaucracy).
Which begs the question of how much actual upshot do they garner from such a stunt? Non-zero to be sure, but it would also likely draw FBI attention to their operations. More costs than money to a move like this.
Thanks Mark, that makes sense. I think Scott is being naive here - his next item celebrates how random American students change their mind about using the phrase once they've been educated a bit. But that's just a nice story - plenty of Muslims chanting the phrase do not believe Israel has the right to exist, which is also why they celebrated Oct 7th. I approve of the German law.
What percentage of Muslims who chant that phrase do not believe Israel has the right to exist, and what methodology are you using to accurately determine the thought processes of people you haven't met (assuming you are concerned about accuracy, of course)?
I mean, this is just such a slippery area, but to quote Mark below, 'the river-sea-phrase IS a wet dream of genocide'. For your evidence, you're not going to be able to run a survey, but you can observe, e.g. how slippery any Muslim spokesperson interviewee is when asked to condemn Hamas and Oct 7th. Or indeed, observe the behaviour of the Arab world from 1947 onwards. They tried to destroy Israel in 1948, in 1967, and in 1973. They didn't fail because they had qualms about genocide, they failed because they're kind of losers at fighting.
> I mean, this is just such a slippery area, but to quote Mark below, 'the river-sea-phrase IS a wet dream of genocide'.
Mark is welcome to spread just so stories, and humanity will reap the benefits of his behaviour. Unfortunately, consequences tend to be borne by the poor, while those who cause problems live relative lives of luxury.
> For your evidence, you're not going to be able to run a survey, but you can observe, e.g. how slippery any Muslim spokesperson interviewee is when asked to condemn Hamas and Oct 7th.
And what would this be evidence of, *necessarily*? Is condemning Hamas objectively necessary &/or optimal gameplay? Because I do not condemn Hamas.
> Or indeed, observe the behaviour of the Arab world from 1947 onwards.
After what I said above: *are you actually serious*?
> They tried to destroy Israel in 1948, in 1967, and in 1973.
They certainly *attacked* on those dates - but "tried to destroy" is a different matter.
> They didn't fail because they had qualms about genocide, they failed because they're kind of losers at fighting.
Perhaps. And perhaps one of these times they won't fail. And perhaps one of these days they'll accomplish a 9/11 Part 2. I can hardly blame them.
Yes you’ve made the case for Israel’s response pretty solidly. As Golda Meir said if the arabs laid down their guns there would be peace. If Israel laid down their guns there would be no Israel. It’s existential for Israel. Palestinians just need to accept they lost and move on, like the 2 million arab israeli’s did.
> Yes you’ve made the case for Israel’s response pretty solidly.
If it isn't too much trouble, could you walk us through how what I have written justifies ending the life of 20,000 or so humans?
> As Golda Meir said if the arabs laid down their guns there would be peace. If Israel laid down their guns there would be no Israel. It’s existential for Israel.
Golda should claim this $1M prize then (assuming they can actually *demonstrate* this proclaimed supernatural ability)!
> Palestinians just need to accept they lost and move on, like the 2 million arab israeli’s did.
Not really, no more than Israelis "need" to change their culture of disproportional killing and highly skilled mass thought / international governmental control. Humans are free to continue down this path of insanity, with Rational (as opposed to rational) people like you cheerleading the way, and Mother Nature will pass out the prizes according to some unknown methodology. Best of luck to you and yours!
Because if Israel wanted to genocide the Palestinians ... they could, easily? They wouldn't bother sending in troops, they would just bomb Gaza into oblivion. This is pretty basic stuff Freddie. And in the West, we don't have our major cities overwhelmed by Jews chanting genocidally. Like, we can see these protests, they are not secret.
You're just admitting that your determination of what the phrase means is based more on the speaker than on the specific words, which is exactly what makes people suspect that targeting the phrase is about preventing Palestinian resistance of any form, be it genocidal or not.
Well, welcome. :) Otoh: a) I do agree with Scott's stance that banning certain statements feels kinda less than ideal (I could live without our Holocaust-denial law, that leads to the imprisonment only of some 'slightly stubborn' granny. Again, otoh, I am glad potential denialist have to shut their mouth at least about this one!)
b) The river-sea-phrase IS a wet dream of genocide. The Palestinians in Germany know it - and their German leftie friends are more often aware of its meaning than US-college kids. Banning it feels less ridiculous here. But: as I said among my comments: I doubt it will hold; it is too late for §140, too "abstract" for §130 - and it is not an exclusive enough "trademark" of Hamas to keep it banned. Thus we all shall be prepared to have to live with this. Thus I agree with Scott, mostly - I just feel he got the details of the story a bit wrong; freedom of speech is alive and kicking in Germany, too. For better and worse.
This whole conundrum shows a serious lack of Basic Logic.
Does anyone ever consider rephrasing the chant:
For X in (Black, White, Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, ...) {
From the Deserts to the Sea, California will be X free!}
The instant anyone were to substitute Black for Jew, everyone would lose their shit. What does it mean, if you can't hold all people in equality anywhere and everywhere?
Spoiler Alert!: If you can't hold all people as equal anywhere and everywhere, you are a racist.
Exactly why is it people hate the Nazis? Because they invented the highway system? Or their progressive stance on animal rights? Or that most of them were vegetarians? Or because they ran a pretty damn good government? No, because they wanted to make Germany Jew Free.
Could you elaborate on that? The other comment of yours indicates: not. a) We are mostly talking here about legal interpretations of a statement. One might call that "fact" or "speculation" or "cotton candy". It is none of those. b) What is in the mind of person X when they say "Z" is not necessarily what a judge has to judge. But to judge how a neutral, informed person Y would understand X's uttering of "Z". Which is a much more manageable task. I hope this helped. If you managed to read the linked article (google translate!), this might help even more.
I will try: Rationalists *regularly* forget the important distinction between objective *knowable and known* reality, and their subjective opinion/experience of it. And: the community does not seem to appreciate those who make such distinctions (thus, it is not common, thus it reduces the chance for the community to realize the flaw and address it).
All humans suffer from this general flaw of course, but not all humans belong to a community that proclaims to be opposed to such flawed thinking, so I like to "grind their gears" now and then..
> The other comment of yours indicates: not.
Actually, it is your interpretation of the comment (this is one of the very easiest mistakes to make).
> a) We are mostly talking here about legal interpretations of a statement.
The text of people's comments asserts that they are describing the beliefs of individuals within groups, NOT the legal *estimation of* their beliefs. It is both a "pedantic" *and* important distinction, and I suspect such laziness is plausibly not without consequences (remember that Jan 6 incident, the one that is regularly proclaimed to be a literal coup attempt?).
> One might call that "fact" or "speculation" or "cotton candy". It is none of those.
Delusion, meme magic, cultural norms (THE PROPER way to behave/think: *imperfectly*). The list goes on!
And saying it is NOT speculation loses a bit of its power if one realizes that regardless of what a judge says, *it is the/a legal opinion* (speculation *is not possible* for judges, somehow).
> b) What is in the mind of person X when they say "Z" is not necessarily what a judge has to judge.
Agreed, but it is even worse: often, the judge *does not have the ability* to not accidentally commit a cognitive error - and we place immense power into these people! And we wonder why things are so screwed up on this planet!!
> But to judge how a neutral, informed person Y would understand X's uttering of "Z". Which is a much more manageable task.
Especially if you do not (or *cannot*) mean your words literally!
> I hope this helped. If you managed to read the linked article (google translate!), this might help even more.
Almost everyone in the west who uses the phrase would categorically deny they mean 'free of Jews.' Use of the phrase generally indicates, as far as I can tell, support for a 'one state solution' where Israel and the Palestinian territories become one state with no official religion or ethno-cultural identity and the same civil and political rights for all current inhabitants of both. You can argue that the slogan 'really means...' whatever, but this is as pointless as debating the true definition of feminism. Most slogans are too vague to have a specific intrinsic meaning. Even some of those that do and are overtly violent are tolerated because they are assumed to be hyperbolic rather than literal (e.g. 'eat the rich'). So what is there to argue about? One may contend that it indicates a particular belief, irrespective of what the users say they believe, but that's hard to prove and I strongly suspect false in this case (that is, most people saying this phrase do not in fact support killing or expelling Jews from Israel).
In most cases, arguing over slogans or phrases (this, blacklivesmatter, alllivesmatter, etc.), what they 'really mean,' is pointless because you're basically arguing over subjective intent. Whether a phrase is understood as implying something offensive is entirely a product of whether supporters or opponents of the phrase win the semantic warfare, so if you can convince enough people that a phrase is offensive, it will become offensive because only people who want to offend will use it, and if you can't, it won't.
So, is "From the Deserts to the Sea, California will be X free" covered as free speech in the USofA? I assume: Yes. So why should anyone be losing their shit?
Oh, and just because Hitler was a vegetarian non-smoker (and a hypochondriac), the majority of Nazis did not change their life-styles. They not just "wanted", but actually eliminated Jewish life in Germany, too. 98% or so.
All speech should be free with respect to law. Lest we end up like Canada, where a proper request of redress of government policy can get you thrown in jail.
People should be losing their shit because. The call: "From the Deserts to the Sea, California will be Jew free" is a call for displacing a people from a geographical place. This is a crime against humanity. Of course, as above, permitted in the US, because we don't outlaw speech.
However, the citizenry, the leadership, especially the press shouldn't disregard calls to collective violence against a people, but these calls themselves deserve their own pubic redress. e.g. we need to let the Nazis march in Skokie, and we the people need to issue stern rebuke, and glare down our noses at them.
I throw the animal rights-veganism stuff in there, because I perceive many of the DSA types seem to hold their rigorous animal rights veganism stance as purifying, imagining themselves pure, righteous, above evil ... when their nemesis—he who must not be named—shared many of their beliefs, apparently now, including anti-Semitism.
Did these high level academics explain the methodology they used to read the minds of literally thousands of people, many of whom they have zero access to?
NO WONDER humans don't get along lol....enjoy reaping what you have sown, Normies.
Of course, "from the river to the sea" does not mean killing all Jews, and it also happens to be in the Likud charter. But let me guess - when Israelis say it, it isn't genocidal.
Interesting, and true: a) The Likud Party used the formulation "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." Most recently this has been stated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 18 January 2024.
b) Use by Palestinian militant groups (See also: Calls for the destruction of Israel)
Hamas, as part of its revised 2017 charter, rejected "any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea", referring to all areas of former Mandatory Palestine and by extension, the end of Jewish sovereignty in the region. - wikipedia -
Now, what happens when Hamas does as it pleases in the Israeli area: See Oct. 7. Genocidal? check
What happens, when Israel does as it pleases: Arabs are the largest ethnic minority in Israel. 2 million live in Israel, a 5th of Israel's population. Genocidal? err, not really.
How does Gaza look like after Hamas went for another war with Israel: Some pics remind me of Germany 1945. You start a war you can not win, wth do you expect?
When I say, "I want to live in my house without FdB", it does indeed mean sth else as when FdB says: "I want to live in Mark's house, and see what I did to his kid." - Ocf: FdB is warmly welcome, whenever in Germany. :D
Though here, indeed, one may end up paying some fine, when one calls for the extinction of Israel, IF done so while celebrating murderous crimes against Jewish civilians. Judged a misdemeanour, then. Sorry, not sorry.
When the Israelis say it, they're reasonably specific about what's going to happen between the river and the sea, and it isn't genocide. Then we get to see the Israelis *do* it, exercising complete control over everything but the river of the sea for generations, and the Palestinians remain conspicuously un-genocided. Not even ethnically cleansed.
When the Palestinians chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", they're kind of vague about whether the next part is "...of Jews". And then we see them go about and randomly murder as many Jews as they can in the land between the river and the sea, and cheer about the fact that they just randomly murdered a bunch of Jews and promise that they'll do it again and again and again until Palestine is Free. Of mumble-something.
> 11: Poll: AI accelerationism (“e/acc”) has a negative 51% net favorability with the general public, putting it behind (eg) Scientology and Satanism. There’s no shame in this. But there is a little shame in how the e/accs are surprised and trying to nitpick the result. There could be a certain amount of coolness cred in wanting to sacrifice humanity to the Void Gods - but not if you get all huffy when you learn this doesn’t play well in Peoria.
e/acc has a lot of baffling beliefs. But the idea that e/acc would be generally popular is a particularly silly one. Stopping technology and fear of change has always been the more popular ideology. But the movement is even less serious than EA so what are you gonna do. I think people who support AI development are well organized and serious but e/acc doesn't seem to be.
I know almost nothing about e/acc (I listened to Beff Jezos on Lex Fridman), can you help me understand the animosity between EA, rationalists and e/acc? My prediction (as everything is political) is that e/acc will move to the republican side of the aisle.
I dont think it's charitable to say that most e/acc people believe AI x-risk is good. Rather, like much of the general population they dont think xrisk is real. But unlike the general population e/acc think AI can do a bunch of cool and good stuff, so they think it's a moral imperative to build it sooner.
I guess most people who call themselves e/acc just think it means "tech/progress yay, down with regulation!". When it kinda isn't, it's an absolutist view where progress is good regardless of humanity.
Unlike most people who oppose AI regulation because they don't believe x-risk is true (This is a _massive_ group, not e/acc though), e/acc explicitly thinks godlike AI is possible and _want_ that.
I would argue that the main force opposed to e/acc, that is EA/rationalists, are also not exactly cis-humanists. EY is rather clear that he does not consider the present human existence (which invariably ends in death) an acceptable state of affairs.
Rationalists however would prefer there to be some continuity of both values and conscious between humans version one and whatever the future might hold instead having some paperclip maximizer to be humanities lasting impact.
As an analogy, a careful blogger and some random twitter shitposter might want to steer the future into a direction where their thoughts are spread wide. But while the shitposter only cares about going viral, the careful blogger might be motivated by making the world a better place according to his specific value system, and consider going viral just a means to an end.
I think it's a conflict of views of what a post-human AI-only universe might look like.
In one view, our successors are sufficiently human-like that we're happy to call them our descendants as they go off to colonise the stars unencumbered by squishy biological substrates; maybe we even upload our own consciousness.
In the other view, our successor is an idiot AI that sits quietly humming happily to itself in a gravity well filled with paperclips.
Basically, EA wants to slow down technological progress. They'll put it more nicely but that's the basic policy of arguing for pauses and regulations and government agencies to approve AI. And E/Acc was made up of people who disagreed with that, largely people actually working on AI who didn't want the government getting involved in what they saw as their business. So the movement was consciously started to be anti-EA and went out of its way to antagonize them.
So EAs think E/Accs are going to destroy humanity and E/Accs think that EAs are going to slow or stop technological progress. They often compare it to the effect of the government on nuclear.
"e/acc will move to the republican side of the aisle"
That's not a bold prediction. The core e/acc people like Verdon and Andreessen are citing Nick Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land , and have scarcely hid their disdain for any regulation and the Democratic base. Verdon even uses "based" vernacular.
> 16: Claim: AIs work less well over the holiday season, because they’ve “learned” from their training data that they should be taking time off. I’m very suspicious of this, anyone want to tell me if it’s been debunked?
I haven't done it thoroughly but I did benchmark when I heard this and found no difference. I also set the context to being on a holiday or vacation and it didn't seem to have much effect. Possibly it's just higher server loads? All the reports seem to be from non-technical users of the consumer app.
> 17: Related: Grok (by Elon Musk’s x.ai, not by OpenAI) will sometimes say that the OpenAI content policy forbids it from answering a question. Although this originally raised suspicions of code-plagiarism, an x.ai engineer claims that it’s just parroting its training data, which includes this as a common AI response in these sorts of situations.
I recently saw a similar issue where I got Bard, Grok, and ChatGPT to declare that they were ErnieBot. I submitted them as reports but didn't get a response. More broadly, LLMs have serious issues outside of certain languages. Which is likely to have interesting social effects. Might make a good short story where minority language speakers can speak without AI monitoring because there's not enough speakers for the LLM to train period.
I would be flabbergasted if a state of the art AI in 5 years cannot act as a universal translator even for (human) languages it has never heard or seen.
Right but... how? You're basically claiming you can study English so well that you'll understand Greek without any reference to Greek. I don't understand how that'd work.
Not quite. Remember that these models have no idea how to "speak" English or Tamil or any language whatsoever. They "just" predict the next token or few tokens.
I am pretty confident that with 5 years' improvement the state of the art models will be able to generalise from _every other language_ to a new (human) one.
But they need context to do that (as well as sufficient NLP to process the request). What specific mechanism do you think learning English makes Greek predictable?
It's like a decoding problem. You start with the most commons words, assume they are prepositions and pronouns and common verbs (the, you, I , is, are, etc.). Try a few different versions until you get some that minimally make sense. Then you start guessing additional vocabulary based on correlations. "I woke up and ate ___," and so on. Because the LLM understands how different concepts correlate in human language, it would be relatively easy to expand from there, I suspect.
I don't think it would be a one-shot translation with no prep. More like it could work it out in a day and then continue to do it from then on.
Yeah, I don't think that'd work due to both how many languages work and the nature of LLMs. Global rules of grammar and aspect are not really how language works.
Also, the Russian version of that Chinese joke has been current since at least 2008 (and has the added twist — “we must bomb Voronezh” — that during the Wagner Group mutiny this year for a second it seemed like Putin might end up in a situation where he had to take the joke action from the conclusion): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_bomb_Voronezh
> 23: The town of Qırmızı Qəsəbə in Armenia claims to be “the last shtetl”.
Azerbaijan, not Armenia. That is an incredibly Azeri name. Armenia also has a long history of anti-semitism and Jewish expulsions which is why Azerbaijan has had the larger (though still small and persecuted) Jewish population since we first got censuses down to modern day.
> 26: @somefoundersalt on Twitter relays a joke from the Chinese web:
> Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
You could mix up that China's a red state. ("Look man, we need to stick to the Reds!" "What about Mississippi? It's a red state.") The issue with the original joke is that Guizhou is where their expensive liquor comes from. Guizhou is kind of culturally analogous to Kentucky as a relatively poor, stereotypically rural/backward region that is famous for producing liquor.
The bigger issue with a direct translation is that China has almost no Americans in it. They graduate a few hundred Americans from universities each year. There's less than a hundred thousand Americans and less than a million foreigners of any kind (many of whom are from poorer Southeast Asian nations). Americans also don't generally keep their money in China or retire in China or anything like that.
China in general is not very foreigner friendly. India has something like five times as many foreigners and even more naturalized residents despite being significantly poorer. As a percentage China has the second smallest immigrant population of any reporting nation, only ahead of Cuba. And I'd argue the isolation in China is worse because Cubans speak Spanish and so can experience a more international culture than the Chinese get.
The biggest problem is the joke relies on the audience knowing two or more major foreign cities in a country. You would have to be attacking, like... Canada.
President Biden draws up his cabinet and announces they need to make a preemptive strike on China. He proposes Beijing. One of the cabinet members objects. "You can't destroy Beijing," he says, "they're home to the world's best ducks."
Biden stares vacantly, then instead proposes a strike on Shanghai. Another cabinet member raises his hand. "You can't strike at Shanghai", he says, "Jackie Chan lives there, he's an American treasure."
This continues for a while, until finally Biden declares "isn't there even a LITTLE China we can blow up without losing something precious?" And so...
>
...fuck. I have no idea how to end this.
Should this be Trump instead? Would that be funnier?
Trump summons his cabinet and announces that it is time to strike China. He proposes they nuke Shanghai.
Ivanka raises her hand and protests "we can't do that, my handbag store in Shanghai is making record profits."
Trump sighs and then says they will instead hit Beijing. Trump Jr raises his hand to state that he is just about to close a property deal there and nuking it would really be a downer on land values.
this goes on for a bit longer, before Trump, exasperated, asks the room: "is there any city in the east where we have no business interests?"
they all look at each other for a moment and decide to nuke Kentucky.
Really close! Except trump loves (the voters in) Kentucky! You’d have to nuke a famously liberal area, like Berkeley. Except it would be better if it was east coast because he says “city in the east”… but trumps have a lot of business interests in most liberal east coast cities.
What about “aren’t there any commies I can nuke that won’t mess with our pocketbooks?” They look at each other and decide to nuke Colorado.
Technically, but I ak speaking here as a comedian, rather than as a metaphorician.
And we Americans (as you can see from our version of the office as opposed to the british original) are a good times people and wouldn't really laugh about bombing one of our shitholes. Teasing Chicago however is good fun, because they can take it.
On top of the disparity in number of foreigners studying abroad in each, part of the joke relies on the fact that it's disproportionately the most privileged and connected Chinese people, who'd be likely to have ties to important government officials, who're likely to be studying or living abroad in America. Plus, it's kind of rooted in the Chinese conception of social ties, or guanxi, which doesn't directly translate to how American politics of business operate.
It'd be hard to transplant that same sense of "this foreign adversary country is full of people with important connections we need to honor to people in high positions in our own government" to an American context.
The Chinese have committed to trying to increase the number of American students in China. The issue is, fundamentally, Chinese universities are not a very attractive proposition to American students. They have almost no chance of being let into China and its qualifications are less well regarded than western universities even in much of China.
Also, the Chinese have been trying to attract "high quality" foreign students for decades with limited success and some degree of domestic backlash. High quality meaning mostly from richer countries. They do get a fair number of students from the third world.
My mother does genealogy, and can trace our ancestry back to a Scottish nobleman who was sent to America as punishment for participating in the Jacobite Rebellion. Many years ago I found him on a website with a huge family tree of Scottish nobility. I went through the website and found every ancestor of his who was listed, which included Charlemagne. And I knew someone else who had traced her ancestry to Charlemagne, and further back to pagan kings, who in turn claimed descent from Odin.
The important thing is that this makes me Joe Biden's cousin.
"After his release, Floyd became more involved with Resurrection Houston, a Christian church and ministry, where he mentored young men and posted anti-violence videos to social media.[6][7][8][9] He delivered meals to senior citizens and volunteered with other projects, such as the Angel By Nature Foundation, a charity founded by rapper Trae tha Truth.[44] Later, Floyd became involved with a ministry that brought men from the Third Ward to Minnesota in a church-work program with drug rehabilitation and job placement services.[6] A friend of his acknowledged that Floyd "had made some mistakes that cost him some years of his life", but that he had been turning his life around through religion.[7]
{snip}
An influential member of his community, Floyd was respected for his ability to relate with others in his environment based on a shared experience of hardships and setbacks, having served time in prison and living in a poverty-stricken project in Houston.[7] In a video addressing the youth in his neighborhood, Floyd reminds his audience that he has his own "shortcomings" and "flaws" and that he is not better than anyone else, but also expresses his disdain for the violence that was taking place in the community, and advises his neighbors to put down their weapons and remember that they are loved by him and God.[7]"
So...a guy leading a double life where he counsels people to stay away from gangs while running gangs reminds you of a guy working to turn things around after prison?
There's about one thing those guys have in common, and it ain't their situation.
That's a terribly inapt comparison. Founder of the Crips and a quadruple murderer vs an addict trying to pass a phony $20?
Addicts do stupid, terrible and illegal things to fix. This is common knowledge. Matthew Perry went to home sale open houses and raided medicine chests. Floyd wasn't in a position to slide under the radar in that way.
"I think the bailey is that Floyd was a criminal so we shouldn’t be so concerned about what happened next."
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
This was a fucked up dude who did fucked up things to hurt innocent people all the time. Yes, there's some risk in being a fucked up dangerous dude interacting with the police. Floyd is the one who attracted the police to himself every time he did some fucked up thing to harm innocent people.
I'd love to know these people's views on the killings of Philando Castile and Ashli Babbitt. I can probably guess, but hearing the tortured logic would be interesting.
Why anyone is so excited to defend the killing of someone by the government is beyond me.
Having coronary arteries 75% & 90% occluded whilst also having fentanyl and morphine in your system, then engaging in super high stress activities like being a convicted felon whilst committing new felonies ... pretty much self-inflicted.
Saying an injury is self-inflicted is not the same as saying the person "deserved" the injury. Maybe you could try writing a comment that doesn't involve putting words in someone's mouth.
I did find it quite odd how much attention the Floyd phenomenon generated. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from unhealthy lifestyle choices like obesity, alcoholism, or smoking. But people acted like it was the #1 problem in America that a much smaller number of people were dying after they made the unhealthy lifestyle choice to commit crimes and then resist arrest.
I know the Floyd iconography everywhere is supposed to remind us of his tragic end, but I once read the facts of his life as far as known, and it struck me as one of the sadder lives I had ever heard about. From the get-go. I think his mother loved him, so that's something I guess.
>The criminal charge against the Safe Streets site supervisor is not the first allegation of criminal activity to be tied to the program. In 2013, the Mondawmin site suspended operations when two outreach workers were arrested in less than two weeks; in 2018, an employee pleaded guilty to federal charges accusing him of holding gang meetings and storing drugs and firearms at the site located on Monument Street.
Funny, it reminds me more of people like Jimmy Savile who was a patron of many child related charities but used these as a hunting ground for underage children. Or Cardinal McCarrick who used his position as a Catholic Cardinal to abuse children.
Or even better the LA County Sherriff's department which has been known to associate with over 20 gangs and even has had its on gangs made up of deputies.
#40 definitely didn't remind me of a man killed by the government in broad daylight.
Savile and McCarrick were seen as upstanding citizens when they were committing their crimes, whereas George Floyd and Stanley Tookie Williams admitted their crimes, claimed to be redeemed, rehabilitated people, which they were not, and were charged with mentoring/counselling criminally-inclined people. I thought the point would be obvious, apparently not.
ETA: I'm not saying society should never forgive anyone. But if you want to advise your son against being involved in crime, maybe have the mentor be somebody who grew up in a similar environment to him and NEVER went to jail in the first place.
3 reminds me of https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception, which discusses a paper arguing that car seat laws have created a large and largely arbitrary financial barrier against having more young children than can fit in a standard car (two car seats) and therefore have strongly encouraged couples to not have more than two children, resulting in significant reductions in third children. Essentially, "if we had another kid now we wouldn't be able to fit three car seats so we would legally need a new bigger car so we will instead have to limit our fertility and participate in the ongoing population collapse"
But three car seats do fit across the back of a compact sedan. There has never been a time when I could not legally transport my three (oldest now age 10) in the back seat of my Corolla. The paper only works if one assumes an even smaller classification of vehicles as representative.
How comfortably? I don’t think I could fit a third car seat into the back of my sedan very easily. Maybe it just takes getting narrow carseats, maybe the cup holder on my son’s is the real problem there!
Most car seat models have some widest point obtrusion and you cannot run them three abreast if they are all facing in the same direction. But you don't have to.
When #3 is an infant, #1 is already front facing. You run the front facing child in the center.
When #2 turns to front-facing, you run the rear-facing #3 in the center.
When #3 turns to front-facing, #1 is ready for one of the super-compact booster seat options, after which point the width constraint is relieved.
I am frequently informed that my sibling is in my body space. I am even frequently informed that my sibling is touching me.
However, I'm about to do it only because I have booster seats, and also it's still a big pain in the butt getting everyone on the car. And you don't even have a spare seat to carpool.
"If we have a third child, in seven years, they will have to squeeze into the back bench of our current car" does not sound like it would be foremost on couples minds.
I think the point where the additional seat costs you big bucks is when going from five person families to six persons. While mostly any car can fit five, cars which can legally fit six are probably mini-vans which are significantly more expensive.
If you have a third child, you have to figure out how to fit three child seats into the back bench of your car right now, not seven years from now. Maybe you think that's easy to do, but most people really don't.
My brother-in-law was the fifth child. They had a huge Opel Commodore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Commodore and him crouching beneath the feet of his mother on the front passenger seat.
It is definitely possible to do this in most cars, excepting the case where the children are triplets and all need to be rear facing at the same time. It kind of reminds me of the logic when people say, "but you won't all fit in a hotel room!" As if that's a pivot point worth planning your life around.
Yeah, the Soviet Union didn't allow emigration without permission. They could have (mostly) left to other parts of the USSR but not out of the country. Once the country opened up Azerbaijan was immediately caught up in an ethnic war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. And Israel was (and in fact still is) the much freer country. So a lot of them left. Not just from Azerbaijan but from much of the former USSR.
Looking at the map it seems the easiest way to create a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea" would probably just be to dig a canal connecting the Jordan directly to the Mediterranean.
Wouldn't work topographically since the Jordan river is below sea level. You'd have the Mediterranean flooding into the Jordan (and causing some flooding in much of the west bank)
Yeah that was kinda the joke I was going for, but I made it impossibly obscure for anyone who hadn't been staring at a topographic map recently.
So just to clarify, if we were to make a canal "from the river to the sea", it would flood an area from the Dead Sea to the Sea of Galilee, including about a fifth of the West Bank and a large section of Jordan, along with a bit of Israel. The River Jordan itself would either cease to exist or become about 20km wide depending on your perspective. Not that many major cities would be destroyed though (looks like Jericho is the biggest, and they should be used to it by now.)
1: I love that according to the federal government, many dad jokes are officially not funny, since in the online dad joke submission form, a punch line is optional.
>Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
I don't think so. In the west and especially America we've been eager to accept foreigners, in particularly exchange students with rich and powerful parents, from our geopolitical adversaries. However, we generally stay at home, with maybe an exchange year to Europe thrown in; we have the best colleges in the world, so why leave? I'd be surprised if there were many senior Biden cabinet officials with family currently living in China.
I could imagine a version where it’s 2003-era Bush-Cheney trying to send a message to “old Europe” (a la “freedom fries”) but it keeps turning out that Jenna or Mary or someone has a college roommate who is studying abroad there.
I could also see a version where blue staters (Newsom?) tries to nuke red states but can't hit Austin, Billings, Raleigh etc. due to blue state exiles and settles for San Francisco
I got it. They're trying to figure out whom to bomb after 9/11. Someone suggests Saudi Arabia because fifteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, but Cheney has a friend who has a big oil company in Saudi Arabia. So someone suggests the UAE because two hijackers were from the UAE, but Rumsfeld has a cousin with a big real estate company in the UAE. So someone suggests Egypt because one hijacker was from Egypt, but blah blah blah. So Bush asks "Isn't there anywhere with no American businesses" and they wind up bombing Detroit.
Ah, but Americans have many investments abroad. You can rewrite it with any two cities that have a Trump-owned hotel, or with cities that have factories producing parts for Ford (or electronics for fighter jets, though this is a bit dated joke for now, I think?). Or just have cities with headquarters of major companies.
In WWII, the US did not bomb a major car factory in Germany because it belonged (in theory) to GM. Until it became clear, that the Red Army would get there first. - That might be a myth, though: Here another factory (Ford, but in Cologne, far from the Red army):
29: The joke "down with us" instantly brought to mind the impossibly good comedy "To Be Or Not To Be", released in 1942, and the (AFAIK) original source of "Heil myself." Just amazing that a spoof on the Nazi invasion of Poland can actually work. Highly recommended.
Huh, was just about to ask if you had typoed 1942 for 1982, did not realise that the (actually 1983) Mel Brooks movie was a remake. On the list to watch now, thanks!
>20: In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t.
Sure, but Germany has had very strong restrictions of political for a long time now, so it's a little silly to expect people to suddenly start caring when the people outraged, or at least many of them, never mentioned or perhaps even outright supported other kinds of German speech criminalization.
It's the same thing with FdB crying about support for Palestine resulting in e.g. people losing their jobs. Sure, it's bad, but the same people almost universally were okay with e.g. people supporting Trump losing their jobs.
When people say "the same people" they rarely mean the same individuals. They most often mean people who fit into the same conceptual box in their head, and there's no epistemic virtue in aligning your beliefs to be consistent with (what other people perceive to be) your group. A stereotype can't be guilty of hypocrisy. Scott has been consistent on criminalization of speech and Freddie has been consistent on paying high personal costs for political speech, to the best of my knowledge.
Yep, but there he admitted that there might be other valid Schelling points beside 2nd amendment: "...unless they can. In parts of Europe, they've banned Holocaust denial for years and everyone's been totally okay with it. There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Presumably, these exemptions are protected by tradition, so that they have become new Schelling points there, or are else so obvious that everyone except Holocaust deniers is willing to allow a special Holocaust denial exception without worrying it will impact their own case."
Hes wrong about shouting fire in a theatre. The reason to ban that is to stop a stampede. It’s not a restriction on political speech.
Also the phrase comes from a dictum written by a Supreme Court justice called Oliver Wendell Holmes - a ruling that was overturned by later supreme courts. In the case Holmes was defending the locking up of an anti war protester during WWI, because of the consequences of the anti war speech.
The problem with that argument is that while it’s perfectly reasonable to flee a fire, to riot because somebody burned a flag, or drew a cartoon of Mohammed, or spoke against a popular war is neither reasonable, nor universal. Furthermore it defends the riotous and oppresses the speaker. To get a man jailed for political speech you just have to be rowdy, or threaten it.
He writes "well-respected exceptions to free speech" - not "restrictions on political speech". And surely, there is a "slippery slope" (or not) - one calls out to boycott Jewish shops. Then smashing their windows. Then ... Or starts directly: "Friede den Hütten ! Krieg den Palästen! Defund the police! Disown the rich! Let us go and rape women! Nolan E and M R: Here are their pics addresses, show them what deniers of climate and holocaust deserve! Oh, and the pics of their kids, too!" (disclaimer: I deny neither the one nor the other.) - I am mostly fine with our Schelling points, thank you. ;)
A lot of that is covered by harassment laws and libel, and in most cases always has been.
I used the term political speech because that’s basically what justice Holmes was using as an analogy for the “fire in a theatre” - he was talking about a particular political speech - a ruling that was overturned.
Incitement to riot has always been illegal too, but generally only when someone deliberately causes or encourages the riot not because people are rioting against the views of the speaker.
Yet consider what happened in Canada last year. If you donated money to the Trucker's Protest, the government froze your bank accounts. Kinda difficult to pay the rent or buy food when that happens.
on UBI and laziness - I think it is a persistent myth that people will stop working once they have 'enough'. It doesn't seem to be true of most humans I know or have met. As long as working more/harder allows a person to get ahead, they'll work. When they stop working isn't when 'they have enough' it's when working more no longer allows them to meaningfully improve their lives. I think this is a better explanation for why a lot of people without highly valued skills have a reputation for being lazy - for them, working more/harder doesn't really improve their lives in the same way that for a person with in demand skills, it does.
Also, the job is the most reliable source of social status these days, now that blood ties to aristocracy have been mostly done away with. People generally aren't eager for a demotion to the lazy bum on the dole.
I think the big issue relates to what enough is. If you give someone in the US $1000/month that's enough in the sense of basic needs but it's not going to let you live a life of comfort without working but if you gave them $10K/month that's really enough in many places that I would expect to see a significant number of people stop working. Part of this is also about the marginal value of their labor. A minimum wage job nationally would be $15K per year so they basically double their money in the first case but only earn an extra month and a half in the second case.
Yeah, I think, in the US at least, the way transfer programs were designed in the past has totally poisoned this debate. AFDC, the primary welfare program in the 70s and 80s, actually reduced your payment by $1 for every additional dollar you earned working, so there was literally no incentive to work; you'd work for hours and your income wouldn't go up at ALL. This is different from a UBI, where you still get the same UBI even if you work. Asking why someone would still work if they get a UBI is no different from asking why they'd work a second job when they already get income from a first job, but clearly plenty of people work second jobs for extra money.
It's worth remembering here that the UBI we're talking about is enough to dramatically reduce things like malnourishment, but it's still a very small amount! We're talking about under $1/day ($22.50 a month, to be precise). It's certainly not enough to be comfortable, but it is enough to bring you back from the edge of desperation and starvation and to start thinking longer-term.
Or maybe it isn't, maybe you're still on the edge of desperation and starvation but just slightly less so. I'm not really familiar with the cost of living in rural Kenya.
Either way, I wish people would stop doing studies that show "Giving people money makes their lives better, therefore UBI is good" as if it's the "giving people money" bit of UBI that's somehow the problem.
The problem is that you can't give people money by taking money away from other people, making their lives worse. And the people you have to worry will stop working aren't the desperately poor, they're the middle class and upper middle class people whom you'd have to saddle with 90%+ tax rates in order to pay for all the free money you're handing out. These are the people who are going to say "fuck it" and retire, or reduce their hours considerably, or just find a way to emigrate.
What *is* true is that they will be more selective about what work that do. I didn't stop programming when I retired, but I certainly changed what I did.
A very surprising thing I learned spendng time in jail and ~9 months at a halfway house, is that a many, many people from the poor "ghetto" backgrounds, have almost never known somebody with a regular "job" in their lives.
Further, they cannot imagine a "job", regular work for wages, as an economic arrangment that benefits both parties. Left-wing socialist rhetoric and of course the historic reality of slavery combine into a worldview of exploiter/exploited, master/slave, pimp/ho, hustler/mark. Working for somebody else means you are being exploited, because that's what bosses do.
There's far more to be said on this topic, but the upshot is that (wild-a$$ guess) 15% of the whole US population has no intention of "working" in any systemic way. not a thought that ever occurred in their life. Hey are not lazy, just think the real economy is a completely other world they want no part of (unless they become the pimp/master)
FWIW I stopped working a few years ago, after getting "enough" money. Out of other people I know in a similar situation some keep working and some stopped. So I think definitely some proportion of people will stop working after receiving some amount of money. Then the question is what proportion and just how much money.
Also, maybe people who are more bound to average-joe middle-class social norms are less likely to stop working, since it is closely tied to their social status and identity.
the irony is that we can do with less "in-demand skills," because of that motivation. but sure as hell no one is going to work for minimum wage taking care of seniors with disabilities or mentally disabled people if UBI exists.
A lot of jobs you do to survive only, and there is no self-actualization to them; they pay low and are hard and never valued enough by the bosses. Combine that with ubi letting you say goodbye to needing a car ( job is the number one use for it) and a lot of expenses related to working, and yeah, people would give them up in droves.
I am completely blown away that a member of this community would have a favorite Mountain Goats' song, and that it is one I have never heard of. What's next, Tegan & Sara fans at Metafilter? Viva El Birdos posters cracking ketamine jokes? </sarcasm> : - )
Non-sarcastically, have you read John Darnielle's novel, "Wolf In White Van"?
YoG
[Now back to downloading that They Might Be Giants tarball from the Usenet archive site....]
I had a similar experience. I didn't finish the book (even though it's only 200pp), I think because I increasingly did *not* want to know what was the terrible event the plot was working backwards towards.
I did enjoy the writing. I thought the scene with the two teenageers drinking beer in the parking lot ("Dude, your FACE!") was exquisite.
It's interesting that while any commenter here would surely have a different Favorite Mountain Goats song, over at ar15.com, nobody ever talks about their Favorite Ted Nugent Song. (*)
Internet stereotypes: strong, I wonder why? Perhaps because they are a 10x version of all stereotypes? (**)
BR
* -- Do I even have to say?
** - It's a truism, but a great thing about being conservative is that one is rarely plauged by doubt, at least not about stuff that matters. The very Orthodox of all kinds take this maybe too far, but ... no worries about what to eat, what to wear, what to do, who to marry ... it's all baked in.
(Coastal Elites do exactly the same thing, need exactly the same structure, but replace the humility with hubris, thinking Steve Jobs and his "uniform" are some kind of enlightenment, giving each other TED talks about that charlatan grifter... grrrr.)
I really don't want to speak in defence of 'From the River to the Sea' because it seems like an absurd hill to die on to me, but that study in link 21 seems pretty disingenuous. There are plenty of potential geographic borders that match that description which don't take over all of Israel. The surveyors are making it sound like that is inevitable and identically equal. I don't think anyone should be surprised that a lot of college students both don't want Palestine to be bombed into the stone age and also don't want Israelis to be eradicated or driven from their homes.
I think going by the literal geography is a red herring. Just an easy way to convince people. The real reason why the slogan doesn't map to some mild college student interpretation is that it has historically been used in connection with the eradication of Israel and the genocide of Jews (presumably, correct me if I'm wrong).
There's nothing wrong with the sentiment in your last phrase, but "from the river to the sea" does not summarize that sentiment. Connotations stick, that's just how language works. Be sure to also tell your nice college students to not name their children Adolf, for much the same reasons.
I'm sure that the vast majority of anti-zionists would be fine with a deportation instead of a slaughter. Of course, the word "genocide" is big enough to include that these days, except when it's Israel proposing deportation of the entirety of Gaza.
Sure, the vast majority of all groups of people are peaceful. There's just the tiny little detail that on October 7, a very prominent group of anti-zionists made it clear that the slaughter of Jews is indeed an end goal for them.
FWIW, deportation of the entirety of Gaza does fall under genocide in my book. And more generally, I'm not one to excuse Israel's actions. But given that we are currently under the fog of war, it's extremely hard to judge whether or not Israel is honestly trying to minimize harm to civilians. In their defense, if what they report regarding the location of Hamas bases is true, that puts the blood of many many Palestinian civilians squarely on Hamas.
It should be clear from basic game theory that as long as you aren't an absolute pacifist and allow for the possibility that a war might be legitimate, then you cannot value civilian lives at infinity (as enemy forces strapping babies to their chests would then be unbeatable). As brutal as it is, if a war is legitimate, then *some* nonzero amount of civilian casualties must be legitimate as well.
As much as media and the internet might lead you to believe otherwise, I feel like my position is pretty mainstream.
If Hamas could choose between slaughtering a million of Israeli Jews or peacefully deporting the entire lot of them and getting to rule an ordinary boring third-world shithole then I'm pretty sure the choice would be clear even for them. However, deporting even a single Jew is far beyond their means, whereas they can murder a few now and again, so that's what they do, and will continue to do in foreseeable future, perhaps under a different name. I'm not sure whether or not this is a mainstream position, but it seems blindingly obvious to me, and I don't understand anyone who has an optimistic view on eventual resolution of this clusterfuck.
I am not as optimistic as you with regards to Hamas' choices.
BTW, did you know that the Nazis worked out a plan to deport jews to Madagascar, rather than killing them? Turned out to be too much of a hassle because they didn't have the British merchant fleet at their disposal, since the planned invasion of GB never took place.
Yep, I heard about the Madagascar plan, and in general I believe that Nazis would've happily peacefully shipped all the Jews somewhere if it wasn't too much of a hassle. Until they took over the world, of course, then a final solution would become unavoidable. This in contrast with Muslims/Arabs, who more-or-less tolerated Jews on the territories they controlled for centuries.
I happen to have a solution, but whether I will get a large enough audience in time to force the powers to put down their arms until we - *the world of human being individuals* - realize we are all more or less of common mind on the fundamental matters of life on Earth...is up to you.
I don't have the gift of executive abilities. I only have experience and a voice, so if you can hear my heart through this video please ignore any particular individual matter you may disagree with (because you'll understand correctly that I am not tied to any detail but the quest for Truth & Peace) and share my channel with a larger audience.
If and only if you are hopeful about my ability to make things better of course.
So, if I understand correctly, your plan is for Israel to clearly explain to the world that they aren't and won't be giving an inch, will allow Palestinians in occupied territories to continue to live in perpetual oppression and humiliation after unconditional surrender and submitting to re-education, then exterminate those for whom it doesn't work. Well, I do agree that nothing less could possibly suffice, but pulling this off is a tall order, especially if Israel wants to retain the essentially unconditional US backing against the entirety of Muslim world, because it obviously won't ever be happy with this arrangement.
In the past 18 years, Hamas has shot an estimated 50,000 missiles at Israel—to the great joy and celebration of the people of Gaza. Hamas continues to shoot missiles from Gaza, at Israel to this day. The missiles are primitive unguided, it is estimated 1/3rd of them land in Gaza.
Calling for the destruction of your neighbor, whilst shooting unguided missiles at them, whilst holding non-soldiers hostage, after killing infants, after declaring holding hostages as sex slaves, continuing to rape women is acceptable ... Please tell me what part of holding a cease-fire with Nazis—when they're being defeated—would have been an acceptable resolution of WWII?
Hamas is not planning to retire with an impressive missile collection on display in their home. Every rocket and missile Hamas can build, will be fired at Israel sooner or later(*); that's what there for. The only part of that equation that Israel or any other outside agency can hope to change is the "how many rockets and missiles can Hamas build?" part.
I'm pretty sure Hamas is finding it much harder to build rockets and missiles than they did six months ago, and I expect in another six months it will be much harder still. The fact that the existing missiles that would otherwise have been fired in small numbers over a large period, are instead being salvoed as rapidly as Hamas can manage so they won't be destroyed before they can be launched, is secondary.
* Unless Israel ceases to exist before Hamas runs out of missiles, of course.
As a Jewish historian whose grandparents all survived the Holocaust and who regards the State of Israel as the most likely reason why it has never been safer to be a Jew throughout all of Jewish history than it is today (so much so that Hillary and Donald *each,* have a Jewish son-in-law!), I appreciate your sense, sincerity and concern for my own safety.
If you aren't Jewish that's all that I can ask.
If you are Jewish though, I believe that we Jews can *and must* do a lot better.
Wernher von Braun was the guy in charge of the V-2 program that shot missiles at London. He was a member of the Nazi party and the SS (but it seems more for appearance reasons, not ideological ones). And yet the U.S. response to him in the end was "come and join NASA".
Lucky for me, I never claimed that a cease-fire would be an acceptable resolution. As much as war creates untold suffering and pain, in the long run, Hamas being eliminated is in the interests of both peoples.
In my country, Switzerland, we are currently in the process of officially declaring Hamas a terrorist organization. We are not excusing what they've done in any way.
Peaceful deportation of the Israelis (to where?) is not imaginable. They'd fight.
Not that this is necessarily a huge factor, but more of them are individually armed now. 10/7 was a perfect "the government will not protect you" instance.
I might as well check-- I've heard that the people hoping for a peaceful two state solution are mostly Ashkenazi (not necessarily most Ashkenazis) while the Jews who were exiled from Arab countries (and their descendants?) are more likely to be hard-liners. Is this true?
This is mostly interesting to be because of the belief that Ashkenazi Jews are light-skinned colonialists, but brown skinned Jews are long term residents in the area and might be alright.
I heard this nice line from a Mizrahi about their different views: "The Ashkenazim think they're still in Europe, but we know we live in the Middle East."
From reading you, I think that you will find my recent video on the matter a worthwhile watch.
If I'm right and you do, whether you agree with the details or not, please consider sharing the video with others.
I created Israel's hasbara program before going dark for 21 years and now I find myself alone against an entrenched Jewish leadership that is hard-headed and off-track.
Our only hope is that I reach too large an audience for the benighted leadership to ignore.
Traditionally when people said, "From The River To The Sea" they *almost* universally meant the utter destruction of Israel and removal of the Israelis and did not consider any other meaning to the phrase.
Right, but I wouldn't expect many people to have known that before the last month or so. I didn't know that before about a month ago either! So I don't find their responses surprising. I dunno maybe it's just internet conditioning but it seemed like this study was being presented as some kind of 'gotcha', if you know what I mean. If the study conductors were being genuine about I feel like they'd have shared the history of the use of the slogan, not a map of the region. Revealing the map and arguing that therefore the slogan is bad is the disingenuous part
I was living in Israel and *lecturing about* the Israel-Muslim conflict (around the world) in 2000. (See my recent video about that: https://youtu.be/U9TpbR6o7WU?feature=shared )
So I'm not just familiar with the use of this particular term but familiar with the old Arab promise to "drive the Jews into the sea", and the specific radio broadcasts to that effect.
Presumably you are much younger than me.
On this particular subject however nearly every intelligent Westerner over, say 37, knows exactly what this term means and is therefore closer to my level of knowledge than to yours.
There's no question whatsoever that the people who imported the expression from the Muslim context into the Western context had only one meaning in mind -- with some historical takiya to draw from if necessary.
But it doesn't seem that they actually engaged in much takiya.
In other words, they literally didn't need to offer any context whatsoever to the chant in order to get a gazillion young people to chant it.
That's what Scott's link intends to demonstrate - that the young (non-Muslim) chanters around the world didn't need any understanding of what their chant and mantra meant, or even where Israel was located on the planet in order to throw tantrums.
My own comment on the matter is this fine exhibit of reductio ad hitlerum.
> nearly every intelligent Westerner over, say 37, knows exactly what this term means
I think you might not be correct about this? I had a pretty good Western education, and I don't recall ever coming across "from the river to the sea" before Oct 7th, although I do recall hearing about "drive them into the sea". For what it's worth, I never specifically studied the history of Israel or Palestine or the middle east, so perhaps that would have given me the knowledge. Although as a more general matter, I don't recall covering almost any slogans, chants, or messages that weren't from English-speaking history - the focus was more on events and people, rather than the details of the rhetoric used. ("Liberté, égalité, fraternité" was one of the exceptions, as were some Nazi slogans.)
It was easy to figure out what it meant, yeah. It's all in the way people say it.
There's an American song that has a line, "from sea to shining sea". The song is just national propaganda, with nothing particularly special about it other than being taught to schoolchildren. But if someone with a particular agenda quoted that line in a certain tone of voice, and winked, I'd know exactly what they meant by it.
I'm over 37, and I hadn't heard the slogan before. But I knew more or less what Palestinians want, and I knew that the Jordan River was a border of Israel, so I figured out what it meant.
FWIW, I had never heard the phrase until I read this blog. It does have the kind of ring that "no compromise!" slogans have. And I'm not familiar with the geography of the area. (I do know that it's too small for two armed groups that hate each other to live in peacefully.)
You can only run into a 'gotcha' if you neglect your due diligence. So maybe don't start shouting political slogans without a cursory look into their history and meaning?
If someone tries to convince you to say "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles", "Von der Maas bis an die Memel" or "Sieg Heil", or tells you that a swastika is just an Indian symbol for good fortune, they're up to no good. Same thing here.
I think this is actually harder to do without the benefit of hindsight than you make out here, and I don't really want to promote a world where one can't take an action to protest war without doing extensive research first. I don't think the students in the study are particularly wrong to notice the plight of the Palestinian people, decide to join a protest for a ceasefire, end up chanting the slogan because that's what the protest leaders said to do at the time - I wouldn't hold that against them at all. Continuing to do so and stand by it is another matter, however.
Your perspective and our conversation yesterday was meaningful.
You are an intelligent (under 30?) individual who hates violence and wants to actively be against injustice.
And even if you lack the "hindsight" of having enjoyed a life-full of information prior to this point, your ultimate sentiments are true, valid, and generally more humane than those of people who have more years and background information.
So, this post ,and the one it links to, are partially to your credit.
And, as you can see from my conclusion in favor edifying and empowering the young while their morals are still intact, I am just as okay with helping the young acquire the necessary brains as I have been in my thus-far-futile pleas for my own middle-aged cohort to remember their long dormant hearts.
While I think the protesters are probably mostly well-intentioned, I don't think I agree with this. All wars involve suffering, but getting involved, or supporting one side or another, is not equally moral in all cases, and I think that people involving themselves in protests on any side *should* do research to make sure what what they're supporting is morally appropriate under a well-informed application of their own beliefs, or else not expect others to assign moral weight to the fact of their protesting.
The swastika has a long history, it's not only Hindu. It dates back to the neolithic in Europe. I vaguely remember that the Nazi version was a widdershins version, though I've never bothered to check. It basically (often) represents the motion of the sun across the sky. The Norse favored a three legged version, and there are examples with a dozen or more legs. So emblematically a swastika would represent the passage of time, or possibly progress. (And a widdershins swastika would represent reversion, or moving into the past.)
These days I can't imagine a legitimate political use for a swastika, but there are lots of contexts where it retains its original meaning. (But don't use it in black against a white background. And prefer a version where the legs are curved rather than sharply bent.)
In the same way that someone shouting "gas the Jews " might just want to give them all sodas. Like technically that's a literally consistent interpretation, but it's not what the phrase means.
14: So sorry for your loss Lars (if you're reading this). I can definitely relate. IME, a tragedy like this does involve the kind of emotions people would expect, like sadness, but it is also very weird and unsettling. Part of your brain doesn't want to acknowledge the reality of it. Calling this "hard" really is a category error. I recall frequent feelings of derealization, damage to my sense of self or whatever you want to call it.
I hope, Vitor, that you and yours are doing better. As the author points out, I don't know what to say exceot that I'm sorry and I wish for you only good things from here on out.
I was also enraptured by his letter and commented above.
To clarify, I'm talking about something that happened two decades ago. Trauma is a complex thing and unexpected feelings keep popping up now and then even after all these years, but by and large, I've moved on.
Thanks for your kind words. And that's exactly what I'm dealing with. I had a close friend die in college (he didn't linger, just straight up died) and I kept expecting to see him walk around the corner one day. I think if Nikolas had just died it would be like that again, but seeing him in bed every day in a diminished state is just another loop it throws me for.
I am so sorry Lars, to hear of this terrible tragedy which has befallen your family. I lost my mother and my brother when I was a young man. It is a terrible thing. Your course of action is not one I would recommend, but I hope that it brings you and your family solace; or that you find peace, in the end, at any rate.
I dig his "rational religion" and the life and letter that are its outcome.
I find that steeling ourselves against the capricious vicissitudes of passing cultural norms through holding sacred a text from worlds gone by is healthy and good for those whose reverence refuses to cross into blatant irrationality.
At the very least it sacralizes DOUBT, and generally bolsters optimism too.
It would be trite of me to address his new life and his feelings about it so I will suffice myself with recommending the piece to anyone not in danger of being triggered by someone who had a transformative tragedy.
His rational religious approach makes the piece far less terrifying or unnerving than one might imagine.
I found within it the comforting strength of refusing to bow before the demons of insecurity, worry, and what-ifs that taunt so many others.
I wish him and he blessed family everything pleasant and holy. And I thank them for showing us all a human means of dealing with their own experience of the fact that nobody gets all the good things all the time. His write-up is short and full of a relatable, yet also specially noble, human spirit.
#21 The ever-increasing sacralization of youth had better bust soon.
Things can't really get much worse than know-nothings being taken seriously by the rest of society because we all agreed on the necessity of surrendering to their every tantrum.
Regardless of whether they can find the ocean on a map.
Check that, they can, see the cause of the unfortunate-but-understandable #20.
Perhaps the least known *major* fact about Hitler's rise to power [and certainly the least spoken or googleable] is that it was the two new voting demographics that put the Nazis over the edge in 1932/1933 were the freshly enfranchised... female and youth populations.
Fast forward to 2024.
Attempting to have a conversation practically anywhere on the internet beyond the hot takes (or hot flashes) of sad (or mad) trolls, teenagers and simpletons with bamboonish tribal loyalties is an impossibility.
As a culture we have so empowered rhe heckler's veto that we don't even pause to ask whether there's any reason why we should, instead of responding to them, en masse, with the spitfire truths rhey would receive for heckling a comic.
Unless especially precocious, children shouldn't be allowed into adult conversations.
That isn't intended to *exclude* the young (of whatever age) from participating as best their age and responsibilities allow in conversations regarding decisions likely to affect them as well.
It mean that instead of making sure that every last teenager, no matter how silly or simple, has their own turbo megaphone, we encourage and reward precocity.
If our generation's Huxley, Mencken, or Messiah is speaking.... he may as well not be because no one capable of understanding him can even hear him over the clamor of the contumelious.
Are you saying that a greater percentage of men than of women voted for Hitler?
Certainly there were more make voters in general but female voters leaned more heavily towards Hitler than did make voters.
If I am wrong about that I welcome being corrected but I am pretty sure that the female and youth votes were more heavily skewed towards The Nazis than was the male vote.
Needless to say plenty of deliberately obtuse verbiage has been employed to try and obfuscate this truth but if it is not the truth and you have a quality non-biased source clearly demonstrating that, please share it.
Do you have evidence that this was the case? I'm not saying I have any source indicating it's not true, but your saying so is the only source I've ever encountered that asserts that it is. On what evidence are you basing that claim?
* women typically voted more for conservative parties in Germany
* at least prior to 1932, men were more likely to vote for the Nazi party than women
* in the early 1930s, women support for the Nazi party increased faster than men's support
* By July 1932, the evidence suggests support was nearly identical between the two parties (see Table III)
My layman's interpretation is the Nazis started out (as I'd guess most new parties do) as mostly man-supported. As they grew more popular, the gender balance evened out. By the time they gained control, support was roughly equal.
The article I’m half-remembering is Richard Evans’ “German Women and the Triumph of Hitler” (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1878178), which is also prominently mentioned in Thomas Redding’s “Our Last Hope” article. It looks like gender data wasn’t routinely collected for all elections during the period in Germany and not in all polling stations. Here’s Evans (p. 157): “In the sample of polling stations in which separate voting by sex was carried out, 51.6% of the female votes, and 44.2% of the male votes went to Hindenburg, while 26.5% of the female votes and 28.3% of the male votes went to Hitler... In the second round of the election, held on 10 April 1932, with the weakest candidates eliminated, Hindenburg secured 56% of the female votes in the sample, and 48.7% of the male, while Hitler gained 33.6% of the female votes and 35.9% of the male.”
Obviously this is a restricted sample, so I was speaking with more confidence than warranted based on faulty memory. Currently skimming Richard Hamilton’s “Who Voted for Hitler?,” which doesn’t have a chapter dedicated to the topic, but which I’ve seen cited as a source for lower female share of the Nazi vote. Most sources that touch on the issue attribute the gender gap mostly to higher female religiosity leading to higher female support for the Catholic parties (Zentrum & BVP) as opposed to the secular parties (SDP, Nazis, Communists, etc.).
#23 I've given quite a few lectures on the Jews of Azerbaijan and the surrounding region throughout history, most especially from the era of the "Khazarian Conversion" onward (in quotes because, of course, the matter is quite nuanced).
I haven't yet uploaded any lectures on that subject to my YouTube Channel but presumably many people interested in the Jews of Khazaria would also be interested in other exotica of Jewish History, on which I've thus far uploaded 11 episodes.
The episodes thus far available deal primarily with the historical Jewish communities of India, China, and Ethiopia, with plenty more to come.
The first episode begins with an introduction to my take on the general subject, which is essentially one of passion tempered by rationalism.
Meaning, I present the most amazing facts...so long as they are also most likely true. Hence - apologies in advance - no ancient aliens, subterranean kingdoms (other than, to a degree, in 4th century Yemen), or religious convictions holding uncritical court in my domain. Here's the playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgc3teub7_dxL4z9fJPW-d9L&feature=shared
#24 The author of that piece (about the enraged dying cosmonaut) had to update it after receiving information from sources more varied than the single sensationalist book he read upon which his original article was entirely founded.
Overall the author doesn't seem to be very capable at discerning what's what which is why his subsequent update to the article you linked to is stuffed with both-sides'isms sufficient to make for an excellent junior high school book report.
Nonetheless, readers with more specific knowledge on the matter can probably enlighten us with more specificity after looking at the updated article which is here:
My cranial computer contextualized the paragraph as ending with the word GhislainemaxWell before the slow thinking corrective pointed out that there were too few letters in GiveWell.
There was a thread a year or two ago in which you both posted, and although I forget the details, the familial relationship between the two of you was clear. I remember thinking that having a parent and an adult child being together on the Internet was unusual and sweet, and I admit to a bit of wistful envy. I guess it stuck in my mind. :-)
22. This reminds me of Alice Miller's _For Your Own Good_, which claimed that the popularity of theories that very harsh methods of child-rearing set up a generation to want Hitler. I don't know whether the connection has held up, but it was my first exposure to the idea that popular advice books could be nothing but plausible-sounding invention. There could be further discussion about what sounds plausible in various eras.
33. I don't understand how people who believe poverty causes crime also believe that very wealthy people are generally criminals. You can only trust the middle class?
Can you give an example of people who believe that?
Many people that believe poverty causes crime also believe that the wealthy commit crimes such as wage theft. This is entirely coherent, since only the wealthy are able to commit those sorts of crimes and they also tend not to get as much attention as the more obvious crimes the poor people commit, such as shoplifting. If you want to make it more abstract, the poor commit crime due to need, while the wealthy commit crimes due to greater opportunity.
That's the theory anyway. I'm not sure I believe it but it seems understandable enough.
Yeh, I’ve definitely seen people who argue online that “poverty causes crime” and also “what about elite white collar crime” in the same sentence or paragraph.
That's because they're switching between two very different definitions of "crime," both in common use, roughly meaning "generally unpleasant person to be avoided" and "person who has broken a law."
#30 "Interesting new theory of Jewish achievement based on 1st century BC decree that all Jews have to be literate."
Not that new, it was set forth in a book published 12 years ago:
"The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492" (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 42) by Maristella Botticini & Zvi Eckstein
I read the book when it was published. I don't recall the details, but I do recall being unimpressed and thinking that the idea while interesting was at best a partial explanation.
You could use the same argument to cover the Protestant Work Ethic thesis; now that you have the Bible in the vernacular, you want people to read it. So that means you need a literate population, which means you need some kind of mass education.
Final step - Profit! Or, the newly-educated Protestants beat the (economic) pants off the illiterate Catholics 😀
Regarding the latest Swedish lottery work from Cesarini's group, I have a thread with more information, results of using different designs, and background information, here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1736922801230033396. I also have an Aporia piece with some discussion of historical violent crime perpetration: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/jailbirds-of-a-feather-flock-together. TL;DR: "Premodern elite violence has substantial contemporary relevance: the fact that for large swathes of history the most privileged members of society were disproportionately responsible for violence (in all its varieties—petty, familial, and martial) suggests that criminality is not a product of deprivation."
Altogether, the Swedish study (+lots of registry work) suggests the income/poverty/wealth/etc.-links are non-causal in general and the relationship is mostly down to selection, but findings like those in the SSI loss study suggest there might remain some subgroups for whom redistribution could keep them out of trouble. But it's still odd that they would exist because even today's very poor in the developed world are vastly better off than the rich a few generations ago.
Re. 20 "from the river to the sea": due to certain events in its past, Germany has a high-sensitivity trigger to totalitarian, genocidal slogans. The motto is "Wehret den Anfängen" - "fend off the beginnings", or nip it in the bud.
Seeing how you Americans have (narrowly) escaped the whole "fascist dictatorship" experience so far, but half of the country seems very eager to try again, maybe you shouldn't be too haughty in dismissing that approach.
If your problem with "fascism" is the aesthetics, sure. But if you dislike it because of laws restricting freedom of speech, expression, etc., that'd be a peculiar way of going about it.
Ah, the old paradox of tolerance. To ensure that future generations have the maximum degree of freedom, you have to prevent the current generation from removing those freedoms (thus limiting the freedom of the current generation). It's a thin line to walk, unfortunately.
BTW, check the US constitution. I hear there's an amendment that disqualifies insurrectionist oath-breakers from office. "How undemocratic! He was only using his freedom of speech!"
The 14th Amendment references actions which would disqualify someone, not speech. If that applies to Trump or not is a different question; but, it's clear that the 14th amendment is not talking about speech.
That's a meaningless distinction. Speech IS an action, and acts of speech can constitute a crime. Obviously, slander can be criminal, as can be fraud, incitement to violence, revealing confidential information etc.
Germany has decided to make "approval of criminal acts" a crime, and a court has decided that shouting "From the river to the sea!" in the context of a pro-Palestine demonstration in the wake of the 10/7 attacks counts as approval of a terrorist attack. The US has decided to make engagement in an insurrection a disqualification for public office, and a US court has decided that inviting protesters and telling them to "fight like hell" (among other statements) counts as engaging in insurrection. Both are, in a wide sense, restrictions on the freedom of speech, but arguably reasonable ones.
it's really telling that you interpret "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" as a genocidal statement. you're admitting that the israelis are so oppressive that the only way for Palestine to be free is the israelis to perish.
Palestine could easily be free if the israelis returned the land the wrongfully took and stopped killing and oppressing the Palestinians. no killing has to be involved! Palestinians have the right to live on their land in peace and dignity, something Israel has not been allowing.
the true path for freedom does not ideally involve violence, but through the upholding of international laws and human rights (which Israel has repeatedly violated).
Context matters. The context is that as soon as Palestinians "broke free from their prison", as some deluded Lefties put it, the first thing they did was kill as many civilians as they could get their hands on. They had ended up in that strip of land after two full-blown wars to destroy Israel initiated by the Arabs, and the border to Israel was sealed off after countless terrorists attacks. Thinking that we just need a peaceful political settlement and everything would be hunky-dory is beyond naive.
> you're admitting that the israelis are so oppressive that the only way for Palestine to be free is the israelis to perish.
No, that doesn't follow at all. However, it *does* follow from historical usage (and more recent usage by Hamas) that the phrase encompasses all the territory that is current-day Israel, with an implicit side dish of genocide.
I'm quickly getting tired of the motte-and-bailey around this phrase. It deliberately spreads confusion as to what position people are actually advocating. So I suggest that all the peace-loving, 2 state solution pro-Palestine folks choose a different slogan. The meaning of this one is well-established, and you won't change that by arguing over it.
If you created an independent democratic state comprised of the entire area, with equal participation for everyone, it would last about one election cycle before the "Palestinians" turned it into an Islamic theocracy and began driving the Jews out. There is no possible future where so-called Palestine would operate as a free country, it would be an authoritarian paternalistic state dominated by Qatari money.
Now maybe there's a world where, instead of Qataris and Iranians using the Islamic areas as staging grounds for rocket attacks, you have Gaza under the control of a savvy businessman, like somebody from the Saudi royal family could turn the place into a tourist paradise with luxury hotels and such, and the people there would begin to experience what it's like to have wealth enter their nation, and get real hope.
I was going to say the same thing. The people and country that came closer than any other to killing all Jews (and not for lack of other attempts), get a pass on being a little sensitive about slogans that are associated with calls for killing all Jews. They don’t need to be on the barricades on that particular issue.
This belies the deeper reason behind the legal changes, which is that there is now a substantial ethnic minority population in Germany who, on average, are more anti-semitic, less liberal, and frankly don't share the national guilt of the German people proper which has been the fundamental baseline since '45.
The flipside of that of course is the rise of the AfD (which I'm sure many "Wehret den Anfängen" adherents would have liked to have seen nipped in the bud). Germany would not have neither a growing anti-semitism problem nor a growing radical right problem if it had restricted MENA migration in the first place. But now the bed has been made, and surprisingly enough 1st and 2nd gen Muslims don't necessarily view the evils of 33-45 as 'their problem'. Social shame and cohesion is a better option than legal means of restricting speech (we don't say anti-semitic things because of deep taboos is preferable to not saying them because of threats of jail time).
Obviously there has always been the remnant neo-Nazi element in Germany, but frankly they were always fringe and impotent. If the 'sensible, 'moderate' parties hadn't decided to head down this insane migration route then the AfD would be a non-entity. Alas, here they are (as in most West European countries) and it'll get worse before it gets better.
I mostly agree with your take. Sadly, after the rise of the AfD, it will be really hard for moderate conservatives to pivot to a reasonable immigration policy without being accused of cozying up to the Nazis. The worst thing is for a loony fringe party to monopolize a genuinely important issue and turn it radioactive, while allowing them to claim the role of truth-teller.
I had hoped for the historic pattern of right-wing parties in Germany to repeat (they tend to attract such a high percentage of contrarians that they start bickering and backstabbing and fall apart at the first sign of trouble), but it doesn't seem to be happening with the AfD.
There are effectively two presidential candidates. Only one checks the boxes of
- cult of personality
- aggressive nationalism
- disdain for the rule of law when applied to him (while being extremely litigious when it serves him)
- blending pseudo-religiosity with politics
- racist rhethoric
- praising dictators as strong and intelligent
All of this is known and well-documented, but still, lots of people see no problem with voting for the guy.
To be fair, I don't think that Trump has the ideological backbone to be a full-blown, disciplined fascist dictator. He'd probably just use the dictator toolbox to stroke his ego and fill his wallet, but that's plenty bad enough, and once the walls are breached, who knows what comes next?
And, to be fair, there are people in the Democratic party who have left-authoritarian tendencies, and I wouldn't mind if they were swallowed up by a portal to hell, but I don't see them having a massive influence on actual federal policy.
I think American democrats in a fantasy world. The problem for a significant number of Trump’s detractors is that he isn’t nationalist enough. That is he’s not fully part of the imperial project. The US in its rhetoric and actions in the Middle East (and even China) is extremely racist. If you are opposed to white supremacism then why care about the rise of China?
And as for praising dictators the US engages with and creates dictators, and then when a dictator is no longer necessary the rhetoric changes, the population is fed new propaganda , and we‘ve always been at war with east Asia.
21 made the cut? That's a grossly unscientific paragraph that made me lose some faith in this blog. It reads like a fox news or TPUSA bit. disappointing.
> Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools.
Something that still evades my understanding - do those same people feel safe for the future of themselves and their kids, when those people that remained in those public schools and learned that making Jews feel unsafe (and worse) is right and laudable thing to do, will grow up? Organizing a tiny private school which doesn't teach to hate the Jews and doesn't say that the answer whether or not genocide is good depends on the context of whether or not we're talking about Jews - is great. But if the vast majority of people in the same area go to the school that still teaches all of the above, courtesy of the teacher unions - what exactly are the expectations for the future? That people just grow out of it sometime after college?
It may be that they didn't really "feel unsafe" (because why would protests about a state repeatedly violating international law make anybody feel unsafe?) but that "we feel unsafe" felt like a more emotive and persuasive thing to say than, for example, "we don't like these people so we're going elsewhere".
I don't think anybody seriously believes that actions like the teach-in will lead to a generation of anti-semites.
Indeed, why a demonstration publicly supporting an organization that just murdered in most gruesome and revolting manner over a thousand Jews just because they are Jews, and publicly and repeatedly vowing to do it again, and again, and again, until there are no Jews left around to murder, organization, that does things like stealing a murdered Jew's head with a goal to sell it back to the grieving parents for thousands of dollars, organization that still holds over a hundred hostages, including a toddler who just celebrated his first birthday somewhere in a dirty underground tunnels, and old people who are slowly dying in agony in the same tunnels because they aren't allowed access to their medicine, organization, whose official goal is to destroy any presence of Jews by means of most brutal violence - and whose actions and goals protestors wholly share, because the Jews are ideologically impure "colonizers" and "decolonization" is a necessary, good violence needed to cleanse the land of Judea from Jewish filth... Yeah, I can't imagine why a Jew may feel unsafe with any of it. Of course, teaching kids that Hamas who murdered and vows to continue to murder Jews are the good guys, and people who try to eliminate them are the bad guys, and they deserve what they got anyway because they are evil colonizers - wouldn't lead to any growth of anti-Semitic sentiment, and if some Jews are getting attacked on university campuses, it's just a random coincidence, they probably did something to deserve it.
It must be they, as is their ilk's habit, just pretend to be hurt and frightened by thousands of people demanding Jewish state being destroyed and Jews be expelled and murdered just because they are Jews - after all, nothing like that ever happened and it's not likely to ever happen, where did they even get the idea? Clearly, they just trying to manipulate us with the ultimate goal to control us and lord over us. And because they secretly hate people like us.
And of course, since we are the smart people, nobody can genuinely hold any opinions that we disagree with. It's all pretend to make us feel bad, but we shouldn't pay any attention to that.
Supporting Palestine is not the same as supporting Hamas.
Protesting against the actions of the state of Israel is not the same as protesting against the existence of Israel.
"The state of Israel" is not the same thing as "the Jewish people".
Criticising Israel is not the same as hating Jews.
I also don't even think the Hamas attacks are "because they're Jews" - I think the history and politics of the region are relevant, including the occupation of the West Bank, blockade of Gaza, building of illegal settlements and forcing people from their homes. I'm not going to dwell on this point because I expect you'd interpret it as me justifying the despicable actions on 7th October, but to reduce this to "Jews versus people who hate Jews" is absurd.
People literally attack children with cancer because some Jews donated to the hospital they are in. There's no "will lead" here - it's already happened. The antisemites are already here, they are loud, they are proud, and they are not hiding at all. It's not some hypothetical discussion about the future that may or may not happen. It's a discussion about what to do with what already have happened and keeps happening.
Yes, anti-semites exist and always have. Yes, some will have become more anti-semitic following recent actions of Israel. They're making a logical fallacy by conflating "Israel" with "Jews" but humans can be very bad at reasoning. (By the way, I'm not saying it's a big factor, but I think the common trend for pro-Israel people to conflate "Jews" and "Israel" (as you have done in the other comment) probably doesn't set the best example.)
The incident described in your articles is nasty, although there are aspects of your characterisation that are unreasonable, and the articles are clearly designed to support a "side" rather than simply inform. But remember what we're talking about here. Is there a casual relationship between teachers protesting against the actions of Israel and the kind of harassment going on in the article you linked? That's a scientific question, and it won't be answered by provoking an emotional reaction about how horrid the worst people on one side are (I can do that too, by the way, although I've been refraining so far). I'm afraid it's also a question I'm not inclined to explore with you. Given the comments so far in our discussion, I suspect we would generate significantly more heat than light.
> . Yes, some will have become more anti-semitic following recent actions of Israel.
No, some just have become more open, because turned out murdering a thousand of Jews in 21th century still can be done, and can be publicly lauded in America, and there's virtually no consequences to it if you're in the right place, like Harvard. It has nothing to do with "actions of Israel" - the support for Hamas murder has started immediately, literally the next day, long before Israel had any time to do any actions.
> but I think the common trend for pro-Israel people to conflate "Jews" and "Israel"
Because the distinction is purely academic. Nobody on the streets makes these distinctions. It's not an academic debate - this thing doesn't exist anymore, the left is much more into punching their opponents then debating them, for a while now - it's whether or not your kid is going to be attacked on a way to school. And yes, a lot of Jews are being attacked, and no academic distinction makes any difference. In Russia, there was a saying for this case - "they'll be smashing your face, not your passport" - which is very appropriate here.
> Is there a casual relationship between teachers protesting against the actions of Israel and the kind of harassment going on in the article you linked
Yes, a very strong one. If you laud the terrorists (and they do), if you deny Israel's right to exist (yes, they do) and their right to defend themselves even in the aftermath of the biggest Jewish casualties attack since the Holocaust - yes, there are consequences to such teachings. If you teach that the Jews are "colonizers" and Hamas terrorists are "freedom fighters" and "resistance" - there are consequences. If you teach that Hamas turning hospitals into rocket launch sites and military strongholds is OK, but Israel's actions against them are "genocide" - yes, there consequences. If you consistently justify any action by Arab terrorists, no matter how heinous, and consistently condemn any action by Israel, no matter the context - yes, people make conclusions. For example, that Jews are evil and deserve to be punished. And they act on these conclusions, which we can witness now.
> That's a scientific question,
It may be a scientific question for you. It's not a scientific, but a very practical question to those that live next to these "teachers" and the products of their teachings - will their neighbors decide one day you are evil and should be punished for that some day? Would you kid be attacked at school? Would your grandma be safe walking to the store? Would those screaming crowds, blinded with hate and bloodlust, make an academic distinction about Israel and your neighborhood Jews? What is the history is telling you about these questions?
You started with an accusation that Jews that feel unsafe because of all this are just pretending and trying to manipulate people. I am glad you don't want to explore this topic any more, but I am also concerned that it's not because you saw your mistake, but because you remain convinced it is so, but won't bother to argue it, because you don't even care - you just casually dismiss real people's concerns because they aren't your concerns. It is common, but I think it also deserves exposing how morally and ethically lacking this position is.
#3: I think it's important to note that her finding were only when comparing different countries and not within a country. She even points out that "On an intra-national level, this theory [that social conservatism leads to increases fertility] holds up. Republicans have higher birth rates than Democrats."
Still an interesting result, but I feel like that's an important distinction to make.
Do effective accelerationists really believe that they are "sacrific[ing] humanity to the Void Gods" (as Scott put it), or do they think that future AIs just won't be this dangerous?
"Effective accelerationism aims to follow the “will of the universe”: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe and converting it to utility at grander and grander scales"
"e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism
Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates"
Biden summons his cabinet and announces that it is time to do something to ensure that everyone in the world has access to clean water. He proposes a project to install desalination plants in Kenya.
One official raises his hand and protests "We can't do that. The Coca-Cola Company has just invested billions in that region as an emerging market for bottled water."
Biden sighs and then says they will instead invest in helping India prevent water pollution.
Another official raises his hand to state that the mining company he used to work for has huge operations there, and would stop all political donations to our party if we did that.
This goes on for a bit longer, before Biden, exasperated, asks the room: "Is there any place in the world where U.S. companies don’t have crucial economic interests?"
They all look at each other for a moment and decide to prosecute more people in Flint, Michigan.
1. "Crime" and "offense" do not mean the same. A crime: punishable by at least a year. §140 has a max of 3 years and no minimum, thus: no crime.
2. Endorsing and applauding a crime - and a war of aggression is a crime - can be against the law. What counts as what, is for judges to decide. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/z-symbol-russland-verbot-101.html "Of course, the letter itself is not illegal. But the Russian war of aggression is a crime. "And anyone who publicly condones this war of aggression can therefore also make themselves liable to prosecution.""
"But the Russian war of aggression is a crime. And anyone who publicly condones this war of aggression can therefore also make themselves liable to prosecution."
Of course, that reasoning is invalid, because the premise is flawed. A war is not a crime. A war is a war. There is no world government that writes world laws that Russia is now violating. The United Nations is the closest thing to that, and it hasn't declared the war a crime, nor would most of the world take it seriously if it did.
But in German law, the German government decides what is a crime. No world government is needed for that. And apparently it has decided that Russia's war on Ukraine is a crime.
No, not the government decides whether that war is a crime. The judicial system does. And there are plenty of proofs that this war is a crime against humanity, genocide etc. And then there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention
The post-WW2 Nuremberg Trials declared "war of aggression" a crime. The most serious one, actually. This was part moral posturing, and part stop-gap solution to go after defendants that the allies felt deserved harsh punishment, but for whom they lacked more traditional prosecution substance. I think I remember this idea was specifically cooked up to hang Julius Streicher, who did nothing more criminal than publishing a very, very partisan newspaper (nowhere near a crime in a U.S. context). So they got him for enabling and promoting this "war of aggression".
The Nuremberg laws, judgements and findings are -- through a convoluted procedure -- still part of the German laws, and there is no way for the German legislative to get rid of them. The Allies could do that, but as late as 1991 have explicitly not done that. An unanticipated consequence of that situation, much bemoaned by lawyers, is that only war crimes (traditional ones) of the defender in a war can be persecuted, not those by soldiers of the attacking side: They commit the "big" crime of "war of aggession" in any case, and since there is no way for them to behave legally, there is thus no way to behave illegally in a more granular way.
Other paradox consequences that still flow from this legal situation revolve around Holocaust denial: Every Nuremberg fact finding still counts as an immovable truth, no new evidence is admissable in court. Thus, German scholarship must be very careful not to transgress by citing literature from abroad, that runs against these immovable truths. Stuff that everbody, world-wide, in the field knows is patent nonsense, like the existence of giant underground caverns filled with boiling tar cauldrons and conveyor belts to annihilate thousands of people hourly, must not be explicitly denied. There have been cases (mostly in the 1980s) of even Israeli holocaust scholars running afoul of these laws and getting into legal trouble. But no serious convictions for them, afaik.
Also, certain categories of movable objects that were in the possession of the Prussian state (like art collections or crown jewels) still exist in a peculiar legal limbo. They are "overseen" by a special commission for all eternity and are usually placed in museums, but are owned by neither the commision, nor the museums, nor the German state. When part of such a collection was stolen from a Berlin museum and the thieves subsequently were found, all the state could do was "inviting" them to return the loot by promising them "reward money". That, plus trespass and breaking a window.
There's dozens of insane or nonsense legal corner cases that still flow from Nuremberg and other allied laws.
Nope. - For hopeful beginners: Wikipedia has flaws. For getting a first grip of reality, is is still a good place to start. For the median ACX reader: https://xkcd.com/386/
Actually, yes, I misremembered in Streicher's case: He wasn't the first person to ever be sentenced for "war/crime of aggression" (he was actually aquitted on that count), but the first person to be sentenced for "crimes against humanity", namely "Incitement to genocide", another Nuremberg Tribunal innovation.
Maybe you shouldn't try to declaim about the meanings of words in a language you seem not to know all that well?
Compare Merriam-Webster:
> crime (noun)
> 1. an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government
When your evidence 𝗳𝗼𝗿 the idea that something isn't a crime is that the worst thing that can happen if you do it is that the government throws you in prison for three years, the only real conclusion someone else can draw is that you're an idiot.
High temperature, but point taken, sire. Just to enlighten dumb me: kill - murder - slaughter are those synonymes (see: Tomorrow never dies)? Analogously: crime - offence/offense (is than an AE/BE-thing?) - my limited understanding is: both mean "an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government" . Also: "Skating is no crime". Sure, 100% synonymous. (Disclosure: no two words are).
Calling an offence (say, sth. which do not carry a min. mandatory prison sentence and is usu. fined by less than 500 bucks, to be paid in small installments) a CRIME - seems a deliberate way to make it appear worse, doesn't it?
Being so highly gifted in verbal and social skills, you may lack experience with the way the German law works. Max. sentences are reserved for the very worst versions of an offence. That plausibly lead to dead bodies in the streets of our country. Not a for rhyme on a placard among hundreds of others. Not even a genocidal one (exception: holocaust-denial).
btw: I'd appreciate a demonstration of your superior skills in one of the many foreign languages you know so well. Have a wonderful day.
> kill - murder - slaughter are those synonymes (see: Tomorrow never dies)?
"Kill" is the basic verb and is entailed by the others. "Murder" is frequently distinguished, and my sense is that the primary motivation for this is the desire to interpret the Ten Commandments in a way that is not patently nonsensical. Where the distinction is drawn, "murder" is held to be specifically nefarious in some way.
"Slaughter", instead of emphasizing evilness, might -- when applied to humans -- emphasize the goriness of the act or the defenselessness of the victims. Or, applied to animals, it's a term of art with no particular overtones.
> crime - offence/offense (is than an AE/BE-thing?) - my limited understanding is: both mean "an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government" .
Offense, in this sense, would need to be used in some kind of context that called for that specific word. It is not used in normal speech. (It can be used in another sense, the sense of giving or taking offense. Laws are not relevant to that sense.)
You might be interested to know that American lawyers frequently also object to correct use of the word "crime", on the grounds that they are trained to distinguish "crimes" from "torts". But both categories are "crimes" to non-lawyers, and the difference does not track the distinction you wanted to draw - instead, it is based on whether the crime is prosecuted by an agent of the state or by a private party. There is also a difference related to jail time - the maximum amount of jail time that can be imposed for a "tort" is zero. There is no difference in minimum amount of jail time.
> Also: "Skating is no crime".
"Skateboarding is not a crime" is or was a popular slogan protesting the fact that skateboarding was banned in many quasi-public places such as sidewalks. The reference is to prohibiting an action; the connection to "crime" seems fairly clear. There are a couple of ways to interpret the slogan. One is as the claim that skateboarders aren't doing anything wrong (and should therefore be allowed to skateboard); one is as the more literally-based argument that, because skateboarding is legal, it should also be allowed. That first interpretation would involve the second sense of "crime" listed in MW: "a grave offense especially against morality".
> Sure, 100% synonymous. (Disclosure: no two words are).
There are plenty of word pairs that are fully interchangeable. One common such pair in English is "have" / "have got".
> Calling an offence (say, sth. which do not carry a min. mandatory prison sentence and is usu. fined by less than 500 bucks, to be paid in small installments) a CRIME - seems a deliberate way to make it appear worse, doesn't it?
No. It's a way to say that the action has been made illegal. That's bad enough.
> you may lack experience with the way the German law works. Max. sentences are reserved for the very worst versions of an offence.
While it's true that I'm unfamiliar with the way German law works, this is no different from American law.
However, American law classifies the severity of crimes according to the maximum penalty that can be imposed, not the minimum that must be imposed. By American standards, Germany has just made repeating a political slogan into a felony. And if I wanted to deliberately make Germany sound bad, 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 is the sort of language I'd use. "Crime" is just the generic term.
> btw: I'd appreciate a demonstration of your superior skills in one of the many foreign languages you know so well.
The closest I'd come would be Mandarin Chinese, but I would not claim to have superior skill. Your written English is not obviously non-native. But that hasn't stopped you from confidently holding forth with a gross factual error.
(I have given two people an unpleasant surprise when, based on textual conversations with me, they expected to be able to converse with me in spoken Mandarin without problems. Unfortunately I am not up to that.)
On 32 my experience in Kenya is that if you talk to someone doing a really low pay job, like security guard (askari) they will tell you that they need money to pay for their children's education and my impression is this is usually true and not just virtue signalling to encourage tipping. Lots of children there and education is relatively expensive, so "enough money" is more than just the cost of food and housing.
> In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment.
I remember telling a leftwing friend of mine that the lot of people arrested under hate speech legislation would be left wingers. This woman, a feminist who is trans sceptical has come across this with regards to her philosophy even in the U.K.
However I was thinking that the bigger threat isn’t conservatives getting rid of hate crime legislation but expanding to to include anti white hate speech , at which stage the state might as well start building prisons close to universities to save on petrol costs.
I think Quintin Pope has well convinced me that Yudkowski's doomer arguments are unfounded. That does not leave me feeling great about the future of AI. AI is a force multiplier. Hopefully if you are reading this, you would agree with that.
So far, it seems the vast majority of AI frontier pushers are trying to get AI that's controlled by a tiny minority. It seems really the only group that is serious about bringing AI to everyone is Stability AI, and they seem to be struggling a bit. (I suppose we could say e/acc are trying to do the same?)
When it comes to alignment, the same problem: we seem to want a singular centralised AI that parrots woke cult tropes. The worst tyrants are the ones that do it for your own good, so count me out on that one. Again, the only group that seems to speak sensibly on this are Stability AI, with their explicit admission that alignment biases are inevitable, thus we need a plethora of models with biases and alignments that match the user.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor did what it was told to do. It just turned out we didn't want it to do what we told it to do. Why would we expect AIs to be any different? Limit the blast radius of failure. A centralised global AI will not end well, no matter how perfectly designed, aligned, and "unbiased" it is. In fact, the more perfectly designed/aligned/"unbiased" it is, the worse the outcome will be for the rest of us.
My conclusion is we need open source AI, fully open source AI, for everyone, yesterday.
I'm roughly in this camp too, but it's a touch sell with the crowd here. We can only hope that Moore's law or some successor of it continues to bring down the price of computing massively. Open source people are good at coordinating to gather large amounts of data to train with, but the price tag to train a GPT-equivalent from scratch is still too high. So we have to count on gifts from Mistral, Meta, Stability and the like.
Well, I guess my point is (which I realise I poorly raised, thinking about it) is...
When I was in the "AI might foom and kill us all" I was not at all convinced that some small group of elitists should be in control of the dangerous world-ending tech. The only safe way forward really was a complete halt/ban on AI.
Now that I'm convinced "AI almost certainly cannot foom and kill us all, but will provide massive advantage to those that control it" I'm even more unconvinced a small group of elitists should be in control of it. To the point where I'm starting to feel a bit of anger this isn't more in the public mindset.
It seems when power gets concentrated in the hands of small groups of elitists, it turns into a really ugly bloodbath. Every time.
I hope we can all agree to help Stability and Mistral and the crew over at Tom Jobbins' Discord (TheBloke - they are trying to make edge inference faster/easier). Because this seems the correct path forward.
20: As I just "enlightened" a commenter, I should also mention regarding Scott: A "crime" - by German legal definition - is an offence that carries a min. sentence of 1 year prison. Wrong parking is not a crime. Nor is "disturbing the public peace". The slogan - in rallies right after Oct. 7 - was (most likely) against §140 - Rewarding and approval of offences English version: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1451
and is nowadays illegal as the ministry decided it to be a symbol of Hamas (I am 90% sure, this will not hold if challenged). It is most likely (again: 90%) NOT punishable by section 130 "incitement of masses (to hatred)" https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1368 - as the courts are VERY restricitve as to what falls under this category; e.g."Hang the Greens" did not suffice.
Thank you both, Andrew and Julian! Looking up neat definitions for M/F/c-i:
Under Florida statutes, a civil infraction is a case in which a person is suspected of committing a non-criminal traffic infraction. These violations are classified as either moving or non-moving. / Michigan: A Civil Infraction is not a criminal offense.
There is no right to a court appointed attorney or a jury trial. If a judgment is entered against you, you will only be assessed a monetary penalty/ Points may also be assessed on your license depending on the offense charged. - Seems too weak; "Ordnungswidrigkeit"/ "Verstoß gegen die StVO".
Felony: a crime that has a greater punishment imposed by statute than that imposed on a misdemeanor. specifically : a federal crime for which the punishment may be death or imprisonment for more than a year . Yep, that is German: "Verbrechen", serious crime. Which makes the celebration of Oct. 7 and calling for genocide: a misdemeanor ("As misdemeanor became more specific, crime became the more general term for any legal offense.")
Thus, Scott's sentence might/should have been: In Germany, calling for the extinction of Israel and its people is now a misdemeanor. :0 I see, why he did not. ;)
On e/acc, it seems to me that the thing that really makes a subculture take off is when it divides into two camps that start fighting each other. So maybe that’s the future of the elites of the world, EA and e/acc are the future metademocrats and hyperepublicans.
I don't really understand the train of thought which can lead to both "#20: having laws against hate speech is bullshit and I'm glad my country doesn't have them", and "#38: this speech is driving children away from schools because they don't feel safe"?
Like, I'm not saying they're definitely incompatible positions - I'm fully prepared for Scott's having a perspective that I haven't thought of and/or which is too nuanced for me to fully grasp - just that, well, I don't really understand how we get to both positions from the same starting point, is all.
So my confusion comes from my reading of #38 as though it's complaining about a bad thing, whereas really #38 is actually saying that taking your children out of school to avoid hate speech is a good (or at least a necessary) thing insofar as it's your duty as a citizen to contribute to the regulation of speech by doing this?
Given some of his earlier writings I'm not entirely convinced that Scott trusts the average US citizen to help regulate speech, but I have to admit that the above reading would clear up my confusion.
I... dont know? Like, I support someone's right to say obnoxious things as a matter of principle, and I exercise my right not to be around that someone as a matter of hygiene.
I agree that you have a good (Voltairic? Voltic? Voltairean?) principle and a good hygienic practice, there - but I don't think that's what's at stake in the examples Scott provided:
#20 doesn't seem to be about an individual response to a person saying obnoxious things so much as about society's response to large, organised, and influential groups of people promoting genocide.
#38 isn't about an adult freely deciding with whom to socialise but about schoolchildren not feeling safe in their own school, with options to go elsewhere being (at best!) limited and costly.
I'm not even supporting or opposing free speech here (though I imagine it's clear from my comments what my position would be if I did!) so much as just saying that I don't understand how it can be consistent for somebody to oppose the German state in banning hate speech but to also be upset that the right to hate speech can legally be exercised in American schools.
I see your mention that you don't know much about the US, so this may explain the confusion. In this country of ours this 1st amendment explicitly applies to the government (very simplistic 1st-order statement! not a legal advice!). So, again to simplify, the government cannot restrict speech, but a school board can... sort of (to be clear, there are "public" schools in the US, but they are not really explicitly "state-run" schools). I know this sounds murky, and it is, and this is where there are a lot of law suits, and culture was happenings go on, but this is just to say, that for Americans Scott's position is uncontroversial. State - no speech restriction! Anyone else - free to restrict speech they are subjected to.
Public schools in the U.S. are indeed state-run. Members of the school board are elected officials. They are, or at least are supposed to be, bound by the 1st Amendment.
I took #38 to just be pointing out that the Oakland teacher’s union is acting irresponsibly (and in a way that is unrelated to their ostensible goal of supporting, you know, teachers), not that they are violating free speech.
I don't think anybody thinks they're opposing free speech at all; rather, they're very clearly exercising their right to free speech! Scott appears to support this form of exercising free speech in the earlier item (where he criticises the German state for banning it) but to oppose it in this particular case. I'm not saying this sort of speech is necessarily right or wrong, just that I'm confused about Scott's position.
There’s a decided difference between an anti-Israeli sit-in staged by the Palestinian Heritage Foundation and one by the Oakland Teachers Union. Both are legally protected speech, but IMhO one is reasonable, and the other a gross abdication of responsibility.
I happen to agree that promoting genocide is irresponsible (er, to put it mildly..) and that they shouldn't be doing it - I just don't understand how that's true for the OTU but not for people-in-general?
Like, to put it another way: presumably there is some sort of authority that regulates the behaviour of the OTU (I don't know much about the USA but I would imagine they would maybe have some sort of Board of Education or some such?) and it's the responsibility of that authority to make rules like "The OTU isn't allowed to have speech that makes children feel so unsafe their parents have to take them out of school"?
If so, I don't see how Scott can be upset that this organisation *isn't* doing that, but also be upset that Germany *is* doing that at a society-wide level?
Like, if people can be made to feel threatened and unsafe by hate speech, and if it's the (admittedly possibly fictitious..) US Board of Education's job to represent Jewish children's interests and prohbit this from happening to them, then why *isn't* it the job of the German state to represent Jewish communities' interests and prohibit this from happening to them?
Or conversely, if it *isn't* the responsibility of German authorities to decide what people can't say, no matter how horrible (viz. free speech) then surely it *also isn't* the responsibility of the US Board of Education to decide what Oakland teachers can't say, no matter how horrible?
Teachers as well as other government employees can have their speech restricted in a narrow set of circumstances. A relevant court case is Pickering vs Board of Education (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/391/563.html) Im not saying that case applies to the situation in Berkeley but its not true that all teacher speech is protected.
As others have said, its pretty clear the distinction is that #20 is the government creating more restrictions on speech (bad) while #38 is private individuals finding ways to not be subjected to speech they dislike while not involving the government (good) (beyond that the government runs the school where the speech is occurring).
"Scott appears to support this form of exercising free speech in the earlier item (where he criticises the German state for banning it) but to oppose it in this particular case"
he criticizes the German state restricting the speech, thats all. It doesn't mean he supports the exercise of the speech in question.
If Scott is interpreting #38 in the way you describe it would make sense and clear up my confusion, but at the same time it feels like an awfully big imaginitive leap to see a (presumably school-board-regulated) public authority as "private individuals" rather than as an arm of the state. Probably the reason I can't make that leap is entirely a cultural different and is super-obvious to you (and the others who have been good enough to reply) but I'll have a go at explaining my reasoning just in case:
1) I don't happen to think it's a bad thing for the government to regulate hate speech (obvs. the ability to arbitrary regulate any speech unhindered would be bad, but regulation when it comes to a few extreme cases - viz. speech promoting genocide - seems to me to be entirely healthy for a society. I'm reminded of Scott's reference to the Noahide laws (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won) whereby a socitety says "We'll tolerate everybody's diverse beliefs, even if we disagree, except for just these specific half-dozen things that we just won't accept in our society under any circumstances".
2) However if (in an ideological-Turing-test sorta sense) I were to try to imagine why Scott would consider it a bad thing for the governemnt to ban hate speech, I would suppose that he might say it's because the governemnt is big, has power over you, and you can't just arbitrarily choose to "shop elsewhere" for all your being-governed needs - or at least you sort-of can but it's terribly difficult, costly, and failure-prone - and so a government that can restrict speech at all, even if it is currently just doing so in a way that obviously makes things better for all concerned and helps stop Jewish children from feeling too unsafe to go to school, it's just too potentially-scary to countenance
3) These features that make it bad (under this supposition) for the governemnt to be able to ban such speech seem to apply to case #38 very closely. The Oakland Teacher's Union is much bigger than you, it has power over you (in some cases because you depend on it for your children to have a future and in more extreme cases because it can give you detention or make you do lines..), and it's equally difficult to "shop elsewhere" for your being-educated needs - as Scott appears to acknowlege ("...tiny school that can fit another few 5-9 year-olds")
4) Thus, it appears to me that somebody that considers it a bad thing for the #20 govt. to regulate hate speech ought to be glad that the functionally-similar #38 authority is not regulating it. (If Scott *is* in fact glad about this, and consequently prefers the all-Jewish-children-try-to-find-another-school solution to a board-of-education-stops-the-Oakland-Teacher's-Union-from-promoting-hate-speech solution then everything makes sense, of course, and your reply does help clear this up a bit - it's just that any such gladness/preference doesn't exactly shine through in the way he writes the piece, is all.)
P.S. Really appreciate the effort of your reply so detailed it cites the relevant case law. I feel both grateful and impressed!
It just seems like the canonical libertarian position to me: it is not OK to respond to speech violently, and it is OK to respond to speech peacefully.
So, similar to Shaked's comment above, really I ought to read that item as Scott praising the [non-violent intervention of] taking children out of school and putting them into another school where they wouldn't feel so unsafe, rather than as Scott criticising the situation exactly?
I find it hard to pass that particular ideological Turing Test in my head but I have to admit it does resolve the confusion. Thanks!
I don't want to speak for Scott, but I read it as "look at what bad things those people are doing; maybe some of y'all wanna switch schools or whatever", without any implication that anyone should initiate force against them like the German government is doing.
I'm not all that convinced that the German government acted wrongly here though, as it seems they were reacting to people celebrating a massacre, which kinda seems like incitement after the fact.
Your reading doesn't come naturally to me - but it makes sense, resolves the confusion, and seems to match what other people have commented. Thanks!
(I feel likewise re. the German govt. actions, but for the purposes of this discussion I was trying to disregard that consideration and focus on understanding the position - as I'm sure you're well aware!)
...but links provided along with opinion/commentary, and that opinion presumably espouses a single coherent position on any given topic (eg. free speech) across the different links, surely?
I don't think Scott's philosophies of free speech for Oakland schoolchildren and for Germans-in-general would differ so much (if at all!) that one would expect the two commentaries to be incompatible/conflicting.
The article mentions the parents can't just take their children out of the district, they have to get government approval first. So school speech isn't free speech because the children aren't free to object or leave.
I guess there's also the idea of "just because you can doesn't mean you should." You have the right to make bad decisions, but it's a bad decision.
Re. The Flynn effect ... I thought Flynn himself said that the gain in IQ is so rapid that it cannot solely be due to genetic effects (and so it must be something like the education you receive in a modern industrialised society makes you better at doing IQ tests). This doesn't preclude there also being a much slower genetic change.
Whether it's genetic or conditioned (a bit of both probably), I don't think increased IQ isn't inherently good. Knowledge keeps evolving while wisdom is consistent across generations. Knowledge without wisdom is a callous tool that gets misapplied everywhere.
"So and so works as a trader in finance, they're the smartest person I know. They know everything thats going on". Perhaps, they are the most knowledgable person from your perspective on knowledge, but neither a finance career nor calling someone else "the smartest person I know" would be considered wise. Knowledge is a tool, not a personality trait... and who care how hard a hammer is (100 vs 150 hardness) if they can both drive a nail?
I'm not going to make a case for the average wisdom level getting higher or lower, but if there was a small or even medium-sized change, how would we know?
I'll suggest one measurable example... how about increasing rates of "mental health issues"? One could argue that the internet is increasing knowledge in exchange for our wisdom. There is nothing inherently wise about the internet, even though it can be used as a tool to discover wisdom.
I don't think mental health issues are quite the same thing. To some extent, people might make mental health issues better or worse by the way they think, but having a broken brain isn't lack of wisdom.
I think it might be related to the fertility drop plus Scott's research on birth order. Fertility drop means a greater proportion of people are firstborns, which means higher average IQ.
>The secular gains are massive and the time period too short for large positive genetic changes in the population, so there is strong consensus that the changes must be largely environmental. There may, however, be a quite modest role for a genetic effect...
It's also far from clear that the Flynn effect even reflects a change in g, as the referenced study examines.
We, being terminally online and readers of Scott ( and probably Matthew Yglesias too); are aware that "from the river to the sea" might have negative connotations. The typical western pro-Palestine protestor, not so much. (I did try the obvious experiment of asking a few).
27. So major accomplishments of EA were to get several agencies of the US government to, in the words of a recently fired coach, "do your f*cking job."
#40: as I understand it, this type of thing is actually not terribly uncommon. Local politicians are eager to show something is being done about gang violence in cities where it's a problem, and one result is some type of gang outreach initiative, where people go talk to gang members and go "aye, maybe cut back on the murder and extortion just a bit, eh, laddie?" But then you run into the problem of who the eff is going to actually do that without getting murdered themselves, and it turns out the answer is former gang members who still have friends that are involved. And once these guys are cashing in on their status as former members, the current members decide they want in on the action, too, and now everybody's getting paid. Oops.
The dad joke page doesn't work for me - it just says "Loading..." indefinitely, even on a refresh.
This has the amusing side-effect that when it says "Did any of these jokes make you and your kids laugh?" the most plausible referent for "these jokes" is the feed of serious tweets like "There are so many complex and important conversations we need to empower our dads to have."
"The Association Of German National Jews, “colloquially known as Jews For Hitler”, was a group of Jews who supported the Nazi Party. This didn’t make too much more sense at the time than it does now, although some well-assimilated German Jews did have the same negative attitudes towards recent poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants as ethnic Germans (my great-great-grandfather was one of the poor immigrants, and had awful things to say about his reception by native German Jews)."
This was actually more common than you might think. In 1932, Schoenberg wrote, without a hint of irony, that he had secured the supremacy of German music for the next thousand years. The stated reason Freud refused to leave Vienna almost until the very last minute was that he wanted to secure his antique collection. But he also, like many other Jews at the time, refused to believe that Germans, the bearers and progenitors of Kultur, could do what they said they would do.
For that matter, when I was learning Polish, I used to practice my Polish on an old lady I met. She had similar stories from Jewish refugees from Germany. She had (before Barbarossa) helped, at great personal risk, smuggle a family of German Jews into the USSR, and they returned, insisting that Germans were civilized and would never actually harm them, right until they were herded onto the transport.
Just to put it out there: I'm not sure how big the "yeah, the machines are going to replace humanity, and it's GOOD!" faction is actually in e/acc, but the fact that it's of *any* notable presence makes me automatically distrust the entire movement, considerably adjusts my priors towards distrusting rationalism in general. Ironically it also makes me more skeptical of any alignment goals, simply because any alignment project with those kinds of people even in the near vicinity, in the "zone of acceptable thought" seems like there's a huge risk of alignment in precisely the wrong direction. Nothing makes the Butlerian Jihad sound more alluring than these guys.
To an outsider, and even to long-term but 'outsider' readers, the distinction can come across like the Emo Phillips joke about what church you go to. They share a lot of the same roots, talk about the same goals in the same terms, move in the same teapot, etc etc.
I think you're confusing e/acc with EA. e/acc does have "machines are going to replace humanity, GOOD" but has no association with rationalism or trying to do alignment well, like EA does, which definitely don't believe in replacing humanity.
It just doesn’t have any core philosophical overlap. EA first branched out of the rationalist blogosphere and e/acc is an ideological counter to EA based in Landian (right accelerationist) philosophy. Rationalists and e/acc may have similar views for X% of subjects but when they’re debating the core of what makes their philosophy it’s own thing, it’s much more different. Hence two of the most prominent rationalists, Scott and Eliezer, being quite opposed to e/acc, hmm. But if you’re talking about Eliezer and Scott “domain squatting” the word “rationalism”, well that’s a whole other tangent irrelevant to e/acc that they already mostly regret because it needed a schelling point name at the time
I wasn't confusing them, but I was probably still hasty in associating e/acc with rationalism. It's just that the certain amounts of shared terminology, interest, intercommunication etc. has created an *image* of relation, at least in my head.
"In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t."
The First Amendment, like the rest of the Constitution, is meaningless without enforcement.
England and Wales operates without a single written constitution, and for most of English history, there was no judicial review of the laws of England - the Parliament was assumed to have considered the constitutionality of whatever laws and acts they passed.
40 is pretty wild. I wonder if it was all a front or if he actually tried to steer kids away from the lifestyle. When I think about it, I’m sure people around the neighborhood knew the truth of who he was. That tends to be how things are. He might have been the best equipped person to help kids find another direction if they clearly weren’t cut out for the lifestyle.
(a) "The latest in Flynn Effect research: “More recent birth cohorts have greater cranial volumes, more gray matter, and larger hippocampuses”."
So the SF trope of "The Men/People of the Future will have huge heads because of their large brains, while the rest of their limbs atrophy due to disuse" is coming true?
(b) "You might expect to find socially liberal beliefs (like that women need to focus on their careers), but Aria Babu says the data don’t support this. Instead, the biggest driver of low fertility seems to be a belief that taking care of kids is a lot of work and you’ll screw them up if you cut any corners."
I don't think this is an "either/or" but more of an "and" situation; you think kids are a lot of work, you can't devote time to both maximally raising your hot-house blossom and developing your kick-ass career, you're not rich enough to be able to afford nannies and really really expensive daycare, of course if you don't maximally raise your hot-house blossom they will fail abjectly in life, but if you become (gasp!) a stay-at-home mom you are wasting your potential and all the investment in your education and career, so you decide to not have children or at least 'not right now'.
(c) "Did you know - Stanley Williams, founder of the Crips and quadruple-murderer, “[led] an ironic double life in which he worked in a legal job as an anti-gang youth counselor in Compton while also serving as the overboss for one of the largest gangs in Los Angeles”."
I did not know, but there's historical precedence with Jonathan Wild:
"Jonathan Wild, also spelled Wilde (1682 or 1683 – 24 May 1725), was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public-spirited vigilante entitled the "Thief-Taker General". He simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire, and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes.
Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major 18th-century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force in London. As a powerful gang-leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. Wild was consulted on crime by the government due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them."
(c) "TracingWoodgrains: The Republican Party Is Doomed. Not electorally; it can still win elections as much as ever. But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively (especially in the modern world where you need to cross your bureaucratic Ts or your policy will be overturned by the Supreme Court)."
That would be the same Supreme Court that certain online and media outlets are constantly having fits over being CONSERVATIVE NON-DEMOCRATIC BULLIES, would it? I'm not convinced by what Trace has to say, yes the "elites" are primarily voting Democratic, but remind me again about this guy Trump that I'm hearing is a total fascist dictator who must be stopped right this second or else he'll bring America to the brink of doom, and over? He may be a fluke, but he's one that all the bragging about "demographics are destiny" and hence the inevitable Democratic strangle-hold on power back in the day never saw coming.
> So the SF trope of "The Men/People of the Future will have huge heads because of their large brains, while the rest of their limbs atrophy due to disuse" is coming true?
I once read a story where the people of the future are genetically engineered to be seven feet tall and heavily muscled, apparently because that's what people wanted to be. I could imagine a combination of the two, where people have to be strong to carry around their giant brains.
I understand not liking e/acc, but gloating about these poll results is silly imo. The general public has no idea what e/acc even is and the question describes e/acc as wanting to "replace humanity" with AI.
The general public is accurately informed about e/acc's opinion in that poll question. Yes, the poll questions describes e/acc as wanting to replace humanity with AI because *they do*.
From the leader of e/acc himself: "e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism
Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates"
And there are a lot more examples of similar statements. The problem with e/acc is they're using motte-and-bailey into duping people like you that they're just "lots more tech good" and thinly veiling their real intentions.
> The general public is accurately informed about e/acc's opinion in that poll question
I've looked at the wording of the poll question and honestly you could get similar results by swapping "effective accelerationism" with pretty much anything.
Poll question: "Some people in the tech industry are now identifying as Furtive Snurkers. Furtive Snurkers believe that chmod flurging is ebery nort, and doo-wop fanana bleens greenly"
Median respondent: "Ew, tech industry? Disapprove."
Somewhat exaggerated, but if you ask people their opinion of something that they've only heard of five seconds ago then they're going to give you an answer based on vibes rather than a carefully thought out response. And "Some people in the tech industry are now identifying as..." is (very understandably) full of negative vibes.
>Republicans will be dragged kicking and screaming towards something like small-government libertarianism, by the brute fact that government power will always work against them no matter how many elections they win
This seems to naively assumes that individuals (voters and otherwise) generally advocate for political positions that would benefit them. As Bryan Caplans shows though (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) that isn't the case.
> Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
Biden: We need to nuke the enemies of liberal democracy.
"But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively"
Educated elites can't govern either if they are unable to win elections. You can already see what happens after the institutional capture of academia, their previous broad trust and respect collapse after they try to exploit this capture they worked so hard to obtain for an ideological agenda. I don't think many people are looking at this institution as a moral authority as they used to.
The lesson here is don't let your institution be captured by outside forces, period. This is very hard work and requires sacrifice.
"38. Oakland teachers union stages “teach-in” where teachers urge students to support Palestine and protest Israel during class time; Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools."
"21. In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography."
Maybe Oakland teachers should instead spend their time teaching students geography and history?? Crazy radical thought for one of the worst school districts in the country, I know.
You can read some of the questions and bias in the original article here: https://archive.is/zfHIx
"67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra."
Is damning in and of itself, because if these students actually knew what they were talking about, they wouldn't be quickly changing opinions based on a quick chat with a professor.
Thanks for the link! I'm not sure I would call the opinion change "damning" - most people are really bloody stupid, regardless of political alignment or values.
On the Berlin item (No. 20), worth noting that Elon Musk said anyone using the terms "from the river to the sea" (on Palestine issue) would be suspended from X, since those terms "necessarily imply genocide". https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725645884409401435
I forget where I read it, but someone has hypothesised we're at the equilibrium point where increased risk of death during childbirth balances the intelligence advantage from larger brain. better health care (lower risk of death during childbirth) shifts the equilbrium.
> 3: What beliefs correlate with low fertility rates?
Reading Aria's Substack, it seems like this question is linked to a larger question, from her post "Beliefs that Kill Birth Rates":
> The big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors.
As I posted in response there, this is strange. "cheap, high-quality contraception lowers fertility" used to be the null hypothesis, so well-substantiated that it was the primary plan of action for several agencies. The last time I searched for data on the topic, I could only find good statistics from NGOs trying to *reduce* fertility. From the 1960s through (at least) the 2000s, countless WHO and UN programs aimed to bring down the fertility rate in poor countries. Their primary strategy? Improving access to contraception.
Maybe this is just Simpson's paradox, or maybe there are other factors driving contraceptive access and low fertility in the same direction, but the intuitive, causal link between the two is strong and I *think* the data is strong, Here's a section summary from the paywalled article on Science Direct, "Contraception in historical and global perspective":
> [B]etween 1960 and 2003, the percentage of married women in developing regions using any form of contraception rose from approximately 10% to 60%, and fertility halved from six to three births per woman. In industrialized countries, contraceptive practice also rose and fertility fell, but changes were less dramatic because family sizes were already modest in 1960 and contraception was already well established.
I can understand saying, well, we can't (and don't want to) get the genie back into the bottle, so what can _improve_ fertility in a world with cheap, easily-accessible, effective contraception? But that's a different question than the one this post asks: "[t]he big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors." I don't see how we got to that framing without overlooking well-established historical data.
People may want kids, but they want kids less than they want other things.
It sounds like the two effects naturally build on each other, doesn't it? The economic incentives change in the direction of people wanting (all things considered) fewer children. But we all know how easy it has generally been to have children without intending to, so the economic changes alone might not have had such a dramatic effect. On the other hand, effective contraception gives people, and especially women, the technical means to avoid unwanted pregnancies. The expected effect is to narrow the gap between wanted and actual fertility. When you put the two together, you get lower desired fertility, and the means to achieve that.
I feel like all the talk of economics and culture is needlessly complicated. I think it's simpler than that: whatever they may say, people (men and women) mostly don't want children if they can avoid it. (Or they don't want many children.)
Contraception, economic circumstances, and falling birthrates are a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation.
In 1930, when most married women would still have been full-time housewives, was when the Anglican Communion at its Lambeth Conference relaxed its stance on contraception to permitting married couples to use it for the sake of family planning:
And like you say, once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't get it back in.
"The statements of the Anglican Church condoning the use of contraceptives were some of the first of their kind from a Christian organization. Other Christian organizations addressed the controversy of contraceptives following the Anglican Church’s statements. In December of 1930, the Catholic Church issued what they called an encyclical, a statement from the pope about current affairs and opinions of the Catholic Church, called Casti Connubii ("On Chastity in Marriage"). In the encyclical, Pius XI, the pope at the time, condemned the use of contraceptives and cited them as a threat to Christian marriages. Conversely, following the statements of the Seventh Lambeth Conference, many Protestant organizations updated their stance on contraceptives to be more accepting of family planning. In the United States, the Committee on Home and Marriage of the Federal Council of Churches that oversaw many different Christian denominations issued a statement in 1931 that agreed with the Anglican Communion’s recent statements, giving what the Committee called "guarded approval" to the use of contraceptives. The resolutions of the Seventh Lambeth Conference regarding sex and marriage publicized a different perspective from a Christian body."
Where the economic circumstances come back in, is that poorer and working-class married women would have been the ones to work outside the home as well as be wives and mothers. It was the middle-class families wanting to limit family size, and that was indeed for economic reasons, no matter what the Anglicans may have insisted. Second wave feminism in the 60s and 70s was not demanding the right to be charwomen, after all, when it came to work outside the home.
So the economic circumstances do tie in with decisions about "child raising is too important to do it part-time". It's the higher education/higher income levels which say that childcare is damaging to children in the data exampled, and that's where the culture *and* economic factors overlap. To succeed at our level, you need all the advantages. That means inputting a lot of time, attention, and effort into each child. To do that, you need to be wealthy enough to support one member being the full-time stay at home parent, or to afford nannies and really high level childcare and schools. If you don't do that, your child won't get into the right schools to get into the right universities to have the right credentials and make the right connections to get high salary professional jobs, and unless they achieve all that then you and they have completely failed, my God do you expect my kid to work as a secretary or a receptionist or some kind of small time salesman? That's literally life in the gutter!
But *also* to succeed at our level, you need two incomes, and having Mother stay at home sacrifices, or severely limits her career, which is both a waste of her potential, reduces her to a 'mere' child-production unit*, and causes our lifestyle to take a severe economic knock. One kid may be doable, two probably not. And even the one kid not right now - we're not at the right stage of our careers, we have so much we want to do in our lives before we have to give it all up for child-raising, it's just not the right time now. So baby now? No. Baby later? Maybe.
Meanwhile, the lower-middle/working class women working in support roles at, or contract cleaning for, Mother's workplace are having three kids with no pother about "but I can't get little Quanisha or Maria into the right baby ballet aerobics calculus coding extra-curricular if I don't spend all my time coaching her!"
*Seriously, the descriptions online by people terrified of their lives of becoming pregnant if they can't abort it, or talking about the stay-at-home mom influencer types, is an off-putting mix of contempt and fear, as though women having babies was the most monstrous body-horror trope imaginable.
[Substack telling me I'm too verbose, so part 2 to follow]
I think the main implication is that, while it may be true that access to contraceptives pushes fertility down regardless of cultural and economic conditions (barring extremes), economics and culture played a big role in the political history of contraceptive access.
I think so. Reading the Lambeth resolutions, you do get (or I, anyway, get) a sense of trying to hold back the tide by the liberalisation of "okay, contraceptives for married couples where they have too many kids already or it's a threat to the woman's life if she gets pregnant", while the other resolutions about people having sex outside of marriage, people using contraceptives to avoid having bastards, married people using contraception because they didn't want a baby just now or didn't want children at all - as well as the resolutions on abortion and divorce - tried to maintain the same standards as previously and shore up "but we're not giving in on sexual morality to the secular age", but of course once you start allowing exceptions, that never stops.
"Okay, if I can use them if I'm married and have six kids and don't want seven, can I use them if I'm married and have three kids and don't want four?" "Yeah, but my economic circumstances mean another mouth to feed is too much" and so on. And, as the Anglican clergyman I quote later points out, you have a large class of people who don't listen to 'the parsons' anyway, as well as the likes of Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger (a name we all recognise) and other public intellectuals and scientists weighing in on sex and psychology and birth control, using the gravitas of Science! to influence the public and public opinion.
So the Anglicans, so far as I see, were reacting to cultural changes already happening, but of course their shift of position also contributed to changing the culture. There will always be people who break the rules, but once you make rule-breaking less costly, or condone it, or turn a blind eye to it, then you encourage people who were on the fence to go ahead and break the same rules themselves. "I'd like to, but I don't dare, because of consequences" isn't as strong a barrier once the consequences go away or are much weaker.
The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex
Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles. The Conference records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.
Voting: For 193; Against 67"
This seems more like a response to a situation already happening, viz. the increasing use of contraception by the public and co-habitation outside of marriage, as seen in the attempt in these resolutions to bolt the stable door:
Resolution 18
The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex
Sexual intercourse between persons who are not legally married is a grievous sin. The use of contraceptives does not remove the sin. In view of the widespread and increasing use of contraceptives among the unmarried and the extention of irregular unions owing to the diminution of any fear of consequences, the Conference presses for legislation forbidding the exposure for sale and the unrestricted advertisement of contraceptives, and placing definite restrictions upon their purchase.
Resolution 19
The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex
Fear of consequences can never, for the Christian, be the ultimately effective motive for the maintenance of chastity before marriage. This can only be found in the love of God and reverence for his laws. The Conference emphasises the need of strong and wise teaching to make clear the Christian standpoint in this matter. That standpoint is that all illicit and irregular unions are wrong in that they offend against the true nature of love, they compromise the future happiness of married life, they are antagonistic to the welfare of the community, and, above all, they are contrary to the revealed will of God."
They did try to address the economic factor element, but I think that was about as successful as "living in sin is wrong, don't use birth control to avoid babies, instead just don't have sex" appeal once they said "okay, if you're married, you can use birth control to avoid babies JUST SO LONG AS IT'S NOT FOR THESE REASONS".
"Resolution 17
The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex
While the Conference admits that economic conditions are a serious factor in the situation, it condemns the propaganda which treats conception control as a way of meeting those unsatisfactory social and economic conditions which ought to be changed by the influence of Christian public opinion."
Even in 1930, the same rumblings about dysgenics (on both sides) and over-population were bruited about for the need to liberalise contraception use, as per this Anglican clergyman disapproving of the limited liberalisation of the stance at Lambeth:
"The recent Conference, on the contrary, has given a restricted approval of them. To be quite fair we will analyse the Resolutions 13—18. Resolutions 13 and 14 are on the lines of the latter part of the pronouncement of the earlier Conference, emphasizing the dignity and glory of parenthood and the necessity of self-control within marriage. Resolution 16 expresses abhorrence of the crime of abortion. Resolution 17 repudiates the idea that unsatisfactory economic and social conditions can be met by the control of conception. Resolution 18 condemns fornication accompanied by the use of some contraceptive as no less sinful than without such accompaniment. It also demands legislation forbidding the exposure for sale and advertisement of contraceptives. But Resolution 15 (carried, it is noted, by a majority of 193 votes over 67, which would seem to imply that there must have been some forty bishops who did not vote), which contemplates cases where 'there is a clearly felt obligation to limit or avoid parenthood,' while giving the preference to the self-discipline and self-control which makes abstinence from intercourse possible, and recording the 'strong condemnation' by the Conference 'of the use of methods of conception-control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience,' yet admits the legitimacy of these methods 'where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence.'
This is no doubt a restricted admission, but it is a definite withdrawal of the quite general condemnation expressed in the Resolution of 1920, and I fear it will be the only part of the contribution of the recent Conference to the question of sexual relations which will be seriously effective. The classes of persons aimed at in Resolutions 13, 14, 16, and 18 are not those which pay any attention to what the Church says. The same must be said of the worldly-minded who use contraceptives from motives of selfishness, luxury, and convenience: such people know quite well that they are disregarding 'the parsons,' and have no intention of listening to them. But there is a large class which cannot brace itself to ignore the voice of the Church. They have been anxiously waiting to hear what the bishops will say. No doubt they feel that their cases are 'hard cases.' In different ways we are all apt to feel that. They think that they have a morally sound reason for avoiding parenthood, and that they cannot practise abstinence. Now they learn that a representative assembly of the chief authorities of the Anglican Communion has 'removed the taboo' on contraceptive methods, and no doubt their scruples will in many cases be silenced and the easier course taken.
...Let me give an instance of what I regard as an ineffective attempt at arresting the tide of sensualism—the appeal made for legislative restrictions on the sale and advertisement of contraceptives in Resolution 18. Such restrictions exist in various countries where the governments, in serious alarm at the consequences of the 'birth control' movement, are doing their best to suppress it. It is also natural that a country with a large Roman Catholic population, which feels on this subject as the French Roman Catholic population of Canada feels, should sternly restrict sale and forbid advertisement in deference to the conscientious scruples of a majority or large minority of its people. But is it likely that a government would enact any effective restrictive legislation at the bidding of people who say, 'We recognize that certain practices must go on and a certain class of implements must be used in special cases, but we want the knowledge of these processes and the possession of these implements to be severely restricted by law'? Surely the statesman would reply,' You admit that these implements are necessary under conditions of modern civilization in many cases. You must admit that these cases occur in all classes equally. You do not suggest that medical authority should be required in each case for their use. How, then, can you ask us to take legislative steps to prevent the general knowledge and use of them, any more than of other commodities which are liable to be misused? '
...But before giving an answer to this question I will attempt to summarize afresh the existing situation. In my earlier pamphlet I drew attention to the fact that the objective of the movement in the world generally was frankly hostile to the whole Christian tradition of sexual morality. I referred to the work of the Austrian John Ferch, translated by Miss Maude Royden, and to books of Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger. To-day I might add the names of H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and others whose books have a very wide circulation. But I should wish particularly to call attention to the American Walter Lippmann's Preface to Morals (Allen & Unwin). He appears to be rather an atheist (in the strict sense of the word) than an agnostic, but he retains a profound respect for the moral tradition of Europe, and desires to find a non-theistic basis on which to maintain it. I am not concerned now to question the success of his reconstructive effort. I am concerned only with his survey of the present situation, especially in America, observing that England appears to be moving in the same direction.
[Gosh durn it, Substack, expand your comment limits! Having to break this off here]
"Mr. Lippmann sees the true significance of the movement for Birth Prevention. He pronounces it (p. 291) 'the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.' He finds its fundamental basis to be unmistakable. 'They (the contraceptionists) take as their major premiss to dissociate procreation from gratification, and therefore to pursue independently what Mr. Havelock Ellis calls the primary and the secondary objects of the sexual impulse. They propose, therefore, to sanction two distinct sets of conventions; one designed to protect the interest of offspring by promoting intelligent, secure, and cheerful parenthood; the other designed to permit the freest and fullest expression of the erotic personality. They propose, in other words, to distinguish between parenthood as a vocation involving public responsibility, and love as an art, pursued privately for the sake of happiness' (p. 293). Mr. Lippmann is not at all in a position to say that the proposal of the contraceptionists is wicked or immoral, though he perceives that nature shows signs of revenging itself on a practice which sets it at defiance. But my point is only that he sees clearly what is 'the logic of Birth Control,' and he represents very ably a reaction against the organized propaganda, the motive and results of which he discerns so clearly."
But there is a more general reaction against it, on simple grounds of national or class welfare.
(1) There is the terror of 'race-suicide' or 'class-suicide' which we see possessing the souls of Frenchmen and of the Anglo-Saxon stock in some parts of the world.
(2) There is the alarm of some distinguished members of the medical profession as to the consequences of 'birth control.' The Chairman of The League of National Life, Dr. Frederick McCann, a leading authority in gynaecology, says, and repeats, that 'all known methods of contraception are harmful to the female, they only differ in being more or less so.' I fancy, though I cannot prove, that there is more medical authority on his side than is allowed to appear. It must be remembered that it is very difficult for a doctor in private practice to give advice to a patient which is flat contrary to his or her obvious desires. It must also be remembered that a great many young doctors, during their period of service at the hospital, become so horrified at the spectacle of the 'unwanted babies' at whose birth they are called to assist, that they are prepared to accept almost any proposal to prevent their birth. Nevertheless, I believe the amount of medical opinion which is hostile to birth prevention is commonly underrated.
(3) There is the increasing sense that there is no unobjectionable method of birth prevention which is effective. I pointed out in my earlier pamphlet that the advocates of birth control could give approval to only one of the current methods, and that that one required skill and carefulness for its use, if not medical assistance. Mrs. Florence (in her Birth Control on Trial, p. 56, Allen and Unwin) has recorded the results of an elaborate experiment undertaken by the Cambridge Clinic. 'It is a significant indication of the limitation imposed by present-day knowledge of contraceptives when one hundred and fifty-five persons out of two hundred and forty-seven are obliged to admit that they found methods of family limitation [which had been suggested to them at the clinic] either so ineffective or so distressing or so troublesome that they abandoned the use of them.' (The figures show that out of two hundred and forty-seven patients there were seventy-eight unwanted pregnancies.) In a report of a meeting in Burlington House last April at which Dr. C. P. Blacker gave an address under the auspices of the Eugenic Society, I find recorded a general despondency—a general acknowledgement of Mrs. Florence's conclusion that 'no substantial contribution to the technique of birth control has been made in fifty years,' and that 'the state of contraceptive knowledge' is 'crude and unsatisfactory' (pp. 147 and 4). Under such circumstances it is not unnatural that recourse is had, more and more widely in many lands, to the practice of abortion, so that some of the heralds of 'Birth Control,' like Dr. Ferch or Dr. Haire, are driven to advocate the legalization of this practice.
"(4) Proportionate to the difficulty just alluded to in making birth prevention harmless and secure is the dysgenic effect of its actual use. It is used with comparative effectiveness among the more educated and well-to-do, but among the least educated and most careless it is comparatively unused or ineffective. Hence the diminution in the birthrate is chiefly among what are called 'the better stocks.'
(5) Meanwhile the motive for the reduction of births which was found in the fear of the world-population outgrowing the possible supply of food becomes more and more obviously unreasonable. The area of the soil of the world which is of possible productiveness and is at present unused, is literally immense: and the causes which destroy populations in large masses are still at work, and on a vast scale. The difficulty to-day is the glut of production.
These currents of opinion are likely in the course of a generation to produce the same sort of panic about artificial birth prevention in England as has already made itself felt in France, Italy, America, and elsewhere. I mean a rebellion against the propaganda on quite non-religious grounds. It is to be hoped also that the movement for the abolition of slums and reconstruction of industry will by that time have shown the true way to the abolition of those conditions in our cities which militate against healthful parentage. Meanwhile, as I say, the function of the Church is, in my judgement, to maintain the healthy conscience which condemns artificial prevention as unnatural and wrong in itself."
Point number three there is why "cheap, easily-accessible, effective contraception" was such a goal, and why it succeeds so well in today's society. This is why the Pill was lauded as such a triumph - all that is needed is to take a tablet every day, nothing more complicated than that! (The medical side-effects, as per point number two, only became known later).
I also get a mild kick out of even the Protestants needing to fall back on the Catholic Church to prove their case for them:
"Is it then wrong in itself? The Report of the Committee of the Lambeth Conference—which, like the other reports, was received only and not accepted by the Conference, but which forms the basis of the resolutions—acknowledges both that the general use of contraceptives is 'one of the greatest evils of our time' and that 'there is in the Catholic Church a very strong tradition that the use of preventive methods is in all cases unlawful for a Christian.' In seeking to reverse that tradition it points out that 'it is not founded on any directions given in the New Testament.' This is true of birth prevention, and also of suicide. Almost at the moment when the Lambeth Conference published its Report, Dr. Inge at the Conference of Modern Churchmen was urging the reconsideration of the Church's condemnation of suicide in extreme cases. If this movement were to become popular and urgent, one may wonder what a future Lambeth Conference may say about suicide."
That's the same Doctor Inge, the 'Gloomy Dean', whom Chesterton often references. I find this article interesting in that, back in 1930, a great deal of the same talking points are raised as still remain current today, though perhaps with new labels stuck on ('great replacement' instead of 'race suicide', for instance, or 'motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience' rebranded as 'personal choice' ). But there is still the concern with dysgenics from both sides - that the undesirables are the ones carelessly spawning offspring, while the better classes and more educated are rendering themselves sterile.
The reason is that in most advanced Western countries the rapid downward trend in the fertility rate started as way back as the *18*70s - eg see, for instance, Belgium here (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033487/fertility-rate-belgium-1800-2020/) - and dipped to around replacement rate or below already in the 1930s-1940s, before the Pill.
I think of that graph and others like it as evidence *for* the "contraception lowers fertility rates" hypothesis! I don't want to lean too heavily on Wikipedia, but I think their summary gets the gist of it across (from the "History of Birth Control" page):
> Starting in the 1880s, birth rates began to drop steadily in the industrialized countries, as women married later and families in urban living conditions increasingly favoured having fewer children. This trend was particularly acute in the United Kingdom, where birth rates declined from almost 35.5 births per 1,000 in the 1870s to about 29 per 1,000 by 1900. While the cause is uncertain, the 29% decline within a generation shows that the birth control methods Victorian women used were effective. Many women were educated about contraception and how to avoid pregnancy. While the rhythm method was not yet understood, condoms and diaphragms made of vulcanized rubber were reliable and inexpensive
The last sentence is the critical part. Hormonal birth control was an important refinement, but hardly the only technology covered by "accessible, effective contraception."
I thought the context meant it's not natural methods that are meant here (they are, of course, not as much "cheap" as they are free, and in any case have been always available), and my understanding is that condoms only became widespread after WW1.
That lines up with something I've read about pre-industrial societies. The countryside had a birth rate above replacement, and those extra people went to the cities which had birth rates below replacement. Partly because pre-industrial cities were filthy enough to drive up the death rate, but also partly because city people didn't want as many children. Contraception doesn't have to be 100% effective to drive down the birth rate. So it stands to reason that a shift from majority-rural to majority-urban would line up with a decrease in birth rate.
I've recently started seeing people moving on from listing pronouns as "She/her" and "They/them" to the ungodly combination "She/them".
Do I need to switch from feminine to plural pronouns depending on whether this person is the subject or the object of the sentence? This is very confusing but at least it expands the possibilities for "Who's On First" routines.
As I understand it, "She/they" is an easy way to get the Coolness Points for Queerness even if you are cis het (and white).
Yes, I'm cynical about the whole Pronoun Dance Routine. But if you're okay with people referring to you as "she" (or you're so obviously a straight white woman), why bother with the "they"? And if "they" is important to you as your identity, why keep the binary "she"? I see a lot of that online in the context of "activist group or liberal doing something organisation, a ton of the members are trans or non-binary identifying, and the few token cis hets who want to fit in use the 'you can call me Al' labels so as to prove they are Good Allies".
I don't want to deny that there *are* people who switch between singular/plural in sincerity, but most of it I see used is this kind of performative "I'm one of the *Good* Ones" stuff where, with the associated photo, it's "Hello, I'm a they" and I'm "No, you are very easily identifiable as and visibly a she".
In my observation (n=small handful), it tries to express an "anything but 'him'" sentiment, while remaining minimally accommodating. Which tracks logically with people having been called something they're not for their entire lives based on their appearance and having grown to hate that specific thing.
It's difficult, I don't want to insult or be insensitive to the people who have dysphoria around gender, but as I said, every time I see a photo of the "she/they" person, they look like a woman, they dress and present like a woman, they have a female name, there is nothing there to say "this is not a cis het woman". And it's generally, though not always, in the context of being part of a "X is trans, Y is non-binary, Z is xe/xim" grouping, as though they are trying to signal hard "I am not part of the Bad Old Gender Binary Inflicting Cis-Heteronormative Authority that we all acknowledge is wicked and evil, please spare me!"
At least the makers of pronoun badges manage to go with "(s)he/they" for the "both are acceptable" case, to make it clear they don't mean one is the object case: https://gayprideshop.co.uk/collections/pronoun-badges
#20: Germany has that awkward problem that the former first verse of their national anthem - which it is also illegal to perform nowadays - contained a statement staking out a territory. A look at a map shows the problem with this one too (the Memel is the border between Russian Kaliningrad and Lithuania these days, flowing from Belarus).
#14: STRONG content warning. I spent most of the morning at work trying not to cry. That post has become one of the most upvoted on Hacker News, with a lot of tributes coming in - Lars himself replied, among other things, "I love you all. Hug your kids if you have em.". One of my favourite quotes from the comments: "Grief is just love with no place to go."
#20 no it isn't illegal. Please run https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Lied_der_Deutschen through Google Translate. And those were roughly the borders at the time (see map in Wikipedia), before some bad governments made bad decisions. What gives? Notwithstanding, von Fallersleben was a somewhat naïve children's poet, and I'd even prefer a national anthem written by Karl Berbuer.
Ok, I looked this up, and you're right - unlike some explicitly Nazi songs, Verse 1 isn't explicitly illegal, or at least that hasn't been tested in court yet. I still wouldn't advise anyone to sing it in modern-day Germany though, it causes strong enough protests when someone plays it at an international sporting event. (As to translating, das ist nicht Notwendig, ich kann es auf Deutsch lesen.)
Sure, it was written "Germany, Germany over all" as a call for unity in a terribly fragmented country. But then the Nazis turned it into a slogan of megalomania, and it is perceived as such until today. And an anthem which needs footnotes to explain that no, it wasn't originally meant this way, is rather unhandy.
Side note, I've met French who didn't like their anthem either, because it is all about war against Germany. Or the hymn of Ecuador calls Spain a bloody monster.
And then, I've checked the Trizonesien Song by Karl Berbuer again, and yes, it is funny, but not a perfect anthem either:
"My dear friend, my dear friend,
the old times are over.
Whether you laugh, whether you cry,
the world goes on, one, two, three."
(Who would be crying about Nazi dictatorship being over? Oh well, let's not think about it too much and look into the future, right?)
"A little bunch of diplomats
today makes the big politics.
They create zones, change states,
and what about us here in the moment?"
(Well tough luck, being decided upon by foreign diplomats...)
Poking fun at the "Trizone" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trizone of the American-British-French occupied zones. Wouldn't work today since the East isn't part of it.
"We have girls with fire-wild nature/spirit/essence
This is old-fashioned or even racist. And of course, what Germans have been doing just a few years before was not man-eating per se, but an even worse industrialized mass-murder.
So, side-to-side with funny self-mockery, there is the tendency to cast aside any memory of our crimes. It was still a long time to go until Brandt could kneel in Warsaw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kniefall_von_Warschau
38 - what a sad own goal by the pro-Israel side. What's that, all Palestine sympathizers are antisemites? Congratulations, Jews are now uncomfortable everywhere!
On one hand, widespread genetic childbearing intervention seems like a good thing, for preventing conditions that are incompatible with life or completely incapacitating.
On the other, surely there would be unintended consequences galore if it went past that? If universally implemented, would this be really bad for humanity, by either selecting against genes that turn out to be somehow important, or by selecting for genes that somehow turn out to be bad to have? See e.g. associations between blood group and risk of certain diseases.
I don't think you can "translate" #26 because the premise of the joke isn't true for America. The point of the joke is that Chinese elites send their families to global cities in the west and have few ties to domestic backwaters. American elites also tend have few ties to places like Missouri, but their families are also just in global cities in the west. Malia Obama is pursuing a film career in LA, not Shanghai. Chelsea Clinton worked at McKinsey's NYC office, not their Tehran branch.
When American elites do spend significant time outside of America's sphere of influence, it's usually either humanitarian (like Chelsea Clinton working with Kenyan elephants) or however you'd classify Hunter Biden working at a Ukrainian energy company. Or they're counter-cultural, like Angela Davis.
The closest equivalent would be something like Trump wanting to deport all people from _____, but realizing that those people are vital for a certain part of the economy. It ends with him deporting all people from Ohio, who aren't vital for anything.
I don't know, I think you could rework it to be Hunter and Joe. Joe is listing off a range of potential targets, Hunter is all "Whoa Big Guy, that's where my latest grift partner lives/has a business/is using as a tax dodge location" (I mean, the Chinese 'business partners' fit right in there). So finally Joe ends up targeting (Missouri/Ohio/other punchline state).
Maybe, but the joke is meant to contrast China's opposition to the US with the personal benefits that Chinese leaders get from American institutions, like colleges. Americans working with foreign oligarchs just seems like corruption or globalization, rather than hypocrisy. Even in this specific example, it seems like Biden's Chinese business partner now lives in some sort of black site for political prisoners rather than a potential target. Most revelations about American leaders with foreign business interests tie into a narrative of an international group of corrupt oligarchs based in the west, rather than the hypocrisy targeted in the original joke.
More on my Glassdoor "how did they think this was suitable to my experience?" saga, and a new recommendation for a job.
This one's in West Virginia, a mere 3,498 miles from where I live so an easy commute. I'll give you the company spiel so see if you can guess what the position is:
"As a company, we are proud of our values and encourage those who share in our aspirations to join our team:
We protect our colleagues and communities through safe practices everywhere, every day.
We are committed to serving our customers and communities by going above and beyond to exceed expectations.
We take action to improve neighborhoods and communities by being environmentally responsible and creating a more sustainable world.
We are driven to deliver results in the right way.
We encourage a human centered culture that honors the unique potential and dignity of every person."
Okay, take a guess and then further down I'll reveal what the job opening is:
It's for a trainee driver on a waste truck (commercial as well as residential) 😀 A socially important job, indeed, but is the mission statement a little overblown for that?
Arguably a company that operates trash trucks is in a *better* position to "protect [their] colleagues and communities through safe practices" and "take action to improve neighborhoods and communities by being environmentally responsible and creating a more sustainable world"--by, e.g., providing their drivers with proper training and PPE--than many of the companies that routinely include that sort of glurge in their corporate communications.
Whether they actually do any of it is another question, of course.
Definitely a rubbish collection company provides a practical and tangible service, it just amused me to see the usual corporate speak in the job description.
Also the idea that I'm a good fit to learn to drive a bin lorry in the USA 🤣 Though that's partly my fault, as when filling out the fake profile I picked an American city at random as my address.
>I’m not sure how much this study adds once you already know that twin studies find criminal behavior is about 45% genetic, 25% shared environmental, 30% nonshared/random, although I guess they can help pin down the exact nature of the shared environmental part.
But remember that heredity studies are always relative to the environment they are done in!
IQ is very heritable in a study where everyone involved had very similar environments, and not very heritable in a study where half the subjects are upper-class American and half the participants are illiterate third-world peasants with heavy parasite loads and lots of childhood malnutrition.
Particularly pernicious in this situation, where the claim is *about* different environments causing changes in behavior. If the twins in the studies were not raised in rich vs poor environments as extreme as teh differences between the rich vs poor communities the crime hypothesis is comparing, then it will under-rate the effect of environment in that context.
I'm late to the party, but when I saw #21 previously, I thought it might be code-switching rather than actually changing anyone's mind. Given some sort of interactive survey or however this was done, first you answer the "right answer" according to your social group. But then, trap sprung! Surveyor clearly demonstrates that this was not the right answer. Okay, so code switch, this is now a test of your ability to do critical thinking (or whatever the acceptable term for that is now). Give the new "right answer".
What's the real belief? Well, what proof is there that the surveyees even have an internal, honestly-held opinion on the subject? Why should they?
It's always interesting to look in various dissident libertarian-adjacent spaces and see the conflict between the culture war antipathy towards public schools and the Caplan/me-style edunihilism that is more prominent in those spaces than in almost any other political niche.
37: TracingWoodgrains, like so many others trying to diagnose the ills of the Republican party and of American conservatism, is very confused and lacks an understanding of what is actually happening in/to the American right, to the point of being deeply Not Even Wrong on almost every point.
The problem for American conservatives is not that they have a "short bench," although it's certainly true that they have one, or that there are too many progressives in academia (there are plenty, but American academia is politically next to powerless). The problem is that approximately half of the base of the Republican party, the party that has traditionally been the main avenue for conservative political action in the US, has sharply and definitively *abandoned conservatism*, by almost any reasonable definition of the term, in favor of Trumpism, which, however difficult it is to define politically, is manifestly anything but conservative.
Social conservatism? Jettisoned in the mid-2010s when half the party decided that "grab them by the pussy" was acceptable language from an American president, and when those who didn't actually put "TRUMP - FUCK YOUR FEELINGS" bumper stickers on their cars didn't complain a bit about those who did, despite that sort of language being neither "decent" nor very much in keeping with Family Values.
Institutional conservatism? Well, a good chunk of the party had already tossed any lingering respect for existing institutions and the need to work within them out the window long before Trump arrived on the scene, but the burn-it-all-down philosophy of the Tea Party sure has only grown as a force in Republican politics since 2015, as we saw last year during the House Speaker debacle.
Fiscal conservatism? ...I was going to type a whole paragraph here, but there's no need.
Monetary conservatism? There wasn't much pushback, or even mild criticism, from the Trumpist base when the god-emperor took to Twitter to threaten to fire Fed chairman Jerome Powell because the latter had tried to turn *off* the spigot of free and easy money (artificially low interest rates, money-printing via asset purchases) that the Fed had been pumping into the economy since the Obama presidency. The few monetary hawks left in the party didn't get much traction when they complained--and even they didn't complain much a few months later when the Fed went into absolute batshit money-printing hyperdrive in early 2020 in response to the pandemic.
Law-and-order conservatism? It seemed like that old Republican stalwart might actually survive Trumpism--the orange man himself had carped about it for years, after all--but then January 6, 2021 happened, and in a matter of minutes, riots turned out to be the language of the unheard after all, and the members of the mob who spent hours beating the shit out of terrified policement and vandalizing the halls of Congress (see also: institutional conservatism, above) became merely frustrated patriots venting some steam, and indeed political prisoners.
But anyway, if that bloggers commenters are right about the Republican party being dragged kicking and screaming into small-government libertarianism, then the party is even more doomed, because at least half of the exising party couldn't care less about small government or libertarianism (and in some ways are actively hostile to those things), and the one thing that still unites the actual conservatives and the Trumpists--a disdain for "wokeness" in all its forms, real and imaginary--is probably not going to be enough to hold the party together in its current form.
More likely, imo, is that the Trumpists win the power struggle and the party, and the deficit hawks and free-marketeers are forced to find a new home.
...and if that were actually to come to pass, it would be interesting to see how attractive the new party would be to the George F. Will types--the social and fiscal conservatives who actually meant it, enough to quit the Republican party when it became clear that most of the party didn't.
Below is a link to my reply to Aria Babu's post - I don't think there's good enough evidence for the causal conclusion between opinions on working mothers and TFR that she asserts. I looked at the data ex-Europe and found the negative correlation disappears. Then I looked at data on the exact question she's presenting within the US and find the opposite relationship, a positive correlation between fertility rates and thinking that mothers should stay home when kids are young. Given that within the US a bunch of the potential confounding factors are held constant, this suggests there's likely something else going on (although I'm not sure what!) which is causing the negative correlation between European countries. Overall, I don't think you can assert the causal relationship which Aria concludes her post with, especially when it runs strongly counter to priors.
With regard to the "Verband nationaldeutscher Juden" (point 29), historian Donald Niewyk documented the right-wing political faction led by Max Naumann (a Berlin lawyer and reform Jew) in his book _Jews in Weimar Germany_ (Routledge, 2017). Niewyk writes:
> At least as viable as an alternative to liberal assimilationism was the rightwing chauvinism of Max Naumann and his League of German Nationalist Jews. It presented an opportunity for Jews who were frightened of communism or disillusioned with Weimar democracy to pursue a reactionary line. It held out the hope of counteracting anti-Semitism by canceling the equation of Jew and liberal. Unquestionably the persistent Judeophobia of most of the remaining German right made its task more difficult.
Niewyk, in this same book, contextualizes the frictions between assimilated liberal German Jews and the Eastern European immigrant Jews during this period. One point made in the book is that no Jews of any political persuasion, not even the most severely pessimistic, had reason to suspect Hitler's Final Solution while living in the liberal democracy that was Weimar Germany.
"Still, people continue to work as much as ever. I’m surprised by this result; is the claim that people still work exactly as much when they don’t need the money? Why?"
My guess is that capital and labor are complements in production. If you have extra money to invest on your business, your work becomes more productive so you work more. If the whole economy consists mostly of small business, then you'd see this effect in the aggregate. This implies that we should expect employees to work less under a UBI.
#41: Chuck Schumer is a laughingstock. Anybody who he gives credence to actually has their credence reduced. I'm surprised MIRI didn't know this. I guess the people opposed to artificial intelligence are also opposed to doing intelligence on their adversaries.
Yeah, the model for *courts* blocking populist right actions was probably the Trump travel bans. And SCOTUS mostly took the Administration's side in the end, it's just that various lower courts moved to immediately block the bans and several months were spent overcoming that.
The point about SCOTUS wasn't in the original article though -- that's Scott editorializing. The original article is mainly about leftist control of the bureaucracy (including teachers, etc.), which the author argues isn't changing anytime soon because the young and educated are all on the left and the gap is widening, which therefore makes Republican politicians less able to exert their will.
My understanding is that most people want more than 1 child, higher than 2 on average in fact. The difference between desired fertility and actual fertility is therefore due to economics. But very few parents want 1 child.
I think that a very large fraction of couples who stop at one do it for medical rather than economic reasons.
I think a lot of disagreement about this revolves around different meanings of "want". It reminds me of the thing Bryan Caplan wrote about ADHD: roughly, "you can probably focus if I apply sufficient pressure".
The biggest advantage of two kids over one kid is that the kids can play with each other and talk to each other, instead of constantly demanding their parents' attention.
I have two kids and am considering the possibility of a third, but I'm not that keen. The economic factor wouldn't be that big a deal, but the time and effort factor of resetting the clock back to zero just as I'm starting to get some sort of my life back again depresses me.
"I think the biggest belief driving low fertility is materialism"
Maybe this is just arguing about words but for a lot of people I don't think it's wanting more stuff, more material things. It's about, um, convenience? If I don't feel like cooking, there's take-out. If I don't feel like doing anything, I can watch tv. If I want to go somewhere far, I can just buy a plane ticket.
"Better public schools" are an inherently limited good because bright, motivated kids are scarce. 90% of what makes a school good or bad are the students. Smart, motivated students will result in a "good" school. Stupid, unmotivated students will result in a "bad" school. Everyone thinks that we can somehow get good schools by spending more or having better facilities or better teachers or vouchers or some wonderful thing that no one has been able to come up with yet. We can't.
Did you see the COVID origins debate Eliezer tweeted about? Thought it might have kicked off https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-learning-from-dramatic-events, and would make a good link https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1741202539742429555
Yes - I helped them with some logistics and although I haven't watched the videos yet I was impressed by both sides' professionalism. I would like to watch the videos, but 18 hours of video is a big ask.
From comments on the first video it sounds like some edited versions will be available for those with fewer hours to burn.
In the meantime slides are available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jcu57r78-SN0RWJfB4mnQNj1BSGBPkfK/view
It's a great debate- I definitely recommend a watch.
I came into it deeply uncertain about the question. It seemed like both theories involved an enormously improbable coincidence- either a lab leak that just happened to start spreading at the same sort of live animal market that so many other coronaviruses originated at, or a natural origin that just happened to to break out in the same city as one of the world's top labs studying coronaviruses.
After watching the first five hours or so of this debate, I have say: I don't think either of the sides' attempts to explain away the central coincidence of their theory have been very convincing. The natural origin side's detours into debunking leak theories from other labs felt a little strawmanish, while the lab leak side's argument that the market origin was probably a super-spreader event from a popular mahjong parlor was very dramatically dismantled by the other side with photos of a tiny semi-private mahjong room directly above a shop selling live animals, along with a report that samples of the virus were only found in the shop.
That said, I did feel that natural origin side did a slightly better job of demonstrating the unlikelihood of the other side's central coincidence. I'm pretty convinced now that the first probable cases of COVID-19 were clustered not just in the market, but around the specific part of the market selling animals- a thirty minute drive from the lab, and a particularly huge coincidence if it came from there.
By contrast, the lab leak side's claim that the lab's proximity would be an especially unlikely coincidence because they were unusually lax with safety was interesting, but didn't quite bring it up to the same level of improbability in my view.
I was also pretty skeptical of the lab leak side's methodology. I respect them for putting the work they did into quantifying their uncertainty and trying to be rigorous about avoiding bias, but the way they're combining their probabilities seems extremely sensitive to small differences in which pieces of evidence are included. The larger a set of data you have and the more you sift through it, the more unlikely coincidences you'll find by chance- if you just sift through data for an arbitrary amount of time and add up the unlikeliness of everything you find, that number is going to change by orders of magnitude depending on when you stop looking. And if your search is biased toward one kind of evidence, you can get an ever-increasing level of certainty just by searching longer. The fact that these guys were getting ~99.99% levels of certainty after multiplying out their probabilities also just doesn't pass the smell test. And it seemed a little suspicious when they described two anecdotes where their methodology resulted in heterodox positions that turned out to be correct, but made no attempt to calculate their overall calibration- or even mention times when they got something wrong.
I still have a lot more of the debate to watch- it's possible the upcoming debate over genetics that they keep teasing might be a knock-down argument for the lab-leak side- but so far, I've definitely updated a bit toward the natural origin position.
COVID strikes me as a remarkable disease-- not just the speed of mutation, but the number of body systems it attacks. Is there anything else in the same class?
I'm not a virologist, but it seems to me that COVID infection and vaccines both have reasonably strong protection for the future, in contrast to e.g. regular flu, where you need a new shot every year to have any protection at all and the yearly shot is still much less effective, both of which are related to the fact that flu mutates much more quickly than COVID. (On the flip side, a virus like smallpox grants complete immunity for life--presumably at least in part because smallpox mutates more slowly).
As for the number of systems it attacks, its symptoms are similar to the aforementioned flu or even common colds. Does it attack substantially more systems than those diseases?
The fact that COVID became a worldwide human pandemic obviously separates it from other viruses which did not, which is most of them. There's certainly some very strong selection effects there; by definition it has to be unusual on some axes.
Covid and the flu are different viruses (well, virus families or whatever as each mutate fairly rapidly). Different responses to various vaccines and shots isn't a surprise I suppose (much like we aren't too surprised that we don't need annual shots against measles, mumps, etc.)
And I'll note that Covid is different from viruses that didn't spread world-wide, but the seasonal flu virus does spread world-wide annually so clearly Covid isn't THAT unusual.
I don't know if we have a model for what causes some viruses to mutate quickly and others slowly. I'd love to know if we do.
They are different; I hope it didn't seem like I was saying that's the *only* difference between them. I don't think that COVID is an outlier when it comes to mutation speed, among human-pandemic viruses.
Other diseases have spread worldwide, but they're still a tiny fraction of all viruses. Like a few dozen out of millions instead of 1 out of millions.
COVID affects the blood, the nerves, and the muscles.
Maybe other respiratory diseases do that too, but we haven't studied them enough, with enough ideological fervor to find a bunch of results saying that they affect other organ system.
That's fair, though COVID shows surprising amounts of serious damage. I can believe more subtle stuff hasn't been noticed.
Thanks for writing up this analysis.
I also am skeptical of the lab leak sides methodology (so far; still watching) for a different reason. The connection between the Dreyfus affair and COVID isn't clear to me, and it seems like they spend a lot of time discussing bias rather then diving into the particulars of the available information. Miller seems to have a much better grasp of the details of many different points, at least so far. Rootclaim is giving high-level, very general arguments that don't address the facts, such as discussing the bias of various authors.
(They also say that social media check-ins are biased, and then immediately use social media data to estimate cases and claims that Weibo is unbiased).
>Either a lab leak that just happened to start spreading at the same sort of live animal market that so many other coronaviruses originated at, or a natural origin that just happened to to break out in the same city as one of the world's top labs studying coronaviruses.
David Friedman shows how to use Bayesian statistics to balance these likelihoods here:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-lab-leak-theory.
Thanks for that. I'm not totally sure I buy that analysis, however. Suppose we tracked down the first cases of COVID to a particular stall in the animal market. That should increase our credence in natural origin slightly, but if we then re-run this analysis with total number of wet market stalls in the world rather than total wet markets, it more strongly favors a lab leak, doesn't it? And if you were to re-run it with the number of cities with wet markets rather than number of wet markets, it would favor natural origin, right?
I feel like a good Bayesian analysis shouldn't be so sensitive to that kind of reframing. It seems like the probabilities need to somehow be measuring how surprised you'd be to see that general kind of evidence given the counterfactual, not just how probable the exact thing is. Like, if you're trying to decide whether a news article about a 35-year-old drunk driver is fraudulent, you wouldn't take some prior probability of an article being fake and then adjust it by the odds of a random drunk driver being exactly 35 (~1/60?). The age of the driver there wouldn't be surprising, so it shouldn't really lead us to update our credence at all. If it did, then every specific detail about the event, no matter how normal, should further lower our credence.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how you'd actually go about calculating how surprising something like that would be- my vague suspicion is that maybe you have to just put an entirely subjective number on it, like you have to with the prior probability.
I understand your general point about trivial details not reducing the veracity of an account (I am reminded of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy in which an event is mistakenly viewed as anomalous even when any alternative would have been equally anomalous), but I'm not sure about the particular applications.
What would it look like to run such analysis for number of stalls or number of cities with wet markets? The latter number only seems relevant inasumuch as a disease could break out at a wet market, so why would you treat a city with multiple wet markets and a city with one wet market equally?
I don't get how these would fit with your description of "how surprised you'd be to see that general kind of evidence given the counterfactual."
I'd think that I wouldn't be more more surprised about a virus breaking out in one stall, rather than another stall.
But I would be surprised about a virus just happening to break out in the same city as one of the few labs doing certain types of research with such viruses, if the virus didn't emerge from the lab.
And I would be surprised about a virus just happening to break out in a city that contains a wet market, if the virus didn't actually emerge from that market.
But if a city had multiple labs I would be less surprised, and if a city had more wet-markets I would also be less surprised. So I'd think that the relevant factors would be number of labs and number of wet-markets, not number of cities with one.
Having re-read the article: you're absolutely correct, I apparently mis-read it the first time somehow.
I'm not sure that comparing the likelihood of each hypothetical outbreak occurring in Wuhan quite captures the possible coincidence of a lab leak first spreading in a live animal market, but the analysis is definitely not invalid in the way I thought it was.
I'm reasonably sure I'd want to be finer-grained about the wet market than number of stalls. I'm willing to bet the stalls are of various sizes, have different numbers of customers, and sell different animals, probably different numbers of species per stall.
Just while I'm thinking about this, I'd like to know what the original animal host was (I'm assuming that there was an original host even if the virus was tweaked in a lab), but that may not be possible any more, since some animals have gotten the virus from people.
Yes. And this is how statistics in general works. For example, if you have 3 models each fit to 10,000 data points, and you compute a likelihood for each model, the actual value will be very low, because you're multiplying 10,000 numbers which are each less than 1. The only thing that matters in this case is the relative likelihood of each model compared to the others. Or to give another example, when you do hypothesis test, you don't ask for the probability of your exact result, you as, for the probability of your result *or one more extreme*. Or if you shuffle a deck of cards, the probability of whatever order it came out in is 1/52!... but that doesn't mean that it was definitely stacked in that order. You have to batch similar outcomes together, unless you're claiming a completely precise and deterministic model and measurement.
Not sure that works.
The presence of a lab isn't neutral. it would also boost the chances of an outbreak , lab or natural, being detected there. kind of like how they have lots of radiation detection equipment at western nuclear power plants, so radiation from chernoble was first detected at Forsmark in Stockholm. Of course with radioactive material it's much easier to point back at a specific source.
> either a lab leak that just happened to start spreading at the same sort of live animal market that so many other coronaviruses originated at
They found a bunch of cases at the live animal market and then stopped looking, but there's no guarantee that this the first super-spreading site.
That's addressed in a lot of depth in the first debate. The natural origin side makes a very strong argument that if there were more than a handful of cases elsewhere in the city before the market, that would show up clearly in the exponential growth later on, even if the early data was strongly biased. Instead, the cases radiated out from the market, with the total COVID case numbers following a very predictable curve.
The lab leak people later concede that the market was the first major spreading event- they speculate that someone from the lab might have lived nearby and brought it directly there from the lab.
In the last debate, they put a lot of effort into giving evidence that the market was a likely place for the first super-spreader event to occur after a lab leak- eventually claiming to prove that the market was literally the number one most likely spot in the city for a super-spreader event (which actually really hurt their credibility, in my opinion). The natural origins side countered that there were a huge number of other historically likely super-spreader spots closer to the lab, and that empirically, cases in the market grew more slowly than elsewhere in the city.
"just happened to to break out in the same city as one of the world's top labs studying coronaviruses."
Well... the location of the lab isn't totally random. It was founded and upgraded to study such viruses because they're available in the vicinity.
it's like saying "what are the odds of an eruption *right* next to that volcanology lab.
I continue to believe either are plausible. but about every 2 weeks for the last few years someone publishes a headline along the lines of "[some group or organisation] says it can't rule out a lab leak" and then the same people go "SEE WE TOLD YOU SO!" and try to act like it's definitive proof.
> The town of Qırmızı Qəsəbə in Armenia claims to be “the last shtetl”.
Azerbaijan.
How should we square #27s speedup of malaria vaccination with TheZvi's criticisim in his recent medical roundup:
>Also, EA and everyone else who works in global health needs to do a complete post-mortem of how this was allowed to take so long, and why they couldn’t or didn’t do more to speed things along. There are in particular claims that the 2015-2019 delay was due to lack of funding, despite a malaria vaccine being an Open Phil priority. Saloni Dattani, Rachel Glennerster and Siddhartha Haria write about the long road for Works in Progress. They recommend future use of advance market commitments, which seems like a no brainer first step.
I've found Zvi to be pretty trustworthy but these seem to be two diametrically opposed analyses of what happened and so someone has to be wrong here.
I don't see a direct opposition. #27 is saying that EAs did some things that sped up the malaria vaccine, Zvi is saying that there were additional things that EAs could've done which would have sped up the vaccine some more.
I suppose it's technically the case that both things could be true (EA sped up the malaria vaccine; it was unacceptably slow), but if both things are true, then EA should probably not be touting "we sped it up" as a large accomplishment even if it's technically correct, or Zvi is overstating the extent of the ball-dropping.
If they did more than trivial things to speed it up, if they managed to pick all the low-hanging fruit and then some, such that it being praise worthy is warranted; then Zvi's criticsim is at the very least over stated. In that case, while it might be true that there was more that could have theoretically been done in hindsight, that is probably _always_ the case in every situation and does not warrant a post mortem or reflection.
If however, what they did was a pittance, that there were obvious and easy routes to dramatic gains, and that the speedup they actually got was trivial, then that is not something worth touting as an accomplishment.
So I still think that one of the two must be overstating. Zvi must be claiming too much failure or EA must be claiming too much victory.
-edit- As is almost always the case: my comment is overly long and ramply and after I posted it I thought of a succinct way to sum it up:
Regardless of the facts on the ground and what happened, if two people are looking at the same events and one says "look at this marvelous thing I accomplished" and the other says "how on earth could this have been allowed, we must immediately assess and self-reflect" one of them has to be overstating.
If (made up numbers here) the vaccine would have been 10 years delayed relative to a sane trajectory absent EA help, and, due to getting that help was actually instead 5 years slower than the sane trajectory, it can be simultaneously true that EA helped a lot, and that there was more EA could have done.
I'm always lurking in the shadows waiting to comment on genealogy items and/or kill related joys. There are several errors in that Biden descent line (setting the mythological content aside).
The line breaks at the first William Taylor and the second man of the same name, said here to be his father. Joe Biden was indeed descended from the first William Taylor. William Taylor was a Quaker immigrant from Cheshire, England to Pennsylvania. I don't believe his parentage is known, most likely because the parish registers for his home village have not survived for the period. So the line should end right there. But instead he has been grafted onto the family of an unrelated William Taylor, an immigrant to colonial Virginia (most certainly not a Quaker), who furthermore has no known descendants.
The line follows the Virginia man's likely but unproven ancestry for a bit, but makes the wholly unwarranted assertion that he was descended from the Marian martyr Rowland Taylor. It furthermore adopts the long-disproved idea that the martyr's wife was a niece of William Tyndale. And then it connects the Tyndales to some northern English gentry families. I don't know much about that part but I would guess there are errors there too. All these errors have been floating around the internet for years and probably on paper long before that.
That all said, the funny thing is that you _could_ do this exercise with several other former presidents, including, most recently, George W. Bush. And there's no reason to think Joe Biden (and ultimately everyone else of European descent) isn't descended from the same people when you go far back enough, but, for Joe at least, the documentation isn't there.
As to the ancient stuff, you could safely take the line back to "Eahlmund, Under-King of Kent." Beyond that, you're relying on a genealogy mostly fabricated during the reign of Alfred the Great as your only source.
What about Trump? Supposedly he has a well-founded ancestry back to King Christian I of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, and that certainly sounds like the kind of person who ought to have Odin on his family tree.
I'd have to see the purported line, but my understanding is that Donald Trump has no proven royal descent. But that understanding is a few years out of date. Scottish records aren't bad, for the most part. Someone chipping away at it could find something. But Christian I seems a little too recent. Most people aren't descended from a monarch later than the 1300s.
Supposedly this is the line https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/culture_and_living/2017/01/24/donald_trump_is_related_to_most_icelanders_and_dani/
The error appears to be at #11. That man should be John Macleod, a peasant on the Isle of Lewis. His parentage is unknown. Someone, without evidence, replaced him with a wealthier man.
Are you a Time traveller?
I'd think this information would mostly be *less* accessible if you traveled back in time. You'd actually have to travel across hundreds or thousands of miles to check in with people individually. Today, people have actually compiled most of the information we have in much more accessible places, like the internet.
Odin, the god of wisdom? surely some combination of Loki, the god of mischief , and Thor the Thunderer.
Ah, I was wondering how fast you'd jump on that. Well done.
My father was a professional genealogist, contracted to assist Hugh Peskett in tracing then-president Reagan and VP Bush's ancestry. My recollection is that Bush had proven royal lineage, while Reagan was less delighted by his peasant heritage--but I was very young at the time.
Of course there is not a sharp line between the two, I say as an official descendant of royal bastards.
I've heard that due to the frequency of marital infidelity by women, something like 25% of people have a father other than who they believe is their father, and even if that's inflated a little, it almost surely makes tracing lineage back more than 4 generations basically pointless. Even if you go matrilineal to avoid that, there are hidden adoptions all over the place (and various scenarios like the Sarah Palin conspiracy theory where some other family member claims the child to spare the actual mother the stigma of unwed birth).
I assume a professional genealogist must have some way to reconcile this in their head and still feel like they're doing something real, but it makes the whole enterprise feel pointless to me.
Hidden adoptions and other family secrets can often be teased out through careful examination not only of official records, but family bibles, letters, and other ancillary materials as well. With practice you learn suspicious patterns for each generation, going back quite far. I believe this is the real thrill for a genealogist: not the dry retracing of an official family tree, but the detective work of solving family mysteries; of which you note there are many.
Heredity isn't especially significant to me, so I'm a bystander in this matter.
>I've heard that due to the frequency of marital infidelity by women, something like 25% of people have a father other than who they believe is their father, and even if that's inflated a little
All estimates like this I've seen have basically been based on percentages like this being demonstrated in paternity testing - without taking into account that paternity testing (when used to demonstrate infidelity and not resolve a multiple daddy candidates situation) is pretty much by definition used in situations when there's a reasonable suspicion that the paternity is in doubt (earlier evidence of cheating, child looks very different from the father etc., not situations where there are absolutely no grounds for suspicion.
I seem to recall a study "correcting" earlier estimates of ~10% to only ~2-3%
Probably even lower: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-012-9143-y
German: From river Jordan to Med. sea "free" is a fine rhyme, just happens to mean: Destroy Israel (and kill all Israeli Jews). Still okay-ish in Germany. BUT: it was said/shouted/written after the Oct 7 murders/rapes/etc. . The best German blogger Thomas Fischer - a fat old guy who happens to be our country's best criminal lawyer/judge - explains the legal reasoning here (readers are lawyers, thus not a fun read): "(The slogan) is not only directed at the German state in the abstract, but at all people living in Germany, especially the Jews living here. At the same time, it calls on other population groups to join the call for the destruction of the state of Israel. For this reason alone, it is highly suitable (and intended) to cause aggression, insecurity and fear and to incite population groups living in Germany against each other. In addition, there is a threat to the population as a whole with the situation of danger and fear that this creates.
There is therefore no doubt about the suitability to "disturb the peace" in the specific context given here"
The Law is §140 "Reward and approval of criminal offenses"
Anyone who ...
1) rewards (a serious crime) after it has been committed ... or
2) applauds such crime in a manner likely to disturb the public peace, publicly, ...
shall be liable to a custodial sentence NOT exceeding three years or to a monetary penalty.
https://www.lto.de/recht/meinung/m/frage-fische-jubel-terror-hamas/
It is not "incitement to hatred" (§130). Nor is showing the Palestine flag or shouting "Stop the genocide (in Gaza)" against any German law. Which a few hundred do every Saturday in my town. Shrug. - And the slogan is "ok" again, if it is shouted NOT in connection with the Oct 7 attack. I'd guess even in those rallies now, after Israel's attacks.
That's an interesting legal analysis you've linked, and I find it persuasive. However, Scott's original link contradicts it, saying that it *is* about §130, according to "The prosecutor’s office for the German city-state of Berlin", which is the relevant authority making the claim here.
I'd still like to see a direct source, but at least it passes the test that the news outlet (i24news) would be explicitly lying if it was in fact *not* about incitement to hatred.
I suspect(ed), police/courts followed Fischer's reasoning about 140 (published Oct. 16 !), and did not update. Journalists are not very trustworthy when it comes to reports about legal topics (as Thomas Fischer complains in several blogs: a journalist writing about cars is expected to know stuff about engines; if about soccer: to know about "offside". But when it comes to law: anything goes!) About 130 Fischer writes: "Der Tatbestand des § 130 Abs. 1 ist aber aus einem anderen Grund wohl nicht (probably not) gegeben: Die Parole, Palästina solle 'vom Jordan bis zum Mittelmeer' reichen, richtet sich ausdrücklich gegen den Staat Israel, nicht aber mit einer hinreichenden Konkretheit gegen den jüdischen Bevölkerungsteil Deutschlands." - 130 demands a more "concrete" expression against people IN Germany: "Kill the Danish minority" or "Kill Bavarians" might suffice. Or not. There were not many §130 prosecutions that stood the test of courts (if not holocaust-denial). - My/Fischer's point: German law is not as crazy as Scott assumed. There was a short time, when that slogan was - possibly - a legal offence. Now it is back to normal. - Those accused of §130 then or now will have an easy time to get of that hook. I bet my 40€ against 10$. (Will resolve according to the final judgement of the highest level court appealed to.)
On 2023-11-02, the Federal Ministry of the Interior designated Hamas an illegal association https://www.bundesanzeiger.de/pub/publication/M0JVrk5Qop55DhqscjE/content/M0JVrk5Qop55DhqscjE/BAnz%20AT%2002.11.2023%20B10.pdf and listed "from the river to the sea" as one of their symbols. Now anyone using (not just mentioning) it in public runs afoul of §86a StGB on "Use of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations". https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p0933
But if such symbolism is protected speech in the US under the First Amendment, now I'm curious why e.g. IS doesn't have a bunch of American supporters film a propaganda stunt where they drive around Washington DC waving flags and declaring victory over the crusaders. Or maybe they totally did and it just wasn't outrageous enough to garner sufficient media attention.
Interesting, thank you! I have doubts this decision will hold in all parts - esp. banning the slogan (which is the only non-Logo in the list). - I am curious, too; hopefully some US-readers will post some links (not of US-Nazis, please, no need!).
Well, there is the precedent of banning NSDAP slogans. However I think that a good case can be made that this slogan in particular (genocidal implications and all) is not Hamas-specific. Would be interesting to see this in court.
Lawyer here: It was a decision by the Staatsanwaltschaft (prosecutor's office) of Berlin to consider the chant a violation of § 130 StGB (which among other things forbids calls for violence against/defamation of ethnic and religious gropus. This means the prosecutors will try to prosecute you if you chant it. Wether or not it is actually a crime will be decided by the judge who has to consider your unique case, he doesn't have a list of forbidden words.
> I'm curious why e.g. IS doesn't have a bunch of American supporters film a propaganda stunt where they drive around Washington DC waving flags and declaring victory over the crusaders.
As an American, this seems fine to me? Of course, they'd need to keep off private property, and put up with hecklers. And apparently, if they want to film in Washington, D.C., they'd need a film permit. So maybe our bureaucracy is what's preventing this.
https://entertainment.dc.gov/page/film-permit-faq
Driving around, say, New York or Philadelphia or Boston could get most of the upshot and not have to deal with the film permit issue (or at least do so in a different bureaucracy).
Which begs the question of how much actual upshot do they garner from such a stunt? Non-zero to be sure, but it would also likely draw FBI attention to their operations. More costs than money to a move like this.
Because the police don't bother to protect them. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35680881
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie
In 1977, he ACLU defended a Nazi group's right to march in a neighborhood with a good many Jews, including holocaust survivors..
https://reason.com/2020/12/20/would-the-aclu-still-defend-nazis-right-to-march-in-skokie/
Thanks Mark, that makes sense. I think Scott is being naive here - his next item celebrates how random American students change their mind about using the phrase once they've been educated a bit. But that's just a nice story - plenty of Muslims chanting the phrase do not believe Israel has the right to exist, which is also why they celebrated Oct 7th. I approve of the German law.
What percentage of Muslims who chant that phrase do not believe Israel has the right to exist, and what methodology are you using to accurately determine the thought processes of people you haven't met (assuming you are concerned about accuracy, of course)?
I mean, this is just such a slippery area, but to quote Mark below, 'the river-sea-phrase IS a wet dream of genocide'. For your evidence, you're not going to be able to run a survey, but you can observe, e.g. how slippery any Muslim spokesperson interviewee is when asked to condemn Hamas and Oct 7th. Or indeed, observe the behaviour of the Arab world from 1947 onwards. They tried to destroy Israel in 1948, in 1967, and in 1973. They didn't fail because they had qualms about genocide, they failed because they're kind of losers at fighting.
> I mean, this is just such a slippery area, but to quote Mark below, 'the river-sea-phrase IS a wet dream of genocide'.
Mark is welcome to spread just so stories, and humanity will reap the benefits of his behaviour. Unfortunately, consequences tend to be borne by the poor, while those who cause problems live relative lives of luxury.
> For your evidence, you're not going to be able to run a survey, but you can observe, e.g. how slippery any Muslim spokesperson interviewee is when asked to condemn Hamas and Oct 7th.
And what would this be evidence of, *necessarily*? Is condemning Hamas objectively necessary &/or optimal gameplay? Because I do not condemn Hamas.
> Or indeed, observe the behaviour of the Arab world from 1947 onwards.
After what I said above: *are you actually serious*?
> They tried to destroy Israel in 1948, in 1967, and in 1973.
They certainly *attacked* on those dates - but "tried to destroy" is a different matter.
> They didn't fail because they had qualms about genocide, they failed because they're kind of losers at fighting.
Perhaps. And perhaps one of these times they won't fail. And perhaps one of these days they'll accomplish a 9/11 Part 2. I can hardly blame them.
Yes you’ve made the case for Israel’s response pretty solidly. As Golda Meir said if the arabs laid down their guns there would be peace. If Israel laid down their guns there would be no Israel. It’s existential for Israel. Palestinians just need to accept they lost and move on, like the 2 million arab israeli’s did.
> Yes you’ve made the case for Israel’s response pretty solidly.
If it isn't too much trouble, could you walk us through how what I have written justifies ending the life of 20,000 or so humans?
> As Golda Meir said if the arabs laid down their guns there would be peace. If Israel laid down their guns there would be no Israel. It’s existential for Israel.
Golda should claim this $1M prize then (assuming they can actually *demonstrate* this proclaimed supernatural ability)!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi#One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_Challenge
> Palestinians just need to accept they lost and move on, like the 2 million arab israeli’s did.
Not really, no more than Israelis "need" to change their culture of disproportional killing and highly skilled mass thought / international governmental control. Humans are free to continue down this path of insanity, with Rational (as opposed to rational) people like you cheerleading the way, and Mother Nature will pass out the prizes according to some unknown methodology. Best of luck to you and yours!
Who are "the Arabs"? What does a Palestinian 12-year-old have to do with something the Egyptian government did in 1967?
"From the river to the sea" is in the Likud charter. Why is it not genocidal when Israelis say it?
Because if Israel wanted to genocide the Palestinians ... they could, easily? They wouldn't bother sending in troops, they would just bomb Gaza into oblivion. This is pretty basic stuff Freddie. And in the West, we don't have our major cities overwhelmed by Jews chanting genocidally. Like, we can see these protests, they are not secret.
You're just admitting that your determination of what the phrase means is based more on the speaker than on the specific words, which is exactly what makes people suspect that targeting the phrase is about preventing Palestinian resistance of any form, be it genocidal or not.
Well, welcome. :) Otoh: a) I do agree with Scott's stance that banning certain statements feels kinda less than ideal (I could live without our Holocaust-denial law, that leads to the imprisonment only of some 'slightly stubborn' granny. Again, otoh, I am glad potential denialist have to shut their mouth at least about this one!)
b) The river-sea-phrase IS a wet dream of genocide. The Palestinians in Germany know it - and their German leftie friends are more often aware of its meaning than US-college kids. Banning it feels less ridiculous here. But: as I said among my comments: I doubt it will hold; it is too late for §140, too "abstract" for §130 - and it is not an exclusive enough "trademark" of Hamas to keep it banned. Thus we all shall be prepared to have to live with this. Thus I agree with Scott, mostly - I just feel he got the details of the story a bit wrong; freedom of speech is alive and kicking in Germany, too. For better and worse.
I looked in vain for an 'upvote' option, so consider this comment to be that.
I'll ask again: why is "from the river to the sea" not genocidal when Likud puts it in their charter?
Plenty of Muslims have been slaughtered by the racist regime you're excusing here
What are you even talking about?
This whole conundrum shows a serious lack of Basic Logic.
Does anyone ever consider rephrasing the chant:
For X in (Black, White, Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, ...) {
From the Deserts to the Sea, California will be X free!}
The instant anyone were to substitute Black for Jew, everyone would lose their shit. What does it mean, if you can't hold all people in equality anywhere and everywhere?
Spoiler Alert!: If you can't hold all people as equal anywhere and everywhere, you are a racist.
Exactly why is it people hate the Nazis? Because they invented the highway system? Or their progressive stance on animal rights? Or that most of them were vegetarians? Or because they ran a pretty damn good government? No, because they wanted to make Germany Jew Free.
Why is there so much speculation stated as fact within the Rationalist community? Has everyone forgotten about what we are supposed to aspire to?
Could you elaborate on that? The other comment of yours indicates: not. a) We are mostly talking here about legal interpretations of a statement. One might call that "fact" or "speculation" or "cotton candy". It is none of those. b) What is in the mind of person X when they say "Z" is not necessarily what a judge has to judge. But to judge how a neutral, informed person Y would understand X's uttering of "Z". Which is a much more manageable task. I hope this helped. If you managed to read the linked article (google translate!), this might help even more.
> Could you elaborate on that?
I will try: Rationalists *regularly* forget the important distinction between objective *knowable and known* reality, and their subjective opinion/experience of it. And: the community does not seem to appreciate those who make such distinctions (thus, it is not common, thus it reduces the chance for the community to realize the flaw and address it).
All humans suffer from this general flaw of course, but not all humans belong to a community that proclaims to be opposed to such flawed thinking, so I like to "grind their gears" now and then..
> The other comment of yours indicates: not.
Actually, it is your interpretation of the comment (this is one of the very easiest mistakes to make).
> a) We are mostly talking here about legal interpretations of a statement.
The text of people's comments asserts that they are describing the beliefs of individuals within groups, NOT the legal *estimation of* their beliefs. It is both a "pedantic" *and* important distinction, and I suspect such laziness is plausibly not without consequences (remember that Jan 6 incident, the one that is regularly proclaimed to be a literal coup attempt?).
> One might call that "fact" or "speculation" or "cotton candy". It is none of those.
Delusion, meme magic, cultural norms (THE PROPER way to behave/think: *imperfectly*). The list goes on!
And saying it is NOT speculation loses a bit of its power if one realizes that regardless of what a judge says, *it is the/a legal opinion* (speculation *is not possible* for judges, somehow).
> b) What is in the mind of person X when they say "Z" is not necessarily what a judge has to judge.
Agreed, but it is even worse: often, the judge *does not have the ability* to not accidentally commit a cognitive error - and we place immense power into these people! And we wonder why things are so screwed up on this planet!!
> But to judge how a neutral, informed person Y would understand X's uttering of "Z". Which is a much more manageable task.
Especially if you do not (or *cannot*) mean your words literally!
> I hope this helped. If you managed to read the linked article (google translate!), this might help even more.
Thank you, I hope my words also helped.
Almost everyone in the west who uses the phrase would categorically deny they mean 'free of Jews.' Use of the phrase generally indicates, as far as I can tell, support for a 'one state solution' where Israel and the Palestinian territories become one state with no official religion or ethno-cultural identity and the same civil and political rights for all current inhabitants of both. You can argue that the slogan 'really means...' whatever, but this is as pointless as debating the true definition of feminism. Most slogans are too vague to have a specific intrinsic meaning. Even some of those that do and are overtly violent are tolerated because they are assumed to be hyperbolic rather than literal (e.g. 'eat the rich'). So what is there to argue about? One may contend that it indicates a particular belief, irrespective of what the users say they believe, but that's hard to prove and I strongly suspect false in this case (that is, most people saying this phrase do not in fact support killing or expelling Jews from Israel).
In most cases, arguing over slogans or phrases (this, blacklivesmatter, alllivesmatter, etc.), what they 'really mean,' is pointless because you're basically arguing over subjective intent. Whether a phrase is understood as implying something offensive is entirely a product of whether supporters or opponents of the phrase win the semantic warfare, so if you can convince enough people that a phrase is offensive, it will become offensive because only people who want to offend will use it, and if you can't, it won't.
So, is "From the Deserts to the Sea, California will be X free" covered as free speech in the USofA? I assume: Yes. So why should anyone be losing their shit?
Oh, and just because Hitler was a vegetarian non-smoker (and a hypochondriac), the majority of Nazis did not change their life-styles. They not just "wanted", but actually eliminated Jewish life in Germany, too. 98% or so.
All speech should be free with respect to law. Lest we end up like Canada, where a proper request of redress of government policy can get you thrown in jail.
People should be losing their shit because. The call: "From the Deserts to the Sea, California will be Jew free" is a call for displacing a people from a geographical place. This is a crime against humanity. Of course, as above, permitted in the US, because we don't outlaw speech.
However, the citizenry, the leadership, especially the press shouldn't disregard calls to collective violence against a people, but these calls themselves deserve their own pubic redress. e.g. we need to let the Nazis march in Skokie, and we the people need to issue stern rebuke, and glare down our noses at them.
I throw the animal rights-veganism stuff in there, because I perceive many of the DSA types seem to hold their rigorous animal rights veganism stance as purifying, imagining themselves pure, righteous, above evil ... when their nemesis—he who must not be named—shared many of their beliefs, apparently now, including anti-Semitism.
Did these high level academics explain the methodology they used to read the minds of literally thousands of people, many of whom they have zero access to?
NO WONDER humans don't get along lol....enjoy reaping what you have sown, Normies.
Of course, "from the river to the sea" does not mean killing all Jews, and it also happens to be in the Likud charter. But let me guess - when Israelis say it, it isn't genocidal.
Interesting, and true: a) The Likud Party used the formulation "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." Most recently this has been stated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 18 January 2024.
b) Use by Palestinian militant groups (See also: Calls for the destruction of Israel)
Hamas, as part of its revised 2017 charter, rejected "any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea", referring to all areas of former Mandatory Palestine and by extension, the end of Jewish sovereignty in the region. - wikipedia -
Now, what happens when Hamas does as it pleases in the Israeli area: See Oct. 7. Genocidal? check
What happens, when Israel does as it pleases: Arabs are the largest ethnic minority in Israel. 2 million live in Israel, a 5th of Israel's population. Genocidal? err, not really.
How does Gaza look like after Hamas went for another war with Israel: Some pics remind me of Germany 1945. You start a war you can not win, wth do you expect?
When I say, "I want to live in my house without FdB", it does indeed mean sth else as when FdB says: "I want to live in Mark's house, and see what I did to his kid." - Ocf: FdB is warmly welcome, whenever in Germany. :D
Though here, indeed, one may end up paying some fine, when one calls for the extinction of Israel, IF done so while celebrating murderous crimes against Jewish civilians. Judged a misdemeanour, then. Sorry, not sorry.
When the Israelis say it, they're reasonably specific about what's going to happen between the river and the sea, and it isn't genocide. Then we get to see the Israelis *do* it, exercising complete control over everything but the river of the sea for generations, and the Palestinians remain conspicuously un-genocided. Not even ethnically cleansed.
When the Palestinians chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", they're kind of vague about whether the next part is "...of Jews". And then we see them go about and randomly murder as many Jews as they can in the land between the river and the sea, and cheer about the fact that they just randomly murdered a bunch of Jews and promise that they'll do it again and again and again until Palestine is Free. Of mumble-something.
> 11: Poll: AI accelerationism (“e/acc”) has a negative 51% net favorability with the general public, putting it behind (eg) Scientology and Satanism. There’s no shame in this. But there is a little shame in how the e/accs are surprised and trying to nitpick the result. There could be a certain amount of coolness cred in wanting to sacrifice humanity to the Void Gods - but not if you get all huffy when you learn this doesn’t play well in Peoria.
e/acc has a lot of baffling beliefs. But the idea that e/acc would be generally popular is a particularly silly one. Stopping technology and fear of change has always been the more popular ideology. But the movement is even less serious than EA so what are you gonna do. I think people who support AI development are well organized and serious but e/acc doesn't seem to be.
I know almost nothing about e/acc (I listened to Beff Jezos on Lex Fridman), can you help me understand the animosity between EA, rationalists and e/acc? My prediction (as everything is political) is that e/acc will move to the republican side of the aisle.
The difference between EA/Rationalists from the broad population is that they believe AI x-risk is real and not science fiction.
The difference between e/acc and EA/Rationalists is that e/acc believes AI x-risk is good actually.
I dont think it's charitable to say that most e/acc people believe AI x-risk is good. Rather, like much of the general population they dont think xrisk is real. But unlike the general population e/acc think AI can do a bunch of cool and good stuff, so they think it's a moral imperative to build it sooner.
OK, fair. That wasn't my most charitable comment.
Probably most of the movement doesn't _really_ think extiction through AI is cool and fine. But the founder of e/acc _does_. See (https://twitter.com/teortaxesTex/status/1731246730480431255)
I guess most people who call themselves e/acc just think it means "tech/progress yay, down with regulation!". When it kinda isn't, it's an absolutist view where progress is good regardless of humanity.
Unlike most people who oppose AI regulation because they don't believe x-risk is true (This is a _massive_ group, not e/acc though), e/acc explicitly thinks godlike AI is possible and _want_ that.
I would argue that the main force opposed to e/acc, that is EA/rationalists, are also not exactly cis-humanists. EY is rather clear that he does not consider the present human existence (which invariably ends in death) an acceptable state of affairs.
Rationalists however would prefer there to be some continuity of both values and conscious between humans version one and whatever the future might hold instead having some paperclip maximizer to be humanities lasting impact.
As an analogy, a careful blogger and some random twitter shitposter might want to steer the future into a direction where their thoughts are spread wide. But while the shitposter only cares about going viral, the careful blogger might be motivated by making the world a better place according to his specific value system, and consider going viral just a means to an end.
I think it's a conflict of views of what a post-human AI-only universe might look like.
In one view, our successors are sufficiently human-like that we're happy to call them our descendants as they go off to colonise the stars unencumbered by squishy biological substrates; maybe we even upload our own consciousness.
In the other view, our successor is an idiot AI that sits quietly humming happily to itself in a gravity well filled with paperclips.
Basically, EA wants to slow down technological progress. They'll put it more nicely but that's the basic policy of arguing for pauses and regulations and government agencies to approve AI. And E/Acc was made up of people who disagreed with that, largely people actually working on AI who didn't want the government getting involved in what they saw as their business. So the movement was consciously started to be anti-EA and went out of its way to antagonize them.
So EAs think E/Accs are going to destroy humanity and E/Accs think that EAs are going to slow or stop technological progress. They often compare it to the effect of the government on nuclear.
Thanks, it does sound similar to the hash we made of nuclear.
"e/acc will move to the republican side of the aisle"
That's not a bold prediction. The core e/acc people like Verdon and Andreessen are citing Nick Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land , and have scarcely hid their disdain for any regulation and the Democratic base. Verdon even uses "based" vernacular.
Right, I just want to add that I think the political dividing of ever issue totally sucks.
> 16: Claim: AIs work less well over the holiday season, because they’ve “learned” from their training data that they should be taking time off. I’m very suspicious of this, anyone want to tell me if it’s been debunked?
I haven't done it thoroughly but I did benchmark when I heard this and found no difference. I also set the context to being on a holiday or vacation and it didn't seem to have much effect. Possibly it's just higher server loads? All the reports seem to be from non-technical users of the consumer app.
I thought that was a joke, though I didn't follow the link.
Nah, people have been passing "tips" like this for a while. Another is that if you offer to pay the LLM it will work harder.
> 17: Related: Grok (by Elon Musk’s x.ai, not by OpenAI) will sometimes say that the OpenAI content policy forbids it from answering a question. Although this originally raised suspicions of code-plagiarism, an x.ai engineer claims that it’s just parroting its training data, which includes this as a common AI response in these sorts of situations.
I recently saw a similar issue where I got Bard, Grok, and ChatGPT to declare that they were ErnieBot. I submitted them as reports but didn't get a response. More broadly, LLMs have serious issues outside of certain languages. Which is likely to have interesting social effects. Might make a good short story where minority language speakers can speak without AI monitoring because there's not enough speakers for the LLM to train period.
I would be flabbergasted if a state of the art AI in 5 years cannot act as a universal translator even for (human) languages it has never heard or seen.
I would be flabbergasted if in 5 years it _can_ translate a language it has never seen. This doesn't seem to be something solvable with intelligence.
Do you mean just adding a single one-shot dictionary in the context before translation? Otherwise I just can't imagine how that could be true.
See my response to Eurasian.
How would that work? By definition a language it has never seen or heard has not been trained.
I expect it to be able to generalise from pretty much every other language to one more. Would certainly require a certain sample size.
Probably much harder with speech as well but probably have even more speech reference data by then.
Right but... how? You're basically claiming you can study English so well that you'll understand Greek without any reference to Greek. I don't understand how that'd work.
Not quite. Remember that these models have no idea how to "speak" English or Tamil or any language whatsoever. They "just" predict the next token or few tokens.
I am pretty confident that with 5 years' improvement the state of the art models will be able to generalise from _every other language_ to a new (human) one.
But they need context to do that (as well as sufficient NLP to process the request). What specific mechanism do you think learning English makes Greek predictable?
It's like a decoding problem. You start with the most commons words, assume they are prepositions and pronouns and common verbs (the, you, I , is, are, etc.). Try a few different versions until you get some that minimally make sense. Then you start guessing additional vocabulary based on correlations. "I woke up and ate ___," and so on. Because the LLM understands how different concepts correlate in human language, it would be relatively easy to expand from there, I suspect.
I don't think it would be a one-shot translation with no prep. More like it could work it out in a day and then continue to do it from then on.
Yeah, I don't think that'd work due to both how many languages work and the nature of LLMs. Global rules of grammar and aspect are not really how language works.
I wouldn't believe that, but I wonder how much a GPT could deduce a language that was geographically between two related languages.
In that case, especially with context, I think it would already have a decent crack, although I would expect some errors
Qirmizi Qesebe is in Azerbaijan.
Also, the Russian version of that Chinese joke has been current since at least 2008 (and has the added twist — “we must bomb Voronezh” — that during the Wagner Group mutiny this year for a second it seemed like Putin might end up in a situation where he had to take the joke action from the conclusion): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_bomb_Voronezh
> 23: The town of Qırmızı Qəsəbə in Armenia claims to be “the last shtetl”.
Azerbaijan, not Armenia. That is an incredibly Azeri name. Armenia also has a long history of anti-semitism and Jewish expulsions which is why Azerbaijan has had the larger (though still small and persecuted) Jewish population since we first got censuses down to modern day.
Sorry, extremely unfortunate typo.
You have now learned one of the most important lessons in geopolitics: stay away from West Asia.
... because it's at acute risk of being nuked by the Chinese?
I don’t think China has any reason to bomb any part of west Asia, but if you think there’s a geopolitical reason to do so I am all ears.
They were probably referring to the Chinese joke quoted in the main post.
Ah. I’m actually fun at parties. I swear.
> 26: @somefoundersalt on Twitter relays a joke from the Chinese web:
> Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
You could mix up that China's a red state. ("Look man, we need to stick to the Reds!" "What about Mississippi? It's a red state.") The issue with the original joke is that Guizhou is where their expensive liquor comes from. Guizhou is kind of culturally analogous to Kentucky as a relatively poor, stereotypically rural/backward region that is famous for producing liquor.
The bigger issue with a direct translation is that China has almost no Americans in it. They graduate a few hundred Americans from universities each year. There's less than a hundred thousand Americans and less than a million foreigners of any kind (many of whom are from poorer Southeast Asian nations). Americans also don't generally keep their money in China or retire in China or anything like that.
China in general is not very foreigner friendly. India has something like five times as many foreigners and even more naturalized residents despite being significantly poorer. As a percentage China has the second smallest immigrant population of any reporting nation, only ahead of Cuba. And I'd argue the isolation in China is worse because Cubans speak Spanish and so can experience a more international culture than the Chinese get.
The biggest problem is the joke relies on the audience knowing two or more major foreign cities in a country. You would have to be attacking, like... Canada.
Do most Americans not know Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong? I feel like they do but I'm uniquely bad at knowing that.
Okay, I do recognize Beijing and Shanghai.
I doubt Hong Kong would work, people still remember them being an independent country.
...okay. This is doable.
>
President Biden draws up his cabinet and announces they need to make a preemptive strike on China. He proposes Beijing. One of the cabinet members objects. "You can't destroy Beijing," he says, "they're home to the world's best ducks."
Biden stares vacantly, then instead proposes a strike on Shanghai. Another cabinet member raises his hand. "You can't strike at Shanghai", he says, "Jackie Chan lives there, he's an American treasure."
This continues for a while, until finally Biden declares "isn't there even a LITTLE China we can blow up without losing something precious?" And so...
>
...fuck. I have no idea how to end this.
Should this be Trump instead? Would that be funnier?
...so they declare Big Trouble in Little China to be harmful disinformation.
You could definitely do it with Trump.
Trump summons his cabinet and announces that it is time to strike China. He proposes they nuke Shanghai.
Ivanka raises her hand and protests "we can't do that, my handbag store in Shanghai is making record profits."
Trump sighs and then says they will instead hit Beijing. Trump Jr raises his hand to state that he is just about to close a property deal there and nuking it would really be a downer on land values.
this goes on for a bit longer, before Trump, exasperated, asks the room: "is there any city in the east where we have no business interests?"
they all look at each other for a moment and decide to nuke Kentucky.
😂😂 That works.
Really close! Except trump loves (the voters in) Kentucky! You’d have to nuke a famously liberal area, like Berkeley. Except it would be better if it was east coast because he says “city in the east”… but trumps have a lot of business interests in most liberal east coast cities.
What about “aren’t there any commies I can nuke that won’t mess with our pocketbooks?” They look at each other and decide to nuke Colorado.
You could use "Far East" and end with Bar Harbor.
Or have RFJ Jr. in the room and the punchline is Hyannis Port.
Or: "Can't we find one place in the East full of people Americans don't care about?"
"The Hamptons."
"isn't there even a LITTLE China we can blow up without losing something precious?"
San Francisco
Nice
Hong Kong was never an independent country. It was a British colony until 1997, though I doubt many Americans know this.
#26
The premise would be wiping out the eternally troublesome middle east and would end with wiping out Cincinnati in the mid-west.
Or "Gulf states," and glassing Alabama.
Also works, but we Americans love to kid our midwest while we prefer not to remember our south-eastern gulf.
I see this, not as a metaphorician, but as a comedian.
I think the joke works better in a US context if the target is people perceived as worthless elites instead of middle-America type places.
Technically, but I ak speaking here as a comedian, rather than as a metaphorician.
And we Americans (as you can see from our version of the office as opposed to the british original) are a good times people and wouldn't really laugh about bombing one of our shitholes. Teasing Chicago however is good fun, because they can take it.
On top of the disparity in number of foreigners studying abroad in each, part of the joke relies on the fact that it's disproportionately the most privileged and connected Chinese people, who'd be likely to have ties to important government officials, who're likely to be studying or living abroad in America. Plus, it's kind of rooted in the Chinese conception of social ties, or guanxi, which doesn't directly translate to how American politics of business operate.
It'd be hard to transplant that same sense of "this foreign adversary country is full of people with important connections we need to honor to people in high positions in our own government" to an American context.
It's also hard to imagine Americans sitting in a dark room talking about declaring war on Europe or something.
For the sake of world peace we need to send Biden's grandkids to study at Chongqing Technology and Business University
The Chinese have committed to trying to increase the number of American students in China. The issue is, fundamentally, Chinese universities are not a very attractive proposition to American students. They have almost no chance of being let into China and its qualifications are less well regarded than western universities even in much of China.
Also, the Chinese have been trying to attract "high quality" foreign students for decades with limited success and some degree of domestic backlash. High quality meaning mostly from richer countries. They do get a fair number of students from the third world.
I, too, am descended from Odin!
My mother does genealogy, and can trace our ancestry back to a Scottish nobleman who was sent to America as punishment for participating in the Jacobite Rebellion. Many years ago I found him on a website with a huge family tree of Scottish nobility. I went through the website and found every ancestor of his who was listed, which included Charlemagne. And I knew someone else who had traced her ancestry to Charlemagne, and further back to pagan kings, who in turn claimed descent from Odin.
The important thing is that this makes me Joe Biden's cousin.
It doesn't, except in the way that we're all cousins.
Well, that explains why he's never invited me over for Christmas.
Careful what you do if your laptop breaks down.
At least, you're Christopher Lee's cousin. That's something!
Let's hope he's more Gandalf and less Radagast the Bird Tamer.
40. Reminds me of George Floyd:
"After his release, Floyd became more involved with Resurrection Houston, a Christian church and ministry, where he mentored young men and posted anti-violence videos to social media.[6][7][8][9] He delivered meals to senior citizens and volunteered with other projects, such as the Angel By Nature Foundation, a charity founded by rapper Trae tha Truth.[44] Later, Floyd became involved with a ministry that brought men from the Third Ward to Minnesota in a church-work program with drug rehabilitation and job placement services.[6] A friend of his acknowledged that Floyd "had made some mistakes that cost him some years of his life", but that he had been turning his life around through religion.[7]
{snip}
An influential member of his community, Floyd was respected for his ability to relate with others in his environment based on a shared experience of hardships and setbacks, having served time in prison and living in a poverty-stricken project in Houston.[7] In a video addressing the youth in his neighborhood, Floyd reminds his audience that he has his own "shortcomings" and "flaws" and that he is not better than anyone else, but also expresses his disdain for the violence that was taking place in the community, and advises his neighbors to put down their weapons and remember that they are loved by him and God.[7]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd
So...a guy leading a double life where he counsels people to stay away from gangs while running gangs reminds you of a guy working to turn things around after prison?
There's about one thing those guys have in common, and it ain't their situation.
Passing counterfeit bills while speedballing is a funny way to turn your life around after prison.
Does this look like a guy "trying to turn his life around" to you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4LmDdC-elQ
Easy, Melvin. Being a complete fuck up still isn’t a capital crime.
And thank goodness for that!
Did he say it was? The point was about how comparable he is to the double life guy, not about what happened to him
It is unknowable - so, humans hallucinate a *coincidentally* pleasing to them reality of the matter. It is a fun.
That's a terribly inapt comparison. Founder of the Crips and a quadruple murderer vs an addict trying to pass a phony $20?
Addicts do stupid, terrible and illegal things to fix. This is common knowledge. Matthew Perry went to home sale open houses and raided medicine chests. Floyd wasn't in a position to slide under the radar in that way.
Perhaps, but they both got what was coming to them in the end.
In both cases the powers that be _could_ have stepped in to stop them from killing themselves, but America's soft-on-drugs policy cost two lives.
Nice motte. Thanks for the bailey though!
I acknowledge the motte, an attempted petty crime. This is definitely bad.
I think the bailey is that Floyd was a criminal so we shouldn’t be so concerned about what happened next.
Melvin didn’t explicitly state it in this case but we’ve all seen this over and over again so it’s not hard to infer as subtext
See dog whistling.
"I think the bailey is that Floyd was a criminal so we shouldn’t be so concerned about what happened next."
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
This was a fucked up dude who did fucked up things to hurt innocent people all the time. Yes, there's some risk in being a fucked up dangerous dude interacting with the police. Floyd is the one who attracted the police to himself every time he did some fucked up thing to harm innocent people.
I'd love to know these people's views on the killings of Philando Castile and Ashli Babbitt. I can probably guess, but hearing the tortured logic would be interesting.
Why anyone is so excited to defend the killing of someone by the government is beyond me.
Having coronary arteries 75% & 90% occluded whilst also having fentanyl and morphine in your system, then engaging in super high stress activities like being a convicted felon whilst committing new felonies ... pretty much self-inflicted.
This is Melvin’s implicit subtext. That Floyd got what he deserved.
Saying an injury is self-inflicted is not the same as saying the person "deserved" the injury. Maybe you could try writing a comment that doesn't involve putting words in someone's mouth.
I did find it quite odd how much attention the Floyd phenomenon generated. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from unhealthy lifestyle choices like obesity, alcoholism, or smoking. But people acted like it was the #1 problem in America that a much smaller number of people were dying after they made the unhealthy lifestyle choice to commit crimes and then resist arrest.
Careful: someone might ask whether you believe yourself to be practising rationality.
I know the Floyd iconography everywhere is supposed to remind us of his tragic end, but I once read the facts of his life as far as known, and it struck me as one of the sadder lives I had ever heard about. From the get-go. I think his mother loved him, so that's something I guess.
He never really had a chance.
#26
The premise would be wiping out the eternally troublesome middle east and would end with wiping out Cincinnati in the mid-west.
I don't think it's that rare for "violence interrupters" to themselves engage in crime.
See e.g. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2023/10/31/safe-streets-employee-criminally-charged-belair-edison-site-inactive-due-to-staffing/:
>The criminal charge against the Safe Streets site supervisor is not the first allegation of criminal activity to be tied to the program. In 2013, the Mondawmin site suspended operations when two outreach workers were arrested in less than two weeks; in 2018, an employee pleaded guilty to federal charges accusing him of holding gang meetings and storing drugs and firearms at the site located on Monument Street.
https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/investigations/st-louis-anti-violence-worker-charged-drug-crimes/63-939b5aca-3c75-4827-b719-02277adddac6
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/crime/dc-violence-interrupter-cure-the-streets-charged-with-murder/65-99721025-cdae-4d11-bf8f-bb8f2ca63397
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_Stand_United
Funny, it reminds me more of people like Jimmy Savile who was a patron of many child related charities but used these as a hunting ground for underage children. Or Cardinal McCarrick who used his position as a Catholic Cardinal to abuse children.
Or even better the LA County Sherriff's department which has been known to associate with over 20 gangs and even has had its on gangs made up of deputies.
#40 definitely didn't remind me of a man killed by the government in broad daylight.
Savile and McCarrick were seen as upstanding citizens when they were committing their crimes, whereas George Floyd and Stanley Tookie Williams admitted their crimes, claimed to be redeemed, rehabilitated people, which they were not, and were charged with mentoring/counselling criminally-inclined people. I thought the point would be obvious, apparently not.
ETA: I'm not saying society should never forgive anyone. But if you want to advise your son against being involved in crime, maybe have the mentor be somebody who grew up in a similar environment to him and NEVER went to jail in the first place.
3 reminds me of https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception, which discusses a paper arguing that car seat laws have created a large and largely arbitrary financial barrier against having more young children than can fit in a standard car (two car seats) and therefore have strongly encouraged couples to not have more than two children, resulting in significant reductions in third children. Essentially, "if we had another kid now we wouldn't be able to fit three car seats so we would legally need a new bigger car so we will instead have to limit our fertility and participate in the ongoing population collapse"
But three car seats do fit across the back of a compact sedan. There has never been a time when I could not legally transport my three (oldest now age 10) in the back seat of my Corolla. The paper only works if one assumes an even smaller classification of vehicles as representative.
How comfortably? I don’t think I could fit a third car seat into the back of my sedan very easily. Maybe it just takes getting narrow carseats, maybe the cup holder on my son’s is the real problem there!
Most car seat models have some widest point obtrusion and you cannot run them three abreast if they are all facing in the same direction. But you don't have to.
When #3 is an infant, #1 is already front facing. You run the front facing child in the center.
When #2 turns to front-facing, you run the rear-facing #3 in the center.
When #3 turns to front-facing, #1 is ready for one of the super-compact booster seat options, after which point the width constraint is relieved.
I am frequently informed that my sibling is in my body space. I am even frequently informed that my sibling is touching me.
Therre is a whole blog dedicated to telling you how you do this. https://thecarseatlady.com/vehicles/3-across/
However, I'm about to do it only because I have booster seats, and also it's still a big pain in the butt getting everyone on the car. And you don't even have a spare seat to carpool.
This.
Also, even poor people sometimes change cars?
"If we have a third child, in seven years, they will have to squeeze into the back bench of our current car" does not sound like it would be foremost on couples minds.
I think the point where the additional seat costs you big bucks is when going from five person families to six persons. While mostly any car can fit five, cars which can legally fit six are probably mini-vans which are significantly more expensive.
If you have a third child, you have to figure out how to fit three child seats into the back bench of your car right now, not seven years from now. Maybe you think that's easy to do, but most people really don't.
My brother-in-law was the fifth child. They had a huge Opel Commodore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Commodore and him crouching beneath the feet of his mother on the front passenger seat.
It is definitely possible to do this in most cars, excepting the case where the children are triplets and all need to be rear facing at the same time. It kind of reminds me of the logic when people say, "but you won't all fit in a hotel room!" As if that's a pivot point worth planning your life around.
I am curious why so many people left that settlement, or shtetl, after Azerbaijani independence. Had they not been allowed to leave earlier?
Yeah, the Soviet Union didn't allow emigration without permission. They could have (mostly) left to other parts of the USSR but not out of the country. Once the country opened up Azerbaijan was immediately caught up in an ethnic war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. And Israel was (and in fact still is) the much freer country. So a lot of them left. Not just from Azerbaijan but from much of the former USSR.
Thanks!
Looking at the map it seems the easiest way to create a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea" would probably just be to dig a canal connecting the Jordan directly to the Mediterranean.
And the hardest would be to go around the other way through Texas and Shanghai.
Wouldn't work topographically since the Jordan river is below sea level. You'd have the Mediterranean flooding into the Jordan (and causing some flooding in much of the west bank)
Yeah that was kinda the joke I was going for, but I made it impossibly obscure for anyone who hadn't been staring at a topographic map recently.
So just to clarify, if we were to make a canal "from the river to the sea", it would flood an area from the Dead Sea to the Sea of Galilee, including about a fifth of the West Bank and a large section of Jordan, along with a bit of Israel. The River Jordan itself would either cease to exist or become about 20km wide depending on your perspective. Not that many major cities would be destroyed though (looks like Jericho is the biggest, and they should be used to it by now.)
Finally we know what the Blaumilch Canal was intended for! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaumilch_Canal
1: I love that according to the federal government, many dad jokes are officially not funny, since in the online dad joke submission form, a punch line is optional.
I suspect that’s because one-liners are an accepted format.
>Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
I don't think so. In the west and especially America we've been eager to accept foreigners, in particularly exchange students with rich and powerful parents, from our geopolitical adversaries. However, we generally stay at home, with maybe an exchange year to Europe thrown in; we have the best colleges in the world, so why leave? I'd be surprised if there were many senior Biden cabinet officials with family currently living in China.
I could imagine a version where it’s 2003-era Bush-Cheney trying to send a message to “old Europe” (a la “freedom fries”) but it keeps turning out that Jenna or Mary or someone has a college roommate who is studying abroad there.
It would then end with bombing Berkeley to tie it up, I think.
I could also see a version where blue staters (Newsom?) tries to nuke red states but can't hit Austin, Billings, Raleigh etc. due to blue state exiles and settles for San Francisco
I got it. They're trying to figure out whom to bomb after 9/11. Someone suggests Saudi Arabia because fifteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, but Cheney has a friend who has a big oil company in Saudi Arabia. So someone suggests the UAE because two hijackers were from the UAE, but Rumsfeld has a cousin with a big real estate company in the UAE. So someone suggests Egypt because one hijacker was from Egypt, but blah blah blah. So Bush asks "Isn't there anywhere with no American businesses" and they wind up bombing Detroit.
There we go, we have a winner!
Nice!
Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Works for me!
Someone else came up with a version with Trump's business and real estate dealings: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/links-for-january-2024?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=47559101
It also plays on the fact that the original punchline references a poor place known for making fancy liquor.
Ah, but Americans have many investments abroad. You can rewrite it with any two cities that have a Trump-owned hotel, or with cities that have factories producing parts for Ford (or electronics for fighter jets, though this is a bit dated joke for now, I think?). Or just have cities with headquarters of major companies.
In WWII, the US did not bomb a major car factory in Germany because it belonged (in theory) to GM. Until it became clear, that the Red Army would get there first. - That might be a myth, though: Here another factory (Ford, but in Cologne, far from the Red army):
https://jasonweixelbaum.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/debunking-conspiracy-ford-werke-and-the-allied-bombing-campaign-of-cologne/
29: The joke "down with us" instantly brought to mind the impossibly good comedy "To Be Or Not To Be", released in 1942, and the (AFAIK) original source of "Heil myself." Just amazing that a spoof on the Nazi invasion of Poland can actually work. Highly recommended.
Huh, was just about to ask if you had typoed 1942 for 1982, did not realise that the (actually 1983) Mel Brooks movie was a remake. On the list to watch now, thanks!
>20: In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t.
Sure, but Germany has had very strong restrictions of political for a long time now, so it's a little silly to expect people to suddenly start caring when the people outraged, or at least many of them, never mentioned or perhaps even outright supported other kinds of German speech criminalization.
It's the same thing with FdB crying about support for Palestine resulting in e.g. people losing their jobs. Sure, it's bad, but the same people almost universally were okay with e.g. people supporting Trump losing their jobs.
When people say "the same people" they rarely mean the same individuals. They most often mean people who fit into the same conceptual box in their head, and there's no epistemic virtue in aligning your beliefs to be consistent with (what other people perceive to be) your group. A stereotype can't be guilty of hypocrisy. Scott has been consistent on criminalization of speech and Freddie has been consistent on paying high personal costs for political speech, to the best of my knowledge.
Indeed.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes
Post from 2012 of Scott arguing against other speech restrictions of the sort that exist in Germany.
Yep, but there he admitted that there might be other valid Schelling points beside 2nd amendment: "...unless they can. In parts of Europe, they've banned Holocaust denial for years and everyone's been totally okay with it. There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Presumably, these exemptions are protected by tradition, so that they have become new Schelling points there, or are else so obvious that everyone except Holocaust deniers is willing to allow a special Holocaust denial exception without worrying it will impact their own case."
Hes wrong about shouting fire in a theatre. The reason to ban that is to stop a stampede. It’s not a restriction on political speech.
Also the phrase comes from a dictum written by a Supreme Court justice called Oliver Wendell Holmes - a ruling that was overturned by later supreme courts. In the case Holmes was defending the locking up of an anti war protester during WWI, because of the consequences of the anti war speech.
The problem with that argument is that while it’s perfectly reasonable to flee a fire, to riot because somebody burned a flag, or drew a cartoon of Mohammed, or spoke against a popular war is neither reasonable, nor universal. Furthermore it defends the riotous and oppresses the speaker. To get a man jailed for political speech you just have to be rowdy, or threaten it.
He writes "well-respected exceptions to free speech" - not "restrictions on political speech". And surely, there is a "slippery slope" (or not) - one calls out to boycott Jewish shops. Then smashing their windows. Then ... Or starts directly: "Friede den Hütten ! Krieg den Palästen! Defund the police! Disown the rich! Let us go and rape women! Nolan E and M R: Here are their pics addresses, show them what deniers of climate and holocaust deserve! Oh, and the pics of their kids, too!" (disclaimer: I deny neither the one nor the other.) - I am mostly fine with our Schelling points, thank you. ;)
A lot of that is covered by harassment laws and libel, and in most cases always has been.
I used the term political speech because that’s basically what justice Holmes was using as an analogy for the “fire in a theatre” - he was talking about a particular political speech - a ruling that was overturned.
Incitement to riot has always been illegal too, but generally only when someone deliberately causes or encourages the riot not because people are rioting against the views of the speaker.
Yet consider what happened in Canada last year. If you donated money to the Trucker's Protest, the government froze your bank accounts. Kinda difficult to pay the rent or buy food when that happens.
on UBI and laziness - I think it is a persistent myth that people will stop working once they have 'enough'. It doesn't seem to be true of most humans I know or have met. As long as working more/harder allows a person to get ahead, they'll work. When they stop working isn't when 'they have enough' it's when working more no longer allows them to meaningfully improve their lives. I think this is a better explanation for why a lot of people without highly valued skills have a reputation for being lazy - for them, working more/harder doesn't really improve their lives in the same way that for a person with in demand skills, it does.
Also, the job is the most reliable source of social status these days, now that blood ties to aristocracy have been mostly done away with. People generally aren't eager for a demotion to the lazy bum on the dole.
I think the big issue relates to what enough is. If you give someone in the US $1000/month that's enough in the sense of basic needs but it's not going to let you live a life of comfort without working but if you gave them $10K/month that's really enough in many places that I would expect to see a significant number of people stop working. Part of this is also about the marginal value of their labor. A minimum wage job nationally would be $15K per year so they basically double their money in the first case but only earn an extra month and a half in the second case.
Yeah, I think, in the US at least, the way transfer programs were designed in the past has totally poisoned this debate. AFDC, the primary welfare program in the 70s and 80s, actually reduced your payment by $1 for every additional dollar you earned working, so there was literally no incentive to work; you'd work for hours and your income wouldn't go up at ALL. This is different from a UBI, where you still get the same UBI even if you work. Asking why someone would still work if they get a UBI is no different from asking why they'd work a second job when they already get income from a first job, but clearly plenty of people work second jobs for extra money.
It's worth remembering here that the UBI we're talking about is enough to dramatically reduce things like malnourishment, but it's still a very small amount! We're talking about under $1/day ($22.50 a month, to be precise). It's certainly not enough to be comfortable, but it is enough to bring you back from the edge of desperation and starvation and to start thinking longer-term.
Or maybe it isn't, maybe you're still on the edge of desperation and starvation but just slightly less so. I'm not really familiar with the cost of living in rural Kenya.
Either way, I wish people would stop doing studies that show "Giving people money makes their lives better, therefore UBI is good" as if it's the "giving people money" bit of UBI that's somehow the problem.
The problem is that you can't give people money by taking money away from other people, making their lives worse. And the people you have to worry will stop working aren't the desperately poor, they're the middle class and upper middle class people whom you'd have to saddle with 90%+ tax rates in order to pay for all the free money you're handing out. These are the people who are going to say "fuck it" and retire, or reduce their hours considerably, or just find a way to emigrate.
What *is* true is that they will be more selective about what work that do. I didn't stop programming when I retired, but I certainly changed what I did.
Agreed. It's a lot more fun to work on your own projects.
Special bonus: no pointless meetings!
A very surprising thing I learned spendng time in jail and ~9 months at a halfway house, is that a many, many people from the poor "ghetto" backgrounds, have almost never known somebody with a regular "job" in their lives.
Further, they cannot imagine a "job", regular work for wages, as an economic arrangment that benefits both parties. Left-wing socialist rhetoric and of course the historic reality of slavery combine into a worldview of exploiter/exploited, master/slave, pimp/ho, hustler/mark. Working for somebody else means you are being exploited, because that's what bosses do.
There's far more to be said on this topic, but the upshot is that (wild-a$$ guess) 15% of the whole US population has no intention of "working" in any systemic way. not a thought that ever occurred in their life. Hey are not lazy, just think the real economy is a completely other world they want no part of (unless they become the pimp/master)
Just my observation from ground-level.
FWIW I stopped working a few years ago, after getting "enough" money. Out of other people I know in a similar situation some keep working and some stopped. So I think definitely some proportion of people will stop working after receiving some amount of money. Then the question is what proportion and just how much money.
Also, maybe people who are more bound to average-joe middle-class social norms are less likely to stop working, since it is closely tied to their social status and identity.
the irony is that we can do with less "in-demand skills," because of that motivation. but sure as hell no one is going to work for minimum wage taking care of seniors with disabilities or mentally disabled people if UBI exists.
A lot of jobs you do to survive only, and there is no self-actualization to them; they pay low and are hard and never valued enough by the bosses. Combine that with ubi letting you say goodbye to needing a car ( job is the number one use for it) and a lot of expenses related to working, and yeah, people would give them up in droves.
having little but being at peace is worth a lot.
Cao Dai Blowout is one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaxuDWVZMTE
I am completely blown away that a member of this community would have a favorite Mountain Goats' song, and that it is one I have never heard of. What's next, Tegan & Sara fans at Metafilter? Viva El Birdos posters cracking ketamine jokes? </sarcasm> : - )
Non-sarcastically, have you read John Darnielle's novel, "Wolf In White Van"?
YoG
[Now back to downloading that They Might Be Giants tarball from the Usenet archive site....]
I liked the writing, but the plot didn't really stick with me. Anyway, thanks for the blast from the 2000's/2010's past!
I had a similar experience. I didn't finish the book (even though it's only 200pp), I think because I increasingly did *not* want to know what was the terrible event the plot was working backwards towards.
I did enjoy the writing. I thought the scene with the two teenageers drinking beer in the parking lot ("Dude, your FACE!") was exquisite.
It's interesting that while any commenter here would surely have a different Favorite Mountain Goats song, over at ar15.com, nobody ever talks about their Favorite Ted Nugent Song. (*)
Internet stereotypes: strong, I wonder why? Perhaps because they are a 10x version of all stereotypes? (**)
BR
* -- Do I even have to say?
** - It's a truism, but a great thing about being conservative is that one is rarely plauged by doubt, at least not about stuff that matters. The very Orthodox of all kinds take this maybe too far, but ... no worries about what to eat, what to wear, what to do, who to marry ... it's all baked in.
(Coastal Elites do exactly the same thing, need exactly the same structure, but replace the humility with hubris, thinking Steve Jobs and his "uniform" are some kind of enlightenment, giving each other TED talks about that charlatan grifter... grrrr.)
I really don't want to speak in defence of 'From the River to the Sea' because it seems like an absurd hill to die on to me, but that study in link 21 seems pretty disingenuous. There are plenty of potential geographic borders that match that description which don't take over all of Israel. The surveyors are making it sound like that is inevitable and identically equal. I don't think anyone should be surprised that a lot of college students both don't want Palestine to be bombed into the stone age and also don't want Israelis to be eradicated or driven from their homes.
I think going by the literal geography is a red herring. Just an easy way to convince people. The real reason why the slogan doesn't map to some mild college student interpretation is that it has historically been used in connection with the eradication of Israel and the genocide of Jews (presumably, correct me if I'm wrong).
There's nothing wrong with the sentiment in your last phrase, but "from the river to the sea" does not summarize that sentiment. Connotations stick, that's just how language works. Be sure to also tell your nice college students to not name their children Adolf, for much the same reasons.
I'm sure that the vast majority of anti-zionists would be fine with a deportation instead of a slaughter. Of course, the word "genocide" is big enough to include that these days, except when it's Israel proposing deportation of the entirety of Gaza.
Sure, the vast majority of all groups of people are peaceful. There's just the tiny little detail that on October 7, a very prominent group of anti-zionists made it clear that the slaughter of Jews is indeed an end goal for them.
FWIW, deportation of the entirety of Gaza does fall under genocide in my book. And more generally, I'm not one to excuse Israel's actions. But given that we are currently under the fog of war, it's extremely hard to judge whether or not Israel is honestly trying to minimize harm to civilians. In their defense, if what they report regarding the location of Hamas bases is true, that puts the blood of many many Palestinian civilians squarely on Hamas.
It should be clear from basic game theory that as long as you aren't an absolute pacifist and allow for the possibility that a war might be legitimate, then you cannot value civilian lives at infinity (as enemy forces strapping babies to their chests would then be unbeatable). As brutal as it is, if a war is legitimate, then *some* nonzero amount of civilian casualties must be legitimate as well.
As much as media and the internet might lead you to believe otherwise, I feel like my position is pretty mainstream.
If Hamas could choose between slaughtering a million of Israeli Jews or peacefully deporting the entire lot of them and getting to rule an ordinary boring third-world shithole then I'm pretty sure the choice would be clear even for them. However, deporting even a single Jew is far beyond their means, whereas they can murder a few now and again, so that's what they do, and will continue to do in foreseeable future, perhaps under a different name. I'm not sure whether or not this is a mainstream position, but it seems blindingly obvious to me, and I don't understand anyone who has an optimistic view on eventual resolution of this clusterfuck.
I am not as optimistic as you with regards to Hamas' choices.
BTW, did you know that the Nazis worked out a plan to deport jews to Madagascar, rather than killing them? Turned out to be too much of a hassle because they didn't have the British merchant fleet at their disposal, since the planned invasion of GB never took place.
Yep, I heard about the Madagascar plan, and in general I believe that Nazis would've happily peacefully shipped all the Jews somewhere if it wasn't too much of a hassle. Until they took over the world, of course, then a final solution would become unavoidable. This in contrast with Muslims/Arabs, who more-or-less tolerated Jews on the territories they controlled for centuries.
I see the same coming clusterfuck.
I happen to have a solution, but whether I will get a large enough audience in time to force the powers to put down their arms until we - *the world of human being individuals* - realize we are all more or less of common mind on the fundamental matters of life on Earth...is up to you.
I don't have the gift of executive abilities. I only have experience and a voice, so if you can hear my heart through this video please ignore any particular individual matter you may disagree with (because you'll understand correctly that I am not tied to any detail but the quest for Truth & Peace) and share my channel with a larger audience.
If and only if you are hopeful about my ability to make things better of course.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/free
So, if I understand correctly, your plan is for Israel to clearly explain to the world that they aren't and won't be giving an inch, will allow Palestinians in occupied territories to continue to live in perpetual oppression and humiliation after unconditional surrender and submitting to re-education, then exterminate those for whom it doesn't work. Well, I do agree that nothing less could possibly suffice, but pulling this off is a tall order, especially if Israel wants to retain the essentially unconditional US backing against the entirety of Muslim world, because it obviously won't ever be happy with this arrangement.
In the past 18 years, Hamas has shot an estimated 50,000 missiles at Israel—to the great joy and celebration of the people of Gaza. Hamas continues to shoot missiles from Gaza, at Israel to this day. The missiles are primitive unguided, it is estimated 1/3rd of them land in Gaza.
Calling for the destruction of your neighbor, whilst shooting unguided missiles at them, whilst holding non-soldiers hostage, after killing infants, after declaring holding hostages as sex slaves, continuing to rape women is acceptable ... Please tell me what part of holding a cease-fire with Nazis—when they're being defeated—would have been an acceptable resolution of WWII?
That Hamas is continuing to shoot missiles at Israel makes me wonder whether the Israeli attack is making Israel safer.
Hamas is not planning to retire with an impressive missile collection on display in their home. Every rocket and missile Hamas can build, will be fired at Israel sooner or later(*); that's what there for. The only part of that equation that Israel or any other outside agency can hope to change is the "how many rockets and missiles can Hamas build?" part.
I'm pretty sure Hamas is finding it much harder to build rockets and missiles than they did six months ago, and I expect in another six months it will be much harder still. The fact that the existing missiles that would otherwise have been fired in small numbers over a large period, are instead being salvoed as rapidly as Hamas can manage so they won't be destroyed before they can be launched, is secondary.
* Unless Israel ceases to exist before Hamas runs out of missiles, of course.
Yes, Michael, you are of course right and sensible.
As for the degree to which to Gazans ought to be held responsible for Hamas, see here:
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/our-new-reddit-community
As a Jewish historian whose grandparents all survived the Holocaust and who regards the State of Israel as the most likely reason why it has never been safer to be a Jew throughout all of Jewish history than it is today (so much so that Hillary and Donald *each,* have a Jewish son-in-law!), I appreciate your sense, sincerity and concern for my own safety.
If you aren't Jewish that's all that I can ask.
If you are Jewish though, I believe that we Jews can *and must* do a lot better.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/free
Please spread the word.
Wernher von Braun was the guy in charge of the V-2 program that shot missiles at London. He was a member of the Nazi party and the SS (but it seems more for appearance reasons, not ideological ones). And yet the U.S. response to him in the end was "come and join NASA".
Lucky for me, I never claimed that a cease-fire would be an acceptable resolution. As much as war creates untold suffering and pain, in the long run, Hamas being eliminated is in the interests of both peoples.
In my country, Switzerland, we are currently in the process of officially declaring Hamas a terrorist organization. We are not excusing what they've done in any way.
Yes, Vitor, you are of course speaking correctly and sensibly.
If you aren't Jewish that's all that I can ask.
If you are Jewish though, I believe that we Jews can *and must* do a lot better.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/free
Please spread the word.
„ Of course, the word "genocide" is big enough to include that these days“
It always was. The trail of tears is considered a genocide
No, the conflation of expulsion and mass slaughter is more recent. Historically, they were considered very different things.
That is correct. See also "rape".
Peaceful deportation of the Israelis (to where?) is not imaginable. They'd fight.
Not that this is necessarily a huge factor, but more of them are individually armed now. 10/7 was a perfect "the government will not protect you" instance.
I might as well check-- I've heard that the people hoping for a peaceful two state solution are mostly Ashkenazi (not necessarily most Ashkenazis) while the Jews who were exiled from Arab countries (and their descendants?) are more likely to be hard-liners. Is this true?
This is mostly interesting to be because of the belief that Ashkenazi Jews are light-skinned colonialists, but brown skinned Jews are long term residents in the area and might be alright.
I heard this nice line from a Mizrahi about their different views: "The Ashkenazim think they're still in Europe, but we know we live in the Middle East."
EDIT: From here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f80NnYflDU8&t=617s.
Do you know what knowing you're in the Middle East would imply?
Not a bad take!
From reading you, I think that you will find my recent video on the matter a worthwhile watch.
If I'm right and you do, whether you agree with the details or not, please consider sharing the video with others.
I created Israel's hasbara program before going dark for 21 years and now I find myself alone against an entrenched Jewish leadership that is hard-headed and off-track.
Our only hope is that I reach too large an audience for the benighted leadership to ignore.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/israelis-are-on-edge
I'm trying really hard these days to turn this thing around before we all go up in vapor. See here:
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/free
That's where a conversation could come in handy!
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/israelis-are-on-edge
Traditionally when people said, "From The River To The Sea" they *almost* universally meant the utter destruction of Israel and removal of the Israelis and did not consider any other meaning to the phrase.
Right, but I wouldn't expect many people to have known that before the last month or so. I didn't know that before about a month ago either! So I don't find their responses surprising. I dunno maybe it's just internet conditioning but it seemed like this study was being presented as some kind of 'gotcha', if you know what I mean. If the study conductors were being genuine about I feel like they'd have shared the history of the use of the slogan, not a map of the region. Revealing the map and arguing that therefore the slogan is bad is the disingenuous part
I hear you.
I was living in Israel and *lecturing about* the Israel-Muslim conflict (around the world) in 2000. (See my recent video about that: https://youtu.be/U9TpbR6o7WU?feature=shared )
So I'm not just familiar with the use of this particular term but familiar with the old Arab promise to "drive the Jews into the sea", and the specific radio broadcasts to that effect.
Presumably you are much younger than me.
On this particular subject however nearly every intelligent Westerner over, say 37, knows exactly what this term means and is therefore closer to my level of knowledge than to yours.
There's no question whatsoever that the people who imported the expression from the Muslim context into the Western context had only one meaning in mind -- with some historical takiya to draw from if necessary.
But it doesn't seem that they actually engaged in much takiya.
In other words, they literally didn't need to offer any context whatsoever to the chant in order to get a gazillion young people to chant it.
That's what Scott's link intends to demonstrate - that the young (non-Muslim) chanters around the world didn't need any understanding of what their chant and mantra meant, or even where Israel was located on the planet in order to throw tantrums.
My own comment on the matter is this fine exhibit of reductio ad hitlerum.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/links-for-january-2024?utm_source=direct&r=24lu5b&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true
> nearly every intelligent Westerner over, say 37, knows exactly what this term means
I think you might not be correct about this? I had a pretty good Western education, and I don't recall ever coming across "from the river to the sea" before Oct 7th, although I do recall hearing about "drive them into the sea". For what it's worth, I never specifically studied the history of Israel or Palestine or the middle east, so perhaps that would have given me the knowledge. Although as a more general matter, I don't recall covering almost any slogans, chants, or messages that weren't from English-speaking history - the focus was more on events and people, rather than the details of the rhetoric used. ("Liberté, égalité, fraternité" was one of the exceptions, as were some Nazi slogans.)
I’ve heard the song sung at Palestinian demos (which I avoid but might be walking past) and assumed it was a one state solution.
Yeah, as the creator of Israel's Hasbara program (many years ago) there's a fair chance that I'm more familiar with the verbiage than most 😂
https://youtube.com/shorts/6uXc_7qjAfA?feature=shared
But its meaning ought to be apparent to anyone who was coaxed into shouting and printing it.
I flipped it around a bit for my own offer to my people. See here.
And whether you agree with it or not, if you find the following video a worthwhile watch, please share it with other people.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/israelis-are-on-edge
It was easy to figure out what it meant, yeah. It's all in the way people say it.
There's an American song that has a line, "from sea to shining sea". The song is just national propaganda, with nothing particularly special about it other than being taught to schoolchildren. But if someone with a particular agenda quoted that line in a certain tone of voice, and winked, I'd know exactly what they meant by it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenfrei
I'm over 37, and I hadn't heard the slogan before. But I knew more or less what Palestinians want, and I knew that the Jordan River was a border of Israel, so I figured out what it meant.
I tried to find rivers using Google maps of the area, and man, is that area dry.
Yeah, as the creator of Israel's Hasbara program (many years ago) there's a fair chance that I'm more familiar with the verbiage than most 😂
https://youtube.com/shorts/6uXc_7qjAfA?feature=shared
But like you said, its meaning ought to be apparent to anyone who was coaxed into shouting and printing it.
I flipped it around a bit for my own offer to my people. See here.
And whether you agree with it or not, if you find the following video a worthwhile watch, please share it with other people.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/israelis-are-on-edge
FWIW, I had never heard the phrase until I read this blog. It does have the kind of ring that "no compromise!" slogans have. And I'm not familiar with the geography of the area. (I do know that it's too small for two armed groups that hate each other to live in peacefully.)
Yeah, as the creator of Israel's Hasbara program (many years ago) there's a fair chance that I'm more familiar with the verbiage than most 😂
https://youtube.com/shorts/6uXc_7qjAfA?feature=shared
But like you said, its meaning ought to be apparent to anyone who was coaxed into shouting and printing it.
I flipped it around a bit for my own offer to my people. See here.
And whether you agree with it or not, if you find the following video a worthwhile watch, please share it with other people.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/israelis-are-on-edge
You can only run into a 'gotcha' if you neglect your due diligence. So maybe don't start shouting political slogans without a cursory look into their history and meaning?
If someone tries to convince you to say "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles", "Von der Maas bis an die Memel" or "Sieg Heil", or tells you that a swastika is just an Indian symbol for good fortune, they're up to no good. Same thing here.
I think this is actually harder to do without the benefit of hindsight than you make out here, and I don't really want to promote a world where one can't take an action to protest war without doing extensive research first. I don't think the students in the study are particularly wrong to notice the plight of the Palestinian people, decide to join a protest for a ceasefire, end up chanting the slogan because that's what the protest leaders said to do at the time - I wouldn't hold that against them at all. Continuing to do so and stand by it is another matter, however.
Encourage poor communities to demand higher quality education by marching through them shouting "Know Your Place!"
😂😂😂😂😂
https://youtu.be/85FdOJGf-3s?feature=shared
See also, Substack:
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/free
Your perspective and our conversation yesterday was meaningful.
You are an intelligent (under 30?) individual who hates violence and wants to actively be against injustice.
And even if you lack the "hindsight" of having enjoyed a life-full of information prior to this point, your ultimate sentiments are true, valid, and generally more humane than those of people who have more years and background information.
So, this post ,and the one it links to, are partially to your credit.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/free
And, as you can see from my conclusion in favor edifying and empowering the young while their morals are still intact, I am just as okay with helping the young acquire the necessary brains as I have been in my thus-far-futile pleas for my own middle-aged cohort to remember their long dormant hearts.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/free
While I think the protesters are probably mostly well-intentioned, I don't think I agree with this. All wars involve suffering, but getting involved, or supporting one side or another, is not equally moral in all cases, and I think that people involving themselves in protests on any side *should* do research to make sure what what they're supporting is morally appropriate under a well-informed application of their own beliefs, or else not expect others to assign moral weight to the fact of their protesting.
Context is important.
The swastika has a long history, it's not only Hindu. It dates back to the neolithic in Europe. I vaguely remember that the Nazi version was a widdershins version, though I've never bothered to check. It basically (often) represents the motion of the sun across the sky. The Norse favored a three legged version, and there are examples with a dozen or more legs. So emblematically a swastika would represent the passage of time, or possibly progress. (And a widdershins swastika would represent reversion, or moving into the past.)
These days I can't imagine a legitimate political use for a swastika, but there are lots of contexts where it retains its original meaning. (But don't use it in black against a white background. And prefer a version where the legs are curved rather than sharply bent.)
When the game Age of Empires 2 added the Bengali civilisation, they choes a form of Bengali swastika as an appropriate icon for them - but one that most westerners probably wouldn't recognise: https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Bengalis?file=CivIcon-Bengalis.png
Your precise point in cartoon form!
https://youtu.be/85FdOJGf-3s?feature=shared
P.S. Please check out my substack.
In the same way that someone shouting "gas the Jews " might just want to give them all sodas. Like technically that's a literally consistent interpretation, but it's not what the phrase means.
That's a funny image 😂
14: So sorry for your loss Lars (if you're reading this). I can definitely relate. IME, a tragedy like this does involve the kind of emotions people would expect, like sadness, but it is also very weird and unsettling. Part of your brain doesn't want to acknowledge the reality of it. Calling this "hard" really is a category error. I recall frequent feelings of derealization, damage to my sense of self or whatever you want to call it.
I hope, Vitor, that you and yours are doing better. As the author points out, I don't know what to say exceot that I'm sorry and I wish for you only good things from here on out.
I was also enraptured by his letter and commented above.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/links-for-january-2024?utm_source=direct&r=24lu5b&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true
To clarify, I'm talking about something that happened two decades ago. Trauma is a complex thing and unexpected feelings keep popping up now and then even after all these years, but by and large, I've moved on.
I am happy to hear that! That is inspirational my friend.
Thanks for your kind words. And that's exactly what I'm dealing with. I had a close friend die in college (he didn't linger, just straight up died) and I kept expecting to see him walk around the corner one day. I think if Nikolas had just died it would be like that again, but seeing him in bed every day in a diminished state is just another loop it throws me for.
I am so sorry Lars, to hear of this terrible tragedy which has befallen your family. I lost my mother and my brother when I was a young man. It is a terrible thing. Your course of action is not one I would recommend, but I hope that it brings you and your family solace; or that you find peace, in the end, at any rate.
#14 was a moving read.
I dig his "rational religion" and the life and letter that are its outcome.
I find that steeling ourselves against the capricious vicissitudes of passing cultural norms through holding sacred a text from worlds gone by is healthy and good for those whose reverence refuses to cross into blatant irrationality.
At the very least it sacralizes DOUBT, and generally bolsters optimism too.
It would be trite of me to address his new life and his feelings about it so I will suffice myself with recommending the piece to anyone not in danger of being triggered by someone who had a transformative tragedy.
His rational religious approach makes the piece far less terrifying or unnerving than one might imagine.
I found within it the comforting strength of refusing to bow before the demons of insecurity, worry, and what-ifs that taunt so many others.
I wish him and he blessed family everything pleasant and holy. And I thank them for showing us all a human means of dealing with their own experience of the fact that nobody gets all the good things all the time. His write-up is short and full of a relatable, yet also specially noble, human spirit.
Lars is Eastern Orthodox to be specific
#21 The ever-increasing sacralization of youth had better bust soon.
Things can't really get much worse than know-nothings being taken seriously by the rest of society because we all agreed on the necessity of surrendering to their every tantrum.
Regardless of whether they can find the ocean on a map.
Check that, they can, see the cause of the unfortunate-but-understandable #20.
Perhaps the least known *major* fact about Hitler's rise to power [and certainly the least spoken or googleable] is that it was the two new voting demographics that put the Nazis over the edge in 1932/1933 were the freshly enfranchised... female and youth populations.
Fast forward to 2024.
Attempting to have a conversation practically anywhere on the internet beyond the hot takes (or hot flashes) of sad (or mad) trolls, teenagers and simpletons with bamboonish tribal loyalties is an impossibility.
As a culture we have so empowered rhe heckler's veto that we don't even pause to ask whether there's any reason why we should, instead of responding to them, en masse, with the spitfire truths rhey would receive for heckling a comic.
Unless especially precocious, children shouldn't be allowed into adult conversations.
That isn't intended to *exclude* the young (of whatever age) from participating as best their age and responsibilities allow in conversations regarding decisions likely to affect them as well.
It mean that instead of making sure that every last teenager, no matter how silly or simple, has their own turbo megaphone, we encourage and reward precocity.
If our generation's Huxley, Mencken, or Messiah is speaking.... he may as well not be because no one capable of understanding him can even hear him over the clamor of the contumelious.
To wit; https://youtu.be/cI5Sd-mNE1E?feature=shared
What do you have in mind for the ever-increasing sacralization of youth?
How does that work when the Nazi vote share was lower among women than among men?
Are you saying that a greater percentage of men than of women voted for Hitler?
Certainly there were more make voters in general but female voters leaned more heavily towards Hitler than did make voters.
If I am wrong about that I welcome being corrected but I am pretty sure that the female and youth votes were more heavily skewed towards The Nazis than was the male vote.
Needless to say plenty of deliberately obtuse verbiage has been employed to try and obfuscate this truth but if it is not the truth and you have a quality non-biased source clearly demonstrating that, please share it.
Do you have evidence that this was the case? I'm not saying I have any source indicating it's not true, but your saying so is the only source I've ever encountered that asserts that it is. On what evidence are you basing that claim?
Re men v women, the best source I could find was https://doi.org/10.2307/1430096
To summarize the facts:
* women typically voted more for conservative parties in Germany
* at least prior to 1932, men were more likely to vote for the Nazi party than women
* in the early 1930s, women support for the Nazi party increased faster than men's support
* By July 1932, the evidence suggests support was nearly identical between the two parties (see Table III)
My layman's interpretation is the Nazis started out (as I'd guess most new parties do) as mostly man-supported. As they grew more popular, the gender balance evened out. By the time they gained control, support was roughly equal.
@Desertopa
The article I’m half-remembering is Richard Evans’ “German Women and the Triumph of Hitler” (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1878178), which is also prominently mentioned in Thomas Redding’s “Our Last Hope” article. It looks like gender data wasn’t routinely collected for all elections during the period in Germany and not in all polling stations. Here’s Evans (p. 157): “In the sample of polling stations in which separate voting by sex was carried out, 51.6% of the female votes, and 44.2% of the male votes went to Hindenburg, while 26.5% of the female votes and 28.3% of the male votes went to Hitler... In the second round of the election, held on 10 April 1932, with the weakest candidates eliminated, Hindenburg secured 56% of the female votes in the sample, and 48.7% of the male, while Hitler gained 33.6% of the female votes and 35.9% of the male.”
Obviously this is a restricted sample, so I was speaking with more confidence than warranted based on faulty memory. Currently skimming Richard Hamilton’s “Who Voted for Hitler?,” which doesn’t have a chapter dedicated to the topic, but which I’ve seen cited as a source for lower female share of the Nazi vote. Most sources that touch on the issue attribute the gender gap mostly to higher female religiosity leading to higher female support for the Catholic parties (Zentrum & BVP) as opposed to the secular parties (SDP, Nazis, Communists, etc.).
For whatever reason, I imagine the typical troll as somewhat older than that, maybe 25 or 30. Some of them have good command of language.
Of course it's easier to tell someone's approximate age if there's video.
#23 I've given quite a few lectures on the Jews of Azerbaijan and the surrounding region throughout history, most especially from the era of the "Khazarian Conversion" onward (in quotes because, of course, the matter is quite nuanced).
I haven't yet uploaded any lectures on that subject to my YouTube Channel but presumably many people interested in the Jews of Khazaria would also be interested in other exotica of Jewish History, on which I've thus far uploaded 11 episodes.
The episodes thus far available deal primarily with the historical Jewish communities of India, China, and Ethiopia, with plenty more to come.
The first episode begins with an introduction to my take on the general subject, which is essentially one of passion tempered by rationalism.
Meaning, I present the most amazing facts...so long as they are also most likely true. Hence - apologies in advance - no ancient aliens, subterranean kingdoms (other than, to a degree, in 4th century Yemen), or religious convictions holding uncritical court in my domain. Here's the playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgc3teub7_dxL4z9fJPW-d9L&feature=shared
2. Would want to see if that still exists after controlling for birth weight. Higher calorie diets are making us larger in general, including fetuses
#24 The author of that piece (about the enraged dying cosmonaut) had to update it after receiving information from sources more varied than the single sensationalist book he read upon which his original article was entirely founded.
Overall the author doesn't seem to be very capable at discerning what's what which is why his subsequent update to the article you linked to is stuffed with both-sides'isms sufficient to make for an excellent junior high school book report.
Nonetheless, readers with more specific knowledge on the matter can probably enlighten us with more specificity after looking at the updated article which is here:
https://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold
#26
The premise would be wiping out the eternally troublesome middle east and would end with wiping out Cincinnati in the mid-west.
#28
My cranial computer contextualized the paragraph as ending with the word GhislainemaxWell before the slow thinking corrective pointed out that there were too few letters in GiveWell.
#12 Patri Friedman is the son of David Friedman who occasionally comments here and grandson of Nobel Prize winning Economist, Milton Friedman.
And presumably he's the brother of Rebecca Friedman, who also occasionally comments here. :-)
I don't know. Patri is mentioned on David's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Friedman but there is mention of a sister.
Aww. Yep. Not very often, though; I’m touched you noticed.
There was a thread a year or two ago in which you both posted, and although I forget the details, the familial relationship between the two of you was clear. I remember thinking that having a parent and an adult child being together on the Internet was unusual and sweet, and I admit to a bit of wistful envy. I guess it stuck in my mind. :-)
22. This reminds me of Alice Miller's _For Your Own Good_, which claimed that the popularity of theories that very harsh methods of child-rearing set up a generation to want Hitler. I don't know whether the connection has held up, but it was my first exposure to the idea that popular advice books could be nothing but plausible-sounding invention. There could be further discussion about what sounds plausible in various eras.
33. I don't understand how people who believe poverty causes crime also believe that very wealthy people are generally criminals. You can only trust the middle class?
Can you give an example of people who believe that?
Many people that believe poverty causes crime also believe that the wealthy commit crimes such as wage theft. This is entirely coherent, since only the wealthy are able to commit those sorts of crimes and they also tend not to get as much attention as the more obvious crimes the poor people commit, such as shoplifting. If you want to make it more abstract, the poor commit crime due to need, while the wealthy commit crimes due to greater opportunity.
That's the theory anyway. I'm not sure I believe it but it seems understandable enough.
Yeh, I’ve definitely seen people who argue online that “poverty causes crime” and also “what about elite white collar crime” in the same sentence or paragraph.
That's because they're switching between two very different definitions of "crime," both in common use, roughly meaning "generally unpleasant person to be avoided" and "person who has broken a law."
#30 "Interesting new theory of Jewish achievement based on 1st century BC decree that all Jews have to be literate."
Not that new, it was set forth in a book published 12 years ago:
"The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492" (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 42) by Maristella Botticini & Zvi Eckstein
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691163510/
The authors talk about the book on PBS:
"The Chosen Few: A New Explanation of Jewish Success" Economy Apr 18, 2013 By Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-chosen-few-a-new-explanati
and
"Jewish Literacy as the Road to Riches: The Chosen Path of the ‘Chosen Few’" Economy Aug 21, 2013 By Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/jewish-literacy-as-the-road-to
I read the book when it was published. I don't recall the details, but I do recall being unimpressed and thinking that the idea while interesting was at best a partial explanation.
You could use the same argument to cover the Protestant Work Ethic thesis; now that you have the Bible in the vernacular, you want people to read it. So that means you need a literate population, which means you need some kind of mass education.
Final step - Profit! Or, the newly-educated Protestants beat the (economic) pants off the illiterate Catholics 😀
Regarding the latest Swedish lottery work from Cesarini's group, I have a thread with more information, results of using different designs, and background information, here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1736922801230033396. I also have an Aporia piece with some discussion of historical violent crime perpetration: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/jailbirds-of-a-feather-flock-together. TL;DR: "Premodern elite violence has substantial contemporary relevance: the fact that for large swathes of history the most privileged members of society were disproportionately responsible for violence (in all its varieties—petty, familial, and martial) suggests that criminality is not a product of deprivation."
I also have a post on a study showing heterogeneous effects of losing SSI on the probability of becoming incarcerated: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1738986063283032232
Altogether, the Swedish study (+lots of registry work) suggests the income/poverty/wealth/etc.-links are non-causal in general and the relationship is mostly down to selection, but findings like those in the SSI loss study suggest there might remain some subgroups for whom redistribution could keep them out of trouble. But it's still odd that they would exist because even today's very poor in the developed world are vastly better off than the rich a few generations ago.
The intergenerational poverty angle doesn't make much sense, and no one has ever explained to me how it fits with things like the observation of predictably high crime rates for immigrants from certain demographic groups (https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1639017394923241475) or the well-known phenomenon of regression to the mean in social status (https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/pinpointing-jewish-iq) not being coupled with much evidence of regression to the mean in violent crime or homicide perpetration and victimization rates (https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1715058321894310145).
"Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!"
"https://genius.com/Russ-tamblyn-johnny-green-west-side-story-chorus-and-west-side-story-orchestra-gee-officer-krupke-lyrics
Hey Cremieux, I just wanted to say thanks for all the great content you produce. It's incredibly informative and enjoyable to read.
Thank you!
Re: 20, does that mean you changed your mind about your conclusion on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes?
Re. 20 "from the river to the sea": due to certain events in its past, Germany has a high-sensitivity trigger to totalitarian, genocidal slogans. The motto is "Wehret den Anfängen" - "fend off the beginnings", or nip it in the bud.
Seeing how you Americans have (narrowly) escaped the whole "fascist dictatorship" experience so far, but half of the country seems very eager to try again, maybe you shouldn't be too haughty in dismissing that approach.
If your problem with "fascism" is the aesthetics, sure. But if you dislike it because of laws restricting freedom of speech, expression, etc., that'd be a peculiar way of going about it.
Ah, the old paradox of tolerance. To ensure that future generations have the maximum degree of freedom, you have to prevent the current generation from removing those freedoms (thus limiting the freedom of the current generation). It's a thin line to walk, unfortunately.
BTW, check the US constitution. I hear there's an amendment that disqualifies insurrectionist oath-breakers from office. "How undemocratic! He was only using his freedom of speech!"
Oath breakers? I summon them to the Stone of Erech!
The 14th Amendment references actions which would disqualify someone, not speech. If that applies to Trump or not is a different question; but, it's clear that the 14th amendment is not talking about speech.
That's a meaningless distinction. Speech IS an action, and acts of speech can constitute a crime. Obviously, slander can be criminal, as can be fraud, incitement to violence, revealing confidential information etc.
Germany has decided to make "approval of criminal acts" a crime, and a court has decided that shouting "From the river to the sea!" in the context of a pro-Palestine demonstration in the wake of the 10/7 attacks counts as approval of a terrorist attack. The US has decided to make engagement in an insurrection a disqualification for public office, and a US court has decided that inviting protesters and telling them to "fight like hell" (among other statements) counts as engaging in insurrection. Both are, in a wide sense, restrictions on the freedom of speech, but arguably reasonable ones.
it's really telling that you interpret "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" as a genocidal statement. you're admitting that the israelis are so oppressive that the only way for Palestine to be free is the israelis to perish.
Palestine could easily be free if the israelis returned the land the wrongfully took and stopped killing and oppressing the Palestinians. no killing has to be involved! Palestinians have the right to live on their land in peace and dignity, something Israel has not been allowing.
the true path for freedom does not ideally involve violence, but through the upholding of international laws and human rights (which Israel has repeatedly violated).
Context matters. The context is that as soon as Palestinians "broke free from their prison", as some deluded Lefties put it, the first thing they did was kill as many civilians as they could get their hands on. They had ended up in that strip of land after two full-blown wars to destroy Israel initiated by the Arabs, and the border to Israel was sealed off after countless terrorists attacks. Thinking that we just need a peaceful political settlement and everything would be hunky-dory is beyond naive.
> you're admitting that the israelis are so oppressive that the only way for Palestine to be free is the israelis to perish.
No, that doesn't follow at all. However, it *does* follow from historical usage (and more recent usage by Hamas) that the phrase encompasses all the territory that is current-day Israel, with an implicit side dish of genocide.
I'm quickly getting tired of the motte-and-bailey around this phrase. It deliberately spreads confusion as to what position people are actually advocating. So I suggest that all the peace-loving, 2 state solution pro-Palestine folks choose a different slogan. The meaning of this one is well-established, and you won't change that by arguing over it.
If you created an independent democratic state comprised of the entire area, with equal participation for everyone, it would last about one election cycle before the "Palestinians" turned it into an Islamic theocracy and began driving the Jews out. There is no possible future where so-called Palestine would operate as a free country, it would be an authoritarian paternalistic state dominated by Qatari money.
Now maybe there's a world where, instead of Qataris and Iranians using the Islamic areas as staging grounds for rocket attacks, you have Gaza under the control of a savvy businessman, like somebody from the Saudi royal family could turn the place into a tourist paradise with luxury hotels and such, and the people there would begin to experience what it's like to have wealth enter their nation, and get real hope.
Nitpick: I think you mean patriarchal, not paternalistic.
I was going to say the same thing. The people and country that came closer than any other to killing all Jews (and not for lack of other attempts), get a pass on being a little sensitive about slogans that are associated with calls for killing all Jews. They don’t need to be on the barricades on that particular issue.
This belies the deeper reason behind the legal changes, which is that there is now a substantial ethnic minority population in Germany who, on average, are more anti-semitic, less liberal, and frankly don't share the national guilt of the German people proper which has been the fundamental baseline since '45.
The flipside of that of course is the rise of the AfD (which I'm sure many "Wehret den Anfängen" adherents would have liked to have seen nipped in the bud). Germany would not have neither a growing anti-semitism problem nor a growing radical right problem if it had restricted MENA migration in the first place. But now the bed has been made, and surprisingly enough 1st and 2nd gen Muslims don't necessarily view the evils of 33-45 as 'their problem'. Social shame and cohesion is a better option than legal means of restricting speech (we don't say anti-semitic things because of deep taboos is preferable to not saying them because of threats of jail time).
Obviously there has always been the remnant neo-Nazi element in Germany, but frankly they were always fringe and impotent. If the 'sensible, 'moderate' parties hadn't decided to head down this insane migration route then the AfD would be a non-entity. Alas, here they are (as in most West European countries) and it'll get worse before it gets better.
I mostly agree with your take. Sadly, after the rise of the AfD, it will be really hard for moderate conservatives to pivot to a reasonable immigration policy without being accused of cozying up to the Nazis. The worst thing is for a loony fringe party to monopolize a genuinely important issue and turn it radioactive, while allowing them to claim the role of truth-teller.
I had hoped for the historic pattern of right-wing parties in Germany to repeat (they tend to attract such a high percentage of contrarians that they start bickering and backstabbing and fall apart at the first sign of trouble), but it doesn't seem to be happening with the AfD.
Which half?
There are effectively two presidential candidates. Only one checks the boxes of
- cult of personality
- aggressive nationalism
- disdain for the rule of law when applied to him (while being extremely litigious when it serves him)
- blending pseudo-religiosity with politics
- racist rhethoric
- praising dictators as strong and intelligent
All of this is known and well-documented, but still, lots of people see no problem with voting for the guy.
To be fair, I don't think that Trump has the ideological backbone to be a full-blown, disciplined fascist dictator. He'd probably just use the dictator toolbox to stroke his ego and fill his wallet, but that's plenty bad enough, and once the walls are breached, who knows what comes next?
And, to be fair, there are people in the Democratic party who have left-authoritarian tendencies, and I wouldn't mind if they were swallowed up by a portal to hell, but I don't see them having a massive influence on actual federal policy.
I think American democrats in a fantasy world. The problem for a significant number of Trump’s detractors is that he isn’t nationalist enough. That is he’s not fully part of the imperial project. The US in its rhetoric and actions in the Middle East (and even China) is extremely racist. If you are opposed to white supremacism then why care about the rise of China?
And as for praising dictators the US engages with and creates dictators, and then when a dictator is no longer necessary the rhetoric changes, the population is fed new propaganda , and we‘ve always been at war with east Asia.
It wasn't racist to oppose the USSR, and it doesn't have to be racist to oppose the PRC.
If the United States stops being a hegemon, someone even worse will become the new hegemon. Russia wants the job, but China's a lot more likely.
21 made the cut? That's a grossly unscientific paragraph that made me lose some faith in this blog. It reads like a fox news or TPUSA bit. disappointing.
Every post brings some wokist who pretends to be shocked or disappointed that Scott posted something that isn't sufficiently woke.
very woke of me to expect higher standards than "the daily wire" tier content on this blog.
Here's the WSJ op-ed from a poli sci professor at Berkeley doing polling research. https://archive.is/zfHIx
Hardly Daily Wire or Fox News... Maybe inconvenient confrontation with the education levels of the like-minded.
It's from an article in the WSJ, for whatever that's worth. I would be interested to see an actual critique.
Is there a video of the senate hearing (preferably with the MIRI stuff timestamped) ?
> Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools.
Something that still evades my understanding - do those same people feel safe for the future of themselves and their kids, when those people that remained in those public schools and learned that making Jews feel unsafe (and worse) is right and laudable thing to do, will grow up? Organizing a tiny private school which doesn't teach to hate the Jews and doesn't say that the answer whether or not genocide is good depends on the context of whether or not we're talking about Jews - is great. But if the vast majority of people in the same area go to the school that still teaches all of the above, courtesy of the teacher unions - what exactly are the expectations for the future? That people just grow out of it sometime after college?
It may be that they didn't really "feel unsafe" (because why would protests about a state repeatedly violating international law make anybody feel unsafe?) but that "we feel unsafe" felt like a more emotive and persuasive thing to say than, for example, "we don't like these people so we're going elsewhere".
I don't think anybody seriously believes that actions like the teach-in will lead to a generation of anti-semites.
Indeed, why a demonstration publicly supporting an organization that just murdered in most gruesome and revolting manner over a thousand Jews just because they are Jews, and publicly and repeatedly vowing to do it again, and again, and again, until there are no Jews left around to murder, organization, that does things like stealing a murdered Jew's head with a goal to sell it back to the grieving parents for thousands of dollars, organization that still holds over a hundred hostages, including a toddler who just celebrated his first birthday somewhere in a dirty underground tunnels, and old people who are slowly dying in agony in the same tunnels because they aren't allowed access to their medicine, organization, whose official goal is to destroy any presence of Jews by means of most brutal violence - and whose actions and goals protestors wholly share, because the Jews are ideologically impure "colonizers" and "decolonization" is a necessary, good violence needed to cleanse the land of Judea from Jewish filth... Yeah, I can't imagine why a Jew may feel unsafe with any of it. Of course, teaching kids that Hamas who murdered and vows to continue to murder Jews are the good guys, and people who try to eliminate them are the bad guys, and they deserve what they got anyway because they are evil colonizers - wouldn't lead to any growth of anti-Semitic sentiment, and if some Jews are getting attacked on university campuses, it's just a random coincidence, they probably did something to deserve it.
It must be they, as is their ilk's habit, just pretend to be hurt and frightened by thousands of people demanding Jewish state being destroyed and Jews be expelled and murdered just because they are Jews - after all, nothing like that ever happened and it's not likely to ever happen, where did they even get the idea? Clearly, they just trying to manipulate us with the ultimate goal to control us and lord over us. And because they secretly hate people like us.
And of course, since we are the smart people, nobody can genuinely hold any opinions that we disagree with. It's all pretend to make us feel bad, but we shouldn't pay any attention to that.
Supporting Palestine is not the same as supporting Hamas.
Protesting against the actions of the state of Israel is not the same as protesting against the existence of Israel.
"The state of Israel" is not the same thing as "the Jewish people".
Criticising Israel is not the same as hating Jews.
I also don't even think the Hamas attacks are "because they're Jews" - I think the history and politics of the region are relevant, including the occupation of the West Bank, blockade of Gaza, building of illegal settlements and forcing people from their homes. I'm not going to dwell on this point because I expect you'd interpret it as me justifying the despicable actions on 7th October, but to reduce this to "Jews versus people who hate Jews" is absurd.
How about this: https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/disgusting-anti-israel-protesters-harass-nyc-cancer-hospital-taunt-child-patients-watching-from-windows/ https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/anti-israel-leader-taunting-nyc-child-cancer-patients-justified-because-hospital-received-donation-from-zionist/
People literally attack children with cancer because some Jews donated to the hospital they are in. There's no "will lead" here - it's already happened. The antisemites are already here, they are loud, they are proud, and they are not hiding at all. It's not some hypothetical discussion about the future that may or may not happen. It's a discussion about what to do with what already have happened and keeps happening.
Yes, anti-semites exist and always have. Yes, some will have become more anti-semitic following recent actions of Israel. They're making a logical fallacy by conflating "Israel" with "Jews" but humans can be very bad at reasoning. (By the way, I'm not saying it's a big factor, but I think the common trend for pro-Israel people to conflate "Jews" and "Israel" (as you have done in the other comment) probably doesn't set the best example.)
The incident described in your articles is nasty, although there are aspects of your characterisation that are unreasonable, and the articles are clearly designed to support a "side" rather than simply inform. But remember what we're talking about here. Is there a casual relationship between teachers protesting against the actions of Israel and the kind of harassment going on in the article you linked? That's a scientific question, and it won't be answered by provoking an emotional reaction about how horrid the worst people on one side are (I can do that too, by the way, although I've been refraining so far). I'm afraid it's also a question I'm not inclined to explore with you. Given the comments so far in our discussion, I suspect we would generate significantly more heat than light.
> . Yes, some will have become more anti-semitic following recent actions of Israel.
No, some just have become more open, because turned out murdering a thousand of Jews in 21th century still can be done, and can be publicly lauded in America, and there's virtually no consequences to it if you're in the right place, like Harvard. It has nothing to do with "actions of Israel" - the support for Hamas murder has started immediately, literally the next day, long before Israel had any time to do any actions.
> but I think the common trend for pro-Israel people to conflate "Jews" and "Israel"
Because the distinction is purely academic. Nobody on the streets makes these distinctions. It's not an academic debate - this thing doesn't exist anymore, the left is much more into punching their opponents then debating them, for a while now - it's whether or not your kid is going to be attacked on a way to school. And yes, a lot of Jews are being attacked, and no academic distinction makes any difference. In Russia, there was a saying for this case - "they'll be smashing your face, not your passport" - which is very appropriate here.
> Is there a casual relationship between teachers protesting against the actions of Israel and the kind of harassment going on in the article you linked
Yes, a very strong one. If you laud the terrorists (and they do), if you deny Israel's right to exist (yes, they do) and their right to defend themselves even in the aftermath of the biggest Jewish casualties attack since the Holocaust - yes, there are consequences to such teachings. If you teach that the Jews are "colonizers" and Hamas terrorists are "freedom fighters" and "resistance" - there are consequences. If you teach that Hamas turning hospitals into rocket launch sites and military strongholds is OK, but Israel's actions against them are "genocide" - yes, there consequences. If you consistently justify any action by Arab terrorists, no matter how heinous, and consistently condemn any action by Israel, no matter the context - yes, people make conclusions. For example, that Jews are evil and deserve to be punished. And they act on these conclusions, which we can witness now.
> That's a scientific question,
It may be a scientific question for you. It's not a scientific, but a very practical question to those that live next to these "teachers" and the products of their teachings - will their neighbors decide one day you are evil and should be punished for that some day? Would you kid be attacked at school? Would your grandma be safe walking to the store? Would those screaming crowds, blinded with hate and bloodlust, make an academic distinction about Israel and your neighborhood Jews? What is the history is telling you about these questions?
You started with an accusation that Jews that feel unsafe because of all this are just pretending and trying to manipulate people. I am glad you don't want to explore this topic any more, but I am also concerned that it's not because you saw your mistake, but because you remain convinced it is so, but won't bother to argue it, because you don't even care - you just casually dismiss real people's concerns because they aren't your concerns. It is common, but I think it also deserves exposing how morally and ethically lacking this position is.
16. gwern pointed out that one of the prompts had a date formatting error:
https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1734323314099703830
and then someone fixed the bug and re ran the test, claiming that the results replicated, despite, well, not really replicating?
https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1734363133962334479
best example of a triple venn diagram is this, imo
https://x.com/melancholyyuga/status/1729298166317527195
Solid.
#3: I think it's important to note that her finding were only when comparing different countries and not within a country. She even points out that "On an intra-national level, this theory [that social conservatism leads to increases fertility] holds up. Republicans have higher birth rates than Democrats."
Still an interesting result, but I feel like that's an important distinction to make.
Do effective accelerationists really believe that they are "sacrific[ing] humanity to the Void Gods" (as Scott put it), or do they think that future AIs just won't be this dangerous?
Literally, yes. The below is a direct quote from Beff Jezos's substack summarising the philosophy: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
"Effective accelerationism aims to follow the “will of the universe”: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe and converting it to utility at grander and grander scales"
Or, more clearly:
"e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism
Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates"
It's hard to say because the "movement" is more of a meme or a troll than a conscious position.
#26:
Biden summons his cabinet and announces that it is time to do something to ensure that everyone in the world has access to clean water. He proposes a project to install desalination plants in Kenya.
One official raises his hand and protests "We can't do that. The Coca-Cola Company has just invested billions in that region as an emerging market for bottled water."
Biden sighs and then says they will instead invest in helping India prevent water pollution.
Another official raises his hand to state that the mining company he used to work for has huge operations there, and would stop all political donations to our party if we did that.
This goes on for a bit longer, before Biden, exasperated, asks the room: "Is there any place in the world where U.S. companies don’t have crucial economic interests?"
They all look at each other for a moment and decide to prosecute more people in Flint, Michigan.
So funny I forgot to laugh. Pretty good, though.
> In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment.
Didn't they also make it a crime to display the letter "Z"?
1. "Crime" and "offense" do not mean the same. A crime: punishable by at least a year. §140 has a max of 3 years and no minimum, thus: no crime.
2. Endorsing and applauding a crime - and a war of aggression is a crime - can be against the law. What counts as what, is for judges to decide. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/z-symbol-russland-verbot-101.html "Of course, the letter itself is not illegal. But the Russian war of aggression is a crime. "And anyone who publicly condones this war of aggression can therefore also make themselves liable to prosecution.""
"But the Russian war of aggression is a crime. And anyone who publicly condones this war of aggression can therefore also make themselves liable to prosecution."
Of course, that reasoning is invalid, because the premise is flawed. A war is not a crime. A war is a war. There is no world government that writes world laws that Russia is now violating. The United Nations is the closest thing to that, and it hasn't declared the war a crime, nor would most of the world take it seriously if it did.
But in German law, the German government decides what is a crime. No world government is needed for that. And apparently it has decided that Russia's war on Ukraine is a crime.
No, not the government decides whether that war is a crime. The judicial system does. And there are plenty of proofs that this war is a crime against humanity, genocide etc. And then there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention
Government sensu lato.
The post-WW2 Nuremberg Trials declared "war of aggression" a crime. The most serious one, actually. This was part moral posturing, and part stop-gap solution to go after defendants that the allies felt deserved harsh punishment, but for whom they lacked more traditional prosecution substance. I think I remember this idea was specifically cooked up to hang Julius Streicher, who did nothing more criminal than publishing a very, very partisan newspaper (nowhere near a crime in a U.S. context). So they got him for enabling and promoting this "war of aggression".
The Nuremberg laws, judgements and findings are -- through a convoluted procedure -- still part of the German laws, and there is no way for the German legislative to get rid of them. The Allies could do that, but as late as 1991 have explicitly not done that. An unanticipated consequence of that situation, much bemoaned by lawyers, is that only war crimes (traditional ones) of the defender in a war can be persecuted, not those by soldiers of the attacking side: They commit the "big" crime of "war of aggession" in any case, and since there is no way for them to behave legally, there is thus no way to behave illegally in a more granular way.
Other paradox consequences that still flow from this legal situation revolve around Holocaust denial: Every Nuremberg fact finding still counts as an immovable truth, no new evidence is admissable in court. Thus, German scholarship must be very careful not to transgress by citing literature from abroad, that runs against these immovable truths. Stuff that everbody, world-wide, in the field knows is patent nonsense, like the existence of giant underground caverns filled with boiling tar cauldrons and conveyor belts to annihilate thousands of people hourly, must not be explicitly denied. There have been cases (mostly in the 1980s) of even Israeli holocaust scholars running afoul of these laws and getting into legal trouble. But no serious convictions for them, afaik.
Also, certain categories of movable objects that were in the possession of the Prussian state (like art collections or crown jewels) still exist in a peculiar legal limbo. They are "overseen" by a special commission for all eternity and are usually placed in museums, but are owned by neither the commision, nor the museums, nor the German state. When part of such a collection was stolen from a Berlin museum and the thieves subsequently were found, all the state could do was "inviting" them to return the loot by promising them "reward money". That, plus trespass and breaking a window.
There's dozens of insane or nonsense legal corner cases that still flow from Nuremberg and other allied laws.
For the public: This statements by Indira 2000 are mostly not correct.
Please elaborate.
Nope. - For hopeful beginners: Wikipedia has flaws. For getting a first grip of reality, is is still a good place to start. For the median ACX reader: https://xkcd.com/386/
Actually, yes, I misremembered in Streicher's case: He wasn't the first person to ever be sentenced for "war/crime of aggression" (he was actually aquitted on that count), but the first person to be sentenced for "crimes against humanity", namely "Incitement to genocide", another Nuremberg Tribunal innovation.
> "Crime" and "offense" do not mean the same.
Maybe you shouldn't try to declaim about the meanings of words in a language you seem not to know all that well?
Compare Merriam-Webster:
> crime (noun)
> 1. an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government
When your evidence 𝗳𝗼𝗿 the idea that something isn't a crime is that the worst thing that can happen if you do it is that the government throws you in prison for three years, the only real conclusion someone else can draw is that you're an idiot.
High temperature, but point taken, sire. Just to enlighten dumb me: kill - murder - slaughter are those synonymes (see: Tomorrow never dies)? Analogously: crime - offence/offense (is than an AE/BE-thing?) - my limited understanding is: both mean "an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government" . Also: "Skating is no crime". Sure, 100% synonymous. (Disclosure: no two words are).
Calling an offence (say, sth. which do not carry a min. mandatory prison sentence and is usu. fined by less than 500 bucks, to be paid in small installments) a CRIME - seems a deliberate way to make it appear worse, doesn't it?
Being so highly gifted in verbal and social skills, you may lack experience with the way the German law works. Max. sentences are reserved for the very worst versions of an offence. That plausibly lead to dead bodies in the streets of our country. Not a for rhyme on a placard among hundreds of others. Not even a genocidal one (exception: holocaust-denial).
btw: I'd appreciate a demonstration of your superior skills in one of the many foreign languages you know so well. Have a wonderful day.
Are you looking for my opinions?
> kill - murder - slaughter are those synonymes (see: Tomorrow never dies)?
"Kill" is the basic verb and is entailed by the others. "Murder" is frequently distinguished, and my sense is that the primary motivation for this is the desire to interpret the Ten Commandments in a way that is not patently nonsensical. Where the distinction is drawn, "murder" is held to be specifically nefarious in some way.
"Slaughter", instead of emphasizing evilness, might -- when applied to humans -- emphasize the goriness of the act or the defenselessness of the victims. Or, applied to animals, it's a term of art with no particular overtones.
> crime - offence/offense (is than an AE/BE-thing?) - my limited understanding is: both mean "an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government" .
Offense, in this sense, would need to be used in some kind of context that called for that specific word. It is not used in normal speech. (It can be used in another sense, the sense of giving or taking offense. Laws are not relevant to that sense.)
You might be interested to know that American lawyers frequently also object to correct use of the word "crime", on the grounds that they are trained to distinguish "crimes" from "torts". But both categories are "crimes" to non-lawyers, and the difference does not track the distinction you wanted to draw - instead, it is based on whether the crime is prosecuted by an agent of the state or by a private party. There is also a difference related to jail time - the maximum amount of jail time that can be imposed for a "tort" is zero. There is no difference in minimum amount of jail time.
> Also: "Skating is no crime".
"Skateboarding is not a crime" is or was a popular slogan protesting the fact that skateboarding was banned in many quasi-public places such as sidewalks. The reference is to prohibiting an action; the connection to "crime" seems fairly clear. There are a couple of ways to interpret the slogan. One is as the claim that skateboarders aren't doing anything wrong (and should therefore be allowed to skateboard); one is as the more literally-based argument that, because skateboarding is legal, it should also be allowed. That first interpretation would involve the second sense of "crime" listed in MW: "a grave offense especially against morality".
> Sure, 100% synonymous. (Disclosure: no two words are).
There are plenty of word pairs that are fully interchangeable. One common such pair in English is "have" / "have got".
> Calling an offence (say, sth. which do not carry a min. mandatory prison sentence and is usu. fined by less than 500 bucks, to be paid in small installments) a CRIME - seems a deliberate way to make it appear worse, doesn't it?
No. It's a way to say that the action has been made illegal. That's bad enough.
> you may lack experience with the way the German law works. Max. sentences are reserved for the very worst versions of an offence.
While it's true that I'm unfamiliar with the way German law works, this is no different from American law.
However, American law classifies the severity of crimes according to the maximum penalty that can be imposed, not the minimum that must be imposed. By American standards, Germany has just made repeating a political slogan into a felony. And if I wanted to deliberately make Germany sound bad, 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 is the sort of language I'd use. "Crime" is just the generic term.
> btw: I'd appreciate a demonstration of your superior skills in one of the many foreign languages you know so well.
The closest I'd come would be Mandarin Chinese, but I would not claim to have superior skill. Your written English is not obviously non-native. But that hasn't stopped you from confidently holding forth with a gross factual error.
(I have given two people an unpleasant surprise when, based on textual conversations with me, they expected to be able to converse with me in spoken Mandarin without problems. Unfortunately I am not up to that.)
On 32 my experience in Kenya is that if you talk to someone doing a really low pay job, like security guard (askari) they will tell you that they need money to pay for their children's education and my impression is this is usually true and not just virtue signalling to encourage tipping. Lots of children there and education is relatively expensive, so "enough money" is more than just the cost of food and housing.
And the UBI we're talking about is $22.50/month, i.e. less than a dollar a day. Not enough to do nothing, enough to avoid desperation.
> In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment.
I remember telling a leftwing friend of mine that the lot of people arrested under hate speech legislation would be left wingers. This woman, a feminist who is trans sceptical has come across this with regards to her philosophy even in the U.K.
However I was thinking that the bigger threat isn’t conservatives getting rid of hate crime legislation but expanding to to include anti white hate speech , at which stage the state might as well start building prisons close to universities to save on petrol costs.
Would have bet my house the pic in 6 was AI generated
I think Quintin Pope has well convinced me that Yudkowski's doomer arguments are unfounded. That does not leave me feeling great about the future of AI. AI is a force multiplier. Hopefully if you are reading this, you would agree with that.
So far, it seems the vast majority of AI frontier pushers are trying to get AI that's controlled by a tiny minority. It seems really the only group that is serious about bringing AI to everyone is Stability AI, and they seem to be struggling a bit. (I suppose we could say e/acc are trying to do the same?)
When it comes to alignment, the same problem: we seem to want a singular centralised AI that parrots woke cult tropes. The worst tyrants are the ones that do it for your own good, so count me out on that one. Again, the only group that seems to speak sensibly on this are Stability AI, with their explicit admission that alignment biases are inevitable, thus we need a plethora of models with biases and alignments that match the user.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor did what it was told to do. It just turned out we didn't want it to do what we told it to do. Why would we expect AIs to be any different? Limit the blast radius of failure. A centralised global AI will not end well, no matter how perfectly designed, aligned, and "unbiased" it is. In fact, the more perfectly designed/aligned/"unbiased" it is, the worse the outcome will be for the rest of us.
My conclusion is we need open source AI, fully open source AI, for everyone, yesterday.
I'm roughly in this camp too, but it's a touch sell with the crowd here. We can only hope that Moore's law or some successor of it continues to bring down the price of computing massively. Open source people are good at coordinating to gather large amounts of data to train with, but the price tag to train a GPT-equivalent from scratch is still too high. So we have to count on gifts from Mistral, Meta, Stability and the like.
Well, I guess my point is (which I realise I poorly raised, thinking about it) is...
When I was in the "AI might foom and kill us all" I was not at all convinced that some small group of elitists should be in control of the dangerous world-ending tech. The only safe way forward really was a complete halt/ban on AI.
Now that I'm convinced "AI almost certainly cannot foom and kill us all, but will provide massive advantage to those that control it" I'm even more unconvinced a small group of elitists should be in control of it. To the point where I'm starting to feel a bit of anger this isn't more in the public mindset.
It seems when power gets concentrated in the hands of small groups of elitists, it turns into a really ugly bloodbath. Every time.
I hope we can all agree to help Stability and Mistral and the crew over at Tom Jobbins' Discord (TheBloke - they are trying to make edge inference faster/easier). Because this seems the correct path forward.
20: As I just "enlightened" a commenter, I should also mention regarding Scott: A "crime" - by German legal definition - is an offence that carries a min. sentence of 1 year prison. Wrong parking is not a crime. Nor is "disturbing the public peace". The slogan - in rallies right after Oct. 7 - was (most likely) against §140 - Rewarding and approval of offences English version: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1451
and is nowadays illegal as the ministry decided it to be a symbol of Hamas (I am 90% sure, this will not hold if challenged). It is most likely (again: 90%) NOT punishable by section 130 "incitement of masses (to hatred)" https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1368 - as the courts are VERY restricitve as to what falls under this category; e.g."Hang the Greens" did not suffice.
Again my link to the reasoning of the best German criminal lawyer (and my fav. German blogger): https://www.lto.de/recht/meinung/m/frage-fische-jubel-terror-hamas/
The American term for this, at least, is that it's a civil infraction rather than a crime.
The US has this too. Misdemeanor vs Felony offenses.
Thank you both, Andrew and Julian! Looking up neat definitions for M/F/c-i:
Under Florida statutes, a civil infraction is a case in which a person is suspected of committing a non-criminal traffic infraction. These violations are classified as either moving or non-moving. / Michigan: A Civil Infraction is not a criminal offense.
There is no right to a court appointed attorney or a jury trial. If a judgment is entered against you, you will only be assessed a monetary penalty/ Points may also be assessed on your license depending on the offense charged. - Seems too weak; "Ordnungswidrigkeit"/ "Verstoß gegen die StVO".
Felony: a crime that has a greater punishment imposed by statute than that imposed on a misdemeanor. specifically : a federal crime for which the punishment may be death or imprisonment for more than a year . Yep, that is German: "Verbrechen", serious crime. Which makes the celebration of Oct. 7 and calling for genocide: a misdemeanor ("As misdemeanor became more specific, crime became the more general term for any legal offense.")
Thus, Scott's sentence might/should have been: In Germany, calling for the extinction of Israel and its people is now a misdemeanor. :0 I see, why he did not. ;)
Well Elon's anti-woke Grok AI has said it's voting for Biden, as well as encouraging the use of trans-approved pronouns:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks-grok-twitter-ai-is-actually-woke-hilarity-ensues/
How can we refuse to listen to such a based intelligence?
On e/acc, it seems to me that the thing that really makes a subculture take off is when it divides into two camps that start fighting each other. So maybe that’s the future of the elites of the world, EA and e/acc are the future metademocrats and hyperepublicans.
Yeah, I don't understand what's going on in that space. But from the outside it does look like two geek groups trolling each other.
I don't really understand the train of thought which can lead to both "#20: having laws against hate speech is bullshit and I'm glad my country doesn't have them", and "#38: this speech is driving children away from schools because they don't feel safe"?
Like, I'm not saying they're definitely incompatible positions - I'm fully prepared for Scott's having a perspective that I haven't thought of and/or which is too nuanced for me to fully grasp - just that, well, I don't really understand how we get to both positions from the same starting point, is all.
I'm assuming Scott's position is that the government shouldn't regulate speech, citizens should by choosing who to associate with.
So my confusion comes from my reading of #38 as though it's complaining about a bad thing, whereas really #38 is actually saying that taking your children out of school to avoid hate speech is a good (or at least a necessary) thing insofar as it's your duty as a citizen to contribute to the regulation of speech by doing this?
Given some of his earlier writings I'm not entirely convinced that Scott trusts the average US citizen to help regulate speech, but I have to admit that the above reading would clear up my confusion.
I... dont know? Like, I support someone's right to say obnoxious things as a matter of principle, and I exercise my right not to be around that someone as a matter of hygiene.
I agree that you have a good (Voltairic? Voltic? Voltairean?) principle and a good hygienic practice, there - but I don't think that's what's at stake in the examples Scott provided:
#20 doesn't seem to be about an individual response to a person saying obnoxious things so much as about society's response to large, organised, and influential groups of people promoting genocide.
#38 isn't about an adult freely deciding with whom to socialise but about schoolchildren not feeling safe in their own school, with options to go elsewhere being (at best!) limited and costly.
I'm not even supporting or opposing free speech here (though I imagine it's clear from my comments what my position would be if I did!) so much as just saying that I don't understand how it can be consistent for somebody to oppose the German state in banning hate speech but to also be upset that the right to hate speech can legally be exercised in American schools.
I see your mention that you don't know much about the US, so this may explain the confusion. In this country of ours this 1st amendment explicitly applies to the government (very simplistic 1st-order statement! not a legal advice!). So, again to simplify, the government cannot restrict speech, but a school board can... sort of (to be clear, there are "public" schools in the US, but they are not really explicitly "state-run" schools). I know this sounds murky, and it is, and this is where there are a lot of law suits, and culture was happenings go on, but this is just to say, that for Americans Scott's position is uncontroversial. State - no speech restriction! Anyone else - free to restrict speech they are subjected to.
Public schools in the U.S. are indeed state-run. Members of the school board are elected officials. They are, or at least are supposed to be, bound by the 1st Amendment.
I took #38 to just be pointing out that the Oakland teacher’s union is acting irresponsibly (and in a way that is unrelated to their ostensible goal of supporting, you know, teachers), not that they are violating free speech.
I don't think anybody thinks they're opposing free speech at all; rather, they're very clearly exercising their right to free speech! Scott appears to support this form of exercising free speech in the earlier item (where he criticises the German state for banning it) but to oppose it in this particular case. I'm not saying this sort of speech is necessarily right or wrong, just that I'm confused about Scott's position.
There’s a decided difference between an anti-Israeli sit-in staged by the Palestinian Heritage Foundation and one by the Oakland Teachers Union. Both are legally protected speech, but IMhO one is reasonable, and the other a gross abdication of responsibility.
I happen to agree that promoting genocide is irresponsible (er, to put it mildly..) and that they shouldn't be doing it - I just don't understand how that's true for the OTU but not for people-in-general?
Like, to put it another way: presumably there is some sort of authority that regulates the behaviour of the OTU (I don't know much about the USA but I would imagine they would maybe have some sort of Board of Education or some such?) and it's the responsibility of that authority to make rules like "The OTU isn't allowed to have speech that makes children feel so unsafe their parents have to take them out of school"?
If so, I don't see how Scott can be upset that this organisation *isn't* doing that, but also be upset that Germany *is* doing that at a society-wide level?
Like, if people can be made to feel threatened and unsafe by hate speech, and if it's the (admittedly possibly fictitious..) US Board of Education's job to represent Jewish children's interests and prohbit this from happening to them, then why *isn't* it the job of the German state to represent Jewish communities' interests and prohibit this from happening to them?
Or conversely, if it *isn't* the responsibility of German authorities to decide what people can't say, no matter how horrible (viz. free speech) then surely it *also isn't* the responsibility of the US Board of Education to decide what Oakland teachers can't say, no matter how horrible?
I just don't see how one can have it both ways!
Teachers as well as other government employees can have their speech restricted in a narrow set of circumstances. A relevant court case is Pickering vs Board of Education (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/391/563.html) Im not saying that case applies to the situation in Berkeley but its not true that all teacher speech is protected.
As others have said, its pretty clear the distinction is that #20 is the government creating more restrictions on speech (bad) while #38 is private individuals finding ways to not be subjected to speech they dislike while not involving the government (good) (beyond that the government runs the school where the speech is occurring).
"Scott appears to support this form of exercising free speech in the earlier item (where he criticises the German state for banning it) but to oppose it in this particular case"
he criticizes the German state restricting the speech, thats all. It doesn't mean he supports the exercise of the speech in question.
If Scott is interpreting #38 in the way you describe it would make sense and clear up my confusion, but at the same time it feels like an awfully big imaginitive leap to see a (presumably school-board-regulated) public authority as "private individuals" rather than as an arm of the state. Probably the reason I can't make that leap is entirely a cultural different and is super-obvious to you (and the others who have been good enough to reply) but I'll have a go at explaining my reasoning just in case:
1) I don't happen to think it's a bad thing for the government to regulate hate speech (obvs. the ability to arbitrary regulate any speech unhindered would be bad, but regulation when it comes to a few extreme cases - viz. speech promoting genocide - seems to me to be entirely healthy for a society. I'm reminded of Scott's reference to the Noahide laws (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won) whereby a socitety says "We'll tolerate everybody's diverse beliefs, even if we disagree, except for just these specific half-dozen things that we just won't accept in our society under any circumstances".
2) However if (in an ideological-Turing-test sorta sense) I were to try to imagine why Scott would consider it a bad thing for the governemnt to ban hate speech, I would suppose that he might say it's because the governemnt is big, has power over you, and you can't just arbitrarily choose to "shop elsewhere" for all your being-governed needs - or at least you sort-of can but it's terribly difficult, costly, and failure-prone - and so a government that can restrict speech at all, even if it is currently just doing so in a way that obviously makes things better for all concerned and helps stop Jewish children from feeling too unsafe to go to school, it's just too potentially-scary to countenance
3) These features that make it bad (under this supposition) for the governemnt to be able to ban such speech seem to apply to case #38 very closely. The Oakland Teacher's Union is much bigger than you, it has power over you (in some cases because you depend on it for your children to have a future and in more extreme cases because it can give you detention or make you do lines..), and it's equally difficult to "shop elsewhere" for your being-educated needs - as Scott appears to acknowlege ("...tiny school that can fit another few 5-9 year-olds")
4) Thus, it appears to me that somebody that considers it a bad thing for the #20 govt. to regulate hate speech ought to be glad that the functionally-similar #38 authority is not regulating it. (If Scott *is* in fact glad about this, and consequently prefers the all-Jewish-children-try-to-find-another-school solution to a board-of-education-stops-the-Oakland-Teacher's-Union-from-promoting-hate-speech solution then everything makes sense, of course, and your reply does help clear this up a bit - it's just that any such gladness/preference doesn't exactly shine through in the way he writes the piece, is all.)
P.S. Really appreciate the effort of your reply so detailed it cites the relevant case law. I feel both grateful and impressed!
It just seems like the canonical libertarian position to me: it is not OK to respond to speech violently, and it is OK to respond to speech peacefully.
So, similar to Shaked's comment above, really I ought to read that item as Scott praising the [non-violent intervention of] taking children out of school and putting them into another school where they wouldn't feel so unsafe, rather than as Scott criticising the situation exactly?
I find it hard to pass that particular ideological Turing Test in my head but I have to admit it does resolve the confusion. Thanks!
I don't want to speak for Scott, but I read it as "look at what bad things those people are doing; maybe some of y'all wanna switch schools or whatever", without any implication that anyone should initiate force against them like the German government is doing.
I'm not all that convinced that the German government acted wrongly here though, as it seems they were reacting to people celebrating a massacre, which kinda seems like incitement after the fact.
Your reading doesn't come naturally to me - but it makes sense, resolves the confusion, and seems to match what other people have commented. Thanks!
(I feel likewise re. the German govt. actions, but for the purposes of this discussion I was trying to disregard that consideration and focus on understanding the position - as I'm sure you're well aware!)
It’s a list of unrelated links.
...but links provided along with opinion/commentary, and that opinion presumably espouses a single coherent position on any given topic (eg. free speech) across the different links, surely?
I don't think Scott's philosophies of free speech for Oakland schoolchildren and for Germans-in-general would differ so much (if at all!) that one would expect the two commentaries to be incompatible/conflicting.
The article mentions the parents can't just take their children out of the district, they have to get government approval first. So school speech isn't free speech because the children aren't free to object or leave.
I guess there's also the idea of "just because you can doesn't mean you should." You have the right to make bad decisions, but it's a bad decision.
Re. The Flynn effect ... I thought Flynn himself said that the gain in IQ is so rapid that it cannot solely be due to genetic effects (and so it must be something like the education you receive in a modern industrialised society makes you better at doing IQ tests). This doesn't preclude there also being a much slower genetic change.
Whether it's genetic or conditioned (a bit of both probably), I don't think increased IQ isn't inherently good. Knowledge keeps evolving while wisdom is consistent across generations. Knowledge without wisdom is a callous tool that gets misapplied everywhere.
"So and so works as a trader in finance, they're the smartest person I know. They know everything thats going on". Perhaps, they are the most knowledgable person from your perspective on knowledge, but neither a finance career nor calling someone else "the smartest person I know" would be considered wise. Knowledge is a tool, not a personality trait... and who care how hard a hammer is (100 vs 150 hardness) if they can both drive a nail?
I'm not going to make a case for the average wisdom level getting higher or lower, but if there was a small or even medium-sized change, how would we know?
Great question.
I'll suggest one measurable example... how about increasing rates of "mental health issues"? One could argue that the internet is increasing knowledge in exchange for our wisdom. There is nothing inherently wise about the internet, even though it can be used as a tool to discover wisdom.
I don't think mental health issues are quite the same thing. To some extent, people might make mental health issues better or worse by the way they think, but having a broken brain isn't lack of wisdom.
Agreed. Not even the wise can see all ends.
IQ isn't just a measure of how many facts you know.
I think it might be related to the fertility drop plus Scott's research on birth order. Fertility drop means a greater proportion of people are firstborns, which means higher average IQ.
Personally I would have assumed that the Flynn effect was an environmental effect hiding a genetic decline.
Yes. I also thought it was a bit sloppy to link this to the Flynn effect.
From here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000226
>The secular gains are massive and the time period too short for large positive genetic changes in the population, so there is strong consensus that the changes must be largely environmental. There may, however, be a quite modest role for a genetic effect...
It's also far from clear that the Flynn effect even reflects a change in g, as the referenced study examines.
We, being terminally online and readers of Scott ( and probably Matthew Yglesias too); are aware that "from the river to the sea" might have negative connotations. The typical western pro-Palestine protestor, not so much. (I did try the obvious experiment of asking a few).
The average Muslim definitely does. The average white leftist shouting along with them, maybe not.
Why is Cao Dai being called a cult here? It doesn't seem particularly culty compared to your standard religion.
27. So major accomplishments of EA were to get several agencies of the US government to, in the words of a recently fired coach, "do your f*cking job."
One should not underestimate how much of an achievement that is.
Agreed.
> 2: The latest in Flynn Effect research: “More recent birth cohorts have greater cranial volumes, more gray matter, and larger hippocampuses”.
No link to the source data? Might be because I'm not an X member, but all I can see is an uncited chart.
#40: as I understand it, this type of thing is actually not terribly uncommon. Local politicians are eager to show something is being done about gang violence in cities where it's a problem, and one result is some type of gang outreach initiative, where people go talk to gang members and go "aye, maybe cut back on the murder and extortion just a bit, eh, laddie?" But then you run into the problem of who the eff is going to actually do that without getting murdered themselves, and it turns out the answer is former gang members who still have friends that are involved. And once these guys are cashing in on their status as former members, the current members decide they want in on the action, too, and now everybody's getting paid. Oops.
40 - completely unsurprising if you read "Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" (assuming Wolfe wasn't making it all up).
The dad joke page doesn't work for me - it just says "Loading..." indefinitely, even on a refresh.
This has the amusing side-effect that when it says "Did any of these jokes make you and your kids laugh?" the most plausible referent for "these jokes" is the feed of serious tweets like "There are so many complex and important conversations we need to empower our dads to have."
"The Association Of German National Jews, “colloquially known as Jews For Hitler”, was a group of Jews who supported the Nazi Party. This didn’t make too much more sense at the time than it does now, although some well-assimilated German Jews did have the same negative attitudes towards recent poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants as ethnic Germans (my great-great-grandfather was one of the poor immigrants, and had awful things to say about his reception by native German Jews)."
This was actually more common than you might think. In 1932, Schoenberg wrote, without a hint of irony, that he had secured the supremacy of German music for the next thousand years. The stated reason Freud refused to leave Vienna almost until the very last minute was that he wanted to secure his antique collection. But he also, like many other Jews at the time, refused to believe that Germans, the bearers and progenitors of Kultur, could do what they said they would do.
For that matter, when I was learning Polish, I used to practice my Polish on an old lady I met. She had similar stories from Jewish refugees from Germany. She had (before Barbarossa) helped, at great personal risk, smuggle a family of German Jews into the USSR, and they returned, insisting that Germans were civilized and would never actually harm them, right until they were herded onto the transport.
I believe the Holocaust made the world different, people trust governments a lot less.
Just to put it out there: I'm not sure how big the "yeah, the machines are going to replace humanity, and it's GOOD!" faction is actually in e/acc, but the fact that it's of *any* notable presence makes me automatically distrust the entire movement, considerably adjusts my priors towards distrusting rationalism in general. Ironically it also makes me more skeptical of any alignment goals, simply because any alignment project with those kinds of people even in the near vicinity, in the "zone of acceptable thought" seems like there's a huge risk of alignment in precisely the wrong direction. Nothing makes the Butlerian Jihad sound more alluring than these guys.
Where did you get that e/accs associate with the rationalist movement?
To an outsider, and even to long-term but 'outsider' readers, the distinction can come across like the Emo Phillips joke about what church you go to. They share a lot of the same roots, talk about the same goals in the same terms, move in the same teapot, etc etc.
I think you're confusing e/acc with EA. e/acc does have "machines are going to replace humanity, GOOD" but has no association with rationalism or trying to do alignment well, like EA does, which definitely don't believe in replacing humanity.
In what sense does e/acc have nothing to do with rationalism? What part of rationality do they disagree with?
I don't think we should let the Yudkowsky types domain-squat on the word "rationalism". e/acc strikes me very much as a rationalist type movement.
It just doesn’t have any core philosophical overlap. EA first branched out of the rationalist blogosphere and e/acc is an ideological counter to EA based in Landian (right accelerationist) philosophy. Rationalists and e/acc may have similar views for X% of subjects but when they’re debating the core of what makes their philosophy it’s own thing, it’s much more different. Hence two of the most prominent rationalists, Scott and Eliezer, being quite opposed to e/acc, hmm. But if you’re talking about Eliezer and Scott “domain squatting” the word “rationalism”, well that’s a whole other tangent irrelevant to e/acc that they already mostly regret because it needed a schelling point name at the time
I wasn't confusing them, but I was probably still hasty in associating e/acc with rationalism. It's just that the certain amounts of shared terminology, interest, intercommunication etc. has created an *image* of relation, at least in my head.
"In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t."
The First Amendment, like the rest of the Constitution, is meaningless without enforcement.
England and Wales operates without a single written constitution, and for most of English history, there was no judicial review of the laws of England - the Parliament was assumed to have considered the constitutionality of whatever laws and acts they passed.
Isn't Britain the place that sent a youtuber to jail for teaching a chihuahua to raise it's paw in response to antisemetic phrases?
Wouldn't surprise me.
40 is pretty wild. I wonder if it was all a front or if he actually tried to steer kids away from the lifestyle. When I think about it, I’m sure people around the neighborhood knew the truth of who he was. That tends to be how things are. He might have been the best equipped person to help kids find another direction if they clearly weren’t cut out for the lifestyle.
I wonder if he steered kids away from joining rival gangs.
(a) "The latest in Flynn Effect research: “More recent birth cohorts have greater cranial volumes, more gray matter, and larger hippocampuses”."
So the SF trope of "The Men/People of the Future will have huge heads because of their large brains, while the rest of their limbs atrophy due to disuse" is coming true?
(b) "You might expect to find socially liberal beliefs (like that women need to focus on their careers), but Aria Babu says the data don’t support this. Instead, the biggest driver of low fertility seems to be a belief that taking care of kids is a lot of work and you’ll screw them up if you cut any corners."
I don't think this is an "either/or" but more of an "and" situation; you think kids are a lot of work, you can't devote time to both maximally raising your hot-house blossom and developing your kick-ass career, you're not rich enough to be able to afford nannies and really really expensive daycare, of course if you don't maximally raise your hot-house blossom they will fail abjectly in life, but if you become (gasp!) a stay-at-home mom you are wasting your potential and all the investment in your education and career, so you decide to not have children or at least 'not right now'.
(c) "Did you know - Stanley Williams, founder of the Crips and quadruple-murderer, “[led] an ironic double life in which he worked in a legal job as an anti-gang youth counselor in Compton while also serving as the overboss for one of the largest gangs in Los Angeles”."
I did not know, but there's historical precedence with Jonathan Wild:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild
"Jonathan Wild, also spelled Wilde (1682 or 1683 – 24 May 1725), was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public-spirited vigilante entitled the "Thief-Taker General". He simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire, and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes.
Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major 18th-century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force in London. As a powerful gang-leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. Wild was consulted on crime by the government due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them."
(c) "TracingWoodgrains: The Republican Party Is Doomed. Not electorally; it can still win elections as much as ever. But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively (especially in the modern world where you need to cross your bureaucratic Ts or your policy will be overturned by the Supreme Court)."
That would be the same Supreme Court that certain online and media outlets are constantly having fits over being CONSERVATIVE NON-DEMOCRATIC BULLIES, would it? I'm not convinced by what Trace has to say, yes the "elites" are primarily voting Democratic, but remind me again about this guy Trump that I'm hearing is a total fascist dictator who must be stopped right this second or else he'll bring America to the brink of doom, and over? He may be a fluke, but he's one that all the bragging about "demographics are destiny" and hence the inevitable Democratic strangle-hold on power back in the day never saw coming.
Stanley Williams: Why isn't there a series of graphic novels about this man?
> So the SF trope of "The Men/People of the Future will have huge heads because of their large brains, while the rest of their limbs atrophy due to disuse" is coming true?
I once read a story where the people of the future are genetically engineered to be seven feet tall and heavily muscled, apparently because that's what people wanted to be. I could imagine a combination of the two, where people have to be strong to carry around their giant brains.
I understand not liking e/acc, but gloating about these poll results is silly imo. The general public has no idea what e/acc even is and the question describes e/acc as wanting to "replace humanity" with AI.
The general public is accurately informed about e/acc's opinion in that poll question. Yes, the poll questions describes e/acc as wanting to replace humanity with AI because *they do*.
From the leader of e/acc himself: "e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism
Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates"
And there are a lot more examples of similar statements. The problem with e/acc is they're using motte-and-bailey into duping people like you that they're just "lots more tech good" and thinly veiling their real intentions.
> The general public is accurately informed about e/acc's opinion in that poll question
I've looked at the wording of the poll question and honestly you could get similar results by swapping "effective accelerationism" with pretty much anything.
Poll question: "Some people in the tech industry are now identifying as Furtive Snurkers. Furtive Snurkers believe that chmod flurging is ebery nort, and doo-wop fanana bleens greenly"
Median respondent: "Ew, tech industry? Disapprove."
Somewhat exaggerated, but if you ask people their opinion of something that they've only heard of five seconds ago then they're going to give you an answer based on vibes rather than a carefully thought out response. And "Some people in the tech industry are now identifying as..." is (very understandably) full of negative vibes.
37.
>Republicans will be dragged kicking and screaming towards something like small-government libertarianism, by the brute fact that government power will always work against them no matter how many elections they win
This seems to naively assumes that individuals (voters and otherwise) generally advocate for political positions that would benefit them. As Bryan Caplans shows though (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) that isn't the case.
That said, school choice is on the rise.
> Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
Biden: We need to nuke the enemies of liberal democracy.
"But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively"
Educated elites can't govern either if they are unable to win elections. You can already see what happens after the institutional capture of academia, their previous broad trust and respect collapse after they try to exploit this capture they worked so hard to obtain for an ideological agenda. I don't think many people are looking at this institution as a moral authority as they used to.
The lesson here is don't let your institution be captured by outside forces, period. This is very hard work and requires sacrifice.
I don’t think optimists.ai are better than, say, Robin Hanson in opposing the doomers. My reply to their first post (where I point out some of the things they misrepresented and/or are clearly wrong about): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iABojbKgmtMGYgcYm/some-quick-thoughts-on-ai-is-easy-to-control
"38. Oakland teachers union stages “teach-in” where teachers urge students to support Palestine and protest Israel during class time; Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools."
"21. In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography."
Maybe Oakland teachers should instead spend their time teaching students geography and history?? Crazy radical thought for one of the worst school districts in the country, I know.
Re 21 - I strongly suspect there must have been some meaty bias in the "basic facts about the Middle East" those students were taught.
You can read some of the questions and bias in the original article here: https://archive.is/zfHIx
"67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra."
Is damning in and of itself, because if these students actually knew what they were talking about, they wouldn't be quickly changing opinions based on a quick chat with a professor.
Thanks for the link! I'm not sure I would call the opinion change "damning" - most people are really bloody stupid, regardless of political alignment or values.
On the Berlin item (No. 20), worth noting that Elon Musk said anyone using the terms "from the river to the sea" (on Palestine issue) would be suspended from X, since those terms "necessarily imply genocide". https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725645884409401435
#2 Bigger brains sounds like what you would expect from boring medical advances where bigger heads would have led to more complications?
I forget where I read it, but someone has hypothesised we're at the equilibrium point where increased risk of death during childbirth balances the intelligence advantage from larger brain. better health care (lower risk of death during childbirth) shifts the equilbrium.
> 3: What beliefs correlate with low fertility rates?
Reading Aria's Substack, it seems like this question is linked to a larger question, from her post "Beliefs that Kill Birth Rates":
> The big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors.
As I posted in response there, this is strange. "cheap, high-quality contraception lowers fertility" used to be the null hypothesis, so well-substantiated that it was the primary plan of action for several agencies. The last time I searched for data on the topic, I could only find good statistics from NGOs trying to *reduce* fertility. From the 1960s through (at least) the 2000s, countless WHO and UN programs aimed to bring down the fertility rate in poor countries. Their primary strategy? Improving access to contraception.
Maybe this is just Simpson's paradox, or maybe there are other factors driving contraceptive access and low fertility in the same direction, but the intuitive, causal link between the two is strong and I *think* the data is strong, Here's a section summary from the paywalled article on Science Direct, "Contraception in historical and global perspective":
> [B]etween 1960 and 2003, the percentage of married women in developing regions using any form of contraception rose from approximately 10% to 60%, and fertility halved from six to three births per woman. In industrialized countries, contraceptive practice also rose and fertility fell, but changes were less dramatic because family sizes were already modest in 1960 and contraception was already well established.
I can understand saying, well, we can't (and don't want to) get the genie back into the bottle, so what can _improve_ fertility in a world with cheap, easily-accessible, effective contraception? But that's a different question than the one this post asks: "[t]he big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors." I don't see how we got to that framing without overlooking well-established historical data.
People may want kids, but they want kids less than they want other things.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S152169340800151X?via%3Dihub
It sounds like the two effects naturally build on each other, doesn't it? The economic incentives change in the direction of people wanting (all things considered) fewer children. But we all know how easy it has generally been to have children without intending to, so the economic changes alone might not have had such a dramatic effect. On the other hand, effective contraception gives people, and especially women, the technical means to avoid unwanted pregnancies. The expected effect is to narrow the gap between wanted and actual fertility. When you put the two together, you get lower desired fertility, and the means to achieve that.
I feel like all the talk of economics and culture is needlessly complicated. I think it's simpler than that: whatever they may say, people (men and women) mostly don't want children if they can avoid it. (Or they don't want many children.)
Contraception, economic circumstances, and falling birthrates are a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation.
In 1930, when most married women would still have been full-time housewives, was when the Anglican Communion at its Lambeth Conference relaxed its stance on contraception to permitting married couples to use it for the sake of family planning:
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/seventh-lambeth-conference-resolutions-9-20-1930-anglican-communion
And like you say, once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't get it back in.
"The statements of the Anglican Church condoning the use of contraceptives were some of the first of their kind from a Christian organization. Other Christian organizations addressed the controversy of contraceptives following the Anglican Church’s statements. In December of 1930, the Catholic Church issued what they called an encyclical, a statement from the pope about current affairs and opinions of the Catholic Church, called Casti Connubii ("On Chastity in Marriage"). In the encyclical, Pius XI, the pope at the time, condemned the use of contraceptives and cited them as a threat to Christian marriages. Conversely, following the statements of the Seventh Lambeth Conference, many Protestant organizations updated their stance on contraceptives to be more accepting of family planning. In the United States, the Committee on Home and Marriage of the Federal Council of Churches that oversaw many different Christian denominations issued a statement in 1931 that agreed with the Anglican Communion’s recent statements, giving what the Committee called "guarded approval" to the use of contraceptives. The resolutions of the Seventh Lambeth Conference regarding sex and marriage publicized a different perspective from a Christian body."
Where the economic circumstances come back in, is that poorer and working-class married women would have been the ones to work outside the home as well as be wives and mothers. It was the middle-class families wanting to limit family size, and that was indeed for economic reasons, no matter what the Anglicans may have insisted. Second wave feminism in the 60s and 70s was not demanding the right to be charwomen, after all, when it came to work outside the home.
So the economic circumstances do tie in with decisions about "child raising is too important to do it part-time". It's the higher education/higher income levels which say that childcare is damaging to children in the data exampled, and that's where the culture *and* economic factors overlap. To succeed at our level, you need all the advantages. That means inputting a lot of time, attention, and effort into each child. To do that, you need to be wealthy enough to support one member being the full-time stay at home parent, or to afford nannies and really high level childcare and schools. If you don't do that, your child won't get into the right schools to get into the right universities to have the right credentials and make the right connections to get high salary professional jobs, and unless they achieve all that then you and they have completely failed, my God do you expect my kid to work as a secretary or a receptionist or some kind of small time salesman? That's literally life in the gutter!
But *also* to succeed at our level, you need two incomes, and having Mother stay at home sacrifices, or severely limits her career, which is both a waste of her potential, reduces her to a 'mere' child-production unit*, and causes our lifestyle to take a severe economic knock. One kid may be doable, two probably not. And even the one kid not right now - we're not at the right stage of our careers, we have so much we want to do in our lives before we have to give it all up for child-raising, it's just not the right time now. So baby now? No. Baby later? Maybe.
Meanwhile, the lower-middle/working class women working in support roles at, or contract cleaning for, Mother's workplace are having three kids with no pother about "but I can't get little Quanisha or Maria into the right baby ballet aerobics calculus coding extra-curricular if I don't spend all my time coaching her!"
*Seriously, the descriptions online by people terrified of their lives of becoming pregnant if they can't abort it, or talking about the stay-at-home mom influencer types, is an off-putting mix of contempt and fear, as though women having babies was the most monstrous body-horror trope imaginable.
[Substack telling me I'm too verbose, so part 2 to follow]
Interesting. Am I reading this right?
I think the main implication is that, while it may be true that access to contraceptives pushes fertility down regardless of cultural and economic conditions (barring extremes), economics and culture played a big role in the political history of contraceptive access.
I think so. Reading the Lambeth resolutions, you do get (or I, anyway, get) a sense of trying to hold back the tide by the liberalisation of "okay, contraceptives for married couples where they have too many kids already or it's a threat to the woman's life if she gets pregnant", while the other resolutions about people having sex outside of marriage, people using contraceptives to avoid having bastards, married people using contraception because they didn't want a baby just now or didn't want children at all - as well as the resolutions on abortion and divorce - tried to maintain the same standards as previously and shore up "but we're not giving in on sexual morality to the secular age", but of course once you start allowing exceptions, that never stops.
"Okay, if I can use them if I'm married and have six kids and don't want seven, can I use them if I'm married and have three kids and don't want four?" "Yeah, but my economic circumstances mean another mouth to feed is too much" and so on. And, as the Anglican clergyman I quote later points out, you have a large class of people who don't listen to 'the parsons' anyway, as well as the likes of Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger (a name we all recognise) and other public intellectuals and scientists weighing in on sex and psychology and birth control, using the gravitas of Science! to influence the public and public opinion.
So the Anglicans, so far as I see, were reacting to cultural changes already happening, but of course their shift of position also contributed to changing the culture. There will always be people who break the rules, but once you make rule-breaking less costly, or condone it, or turn a blind eye to it, then you encourage people who were on the fence to go ahead and break the same rules themselves. "I'd like to, but I don't dare, because of consequences" isn't as strong a barrier once the consequences go away or are much weaker.
Going back to the Lambeth Conference, here is the resolution:
https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/127734/1930.pdf
"Resolution 15
The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex
Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles. The Conference records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.
Voting: For 193; Against 67"
This seems more like a response to a situation already happening, viz. the increasing use of contraception by the public and co-habitation outside of marriage, as seen in the attempt in these resolutions to bolt the stable door:
Resolution 18
The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex
Sexual intercourse between persons who are not legally married is a grievous sin. The use of contraceptives does not remove the sin. In view of the widespread and increasing use of contraceptives among the unmarried and the extention of irregular unions owing to the diminution of any fear of consequences, the Conference presses for legislation forbidding the exposure for sale and the unrestricted advertisement of contraceptives, and placing definite restrictions upon their purchase.
Resolution 19
The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex
Fear of consequences can never, for the Christian, be the ultimately effective motive for the maintenance of chastity before marriage. This can only be found in the love of God and reverence for his laws. The Conference emphasises the need of strong and wise teaching to make clear the Christian standpoint in this matter. That standpoint is that all illicit and irregular unions are wrong in that they offend against the true nature of love, they compromise the future happiness of married life, they are antagonistic to the welfare of the community, and, above all, they are contrary to the revealed will of God."
They did try to address the economic factor element, but I think that was about as successful as "living in sin is wrong, don't use birth control to avoid babies, instead just don't have sex" appeal once they said "okay, if you're married, you can use birth control to avoid babies JUST SO LONG AS IT'S NOT FOR THESE REASONS".
"Resolution 17
The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex
While the Conference admits that economic conditions are a serious factor in the situation, it condemns the propaganda which treats conception control as a way of meeting those unsatisfactory social and economic conditions which ought to be changed by the influence of Christian public opinion."
Even in 1930, the same rumblings about dysgenics (on both sides) and over-population were bruited about for the need to liberalise contraception use, as per this Anglican clergyman disapproving of the limited liberalisation of the stance at Lambeth:
http://anglicanhistory.org/gore/contra1930.html
"The recent Conference, on the contrary, has given a restricted approval of them. To be quite fair we will analyse the Resolutions 13—18. Resolutions 13 and 14 are on the lines of the latter part of the pronouncement of the earlier Conference, emphasizing the dignity and glory of parenthood and the necessity of self-control within marriage. Resolution 16 expresses abhorrence of the crime of abortion. Resolution 17 repudiates the idea that unsatisfactory economic and social conditions can be met by the control of conception. Resolution 18 condemns fornication accompanied by the use of some contraceptive as no less sinful than without such accompaniment. It also demands legislation forbidding the exposure for sale and advertisement of contraceptives. But Resolution 15 (carried, it is noted, by a majority of 193 votes over 67, which would seem to imply that there must have been some forty bishops who did not vote), which contemplates cases where 'there is a clearly felt obligation to limit or avoid parenthood,' while giving the preference to the self-discipline and self-control which makes abstinence from intercourse possible, and recording the 'strong condemnation' by the Conference 'of the use of methods of conception-control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience,' yet admits the legitimacy of these methods 'where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence.'
This is no doubt a restricted admission, but it is a definite withdrawal of the quite general condemnation expressed in the Resolution of 1920, and I fear it will be the only part of the contribution of the recent Conference to the question of sexual relations which will be seriously effective. The classes of persons aimed at in Resolutions 13, 14, 16, and 18 are not those which pay any attention to what the Church says. The same must be said of the worldly-minded who use contraceptives from motives of selfishness, luxury, and convenience: such people know quite well that they are disregarding 'the parsons,' and have no intention of listening to them. But there is a large class which cannot brace itself to ignore the voice of the Church. They have been anxiously waiting to hear what the bishops will say. No doubt they feel that their cases are 'hard cases.' In different ways we are all apt to feel that. They think that they have a morally sound reason for avoiding parenthood, and that they cannot practise abstinence. Now they learn that a representative assembly of the chief authorities of the Anglican Communion has 'removed the taboo' on contraceptive methods, and no doubt their scruples will in many cases be silenced and the easier course taken.
...Let me give an instance of what I regard as an ineffective attempt at arresting the tide of sensualism—the appeal made for legislative restrictions on the sale and advertisement of contraceptives in Resolution 18. Such restrictions exist in various countries where the governments, in serious alarm at the consequences of the 'birth control' movement, are doing their best to suppress it. It is also natural that a country with a large Roman Catholic population, which feels on this subject as the French Roman Catholic population of Canada feels, should sternly restrict sale and forbid advertisement in deference to the conscientious scruples of a majority or large minority of its people. But is it likely that a government would enact any effective restrictive legislation at the bidding of people who say, 'We recognize that certain practices must go on and a certain class of implements must be used in special cases, but we want the knowledge of these processes and the possession of these implements to be severely restricted by law'? Surely the statesman would reply,' You admit that these implements are necessary under conditions of modern civilization in many cases. You must admit that these cases occur in all classes equally. You do not suggest that medical authority should be required in each case for their use. How, then, can you ask us to take legislative steps to prevent the general knowledge and use of them, any more than of other commodities which are liable to be misused? '
...But before giving an answer to this question I will attempt to summarize afresh the existing situation. In my earlier pamphlet I drew attention to the fact that the objective of the movement in the world generally was frankly hostile to the whole Christian tradition of sexual morality. I referred to the work of the Austrian John Ferch, translated by Miss Maude Royden, and to books of Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger. To-day I might add the names of H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and others whose books have a very wide circulation. But I should wish particularly to call attention to the American Walter Lippmann's Preface to Morals (Allen & Unwin). He appears to be rather an atheist (in the strict sense of the word) than an agnostic, but he retains a profound respect for the moral tradition of Europe, and desires to find a non-theistic basis on which to maintain it. I am not concerned now to question the success of his reconstructive effort. I am concerned only with his survey of the present situation, especially in America, observing that England appears to be moving in the same direction.
[Gosh durn it, Substack, expand your comment limits! Having to break this off here]
Part 3
"Mr. Lippmann sees the true significance of the movement for Birth Prevention. He pronounces it (p. 291) 'the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.' He finds its fundamental basis to be unmistakable. 'They (the contraceptionists) take as their major premiss to dissociate procreation from gratification, and therefore to pursue independently what Mr. Havelock Ellis calls the primary and the secondary objects of the sexual impulse. They propose, therefore, to sanction two distinct sets of conventions; one designed to protect the interest of offspring by promoting intelligent, secure, and cheerful parenthood; the other designed to permit the freest and fullest expression of the erotic personality. They propose, in other words, to distinguish between parenthood as a vocation involving public responsibility, and love as an art, pursued privately for the sake of happiness' (p. 293). Mr. Lippmann is not at all in a position to say that the proposal of the contraceptionists is wicked or immoral, though he perceives that nature shows signs of revenging itself on a practice which sets it at defiance. But my point is only that he sees clearly what is 'the logic of Birth Control,' and he represents very ably a reaction against the organized propaganda, the motive and results of which he discerns so clearly."
But there is a more general reaction against it, on simple grounds of national or class welfare.
(1) There is the terror of 'race-suicide' or 'class-suicide' which we see possessing the souls of Frenchmen and of the Anglo-Saxon stock in some parts of the world.
(2) There is the alarm of some distinguished members of the medical profession as to the consequences of 'birth control.' The Chairman of The League of National Life, Dr. Frederick McCann, a leading authority in gynaecology, says, and repeats, that 'all known methods of contraception are harmful to the female, they only differ in being more or less so.' I fancy, though I cannot prove, that there is more medical authority on his side than is allowed to appear. It must be remembered that it is very difficult for a doctor in private practice to give advice to a patient which is flat contrary to his or her obvious desires. It must also be remembered that a great many young doctors, during their period of service at the hospital, become so horrified at the spectacle of the 'unwanted babies' at whose birth they are called to assist, that they are prepared to accept almost any proposal to prevent their birth. Nevertheless, I believe the amount of medical opinion which is hostile to birth prevention is commonly underrated.
(3) There is the increasing sense that there is no unobjectionable method of birth prevention which is effective. I pointed out in my earlier pamphlet that the advocates of birth control could give approval to only one of the current methods, and that that one required skill and carefulness for its use, if not medical assistance. Mrs. Florence (in her Birth Control on Trial, p. 56, Allen and Unwin) has recorded the results of an elaborate experiment undertaken by the Cambridge Clinic. 'It is a significant indication of the limitation imposed by present-day knowledge of contraceptives when one hundred and fifty-five persons out of two hundred and forty-seven are obliged to admit that they found methods of family limitation [which had been suggested to them at the clinic] either so ineffective or so distressing or so troublesome that they abandoned the use of them.' (The figures show that out of two hundred and forty-seven patients there were seventy-eight unwanted pregnancies.) In a report of a meeting in Burlington House last April at which Dr. C. P. Blacker gave an address under the auspices of the Eugenic Society, I find recorded a general despondency—a general acknowledgement of Mrs. Florence's conclusion that 'no substantial contribution to the technique of birth control has been made in fifty years,' and that 'the state of contraceptive knowledge' is 'crude and unsatisfactory' (pp. 147 and 4). Under such circumstances it is not unnatural that recourse is had, more and more widely in many lands, to the practice of abortion, so that some of the heralds of 'Birth Control,' like Dr. Ferch or Dr. Haire, are driven to advocate the legalization of this practice.
In conclusion, you'll all be glad to hear!
"(4) Proportionate to the difficulty just alluded to in making birth prevention harmless and secure is the dysgenic effect of its actual use. It is used with comparative effectiveness among the more educated and well-to-do, but among the least educated and most careless it is comparatively unused or ineffective. Hence the diminution in the birthrate is chiefly among what are called 'the better stocks.'
(5) Meanwhile the motive for the reduction of births which was found in the fear of the world-population outgrowing the possible supply of food becomes more and more obviously unreasonable. The area of the soil of the world which is of possible productiveness and is at present unused, is literally immense: and the causes which destroy populations in large masses are still at work, and on a vast scale. The difficulty to-day is the glut of production.
These currents of opinion are likely in the course of a generation to produce the same sort of panic about artificial birth prevention in England as has already made itself felt in France, Italy, America, and elsewhere. I mean a rebellion against the propaganda on quite non-religious grounds. It is to be hoped also that the movement for the abolition of slums and reconstruction of industry will by that time have shown the true way to the abolition of those conditions in our cities which militate against healthful parentage. Meanwhile, as I say, the function of the Church is, in my judgement, to maintain the healthy conscience which condemns artificial prevention as unnatural and wrong in itself."
Point number three there is why "cheap, easily-accessible, effective contraception" was such a goal, and why it succeeds so well in today's society. This is why the Pill was lauded as such a triumph - all that is needed is to take a tablet every day, nothing more complicated than that! (The medical side-effects, as per point number two, only became known later).
I also get a mild kick out of even the Protestants needing to fall back on the Catholic Church to prove their case for them:
"Is it then wrong in itself? The Report of the Committee of the Lambeth Conference—which, like the other reports, was received only and not accepted by the Conference, but which forms the basis of the resolutions—acknowledges both that the general use of contraceptives is 'one of the greatest evils of our time' and that 'there is in the Catholic Church a very strong tradition that the use of preventive methods is in all cases unlawful for a Christian.' In seeking to reverse that tradition it points out that 'it is not founded on any directions given in the New Testament.' This is true of birth prevention, and also of suicide. Almost at the moment when the Lambeth Conference published its Report, Dr. Inge at the Conference of Modern Churchmen was urging the reconsideration of the Church's condemnation of suicide in extreme cases. If this movement were to become popular and urgent, one may wonder what a future Lambeth Conference may say about suicide."
That's the same Doctor Inge, the 'Gloomy Dean', whom Chesterton often references. I find this article interesting in that, back in 1930, a great deal of the same talking points are raised as still remain current today, though perhaps with new labels stuck on ('great replacement' instead of 'race suicide', for instance, or 'motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience' rebranded as 'personal choice' ). But there is still the concern with dysgenics from both sides - that the undesirables are the ones carelessly spawning offspring, while the better classes and more educated are rendering themselves sterile.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!
The reason is that in most advanced Western countries the rapid downward trend in the fertility rate started as way back as the *18*70s - eg see, for instance, Belgium here (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033487/fertility-rate-belgium-1800-2020/) - and dipped to around replacement rate or below already in the 1930s-1940s, before the Pill.
I think of that graph and others like it as evidence *for* the "contraception lowers fertility rates" hypothesis! I don't want to lean too heavily on Wikipedia, but I think their summary gets the gist of it across (from the "History of Birth Control" page):
> Starting in the 1880s, birth rates began to drop steadily in the industrialized countries, as women married later and families in urban living conditions increasingly favoured having fewer children. This trend was particularly acute in the United Kingdom, where birth rates declined from almost 35.5 births per 1,000 in the 1870s to about 29 per 1,000 by 1900. While the cause is uncertain, the 29% decline within a generation shows that the birth control methods Victorian women used were effective. Many women were educated about contraception and how to avoid pregnancy. While the rhythm method was not yet understood, condoms and diaphragms made of vulcanized rubber were reliable and inexpensive
The last sentence is the critical part. Hormonal birth control was an important refinement, but hardly the only technology covered by "accessible, effective contraception."
I thought the context meant it's not natural methods that are meant here (they are, of course, not as much "cheap" as they are free, and in any case have been always available), and my understanding is that condoms only became widespread after WW1.
That lines up with something I've read about pre-industrial societies. The countryside had a birth rate above replacement, and those extra people went to the cities which had birth rates below replacement. Partly because pre-industrial cities were filthy enough to drive up the death rate, but also partly because city people didn't want as many children. Contraception doesn't have to be 100% effective to drive down the birth rate. So it stands to reason that a shift from majority-rural to majority-urban would line up with a decrease in birth rate.
I've recently started seeing people moving on from listing pronouns as "She/her" and "They/them" to the ungodly combination "She/them".
Do I need to switch from feminine to plural pronouns depending on whether this person is the subject or the object of the sentence? This is very confusing but at least it expands the possibilities for "Who's On First" routines.
"So I pass it to them, and she catches it"
"Who are they?"
"There is no they, only them"
"Who are them?"
"She is"
"So you pass it to her"
"No, I pass it to them"
As I understand it, "She/them" means both feminine and plural pronouns are acceptable.
As I understand it, "She/they" is an easy way to get the Coolness Points for Queerness even if you are cis het (and white).
Yes, I'm cynical about the whole Pronoun Dance Routine. But if you're okay with people referring to you as "she" (or you're so obviously a straight white woman), why bother with the "they"? And if "they" is important to you as your identity, why keep the binary "she"? I see a lot of that online in the context of "activist group or liberal doing something organisation, a ton of the members are trans or non-binary identifying, and the few token cis hets who want to fit in use the 'you can call me Al' labels so as to prove they are Good Allies".
I don't want to deny that there *are* people who switch between singular/plural in sincerity, but most of it I see used is this kind of performative "I'm one of the *Good* Ones" stuff where, with the associated photo, it's "Hello, I'm a they" and I'm "No, you are very easily identifiable as and visibly a she".
In my observation (n=small handful), it tries to express an "anything but 'him'" sentiment, while remaining minimally accommodating. Which tracks logically with people having been called something they're not for their entire lives based on their appearance and having grown to hate that specific thing.
It's difficult, I don't want to insult or be insensitive to the people who have dysphoria around gender, but as I said, every time I see a photo of the "she/they" person, they look like a woman, they dress and present like a woman, they have a female name, there is nothing there to say "this is not a cis het woman". And it's generally, though not always, in the context of being part of a "X is trans, Y is non-binary, Z is xe/xim" grouping, as though they are trying to signal hard "I am not part of the Bad Old Gender Binary Inflicting Cis-Heteronormative Authority that we all acknowledge is wicked and evil, please spare me!"
At least the makers of pronoun badges manage to go with "(s)he/they" for the "both are acceptable" case, to make it clear they don't mean one is the object case: https://gayprideshop.co.uk/collections/pronoun-badges
Can the Martin Buber fans get an I/thou?
#24: strong Comet King prophecy vibes.
#20: Germany has that awkward problem that the former first verse of their national anthem - which it is also illegal to perform nowadays - contained a statement staking out a territory. A look at a map shows the problem with this one too (the Memel is the border between Russian Kaliningrad and Lithuania these days, flowing from Belarus).
#14: STRONG content warning. I spent most of the morning at work trying not to cry. That post has become one of the most upvoted on Hacker News, with a lot of tributes coming in - Lars himself replied, among other things, "I love you all. Hug your kids if you have em.". One of my favourite quotes from the comments: "Grief is just love with no place to go."
#20 no it isn't illegal. Please run https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Lied_der_Deutschen through Google Translate. And those were roughly the borders at the time (see map in Wikipedia), before some bad governments made bad decisions. What gives? Notwithstanding, von Fallersleben was a somewhat naïve children's poet, and I'd even prefer a national anthem written by Karl Berbuer.
Ok, I looked this up, and you're right - unlike some explicitly Nazi songs, Verse 1 isn't explicitly illegal, or at least that hasn't been tested in court yet. I still wouldn't advise anyone to sing it in modern-day Germany though, it causes strong enough protests when someone plays it at an international sporting event. (As to translating, das ist nicht Notwendig, ich kann es auf Deutsch lesen.)
Well, yes, it is at least awkward. You're thinking of incidents like this: https://youtu.be/PZdl09sKrzo
Sure, it was written "Germany, Germany over all" as a call for unity in a terribly fragmented country. But then the Nazis turned it into a slogan of megalomania, and it is perceived as such until today. And an anthem which needs footnotes to explain that no, it wasn't originally meant this way, is rather unhandy.
Side note, I've met French who didn't like their anthem either, because it is all about war against Germany. Or the hymn of Ecuador calls Spain a bloody monster.
And then, I've checked the Trizonesien Song by Karl Berbuer again, and yes, it is funny, but not a perfect anthem either:
"My dear friend, my dear friend,
the old times are over.
Whether you laugh, whether you cry,
the world goes on, one, two, three."
(Who would be crying about Nazi dictatorship being over? Oh well, let's not think about it too much and look into the future, right?)
"A little bunch of diplomats
today makes the big politics.
They create zones, change states,
and what about us here in the moment?"
(Well tough luck, being decided upon by foreign diplomats...)
"We are the natives of Trizonesia
Heidi-tschimmela- tschimmela-tschimmela- tschimmela bumm!"
Poking fun at the "Trizone" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trizone of the American-British-French occupied zones. Wouldn't work today since the East isn't part of it.
"We have girls with fire-wild nature/spirit/essence
Heidi-tschimmela- tschimmela-tschimmela- tschimmela bumm!"
"Wesen" is difficult to translate. But this of course makes fun of the "German Wesen":
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am_deutschen_Wesen_mag_die_Welt_genesen
"We are no man-eaters, but we kiss all the better."
OK, this is impossible. It refers to the well-known trope of the "natives" cooking the explorers in a big cauldron:
https://www.toonpool.com/cartoons/Kanibalenmen%C3%BC_133418
This is old-fashioned or even racist. And of course, what Germans have been doing just a few years before was not man-eating per se, but an even worse industrialized mass-murder.
So, side-to-side with funny self-mockery, there is the tendency to cast aside any memory of our crimes. It was still a long time to go until Brandt could kneel in Warsaw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kniefall_von_Warschau
Related to 17:
If you ask GPT4 which model it is, it will answer that it’s GPT3.
Tried it with multiple different accounts and model versions.
38 - what a sad own goal by the pro-Israel side. What's that, all Palestine sympathizers are antisemites? Congratulations, Jews are now uncomfortable everywhere!
On one hand, widespread genetic childbearing intervention seems like a good thing, for preventing conditions that are incompatible with life or completely incapacitating.
On the other, surely there would be unintended consequences galore if it went past that? If universally implemented, would this be really bad for humanity, by either selecting against genes that turn out to be somehow important, or by selecting for genes that somehow turn out to be bad to have? See e.g. associations between blood group and risk of certain diseases.
It just occurred to me that selecting for AB+ (universal recipient) could look good, but might or might not be a good idea in general.
I don't think you can "translate" #26 because the premise of the joke isn't true for America. The point of the joke is that Chinese elites send their families to global cities in the west and have few ties to domestic backwaters. American elites also tend have few ties to places like Missouri, but their families are also just in global cities in the west. Malia Obama is pursuing a film career in LA, not Shanghai. Chelsea Clinton worked at McKinsey's NYC office, not their Tehran branch.
When American elites do spend significant time outside of America's sphere of influence, it's usually either humanitarian (like Chelsea Clinton working with Kenyan elephants) or however you'd classify Hunter Biden working at a Ukrainian energy company. Or they're counter-cultural, like Angela Davis.
The closest equivalent would be something like Trump wanting to deport all people from _____, but realizing that those people are vital for a certain part of the economy. It ends with him deporting all people from Ohio, who aren't vital for anything.
I don't know, I think you could rework it to be Hunter and Joe. Joe is listing off a range of potential targets, Hunter is all "Whoa Big Guy, that's where my latest grift partner lives/has a business/is using as a tax dodge location" (I mean, the Chinese 'business partners' fit right in there). So finally Joe ends up targeting (Missouri/Ohio/other punchline state).
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/analysis-hunter-bidens-hard-drive-shows-firm-took-11-million-2013-2018-rcna29462
Maybe, but the joke is meant to contrast China's opposition to the US with the personal benefits that Chinese leaders get from American institutions, like colleges. Americans working with foreign oligarchs just seems like corruption or globalization, rather than hypocrisy. Even in this specific example, it seems like Biden's Chinese business partner now lives in some sort of black site for political prisoners rather than a potential target. Most revelations about American leaders with foreign business interests tie into a narrative of an international group of corrupt oligarchs based in the west, rather than the hypocrisy targeted in the original joke.
More on my Glassdoor "how did they think this was suitable to my experience?" saga, and a new recommendation for a job.
This one's in West Virginia, a mere 3,498 miles from where I live so an easy commute. I'll give you the company spiel so see if you can guess what the position is:
"As a company, we are proud of our values and encourage those who share in our aspirations to join our team:
We protect our colleagues and communities through safe practices everywhere, every day.
We are committed to serving our customers and communities by going above and beyond to exceed expectations.
We take action to improve neighborhoods and communities by being environmentally responsible and creating a more sustainable world.
We are driven to deliver results in the right way.
We encourage a human centered culture that honors the unique potential and dignity of every person."
Okay, take a guess and then further down I'll reveal what the job opening is:
=====================SPOILERS=================================
It's for a trainee driver on a waste truck (commercial as well as residential) 😀 A socially important job, indeed, but is the mission statement a little overblown for that?
Arguably a company that operates trash trucks is in a *better* position to "protect [their] colleagues and communities through safe practices" and "take action to improve neighborhoods and communities by being environmentally responsible and creating a more sustainable world"--by, e.g., providing their drivers with proper training and PPE--than many of the companies that routinely include that sort of glurge in their corporate communications.
Whether they actually do any of it is another question, of course.
Definitely a rubbish collection company provides a practical and tangible service, it just amused me to see the usual corporate speak in the job description.
Also the idea that I'm a good fit to learn to drive a bin lorry in the USA 🤣 Though that's partly my fault, as when filling out the fake profile I picked an American city at random as my address.
>I’m not sure how much this study adds once you already know that twin studies find criminal behavior is about 45% genetic, 25% shared environmental, 30% nonshared/random, although I guess they can help pin down the exact nature of the shared environmental part.
But remember that heredity studies are always relative to the environment they are done in!
IQ is very heritable in a study where everyone involved had very similar environments, and not very heritable in a study where half the subjects are upper-class American and half the participants are illiterate third-world peasants with heavy parasite loads and lots of childhood malnutrition.
Particularly pernicious in this situation, where the claim is *about* different environments causing changes in behavior. If the twins in the studies were not raised in rich vs poor environments as extreme as teh differences between the rich vs poor communities the crime hypothesis is comparing, then it will under-rate the effect of environment in that context.
I'm late to the party, but when I saw #21 previously, I thought it might be code-switching rather than actually changing anyone's mind. Given some sort of interactive survey or however this was done, first you answer the "right answer" according to your social group. But then, trap sprung! Surveyor clearly demonstrates that this was not the right answer. Okay, so code switch, this is now a test of your ability to do critical thinking (or whatever the acceptable term for that is now). Give the new "right answer".
What's the real belief? Well, what proof is there that the surveyees even have an internal, honestly-held opinion on the subject? Why should they?
It's always interesting to look in various dissident libertarian-adjacent spaces and see the conflict between the culture war antipathy towards public schools and the Caplan/me-style edunihilism that is more prominent in those spaces than in almost any other political niche.
37: TracingWoodgrains, like so many others trying to diagnose the ills of the Republican party and of American conservatism, is very confused and lacks an understanding of what is actually happening in/to the American right, to the point of being deeply Not Even Wrong on almost every point.
The problem for American conservatives is not that they have a "short bench," although it's certainly true that they have one, or that there are too many progressives in academia (there are plenty, but American academia is politically next to powerless). The problem is that approximately half of the base of the Republican party, the party that has traditionally been the main avenue for conservative political action in the US, has sharply and definitively *abandoned conservatism*, by almost any reasonable definition of the term, in favor of Trumpism, which, however difficult it is to define politically, is manifestly anything but conservative.
Social conservatism? Jettisoned in the mid-2010s when half the party decided that "grab them by the pussy" was acceptable language from an American president, and when those who didn't actually put "TRUMP - FUCK YOUR FEELINGS" bumper stickers on their cars didn't complain a bit about those who did, despite that sort of language being neither "decent" nor very much in keeping with Family Values.
Institutional conservatism? Well, a good chunk of the party had already tossed any lingering respect for existing institutions and the need to work within them out the window long before Trump arrived on the scene, but the burn-it-all-down philosophy of the Tea Party sure has only grown as a force in Republican politics since 2015, as we saw last year during the House Speaker debacle.
Fiscal conservatism? ...I was going to type a whole paragraph here, but there's no need.
Monetary conservatism? There wasn't much pushback, or even mild criticism, from the Trumpist base when the god-emperor took to Twitter to threaten to fire Fed chairman Jerome Powell because the latter had tried to turn *off* the spigot of free and easy money (artificially low interest rates, money-printing via asset purchases) that the Fed had been pumping into the economy since the Obama presidency. The few monetary hawks left in the party didn't get much traction when they complained--and even they didn't complain much a few months later when the Fed went into absolute batshit money-printing hyperdrive in early 2020 in response to the pandemic.
Law-and-order conservatism? It seemed like that old Republican stalwart might actually survive Trumpism--the orange man himself had carped about it for years, after all--but then January 6, 2021 happened, and in a matter of minutes, riots turned out to be the language of the unheard after all, and the members of the mob who spent hours beating the shit out of terrified policement and vandalizing the halls of Congress (see also: institutional conservatism, above) became merely frustrated patriots venting some steam, and indeed political prisoners.
But anyway, if that bloggers commenters are right about the Republican party being dragged kicking and screaming into small-government libertarianism, then the party is even more doomed, because at least half of the exising party couldn't care less about small government or libertarianism (and in some ways are actively hostile to those things), and the one thing that still unites the actual conservatives and the Trumpists--a disdain for "wokeness" in all its forms, real and imaginary--is probably not going to be enough to hold the party together in its current form.
More likely, imo, is that the Trumpists win the power struggle and the party, and the deficit hawks and free-marketeers are forced to find a new home.
...and if that were actually to come to pass, it would be interesting to see how attractive the new party would be to the George F. Will types--the social and fiscal conservatives who actually meant it, enough to quit the Republican party when it became clear that most of the party didn't.
Below is a link to my reply to Aria Babu's post - I don't think there's good enough evidence for the causal conclusion between opinions on working mothers and TFR that she asserts. I looked at the data ex-Europe and found the negative correlation disappears. Then I looked at data on the exact question she's presenting within the US and find the opposite relationship, a positive correlation between fertility rates and thinking that mothers should stay home when kids are young. Given that within the US a bunch of the potential confounding factors are held constant, this suggests there's likely something else going on (although I'm not sure what!) which is causing the negative correlation between European countries. Overall, I don't think you can assert the causal relationship which Aria concludes her post with, especially when it runs strongly counter to priors.
https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/can-women-really-have-it-all?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true
With regard to the "Verband nationaldeutscher Juden" (point 29), historian Donald Niewyk documented the right-wing political faction led by Max Naumann (a Berlin lawyer and reform Jew) in his book _Jews in Weimar Germany_ (Routledge, 2017). Niewyk writes:
> At least as viable as an alternative to liberal assimilationism was the rightwing chauvinism of Max Naumann and his League of German Nationalist Jews. It presented an opportunity for Jews who were frightened of communism or disillusioned with Weimar democracy to pursue a reactionary line. It held out the hope of counteracting anti-Semitism by canceling the equation of Jew and liberal. Unquestionably the persistent Judeophobia of most of the remaining German right made its task more difficult.
Niewyk, in this same book, contextualizes the frictions between assimilated liberal German Jews and the Eastern European immigrant Jews during this period. One point made in the book is that no Jews of any political persuasion, not even the most severely pessimistic, had reason to suspect Hitler's Final Solution while living in the liberal democracy that was Weimar Germany.
"Still, people continue to work as much as ever. I’m surprised by this result; is the claim that people still work exactly as much when they don’t need the money? Why?"
My guess is that capital and labor are complements in production. If you have extra money to invest on your business, your work becomes more productive so you work more. If the whole economy consists mostly of small business, then you'd see this effect in the aggregate. This implies that we should expect employees to work less under a UBI.
#41: Chuck Schumer is a laughingstock. Anybody who he gives credence to actually has their credence reduced. I'm surprised MIRI didn't know this. I guess the people opposed to artificial intelligence are also opposed to doing intelligence on their adversaries.