37: A story on the internet about somebody who's name is claimed to be Title Pavel is almost always fictitious. It is a reference to the Dark Knight Rises cold open
I’m not surprised or disappointed by point 33. Tolerating people with weird kinks is different than tolerating people advocating for real-life harmful things, so r/forcedbreeding seems 0% hypocritical to me.
That's the Anglosphere's default mainstream social media culture for people in a certain age band. To get away from it you have to actively avoid it -- build yourself a better bubble. If you're on Reddit, look for unusually nice, well-moderated subreddits (which will usually not be the most popular); if you're on Twitter, follow only people who put nice tweets on your timeline (who will usually not be the most famous); and so on.
I used to be a subscriber, and this is a good recommendation. Niche hobby subreddits can be great. Any subreddit where you can get 1000 upvotes will be part of the same hivemind as the rest of Reddit.
The inverse of this is 4chan. Maybe the explanation is as simple as, people who both A) have a lot of free time and B) choose to spend it complaining on the internet usually suck. Self-selection.
I think that this is probably wrong. In particular I think that having weird kinks is probably correlated with wanting websites to be more permissive about what content they allow, for obvious reasons.
Based on subreddit overlap, forcedbreeding appears to be *heavily* red-aligned; lefties just aren't into raceplay, sorry. Feel free to update your priors.
The overlap with non-sex subs begins with creepypms, survivinginfidelity, various games (all of which skew Left, the former notably and the latter two in the general Reddit way), continues with some pro-trans subs (*super* Left), takes a brief detour to mentalhealth and some weed + shrooms subs (the Right is notoriously high-strung and pro-drug, right?), goes on to adviceanimals and antiwork (do you even have to ask?), and... scrolling... scrolling...
...okay, I finished the list and still haven't found any especially "red" subs, with the single probable exception of firearms — near the bottom (1.18).
So... I think it's probably bullshit to suggest the subreddit is Right-leaning, as its stated positions would obviously suggest anyway.
> is different than tolerating people advocating for real-life harmful things,
There's no *way* anyone could possibly believe that a ""fetish"" page about the most depraved acts of violence against women could possibly have any negative real world impact, you know, like making women who see it feel unsafe or hated, or encouraging weirdos to act out depraved fantasies or generally be aggressive towards women IRL. It's just a fetish, bro.
And if you disagree, then you necessarily must also be 100% fine with the exact same fetish page except all the men are white and all the women are black and they get called the n-word constantly. Because the only way this could be doing any real world harm is in the ways I described above, meaning they're either both harmful or both harmless.
And I'm really curious though what harm you imagine a "pro-russian" subreddit is having in the real world (other than the kinds of things I described above).
To be clear, I am an asexual woman who is so extremely repulsed by the idea of pregnancy that I got myself sterilized (despite the fact that I don’t have sex). I can scarcely imagine a fetish that could possibly be more aversive to me. I don’t know how problematic r/forcedbreeding is in practice, because I never want to look there. Maybe they actually do have a terrible separation of real life from fantasy, IDK.
However, I do know that the vast majority of people with fetishes, even really weird ones, are perfectly capable of knowing what is and isn’t appropriate in reality. Moreover, they typically aren’t trying to convert other people to any particular political position or course of action.
On the other hand, anti-vax misinformation often DOES advocate for people to take IRL harmful courses of action. Pro-Russian posts are often propaganda to get people to stop supporting the defense of Ukraine. Obviously there’s nuance to this as well; Russia is not 100% wrong, and vaccines do actually have sometimes concerning side effects. My impression is that subreddits/posters that get banned for these topics usually do post actual false or highly misleading information, but if they don’t, I wouldn’t want them banned just for having unpopular political opinions.
Still, my personal opinion on either topic isn’t the point. My point is that it’s perfectly consistent to tolerate disturbing kink spaces but not tolerate people advocating worrying courses of action IRL.
this juxtaposition is not necessarily philosophically inconsistent, but it does show the r/forcedbreeding people to have terrible judgment
disturbing sex weirdo communities, no matter how unobjectionable IRL and how good their separation of real life from fantasy, can only survive and continue on the back of a broad social tolerance
deliberately undermining that tolerance, as by demanding the deplatforming of other people's objectionable speech, will inevitably turn back and rebound on the sex weirdos sooner rather than later
every censorship trend of the modern era fell first and hardest on people who were considered sexually immoral
It depends on where the wind is blowing. One of the latest trends in social justice is kink acceptance, the current frontier being whether it has place in parades and textbooks. It’s a good opportunity for controversial fetish communities to earn mainstream social media allies, and the way to do it is by aligning with them on issues they care about. By my observation, the more aggressive and seemingly out of place the activism is, the more traction it gets.
Can the culture war bite them in the ass once the wind changes? It might. But not only trying to raising universal tolerance for objectionable communities is very hard and often counterproductive, it’s also much, much more damning, because this is what a truly bad community trying to exploit liberals’ tolerance would do.
all of this depends partly on how “weird” unpacks. this particular weird sex community is into a what arguably is a very exaggerated version of the predominant hegemony, as opposed to a transgression or subversion that destabilizes people’s subconscious premises and assumptions, so the weirdness coefficient is maybe not actually that high in the big picture. i don’t think they’re gonna be first, second, or fifth in line when the puritans come for the weird sex. at the moment it seems like the ascendant right wing puritans are mostly going after LGBTQ and the ascendant left wing puritans are mostly going after people they’ve decided are doing LGBTQ wrong
It's impossible to be tolerant of literally everything. Tolerating weird fetishes but not blatant misinformation strikes me as entirely reasonable and consistent.
Honestly, I like Facebook's compromise on this. You're still allowed to post fake news and misinformation - you won't get banned for it and the post won't get deleted - but the site will put a notice in front of the post saying that the information is wrong and explaining why it's wrong. People can still see it, and they can still choose to believe it, but at least they won't believe it by default. It puts them in a position where they have to exercise some critical thinking, either to say "ok, my friend is probably wrong on this one" or "FB is wrong, this is actually true despite the notice," rather than accepting it uncritically.
It's not a perfect solution: Sometimes the notices really are wrong, either because the mainstream media itself is incorrect on an issue, or FB's fact-checkers made a mistake when checking mainstream media sources, or because the automated algorithm applied the notice in the wrong context. But I think it's still better than either deleting suspected misinformation outright, or simply doing nothing and leaving it be. Sure, the anti-censorship crowd still thinks it's just another top-down method of control, and the anti- misinformation crowd thinks it's useless half-measure that doesn't actually do anything to meaningfully prevent the spread of fake news. But as the old saying goes, a good compromise is one that leaves every side partly dissatisfied.
Yeah, if you go on that sub there's a post that references Dobbs, and the top voted comments on it are all along the lines of "Whoa, this is just a kink, let's keep it that way, we don't want this IRL" . To the point where the OP had to pop in and explain that the post was just their way of working through some trauma from a sexual assault and of course they didn't really mean it and didn't want to upset anyone.
It’s just tribal identification all the way down. My guess is the same people who posted the condemnation of anti-vaxers would even more furiously condemn someone who wanted society to temporarily pause gay orgies to control the spread of monkeypox
You could say the same thing about pro-vax misinformation. It advocates for people whose cost-benefit analysis is clearly negative to get the vaccine anyway, increasing their risk of heart inflammation, brain blood clots, and death.
Forced breeding doesn't even strike me as that weird or depraved. A significant fraction of women I have been with were in to light BDSM/power play type and obviously impregnation/breeding being sort of the telos of sex is an obvious thing to fixate on. And in particular at least as construed on that sub, the focus is not really on violating consent, and more on sort of being overwhelmed by a primal urge to procreate (the fantasy seems to be that the woman wants to be breeded, not that you are literally forcing her to)
On the other hand there were some actual rape fetish kinks that were in fact banned on reddit (even though many women do have that kink to, sometimes even as a way of coping with trauma)
Ironically, having actually looked at the reddit page in question... It looks like 90+% of the posts are actually by women - usually women posting pictures of themselves with some variation of 'Breed me Daddy' or the like. Not what I would have expected, but I suppose it makes some sense.
Umm, r/forced breeding is producing pro-rape content whatever pro-Russian subreddit is out there is producing pro-Putin content, if you hold the typical belief in the magical powers of internet content to determine behavior that underlies pro censorship arguments then both would be harmful. In fact the pro-rape content far more so.
I’m guessing that a lot of the r/forcedbreeding people would be:
a. Very in favor of censoring subreddits that advocate raping people IRL.
b. Fine with subreddits that were pro-Russian in the sense that they celebrated fictional Russian characters, or enthused about Baklava recipes, or really anything that wasn’t spewing propaganda about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s important to note that not all speech is even protected by the First Amendment. The typical example is “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”, because it involves giving out false information that can cause panic/harm. Private sites can restrict speech much more than that, of course, but certainly a good starting point is… false information that can cause panic/harm.
I’m someone who has had some life-threatenly bad reactions to vaccines, and as such, the COVID vaccine was the first time I got vaxxed since I was 2. It would be REALLY NICE if I could ever read vaccine-critical posts that WEREN’T blatantly false conspiracy theories (or worse, subtly false conspiracy theories). There are certainly such posts out there, but the presence of all the junk ironically makes it much harder to learn about vaccine-critical stuff than it would be if there was more censorship of the topic.
Charitably, it's only an analogy, albeit a rather-troubled one ("fire in a crowded theatre" comes from a SCOTUS decision upholding bans on, um, protests against conscription).
The pattern I'm mostly relating here is avoiding to be meek. If you act like you ask for permission to exist you're more likely to be seen as prey, so some amount of aggression is actually adaptive.
I *am* disappointed though by the failure to generalize the concept of tolerance. "It should apply to me but not to you" is pretty much the classic mistake.
Yes, what people who invoke the so-called "Paradox of Tolerance" fail to do is take the argument to its logical conclusion. "If I am tolerant of [outgroup], then they might gain power and be intolerant of me, therefore it is justified for me to be preemptively intolerant of them first" - but then [outgroup] could invoke that same principle to justify being intolerant of the first group, since they know that if they gain power they will be intolerant of them, thereby justifying their initial intolerance. This is a preemption game, a well-known concept in game theory.
By invoking the "paradox," it actually becomes rationally justified for *both* groups to be intolerant of each other, and at that point, the entire premise of liberalism is basically dead and it's just the friend-enemy distinction all the way down.
Or, like EY likes to say, we could get together and agree to do Something Which Is Not That. Like setting a meta-rule that we can debate individual ideas until we get hoarse, but will shop short of canceling them. Which is how liberalism came to be.
It clearly isn't; if that's an average then circa 50% of graduates will be below that threshold, so you clearly don't need a three-digit IQ to graduate with a Bachelor's these days.
seems simple that if more people are going to college, the avg IQ of non college will drop, even if the 'needed' is entirely unchanged between 1960 and now. the only way you could even hypothesise 'needed' is if the groups included *all* graduates, not just ones that didnt get higher degrees.
also seems to make sense that 1960 high school was about average population iq, and today college grad is about avg
Doesn't sound like it. I think the chart just shows the average/median/whatever IQ for people who topped out at a certain level of education. It's not a requirement, it's just a statistic. That's why we shouldn't call it "needed."
I would like to see this data disaggregated by discipline. Have requirements for STEM degrees declined? How below average can one be and still get a MEd?
Probably start at "Education level needed/advantageous for [Job]" and work backward from there to IQ would be better. Civil Engineer -- Teacher -- Trial Lawyer -- Medical Doctor require in my area 4 -- 5 -- 7 -- Between 11 and 15 years of education respectively; and while there are very smart Civil Engineers they rarely go back and get another 1-7 years of education to "catch up," they get the education they need and stop.
If at different times different amounts of education were required or advantageous for different careers, we'd see different education levels achieved by people who wanted to pursue those careers. Rather than a model of X has IQ^y >>> X Maximizes the level of education they can reach based on IQ^y; the model goes X has Career Ambition Z >>> X reaches the level of education necessary for Career Z as long as their IQ^y can get them there.
> unusually obese Russian soldier (which doesn’t show up in reverse image search)
They don't mention which reverse image search they tried (presumably the Google one). Google is thought to intentionally cripple it's search results for privacy reasons. Russian search engine Yandex has a much better one, you could find people's social network profiles just by a pic taken in public transport. In fact, they mention Yandex later in the chain, but they should have tried reverse image search there too.
I was suspicious at the time and tried to internet-sleuth it myself (failed), I didn't know Yandex had reverse image search - that would have been ideal, but I can add tineye to the list of reverse image searches that had nothing helpful.
/If you can't trust an undisclosed senior intelligence source, what can you trust?
Unemployment to population ratio has stayed the same, but the age-range is what is important there. I cannot begin to describe the amount of 54+persons I saw leave the workforce over the last two years.
Budget deficit is lower mainly because Trump got the TCJA passed in his year for all his needs, but Biden failed with the BBB. Had Biden succeeded, the deficit would (as it does) continue to trend worse.
No idea what explains the increase in net worth. The three-fold increase over 4 years seems ridiculous
If it's net worth for the lower 50% of the population, then it's something to do with house prices/homeownership/mortgage equity. The deficit will also partly be due to the magical combination of low interest rates and 10% inflation.
I don't think the lower half owns a lot of homes. I just looked up home ownership rates, and it's around 65% for the whole country, and I imagine most of that is in the upper half. It could be around 100% for the upper half and around 30% for the lower half.
"Lower half by income" includes some people who were previously in higher income brackets, but who are now retired, long-term unemployed, underemployed, or on unpaid sabbatical.
If a lot of people have retired early over the last few years, I could definitely see that inflating the mean net worth of "lower-income" households.
Yep, when looking at income buckets this is always a good thing to keep in mind. Almost everyone spends at least a year in a poverty income bracket at some point (usually when they are 18/19/a student or when they retire).
In theory, someone who inherited millions of dollars but has no income would be in this bucket. Also, someone who makes millions a year but has a terrible gambling problem and lots of debts would be in the opposite bucket and skew that number downward.
Overall i think its pretty useless to compare the net worth of various income brackets without having lots of caveats or more filters (probably for age - looking at only prime working age would help this stat be more useful).
Agreed that looking at income buckets as static and/or as a tight mapping onto functional wealth is overplayed. I believe the stat is that 12% of American households spend at least one year in the top 1% of income earners in their lifetime. And 56% spend at least one year in the top 20%. (I forget the year these stats are from without pulling a book off my shelf.)
Yes but it’s an average figure over the whole bottom 50%, not the median. If 65% of the country owns homes that means 30% of the bottom half does (15/50). Those 30% have seen a huge increase in home equity since 2018. That would have a big impact on the arithmetic average
We dumped lots of money into households with stuff like the CARES Act. Bottom 50% includes lots of people who had essentially zero net worth so it's not surprising that number went up a lot. (They were also forbidden from a lot of spending during the shutdown.)
Way more money was dumped onto people during Trump's term than during Biden's so trying to give Biden credit for this one just reveals how BS the whole thing is.
Most of those raw numbers look like "it's 4 years later. Number went up" or they are citing the 50% of economic stats that improved, and omitting any that didn't.
It does, if true, mean things haven't gotten worse - which is the point. It's a refutation to "Biden sucks" claims.
But why would the fact that a bunch of old people have retired be treated as an indicator that the economy isn't good? As clearly demonstrated by the stats on the other demographics, the reason why they are retired now is something other than a bad labor market now
Two key things with net worth are 1) it's very steeply sloping, especially in the bottom half: 40th percentile is about half the median, 20th is about half of 25th 2) It is sharply negative at the bottom.
This means that slight shifts in the percentiles move the number around a lot. My guess is actually that the change in bottom 50th percentile wealth might be as related to trends in student loans as anything else--house ownership isn't common in the bottom 50th percent of households, but student loans are. ($100k in negative net worth is quite frequently related to an new profesisonal degree.)
The CBO attribute the budgetary deficit reduction to “spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic—mostly for the recovery rebates (also known as economic impact payments), unemployment compensation, pandemic relief through the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the Coronavirus Relief Fund—and because revenues were lower".
The lower revenues, they attribute to lower nominal wages (and thus lower income/payroll taxes) during the pandemic and the payroll tax deferrals provisioined the CARES Act (if I understand it correctly, some of these were accounted for in 2022).
Eyeballing the CBO graph, total budget deficits for 2021 - 2022 (Biden) seems larger than those of 2019 - 2020 (Trump).
23. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Cheaper housing means people can potentially do successful household formation earlier, which usually means more children. That was the big deal with the Baby Boom of the Postwar Era - marriage age dropped and people formed households earlier because of affordable housing and good paying work.
37. It gets even worse. IIRC the high-temperature superconductors have a much lower current they can tolerate before they lose superconductivity than copper. I guess that means you'd really have to ramp up the voltage with them?
I know about that because there's sort of a thing now in speculative futurist megastructures, where they're supposed to get to gargantuan sizes because you design them around using compressive strength and "active support" structures (IE something like a magnetic bearing scaled up enormously). High-temperature superconductors would really help with that.
>Cheaper housing means people can potentially do successful household formation earlier, which usually means more children.
Obviously. But, there's a long way between that and the claim that zoning laws explain the bulk of differences in housing affordability between places in the country, or that housing affordability is the root cause of the bulk of the decrease in fertility rate. All things being equal, sure, but all things aren't equal.
>That was the big deal with the Baby Boom of the Postwar Era - marriage age dropped and people formed households earlier because of affordable housing and good paying work.
Are you so sure? The baby bom was a boom compared to the great depression and WW2. The peak baby boom fertility rate was actually lower than it was before 1920.
But the country was a lot more rural before 1920 than in 1946-1964. During the Baby Boom there was a lot less need for children to work on the family farm than there had been at the beginning of the 20th century.
3 - Without reading the study I am calling bullshit. May change my mind later.
4 - Is true, but agree his color choices were poor. He should have used gray for 2015-2019 and colored only the last 3 years. If you are wondering about lag in data, up through week 23 (6/11) we have 97% data collected, and the twelve week stretch from 3/19 gives us our first 12 week run in 2.5 years with 3 months of no excess deaths. The data after early June is incomplete, but I would guess will give us another 2 months of zero excess deaths. Fall and winter is anyone's guess.
6 & 8 - Of course
10 - "Oh dear god!" - Holy shit
11 - Love Stuart Ritchie, hope he has a follow-up to Science Fictions soon.
12 - I'm still kinda bummed computers finally beat us in Go
17 - Is this a real thing?
20 - Subscribed. Interesting piece on a topic I had never considered.
25 - Don't like charts where time frames seem selectively chosen to make a point and not directly comparable is first take without replicating the data. The KPI chose don't mean much to me. I can only say where I live (Cleveland), things cost more and everyone is short staffed.
> Without reading the study I am calling bullshit. May change my mind later.
Why bother writing this? You "call bullshit" and haven't even read the study. Why?
And if it weren't bad enough to do this generally, it's even more so for this specific example. The percent of the population getting highschool and college diplomas has signficantly risen in the past 60 years, so unless there is no relationship between getting a diploma and how intelligent one is, then significant falls in mean IQ for each education level is to be expected.
I retract my previous statement. I went through my forecast and realized it was undercounting because of how many more accidental deaths we have since 2020 (accidents, homicides, suicides). These are the last deaths to get fed into CDC datasets.
We went from a yearly average of 250K up to 290K in 2020 and 314K in 2021 for accidental deaths.
I said previously we had 97% of data collected up through 6/11 but probably closer to 94% now that a larger number of deaths are lagged (these take 6-12 months to become fully complete - we just got complete 2021 data last week or so).
I think the excess death dashboard you linked is reasonable assuming the accidental deaths continue on the 2020-2021 trend and therefore we probably will have 690,000 deaths in that 3 month stretch (mid march - mid june) instead of the 675,000 forecasted.
I'm not so optimistic about the excess deaths picture. Excess deaths for 2022 looks a bit too much like 2021 for me to have confidence to pop the cork on the champaign bottle just yet. It's good that the raw number of deaths is lower than last year, but I haven't seen anyone make good precise predictions about the path of deaths beyond a couple of weeks.
3: I have a hard time with the plausibility of this. If it were just that more people were going to college, there would be less assortment of individuals by IQ. Thus you'd expect a decrease over time in IQ among the high educational attainment groups and an increase in the "high school" group. What we see is decreases across all groups.
Additionally, IQ scores have increased generally over the period something like 10-20 points as documented by the Flynn effect. So I just don't see how you could get decreases in all groups as the only one that isn't shown is "no or incomplete high school."
Given that they are doing an IQ proxy, not real IQ, I'd bet that there is something going very wrong under the hood. Happy to be proven wrong if they write up something rigorous.
(1) They are probably using that-year IQ scores for each year, which is why you don't see a Flynn effect
(2) The IQ of all 3 groups can go down if the upper 2 groups each become easier to complete but still hard enough to complete that there's an IQ cut-off, observe:
1960s:
G: 115
C: 110, 105
H: 100, 95, 90
2010s:
G: 115, 110
C: 105, 100
H: 95, 90
So basically there's still assortment of individuals by IQ, but the minimum thresholds of graduate school and college have dropped.
EDIT: Also, there's a population of "never completed high school" that went from "significant" in the 1960s to "very small and very low IQ" in the 2010s
(1) They are not actually using IQ. I don't think the (poor) proxy that they are using is normed by year.
(edit) You may have hit on it here. I didn't realize that 60% of people in the 60s had less than high school attainment compared to 10% now. The graph only covers 40% of the highest educated people in the 60s but it covers 90% of the population in the present.
The proprotion of people getting a high school diploma significantly increased since 1960, and much of that increase was for black students, who have a significantly lower mean IQ than white students, meaning that this effect was magnified. This is also true to a lesser extent with hispanics (but mainly that large numbers of hispanics immigrated to the US over this time period, not that they were here but not getting HS displomas).
There's been a big increase in the percentage of Hispanics getting high school degrees since the 2008 recession. Up through 2007, it was not uncommon for Latino boys to drop out of high school to work construction, but then the Great Crash meant a lot more had nothing better to do than stick around school to graduate and maybe try community college.
This is just a classic Simpsons Paradox - if the education groups are completely sorted by IQ, and then the highest members of each group move up to the next education group, then all education groups will have a decrease in average IQ, even if populationwide average IQ increases.
There was once an Australian politician that complained about New Zealanders moving to Australia and lowering the average IQ of both countries (or maybe it was a New Zealand politician complaining about Australians moving there).
They aren't using IQ per se. The General Social Survey (GSS) does not include an IQ test. They're using the "wordsum" question, which is a 10-item vocabulary test where individuals find a synonym to a listed word from four choices, I believe.
These numbers are somehow transformed to IQ scores, but the very brief amount of google searching suggests a correlation of wordsum and IQ of ~ 0.7. Good, not perfect. Verbal intelligence, but how correlated are verbal and numerical intelligence?
A few stray observations:
1. Folks could only have 11 IQ values if the wordsum variable ranges from 0-11, right? Not sure how fine-grained you can get with that re. IQ scores.
2. Do folks' vocabularies develop as they age? Not sure. But if so, this might be a chart showing that older people are older than younger people.
3. Could also be measuring ESL over time. Presumably a larger percentage of post-graduate degrees are held by Asian immigrants, for example. In that case, relatively high vocabulary knowledge of your second language is arguably more impressive than slightly higher vocabulary scores of your first language.
The use of the 10 word Wordsum vocabulary quiz on the General Social Survey isn't a real IQ test, but for something that quick and dirty, the results are strikingly reasonable in almost all the applications I've seen of Wordsum over the last 15-20 years.
25. A combination of COVID deaths reducing the workforce, older people taking earlier retirement, and reduced immigration relative to economic growth would seem to explain it. That also seems to explain why unemployment in Europe is at historic lows.
#21/robustness- ratio of glia to neurons in the human brain is ~4:1 and whenever AI comes up I think how I definitely see the opposite of that kind of investment in infrastructure by SDEs and I'm excited for how absurd/poorly executed the next 40 years are going to be
Re 25. They aren't saying if it's median or average. Say a quarter to a half of bottom 50% households owns a home. In the past 4 years or so, average home price seems to have gone up something like 100K. So that would have an average bottom 50% household gain 25K to 50K.
I imagine the median value has either gone down or stayed about the same, so they are probably listing the average value to make it look good.
This seems to agree with households in 50th to 90th percentile gaining 100K, since presumably most of them own a home.
I'd be equally suspicious of the rest of the numbers, even if technically accurate. Most obviously, I can believe that the hourly rate went slightly up, but the prices of everything consumable (and of many non-consumable goods as well) have gone way up, so everyone is getting way less for a bit more money.
I don’t think I agree with Jacob Steinhardt’s framing that adversarial robustness is best thought of as “safety” rather than “capabilities”, at least not in the avoiding-AGI-apocalypse sense of safety. (Clearly it is safety in the sense that a self-driving car needs it to avoid crashing into things.)
Consider: if an object detector can be confused into labeling a rifle as a watermelon by the presence of a label in the image that says “watermelon”, isn’t that a shortfall in some essential capability? Would you be worried about a putative AGI that fell for things like that taking over the world?
24. Looks like in other countries, they had to look for a compromise that is at least temporarily acceptable by most. In America, it was "decided" by judicial fiat and the side that won declared it case closed, now and forever. Except turns out it wasn't. But by now both sides are polarized to the extremes and aren't willing to talk to the other side, so there would be a lot of fighting there.
25. Real net worth figure looks wildly out of place. No way it grew over 2x in 4 years.
32. I'm not sure what would be the theory of $500 making permanent improvement in a poor family's life. I mean, there could be certain cases, but wouldn't it be that in the majority of cases there are deeper reasons for the poverty that one-off $500 could ever fix?
I'm "pro-choice", but I can't help but notice that a lot of Democrats talked a big game while Trump was in office, saying how he is acting unconstiutionally and how he has no respect for the constiution. Now he's gone and I don't recall seeing a single constitutional argument against this ruling being made by any halfway prominent Democrat.
Look I'm pretty cynical about law and constitutionality but the best argument that reversing Roe was unconstitutional is that when we talk about constitutional norms, we're talking about a broad range of ideas, but almost no one would dispute that *stare decisis* is part of how the constitution has been interpreted for centuries. Once a decision has been made, that's it- matter is more or less over. You can very slowly chip away at it over many decades or centuries till it's effectively dead letter, or you can amend the constitution, but otherwise that's meant to be it. A future court just saying "actually that was wrong" negates the whole idea of a supreme court.
Of course it's insane to give any supreme court, undemocratically elected, that level of power over such a vague document as the constitution and bill of rights. But that's what the constitution does, and respect for the constitution requires respect for constitutional precedent.
I've not read the entire US Constitution; is there anything in there actually implying stare decisis? Roe was hilariously unconstitutional (mootness and making shit up), so you could argue that SCOTUS upholding it would still be unconstitutional.
And SCOTUS going "we stuffed up" has happened a lot of times before (e.g. Lawrence v. Texas directly overruling Bowers v. Hardwick after 17 years, or the kinda-vaguely-defined end of Lochner but still definitely less time than Roe stood for).
> is there anything in there actually implying stare decisis
Nope, and can't be. It'd be insane - even the Constitution itself has amendment process (and they literally started amending it immediately after signing it). How would you expect to bind future generations to the will of people long dead and never modify it? It just can't work this way. One can try design the process so good that the future generations would rather follow it than try to design a new one entirely from scratch, but if your process is so inflexible that you expect the future generations to abide by the decisions taken centuries ago and never be able to challenge them - the descendants would just say "screw you, dead man" and refuse to follow it. That's why there should be fine tuning between change being hard (we don't want to emphasize everyday squabbles and let the legal system to be swayed by it too much) and change being possible (otherwise people would just abandon this system or ignore what you wanted and change it anyway).
"Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of these difficulties, the Convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which in an abstract view of the subject might lead and ingenious theorist to bestow on a constitution planned in his closet or his imagination."
Actually, Roe Vs Wade wasn't necessarily as unconstitutional as one might think.
But the best (or only) argument I found would have been with the unenumerated rights: when the US constitution was adopted, abortion used to be legal and widely available.
(The constitution by itself only binds the federal government, but there have been some later maneuvers to bind the states as well.)
> when the US constitution was adopted, abortion used to be legal and widely available
Was it? Without any limits up to the moment of birth? I find it a bit hard to believe, given the Christian churches' position on the matter. I can find references to abortion being legal "before quickening" - i.e. the same 15-16 week boundary which we find in many cases today - but I can't find any source that claims there was no limits for abortion on demand at that time. Could you provide a source to these claims?
In addition to that, I think embracing the argument of "something that has been legal in 18th century can't be regulated or prohibited now" would have much larger consequences than either side would be willing to accept. For starters, we know some examples of things being legal then that we don't really want back - like slavery or racial discrimination...
But there's also precedent for the Supreme Court overriding itself.
According to the first reference I found (which may not be the final word on the matter) the Supreme Court between 1789 and 2020 issued 25,444 judgements, and overruled itself 145 times. A general argument that the court must *always* follow stare decisis would be inconsistent with the meta-precedent that the court can overrule itself.
1954 Brown overturned the 1896 Plessy ruling. About the same time frame as 2022 Dobbs overturning 1973 Roe. I wouldn't consider 50+ years sudden. There's jurisprudence in between that indicated the legal reasoning behind Roe was troubled too, e.g. Casey ...
This whole conversation was discussed in the SCOTUS 2022 Dobbs opinion. The problem with Casey was that it waved vaguely in the direction of 'stare decisis' while itself muddying the waters of what the term meant. Saying it stood on precedent, it then went on to reject half of Roe and define a new set of principles it pulled from thin air. It was a weird way to invoke stare decisis.
Dobbs, OTOH, was careful to lay out a definite framework for how it thought stare decisis should be applied, and had been applied in the past. Sure, the dissents disagreed with some of their reasoning/framework, but if we're comparing Dobbs with Casey, it's clear that of the two decisions Dobbs at least tries to strengthen stare decisis - clearly defining our expectations of when it should hold - while Casey wasn't as interested in whether its unique approach to the principle would create more problems down the road.
As to whether other modern precedents also ride on the Dobbs decision, I agree that revisiting Roe creates the potential to revisit other decisions conservatives don't like. But I'm not convinced those are likely to be overturned anytime soon. For a few reasons:
Conservatives worked for decades to bias the court in favor of overturning Roe (likewise on the other side). There's not the same drive from the Right over Obergefell or other precedents. The 'unborn holocaust' argument endured for strong political reasons. (Dobbs even mentioned how Roe's holding had influenced SCOTUS appointments for decades - something that's hopefully in the past.) More likely, conservatives will want go back to asking their appointees whether they'll protect against 'legislating from the bench'. It's harder to drive political will toward abolishing substantive due process.
Indeed, there's a strong 'libertarian conservative' movement inside the party that's less interested in legislating conservative ideas on morality (which tend to lose at the polls) and more interested in protecting free expression of those ideas. With the current ideological makeup of the court, you'd need to swing farther to the Right to overturn something like Obergefell. Put someone like DeSantis in office from 2024-2032, and I still don't think you'd get it overturned.
Dobbs relied on the idea that the State has a pre-birth interest in the life of the unborn. That interest was recognized initially in Roe and affirmed in Casey, when they created viability-based arguments. That weakened the case from, "constitutionally-protected right" to "only within limited circumstances determined by SCOTUS" (trimester/viability). In other words, Roe/Casey created limits to the abortion right they defined, and that's the wedge SCOTUS used to break the whole framework apart. The end result was always going to have to land on either 'legal until birth' or 'no constitutional protection'. That same vulnerability embedded in Roe/Casey from the beginning doesn't apply for the other precedents Thomas & co. want to revisit.
Not a lawyer or law professor either, but I have heard about SCOTUS overturning previous decisions - including conceptual frameworks - before. E.g. the whole approach to questions of race changed quite a lot over time. How much the government is allowed to meddle in economics has changed. Approach to freedom of speech (remember the infamous "fire in crowded theater"?) changed too. It's not unheard of.
Of course, people disliking a particular decision would always claim it's absolutely beyond acceptable and the Court had never fallen so deeply as when it disagreed with them. But it's just self-serving rhetoric, nothing more.
>it's insane to give any supreme court, undemocratically elected, that level of power over such a vague document as the constitution and bill of rights
The Supreme Court is unelected and unrepresentative on purpose - read Federalist #51, 78-81. The whole point is that the judicial branch is a check on majority passions of the moment because the majority has a tendency to get carried away with whatever shiny thing they want right now and ride roughshod over the minority. The U.S. Constitution is not vague - it is a document that says what powers the government has, it's not a document that sets out laws (laws are Congress' job). The Bill of Rights is not vague at all, they are definitive statements about what the government cannot do.
> but almost no one would dispute that *stare decisis* is part of how the constitution has been interpreted for centuries
Actually, a lot of people would dispute it, including members of SCOTUS itself. Overturning previous decisions is not an easy step and should not be taken lightly, but it happens, and it happens routinely in many cases.
In fact, this is the only way the Court can stay relevant today. If all the Court could do is recite what people in 18th-19th century decided, without ever being able to change anything, then people today would reasonably argue that such Court is useless - we don't live in 18th century anymore. Times changed, needs changed, morals and mores changed. If the Court is never allowed to change, it'll just become irrelevant fossil.
Of course, one does also have to be wary of the opposite extreme - the "living document" doctrine, which essentially says there's no meaning in Constitution outside our opinion, and it's just an empty shell to be filled with anything we desire today. There are certain principles and ideas we want to keep, and the deeper the change goes, the harder it should be and more consideration should be taken before doing it. Neither "never change" or "nothing is fixed, everything is up for grabs anytime we want" is workable. Finding a reasonable middle ground is the responsibiity we entrust SCOTUS members to bear.
It's a good point that SCOTUS that followed prior decisions would be unable to legislate from the bench. They would have to depend on congress for legislation. \S
Unfortunately, SCOTUS can override Congress, unless it's a Constitutional amendment, so that would require an amendment to correct any mistake SCOTUS made in the past. I think that would make the system much less useful - and make SCOTUS way overpowered. Imagine some SCOTUS decision you don't think was right - I'm sure no matter what your politics is, you could find one - and imagine there's absolutely no way to change it without passing a constitutional amendment - which is not going to happen because half of the states will always be against it.
This is true and not true. For example, with a normal law, Congress could have defined human life to begin at 2 months. That would be a profound enough change to force a revisitation of RvW (because after 2 months abortion would now legally be murder). SCOTUS could then balance the two rules without merely overruling RvW.
It is worth noting that my original post was snark/sarcasm. ( see the \S)
I propose that ACX spam Reddit with carefully chosen insults to try to draw a specific shape on the graph.
There is. It's called "the skeptic community". They've moved on from atheism and just talk about Elon Musk now.
37: A story on the internet about somebody who's name is claimed to be Title Pavel is almost always fictitious. It is a reference to the Dark Knight Rises cold open
looks like you meant this to be about 37, not 38
thank you.
Actually I think I have been bamboozled as it was 38 when I wrote it and is still 38 in the substack email I received
Also people have mentioned 40, but there is no 40.
There was no 36 in the email version.
I’m not surprised or disappointed by point 33. Tolerating people with weird kinks is different than tolerating people advocating for real-life harmful things, so r/forcedbreeding seems 0% hypocritical to me.
Exactly. You could basically just say redditor at this point.
That's the Anglosphere's default mainstream social media culture for people in a certain age band. To get away from it you have to actively avoid it -- build yourself a better bubble. If you're on Reddit, look for unusually nice, well-moderated subreddits (which will usually not be the most popular); if you're on Twitter, follow only people who put nice tweets on your timeline (who will usually not be the most famous); and so on.
If you want to find nice people on Reddit, try r/slaythespire ;)
I used to be a subscriber, and this is a good recommendation. Niche hobby subreddits can be great. Any subreddit where you can get 1000 upvotes will be part of the same hivemind as the rest of Reddit.
Or No Man's Sky gaming community. One of the best I've found.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/
The inverse of this is 4chan. Maybe the explanation is as simple as, people who both A) have a lot of free time and B) choose to spend it complaining on the internet usually suck. Self-selection.
I think that this is probably wrong. In particular I think that having weird kinks is probably correlated with wanting websites to be more permissive about what content they allow, for obvious reasons.
Your PoliticalIdeology Is Not Okay
Pediatricians here catching strays in the comment section, LOL
Based on subreddit overlap, forcedbreeding appears to be *heavily* red-aligned; lefties just aren't into raceplay, sorry. Feel free to update your priors.
That's because it isn't *heavily* (or even just heavily) red-aligned at all: https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/forcedbreeding
The overlap with non-sex subs begins with creepypms, survivinginfidelity, various games (all of which skew Left, the former notably and the latter two in the general Reddit way), continues with some pro-trans subs (*super* Left), takes a brief detour to mentalhealth and some weed + shrooms subs (the Right is notoriously high-strung and pro-drug, right?), goes on to adviceanimals and antiwork (do you even have to ask?), and... scrolling... scrolling...
...okay, I finished the list and still haven't found any especially "red" subs, with the single probable exception of firearms — near the bottom (1.18).
So... I think it's probably bullshit to suggest the subreddit is Right-leaning, as its stated positions would obviously suggest anyway.
> is different than tolerating people advocating for real-life harmful things,
There's no *way* anyone could possibly believe that a ""fetish"" page about the most depraved acts of violence against women could possibly have any negative real world impact, you know, like making women who see it feel unsafe or hated, or encouraging weirdos to act out depraved fantasies or generally be aggressive towards women IRL. It's just a fetish, bro.
And if you disagree, then you necessarily must also be 100% fine with the exact same fetish page except all the men are white and all the women are black and they get called the n-word constantly. Because the only way this could be doing any real world harm is in the ways I described above, meaning they're either both harmful or both harmless.
And I'm really curious though what harm you imagine a "pro-russian" subreddit is having in the real world (other than the kinds of things I described above).
To be clear, I am an asexual woman who is so extremely repulsed by the idea of pregnancy that I got myself sterilized (despite the fact that I don’t have sex). I can scarcely imagine a fetish that could possibly be more aversive to me. I don’t know how problematic r/forcedbreeding is in practice, because I never want to look there. Maybe they actually do have a terrible separation of real life from fantasy, IDK.
However, I do know that the vast majority of people with fetishes, even really weird ones, are perfectly capable of knowing what is and isn’t appropriate in reality. Moreover, they typically aren’t trying to convert other people to any particular political position or course of action.
On the other hand, anti-vax misinformation often DOES advocate for people to take IRL harmful courses of action. Pro-Russian posts are often propaganda to get people to stop supporting the defense of Ukraine. Obviously there’s nuance to this as well; Russia is not 100% wrong, and vaccines do actually have sometimes concerning side effects. My impression is that subreddits/posters that get banned for these topics usually do post actual false or highly misleading information, but if they don’t, I wouldn’t want them banned just for having unpopular political opinions.
Still, my personal opinion on either topic isn’t the point. My point is that it’s perfectly consistent to tolerate disturbing kink spaces but not tolerate people advocating worrying courses of action IRL.
this juxtaposition is not necessarily philosophically inconsistent, but it does show the r/forcedbreeding people to have terrible judgment
disturbing sex weirdo communities, no matter how unobjectionable IRL and how good their separation of real life from fantasy, can only survive and continue on the back of a broad social tolerance
deliberately undermining that tolerance, as by demanding the deplatforming of other people's objectionable speech, will inevitably turn back and rebound on the sex weirdos sooner rather than later
every censorship trend of the modern era fell first and hardest on people who were considered sexually immoral
It depends on where the wind is blowing. One of the latest trends in social justice is kink acceptance, the current frontier being whether it has place in parades and textbooks. It’s a good opportunity for controversial fetish communities to earn mainstream social media allies, and the way to do it is by aligning with them on issues they care about. By my observation, the more aggressive and seemingly out of place the activism is, the more traction it gets.
Can the culture war bite them in the ass once the wind changes? It might. But not only trying to raising universal tolerance for objectionable communities is very hard and often counterproductive, it’s also much, much more damning, because this is what a truly bad community trying to exploit liberals’ tolerance would do.
all of this depends partly on how “weird” unpacks. this particular weird sex community is into a what arguably is a very exaggerated version of the predominant hegemony, as opposed to a transgression or subversion that destabilizes people’s subconscious premises and assumptions, so the weirdness coefficient is maybe not actually that high in the big picture. i don’t think they’re gonna be first, second, or fifth in line when the puritans come for the weird sex. at the moment it seems like the ascendant right wing puritans are mostly going after LGBTQ and the ascendant left wing puritans are mostly going after people they’ve decided are doing LGBTQ wrong
(and straight men who would like to date, of course. but that’s a sort of evergreen dating from the oughts and before, not an acute trend)
It's impossible to be tolerant of literally everything. Tolerating weird fetishes but not blatant misinformation strikes me as entirely reasonable and consistent.
Honestly, I like Facebook's compromise on this. You're still allowed to post fake news and misinformation - you won't get banned for it and the post won't get deleted - but the site will put a notice in front of the post saying that the information is wrong and explaining why it's wrong. People can still see it, and they can still choose to believe it, but at least they won't believe it by default. It puts them in a position where they have to exercise some critical thinking, either to say "ok, my friend is probably wrong on this one" or "FB is wrong, this is actually true despite the notice," rather than accepting it uncritically.
It's not a perfect solution: Sometimes the notices really are wrong, either because the mainstream media itself is incorrect on an issue, or FB's fact-checkers made a mistake when checking mainstream media sources, or because the automated algorithm applied the notice in the wrong context. But I think it's still better than either deleting suspected misinformation outright, or simply doing nothing and leaving it be. Sure, the anti-censorship crowd still thinks it's just another top-down method of control, and the anti- misinformation crowd thinks it's useless half-measure that doesn't actually do anything to meaningfully prevent the spread of fake news. But as the old saying goes, a good compromise is one that leaves every side partly dissatisfied.
Yeah, if you go on that sub there's a post that references Dobbs, and the top voted comments on it are all along the lines of "Whoa, this is just a kink, let's keep it that way, we don't want this IRL" . To the point where the OP had to pop in and explain that the post was just their way of working through some trauma from a sexual assault and of course they didn't really mean it and didn't want to upset anyone.
It’s just tribal identification all the way down. My guess is the same people who posted the condemnation of anti-vaxers would even more furiously condemn someone who wanted society to temporarily pause gay orgies to control the spread of monkeypox
You could say the same thing about pro-vax misinformation. It advocates for people whose cost-benefit analysis is clearly negative to get the vaccine anyway, increasing their risk of heart inflammation, brain blood clots, and death.
Forced breeding doesn't even strike me as that weird or depraved. A significant fraction of women I have been with were in to light BDSM/power play type and obviously impregnation/breeding being sort of the telos of sex is an obvious thing to fixate on. And in particular at least as construed on that sub, the focus is not really on violating consent, and more on sort of being overwhelmed by a primal urge to procreate (the fantasy seems to be that the woman wants to be breeded, not that you are literally forcing her to)
On the other hand there were some actual rape fetish kinks that were in fact banned on reddit (even though many women do have that kink to, sometimes even as a way of coping with trauma)
Ironically, having actually looked at the reddit page in question... It looks like 90+% of the posts are actually by women - usually women posting pictures of themselves with some variation of 'Breed me Daddy' or the like. Not what I would have expected, but I suppose it makes some sense.
Lots of them are trying to advertise OnlyFans accounts or similar things.
Umm, r/forced breeding is producing pro-rape content whatever pro-Russian subreddit is out there is producing pro-Putin content, if you hold the typical belief in the magical powers of internet content to determine behavior that underlies pro censorship arguments then both would be harmful. In fact the pro-rape content far more so.
I’m guessing that a lot of the r/forcedbreeding people would be:
a. Very in favor of censoring subreddits that advocate raping people IRL.
b. Fine with subreddits that were pro-Russian in the sense that they celebrated fictional Russian characters, or enthused about Baklava recipes, or really anything that wasn’t spewing propaganda about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s important to note that not all speech is even protected by the First Amendment. The typical example is “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”, because it involves giving out false information that can cause panic/harm. Private sites can restrict speech much more than that, of course, but certainly a good starting point is… false information that can cause panic/harm.
I’m someone who has had some life-threatenly bad reactions to vaccines, and as such, the COVID vaccine was the first time I got vaxxed since I was 2. It would be REALLY NICE if I could ever read vaccine-critical posts that WEREN’T blatantly false conspiracy theories (or worse, subtly false conspiracy theories). There are certainly such posts out there, but the presence of all the junk ironically makes it much harder to learn about vaccine-critical stuff than it would be if there was more censorship of the topic.
Basically, uncensored fiction != uncensored everything.
I'm not sure what American laws have to do with questions of ethics / morals?
Charitably, it's only an analogy, albeit a rather-troubled one ("fire in a crowded theatre" comes from a SCOTUS decision upholding bans on, um, protests against conscription).
Such as forcing people to get injected with vaccines that cause heart inflammation, brain blood clots, and death?
The pattern I'm mostly relating here is avoiding to be meek. If you act like you ask for permission to exist you're more likely to be seen as prey, so some amount of aggression is actually adaptive.
I *am* disappointed though by the failure to generalize the concept of tolerance. "It should apply to me but not to you" is pretty much the classic mistake.
Yes, what people who invoke the so-called "Paradox of Tolerance" fail to do is take the argument to its logical conclusion. "If I am tolerant of [outgroup], then they might gain power and be intolerant of me, therefore it is justified for me to be preemptively intolerant of them first" - but then [outgroup] could invoke that same principle to justify being intolerant of the first group, since they know that if they gain power they will be intolerant of them, thereby justifying their initial intolerance. This is a preemption game, a well-known concept in game theory.
By invoking the "paradox," it actually becomes rationally justified for *both* groups to be intolerant of each other, and at that point, the entire premise of liberalism is basically dead and it's just the friend-enemy distinction all the way down.
Or, like EY likes to say, we could get together and agree to do Something Which Is Not That. Like setting a meta-rule that we can debate individual ideas until we get hoarse, but will shop short of canceling them. Which is how liberalism came to be.
is it fair to call that 'IQ needed'?
I would need to be convinced that "IQ needed" really best explains this.
It clearly isn't; if that's an average then circa 50% of graduates will be below that threshold, so you clearly don't need a three-digit IQ to graduate with a Bachelor's these days.
Yeah, definitely should not be phrased IQ needed since that implies causation and all kinds of other effects that we don't know are the case.
seems simple that if more people are going to college, the avg IQ of non college will drop, even if the 'needed' is entirely unchanged between 1960 and now. the only way you could even hypothesise 'needed' is if the groups included *all* graduates, not just ones that didnt get higher degrees.
also seems to make sense that 1960 high school was about average population iq, and today college grad is about avg
Yes, if a group (like high school graduates) becomes almost universal, it's statistic properties will have to get close to the median.
Maybe they were the SAT cut-offs for admission, although I don't know how you apply the test to high school graduation.
Doesn't sound like it. I think the chart just shows the average/median/whatever IQ for people who topped out at a certain level of education. It's not a requirement, it's just a statistic. That's why we shouldn't call it "needed."
I would like to see this data disaggregated by discipline. Have requirements for STEM degrees declined? How below average can one be and still get a MEd?
Probably start at "Education level needed/advantageous for [Job]" and work backward from there to IQ would be better. Civil Engineer -- Teacher -- Trial Lawyer -- Medical Doctor require in my area 4 -- 5 -- 7 -- Between 11 and 15 years of education respectively; and while there are very smart Civil Engineers they rarely go back and get another 1-7 years of education to "catch up," they get the education they need and stop.
If at different times different amounts of education were required or advantageous for different careers, we'd see different education levels achieved by people who wanted to pursue those careers. Rather than a model of X has IQ^y >>> X Maximizes the level of education they can reach based on IQ^y; the model goes X has Career Ambition Z >>> X reaches the level of education necessary for Career Z as long as their IQ^y can get them there.
> unusually obese Russian soldier (which doesn’t show up in reverse image search)
They don't mention which reverse image search they tried (presumably the Google one). Google is thought to intentionally cripple it's search results for privacy reasons. Russian search engine Yandex has a much better one, you could find people's social network profiles just by a pic taken in public transport. In fact, they mention Yandex later in the chain, but they should have tried reverse image search there too.
I was suspicious at the time and tried to internet-sleuth it myself (failed), I didn't know Yandex had reverse image search - that would have been ideal, but I can add tineye to the list of reverse image searches that had nothing helpful.
/If you can't trust an undisclosed senior intelligence source, what can you trust?
#25
Unemployment to population ratio has stayed the same, but the age-range is what is important there. I cannot begin to describe the amount of 54+persons I saw leave the workforce over the last two years.
Budget deficit is lower mainly because Trump got the TCJA passed in his year for all his needs, but Biden failed with the BBB. Had Biden succeeded, the deficit would (as it does) continue to trend worse.
No idea what explains the increase in net worth. The three-fold increase over 4 years seems ridiculous
If it's net worth for the lower 50% of the population, then it's something to do with house prices/homeownership/mortgage equity. The deficit will also partly be due to the magical combination of low interest rates and 10% inflation.
I don't think the lower half owns a lot of homes. I just looked up home ownership rates, and it's around 65% for the whole country, and I imagine most of that is in the upper half. It could be around 100% for the upper half and around 30% for the lower half.
It’d be unusual to be sitting in the lower half of the country by income and have 60 grand in the bank though - I can’t think what else it would be?
"Lower half by income" includes some people who were previously in higher income brackets, but who are now retired, long-term unemployed, underemployed, or on unpaid sabbatical.
If a lot of people have retired early over the last few years, I could definitely see that inflating the mean net worth of "lower-income" households.
Yep, when looking at income buckets this is always a good thing to keep in mind. Almost everyone spends at least a year in a poverty income bracket at some point (usually when they are 18/19/a student or when they retire).
In theory, someone who inherited millions of dollars but has no income would be in this bucket. Also, someone who makes millions a year but has a terrible gambling problem and lots of debts would be in the opposite bucket and skew that number downward.
Overall i think its pretty useless to compare the net worth of various income brackets without having lots of caveats or more filters (probably for age - looking at only prime working age would help this stat be more useful).
Agreed that looking at income buckets as static and/or as a tight mapping onto functional wealth is overplayed. I believe the stat is that 12% of American households spend at least one year in the top 1% of income earners in their lifetime. And 56% spend at least one year in the top 20%. (I forget the year these stats are from without pulling a book off my shelf.)
Yes but it’s an average figure over the whole bottom 50%, not the median. If 65% of the country owns homes that means 30% of the bottom half does (15/50). Those 30% have seen a huge increase in home equity since 2018. That would have a big impact on the arithmetic average
We dumped lots of money into households with stuff like the CARES Act. Bottom 50% includes lots of people who had essentially zero net worth so it's not surprising that number went up a lot. (They were also forbidden from a lot of spending during the shutdown.)
Way more money was dumped onto people during Trump's term than during Biden's so trying to give Biden credit for this one just reveals how BS the whole thing is.
Most of those raw numbers look like "it's 4 years later. Number went up" or they are citing the 50% of economic stats that improved, and omitting any that didn't.
It does, if true, mean things haven't gotten worse - which is the point. It's a refutation to "Biden sucks" claims.
Biden still sucks. But he doesn't singlehandedly control the American economy. (Neither did Trump.)
But why would the fact that a bunch of old people have retired be treated as an indicator that the economy isn't good? As clearly demonstrated by the stats on the other demographics, the reason why they are retired now is something other than a bad labor market now
Two key things with net worth are 1) it's very steeply sloping, especially in the bottom half: 40th percentile is about half the median, 20th is about half of 25th 2) It is sharply negative at the bottom.
This means that slight shifts in the percentiles move the number around a lot. My guess is actually that the change in bottom 50th percentile wealth might be as related to trends in student loans as anything else--house ownership isn't common in the bottom 50th percent of households, but student loans are. ($100k in negative net worth is quite frequently related to an new profesisonal degree.)
As I pointed out above, if 65% of Americans own homes then home ownership is quite common in the bottom 50% — in fact 30% of the bottom half own homes
It might be more. The 30% figure only applies if anyone in the top 50% owns a home.
The CBO attribute the budgetary deficit reduction to “spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic—mostly for the recovery rebates (also known as economic impact payments), unemployment compensation, pandemic relief through the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the Coronavirus Relief Fund—and because revenues were lower".
The lower revenues, they attribute to lower nominal wages (and thus lower income/payroll taxes) during the pandemic and the payroll tax deferrals provisioined the CARES Act (if I understand it correctly, some of these were accounted for in 2022).
Eyeballing the CBO graph, total budget deficits for 2021 - 2022 (Biden) seems larger than those of 2019 - 2020 (Trump).
Source: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-06/58111-MBR.pdf
It seems obvious to me that cops killed most of the bottom 10% and thus the 50% point just shifted north increasing average wealth. \S
23. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Cheaper housing means people can potentially do successful household formation earlier, which usually means more children. That was the big deal with the Baby Boom of the Postwar Era - marriage age dropped and people formed households earlier because of affordable housing and good paying work.
37. It gets even worse. IIRC the high-temperature superconductors have a much lower current they can tolerate before they lose superconductivity than copper. I guess that means you'd really have to ramp up the voltage with them?
I know about that because there's sort of a thing now in speculative futurist megastructures, where they're supposed to get to gargantuan sizes because you design them around using compressive strength and "active support" structures (IE something like a magnetic bearing scaled up enormously). High-temperature superconductors would really help with that.
>Cheaper housing means people can potentially do successful household formation earlier, which usually means more children.
Obviously. But, there's a long way between that and the claim that zoning laws explain the bulk of differences in housing affordability between places in the country, or that housing affordability is the root cause of the bulk of the decrease in fertility rate. All things being equal, sure, but all things aren't equal.
>That was the big deal with the Baby Boom of the Postwar Era - marriage age dropped and people formed households earlier because of affordable housing and good paying work.
Are you so sure? The baby bom was a boom compared to the great depression and WW2. The peak baby boom fertility rate was actually lower than it was before 1920.
But the country was a lot more rural before 1920 than in 1946-1964. During the Baby Boom there was a lot less need for children to work on the family farm than there had been at the beginning of the 20th century.
> speculative futurist megastructures
Can you share some good links on this subject? I’m intrigued and my naive Google search gives non-technical stuff.
1 - Brilliant
3 - Without reading the study I am calling bullshit. May change my mind later.
4 - Is true, but agree his color choices were poor. He should have used gray for 2015-2019 and colored only the last 3 years. If you are wondering about lag in data, up through week 23 (6/11) we have 97% data collected, and the twelve week stretch from 3/19 gives us our first 12 week run in 2.5 years with 3 months of no excess deaths. The data after early June is incomplete, but I would guess will give us another 2 months of zero excess deaths. Fall and winter is anyone's guess.
6 & 8 - Of course
10 - "Oh dear god!" - Holy shit
11 - Love Stuart Ritchie, hope he has a follow-up to Science Fictions soon.
12 - I'm still kinda bummed computers finally beat us in Go
17 - Is this a real thing?
20 - Subscribed. Interesting piece on a topic I had never considered.
25 - Don't like charts where time frames seem selectively chosen to make a point and not directly comparable is first take without replicating the data. The KPI chose don't mean much to me. I can only say where I live (Cleveland), things cost more and everyone is short staffed.
33 - .... wow
40 - That's incredible!
> Without reading the study I am calling bullshit. May change my mind later.
Why bother writing this? You "call bullshit" and haven't even read the study. Why?
And if it weren't bad enough to do this generally, it's even more so for this specific example. The percent of the population getting highschool and college diplomas has signficantly risen in the past 60 years, so unless there is no relationship between getting a diploma and how intelligent one is, then significant falls in mean IQ for each education level is to be expected.
1) because it’s a tweet
2) IQ is a notoriously fragile metric
3) I suspect design flaws in sampling
re: 4: IS it true? Where are those numbers coming from, the numbers I see on https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard don't match his graph.
Yes I’ll explain with more detailed sources (all from CDC) later tonight. Traveling today.
I retract my previous statement. I went through my forecast and realized it was undercounting because of how many more accidental deaths we have since 2020 (accidents, homicides, suicides). These are the last deaths to get fed into CDC datasets.
We went from a yearly average of 250K up to 290K in 2020 and 314K in 2021 for accidental deaths.
I said previously we had 97% of data collected up through 6/11 but probably closer to 94% now that a larger number of deaths are lagged (these take 6-12 months to become fully complete - we just got complete 2021 data last week or so).
I think the excess death dashboard you linked is reasonable assuming the accidental deaths continue on the 2020-2021 trend and therefore we probably will have 690,000 deaths in that 3 month stretch (mid march - mid june) instead of the 675,000 forecasted.
I'm not so optimistic about the excess deaths picture. Excess deaths for 2022 looks a bit too much like 2021 for me to have confidence to pop the cork on the champaign bottle just yet. It's good that the raw number of deaths is lower than last year, but I haven't seen anyone make good precise predictions about the path of deaths beyond a couple of weeks.
3: I have a hard time with the plausibility of this. If it were just that more people were going to college, there would be less assortment of individuals by IQ. Thus you'd expect a decrease over time in IQ among the high educational attainment groups and an increase in the "high school" group. What we see is decreases across all groups.
Additionally, IQ scores have increased generally over the period something like 10-20 points as documented by the Flynn effect. So I just don't see how you could get decreases in all groups as the only one that isn't shown is "no or incomplete high school."
Given that they are doing an IQ proxy, not real IQ, I'd bet that there is something going very wrong under the hood. Happy to be proven wrong if they write up something rigorous.
(1) They are probably using that-year IQ scores for each year, which is why you don't see a Flynn effect
(2) The IQ of all 3 groups can go down if the upper 2 groups each become easier to complete but still hard enough to complete that there's an IQ cut-off, observe:
1960s:
G: 115
C: 110, 105
H: 100, 95, 90
2010s:
G: 115, 110
C: 105, 100
H: 95, 90
So basically there's still assortment of individuals by IQ, but the minimum thresholds of graduate school and college have dropped.
EDIT: Also, there's a population of "never completed high school" that went from "significant" in the 1960s to "very small and very low IQ" in the 2010s
(1) They are not actually using IQ. I don't think the (poor) proxy that they are using is normed by year.
(edit) You may have hit on it here. I didn't realize that 60% of people in the 60s had less than high school attainment compared to 10% now. The graph only covers 40% of the highest educated people in the 60s but it covers 90% of the population in the present.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/americas-education.html
The proprotion of people getting a high school diploma significantly increased since 1960, and much of that increase was for black students, who have a significantly lower mean IQ than white students, meaning that this effect was magnified. This is also true to a lesser extent with hispanics (but mainly that large numbers of hispanics immigrated to the US over this time period, not that they were here but not getting HS displomas).
There's been a big increase in the percentage of Hispanics getting high school degrees since the 2008 recession. Up through 2007, it was not uncommon for Latino boys to drop out of high school to work construction, but then the Great Crash meant a lot more had nothing better to do than stick around school to graduate and maybe try community college.
This is just a classic Simpsons Paradox - if the education groups are completely sorted by IQ, and then the highest members of each group move up to the next education group, then all education groups will have a decrease in average IQ, even if populationwide average IQ increases.
There was once an Australian politician that complained about New Zealanders moving to Australia and lowering the average IQ of both countries (or maybe it was a New Zealand politician complaining about Australians moving there).
I think that's the Will Rogers effect, not Simpson's Paradox.
"When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states."
They aren't using IQ per se. The General Social Survey (GSS) does not include an IQ test. They're using the "wordsum" question, which is a 10-item vocabulary test where individuals find a synonym to a listed word from four choices, I believe.
https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5305/vshow
These numbers are somehow transformed to IQ scores, but the very brief amount of google searching suggests a correlation of wordsum and IQ of ~ 0.7. Good, not perfect. Verbal intelligence, but how correlated are verbal and numerical intelligence?
A few stray observations:
1. Folks could only have 11 IQ values if the wordsum variable ranges from 0-11, right? Not sure how fine-grained you can get with that re. IQ scores.
2. Do folks' vocabularies develop as they age? Not sure. But if so, this might be a chart showing that older people are older than younger people.
3. Could also be measuring ESL over time. Presumably a larger percentage of post-graduate degrees are held by Asian immigrants, for example. In that case, relatively high vocabulary knowledge of your second language is arguably more impressive than slightly higher vocabulary scores of your first language.
The use of the 10 word Wordsum vocabulary quiz on the General Social Survey isn't a real IQ test, but for something that quick and dirty, the results are strikingly reasonable in almost all the applications I've seen of Wordsum over the last 15-20 years.
Most graduate degrees are in education and business. (Like almost 50%)
People seem to imagine the tweet is a statement about Physics PhDs.
Uh, no. Physical Sciences are like 1%. Engineering, CS and Biology together get you to about 10%.
So at least be aware what you are arguing for or against…
High school dropouts are less intelligent today than in 1935 or even in 1975.
25. A combination of COVID deaths reducing the workforce, older people taking earlier retirement, and reduced immigration relative to economic growth would seem to explain it. That also seems to explain why unemployment in Europe is at historic lows.
Covid deaths in workforce age should be an order of magnitude less than what you need to see this kind of effects.
Considering it's politically motivated "statistics", I wouldn't even bother check it. Just ignore out of hand, no matter which side it comes from.
#21/robustness- ratio of glia to neurons in the human brain is ~4:1 and whenever AI comes up I think how I definitely see the opposite of that kind of investment in infrastructure by SDEs and I'm excited for how absurd/poorly executed the next 40 years are going to be
Re 25. They aren't saying if it's median or average. Say a quarter to a half of bottom 50% households owns a home. In the past 4 years or so, average home price seems to have gone up something like 100K. So that would have an average bottom 50% household gain 25K to 50K.
I imagine the median value has either gone down or stayed about the same, so they are probably listing the average value to make it look good.
This seems to agree with households in 50th to 90th percentile gaining 100K, since presumably most of them own a home.
I'd be equally suspicious of the rest of the numbers, even if technically accurate. Most obviously, I can believe that the hourly rate went slightly up, but the prices of everything consumable (and of many non-consumable goods as well) have gone way up, so everyone is getting way less for a bit more money.
I don’t think I agree with Jacob Steinhardt’s framing that adversarial robustness is best thought of as “safety” rather than “capabilities”, at least not in the avoiding-AGI-apocalypse sense of safety. (Clearly it is safety in the sense that a self-driving car needs it to avoid crashing into things.)
Consider: if an object detector can be confused into labeling a rifle as a watermelon by the presence of a label in the image that says “watermelon”, isn’t that a shortfall in some essential capability? Would you be worried about a putative AGI that fell for things like that taking over the world?
Human fall for a lot of silly things, but they still managed to take over the world.
(However, I agree with most of your argument.)
24. Looks like in other countries, they had to look for a compromise that is at least temporarily acceptable by most. In America, it was "decided" by judicial fiat and the side that won declared it case closed, now and forever. Except turns out it wasn't. But by now both sides are polarized to the extremes and aren't willing to talk to the other side, so there would be a lot of fighting there.
25. Real net worth figure looks wildly out of place. No way it grew over 2x in 4 years.
32. I'm not sure what would be the theory of $500 making permanent improvement in a poor family's life. I mean, there could be certain cases, but wouldn't it be that in the majority of cases there are deeper reasons for the poverty that one-off $500 could ever fix?
I'm "pro-choice", but I can't help but notice that a lot of Democrats talked a big game while Trump was in office, saying how he is acting unconstiutionally and how he has no respect for the constiution. Now he's gone and I don't recall seeing a single constitutional argument against this ruling being made by any halfway prominent Democrat.
Look I'm pretty cynical about law and constitutionality but the best argument that reversing Roe was unconstitutional is that when we talk about constitutional norms, we're talking about a broad range of ideas, but almost no one would dispute that *stare decisis* is part of how the constitution has been interpreted for centuries. Once a decision has been made, that's it- matter is more or less over. You can very slowly chip away at it over many decades or centuries till it's effectively dead letter, or you can amend the constitution, but otherwise that's meant to be it. A future court just saying "actually that was wrong" negates the whole idea of a supreme court.
Of course it's insane to give any supreme court, undemocratically elected, that level of power over such a vague document as the constitution and bill of rights. But that's what the constitution does, and respect for the constitution requires respect for constitutional precedent.
I've not read the entire US Constitution; is there anything in there actually implying stare decisis? Roe was hilariously unconstitutional (mootness and making shit up), so you could argue that SCOTUS upholding it would still be unconstitutional.
And SCOTUS going "we stuffed up" has happened a lot of times before (e.g. Lawrence v. Texas directly overruling Bowers v. Hardwick after 17 years, or the kinda-vaguely-defined end of Lochner but still definitely less time than Roe stood for).
> is there anything in there actually implying stare decisis
Nope, and can't be. It'd be insane - even the Constitution itself has amendment process (and they literally started amending it immediately after signing it). How would you expect to bind future generations to the will of people long dead and never modify it? It just can't work this way. One can try design the process so good that the future generations would rather follow it than try to design a new one entirely from scratch, but if your process is so inflexible that you expect the future generations to abide by the decisions taken centuries ago and never be able to challenge them - the descendants would just say "screw you, dead man" and refuse to follow it. That's why there should be fine tuning between change being hard (we don't want to emphasize everyday squabbles and let the legal system to be swayed by it too much) and change being possible (otherwise people would just abandon this system or ignore what you wanted and change it anyway).
"Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of these difficulties, the Convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which in an abstract view of the subject might lead and ingenious theorist to bestow on a constitution planned in his closet or his imagination."
James Madison
The Federalist No. 37
Actually, Roe Vs Wade wasn't necessarily as unconstitutional as one might think.
But the best (or only) argument I found would have been with the unenumerated rights: when the US constitution was adopted, abortion used to be legal and widely available.
(The constitution by itself only binds the federal government, but there have been some later maneuvers to bind the states as well.)
> when the US constitution was adopted, abortion used to be legal and widely available
Was it? Without any limits up to the moment of birth? I find it a bit hard to believe, given the Christian churches' position on the matter. I can find references to abortion being legal "before quickening" - i.e. the same 15-16 week boundary which we find in many cases today - but I can't find any source that claims there was no limits for abortion on demand at that time. Could you provide a source to these claims?
In addition to that, I think embracing the argument of "something that has been legal in 18th century can't be regulated or prohibited now" would have much larger consequences than either side would be willing to accept. For starters, we know some examples of things being legal then that we don't really want back - like slavery or racial discrimination...
Yes, before quickening. I did not intent to make any claims that there was no limit.
But there's also precedent for the Supreme Court overriding itself.
According to the first reference I found (which may not be the final word on the matter) the Supreme Court between 1789 and 2020 issued 25,444 judgements, and overruled itself 145 times. A general argument that the court must *always* follow stare decisis would be inconsistent with the meta-precedent that the court can overrule itself.
Yes but, so the argument goes, a turn around this big, blatant and sudden is unheard of.
Whether that's actually true or not, I know not. I have no background in Jurisprudence
I dunno, Brown v. Board of Education was pretty big.
1954 Brown overturned the 1896 Plessy ruling. About the same time frame as 2022 Dobbs overturning 1973 Roe. I wouldn't consider 50+ years sudden. There's jurisprudence in between that indicated the legal reasoning behind Roe was troubled too, e.g. Casey ...
This whole conversation was discussed in the SCOTUS 2022 Dobbs opinion. The problem with Casey was that it waved vaguely in the direction of 'stare decisis' while itself muddying the waters of what the term meant. Saying it stood on precedent, it then went on to reject half of Roe and define a new set of principles it pulled from thin air. It was a weird way to invoke stare decisis.
Dobbs, OTOH, was careful to lay out a definite framework for how it thought stare decisis should be applied, and had been applied in the past. Sure, the dissents disagreed with some of their reasoning/framework, but if we're comparing Dobbs with Casey, it's clear that of the two decisions Dobbs at least tries to strengthen stare decisis - clearly defining our expectations of when it should hold - while Casey wasn't as interested in whether its unique approach to the principle would create more problems down the road.
As to whether other modern precedents also ride on the Dobbs decision, I agree that revisiting Roe creates the potential to revisit other decisions conservatives don't like. But I'm not convinced those are likely to be overturned anytime soon. For a few reasons:
Conservatives worked for decades to bias the court in favor of overturning Roe (likewise on the other side). There's not the same drive from the Right over Obergefell or other precedents. The 'unborn holocaust' argument endured for strong political reasons. (Dobbs even mentioned how Roe's holding had influenced SCOTUS appointments for decades - something that's hopefully in the past.) More likely, conservatives will want go back to asking their appointees whether they'll protect against 'legislating from the bench'. It's harder to drive political will toward abolishing substantive due process.
Indeed, there's a strong 'libertarian conservative' movement inside the party that's less interested in legislating conservative ideas on morality (which tend to lose at the polls) and more interested in protecting free expression of those ideas. With the current ideological makeup of the court, you'd need to swing farther to the Right to overturn something like Obergefell. Put someone like DeSantis in office from 2024-2032, and I still don't think you'd get it overturned.
Dobbs relied on the idea that the State has a pre-birth interest in the life of the unborn. That interest was recognized initially in Roe and affirmed in Casey, when they created viability-based arguments. That weakened the case from, "constitutionally-protected right" to "only within limited circumstances determined by SCOTUS" (trimester/viability). In other words, Roe/Casey created limits to the abortion right they defined, and that's the wedge SCOTUS used to break the whole framework apart. The end result was always going to have to land on either 'legal until birth' or 'no constitutional protection'. That same vulnerability embedded in Roe/Casey from the beginning doesn't apply for the other precedents Thomas & co. want to revisit.
Not a lawyer or law professor either, but I have heard about SCOTUS overturning previous decisions - including conceptual frameworks - before. E.g. the whole approach to questions of race changed quite a lot over time. How much the government is allowed to meddle in economics has changed. Approach to freedom of speech (remember the infamous "fire in crowded theater"?) changed too. It's not unheard of.
Of course, people disliking a particular decision would always claim it's absolutely beyond acceptable and the Court had never fallen so deeply as when it disagreed with them. But it's just self-serving rhetoric, nothing more.
>it's insane to give any supreme court, undemocratically elected, that level of power over such a vague document as the constitution and bill of rights
The Supreme Court is unelected and unrepresentative on purpose - read Federalist #51, 78-81. The whole point is that the judicial branch is a check on majority passions of the moment because the majority has a tendency to get carried away with whatever shiny thing they want right now and ride roughshod over the minority. The U.S. Constitution is not vague - it is a document that says what powers the government has, it's not a document that sets out laws (laws are Congress' job). The Bill of Rights is not vague at all, they are definitive statements about what the government cannot do.
1. Any document that includes the phrase "reasonable" or "unreasonable" is extremely vague.
2. Yes, it was intentional, it was also insane.
This does ignore any issue of stare decisis 150 years before Roe.
If Roe v Wade overturned a 100 year old law, that was being enforced, why should the stare decisis clock start in 1973?
> but almost no one would dispute that *stare decisis* is part of how the constitution has been interpreted for centuries
Actually, a lot of people would dispute it, including members of SCOTUS itself. Overturning previous decisions is not an easy step and should not be taken lightly, but it happens, and it happens routinely in many cases.
In fact, this is the only way the Court can stay relevant today. If all the Court could do is recite what people in 18th-19th century decided, without ever being able to change anything, then people today would reasonably argue that such Court is useless - we don't live in 18th century anymore. Times changed, needs changed, morals and mores changed. If the Court is never allowed to change, it'll just become irrelevant fossil.
Of course, one does also have to be wary of the opposite extreme - the "living document" doctrine, which essentially says there's no meaning in Constitution outside our opinion, and it's just an empty shell to be filled with anything we desire today. There are certain principles and ideas we want to keep, and the deeper the change goes, the harder it should be and more consideration should be taken before doing it. Neither "never change" or "nothing is fixed, everything is up for grabs anytime we want" is workable. Finding a reasonable middle ground is the responsibiity we entrust SCOTUS members to bear.
It's a good point that SCOTUS that followed prior decisions would be unable to legislate from the bench. They would have to depend on congress for legislation. \S
Unfortunately, SCOTUS can override Congress, unless it's a Constitutional amendment, so that would require an amendment to correct any mistake SCOTUS made in the past. I think that would make the system much less useful - and make SCOTUS way overpowered. Imagine some SCOTUS decision you don't think was right - I'm sure no matter what your politics is, you could find one - and imagine there's absolutely no way to change it without passing a constitutional amendment - which is not going to happen because half of the states will always be against it.
This is true and not true. For example, with a normal law, Congress could have defined human life to begin at 2 months. That would be a profound enough change to force a revisitation of RvW (because after 2 months abortion would now legally be murder). SCOTUS could then balance the two rules without merely overruling RvW.
It is worth noting that my original post was snark/sarcasm. ( see the \S)